Hell To Pay Read online

White arrived with Trooper, back on his leash. “I need to fix him up some,” said White, not looking into his friends’ eyes.

  “We’ll do it now,” said Potter. “Let’s go.”

  A COUPLE of blocks away, near Fort Slocum Park, Potter pulled the Chevy into an alley where there seemed to be no activity. He cut the engine and looked over the backseat at White; Trooper sat panting, his hip resting against his owner’s.

  “Dog needs to pee,” said Potter.

  “He went,” said White. “Let’s just take him to the vet place.”

  “He already bleedin’ all over the backseat. He pees back there, too, I ain’t gonna be too happy. Gimme the leash, man, I’ll walk him.”

  “I’ll walk him,” said White. His lip quivered when he spoke.

  “Let D walk him if he wants to, Coon,” said Little. “Dog needs to pee, don’t make no difference who be holdin’ the leash.”

  Potter got out of the car and went around to White’s side. He opened the door and took hold of the leash. The dog looked over at White and then jumped his lap and was out of the car.

  Potter walked Trooper down the alley until they were behind a high wooden privacy fence. Potter looked around briefly, saw no one in the neighboring yards or in the windows of the houses, and commanded the dog to sit.

  When Trooper sat, Potter pulled the.357 Colt from his waistband, pointed it close to the dog’s right eye, and squeezed the trigger. Trooper’s muzzle and most of his face exploded out into the alley in a haze of bone and blood. The dog toppled over onto its side and its legs straightened in a shudder. Potter stepped back and shot the dog in the ribcage one more time. Trooper’s carcass lifted an inch or two off the ground and came to rest.

  Potter went back to the car and got behind the wheel. Little was holding a match to the half of the White Owl blunt he had not yet smoked.

  “Gun works,” said Potter.

  Little nodded. “Loud, too.”

  Potter put the trans in gear, draped his arm over the bench seat, and turned his head to look out the rear window as he reversed the car out of the alley. White was staring out the window, his face dirty from tears he had tried to wipe away.

  “Go on and get it out you,” said Potter. “Someone you know see you cryin’ over some dumb animal, they gonna mistake you for a bitch. And I ain’t ridin’ with none of that.”

  POTTER, Little, and White bought a kilo of marijuana from their dealer in Columbia Heights, dimed out half of it back at their place, and delivered the dimes to their runners so they could get started on the evening rush. Then the three of them drove north up Georgia Avenue and over to Roosevelt High. They went into the parking lot at Iowa Avenue and parked the Chevy beside a black Cadillac Brougham. There were several other cars in the lot.

  Potter looked in the rearview at White, staring ahead. “We straight, Coon?”

  “Just a dumb animal, like you said. Don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

  Potter didn’t like the tone in White’s voice. But White was just showing a little pride. That was good, but he’d never act on his anger for real. Like his weak-ass dog, he wasn’t game.

  “I’ll check it out,” said Potter to Little.

  He walked across the parking lot and stood at the fence that bordered the stadium down below. After a while he came back to the car.

  “You see him?” said Little as Potter got back behind the wheel.

  “Nah,” said Potter. “Just some kids playin’ football. Some old-time motherfuckers, coaches and shit.”

  “We can come back.”

  “We will. I’m gonna smoke that motherfucker when I see him, too.”

  “Wilder don’t owe you but a hundred dollars, D.”

  “Thinks he can ignore his debt. Tryin’ to take me for bad; you know I can’t just let that go.”

  “Ain’t like you need the money today or nothin’ like that.”

  “It ain’t the money,” said Potter. “And I can wait.”

  chapter 2

  DEREK Strange was coming out of a massage parlor when he felt his beeper vibrate against his hip. He checked the number printed out across the horizontal screen and walked through Chinatown over to the MLK library on 9th, where a bank of pay phones was set outside the facility. Strange owned a cell, but he still used street phones whenever he could.

  “Janine,” said Strange.

  “Derek.”

  “You rang?”

  “Those women been calling you again. The two investigators from out in Montgomery County?”

  “I called them back, didn’t I?”

  “You mean I did. They been trying to get an appointment with you for a week now.”

  “So they’re still trying.”

  “They’re being a little bit more aggressive than that. They’re heading into town right now, want to meet you for lunch. Said they’d pick up the tab.”

  Strange tugged his jeans away from his crotch where they had stuck.

  “It’s a money job, Derek.”

  “Hold up, Janine.” Strange put the receiver against his chest as a man who was passing by stopped to shake his hand.

  “Tommy, how you been?”

  “Doin’ real good, Derek,” said Tommy. “Say, you got any spare love you can lay on me till I see you next time?”

  Strange looked at the black baggage beneath Tommy’s eyes, the way his pants rode low on his bony hips. Strange had come up with Tommy’s older brother, Scott, who was gone ten years now from the cancer that took his shell. Scott wouldn’t want Strange to give his baby brother any money, not for what Tommy had in mind.

  “Not today,” said Strange.

  “All right, then,” said Tommy, shamed, but not enough. He slowly walked away.

  Strange spoke into the receiver. “Janine, where they want to meet?”

  “Frosso’s.”

  “Call ’em up and tell ’em I’ll be there. ’Bout twenty minutes.”

  “Am I going to see you tonight?”

  “Maybe after practice.”

  “I marinated a chuck roast, gonna grill it on the Weber. Lionel will be at practice, won’t he? You’re going to drop him off at our house anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can talk about it when you come back by the office. You got a two o’clock with George Hastings.”

  “I remember. Okay, we’ll talk about it then.”

  “I love you, Derek.”

  Strange lowered his voice. “I love you, too, baby.”

  Strange hung up the phone. He did love her. And her voice, more than her words, had brought him some guilt for what he’d just done. But there was love and sex on one side and just sex on the other. To Strange, the two were entirely different things.

  STRANGE drove east in his white-over-black ’89 Caprice, singing along softly to “Wake Up Everybody” coming from the deck. That first verse, where Teddy’s purring those call-to-arms words against the Gamble and Huff production, telling the listener to open his eyes, look around, get involved and into the uplift side of things, there wasn’t a whole lot of American music more beautiful than that.

  His Rand McNally street atlas lay on the seat beside him. He had a Leatherman tool-in-one looped through his belt, touching a Buck knife, sheathed and attached the same way on his right hip. His beeper he wore on his left. The rest of his equipment was in a double-locked glove box and in the trunk. It was true that most modern investigative work was done in an office and on the Internet. Strange thought of himself as having two offices, though, his base office in Petworth and the one in his car, right here. His preference was to work the street.

  It was early September. The city was still hot during the day, though the nights had cooled some. It would be that way in the District for another month or so.

  “‘The world won’t get no better,’” sang Strange, “‘if we just let it be…’”

  Soon the colors would change in Rock Creek Park. And then would come those weeks near Thanksgiving when the weather turned for
real and the leaves were still coming down off the trees. Strange had his own name for it: deep fall. It was his favorite time of year in D.C.

  FROSSO’S, a stand-alone structure with a green thatched roof, sat on a west-side corner of 13th and L, Northwest, like a pimple on the ass of a beautiful girl. The Mediterranean who owned the business owned the real estate and had refused to sell, even as the offers came in, even as new office buildings went in around him. Frosso’s was a burger-and-lunch counter, also a happy-hour bar and hangout for those remaining workers who still drank and smoked or didn’t mind the smell of smoke on their clothes. Beer gardens in this part of downtown were few and far between.

  Strange made his way through a noisy dining area to a four-top back by the pay phone and head, where two women sat. He recognized the investigators, a salt-and-pepper team, from an article he’d read on them in City Paper a few months back. They worked cases retrieving young runaways gone to hooking. The two of them were aligned with some do-goodnik, pro-prosti organization that operated on grants inside D.C.

  “Derek Strange,” he said, shaking the black woman’s hand and then the white woman’s before he took a seat.

  “I’m Karen Bagley. This is Sue Tracy.”

  Strange slid his business card across the table. Bagley gave him one in turn, Strange scanning it for the name of their business: Bagley and Tracy Investigative Services, and below the name, in smaller letters, “Specializing in Locating and Retrieving Minors.” A plain card, without any artwork, Strange thinking, They could use a logo, give their card a signature, something to make the customers remember them by.

  Bagley was medium-skinned and wide of nose. Her eyes were large and deep brown, the lashes accentuated by makeup. Freckles like coarse pepper buckshotted her face. Sue Tracy was a shag-cut blonde, green-eyed, still tanned from the last of summer, with smaller shoulders than Bagley’s. They were serious-faced, handsome, youngish women, hard boned and, Strange guessed – he couldn’t see the business end of their bodies, seated at the table – strong of thigh. They looked like the ex-cops that the newspaper article had described them to be. Better looking, in fact, than most of the female officers Strange had known.

  Tracy pointed a finger at the mug in front of her. Bagley’s hand was wrapped around a mug as well. “You want a beer?”

  “Too early for me. I’ll get a burger, though. Medium, with some blue cheese crumbled on top. And a ginger ale from the bottle, not the gun.”

  Tracy called the waitress over, addressed her by name, got a burger working for Strange. The waitress said, “Got it, Sue,” tearing the top sheet off a green-lined pad before turning back toward the lunch counter.

  “You’re a hard man to get ahold of,” said Bagley.

  “I been busy out here,” said Strange.

  “A big caseload, huh?”

  “Always somethin’.” A glass was placed before Strange. He examined a smudge on its lip. “This place clean?”

  “Like a dog’s tongue,” said Tracy.

  “Some say that about a dog’s hindparts, too,” said Strange. “But I wouldn’t put my mouth to one.”

  “Maybe they ought to put that on the sign out front,” said Tracy, without a trace of a smile. “Good food, and clean, too, like the asshole on a dog.”

  “Might bring in some new customers,” said Strange. “You never know.”

  “They don’t need any new customers,” said Bagley. “The regulars float this place.”

  “I take it you two are numbered with the regulars.”

  “We used to come here plenty for information,” said Tracy. “Here and the all-night CVS below Logan Circle.”

  “Information,” said Strange. “From prostitutes, you mean.”

  Bagley nodded. “The girls would be in the CVS at all hours, buying stockings, tampons, you name it.”

  “Them and the heroin lovers,” said Strange. “They do crave their chocolate in the middle of the night. I remember seein’ them in there, grabbing the Hershey bars off the racks with their eyelids lowered to half-mast.”

  “You hung out there, too?” said Bagley.

  “Back when it was People’s Drug, which must be over ten years back now, huh? Used to stop in for my own essentials when everything else was closed. I was a bit of a night bird then myself.”

  “The demographics have shifted some the last couple of years,” said Tracy. “A lot of the action’s moved east, into the hotel cluster of the new downtown.”

  “But this here tavern was a known hangout for prostis, wasn’t it?”

  “More like a safe haven,” said Bagley. “Nobody bothered them in here. It was a place to have a beer and a smoke. A moment of quiet.”

  “No more, huh?”

  Bagley shrugged. “There’s been an initiative to get the girls out of public establishments.”

  Tracy moved her mug in a small circle on the table. “The powers that be would rather have them shivering in some doorway in December than warm in a place like this.”

  “I guess y’all think they ought to just go ahead and legalize prostitution, right? Since it’s one of those victimless crimes, I mean.”

  “Wrong,” said Tracy. “In fact, it’s the only crime I know of where the perp is the victim.”

  Strange didn’t know what to say to that one, so he let it ride.

  “What about you?” asked Bagley. “What do you think about it?”

  Strange’s eyes darted from Bagley’s and went to nowhere past her shoulder. “I haven’t thought on it all that much, tell you the truth.”

  Bagley and Tracy stared at Strange. Strange turned his head, looked toward the grill area. Where was that burger? All right, thought Strange, I’ll have my lunch, listen to these Earnest Ernestines say their piece, and get on out of here.

  “You come recommended,” said Bagley, forcing Strange to return his attention to them. “A couple of the lawyers we’ve worked with down at Superior Court say they’ve used you and they’ve been pleased.”

  “Most likely they used my operative, Ron Lattimer. He’s been doing casework for the CJA attorneys. Ron’s a smart young man, but let’s just say he doesn’t like to break too much of a sweat. So he likes those jobs, ’cause when you’re working with the courts you automatically got that federal power of subpoena. You can subpoena the phone company, the housing authority, anything. It makes your job a whole lot easier.”

  “You’ve done some of that,” said Bagley.

  “Sure, but I prefer working in the fresh air to working behind a computer, understand what I’m saying? I just like to be out there. And my business is a neighborhood business. Over twenty-five years now in the same spot. So it’s good for me to have a presence out there, the way-”

  “Cops do,” said Tracy.

  “Yeah. I’m an ex-cop, like you two. Been thirty-some-odd years since I wore the uniform, though.”

  “No such thing as an ex-cop,” said Bagley.

  “Like there’s no such thing as a former alcoholic,” said Tracy, “or an ex-Marine.”

  “You got that right,” said Strange. He liked these two women a touch more now than when he’d walked in.

  Strange turned the glass of ginger ale so that the smudge was away from him and took a sip. He replaced the glass on the table and leaned forward. “All right, then, now we had our first kiss and got that over with. What do you young ladies have on your minds?”

  Bagley glanced briefly over at Tracy, who was in the process of putting fire to a cigarette.

  “We’ve been working with a group called APIP,” said Bagley. “Do you know it?”

  “I read about it in that article they did on you two. Something about helping out prostitutes, right?”

  “Aiding Prostitutes in Peril,” said Tracy, blowing a jet of smoke across the table at Strange.

  “Some punk-rock kids started it, right?”

  “The people behind it were a part of the local punk movement twenty years ago,” said Tracy, “as I was. They’re not kids anymo
re. They’re older than me and Karen.”

  “What do they do, exactly?”

  “A number of things, from simply providing condoms to reporting violent johns. Also, they serve as an information clearinghouse. They have an eight-hundred number and a Web site that takes in e-mails from parents and prostitutes alike.”

  “That’s where you two come in. You find runaways who’re hookin’. Right?”

  “That’s a part of what we do,” said Bagley. “And we’re getting too busy to handle all the work ourselves. The county business alone keeps us up to our ears in it. We could use a little help in the District.”

  “You need me to find a girl.”

  “Not exactly,” said Bagley. “We thought we’d test the waters with you on something simpler, see if you’re interested.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “There’s a girl who works the street between L and Mass, on Seventh,” said Tracy.

  “Down there by the site for the new convention center,” said Strange.

  “Right,” said Tracy. “The last two weeks or so a guy’s been hassling her. Pulling up in his car, trying to get her to date him.”

  “Ain’t that the object of the game?”

  “Sure,” said Bagley. “But there’s something off about this guy. He’s been asking her, Do you like it rough? Telling her she’s gonna dig it, he can tell she’s gonna dig it, right?”

  Strange shifted in his seat. “So? Girl doesn’t have to be a working girl to come up against that kind of creep. She can hear it in a bar.”

  “These working women get a sense for this kind of thing,” said Bagley. “She says there’s something not right, we got to believe her. And he doesn’t want to pay. Says he doesn’t have to pay, understand? She’s scared. Can’t go to the cops, right? And her pimp would beat her ass blue if he knew she was turning down a trick.”

  “Even a no-money trick?”

  Strange stared hard at Tracy. Her eyes did not move away from his.

  Tracy said, “This is the information we have. Either you’re interested or you’re not.”

  “I hear you,” said Strange, “but I’m not sure what you want me to do. You’re lookin’ for me to shake some cat down, you got the wrong guy.”