Right as Rain by George P. Pelecanos

hand wrapped around a snifter of something brown.
    The man wants to be left alone, thought Quinn, I’ll leave him alone. He got up and moved toward a dark hall, where the head was always located in a place like this.
    STRANGE was walking toward the table where Sherman Coles was sitting, and had gotten to within a few yards of it, when another man emerged from out of the shadows. He was a very big man, with wide shoulders and hard, chiseled features. The cut of his biceps showed beneath his shiny shirt.
    Strange stopped walking just as the man flanked Coles. He could have averted his eyes, kept going past the table, but they had watched his approach all the way and would say something or stop him if he tried the dodge. He knew his shot at Coles was over for today. Any way he looked at it, he was burned. It made no sense for him to turn his back on them, though, or walk past them, or anything else. He had to stop and let it play out. And he was curious to know what Coles had to say.
    “You lookin’ for someone, man?”
    “I was,” said Strange, forcing a friendly smile. “From across the room there, I thought you were this fella I knew, from back in the neighborhood where I came up.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Coles’s tone was high and theatrical. “You got to have twenty years on me, though. So how could we have come up together? Huh?”
    Strange shook his head. “We
couldn’t
have, you’re right. Now that I’m up close … The thing of it is, I can’t see too good in this low light. And don’t even get me started about my failing eyes.”
    Coles took a sip from the snifter before him and tapped ash off his cigarette. He glanced over his shoulder to the man behind him and said, “You hear that, Richard?”
    A crescent scar semicircled Richard’s left eye. “Man can’t see too good in this light.”
    “Or maybe he thinks we can’t see too good,” said Coles. “’Cause we did see you, sittin’ over there with your Caucasian partner, lookin’ at whatever it is you put back in your pocket, tryin’ to make me.”
    “Trying to make you as what?” Strange chuckled and spread his hands. “Brother, I told you, I just mistook you for someone else.”
    “Oh, you
mistook
all right.” Coles smiled, then dragged on his cigarette.
    “Whatever you’re thinking,” said Strange, his voice steady, “you are wrong.”
    “Tell you what,” said Coles, looking past Strange. “I’ll just go ahead and ask the white boy. Here he comes now.”
    QUINN had been turned away by a sign on the men’s room door that told him it was closed for repair. He was coming back down the hall when he stopped briefly to look through the crack of a partially open door. In the candlelit room, a young man in a chair was being fellated by the waitress who’d been talking to them minutes earlier. Her head was between the guy’s legs, her knees sunk into orange shag carpet, and there was a bottle of bad champagne and two glasses on a small table beside them, the hustle just as Strange had described. A sculpture candle of a black couple standing up, intertwined and making love, burned on the table next to the glasses. Quinn walked on.
    He came out of the hall and along the bar and saw Strange in a dark corner of the room, standing in front of the table where Coles sat. A big man stood behind the table, cracking the knuckles of one hand with the palm of the other. Quinn walked toward them.
    Quinn knew Strange had warned him to stay off, and he considered this while he continued on, and then he was standing next to Strange, thinking, I’m here, I can’t change that now. He spread his stance close to the table, looked down on Sherman Coles, and affected his cop posture. It was the way he used to dominate, standing outside the driver’s—side window of a car he’d stopped out on the street.
    “Here go your backup,” said Coles. “What you think, Richard? This salt—and—pepper team we got here, they cops?”
    “Look more like the Orkin