“Sure.” Stefanos took the slip of paper, looked at it. “Real Right Records. I bought a couple of LPs there once.”
“I work there,” said Karras. “That is, I’m going to be.”
“Cool.” Stefanos looked back at his friend once again. “Look, Dimitri, if that’s it—”
“You gotta go.”
“Yeah. I better go.”
“All right,” said Karras. “Go.”
Stefanos went to the car, dropped into the shotgun bucket. Billy Goodrich had gotten back behind the wheel.
“Who was that guy?” said Goodrich.
“A friend of my grandfather’s.”
“Your papa send him to talk to you?”
“Papou.”
“Whatever. He send that guy to tell you to be careful and shit?”
“He’s just a friend.”
Goodrich smiled. “What’d he want, then, Greek?”
“I don’t know,” Stefanos said truthfully. “Come on, Billy, let’s ride.”
Goodrich cooked the 327 and pulled away from the curb. Nick Stefanos looked in the sideview mirror at Karras, still standing in the street, watching them drive away. The Camaro went over a rise and crossed 16th.
Stefanos glanced back in the mirror. Dimitri Karras was gone.
Nick Stefanos and Billy Goodrich picked up the Larson in Alexandria and put the boat on the hitch. Their next stop was a market, where they bought a cold six-pack of beer. Though it was barely noon, they grabbed two Buds out of the bag, pulled the rings, and tapped cans.
“To our trip, Greek.”
Stefanos had a swig of beer as Goodrich turned the ignition.
“We got everything?” said Stefanos.
An ounce of Mexican sat in the glove box, along with a vial filled to the top with Black Beauties and a half dozen hits of Purple Haze; a plastic grenade hung from the rearview, and a Bad Company logo was taped, facing out, to the windshield of the car. Several Marlboro hardpacks were scattered on the dash. Plastered to the rear of the Camaro was a bumper sticker that read, “Mott the Hoople: Tell Chuck Berry the news.”
“Everything that matters,” said Goodrich.
Billy Goodrich laughed and caught rubber pulling out of the lot. Stefanos slapped Sally Can’t Dance into the Pioneer eight-track deck. The druggy guitar of “Kill Your Sons” crashed from the Superthruster speakers.
They took a ramp leading to 95 South. Goodrich pinned the gas pedal, pushing the Camaro up to eighty-five. He began to talk to Stefanos about the movie they had seen together on Saturday night. But Stefanos wasn’t really listening to his friend. He couldn’t get the image of that Karras guy out of his head.
Nick Stefanos couldn’t figure out why Karras bothered him. He would never get off the track like Karras. It wasn’t like he was looking into his own future when he looked into that Karras dude’s wasted, hollowed-out eyes. What had happened to Dimitri Karras, whatever had happened, could never happen to him. He was way too smart for that. And he had so much time.
“Hey, Greek!”
“What?”
“I’m talkin’ to you, man! I was just sayin’, the movie was badder than a motherfucker, wasn’t it?”
There was little traffic on the interstate. They were on a long straightaway, the white lines bleeding into the horizon. Stefanos smiled, looking at the road ahead.
“Yeah,” said Nick Stefanos. “King Suckerman was bad.”
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Epigraph
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
Also by George P. Pelecanos
“This book smokes.”
Copyright
Also by George P. Pelecanos:
The Big Blowdown
Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go
Shoedog
Nick’s Trip
A Firing Offense
“This book smokes.”—Kirkus Reviews
“George Pelecanos’s bright, entertaining novel wonderfully evokes both the real and mythic 1970s in all their sleazy glory. King Suckerman is down. King Suckerman is nasty. King Suckerman is outta sight.”
—Peter Blauner, author of The Intruder and Slow Motion Riot
“One of the 1990s’ rising stars in crime fiction.”
—James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor
“Pelecanos is a fresh, new, utterly hard-boiled voice. He writes tought-guy talk for a younger generation, and he knows the workaday world of Washington that the media ignore.”
—Washington Post Book World
“George Pelecanos is one of those writers whose books I would never miss.”
—Harlan Ellison
“In the best tradition of hard-boiled fiction, Pelecanos’s haunting, gritty story works its way deep into his readers’ collective psyches.”
—Booklist on Shoedog
“Pelecanos lifted me from my chair and hurled me right into the mean D.C. streets….Bravo!”
—T. Jefferson Parker on The Big Blowdown
“A vision of reality that’s as sharp and dangerous as ground glass but tempered with a deep nostalgia for long-lost innocence. Perfect of its kind. Vintage Pelecanos.”
—Booklist on The Big Blowdown
“The Big Blowdown could have been a Black Lizard book back in the days, standing strong among the Thompsons, Goodises, Willefords, Rabes, Marlowes, and Whittingtons. What higher praise? To miss out on Pelecanos would be criminal.”
—Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by George P. Pelecanos
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: August 2011
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material: Excerpt from “Back to the World” written by Curtis Mayfield. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Mayfield, Curtom Classics, Inc. and Ichiban Records, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
by
Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited
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ISBN: 978-0-316-20446-0