“Another one? You just ran some water through it five minutes ago.”
“The upstairs head was out of order. I’ll see you out at the car.”
Strange said, “Right,” and walked from the bar. Quinn waited until he was gone and then headed down the hall.
On his way out, Strange told the doorman he’d be right back. He walked quickly to his car and pulled a set of handcuffs and a sap from the trunk, sliding the sap into the breast pocket of his jacket, then went back into the club. He took the steps up to the second floor two at a time and moved through the table area to the four—top where Sherman Coles still sat.
Coles’s eyes widened, watching Strange moving in his direction, purpose in his step. Coles’s neck jerked, birdlike, as he looked around the bar, searching frantically for a familiar face.
“Right here, Sherman,” said Strange, and he kicked the table into Coles, sending him to the floor in a shower of drink and live ashes.
Strange got Coles up to his feet, turned him, and yanked his arms up, forcing Coles to his knees. Strange put his own knee to Coles’s back while he cuffed him, and then he pulled Coles to his feet.
Strange drew his wallet, flipped it open, and showed his license to the room in general.
“Investigator!” shouted Strange. “Don’t no one interfere and everything’s gonna be all right!”
He did this in situations like this one, and nearly every time it worked. It wasn’t a lie, and to most people, “investigator” meant cop. The waitresses and patrons and the men who were being lap—danced all stopped what they were doing, but no one came near him and no one interfered.
Strange kept his wallet open, holding it out for all to see, as he pushed Coles along toward the stairs.
“Where my brother at, man?” said Coles.
“That white man I was with, he’s talking to him, I expect.”
“Richard’ll kill him.”
“Keep walkin’, man.”
On the stairs, Coles lost his footing. Strange pulled him back upright with a jerk to his arms.
Coles looked over his shoulder and said, “Bounty hunter, like I thought.”
“They call us bail agents now, Sherman.”
“Knew you’d be back,” mumbled Coles. “You had that look in your eye.”
“Yeah,” said Strange. “But you didn’t know I’d be back so soon.”
QUINN walked down the hall, shakily singing along under his breath to another Prince tune that was playing now in the main portion of the club. There were small speakers hung in the hall, but their sound was trebly, not bass heavy like out near the stages, and this thin, shrill tone made his blood jump, as did the thought of what he was about to do.
“Gonna be a beautiful night, gonna be a beautiful night… .”
Quinn went straight back to the end of the hall, pushed on a swinging door, and went through the frame into a fluorescent—lit, dirty kitchen. The light came up bright off the steel prep tables that were spread about the room.
“Amigo,” said Quinn to a small Salvadorian with a thin mustache, wearing a stained white apron, leaning against a prep table near the back of the kitchen and smoking a cigarette.
The man said nothing and his eyes said nothing. The kitchen radio blared in the room.
“Dante sent me back here,” said Quinn, shouting so the man could hear. Quinn scanned the kitchen quickly and went to where a steel tenderizing mallet lay atop an industrial microwave oven. He picked up the mallet, measured its weight in his hand, waved it stupidly, and said, “Dante needs one of these out at the bar.”
The man shrugged and dragged on his cigarette, dropping the butt on the Formica at his feet and crushing it under a worn black shoe.
“I’ll bring it right back,” said Quinn, but he knew the man didn’t care. He was only talking now to hear his own voice and to keep the adrenaline going, and he was out of the kitchen just as quickly as he’d come in.
Now he was back in the hall and walking toward the men’s room. Now he was pushing on the men’s room door, walking through it and into the men’s room, looking at Richard Coles taking a piss at one of the stand—up urinals against the wall.
Quinn kept moving. He said, “Hey, Richard,” and when Richard Coles turned his head to the side, Quinn swung the mallet fast and hard and connected its ridged surface to the bridge of Richard’s nose. Richard’s nose shifted to the right, and blood sprayed off in the same direction. A stream of urine swung out and splashed at Quinn’s feet. Richard’s legs gave out from under him, and Quinn kicked him in the groin as he hit the tiles. He kicked him in the cheekbone, and blood splattered onto the porcelain face of the urinal. Quinn heard his own grunt as he kicked Richard in the side and was about to kick him again when he saw Richard’s eyes roll up into his head.
Quinn’s hands were shaking. He waited for the rise and fall of Richard’s chest. He said, “Terry Quinn,” and he dropped the mallet to the floor.
Out in the bar there was a buzz, a sense that something had gone down. The dancers were moving on the various stages, but the patrons were turned away from them, talking among themselves.
Men moved out of Quinn’s path as he walked through the club. He felt the power, and it was a familiar feeling, though he hadn’t felt it for a while. It was like he was wearing the uniform again, and he knew now that this was what he had been missing for a long time. He felt good.
QUINN got into the passenger side of Strange’s car and looked over the lip of the bench. Sherman Coles was stretched out and cuffed, lying on the backseat.
Strange nodded at the blood on Quinn’s boots. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Where my brother at?” said Sherman from the backseat.
Neither Quinn nor Strange answered Coles.
“How’d you know I’d walk out of there?” said Quinn.
“I didn’t know,” said Strange. “What I did know, you’d give me enough time.”
“Where’s my brother!” yelled Sherman.
Quinn said to Strange, “You always go for the light work?”
“When I can.” Strange ignitioned the Chevy. “I got to get little Sherman over to Fifth Street, process the paperwork. I know you don’t want to stick around for that.”
“Drop me at the first Metro station you see,” said Quinn. “I need to get home. I’m seein’ a lady tonight.”
“Yeah,” said Strange, thinking of his mother. “I’m seein’ one, too.”
Strange pulled off the curb and drove toward M Street. He looked over at Quinn, still intense, sitting straight up in his seat, his knuckles rapping at the window.
“Gonna split the agent’s fee with you on this one, Terry. How’s that sound?”
“How’s this sound: You and me work together on that other thing.”
“Together? You’re the subject of my investigation, you forget about that?”
“I didn’t forget.”
“Look, you got nothin’ to worry about. The review committee said you were right as rain on that shooting. I got no reason to doubt it.”
“Right as rain. Yeah, I remember, that’s exactly what they said.” “And you couldn’t get with me on this, anyway. You don’t have the license to be doing the kind of work I do.”
“If you’re going to stay on it, I want to be involved.”
Strange goosed the gas, coming out of the turn.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You and me, we’re not through.”
Chapter 10
DEREK Strange’s mother, Alethea Strange, lived in the District Convalescent Home in Ward 3, the predominantly white and wealthy section of Northwest D.C. The home, a combination hospice and nursing facility, had been operating in the city since the nineteenth century.
Strange didn’t like nursing homes, for the same simple reason he didn’t care for hospitals or funeral parlors. After his mother had her stroke back in ’96, he had brought her to his house and hired a round—the—clock nurse, but a clot sent her back
to the hospital, where the surgeons took her right leg. She had gotten around before with a walker, but now she was permanently wheelchair—bound, paralyzed on her right side, and she had previously lost most of her speech and the ability to read and write. Alethea Strange managed to tell her only living child that she wanted to go somewhere else to live out her days, with people who were sick like her. He suspected she was only asking to go away so as not to be a burden on him. Still, he granted her wish and put her in the District Convalescent Home’s long—term care facility, as they accepted patients on Medicaid and there was nothing else that he could see to do.
In the lobby of the home that night, they were having some sort of event, young folks with green shirts, a church group most likely, trying to lead the elderly residents in song. There was a dining facility and a library with an aquarium in it down here, too. Alethea Strange never attended these events or sat in these rooms, and she only came down to the first level when Derek brought her down. In the spring and early summer, she would allow her son to wheel her out to the nicely landscaped courtyard, where a black squirrel, a frequent visitor to the complex, drank water while standing on the lip of the fountain. She’d sit in a block of sun, and he’d sit on a stone bench beside her, rubbing her back and sometimes holding her hand. The sight of the squirrel seemed to bring something to her day.
Strange went to the edge of the hospice at the end of a long hall and took the elevator up to the third floor. He walked through another hall painted drab beige, and as he approached the long—term wing where his mother resided he smelled the mixture of bland food, sickness, and incontinence that he had come to dread.
His mother was in her wheelchair, seated at one of three round tables in a television room where the residents could also take their meals. Next to her was another stroke victim, an Armenian man whose name Strange could never remember, and next to him was a skeletal woman in a kind of reclining wheelchair who never spoke or smiled, just stared up at the ceiling with red—rimmed, hollowed—out eyes. At the table beside them a woman fed her bib—wearing husband, and next to them a man sat sleeping before an untouched tray of food, his chin down on his chest. No one seemed to be watching the basketball contest playing on the television set, or listening to the announcer who was loudly calling the game. Strange patted the Armenian’s shoulder, pulled a chair from the other side of the room, and drew it to his mother’s side.
“Momma,” said Strange, kissing her on the cheek and taking her hand, light and fragile as paper.
She smiled crookedly at him and slowly blinked her eyes. There was a bead of applesauce hanging on the edge of her lip, and he wiped it clean with the napkin that had fallen into her lap.
“You want a little of this tea right here?”
She pointed with a shaking hand to two sugar packets. Strange ripped the packets open and poured sugar into the plastic cup that held the tea. He stirred it and put the cup in her hand.
“Hot,” she said, the t soft as a whisper.
“Yes, ma’am. You want some more of that meat?”
He called it “that meat” because he wasn’t exactly sure if it was fowl or beef, smothered as it was in a grayish, congealed gravy.
His mother shook her head.
Strange noticed that the table beside them wobbled whenever the wife leaned on it to give her husband another forkful of food. He got up and went to a small utility room, where he knew they kept paper towels, and he folded some towels in a square and wedged the square under the foot of the table that was not touching the floor. The wife thanked Strange.
“I fixed the table,” said Strange to a big attendant as he passed her on the way back to his mother. She nodded and returned to her conversation with another employee.
He knew this attendant — he knew them all, immigrants of color, by sight. This one was on the mean side, though she was always polite in his presence. His mother had told him that this one raised her voice to her and teased her in an unkind way when she had his mother alone. Most of the staff members were competent and many were kind, but there were two or three attendants here who mistreated his mother, he knew. One of them had even stolen a present he had given her, a small bottle of perfume, off the nightstand in her room.
He knew who these attendants were and he hated them for it, but what could he do? He had made the decision long ago not to report them. He couldn’t be here all that often, and there was no telling what a vindictive attendant would do in his absence. What he tried to do was, he let them know he was onto them with his eyes. And he prayed to God that the looks he gave them would give them pause the next time they had the notion to disrespect his mother in this most cowardly of ways.
“Momma,” said Strange, “I had a little excitement on the job today.” He told her the story of Sherman Coles and his brother, and of the young ex-police officer who had come along. He made it sound funny and unthreatening because he knew his mother worried about him and what he did for a living. Or maybe she was done worrying, thought Strange. Maybe she didn’t think of him out there, could no longer picture him, or her city and its inhabitants, at all.
When he was done his mother smiled in that crooked way she had of smiling now, her lips pulled over toothless gums. Strange smiled back, not looking at the splotchy flesh or the stick arms or the atrophied legs or the flattened breasts that ended near her waist, but looking at her eyes. Because the eyes had not changed. They were deep brown and loving and beautiful, as they had always been, as they had been when he was a child, when Alethea Strange had been young and vibrant and strong.
“Room,” said his mother.
“Okay, Momma.”
He wheeled her back to her room, which overlooked the parking lot of a post office. He found her comb in the nightstand and drew it through her sparse white hair. She was nearly bald, and he could see raised moles and other age marks on her scalp.
“You look nice,” he said when he was done.
“Son.” Those eyes of hers looked up at him, and she chuckled, her sharp shoulders moving up and down in amusement.
Alethea Strange pointed to her bedroom window. Strange went to the window and looked out to its ledge. His mother loved birds; she’d always loved to watch them build their nests.
“Ain’t no birds out there building nests yet, Momma,” said Strange. “You’re gonna have to wait for the spring.”
Walking from her room, Strange stopped beside the big attendant and gave her a carnivorous smile that felt like a grimace.
“You take good care of my mother now, hear?”
Strange went toward the elevators, unclenching his jaw and breathing out slow. He began to think, as he tended to do when he left this place, of who he might call tonight. Being here, it always made him want a woman. Old age, sickness, loss, and pain … all of the suffering that was inevitable, you could deny its existence, for a little while anyway, when you were making love. Yeah, when you were lying with a woman, coming deep inside that sucking warmth, you could even deny death.
“YOU want a little more?”
“Sure.”
Terry Quinn reached across the table and poured wine into Juana Burkett’s glass. Juana sipped at the Spanish red and sat back in her chair.
“It’s really good.”
“I got it at Morris Miller’s. The label on the bottle said it was bold, earthy, and satisfying.”
“Good thing you protected it on your little journey.”
“I was cradling it like a baby on the Metro on the way over here.”
“You really ought to get a car, Tuh—ree.”
“Didn’t need one, up until recently. My job is close to my house, and I can take the subway downtown, I need to. But I was thinking, maybe I should get one now.”
“Why now?”
“Your house is kind of a far walk from the Catholic U station.”
“You’re pretty sure of yourself.” Juana’s eyes lit with amusement. “You think I’m gonna ask you back?”
“I don’t k
now. You keep making dinners like this one, I’m not going to wait for an invitation. I’ll be whining like a dog to come in, scratching on the door out on your front porch. ’Cause you are one good cook.”
“I got lucky. This was the first time I made this dish. Baby artichokes and shrimp over linguini, it just looked so good when I saw the recipe in the Post.”
“Well, it was.” Quinn pushed his empty plate aside. “Next time I take you to dinner. A little Italian place called Vicino’s on Sligo Avenue, they got a red peppers and anchovies dish to make you cry.”
“That’s on your street.”
“We can walk to it,” said Quinn. “Stay in the neighborhood, until I get my car.”
Juana went to get coffee and brandy from the kitchen. Quinn got up and walked to the fireplace, where a pressed—paper log burned, colored flames rolling in a perfect arc. He picked up a CD case from a stack of them sitting on top of an amp: Luscious Jackson. Chick music, like all the rock and soul with female vocals she had been playing that night.
Juana’s group house was nicer than most. Her roommates were grad students, a young married couple named James and Linda. He had met them when he’d arrived, and they were good—looking and nice and, as they had disappeared upstairs almost immediately, considerate as hell. Juana told him that James and Linda had the entire top floor of the house, and she had the finished basement for a quarter of the rent. The furnishings were secondhand but clean. Postcard—sized print reproductions of Edward Hopper, Degas, Canne, and Picasso paintings were framed and hung throughout the house.
Juana came out of the kitchen carrying a tray balanced on one hand. She wore a white button—down shirt out over black bells, with black waffle—heeled stacks on her feet. Black eyeliner framed her night—black eyes. She placed the tray on a small table and went around the room closing the miniblinds that hung from the windows.
“Wanna sit on the couch?”
“Okay,” said Quinn.
Quinn pulled the couch close to the fire. They drank black coffee and sipped Napoleon brandy.
“I downloaded all the stories they did on you last year off the Internet,” said Juana.