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:
“Don’t mind B.R.,” said Cooper. “He means you no harm. The shotgun, in a funny kind of way, it’s his friend.”
“Sure,” said Marchetti. “We’re all on the same page. Clarenze here, he’s the worrier of my staff. Needs to get down a little. Boogie. Know what I mean, Wilton? Can I call you Wilton?”
Cooper rolled his eyes toward Tate. “I’m a little confused. Your boss here called you Clarenze. Thought you said your name was Clarence.”
“It is,” said Tate.
“Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.”
“So,” said Marchetti, “how’s my buddy Carlos doin’?”
Wilton Cooper said, “Carlos is good. Stylin’, too. Looks about a million miles away from when you knew him. What was he, a busboy in your daddy’s place?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, he ain’t no busboy now. Likes the warmer climate, too. More natural for him. But you know how it is, you improve your station in life, all you’re doin’ sometimes is tradin’ in one set of troubles for another.”
“Things aren’t going so good for my friend Carlos down there?”
“Don’t misunderstand me, now. Things are all right. But the goods Carlos trades in, well, the competition in South Florida, it can get a little fierce. And you get locked in to certain distribution channels, all of the sudden they start owning you.”
Got to keep the vendors on their toes, thought Tate. Competition beats negotiation every time.
“So,” said Cooper, “Carlos was talkin’ to you, and you claimed you could hook him up with a sweet deal on a few keys of ’caine. Something we could take back home, step on a little, make a nice profit. At the same time, let our suppliers know in a subtle way that we can always buy somewhere else, but out of town, not in our own backyard, so we don’t be startin’ no wars down there and shit.”
“That’s exactly what I told him. I have a source—”
“A source,” said Cooper.
“That’s right,” said Marchetti. “A biker I know. Guy by the name of Larry.”
“Larry.”
“Uh-huh. Him and his gang — well, I don’t know if you can call them a gang, exactly, but they all ride bikes — they’re staying out in a little house on some farmland in a place called Marriottsville, up near Baltimore. Larry and his friends, they deal in quantity.”
“You know this.”
“I struck up a friendship with Larry and his lady — Larry calls her his lady — in a bar here in D.C. Right on Capitol Hill. Same bar I took Viv over there away from, the place where she was serving drinks, getting her ass patted all day by the customers. Right, Viv?”
“Yeah, Eddie,” said Vivian. “You swept me off my feet.”
“So I tell Larry what I do. ‘I buy and sell things for a living,’ I say. And Larry says, ‘I got something you can buy, bro, and you can turn around and sell it for a whole lot more.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah?’”
“Why didn’t you, then?” said Cooper.
“What I do here,” said Marchetti, “I buy hard goods, move them around for a profit.”
“You’re a fence.”
“Yeah. And I move a little reefer, too. Viv likes to smoke it now and again, so it keeps us in a private stash. But cocaine? Shit, Wilton, I gotta be honest with you, I’m playing an away game there. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if it was sitting in my lap.”
“Start by gettin’ it out your lap,” said Russell, “and up your got-damn nose.”
“Got that shit right,” said Ronald, cooler than a corpse, giving soft skin to Russell without even moving his eyes.
“So you got to talking to Carlos,” said Cooper.
“Thought we could work something out.”
“You be the broker,” said Cooper.
“For the standard ten points,” said Marchetti.
“And that would bring us up to today.”
“Right. The way Carlos put it, he’d send you up here, you show me you got the money so I don’t embarrass myself, and I put you up with Larry. You make the buy, I get my twenty G’s, you go home, everyone’s happy. How’s that sound?”
“Solid as a motherfucker, Eddie.”
“So,” said Marchetti with a nervous smile. “The money.”
“What,” said Cooper, “you thought I’d forget about that?”
Tate looked over at the white boy, hip cocked, his finger grazing the back of the shotgun’s trigger.
Cooper arched his back, dug into his front pocket, grunted. “Be glad when these tight jeans go out of style. Here we are.” He pulled free a roll of bills, leaned forward, dropped the bills on Marchetti’s desk. “Twenty grand. How’s that look to you, Spags?”
Eddie Marchetti smiled, picked up the money. He looked at it briefly, like he didn’t need to count it, counted it quickly in his head. Tate got off the desk at the sound of a car door, went to the window behind Marchetti’s desk.
“Black dude and a white dude, Eddie, comin’ to the door.”
“White dude look like a Greek?” said Marchetti, his eyes still on the bills.
“How should I know, man?”
“It’s that Karras guy, most likely, come to pick up his dope.”
“Should I tell him to come back later?” said Tate.
“Hey, Wilton,” said Marchetti, “you don’t mind I do a little business real quick, do ya?”
“No,” said Cooper, “I don’t mind.”
“Go ahead, Clarenze,” said Marchetti. “Buzz the Greek in.”
Five
Up this way, I guess,” said Karras. Clay followed him up a darkened concrete-and-steel stairwell.
“You mean you’ve never been here before?”
“This isn’t my usual distributor.”
“So you don’t even know who you’re dealing with.”
“Technically, yeah. But my distributor, guy named Loopy, he’s going on vacation, he offered to hook me up with his man, just this one week.”
“Loopy.”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, Loopy’s cool.”
“Name like Loopy, he don’t sound all that cool to me.”
Karras opened the heavy door at the top of the landing. He and Clay walked into a large room with a concrete floor, where several men stood and sat around and one young woman reclined on a wine leather couch. One of those standing, a skinny white kid with a face full of acne, held a sawed-off shotgun at his side.
Karras and Clay had a look at the group, all of whom had turned to look at them. Clay knew then he should not have come along. His friend had asked him to, and because Karras was his friend, Clay had done it. But he shouldn’t have come, just the same. He only wanted to run his business, live a quiet kind of life. He had seen all the guns he would ever want to see. And here he was, facing a roomful of country knuckleheads and a teenage peckerwood with his finger curled around the hot trigger of doom. Clay knew there was nothing more dangerous than a young boy with a loaded gun. The young, they just didn’t understand death.
“Who’s Eddie Marchetti?” said Karras in a gregarious, confident tone, stepping across the room, a friendly smile on his face. He’d talked his way out of tighter situations than this: squarehead cops and jealous boyfriends and barroom bad-asses and all the rest. Clay walked with him.
“That’s me,” said Marchetti, dropping the money on his desk. “You Dimitri Karras?”
“That’s right. This is my friend Marcus Clay.”
Clay nodded, noticed the tall brother, the one with the gentle eyes who sat on the edge of the desk, give him a second look at the sound of his name.
“Dimitri and Marcus,” said Marchetti, giving it his smile, just one of the boys. “Sounds like a couple of gladiators.”
“Look more like Christopher Salt and Charlie Pepper to me,” said Clagget. “Right, Wilton?”