The Man Who Came Uptown
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-47982-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Man Who Came Uptown». Краткое содержание книги:
If his mother only knew the stuff he was into at an early age. He’d had sex with a girl when he was eleven, the kind of neighborhood gal who liked to get with boys who were inexperienced. Soon after, at twelve or thirteen, the bad started. The usual trouble that some young men find. Stealing things you didn’t need from stores and unlocked cars. Fights. That swell of adrenaline when you stepped to someone. Sometimes he was the aggressor and sometimes not. Most confrontations you couldn’t walk away from ’less you wanted to be labeled a punk. Which got him suspended from school a couple of times. Put him in a cycle.
Next there was joyriding. This led him to hotwiring cars. He was a natural under the wheel. He could handle the hell out of a vehicle; he just took to it right away. Liked to drive fast too. Until he got caught for the second time. Got sent to Oak Hill and a six-by-nine cell, a cot and mattress on a concrete floor. Mice and roaches running over him at night. More fights. A guard who swung on him, and he swung back. They put him on meds after that, made him dead inside. When he came out, harder than before, he stole another car.
Looking back, he couldn’t see any reason to it. Just impulse and confusion. Wasn’t like that for all young men, but for some, it was. The brain did change eventually. For many, put into the system and damaged by it, that change came too late.
But this last thing, this rip-and-run with Mario? A man his age? He had no excuse for that.
“I’m just saying that I had high hopes for you,” said Doretha.
“Had?”
“You didn’t let me finish. I still do.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“I will.”
“Small steps,” said Doretha.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The clocks had sprung forward, and it was still light out, so Michael sat on the rocker couch out on the porch and read his latest library book, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. It was the novel Anna had recommended the night she and her husband had come into the DL. Took some concentration to get into it, and careful reading, but he was glad he had given it a try. All these African immigrants throughout the city and inner suburbs, working in parking garages, owning small businesses, coffeehouses and the like, and Michael had never really thought too much about them or what was going on in their heads. Until he’d read this book. What would Anna have said if she were leading the book club? It was “a window into their inner lives.”
A car horn sounded on Sherman Ave. Michael looked down to the street. There, in an idling, midsize black SUV, sat Phil Ornazian, the private detective who had worked Michael’s case.
Michael had not thought much about the reason for the unexpected dropping of his charges. More to the point, he had kept it from his mind.
He put the book down on the rocker couch, stood, and walked down the concrete steps to the street.
“HOW’S IT going?” said Ornazian.
“I’m at a restaurant on Eleventh. The District Line. Kitchen job. It’s steady.”
“Glad it’s working out for you.”
“Never got a chance to thank you for what you did to get me off,” said Michael. “For whatever you did.”
Ornazian said, “The thank-you part comes now.”
They were seated in the front buckets of the Edge. Ornazian had his satellite radio on and he was keeping the music low. The display screen said they were listening to a song from something called Run the Jewels, an act Michael did not know. He wondered if Ornazian was playing hip-hop on Michael’s account or if he listened to it for pleasure on his own.
“How’d you do it?” said Michael. “They had me airtight.”
“I knew I could change the man’s mind for the same reason you knew you could take him off. He was a boy playing a man’s game. White private-school kid from Ward Three, college grad. Moves over to Shaw and all of a sudden he thinks he’s street. Thinks he can apply his business degree to marijuana distribution. Lead a normal life, a wife and two kids, a house off Seventh Street, while he does his thing. After all, it’s just marijuana. But dealing weed’s the same as selling heroin or coke. It’s a prop in the underground economy, which means hard people are involved and they will try to take what you’ve got. Which is why you and your boy pulled the rip-and-run on him. Right?”
“Didn’t work out so good for me.”
“You thought the man had a code. Some people who were born privileged act like it the rest of their lives. He was outraged that you would rob him. He was more than ready to put you away.”
“And what stopped him?”
“I convinced him not to testify.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is, you dodged five years in a federal joint.”
“And now’s the thank-you part.”
Ornazian nodded. “I’m about to rob a man who has a brothel in Columbia Heights. We’re going to take him off at his house in Hyattsville. Me and an associate of mine. An ex-cop.”
“So you’re doing a home invasion.”
“We’re gonna relieve a slave trader of his ill-gotten gains.”
“That’s how you sellin it to yourself?”
“He’s a bad guy.”
“I’m not participating in no robbery.”
“You won’t be in the house. You won’t touch a weapon. But there are too many variables for us to handle the thing ourselves. I need a driver.”
“Get someone else.”
“I know you can drive. You dusted the police the night you pulled the robbery. And I know I can trust you. You never gave up your associate. You stood tall.”
“Get someone else.”
Ornazian sighed. Michael couldn’t tell if he really was regretful or if it was all a show.
“You know, Michael...”
“What?”
“The judge dismissed your case without prejudice. That means you could be retried. That is, if the witness changes his mind and decides to testify.”
“You’d set that in motion?”
“I wouldn’t like it.”
“What about you? What if I talked about what you did? Witness tampering draws serious time.”
“Then I guess we’d both be fucked. But you won’t do that, Michael. You’re doing well out here. You don’t want to mess with that now.”
Michael said nothing. Their windows were down, and both of them let the proposition settle as they listened to the radio and the car sounds in the street.
“I don’t know what the take will be,” said Ornazian. “But I’ll guarantee you a thousand dollars for two, three hours of work. It could be more.”
Michael did not respond.
“I’ll get you a car,” said Ornazian. “I’ll find you something fast.”
Again, there was no response. Ornazian asked for Michael’s new cell number and Michael gave it up. Then Ornazian took Michael’s cell and entered his own number into the phone. Michael pulled the latch on his door, telling Ornazian that their conversation was over.
“I’ll be in touch,” said Ornazian.
Michael walked up the steps to his mother’s house.
Ornazian pulled off the curb and headed north, toward Petworth. Sydney had phoned him about dinner. She was cooking a fish stew.
Fifteen
Billy Hanrahan attended a prep school in Potomac that, in Ornazian’s day, had had a reputation as a military-style academy where parents sent their sons for structure and discipline. The school was now co-ed and its rep as a place for wayward boys had changed. Billy lived in the school district of Walt Whitman High, among the highest-achieving public schools in the country, so there had to be a reason that Billy’s parents were spending forty thousand dollars a year on private-school tuition. Maybe Billy needed a competitive environment and a focus on academics and achievement. Maybe his parents liked their friends to see the school’s coat-of-arms decal on the back window of their luxury car. The reason was immaterial, but the lives of the wealthy were endlessly fascinating to Ornazian.