Shoedog by George P. Pelecanos Page B

the marble staircase outside his office door.
    These meetings exhilarated him but tired him as well. Gorman and Valdez always asked the wrong questions. And Jackson, his own stupidity magnified by his groundless self-confidence, asked no questions at all. But Jackson did as he was told, absolutely, and the value of that was great.
    The cleanest of them was Randolph, and with him Grimes never worried; Randolph had always done his job, and done it precisely and without incident. He knew Randolph’s worth, and the importance of keeping him in the fold.
    Polk, too, had always been a professional. There was no reason to believe he would not acquit himself well on this one. Still, this would be Polk’s last job. Polk was becoming irrational, careless, dangerously close to spoiling it. He would have to go. Friendship meant little now, its worth receding with time, fading behind the primary concern of self-preservation. Grimes believed in nothing if not protecting the things he valued most.
    And there was Constantine. The young man with the long black hair asked the right questions, and kept his mouth shut when there was nothing pertinent to say. Grimes believed he would deliver when things heated up. Constantine’s strengths, though—his lack of emotion, the absence of a moral center—also made him a dangerous man. If Constantine had a weakness, it was the weakness that plagued most men. He had seen it in Constantine’s eyes when Delia had entered the room. But Grimes wouldn’t use it. He would find something else in Constantine, some kind of opening. And then Grimes would break him, like he had broken the others.
    Grimes looked at the brown spots on the back of his hand as his fingers moved through the magnetic chips. He had noticed the spots only recently, and then he had noticed the cracks and deep wrinkles around his knuckles, and the thinness of his fingers at their joints. He pictured the brightness in Delia’s eyes when Constantine had touched her hand. He tried to remember the time when Delia had looked at him in that same way.
    Grimes heard footsteps approach his door, heard a knock on the door, saw the brass knob begin to turn. He straightened in his chair, softened the tightness that had crept into his face.
    C ONSTANTINE knocked on Grimes’s door, entered.
    Grimes sat behind his desk, wearing a canary yellow polo shirt under a blue blazer, his gray hair swept back. He motioned for Constantine to sit in the chair in front of the desk. Constantine walked across the room, had a seat in the chair, and crossed one leg over the other. He waited as Grimes relighted his cigar.
    Grimes let some smoke pass from his mouth. “Would you like one, Constantine?”
    “I don’t smoke them.”
    Grimes looked lovingly at his cigar. “This one’s got a Dominican filler, with a Connecticut Valley wrapper. Assembled in Jamaica. I go for the pyramid tip, myself, though that’s a matter of preference over taste, the way it feels on your lips.” He drew on it, looked back at Constantine. “It’s a shame. You really should be interested in good things. As you get older, your more basic passions decrease. Naturally, your desire for material pleasure gets greater.”
    “Possessions only complicate things,” Constantine said. “I can’t fit a sixty-thousand-dollar car into my backpack.”
    “Or a woman,” Grimes said.
    “No.”
    “But you could fit a nice cigar into your pack, couldn’t you?”
    “What’s your point?”
    “Only this. Within the scope of his ambition—even his limited ambition—a man should always strive to have me best. And by extension, to do his best.” Grimes parted his thin lips into something resembling a smile. “I think you’ve got that quality in you, Constantine. I think you just don’t know it.”
    “My ambition is to keep moving,” Constantine said.
    “You might think so,” Grimes said. “But I saw something in you yesterday, when I first mentioned the job. You were interested in