Shame the Devil (26 page)

“That’s our intent. We need a substantial payday this time. Roman and Gus here have run into a financial setback. Your cut
will be the usual — ten percent. That okay with you, T. W.?”

Wilson nodded.

“Tomorrow we’ll see Manuel and Jaime. You’ve called them, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’d they have to say?”

They said you killed a minister in cold blood down on the Eastern Shore
.

“They said to come on by,” said Wilson. “They’ll have a car for you on Monday.”

“I need something with a little muscle. I’ve been driving this piece-of-shit truck —”

“They’re on it,” said Wilson.

“Damn, boy!” shouted Kendricks, jumping up from his chair and shutting off the set. “Can’t nobody in this league fuck with
the Bulls?”

“Hey, Booker,” said Otis. “Keep your voice down, man.”

Kendricks dismissed them all with a wave of his hand. “Y’all are just way too serious for a Saturday night. I’m gonna take
a walk, catch some air.”

Kendricks slipped the pistol into the pocket of his baggy slacks and put on a jacket. “See ya later, Tall Tree,” he said,
smiling at Lavonicus before leaving the house.

Lavonicus blinked his eyes hard, but he did not raise his head.

When the door closed, Otis said, “Hard to believe that man shares a drop of my blood.”

Farrow said, “Where’s he goin’, anyway, in this cold?”

“I don’t know,” said Otis. “But if I owned one of these farms around here, right about now I’d be putting a lock on the barn
door.”

“Likes those kickin’ mules, huh?” said Farrow.

“I don’t even think they have to kick to get his fancy. All he needs is the right texture to get him started. You want to
know the truth, I wouldn’t even trust my cousin around a rare steak.”

Wilson cleared his throat. “That about it? ’Cause I got to make the drive back into town.”

“Wait a minute,” said Farrow, turning to Lavonicus. “Gus, give us a couple of minutes alone here, will you?”

“Sure.” Lavonicus stood and ducked an arched frame as he entered the hall to the back bedrooms.

“Gus don’t know much about the details of our history,” said Otis. “He don’t
need
to know, is what I’m sayin’.”

Farrow stopped pacing and looked down at Wilson. “You find out where that cop lives?”

“No,” said Wilson. “Not yet.”

“What about his sons?”

“His sons live with him. That much I got from the papers.”

“Find his address,” said Farrow. “I owe him a visit.”

Wilson nodded and said, “That it?”

“One more thing,” said Farrow. “Want to get this out on the table once and for all, and then bury it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Your pizza chef friend. I want to make sure you’re not carrying a grudge over what happened.”

“I’m not. I told you as much on the phone.”

“Look at me, T. W., not at the floor.”

Wilson locked eyes with Farrow.

“What happened in that pizza parlor was a necessity,” said Farrow. “In a situation like that, when you pull the trigger one
time you have to keep pulling it until nobody’s left alive. Charles might have been the most stand-up guy who ever walked
down the block, but the cops would’ve broken him, and he would’ve fingered us all to make a deal. Anybody would have. What
we did to him was just business and self-preservation. Ours
and
yours. So I want you to tell me now that you don’t have a problem with what went down.”

Wilson’s mouth twitched.

“Do you have a problem, T. W.?”

I’d kill you now if I was man enough. But I am not man enough. God help me, I’m as weak as they come
.

“No,” said Wilson. “I don’t have a problem.”

“Good,” said Farrow. “I’ll see you Monday at the garage.”

“Right.”

Wilson killed his beer. He stood from the couch and walked from the house.

“Man’s still got that tired Arsenio fade,” said Otis, pushing his own hair back behind his ears. “Needs to get himself to
a shop where they’re doin’ that new thing.”

Farrow listened to Wilson’s Dodge pull away. “What do you think of him?”

“The man is troubled, that much is plain. But troubled don’t mean dangerous.”

“No, it doesn’t. Wilson’s weak and afraid. He always was someone you could push around.”

“So we got nothin’ to worry about, right?”

“He’s paralyzed,” said Farrow. “He’ll never make a play.”

Thomas Wilson gripped the steering wheel tightly to stop the shake in his hands. Anger was making his hands shake, but there
was something else, too: fear. The fear was stronger than the anger. And the knowledge of this made him ashamed.

Wilson turned left off the two-lane and drove north on 301.

How had he come to be with these kinds of men? Looking back on it, it was an obvious path that had brought him to where he
was now.

His life had turned with his coke addiction. He understood completely what Dimitri Karras was riffing on at those meetings,
though of course he could never admit to Dimitri or the rest of them that he was a member of that same NA club. By way of
explaining the hole in his personal time line, he had only told them that he had gone away for a few years to find his calling.
Gone away, hell. Put away was more like it.

It had started as a casual thing for Wilson, back in the late seventies. That’s the way it always started with this shit;
cocaine was the drug that always drove the car and never gave up the keys. By the time you knew it, it was too late.

Wilson had started dealing to support his habit. He was arrested and charged twice, but the judges were right, the jails were
full, and he did no time.

After a while Wilson figured, if you’re gonna be into it, why not step it up, make some bigger money, get into it for real?
So he hooked up with a dealer who controlled the action down around the dwellings at 7th and M in Northwest, and he became
this dealer’s mule. Wilson began to make the regular Amtrak run from Union Station to Penn Station and back again. It was
safer than being out on the corner, and it seemed to be risk free.

But Wilson had misjudged the stealth of his dealer’s rivals, who’d gotten the time of his run from a nose-fiend on the street.
The cops pulled Wilson and his black leather suitcase off the Metroliner at the 30th Street station in Philly, busted his
dumb ass right there on the platform. With Wilson’s priors and the quantity confiscated, he took the big fall. They sent him
up to Lewisburg, the federal joint in PA.

In prison, Wilson got free of his coke jones but collected fateful relationships with many men: Frank Farrow, Roman Otis,
Lee Toomey, Manuel Ruiz, and Jaime Gutierrez among them. On the last day of his bit, he promised Farrow and Otis he’d stay
in touch.

When Wilson got out, he vowed to stay straight. But from his muling days he remembered how it felt to have money, real money,
in his pocket all the time. His mother had died when he was in Lewisburg, and his uncle Lindo was good enough to hook him
up with the hauling job. Lindo was all right to talk to during the day, but Lindo was old-time, and Lindo wasn’t his boy.
That distinction would always go to his lifelong friend, Charles Greene.

One night he and Charles had a couple of drinks and Charles got loose with his tongue. He began to tell Wilson about the pizza
parlor where he had been working for some time. How the place was more or less a front for a large gaming operation, numbers
and book and the like. How the man who co-owned the joint, Carl Lewin, was his own bagman. How Lewin made May’s the last stop
on his run, the same day, same time, every week.

Wilson thought of the money, then thought of his old acquaintances from Lewisburg, Farrow and Otis. Tough guys, professionals,
who made it their specialty to take off other criminals. He had the idea that he could contact Farrow and set this thing up.
Get Manuel and Jaime, who had gone into the chop business at a garage in Silver Spring, involved as well. He talked himself
into it, and then he talked Charles into it, too. Convinced Charles that this was ill-gotten money anyway, it would just be
going from one set of dirty hands to another. His employer would never, ever know. And no one would get hurt.

After the bloodbath in the kitchen, Wilson did not go to the law and confess his involvement. The atmosphere was lynch-mob
heavy in town in the weeks following the murders, and Wilson was… well, Wilson was scared. Much as he had loved Charles, he
couldn’t bring Charles back. He didn’t want to go to prison again, and if he did go, Farrow would find a way to reach him
on the inside. No, there wasn’t any kind of good that could come out of going to the law. That’s what he thought at the time.
And then he went to the meetings, thinking that hearing the stories of the others might ease his pain. There, he became friends
with the victims’ relatives, and their pain became his. He hadn’t figured on that. It was like there was a nest of angry spiders
now, all the time, crawling around in his head.

Now Farrow wanted him to set up the cop in the wheelchair, and maybe his sons.

Wilson approached the lights of the strip shopping centers along the highway side of La Plata. He cracked the window to let
in some air. It felt kind of stuffy in the car, and there was a tightness in his chest.

He knew he was a coward. It was because of his cowardice that things had come this far.

Once you were in with Farrow and Otis, you were in with them for good. He could follow them or kill them or run. Those were
his choices.

He prayed that when the time came, the Lord would let him be a man.

ON MONDAY MORNING
, Nick Stefanos leaned out of the open window of his Dodge at the P. G. Plaza Metro station and snapped photographs of Erika
Mitchell meeting her new boyfriend in the parking lot beside his idling Acura. Stefanos steadied the long lens of his Pentax
as he shot. He caught Erika and her boyfriend embracing and he got one of them kissing and another of Erika getting into his
car.

Stefanos dropped the roll of film at a shop on Georgia Avenue and smoked a cigarette in his car as he looked over the list
Al Adamson had given him, checking the addresses against the detail map he kept in the Dodge. He pulled off the curb and drove
over to Hyattsville, to a garage off Queens Chapel Road.

C. Lewis, the seasoned-leaning-to-elderly owner of the shop, had no knowledge of the red Torino, mentioning only that it was
“one beautiful car.” He added that there had been fewer than a hundred manufactured of that particular model, so locating
it shouldn’t prove to be all that difficult. Stefanos thanked him, and Lewis said, “Say hi to Al.”

Stefanos drove back into Northwest, to a garage named Strange Auto near 14th and Arkansas. Go-go music was pumping from the
open bay as Stefanos approached.

The owner, Anthony Strange, informed Stefanos that “the only thing I’ll touch here is Mustangs. Torino ain’t nothin’ but an
overgrown Maverick, and I ain’t
even
gonna tell you what I think of them.” His mechanic, a very young man with a black knit cap pulled low on his forehead, laughed
and turned up the Back Yard CD he had coming from the box.

Out on the sidewalk, Stefanos looked at the next name on his list. The place was just up over the District line. He wasn’t
far from there now.

Thomas Wilson was standing in the back of the garage, talking to Manuel and Jaime, when the bell rang from the front of the
bay.

“That would be them,” said Wilson.

“Yes,” said Manuel.

Jaime Gutierrez dropped his cigarette to the concrete and ground it under his boot as Manuel Ruiz went to the bay door. He
hit a red button beside the door; the door lifted, and a Ford Ranger rolled into the garage. Manuel lowered the door as Frank
Farrow parked the pickup beside a two-tone Falcon.

Farrow and Roman Otis stepped out of the pickup. Otis stretched his long frame and followed Farrow to where Wilson and Gutierrez
stood. Manuel met the group, and Farrow shook his hand.

“Damn,” said Otis, rolling his head so that his neck muscles relaxed. “Tall man like me can’t take a long journey in a truck
that size, for real. Got used to the size of that Mark you hooked me up with, Man-you-el.”

“I am pleased that you like it.”

“Goddamn right I like it. That’s a beautiful car.”

“What’ve you got for me?” said Farrow.

“Is over here,” said Manuel, and they followed him as he led the way. Farrow looked at the red Mustang with the Formula tires
with raised white lettering and the black scoop on the hood.

“A Mach One?”

“Yes,” said Manuel. “Nineteen seventy-three, three fifty-one automatic. Original white interior. Beautiful.”

“It’s red.”

“That’s right.”

“Does it run?”

“It is very straight.”

Jaime nodded in agreement and lit another cigarette.

Farrow ran his finger along the waxed surface of the hood. “You have clean tags for it, amigo?”

“Yes.”

“Put them on. And get rid of that Ranger any way you see fit. It’s on the hot sheet by now.”

“Okay, Frank,” said Manuel. “You can sit in the offi while we put on the tags, if you wish.”

“You said ‘offi,’” said Otis, showing his gold tooth. “But you meant ‘office,’ right?”

Manuel smiled thinly.

“Come on with us, T. W.,” said Farrow.

Wilson said, “Right.”

The office was small, and many of the papers on its cluttered desk were smudged with grease. Otis had a seat on a wooden slat-back
chair and put his feet up on the desk. Farrow sat on the edge of the desk and put fire to a Kool.

“So, T. W. Any progress on finding Detective Jonas?”

“Not yet.”

Farrow looked at Otis. “Gimme that phone book over there, Roman. The D.C. edition.”

Otis handed him the directory that was on the desk. Farrow flipped through the pages, found the one he was looking for, and
folded the book open so that Wilson could see it.

“Here’s Jonas, right here,” said Farrow. “On Hamlin Street. Now give me that detail map over there, Roman.”