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.
TWENTY-SIX
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.