A Firing Offense by George P. Pelecanos Page B

eyes.” They both laughed drunkenly.
    “I’m looking for my little brother,” I said, pulling a twenty from my pocket along with the photo of Jimmy Broda. I kept the bill and handed them the picture. They stared at it rather stupidly for a long while.
    “What’s this dude’s name?” flannel-shirt finally asked.
    “Jimmy Broda.”
    “The picture’s not too good,” he said, quickly adding, “but I seen him around.”
    “Recently?” He looked at his friend, then at the jacket pocket where I had replaced the Jackson.
    “All this talk is making me thirsty, big brother.”
    “You’re covered on the twenty,” I said. “Go ahead.”
    “I think I know who the dude is, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. He runs with a guy they call Redman, you know, this redheaded motherfucker.”
    “Yeah?”
    “And sometimes I seen him with this good lookin’ older bitch. But it might be that she hangs out with Redman.”
    “This Redman got a real name, or the girl?”
    “I don’t know his name or hers,” he said, disappointed but still hungry.
    “When’s the last time you saw him or his friends?”
    “It’s been awhile. I don’t know, a few weeks maybe.”
    “Would they hang out anywhere else?”
    “No, man,” he said, “this is it now. This place is happenin’,even though there’s too many niggers come in here for my taste.” His friend chuckled uneasily.
    “Who else would know more?” I asked, revealing the twenty once again.
    “We know
all
the skins, man,” he said defensively. “You know that graffiti—you can see it on the Red Line near Fort Totten—says ‘United Skinheads’ over an American flag?” I nodded that I had seen it.
“I
did that.”
    “That’s a nice piece of work. But there must be somebody else I can talk to who might know a little more.”
    He looked at his friend, then at me. “It will cost you another ten.”
    I pulled out the bill and slapped it together with the twenty.
    “There’s a rowhouse on Ninth and G, Southeast, got a red awning over the porch. The dude you want to talk to is John Heidel. But don’t tell him we turned you on to the address.” I handed him the thirty, and he eyed me suspiciously. “You sure you’re no cop?”
    I looked him over and said, “If I was, I would have called for backup by now.”
    “Damn straight,” he said, missing the irony and walking, with his friend, down the stairs to hang out in the cloakroom.
    I followed them down but veered off into the men’s toilet. I stood at the urinal and drained, reading the names of bands and slogans etched into the black walls.
    Below an anarchy symbol, two words were dug deep into the heart of the plaster. “No Future.” I buttoned up my fly and flushed the head.

TEN
    T HE RED-AWNINGED ROWHOUSE stood in the middle of G between Ninth and Tenth, just as flannel-shirt had said. I parked in front of it the next morning somewhere around eleven o’clock.
    Real estate salesmen pitched this area as Capitol Hill, and it was, though a far cry from the connotations that such a prestigious name would suggest. There were residential homes here, struggling group houses, neighborhood bars and shops, and a few marginally upscale businesses that quickly came and went.
    I opened a chain-link gate and stepped along a concrete walkway split and overgrown with weeds and clover. A mongrel shepherd in the adjacent yard was on the end of its tether, up on its hind legs and growling viciously.
    I stepped up onto a small porch with brown brick columns and knocked on a thin wooden door. A dirgelike bass insinuated itself through the walls of the house.
    I knocked again. The door swung open and a girl stood before me. She was taller than me, even allowing for the fact that she was up a step. Her legs were long and her hips immaturely narrow. Through the sides of her green tank top I could see the curvature and bottom-fold of narrow, sausagelike breasts. Her tired eyes bore the mark of experience, though her childlike