King Suckerman
- Автор: Пелеканос Джордж
- Серия: D.C. Quartet #2
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- ISBN: 978-0-316-69590-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «King Suckerman». Краткое содержание книги:
“All right, Ma, all right. You told me this story like fifty times.”
“Nick Stefanos hired him. Nick took him in.”
“I said all right.”
“You go down and see Nick today. Okay?”
Right after I go and off an ounce of weed to a bunch of high school boys. Yeah, then I’ll give some old guy advice on how to raise a kid.
“Okay,” said Karras. “I’ll go see Nick.”
Eleni Karras leaned her back against the sink. Past her round shoulders Dimitri Karras watched a wren glide and light on the corner of the outside windowsill, where it was building a nest. His mother had always stood there in front of the sink, her arms crossed, talking to him about his day while he ate the food she had prepared; and birds had been building nests in that spot for twenty years. Karras smiled.
“What’s so funny, Dimitraki? Eh?
“Nothin’. Just good to see you, that’s all.”
“Wanna little bit more pudding?”
“Sure, Ma. One more bowl.”
Wilton Cooper sat on the edge of Eddie Marchetti’s desk, rapped a rolled-up District of Columbia detail map against his thigh. B. R. Clagget stood behind him, hip cocked, smoking a long white cigarette.
“So the deal went all right,” said Marchetti, nervously moving his swivel chair back and forth behind the desk.
“Deal went real smooth,” said Cooper.
“See, Clarenze? I told you, no problemo.”
Clarence Tate, standing next to the office window, nodded shortly. He was watching the skinny white dude, thinking how pale and weak he looked. Tate had noticed the pus on the kid’s gums, figured he was heading into a fever infection now. Cooper should’ve made sure the kid was treated right, if he had given a fuck. But Cooper, you could see it in his eyes, he didn’t care if he ever saw the sun come up on another day. Why would he care if the kid he was riding with lived or died?
“You meet Larry’s lady?” said Marchetti.
“Oh, yeah,” said Cooper. “That was one wild freak.”
“She makes quite an impression, right?”
“Talk about it,” said Cooper. “She damn near blew me away!”
Cooper and Marchetti laughed. Tate watched Clagget’s pig eyes move knowingly toward Cooper.
“So anyway,” said Cooper, “been a pleasure doin’ business with all a y’all, so far. Now I mean to clean things up, get that money back from Trouble Man.”
“Sounds good,” said Marchetti. “If you see my girl, maybe you could persuade her to come on back, too.”
“Maybe so. Might just throw her in on the bargain.”
Marchetti head-motioned Tate. “Clarenze, you were gonna ask around, see if you could dig up an address on that Clay character, or the Greek.”
Tate had made some calls that morning, talked to a couple brothers he had kept in contact with who had played Interhigh ball in the midsixties and still played pickup around town. Tate told them he owed Marcus Clay a few bucks, that he was trying to locate Clay to pay him back. Both of them knew Clay, but the first guy he talked to didn’t fall for that old game and said nothing further. The second brother, who was slow from a five-year love affair with a bottle of Tango, told Tate that Clay owned a record shop called Real Right on Connecticut above Dupont.
Marchetti said, “You turn up anything yet?”
Tate said, “Nothing yet.”
Cooper smiled. “No matter.” He unrolled the detail map, held it up so Tate could see. “It’s a trip, man. With a phone book and one of those, you can find damn near anyone you want real easy. See, I remember that Karras dude talking about his high school — Wilson, if I recall. He did play for Wilson, didn’t he, Clarence?”
“What the man said.”
“So I looked up the high school on the map, then all the Karrases in the phone book who lived in that area. Wasn’t but one. His folks, I’d guess. Thought I’d slide on over there, see what I could dig up on my own.”
“That’s a start, then,” said Marchetti happily.
“Real slick, how you did that,” said Tate.
“Oh, I’m on it, blood,” said Cooper, sliding off the desk and standing straight. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled free a slip of notepaper, tossed it onto Marchetti’s desk. “Thought you might like to know where me and B.R. gonna be at the next few days. Decided we’d check out of our motel, stay close to the Thomas brothers, kind of double up in their cousin’s place. More convenient and shit.”
Marchetti looked at the scribbling on the paper. “You put your phone number on here. Good.”
“Case you need to reach me. Mind, I don’t think you ought to be giving out the number to anybody else. Might make me... misunderstand our relationship. Dig?”
“Solid, Wilton,” said Marchetti.
“Yeah,” said Cooper, winking at Tate. “Solid as a motherfucker, Spags.” Cooper jerked his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s go, B.R. Time you and me was headin’ uptown.”
A few minutes later, Tate tracked Cooper and Clagget from the window as they walked to the red Challenger out on the street.
“Hey, Eddie.”
“What.”
“You talk to your biker friend Larry today, see how he liked the way the deal went down?”
“I called him a couple of times, but I couldn’t get through. The phone must be fucked or somethin’. Why?”
Tate studied the collapsed front end on the Dodge. “No reason.”
“You worry too much, Clarenze.”
“Cats like Cooper—”
“Look, you’ve got to deal with guys like Cooper once in a while if you want to score. I been around the block enough times to know Cooper’s dangerous. But, hey: No balls, no glory, right?”
Right, thought Tate. And no brains, no headaches, either.
Thirteen
Dewey Schmidt shot off on the magazine photograph of a girl named Tracey who liked guys with muscles and candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach. He opened his eyes, shivered, looked down at his manhood as he gave himself a few more strokes to squeeze out the excess jam. Most guys felt a little blue after, but Dewey could go a couple of times a day easy without a bit of remorse. He really loved to jerk off.
Dewey closed the magazine, put it in the bottom of the stack. You had to rotate the Swanks, otherwise you’d ruin them fast. Dewey had his favorite magazine girls, but once you got a good ten-hut going, one naked chick was as good as the next, and by then Dewey had forgotten about Tracey anyhow and shifted his fantasy to Lindy, one of his Magnificent Seven at Einstein High. Dewey kept a list of seven girls tacked to his bulletin board next to his lobby card of Clint Eastwood from Magnum Force. The list changed frequently, Lindy having bumped a girl named Betty Dasch — Dewey called her Betty Gash — after Dewey had seen Lindy on the last day of school in her imitation leopard-skin shorts. It was those shorts, and what lay black and steaming beneath them, that had made Dewey dump Betty from the list and get dizzy in love over Lindy.
Dewey pulled his jeans up from down around his ankles, zipped his fly. He picked up a dumbbell, did curls with his right arm until the vein in his bicep popped up nice, repeated the action with his left. Looking in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of his bedroom door, he shook out his straight black hair.
“Schmidt the Snake,” said Dewey, smiling rakishly as he ran a thumb along the cat hairs of his mustache.
Dewey went to the living room, left a note for his mom, a secretary at the Department of Transportation, in case she came home early. He slipped the note under a Harold Robbins paperback called The Adventurers that his mother had been reading for the last year. Going out the door, he pulled on the crotch of his jeans, separating it and his fishnet underwear from where his cock had begun to stick.