Hard Revolution

Book 4: Derek Strange and Terry Quinn Series

by George Pelecanos

Genres: African American Mystery & Detective; Historical Fiction; Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

In this epic showdown from "one of the best crime novelists alive" (Dennis Lehane), police officer Derek Strange hunts his brother's killer through a city erupting with rage.

Release date: March 1, 2004

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 383

Sample

“Reviewers of George Pelecanos’s terrific crime novels have compared him to Zola and Balzac. I’d like to add, at the risk
of appearing pretentious (which has never stopped me before), another major French novelist: Proust. The search through memories
propels and colors all of Pelecanos’s stories.… The author’s most important skill: the ability to put us into a character’s
skin and make everything about him understandable. Hard Revolution is packed with many such revealed souls, from Derek Strange’s heartbreakingly fragile older brother, Dennis, to a hateful
but instantly recognizable threesome of white hoodlums whose determination to kill and die is a part of their DNA.”


—Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

“Pelecanos is at the pinnacle of the noir tradition, without pity but with great humanity. Hard Revolution throbs with explicit detail to its conclusion. And though it’s a foregone conclusion, its inevitability grabs the reader
by the throat even as it reaches the heart.”


—Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

“Pelecanos’s novels are immensely readable.… No one who lives in this city and reads fiction and cares about the world we
live in can afford not to read these books. They are reports from the front lines that are only a few miles away, unblinking
looks at a reality that is all around us, that perhaps we think we’ve known for years, and yet most often we have never really
known at all.”


—Patrick Anderson, Washington Post Book World

“Pelecanos is in top form.… The dialogue is real and raw, and, as in the author’s other works, the story is set to a rich
R&B soundtrack.… Pelecanos draws readers in and surrounds them with the sights and sounds.… The depiction of Washington is
the book’s crowning achievement.”


—David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle

“The dialogue Pelecanos puts into the mouths of ethnically, economically, and socially diverse characters never feels forced,
clichéd, or gratuitous, and if it isn’t the real deal, it sure reads like it. The fact that Hard Revolution and last year’s Soul Circus are separated in time by as many as forty-four years in narrative time—and both ring true—only makes this feat that much
more impressive.… For Pelecanos’s loyal fans, Hard Revolution will be an essential addition to the repertoire; for the uninitiated, it will serve as an introduction to one of the country’s
finest writers, no matter the genre. Either way, terrific stuff.”


—Gary Dretzka, Chicago Sun-Times

“Gripping tale.… Hard Revolution is a violent, action-packed page-turner, but at its heart, a character study.… It is Strange’s book and will be doubly rewarding
for readers who learned to love him as a graybeard.”


—Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Pelecanos has an ability to fascinate the strictest law-abiding reader with detailed and authentic-feeling glimpses into
the machinery of crime.… Whatever we think of the crime fiction genre, there are occasions when a writer begins to outgrow
the description. In the maturation of his work, and particularly in Hard Revolution, George Pelecanos has emerged as such a writer.… As he ever more closely scrutinizes his characters and their environs, it
may emerge that his true subject is not Washington or crime or race but rather family, in all its manifestations, nuclear
and national: the ways Americans love, betray, help, and cannot help one another.”


—Anthony Walton, New York Times Book Review

DEREK STRANGE GOT down in a three-point stance. He breathed evenly, as his father had instructed him to do, and took in the pleasant smell
of April. Magnolias, dogwoods, and cherry trees were in bloom around the city. The scent of their flowers, and the heavy fragrance
of a nearby lilac bush growing against a residential fence, filled the air.


“You keep your back straight,” said Derek, “like you’re gonna set a dinner up on it. You ain’t want your butt up in the air,
either. That way you’re ready. You just blow right out, like, and hit the holes. Bust on through.”


Derek and his Saturday companion, Billy Georgelakos, were in an alley that ran behind the Three-Star Diner on a single-number
block of Kennedy Street, at the eastern edge of Northwest D.C. Both were twelve years old.


“Like your man,” said Billy, sitting on a milk crate, an Our Army at War comic book rolled tightly in his meaty hand.


“Yeah,” said Derek. “Here go Jim Brown right here.”


Derek came up out of his stance and exploded forward, one palm hovering above the other, both close to his chest. He took
an imaginary handoff as he ran a few steps, then cut, slowed down, turned, and walked back toward Billy.


Derek had a way of moving. It was confident but not cocky, shoulders squared, with a slight looseness to the hips. He had
copied the walk from his older brother, Dennis. Derek was the right height for his age, but like all boys and most men, he
wished to be taller. Lately, at night when he was in bed, he thought he could feel himself growing. The mirror over his mother’s
dresser told him he was filling out in the upper body, too.


Billy, despite his wide shoulders and unusually broad chest, was not an athlete. He kept up on the local sports teams, but
he had other passions. Billy liked pinball machines, cap pistols, and comic books.


“That how Brown got his twelve yards in eleven carries against the ’Skins?” said Billy.

“Uh-uh, Billy, don’t be talkin’ about that.”

“Don Bosseler gained more in that game than Brown did.”

“In that game. Most of the time, Bosseler ain’t fit to carry my man’s cleats. Two weeks before that, at Griffith? Jim Brown ran for one
hundred and fifty-two. The man set the all-time rushing record in that one, Billy. Don Bosseler? Shoot.”


“Awright,” said Billy, a smile forming on his wide face. “Your man can play.”

Derek knew Billy was messing with him, but he couldn’t help getting agitated just the same. Not that Derek wasn’t a Redskins
fan. He listened to every game on the radio. He read the Shirley Povich and Bob Addie columns in the Post whenever they saw print. He followed the stats of quarterback Eddie LeBaron, middle linebacker Chuck Drazenovich, halfback
Eddie Sutton, and others. He even tracked Bosseler’s yards-per-carry. In fact, he only rooted against the ’Skins twice a year,
and then with a pang of guilt, when they played Cleveland.


Derek had a newspaper photo of Brown taped to the wall of the bedroom he shared with his brother. With the exception of his
father, there was no one who was more of a hero to him than Brown. This was a strong individual who commanded respect, not
just from his own but from people of all colors. The man could play.


“Don Bosseler,” said Derek, chuckling. He put one big, long-fingered hand to the top of his head, shaved nearly to the scalp,
and rubbed it. It was something his brother, Dennis, did in conversation when he was cracking on his friends. Derek had picked
up the gesture, like his walk, from Dennis.


“I’m kiddin’ you, Derek.” Billy got up off the milk crate and put his comic book down on the diner’s back stoop. “C’mon, let’s
go.”


“Where?”

“My neighborhood. Maybe there’s a game up at Fort Stevens.”

“Okay,” said Derek. Billy’s streets were a couple of miles from the diner and several miles from Derek’s home. Most of the
kids up there were white. But Derek didn’t object. Truth was, it excited him some to be off his turf.


On most Saturdays, Derek and Billy spent their time out in the city while their fathers worked at the diner. They were boys
and were expected to go out and find adventure and even mild forms of trouble. There was violence in certain sections of the
District, but it was committed by adults and usually among criminals and mostly at night. Generally, the young went untouched.


Out on the main drag, Derek noticed that the local movie house, the Kennedy, was still running Buchanan Rides Alone, with Randolph Scott. Derek had already seen it with his dad. His father had promised to take him down to U Street for the
new John Wayne, Rio Bravo, which had people talking around town. The picture was playing down at the Republic. Like the other District theaters on U,
the Lincoln and the Booker T, the Republic was mostly for colored, and Derek felt comfortable there. His father, Darius Strange,
loved westerns, and Derek Strange had come to love them, too.


Derek and Billy walked east on the commercial strip. They passed two boys Derek knew from church, and one of them said, “What
you hangin’ with that white boy for?” and Derek said, “What business is that of yours?” He made just enough eye contact for
the boy to know he was serious, and all of them went on their way.


Billy was Derek’s first and only white playmate. The working relationship between their fathers had caused their hookup. Otherwise
they never would have been put together, since most of the time, outside of sporting events and first jobs, colored boys and
white boys didn’t mix. Wasn’t anything wrong with mixing, exactly, but it just seemed more natural to be with your own kind.
Hanging with Billy sometimes put Derek in a bad position; you’d get challenged out here when your own saw you walking with
a white. But Derek figured you had to stand by someone unless he gave you cause not to, and he felt he had to say something
when conflict arrived. It wouldn’t have been right to let it pass. Sure, Billy often said the wrong things, and sometimes
those things hurt, but it was because he didn’t know any better. He was ignorant, but his ignorance was never deliberate.


They walked northwest through Manor Park, across the green of Fort Slocum, and soon were up on Georgia Avenue, which many
thought of as Main Street, D.C. It was the longest road in the District and had always been the primary northern thoroughfare
into Washington, going back to when it was called the 7th Street Pike. All types of businesses lined the strip, and folks moved about the sidewalks day and night. The
Avenue was always alive.


The road was white concrete and etched with streetcar tracks. Wood platforms, where riders had once waited to board streetcars,
were still up in spots, but the D.C. Transit buses were now the main form of public transportation. A few steel troughs, used
to water the horses that had pulled the carts of the junkmen and fruit and vegetable vendors, remained on the Avenue, but
in short order all of it would be going the way of those mobile merchants. It was said that the street would soon be paved
in asphalt and the tracks, platforms, and troughs would disappear.


Billy’s neighborhood, Brightwood, was mostly white, working- and middle-class, and heavily ethnic: Greeks, Italians, Irish
Catholics, and all varieties of Jew. The families had moved from Petworth, 7th Street, Columbia Heights, the H Street corridor
in Northeast, and Chinatown, working their way north as they began to make more money in the prosperous years following World
War II. They were seeking nicer housing, yards for their children, and driveways for their cars. Also, they were moving away
from the colored, whose numbers and visibility had rapidly increased citywide in the wake of reurbanization and forced desegregation.


But even this would be a temporary move. Blockbuster real estate agents in Brightwood had begun moving colored families into
white streets with the intention of scaring residents into selling their houses on the cheap. The next stop for upper-Northwest,
east-of-the-park whites would be the suburbs of Maryland. No one knew that the events of the next nine years would hasten
that final move, though there was a feeling that some sort of change was coming and that it would have to come, an unspoken
sense of the inevitable. Still, some denied it as strongly as they denied death.


Derek lived in Park View, south of Petworth, now mostly colored and some working-class whites. He attended Backus Junior High
and would go on to Roosevelt High School. Billy went to Paul Junior High and was destined for Coolidge High, which had some
coloreds, most of whom were athletes. Many Coolidge kids would go on to college; far fewer from Roosevelt would. Roosevelt
had gangs; Coolidge had fraternities. Derek and Billy lived a few short miles apart, but the differences in their lives and
prospects were striking.


They walked the east side of Georgia’s 6200 block, passing the open door of the Arrow cleaners, a business that had been in
place since 1929, owned and operated by Bill Caludis. They stopped in to say hey to Caludis’s son, Billy, whom Billy Georgelakos
knew from church. On the corner sat Clark’s Men’s Shop, near Marinoff-Pritt and Katz, the Jewish market, where several of
the butchers had camp numbers tattooed on their forearms. Nearby was the Sheridan Theater, which was running Decision at Sundown, another Randolph Scott. Derek had seen it with his dad.


They crossed to the other side of Georgia. They walked by Vince’s Agnes Flower Shop, where Billy paused to say a few words
with a cute young clerk named Margie, and the Sheridan Waffle Shop, also known as John’s Lunch, a diner owned by John Deoudes.
Then it was a watering hole called Sue’s 6210, a Chinese laundry, a barbershop, and on the corner another beer garden, the
6200. “Stagger Lee” was playing on the house juke, its rhythms coming through the 6200’s open door.


On the sidewalk outside the bar, three young white teenagers were alternately talking, smoking cigarettes, and running combs
through their hair. One of them was ribbing another, asking if his girlfriend had given him his shiner and swollen face. “Nah,”
said the kid with the black eye, “I got jumped by a buncha niggers down at Griffith Stadium,” adding that he was going to
be looking for them and “some get-back.” The group quieted as Derek and Billy passed. There were no words spoken, no hard stares, and no trouble. Derek
looking at the weak, all-mouth boy and thinking, Prob’ly wasn’t no “buncha niggers” about it, only had to be one.


At the corner of Georgia and Rittenhouse, Billy pointed excitedly at a man wearing a brimmed hat, crossing the street and
heading east. With him was a young woman whose face they couldn’t see but whose backside moved in a pleasing way.


“That’s Bo Diddley,” said Billy.

“Thought he lived over on Rhode Island Avenue.”

“That’s what everyone says. But we all been seein’ him around here lately. They say he’s got a spot down there on Rittenhouse.”

“Bo Diddley’s a gunslinger,” said Derek, a warmth rising in his thighs as he checked out the fill of the woman’s skirt.

They walked south to Quackenbos and cut across the lot of the Nativity School, a Catholic convent that housed a nice gymnasium.
The nuns there were forever chasing Billy and his friends from the gym. Beyond the lot was Fort Stevens, where Confederate
forces had been repelled by the guns and musketry of Union soldiers in July of 1864. The fort had been re-created and preserved,
but few tourists now visited the site. The grounds mainly served as a playing field for the neighborhood boys.


“Ain’t nobody up here,” said Derek, looking across the weedy field, the American flag flying on a white mast throwing a wavy
shadow on the lawn.


“I’m gonna pick some porichia for my mom,” said Billy.


“Say what?”

Derek and Billy went up a steep grade to its crest, where several cannons sat spaced in a row. The grade dropped to a deep
gully that ran along the northern line of the fort. Beside one of the cannons grew patches of spindly plants with hard stems. Billy pulled a few of the plants and shook the dirt off the roots.


“Thought your mama liked them dandelion weeds.”

“That’s rodichia. These here are good, too. You gotta get ’em before they flower, though, ’cause then they’re too bitter. Let’s go give ’em
to her and get something to drink.”


Billy lived in a slate-roofed, copper-guttered brick colonial on the 1300 block of Somerset, a few blocks west of the park.
In contrast with the row houses of Park View and Petworth, the houses here were detached, with flat, well-tended front lawns.
The streets were heavy with Italians and Greeks. The Deoudes family lived on Somerset, as did the Vondas family, and up on
Underwood lived a wiry kid named Bobby Boukas, whose parents owned a flower shop. All were members of Billy’s church, St.
Sophia. On Tuckerman stood the house where midget actor Johnny Puleo, who had played in the Lancaster-Curtis circus picture,
Trapeze, stayed for much of the year. Puleo drove a customized Dodge with wood blocks fitted to the gas and brake pedals.


On the way to the Georgelakos house, Derek stopped to pet a muscular tan boxer who was usually chained outside the front of
the Deoudes residence. The dog’s name was Greco. Greco sometimes walked with the police at night on their foot patrols and
was known to be quick, loyal, and tough.


Derek got down on his haunches and let Greco smell his hand. The dog pushed his muzzle into Derek’s fingers, and Derek patted
his belly and rubbed behind his ears.


“Crazy,” said Billy.

“What you mean?”

“Usually he rises up and shows his teeth.”

“To colored boys, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“He likes me.” Derek’s eyes softened as he admired the dog. “One day, I’ma get me one just like him, too.”


AFTER DELIVERING THE porichia to Billy’s mother, the boys returned to Fort Stevens. There they saw two brothers, Dominic and Angelo Martini, standing in
the middle of the field.


“You wanna move on?” said Billy. The last time they’d met, Dominic Martini had ridden Derek hard.

“Nah,” said Derek. “It’s all right.”

They approached the boys. Dominic, sixteen, stood a couple inches shy of six feet and had the build of a man in his twenties.
His skin was dark, as was his perfectly pompadoured hair. His black eyes were flat. He had dropped out of Coolidge on his
last birthday and was a pump jockey at the Esso station south of Georgia and Piney Branch. His brother, Angelo, fourteen,
was similarly complected but lacked the size, good looks, and confidence of Dominic. His slumped posture said that he was
aware of the difference.


“Billy,” said Dominic. “See you got your shadow with you today.”


“His name’s Derek,” said Billy, a forced strength to his voice.

“Relax, Billy boy.” Dominic smiled, dragged on his cigarette, and gave Derek the once-over. “Wanna fight?”

Derek had expected the challenge. The first time they’d met, he had seen Martini do this to another kid who was minding his
own and crossing the park. Dominic, he supposed, liked to lead with the question, let everyone know from the start that he
was in control. It knocked the other guy off balance and was a way for Dominic to gain the immediate upper hand.


“Not today,” said Derek.

“Maybe you wanna run to yo’ mama instead.”

Dominic’s mention of his mother and his idea of a colored accent caused Derek to involuntarily ball his fists. He took a breath
and relaxed his hands.


“Now, look here, I don’t mean you gotta mix with me,” said Dominic. “Wouldn’t be fair. I don’t pick on no one littler, see?”


You ain’t all that much bigger than me, thought Derek.

“I was thinkin’ of you and Angie,” said Dominic, and as the words left his mouth, Angelo’s eyes dropped.

“I got no quarrel with your brother,” said Derek.

“Knock it off, Dom,” said Angelo.

“I’m talkin’ to Derek,” said Dominic.


Derek knew he could take Angelo. Shoot, the boy’s chin was down on his chest; he was already beat. Derek figured that Angelo feared colored boys the same way many other white boys did. And that fear would be the difference.
But there wasn’t anything in kicking Angelo’s ass for Derek. Wasn’t any way he could win.


“You got your mitts?” said Derek.

“Yeah, we got ’em,” said Dominic. “So?”


“Me and Billy,” said Derek, “we’ll take y’all on in a ball game instead. How about that?”

“Fine,” said Dominic. “But first say you won’t fight.”

“Dominic,” said Angelo in a pleading way.

“I got no need to fight,” said Derek.

“That ain’t the same thing. Say what I told you to say or step to my brother and put up your hands.”

“Okay, then,” said Derek. “I won’t fight.” He didn’t mind saying it. He had not backed up a step, folded his arms, or looked
away. His body said that he was not afraid. Dominic could see it. He knew.

“All right,” said Dominic. For a moment, Derek saw something human in Martini’s eyes. “Let’s play ball.”

The Martini boys had a bat, a hardball, and two mitts stashed in the ammo bunker built into the base of the fort’s hill. Basically,
the game was stickball, but without the wall. Base hits were calculated by landmarks—the flagpole, the fort’s commemorative
plaque, et cetera—with the crest of the hill the ultimate goal. A ball hit over “the wall” of the fortification line was a
home run.


Derek had the superior swing, and even Billy was a better athlete than the Martinis. Soon it was apparent that the contest
was done. When Derek knocked out his third homer, Dominic said he was bored and stopped the game. After putting the playing
equipment back in the bunker, Dominic turned to Derek.


“Say, you ever had any, man?”

“Sure have,” said Derek, which was a lie. He had rubbed a little over-the-shirt tit off this older girl in his neighborhood,
had a reputation for starting the young boys off, but that was all.


“Sure you have,” said Dominic, laughing a little and lighting a cigarette. “Me, I get it all the time.”

He told Derek about the Fort Club, which he and his friends had recently formed, and how they drank beer and pulled trains
on girls inside the bunker on Friday nights. Derek issued a small shrug, enough to stave off another conflict, not enough
to let Dominic think that he cared. It wasn’t the reaction Dominic wanted. He pulled something from his pocket and held it
in front of Derek.


“You know what this is?”

“That’s a cherry bomb.”

“How about I set it off?”

“Go ahead.”

Martini lit the fuse off his smoke and calmly dropped the bomb into the muzzle of one of the cannons. The cherry bomb exploded,
and its report was surprisingly loud. A janitor came out of the church, yelled something at the boys, and walked toward them.
Angelo and Billy jogged in the direction of 13th Street. Derek and Dominic followed the other two out of the park, walking
at a leisurely pace.


“You and me,” said Dominic, “we ain’t gonna run from nothin’, right?”

Derek had the feeling that this afternoon would come to some kind of bad, the way a boy always knows that the direction of
the day has turned. It was as if he were walking, willingly, from the sunny side of the street to the side covered in shadow.
He had been raised to understand the clear difference between right and wrong, and he knew that, right about now, he should
head back to the diner with Billy. But he was attracted to that shadowed side just the same. So when Dominic suggested they
go over to “the Sixth,” just to “fuck around some,” Derek did not object.




THE SIXTH PRECINCT station was on Nicholson, set to the left of Brightwood Elementary. The station structure, all brick fronted with columns, looked like a small schoolhouse itself. A goldfish pond was set beside the concrete drive that horseshoed
the rear of the station. The boys approached it from the right side, grouped themselves beside a tall oak, and studied the
building through a chain-link fence.


“There’s the cell block right there,” said Dominic, pointing to the right side of the building. “They ain’t got nothin’ but
old spring cots for you to sleep on.”


“How do you know?” said Billy, challenging Martini but secretly impressed.


“Our old man told us,” said Angelo. Their father had slept off public drunks in the station a couple of times in the past
year.


“Not just that,” said Dominic, annoyed. “I been in there myself.” He had never actually spent the night in the jail, though
he had aspirations. Dominic had been written up for a field investigation, which was less dramatic than “a record,” for throwing
a rock through a window of the elementary school.


Back behind the main structure was a garage housing several Harleys for the motorcycle cops. One of the precinct’s three squad
cars, a high-horse Ford, was parked in the lot, beside a black unmarked, also a Ford. The boys of Brightwood recognized the
squad car numbers, 61 to 63, printed on the sides of the vehicles. They knew the names of the desk sergeant and homicide cops
and the beat police as well. Among them was an Irish cop whose status had been elevated to legend after he had taken a .45
slug in the gut. The Sixth also had one uniformed colored cop, William Davis, and the hated Officer Pappas, a Greek who was
especially tough on kids. He had made it his mission to bust the fathers and sons, some of whom were fellow Greeks, who ran
numbers and occasionally fenced out of their businesses up on the Avenue. Pappas had a pencil-thin mustache, which the boys
thought of as a French look that bordered on feminine. They had nicknamed him Jacques. When he was on foot patrol, they taunted him from rooftops
and alleys, calling out to him with high-pitched voices, “Jaaacques, oh, Jaaacques.”


Officer Davis came from the front of the building and walked to squad car number 62. Davis was tall and lean, his uniform
perfectly pressed, his service revolver snapped into its holster. Derek wondered what you had to do to become a police. Must
be something to it to make Davis walk the way he was walking. Chin up, close to a swagger. It seemed like the man had pride.


Dominic Martini picked up a rock. Derek grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t,” said Derek.

Derek’s action surprised both of them, so much so that Dominic didn’t resist. He dropped the rock, shook his hand free, and
stared at Davis.


“Look at him,” said Martini with contempt. “He really thinks he’s somethin’.”

He is, thought Derek Strange, studying the police officer as he got into the Ford. That’s a man right there.




BUZZ STEWART FED gas into the tank of a ’57 DeSoto Fireflite, a two-tone red-and-white sedan fitted out with whitewalls and skirts. A cigarette
dangled from his lips as he worked the pump. He wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the tanks, but there wasn’t anyone
at the station, including his boss, big enough to tell him not to. As he replaced the pump handle and took the money from
the square behind the wheel, he thumb-flicked ash off his Marlboro and put the smoke back in his thin-lipped mouth.


“Hey, Buzz,” said Dominic Martini, walking by with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand.

“Hey,” mumbled Stewart.


Stewart watched Martini, an Italian kid who worked weekend nights, join a group of younger boys at the edge of the Esso station
lot. One of the boys was Martini’s no-balls brother. The other was some fattish kid, looked like another spaghetti-bender
to him. The third kid was a nigger. Now, why would Martini want to run with a colored boy? He’d have to give Dom some shit
about it the next time they talked.


Stewart walked across the lot, patting his Brylcreemed blond hair. He admired his veins, like root tendrils, standing up on
the inside of his forearms and popping out on his biceps. He felt strong. He went six-three and one ninety, none of it waste.
Some guys thought they could challenge him, all that harder-you-fall bullshit they had to tell themselves ’cause they were
small. Stewart could back up his size and didn’t need to be pushed to prove it.


He went insi