Adamson looked up. Light flashed off the lenses of his glasses. “I don’t recall that car.”
“Like I say, limited. Real limited. Fast car, but stock. Maybe a restoration job.”
“Restoration, huh? There’s a few guys I can turn you on to. Guys I’ve run into over the years. You’re lookin’ for D.C. boys, right?”
“Inside the Beltway ought to do it.”
Adamson backed up and stood. “Be right back.”
Stefanos smoked a cigarette, waiting for Adamson to return. He crushed the smoke under his shoe as Adamson came back into the bay. Adamson stared at the butt flattened on the concrete.
“I tell you you could do that in here?”
“No.”
Adamson glared at Stefanos. Stefanos picked up the butt and dropped it in the pocket of his work shirt.
“Here you go, man,” said Adamson. He handed a slip of note-paper to Stefanos. “Had to transpose that out of my Rolodex.”
Stefanos read off the names. Adamson’s handwriting was like a doctor’s – nearly illegible. “Clewis?” he said.
“Supposed to be C. Lewis. As in Charlie. Has a shop over in Hyattsville.”
“Okay. And what’s this? Manul Rulz and -”
“Manuel Ruiz and Jaime Gutierrez. Two mechanics up in Silver Spring, right over the District line. They specialize in Ford restorations.”
“Okay. I think I can figure this out.”
Stefanos uncovered a stick of gum from its foil wrapper and began to put the gum in his mouth.
“I tell you you could do that?” said Adamson.
“What?”
Adamson half grinned. “Just kidding you, man.”
“I knew that.” Stefanos relaxed his shoulders. “Say, I’m no Ford expert, but I remember when Lincoln-Mercury was putting out some really strange models. Didn’t there used to be a Cartier-edition Lincoln, way back?”
“Yeah, had the Landau roof with the opera window cutout. New York Cartier gauges on the dash, too.”
“And there was this other model they had, two-tone job, came out in the late seventies -”
“The Mark Five Bill Blass.” Adamson smiled. “All the brothers who thought they were stylin’ had to have that one.”
“Well, I’ll let you get back to it.”
“Yeah, I better.”
Stefanos looked Adamson over. “You know, you don’t mind my sayin’ so, the shape you’re in, you could put the fear of God into Mike Tyson. You ever do any kickboxing, anything like that?”
Adamson adjusted his glasses. “Never had to.”
“Right. Thanks a million, hear?”
Adamson nodded and got back under the hood of the Mark.
At five-thirty in the evening, Stefanos sat behind the wheel of his Dodge in the parking lot of the Prince George’s Plaza metro station, waiting for the tall man in the Acura to drop Erika Mitchell off. A couple of minutes later, the car arrived. Stefanos wrote down the Virginia plate numbers as he watched the man and Erika in silhouette through the Acura’s back window.
The Acura pulled out of the lot. Stefanos put the Dodge in gear and followed.
The driver of the Acura took East West Highway to Riggs to New Hampshire, cutting off on Kennedy. Stefanos stayed back a quarter mile. The Acura drifted off Kennedy and went up First Place, pulling over to the curb in front of a row house there. Stefanos parked his Dodge a half block south.
Two young men came from the row house and walked to the Acura as the driver let down his window. One of the young men handed something to the driver. Darkness had fallen now, and Stefanos could not see what had transpired. The young men stood around talking to the driver, and then the driver pulled the car off the curb and rolled north. Stefanos followed.
As he followed, Stefanos considered what he had just seen. A young black man who did not appear to have worked that day was driving a thirty-thousand-dollar car. He briefly met with two other young black men, who passed him something through his window.
If the young driver had been white and living in Potomac or Ward 3, Stefanos might have come to a different conclusion, or no conclusion at all. After all, you could drive by Churchill High School or St. Alban’s in the middle of the day and see a parking lot filled with Acuras and BMWs.
But this wasn’t Ward 3, and Stefanos had to make the leap: Erika Mitchell had a history of going with young men who flirted with the drug trade. Now she was hooked up with the driver of the Acura, most likely also a drug dealer.
Stefanos pushed a tape of the Getaway People, a mix of old-school funk and Beck-style hiptronics, into the deck. “Does My Colour Scare You?” came forward, and he turned it up.
The Acura cut up Blair Road and went north along the west side of the railroad tracks. It turned left on Rittenhouse. Stefanos waited, hung a left onto a residential street of modest, proudly maintained homes, watched the glow of the Acura’s taillights flare as the driver braked. The Acura swung right into a driveway.
Stefanos drove slowly down the block, checking the addresses. He neared the spot where the Acura had turned, and he cut the Dodge to the curb. He got out of the car and walked down the sidewalk.
The driver of the Acura was stepping out of his car as Stefanos approached the house, a small, clapboard, single-family home. The Acura was parked in front of a detached, locked-down garage.
Stefanos kept walking. He was reading the address and making a mental note of it when he bumped into a man.
“Fuck you think you doin’?” said the young man, low slung with a stoved-in nose. He made a sweeping motion with his hands.
“Sorry,” said Stefanos. “I wasn’t watching -”
“Gotdamn right you sorry. You about the sorriest motherfucker I seen all day.”
Stefanos walked around the man and kept on, glancing back over his shoulder. The young man was standing there studying him, giving him the requisite hard look. The driver of the Acura stood by his car. He had heard the exchange and was studying Stefanos now, too.
Stefanos quickened his step. He made a right on 2nd, another right on Sheridan, and circled the block. He got into his Coronet, U-turned it, and gave it gas.
He stopped at Blair Liquors up the road. He bought a can of Budweiser and a pint of Old Crow. He sat in the car and had a deep drink from the bottle. He drank some more. He opened the can of beer and lit a cigarette. He was breathing normally now, and he headed for home.
TWENTY-TWO
On Saturday morning, Dimitri Karras drove his faded navy blue BMW down into Maryland’s St. Mary’s County, following Bernie Walters’s pickup all the way. They stopped for coffee, then stopped again for ammunition and bait, and made one last stop at a drive-through liquor store, where Karras watched the clerk pass a case of beer through the window of Walters’s truck. Pulling out of the lot, Karras saw a puff of smoke come from the driver’s side of the F-150 as Walters lit a cigarette.
They drove down Route 5 and then 242, through the towns of Clements and Dynard and onto back roads skirting the western shore of Clements Bay, an offshoot of the lower Potomac. A hard dirt road led them through woods to a clearing opening to two hundred feet of brackish creek. Walters parked the truck next to his pop-up trailer, and Karras pulled in beside him. Walters had a beer in his hand as Karras met him by the truck.
“Care for one?” said Walters, holding up the can.
“No, thanks, I’m good.” Karras zipped up his coat.
“A little cold,” said Walters, who wore only a down vest over a denim shirt, blue jeans, and his Orioles cap. He shaded his eyes from the sun and studied the clear sky. “But not bad.”
Karras looked around the property. “Nice, Bern.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fine. When the weather breaks and these trees fill out, you’re really alone back here. Which is how I like it. I don’t even have a phone line.”
“You’re gonna stay down here all week without a phone?”