Mischief

13.

THE MORNING OF APRIL FOURTH dawned gray and uncertain, a lowering sky covering the city like a gunmetal lid. The crowds began gathering at eight in the morning, long before the concert site was open to the public. This was a free event, with unreserved seating, first come, first admitted. By ten o’clock, the overcast began burning off, and by a little before eleven the sun was shining brightly and the sky was as blue as a periwinkle’s bloom. A fresh breeze wafted in over the River Harb, adding a briskness to the day, but no one involved with the concert in the park was complaining. For April, they could not have wished for better weather.

It must have been like this in olden times, Chloe thought, when people from miles about came to local fairs. Sil had asked her to meet him at eleven sharp, at the main entrance to the site. As she approached now, she saw at once that a crowd had gathered around him, shouting his name, waving autograph books and programs for him to sign. The moment he spotted her, he broke away from the crowd, and came to her, and took her hand. She felt enormously privileged as he ushered her quickly through security and led her toward the cyclone fence that enclosed the backstage area.

“Better put this on,” he said, “let you go wherever you like. He slipped a lanyard over her head. The orange laminate hanging from it had the name of the group, Spit Shine, printed across the top, and then—in bolder lettering below it—the wordARTIST. They went past the beer tent and then through the guard gates, and he helped her up the wooden steps leading to the stage. People were busily coming and going everywhere. Still holding her hand, he led her to where Jeeb was testing his sound levels. Each of the artists had one or two, sometimes three, stage monitors at his feet, enabling him to hear any other performer onstage in whichever proportions he chose. As Sil approached, Jeeb was monitoring a sample chorus from the two girls in the crew, standing some six feet away from him on either side, and rapping out the lyrics to “Hate,” which would be the second song they’d be doing today.

“Jeeb,” Sil said, “I’d like you to meet Chloe Chadderton. Chloe, this’s Jeeb Beeson, leader of the group.”

“Hey, how you doin?” Jeeb said.

“Her husband wrote ‘Sister Woman,’” Sil said.

“We openin with that,” Jeeb said.

“I can’t wait to hear it,” Chloe said.

“Girls do the main rap, me an’ Silver do a kind of jungle chant behind ’em. Works real fine. Your husband wrote some fine words, Chloe.”

“Thank you,” she said, though George Chadderton seemed a long time ago, and Silver Cummings represented the present and, she hoped, the future as well. Six feet away, like bookends on either side of the little triangle Chloe formed with Sil and Jeeb, the girls kept rapping the lyrics to “Hate,” the words angling up out of the speaker at Jeeb’s feet:

“You got a date with hate…

“At the Devil’s gate…”

CARELLA AND BROWN figured they’d get there by noon. Check with the security people, see if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious in the hours before the concert was scheduled to begin. But neither of them was convinced that the concert was the Deaf Man’s target, so they sat now at their separate desks, poring over newspapers and magazines, trying to pinpoint any event that would start at oneP .M. and that might or might not include fire as part of the performance.

Neither of them realized that the event they were looking for had been posted on the squadroom bulletin board all week long.

From: Jacques Duprès, Deputy Commissioner Police Department Public Information Division

For Release: Immediately

On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00pm., narcotics seized in 6, 955 arrests by the Police Department will be destroyed at the Department of Sanitation Incinerator on River Harb Drive at Houghton Street.

Included in the contraband to be destroyed is 24lbs, 4 ounces and 113 grains of heroin, valued at $24, 251, 875.

Cocaine Valued at $3, 946, 406, crack cocaine valued at $583, 000, marijuna valued at $221, 689, and other drugs and equipment to administer drugs, including LSD, opium, and hashish will also be destroyed.

THE CROWD WAS mostly black. The Deaf Man was counting on that. There were also whites in the crowd. The Deaf Man was counting on that as well. There were Hispanics in the crowd, and some Asians, but the Deaf Man considered them inessential to his plan. Most of the people in the crowd were young. This fit in perfectly with his scheme. Young males were quick to take offense and to seek reprisal; young girls were quick to urge mischief and to seek excitement. Fifty percent of the teenagers in this city carried guns. This was a well-publicized figure that had not escaped the Deaf Man’s attention. He knew that at an event as massive as the concert, a weapons check would be unlikely if not impossible. This was not a junior high school with a security guard at the door. This was a ten-acre meadow with a makeshift entrance marked by two pylons spaced some twenty feet apart and painted in alternating red, white, and blue stripes, with a security guard standing at each pylon, smiling benignly. But even if there was a weapons check, even if every young male who entered the concert site was unarmed, there would be a riot anyway.

The Deaf Man was counting on it because he knew human nature and he knew it would happen.

THE GIRLS INTERRUPTED their sound check when Sil came over to introduce Chloe to them. They were wearing the same overalls and high-topped boots the men were wearing, but the bibs on theirs seemed cut a bit more narrow to reveal generous breasts in tight blue T-shirts. Sex and violence, that was what Chloe guessed rap was all about, never mind the protest crap. Protest never sold a nickel’s worth of records. She’d have to tell that to Sil one day. Later. In the future.

The one named Grass, the prettier of the two, and the youngest—Chloe judged her to be no more than eighteen, nineteen—looked her up and down the way some men at the club did, gauging her, taking her measure, wondering if this was competition here, Sil holding to her hand so tight that way. Chloe figured the same as she had the night they’d had dinner together, when he’d mentioned her name so offhandedly: There was something going on between these two.

“Nice to meet you,” Grass said.

Her eyes met Chloe’s directly.

A challenge in them.

Little eighteen-year-old pisspants.

Chloe grabbed Sil’s hand tighter.

WHILE HE WAITED for Brown to come out of the men’s room, Carella looked over the squadroom bulletin board. Aside from the usual Wanted flyers, there were bits and scraps of everything from notices of changes in departmental rules and regulations, to a detailed reminder on how to administer the Miranda warnings; to a For Sale sign from an officer wanting to get rid of a ten-speed bike, to a flyer about aerobics and weight-lifting classes at the Headquarters Gym, to another flyer about the D.A. Easter Dance and another about the Emerald Society’s Celebrity Auction, and a…

For Release: Immediately

On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1: 00pm., narcotics seized in 6, 955 arrests by the Police Department…

“Let’s go,” Brown said, and zipped up his fly as he came out of the men’s room.

THEY LET the crowd in at twelve noon.

The crowd streamed in between the red, white, and blue pylon markers, an orderly crowd here for a day’s outing in the sun. The promoters of the event had set up concessionaire trucks around the perimeter, so that all sorts of food and soft drinks were available, but many in the crowd had brought along their own sandwiches and some of them had brought bottles of beer and soda pop in ice coolers, and some of them were sipping mixed alcoholic drinks from plastic Gatorade bottles. There was the usual mad rush to grab space near the stage area, but on the whole this was a civilized crowd intent only on enjoying the day and the music. Nobody wanted a hassle here today. Nobody wanted to fight over who got closest to the performers.

This was going to be a good, sweet, sunshine-filled day.

THE CHIEF security officer’s name was Fred Bartlett. He was a burly man almost as tall and as wide as Brown, with a ruddy face and a nose that appeared to have been broken more than once. His flinty blue eyes said Don’t mess with me.

“I’ve seen crowds at any kind of event you’d care to name,” he told the detectives. “I worked security at baseball games and football games and hockey games and ice shows and pop concerts and folk concerts and rock concerts and even a concert Barbra Streisand done in her own backyard in L.A. I know when a crowd’s gonna be trouble and when it ain’t. I can spot a crowd gonna turn mean from the minute it comes in the place, whatever kind of place it may be, an arena, a concert hall, an ice-skating rink, or a park like this one today.”

“Uh-huh,” Brown said.

He was thinking the man was a blowhard.

“And I can tell you,” Bartlett said, “that this crowd here today is as peaceful as any kind of crowd you’d hope for. They’re all here to have a good time today. The sun don’t hurt. It’s about time spring really got here. That’s what you can sense with this crowd. It’s been a long hard winter and now spring is here and we’re all gonna sit back and enjoy it.”

“You haven’t received any threatening phone calls, have you?” Carella asked.

“Nothing.”

“Bomb scares, anything like that?” Brown said.

“Nothing,” Bartlett said.

“Anybody threatening to set a fire?”

“Nothing.”

Carella looked at his watch.

It was twelve-thirty sharp.

THE GARBAGE TRUCK made a sharp turn off the street leading to the river, and then paralleled the river for several blocks, Gloria at the wheel, the Deaf Man sitting beside her. Hanging on to either side of the truck were Carter and Florry. Each of the four was wearing the sanitation department uniform: baggy spruce-green trousers, T-shirt, and jacket. Under the jackets, each of the four had tucked into the waistband of the trousers a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Uzi assault pistol. The Israeli-made weapon carried a twenty-round magazine and, because it was designed to absorb recoil, could accurately fire all twenty rounds within seconds.

They were going in with eighty rounds of ammunition.

The Deaf Man figured that would be more than enough to do the job.

FROM WHERE chloe Chadderton sat on a folding chair on the left hand side of the stage, she saw someone she thought she’d known from another time, another life. The white detective who’d investigated her husband’s murder all those years ago. The good looking one with the slanted eyes that made him look like a Chink. Standing there with a brother bigger than a mountain, talking to a man in uniform almost as big. She couldn’t remember the detective’s name. Maybe she didn’t want to.

She looked at her watch.

It was twenty minutes to one.

GLORIA DROVE the truck in through the open gate in the cyclone fence. In the distance, puffy white clouds rode the piercing blue sky. A man was looking out over the river, where a tugboat pushed heavily against a mild chop; he was wearing the same spruce-green uniform everyone in or on the truck was wearing. He didn’t even glance up as Gloria stopped the truck alongside the incinerator building.

She cut the ignition and pocketed the key.

All four of them put on the ski masks.

SOMETHING KEPT bothering Carella.

“What do you think?” Brown asked. “We stay awhile, or we go back to the office?”

“I think we’d better stay awhile,” he said.

“Maybe he was just pulling our leg all along,” Brown said. Carella looked at him.

“Well,” Brown said, and shrugged.

It was close to a shrug of defeat.

Both of them knew the Deaf Man hadn’t been pulling their leg but neither of them had even the faintest notion of what his plan might be.

THERE WERE TWO sanitation Department employees inside the incinerator building. One of them was reading a sports magazine. The other one was eating a sausage and pepper sandwich his wife had made him for lunch. When the front door opened, they thought it was the cops from the Property Clerk’s Office, here to burn their dope. It was only a quarter to one, but sometimes they got here a little early. Instead, they saw four guys in ski masks and uniforms same as they were wearing, all four of them holding guns.

The tallest one said, “Nice and easy.”

The two garbage men knew better than to move.

FROM WHERE THEY stood behind the stage waiting for the show to begin, Carella and Brown could hear the voice of the crowd. It was a single voice that vibrated with the pleasure of expectation. At one o’clock sharp…

On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

…according to what Bartlett had told them, the concert would open with a rap group called Spit Shine…

“Here’s the program right here,” he’d said, “you can keep it, I’ve got dozens of ’em.”

It was now five minutes to one, and the voice of the crowd…

On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

…hummed now with expectancy. In just five minutes, the concert would begin. Bartlett had estimated that there were 250,000 people in the crowd. 250,000 people waiting for…

Explosion?

Here?

Carella could not imagine how.

AT THREE MINUTES past one, just as Spit Shine began performing the song George Chadderton had written, rapping out his words, a van marked with the police department’s seal and the wordsPROPERTY CLERK ’S OFFICErolled down the ramp into the river front complex and parked alongside a graffiti-riddled garbage truck near the rear of the incinerator building. A radio car came down the ramp after it, and two officers got out of the car just as a sergeant and another officer got out of the van. The men exchanged greetings there at the river’s edge, commented on what a great day it was, and then the sergeant said, “Let’s see if they’re ready for us,” and they all walked into the building and found themselves looking into the barrels of what appeared to be four semiautomatic assault pistols.

The sergeant wondered why this hadn’t happened long before now, this city.

“…WHY SHE DO THIS WAY?

“On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay?

“She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,

“On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay…”

Sitting on the side of the stage, listening to the lyrics her husband had written so long ago, Chloe realized that the group was doing something marvelous with them, Sil and Jeeb in the background rapping a steady insistent urgent beat, the two girls rapping the words in a keening high-pitched wail that almost brought Chloe to tears.

The sound was picked up by forty or fifty microphones collecting audio information on the stage and feeding it into a cable that measured some two inches in diameter and lay on the ground like a snake. This cable, which was in fact called the snake, ran from the stage through the center of the audience in a lane flanked by sawhorses and covered with a rubber mat, going back some hundred and fifty feet to the control tower, where two sound engineers sat behind the console doing a house mix by ear.

From the console, four separate feeds ran out to the delay towers and the left and right main speakers stacked on either side of the stage. There were sixteen speakers stacked in each of the delay towers, together with a dozen thousand-watt amplifiers. The system had been equalized during the days before the concert, the delays calibrated so that the sound coming from the delay towers was synchronized with the sound coming from the towers on either side of the stage, where eighty speakers in each tower were moving a hell of a lot of air.

“…won’t she hear my song?

“What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.

“Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong…”

THE ONLY ONE they had to shoot was the garbage man taking the air at the river’s edge. It was Gloria who shot him because she was the one standing closest to him when he turned and yelled, “Hey! What’s goin on here?”

This may have been because he’d just seen four men in ski masks moving toward the police van. Gloria was thinking about the payoff on this thing, and she wasn’t about to have any shitty little garbage man screw it up. She fired three shots in rapid succession, the sound dissipating instantly over the water. The shots took him full in the face and knocked him back against the cyclone fence. He slid to the ground like an oil rag.

“Nice,” the Deaf Man said.

Then they all climbed into the police van, and he handed Gloria the keys he’d taken from the sergeant’s belt.

THE SONG WAS CALLED“Hate.”

It started at twelve minutes past one, just as Gloria turned the van’s ignition key.

Jeeb was the lead rapper on this one.

Sil did backup.

The girls sneered and snarled in the background.

The Deaf Man had no prior knowledge of the program that would be performed at today’s concert. He was only concerned with timing and diversion, the magician’s concern. He was stealing thirty million dollars’ worth of narcotics under the very noses of the police, and the only way to get away clean was to divert them.

The timer was set for one-twenty sharp.

At that time, he hoped to be transferring the contents of the police van into the rented Chevrolet already waiting in the boat basin parking lot farther downtown.

It was pure coincidence that the song’s content would aid and abet his plan. His plan was foolproof even without the song, but the song couldn’t hurt; give him a little chicken soup, as the lady in the balcony once remarked. Had he been here, the Deaf Man would have been pleased by the song and the spirited performance of the group named Spit Shine.

Sitting in the audience, Carella recognized dangerous and inflammatory lyrics when he heard them, all right, but his mind kept clicking back over something he’d seen or read, something in one of the newspapers or magazines, something about…

Saturday, April 4th…

Something about…

April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

Too damn many newspapers, too damn many magazines.

“…kick the ofay, kill the ofay, snuff the ofay, off the ofay, box the ofay,hate the ofay, cause the ofay hate you !

“Hate the ofay….”

His mind circled back again.

April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

“…fuck the ofay, juke the ofay…”

Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

“…shoot the ofay, spike the ofay…”

Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M., narcotics seized in…

“They burn it!” he shouted.

“…dothe ofay…”

“What!” Brown shouted.

“The narcotics! They burn the stuff!”

“…like the ofay do you !”

And in just that instant, Florry’s timer kicked in and the Deaf Man’s digitally stored voice erupted.

THE WAY FLORRY had explained it to him, you had to think of it as upstream and downstream. The sound from the stage ran downstream to the console where it was mixed, and then it ran out of the console, back upstream to the speakers in the various towers. Downstream, upstream. Into the console, out of the console again.

“You’ve got your snake running into the console and then your matrix outputs running out of it,” Florry said. “The matrix outputs are carrying the sound that came downstream and got mixed and is now running back upstream again. It’s like a bottleneck right there, where the mixed sound narrows down to just these four signal lines going out to the main speakers left and right, and the delay speakers left and right. You follow me so far?”

“Barely,” the Deaf Man said.

“Stick with me,” Florry said, and grinned. “Suppose we direct the sound going upstream into our little black box, hmm? So that instead of going straight to the speakers, it goes through the box and out of it again. Business as usual, no depredation of sound. Everything coming from the stage is mixed at the console, goes out of the console into the box, passes through the box and out of the box, and then on to the speakers. Everything still going downstream and then upstream again. Until we decide to abort it.”

“How do we do that?”

“Simple,” Florry said.

The way Florry did it—and the way it was working this very instant—was not, in fact, quite as simple as he’d claimed it was.

To make it easier for the Deaf Man to understand, he explained that the heart of his “little black box” was a 24-volt DC battery pack that drove all the elements necessary to abort the sound coming from the stage and to substitute for it the message the Deaf Man had recorded. In addition to the resistors, capacitors, and opamps that were the essential components of any sound circuitry, the various other elements in the box were:

A digital clock, which had been preset to go off at one-twenty sharp…

Four relays, which in effect created a two-pole switch, and…

An EPROM, the electronic chip upon which Florry had digitally stored the Deaf Man’s voice.

“There are two positions in that box,” Florry said. “The A position is your normal output, the mixed signal going from the console, through the box, and to the speakers. Before the timer kicks in, nobody’ll even guess the signal is running through our box. That’s the first position. But the instant that timer kicks in, your relays switch to the B position, which is the message on the EPROM we burned. The timer throws the switch, which kills the sound coming from the stage and sends out your voice instead. From that second on, a twenty-four-volt battery’ll be running sound to every speaker in the joint! Just think of it! All those speakers in each tower, and your voice booming from every one of them, a goddamn box from hell!”

The Deaf Man’s voice was booming from them now.

“NIGGERS EAt SHIT !”

If you were sitting on the stage, as Chloe was, or if you were sitting no more than fifty feet back from the stage, you might have heard the sound generated by the group’s own amps and speakers, but this was almost totally overridden by the voice that thundered from the stacks of speakers the little black box was now controlling.

“ALLNIGGERS EAT SHIT!”

The voice was high and strident. The Deaf Man had shouted into the mike when they were burning the EPROM, and now his voice bellowed from the speakers.

“EVERY FUCKING NIGGER On EARTH EATS SHIT!”

At first, the audience thought this was part of the act. Strange things sometimes happened at these concerts, and Spit Shine was still up there performing, wasn’t it? Even the two men behind the console were initially confused. The board was showing input from the stage mikes, so maybe the group was just being totally outrageous. But the engineers could see the stage, and all at once Spit Shine stopped dead. And where an instant earlier there’d been their faintly amplified rap competing with the thunderous sound coming from all those high-powered speakers, now there was only the Deaf Man’s voice, as insistent as Hitler’s had been when he was exhorting his masses.

“THAT’S WHY NIGGERS ARE THe COLOR OF SHIT!”

The input lights on the board went out the minute Spit Shine quit.

“It’s not coming from the stage,” one of the engineers said.

“THAT’S WHY NIGGERs STINK LIKE SHIT!”

The intercom call light flashed.

The other engineer picked up.

“What’s the joke?” a voice asked.

“It’s not us,” the engineer said.

“THAT’S WHY NIGGERS ARe DUMB AS SHIT!”

“Are your masters down?” the voice asked.

The first engineer slapped at the master faders.

“Nothing’s going out of the console,” he said.

But the shouting continued.

“NIGGERs ARE SHIT…”

“Must be somebody on the stage,” the second engineer said.

“NIGGERS’LL TURN THe WORLD TO SHIT, NIGGERS’LL…”

“Let’s pull all the wires,” the first engineer said.

But just then the first shot was fired—and it was too late.

CARELLA AND BROWN were already in the car when the crowd exploded. On the other end of the radio Alf Miscolo in the clerical office was giving them the location of the incinerator. As an aside, he reported that Hawes and Meyer had just left the squad room on their way to Grover Park.

“There’s some kind of trouble there,” he said.

THE SOME KIND OF TROUBLE was the same kind of trouble that had been eroding America’s spirit for the past half-century. In an unmarked sedan speeding crosstown and downtown toward the Department of Sanitation incinerator on Houghton and the river, a white man yelled “Hit the hammer!” to a black man, and the black man flicked the siren switch and rammed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The white man and the black man in that speeding police sedan had been raised in an America that promised a melting pot, that told them stories about people from all nations living together in harmony and peace. In this land of the free and home of the brave, men and women of every religion and creed would loudly sing the praises of freedom while reaping all those amber waves of grain. The persecution, the starvation, the deprivation that had brought this human refuse to our teeming shores would be obliterated here for all time. Men and women would come to respect each other’s customs and beliefs while simultaneously merging into a strong single tribe with a strong single voice, a voice distinctly American, a voice more powerful precisely because it was composed of so many different voices from so many different lands. Here in America, the separate parts would at last become the whole, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Well, the liberty and justice for all had somehow become liberty and justice for merely some , and the glorious notion of a unified tribe had somehow become something no one ever mentioned anymore, like a dream dreamt too often and too yearningly, until its brilliant colors faded to drab and you woke up crying. Because the Deaf Man had realized all this, and because he’d had not the slightest compunction about capitalizing on it, he’d been able to instigate a riot with total certainty and absolute ease.

Carella and Brown were well aware of the riot.

They had rushed to the car before the crowd got completely out of hand because containing a riot was not their obligation; catching the man who’d caused it was. Now there was nothing but the riot on every police radio channel, interspersed with dispatcher warnings to maintain total radio silence until the trouble was contained. The riot made them uncomfortable because they were respectively a white man and a black man and the trouble in the park was one of color. But they were a black man and a white man acting as a team to catch the son of a bitch responsible for the riot, the man who’d turned a promising golden day into yet another dark and dismal gloom. Tight-lipped, they sped downtown with the siren blaring, passing a dozen or more radio cars racing uptown in the opposite direction.

Which was what the Deaf Man had planned all along.

“CHLOE!” he shouted. “Take my hand!”

She reached for his hand.

Reached for the future.

Grasped it eagerly.

Below the stage, there was bedlam. The first shot had inspired more shooting. When there are guns on the scene, the first gun openly to appear encourages boldness from anyone else who’s armed. Boldness and the challenge of the Old West. High noon in the OK Corral. All that shit. Guns are guns. Guns are weapons of destruction. There were an estimated 250,000 people on that lawn when the first gun came out and the first shot was fired. It was fired by a black man at a white man because the Deaf Man’s baiting words were directed at blacks, and because—as Rivera had written about the multitude—“It will turn on itself and see in itself the olden enemy.” Well,this multitude had heard the inflammatory words, and they had correctly identified the speaker of those words as white, and their single goal was to kill Whitey…

Its fury will blind its eyes…

…kick the ofay, kill the ofay, snuff the ofay, off the ofay, box the ofay,hate the ofay, cause the ofay hate you !

The crowd moved forward relentlessly, chanting, stamping, shouting, a massive beast that seemed all flailing arms and thrashing legs…

“This way!” Sil shouted. “The band trailer!”

White men and black men were shooting at each other, shoving at each other, screaming at each other, pushing at each other, kicking each other, punching each other…

…eager to destroy the victim it had chosen, the common enemy, a roar rising as if from a single throat, “kill, kill,kill ! ”

Sil threw open the trailer door, put his hands on either side of her waist, and lifted her onto the step.

The white man’s bullet took Chloe in the back of her head, spattering blood and brain tissue onto the side of the trailer where the wordsSPIT SHINE were lettered in bold silver lettering edged in black, shattering her dream and killing her at once.

OUTSIDE THE incinerator building, Carella and Brown found a man lying at the foot of the cyclone fence, dead. Inside the building, they found two garbage men and four police officers bound and gagged, blindfolded, and wearing ski masks for good measure.

They figured the Deaf Man had arrived in the garbage truck parked outside.

THE FOOT PATROLMAN walking the beat outside the boat basin saw what looked like a police van sitting in the parking lot, close to the river’s edge. He checked it out, and sure enough it was a P.D. vehicle, with Property Clerk’s Office markings on its side panels. He opened the door on the driver’s side, and found a set of keys hanging from the ignition.

Aside from that, all there was in the van was some stuff looked like syringes and pipes and other cheap drug paraphernalia.

THEY HAD DRIVEN from the boat-basin parking lot, uptown to the Hamilton Bridge, and then over it to the next state—Florry, Carter, and Gloria driving their own rented cars, the Deaf Man driving the Chevrolet he’d rented. By two-thirty that afternoon, he’d paid all of them the remainder of their fees and had opened several bottles of champagne in celebration. All four cars were parked outside the motel room. The stolen narcotics were covered with a tarpaulin in the trunk of the Deaf Man’s Chevy. He had told them it would be best if they went their separate ways in fifteen-minute intervals, Florry first, then Carter, then Gloria. They seemed content to let him do things his way. There’d been scarcely any fuss at all this afternoon, and they were now all a hundred thousand dollars richer because of him.

They toasted the ease with which the job had gone down, toasted each other’s brilliance and cool, particularly toasted Gloria, who, for a woman, had displayed uncommon ballsiness in putting away the garbage man. None of them complained about the split. They knew—or must have known—that the narcotics in the Chevy outside were worth a great deal more than the Deaf Man had paid them, but he was the one who’d concocted the scheme, and they knew in their hearts that he was entitled to the lion’s share.

So they drank their champagne like good old friends at a black tie party late in the night after everyone else had gone home, and at last Florry looked at his watch and said “Time to boogie,” and went into the bathroom to change his clothes. When he came out again, he was wearing brown corduroy trousers, a green sports shirt, a tan V-necked sweater, and brown socks with brown loafers. Carter told him not to spend all his money in one place, and they all laughed and he shook hands all around and went outside, where in a minute or so they heard his car starting and driving off.

Ten minutes later, Carter sighed and said, “My friends, all good things must come to an end,” and he went into the bathroom to change, shedding the spruce-green uniform and returning in a red turtleneck, gray slacks, a blue blazer, and blue socks with black shoes. He shook hands with the Deaf Man, kissed Gloria on the cheek, and went out. The moment the Deaf Man heard his car driving off, he said, “Alone at last.”

Gloria arched an eyebrow.

“I have to be out of here in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“You still haven’t taught me that trick of yours,” he said.

“That trick’s a secret,” she said. “I haven’t taught that trick to anyone in the world.”

“Know any other tricks?”

“A few.”

“Want to teach me those?”

“The fifteen minutes was your idea,” she said.

“But who’s counting?” he said, and smiled.

He poured more champagne, and he turned on the radio that was part of the room’s television set and found a station playing elevator music, soft and romantic, with a lot of strings. Gloria sat in the room’s only easy chair, and he sat on the edge of the bed, and leaned over to clink his glass against hers, and they both said “Cheers” at the same moment, and then brought the glasses to their lips and sipped at the good bubbly wine. She was watching him over the rim of the glass. He considered this a good sign.

“Are you going to drive home in that garbage man’s uniform?” he asked.

“No, I’ll change before I leave,” she said.

There was a moment’s hesitation.

Then he said, “Why don’t you change now?”

She looked at him for a moment. Then she put down her glass and said, “Sure.”

She was in the bathroom for what seemed like a very long time. When she came out again, she was wearing a short black skirt with black pantyhose, a red silk blouse, and high-heeled black patent pumps. Through the open bathroom door, he could see all the garbage man uniforms heaped on the floor near the tub. She sat where she’d been sitting earlier, crossed her legs in the black pantyhose, picked up her champagne glass, lifted it to him in a silent toast, and drank again. He went to where she was sitting, leaned over her, and kissed her.

“The day I interviewed you,” he said.

“Yes?”

Still leaning over her. Her face tilted up to his.

“You asked me what I wanted you to do, do you remember?”

“I remember.”

He kissed her again.

“You have a lovely mouth,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You do remember what you said, don’t you?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“Sure.”

“What did I say?”

“You said you didn’t pay women for sex.”

“And what’d you say to that?”

“I said, ‘Good, because I don’t suck cocks for money.’”

“Good,” he said, “because I don’t plan to give you any money.”

“Good,” she said.

“Good,” he repeated, and took her hands, and helped her gently out of the chair. Lifting her into his arms, he carried her to the bed, and put her down on it, and kicked off his loafers and lay down beside her. She rolled into him to meet him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her more fiercely this time, and then his hands were under the short black skirt, easing the pantyhose down over her hips and past the blonde triangle of her pubic patch, rolling them down over the long length of her legs, until they were bunched at her ankles, holding her there like leg cuffs, the black high-heeled pumps just below them.

“I want to tie you to the bed,” he said.

“Sure,” she said.

With leather thongs, he tied her wrists to the headboard posts and her ankles to the footboard posts, leaving her spread-eagled and waiting on the bed while he went into the bathroom to undress. He came to her naked and hard, and kissed her again, and put his hand on her where she was spread and helpless and vulnerable below. He played games with her for an hour or more, the April afternoon drifting slowly by while he teased her first with his hands and his mouth and then with his cock and finally with the Uzi, adding a little danger to the game, the barrel of the gun cool against her thighs, Gloria writhing on the bed beside him. She was still bound when at last he entered her. He did not untie her until twenty minutes later, when they were both exhausted and sweaty and spent.

“Now you,” she said.

“Oh-ho,” he said.

He was lying on his back, his forearm across his eyes, his long muscular body relaxed, his cock limp.

“Sauce for the goose,” she said, and gathered the leather thongs from where he’d tossed them on the floor.

She tied his hands first.

Then his ankles.

Spread-eagled on the bed, he looked at her and smiled.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Same as you did to me,” she said. “Only better.”

She knelt between his spread legs and took him in her mouth. He was erect again within seconds.

“Now suffer,” she said, and got off the bed and put on first the pantyhose and the skirt…

“Reverse strip,” he said, smiling.

“Yep, reverse strip,” she said, and put on her brassiere and the red silk blouse and the high-heeled pumps…

“Come on over here,” he said.

“Nope,” she said, and buttoned the blouse swiftly, button by button, and tucked the blouse into the skirt…

“Come on, bitch.”

“Beg for it,” she said, and went to the dresser and picked up the Uzi.

“Uh-oh,” he said, smiling.

“Yep,” she said, and nodded and fired two quick shots into his chest. She turned away at once, picked up her handbag and the keys to the Chevy, looked back at him again quickly, turned away from the sight of all that blood, and left the room.