Hell To Pay

“They’ll keep us from getting killed. My night vision is for shit.”

They drove down into Northwest, cutting into Rock Creek Park at 16th and Sherrill and heading south. Tracy slipped a Mazzy Star compilation tape into the deck. Chicks and their chick music, thought Quinn, but this was guitar driven and pretty nice.

They didn’t talk much on the ride into town. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Quinn didn’t feel like he did around most women, like he had to explain who he was, why he’d chosen the path he’d taken, the one that had put him on the way to becoming a cop. The singer’s voice, breathy but unforced, was relaxing him, and arousing him, too. He looked over at Tracy, at the tendons in her neck, the elegant cut of her jaw as it neared her ear.

“What?” said Tracy.

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring at me again, Terry.”

“Sorry,” said Quinn. “I was just thinking.”

After a while they came up out of the park. Stella emerged from the shadows of a church at 23rd and P as they pulled the van along the curb.

“That her?”

“Yeah.”

“She looks fifteen.”

“Cobras live to be fifteen, too,” said Quinn.

“They do?”

“I’m making a point.”

“The back doors are open,” said Tracy. “Tell her to get in there.”

Quinn rolled down his window as Stella reached the van. She wore black leather pants and a white poplin shirt, with a black bag shaped like a football slung over her shoulder. Her eyeglasses sat crooked on her face.

“You like?” said Stella, looking down at her pants. Her eyes were magnified comically behind the lenses of her glasses. “I wore ’em for you, Officer Quinn. They’re pleather, but that’s okay. I get paid tonight, I’m gonna buy me a pair of leather ones on the for-real side.”

“You look nice,” said Quinn.

“What color should I get? The black or the brown?”

“The back door’s open. Let’s go.”

They drove east. Quinn introduced Stella to Sue Tracy. Stella was cool to her questions. She only became animated when responding to Quinn. Clearly she was eager for his attention. It was plain to Tracy that Stella had a crush on Quinn, or it was a daddy thing, but he was ignoring it. More likely, as with many men, the obvious had eluded him.

On 16th they saw some girls working the stroll, a stretch of sidewalk off the hotel strip south of Scott Circle.

“Around here?” said Tracy.

“Those aren’t World’s,” said Stella.

“Where, then?” said Quinn.

“Keep goin’,” said Stella. “He ain’t into that visiting-businessmen trade. They talk too much, take too much time. Worldwide’s girls walk between the circles. The Logan-and-Thomas action, y’know what I’m sayin’?”

Quinn knew. “That’s old-school turf. I remember that from when I was a teenager.”

Tracy shot him a look from across the seat.

“Strictly locals,” said Stella. “Husbands whose wives won’t blow ’em, birthday boys lookin’ to get their cherry broke, barracks boys, like that. World’s got some rooms nearby.”

“We’re gonna try and take her in Wilson’s trick-house?” said Quinn. “Why?”

“Because she don’t trust me,” said Stella. “She won’t meet me anywhere else.”

Tracy steered the van around Thomas Circle.

“North now,” said Stella, “and make a right off Fourteenth at the next block.”

The landscape changed from ghost town–downtown to living urban night as soon as they drove onto the north side of the circle. Small storefronts, occupying the first floors of structures built originally as residential row houses, low-rised the strip. The commercial picture was changing, new theater venues, cafes, and bars cropping up with regularity. In fact, it had been “changing” for many years. White gentrifiers tried to close down the family-run markets, utilizing obscure laws like the one forbidding beer and wine sales within a certain proximity to churches. The crusading gentrifiers cited the loiterers on the sidewalks, the kinds of unsavory clientele those types of businesses attracted. What they really wanted was for their underclass dark-skinned neighbors to go away. But they wouldn’t go away. The former Section Eights were up the street, and so were families who had lived here for generations. It was their neighborhood. It was a small detail that the gentrifiers never tried to understand.

There weren’t any hookers walking the 14th strip. But as they turned right and drove a block east, Quinn could see cars double-parked ahead wearing Maryland and Virginia plates, their flashers on, girls leaning into their driver’s-side windows.

“Pull over,” said Stella.

Tracy curbed the van and cut the engine. Quinn studied the street.