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:
“Hey,” said Karras. “Who’s Noah Castle’s brother?”
“Me,” said the skinny kid. “Jimmy Castle.”
Karras looked around quickly, extended his hand for what looked like a shake, passed the bag of weed from his palm to Jimmy’s. The tall stupid-looking one handed Karras a tightly rolled tube of cash. Karras put the cash in his pocket without a glance.
The four of them stood there for a few moments, none of them saying a word. Jimmy Castle shuffled his feet.
“Fifty bucks an OZ,” said the cocky one, stepping forward hesitantly. “It better be good.”
“You got any complaints, you know where to find me,” said Karras.
“My brother says he sells good herb,” said Jimmy to the cocky one.
“Always,” said Karras, forcing a smile. “You guys enjoy yourselves, hear?”
Karras left them standing on the path, walked over the bridge toward his car. He rubbed at an itch on his face. It wasn’t like he was hanging around outside the local high school wearing a trench coat, pushing drugs. It wasn’t anything like that at all. The way it was, Karras knew Noah Castle, an usher at the Janus who drank regularly at Mr. Eagan’s in the neighborhood, pretty well. Noah had told him that his brother and his brother’s friends were looking to score a bag of dope. Noah had said it would be all right. And anyway, there wasn’t anything wrong with smoking a little pot now and then. This was something that Karras truly believed. Kids were gonna smoke it, and they had as much right to smoke it as anybody else. They were gonna get it somewhere, if not from him than from someone else...
Karras drove quickly from the park. It made him uncomfortable to be out of the city, even for a short period of time. He’d go downtown, talk to this Stefanos character, see what the old bird had on his mind.
Crossing the District line, Karras exhaled evenly. He found Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous debut in his carrying case, pushed the eight-track tape into the deck. “Then Came the Last Days of May” began, Buck Dharma’s familiar fluid guitar lines filling the air. Though it was awfully sad, Karras deeply loved that tune: a song about friends and money and a drug deal gone wrong.
Fourteen
Clarence Tate parked his ride outside Meridian Heights, an apartment building gone condo on 15th Street, just east of Meridian Hill Park. He stayed in his black Monte Carlo after he had killed the engine, listening to the Stylistics going into the last verse of “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” Russell Thompkins’s falsetto and the harmony on the chorus giving him chills, like the Lord was doing the singing himself.
When the song ended, Tate got out of his car and crossed the street. Behind him, some tough-looking kids were entering the park; the brothers and sisters around town who were politically inclined had begun referring to Meridian as Malcolm X Park, and the name had started to stick, but what they really needed to concentrate on was cleaning the place up. Tate owned a condo in Meridian Heights and was concerned about the falling property values in the neighborhood.
He entered the building’s small lobby. The old white guy who had been hired as security, Andy something, he was an okay dude but also a stone lush and therefore always either in search of a drink or down in the boiler room sleeping off the bottle he had found. Never at his post in the lobby, though, which pissed Tate off to the max. All these strangers were in town for the big July Fourth weekend, walking the streets, carrying on, gettin’ all liquored up, and doing who knew what else, and there wouldn’t be any security to speak of in the Heights to fend off any crime. Tate was fond of Andy and all that, but he knew Andy would be partying just as hard as everyone else come Sunday night. Harder, most likely.
The building had a staircase leading to the roof and an elevator that went, very slowly, to the top floor. Tate entered the stairwell rather than wait, as he was only going up to the fourth floor.
Tate had bought this place with his wife originally, and his little girl had spent her first few months here. But once his wife had gone off and gotten remarried to the street, Tate and his daughter had moved back in with his parents in the old neighborhood. Tate figured he’d rent the condo out, save some money like that, hope against hope that the Meridian Hill east area didn’t go all the way to shit in the meantime and the condo would keep its value. He had a tenant in there now by the name of Enrique, who lived with a girl named Ruth. Enrique was cool, but he was struggling his own self, so Tate had to come around the first week of every month and personally collect. It was always about money, man, that was for damn sure.
Money. If he could only move those hot goods out of Marchetti’s warehouse, take his cut, he could make a clean break from Eddie Spags. With Eddie striking girls now, dealing in reefer and blow, and especially with that bad nigger Cooper and his shotgun boys in town, the shit was just getting way too deep for Tate’s taste. Tate wanted to live. And he didn’t even want to think about making his little girl an orphan.
But everything took money, all the time.
A friend had told Tate about a group of brothers across town, dudes working out of a storefront who were paying top dollar for hot goods and buying in quantity as well. Tate would have to check into it, find out what that setup was all about. In the meantime, get up to the fourth floor, collect the rent check from Enrique and his squeeze. ’Cause that rent check, that was real money, too.
Wilton Cooper checked the address he had written down on the pad of paper, tossed the detail map on the backseat. He slowed the Challenger, pulled over to the curb on Davenport near 45th, parked beneath a big tree. He looked out the window at the house whose address matched up with the number he had on the pad.
“This it, Wilton?”
“This here’s the number. Only Karras for this part of town in the D.C. book.”
“Think he lives here?”
“Gonna find out right quick.”
Cooper looked at the houses, modest and understated, on the block. Not too much serious money here, but enough to keep the real world behind that invisible fence. Driving in, he hadn’t seen a brother or a brown man for the last few miles at least. Kind of place where everybody talks about the injustices of society, the need for education, rehabilitation over incarceration, all that. Guys wearing glasses without rims, reading the paper every morning with classical music playing soft in the background, talking over the fence to other guys who look like them about all the bad things happening out there, shaking their heads, talking, talking, talk, talk, talk. Neighborhood like this, where nothing bad ever happened, where nobody would know how to do a damn thing about it if something bad did, a couple of motivated niggers with guns could walk through a place like this and fuck some motherfuckers up at will. Course, they’d send in the cavalry soon enough to gun ’em down. Before they did, though, on the way to his doom, a man could have some fun. Cooper grinned.
“What’s so funny, Wilton?”
“Nothin’, little brother.” Cooper glanced across the seat. “You ain’t lookin’ so good, you know?”
“I’m all right.”
“You just sit tight, then. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Cooper pulled his shirttail out to cover the butt of the .45 he had holstered behind his back. He got out of the car. He walked toward the house.
Eleni Karras had been watching from the window ever since the red car had pulled to a stop in front of her house. She watched the big mavros with the football-player chest get out of the driver’s side and walk toward her place. Maybe he was selling something — though he didn’t look like a salesman — or maybe he needed help. His friend needed help, that was it; the red-faced boy sitting in the passenger seat, he didn’t look too well.