The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories by George Pelecanos

Author:George Pelecanos [Pelecanos, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-01-05T23:00:00+00:00

You know all those cop shows on TV, where the detectives convince the suspect to talk before the lawyer arrives? It’s bullshit, the worst thing you can do. My father always told me that if I ever got jammed up just to keep my mouth shut and wait for the guys in the suits. Also, ’cause he figured I’d get DWI’d someday, he told me to refuse the breath tests and keep my piss inside me. Judging from what happened to Paddy, I don’t think he ever had any guidance like that. Plus, they gave him some court-appointed attorney who didn’t help his case. My lawyer was a heavy hitter, a friend of my dad’s, and he did me right.

Paddy did a few months’ detention up at Seven Locks, and I got a community service thing where I had to wear a jumpsuit and pick up trash in Sligo Creek Park. Also, I was required to attend these classes at an old Catholic school on Riggs Road, where some horse-faced guy talked about the evils of alcohol and drugs, one night a week for six weeks. It was me and a bunch of losers, alkies and spentheads who’d flip the teacher the bird behind his back when they weren’t drawing sword-and-sorcery artwork in their notebooks or scratching their initials into their desks.

You’d think it was lucky we walked into that bust before something worse happened to us. That I might have looked around me in that rehab class, checked out the company I was keeping, and realized that I needed to turn my life around. But I guess I wasn’t that smart.

Soon after those classes ended, I started doing the occasional blast on weekends again, telling myself it was recreational. Then, big surprise, I began to hunt for it during the week. One night I got drunk and wanted it so bad that I went into a rough neighborhood down in Petworth, off Georgia Avenue in D.C., where this guy in a bar had told me I could cop. I bought a half from some hard-looking black dudes and got knocked out with a lead pipe by the same dudes while I was walking back to my car. I woke up at the Washington Hospital Center, my face looking like a duck’s. I never did another line. My father said that I had to fall down and hit my head to find out I wasn’t normal, and I guess he was right.

Paddy went away after his jail time, to Florida or some shit, and after that I lost contact with him completely. Scott had this theory that Paddy had flipped on Carlos and them and was probably too scared to stay in Maryland. As for Scott, him and me drifted apart.

I saw them both at the twentieth reunion for my high school, held a few years ago at some hotel up in Gaithersburg. Scott was heavy and bald and on his second wife. He mentioned his law firm and something about a new model Lexus he had his eye on.

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