Hell To Pay

“Good, baby.” Wilson smiled, showing a row of gold caps. “I’ll give you a foot massage later on, hear?”

But Carola was already off, walking down the block, Wilson thinking, Glad I got me that degree in pimpology. All you had to do was use a little psychiatry on these bitches, worked every time.

He cut the engine on the Mercedes and untangled his frame from the car. Big man like he was, it was a struggle to get out of these foreign rides. But his time in Berlin had given him a permanent love for German automobiles, and, though they were more roomy, he never had liked the way Cadillacs and Lincolns drove.

He stood beside his car, smoothed out the leather on his coat, and adjusted his hat. Before he closed the door of the Mercedes, he put one foot up on the rocker panel, then the other, and buffed the vamps of his alligator shoes with the palm of his hand. What was the point of spending five hundred dollars on a pair of gators if they didn’t have a nice shine? He closed the door and stood straight.

Now he’d have to see what Carola was talkin’ about. See what some white boy was doin’ wandering around in his house without a woman he’d paid to fuck.

“OH, shit,” said Stella, leaning forward, blinking hard behind her glasses. “There go World.”

“Where?”

“That’s his ride right there, the blue Mercedes. He’s talkin’ to Carola, up in the window there.”

Sue Tracy watched the girl step away from the tricked-out car and walk off down the block. Then she watched Worldwide Wilson get out of his car. He wore a full-length leather coat with tooled-out skin, and a hat with a matching tooled band. Wilson stood tall, a good six three, his shoulders filling out the soft cut of the coat. He had the walk of a big cat.

Tracy keyed the mic on the radio in her hand. There was no response.

Wilson walked up the row house steps. He pulled on the front door and moved fluidly through the space. The door closed behind him, and he disappeared into the house.

She tried the radio again and tossed it on the seat beside her.

“Shit, Terry.”

“What?” said Stella.

Tracy didn’t answer. She ignitioned the van and slammed the tree up into first. She drove to the corner and cut a hard left.

QUINN’S hand came off the shaky wooden banister as he stepped up onto the second-floor landing. The banister continued down a straight, narrow hall. The doors to the rooms, all closed and topped with frosted-glass transoms, were situated opposite the banister. Television cable ran from one room to the other in the hall, going transom to transom. Quinn heard no activity on the second floor. He took the hall to the next set of stairs.

Sounds from above grew louder as he ascended the stairs. It was the sound of furniture moving on a hard floor. Talk from a radio and the human bass of a man’s voice and the unformed voice of a young girl.

Up on the landing, Quinn checked the sash window at the back of the house. It was open a crack, and he lifted it further and looked down through the mesh of the fire escape to the alley below. The alley was unlit, unblocked, and looked to be passable by car.

Quinn went to the first door, marked 3C in tacked-on letters broken off in spots. From behind the door came the talk radio and the man-girl sounds and the sound of bedsprings. The knob in his hand turned freely, and Quinn pushed on the door and walked inside.

A fat middle-aged black guy was on top of Jennifer Marshall on the bed. His fat ass and his fat sides jiggled as he pumped at her, and Quinn was on him just as he turned his head. He pulled him back by the shoulders and then pushed him roughly against the wall that abutted the bed. The man’s head, bald on top and patched with black sides, made a hollow sound as it hit the wall.

Quinn speed-scanned the room: high ceilings and chipped plaster walls. A bed and a nightstand that held a lamp and a radio, with a bathroom coming off the room. Clothing lay in a pile beside the bed.

Jennifer had removed her skirt and panties only. She sat up against the headboard, her legs still spread. Her sex was pink and sparsely tufted with reddish brown hair. Quinn looked away.

“Get your clothes on,” said Quinn to the man, “and get your ass out of here, now.”

The man, naked except for a pair of brown socks, didn’t move. His face was still, and his swollen penis, sheathed in a condom, was frozen in place.

“I told you to get going.”

“What the fuck’s goin’ on?” said Jennifer.

Quinn picked up Jennifer’s skirt and panties and tossed them before her on the bed. “Put ’em on.” And to the man he said, “Move.”

The man began to dress. Jennifer slipped on her panties and got off the bed, her skirt in her hands. She was thin of wrist, with skinny legs. Up close the heavy makeup could not conceal her age. She looked like a child who had gotten into her mother’s things.

“Hurry up,” said Quinn.

“Who are you?” said Jennifer.

“I’m an investigator,” said Quinn. “D.C.”

The door opened. Worldwide Wilson stepped into the room.

“An investigator, huh?” Wilson’s gold-capped smile spread wide. “You won’t mind then, motherfucker, if I have a look at your badge.”

SUE Tracy pulled the van alongside the back of the building. Eyes glowed beneath a Dumpster, frozen in the fan of the headlights. As Tracy cut the engine and the headlights the alley went black. She let herself adjust to the sudden change of light. Lines of architecture began to take shape. A rat, then another, scampered across the alley in front of the van.

Residual light bled out from the curtained windows of a sleeper porch on the second floor and a window