8.

THE PAIR OF THEM were waiting outside the hospital when Sharyn came out at six-thirty that morning. Big blond guy who looked like Kansas, beautiful redheaded woman with him. Sharyn figured them for relatives of the cop who’d got shot.

“Dr. Cooke?” the redhead said. “I’m Detective Burke? I work with Georgia? Detective Mowbry? We’re on the hostage negotiating…”

“Yes, how are you?” Sharyn said warmly, and extended her hand.

“Detective Kling,” the blond one said, and extended his hand in turn. They both seemed extremely nervous. Sharyn guessed they were anticipating bad news they didn’t really want to hear.

“How is she?”

This from the blond one.

“She should be all right,” Sharyn said.

“Would…you like a cup of coffee or something?”

This from the redhead…“I was standing right next to her when she got shot, I’d really like to…”

“Of course,” Sharyn said.

THE REDHEAD’S first name was Eileen.

The blond was Bert.

They were on a first-name basis and apparently knew each other well. Although Sharyn was a one-star chief, she never wore the uniform and didn’t much go for the paramilitary bullshit of the police force. As they walked to the diner, she asked them to please call her Sharyn.

Kling thought he’d heard Sharon.

In his mind, he registered her name as Sharon.

The diner at sevenA .M. that Monday morning was packed when the three of them walked in. It was starting out to be a nice day, the sun shining, all traces of yesterday’s snow and rain gone, the temperature still quite low, though, considering that spring was already ten days old. Forty-two degrees Fahrenheit didn’t feel like spring, even if the sun was shining. Neither did five or six degrees above zero centigrade.

Sharyn and Kling were wearing overcoats. No mufflers, no gloves, just the overcoats they’d worn in yesterday’s miserable rain and snow, looking a bit rumpled now. Eileen was wearing the jeans and blue jacket she’d been wearing when Georgia got hit, the big wordPOLICE across the back of the jacket in white letters. All three of them looked somewhat tired and drawn as they found a leatherette booth toward the rear of the diner, the only one available, too close to the kitchen and the men’s room. They took off their coats, hung them on wall hooks where they could keep an eye on them.

Kling ordered eggs over easy with home fries and bacon. Eileen ordered a Western omelet with the fries and country sausages. Sharyn ordered the Belgian waffles. All three of them ordered coffee.

“We’ve been getting calls all night long,” Sharyn said. “She has a lot of friends.”

“How is she?” Eileen asked.“Really.”

“Well…we won’t really know for a few days yet. She’ll be in the recovery room for the better part of the week, we’ll be watching her carefully all that time. If there’s the slightest sign that anything’s wrong…”

“Is anything wrong now ?” Kling asked.

He kept staring at Sharyn intently, but she assumed that was because he was so interested in what she had to tell them about Georgia Mowbry.

“Her condition is stable at the moment,” she said.

“But she’s in coma, isn’t she?” Eileen asked. “Isn’t that bad?”

Inducedcoma,” Sharyn said. “To reduce brain activity. This was a very serious injury, you know, the trauma was severe. She’s lost the eye….”

“Oh Jesus,” Eileen said.

“There was nothing we could do for it.”

Eileen nodded.

“How long will she be in the recovery room?” Kling asked.

“Better part of the week, I’d say. As soon as she comes around, we’ll move her into…”

Willshe come around?” Eileen asked.

“That’s our expectation. As I’m sure you know, the gun was fired at relatively close range….”

“How close?” Kling asked.

“Four to five feet,” Eileen said.

“No tattooing or burn marks,” Sharyn said. “Not much bleeding.”

“What kind of gun?” Kling asked.

“Twenty-two caliber Llama,” Sharyn said. “I’ll be honest with you, in cases such as this…skull injury, severe trauma, hemorrhaging…”

“I thought you said there wasn’t much bleeding,” Eileen said.

“At the site of the wound. But when we went in, we found an open vein in the brain. What I’m saying is we’re lucky she made it alive to the hospital. That she survived the initial shock—the forcible entry of the missile, the shattering of bone, the brain penetration…well, that in itself is impressive. But until we know how severe the damage to the brain was…well.”

Brain damage, Eileen thought. Jesus.

“The Commish is a bit sensitive about this one,” Sharyn said. “He had to acknowledge what happened on Cumberland—there was a television truck at the scene, covering the hostage situation—but he didn’t want anyone to know that the wounded cop was a woman, shot in the eye , no less. He wouldn’t let me release her name till this morning. Brady’s been calling, too…Inspector Brady, commander of…”

“Yes.”

“…been calling every ten minutes. I don’t know which he’s more worried about, her or his program. He lost a female negotiator some time back….”

“Yes,” Eileen said.

“Well, you know then.”

“Yes. Dr. Cooke…”

“Sharyn, please.”

“Sharyn…what’s the prognosis?”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“When will you know?” Kling asked.

“When she comes around. When we can make some tests.”

“We don’t want to lose her,” Eileen said.

“Neither does anyone, believe me,” Sharyn said. “That’s why I’m here.”

THAT NIGHT at twenty minutes to eleven—some thirty-five hours after Georgia was shot—the nurse who came into her room for a routine check noticed that she was having difficulty breathing, this despite the fact that she was on a respirator. Alarmed, she reported this to the resident, who examined her briefly and then asked one of his superiors to come have a look at her.

An hour later, just as the midnight shift was coming on, it was concluded that Georgia had contracted aspiration pneumonia. It was the doctors’ surmise that she had breathed vomit into her lungs sometime during the first few minutes after the shooting. The vomiting had been an involuntary reaction to a bullet penetrating the brain. She had undoubtedly sucked in a deep breath, pulling vomit into her nostrils and subsequently into her lungs. The vomit contained stomach acids, which were corrosive. Chemical pneumonia had inevitably and swiftly led to bacterial pneumonia.

They sucked the vomit out of her lungs mechanically.

They began treating her with antibiotics, and they put her on the Positive End Expirator Pressure machine, familiarly called the PEEP and designed to keep the lungs slightly expanded under pressure.

Georgia Mowbry’s postoperative problems were just beginning.

THE MEETING had started at tenP .M., but this was a matter of life or death to them, and so the writers were still talking and arguing at ten minutes past midnight.

The writers called themselves an “alliance.”

The Park Place Writers Alliance.

Park Place was the street on which they met, a little cul-de-sac off Grover Park. Henry Bright, the president of the Alliance, lived in an apartment on Park Place, which was a shitty little street lined with tenements and spindly soot-covered trees. Henry had decorated the walls of the apartment with spray paint. Talk about your top to bottoms, Henry Bright’s apartment was a riot of color. Henry was twenty-two years old and knew just where he wanted to go in this city. Where he wanted to go was to the very top. He wanted to be known through all eternity as the writer who’d thrown up the most tags ever.

In the old days, these writers’ associations prided themselves on the scope of their artwork. Some of them even achieved a small measure of fame. One of them even had his work, such as it was, hanging in museums. Although some people thought it strange that a graffiti writer would be so honored, since most people felt these vandals should be hanged by their thumbs in the marketplace. But at least, back then, these writers—with a little encouragement from writers of quite another sort—really did consider themselves artists. So when they got together to form these writers’ groups or associations or leagues or unions, as the organizations were variously called, they were doing so to protect their work.

The Park Place Writers Alliance did not use spray paint anymore. They did not throw up any big two-tone pieces or color-blended burners because nowadays either there was paint-resistant material that would cause the paint to run as if it were crying, or else the piece you worked on all night would be taken off with acid the next day, it just didn’t pay anymore. Besides, paint wasn’t for posterity.

What was for posterity was scratching the marker into glass. You used either a key or a ring with a hard stone, if you could afford one, and you scratched the marker into the glass or the plastic, HB for Henry Bright, if you happened to be Henry. If you were one of the other three guys in the Alliance, you scratched either LR or JC or EB. If you worked on a big plate-glass window together, all four of you in the Alliance, then in addition to throwing up your personal marker, you put in the identifying Alliance tag, PPWA, in a corner of the window. This past Saturday night, they’d done a big jewelry store window on Hall Avenue downtown, all four of them etching their markers into the glass, and then throwing up the Alliance tag in the lower right-hand corner. Replace that window, it’d cost the store thousands of dollars. Be easier to leave it there, let the people look in at the jewelry through the initials scratched into the plate glass.

Henry had called the meeting tonight—lastnight, actually, since it was already a quarter past twelve now—because he’d detected that some of the others in the Alliance were running scared. Larry especially—who was only sixteen, but who was an industrious writer, throwing up the LR marker all over town, Larry Rutherford, LR, scratching in the tag with a diamond ring his grandfather had left him—Larry seemed very scared. When, for example, Henry suggested that they all go down to Hall Avenue again this coming weekend—“Do the bookstore across the street from the big jewelry store, make it like Alliance Alley , what do you think?”—all Larry said was, “And get ourselves killed ?”

What they were here discussing tonight was whether they were going to let some fuckin lunatic stand in the way of immortality. Because Henry didn’t care how the others felt about getting the marker out, that was a matter of their own personal aspirations or lack of them, although some measure of Alliance pride was also involved. But his own burning ambition was to become famous all over this city, and then to branch out across the river maybe, make his way west across the entire U.S. of A., throwing up the HB marker on every piece of glass or plastic in the country. HB. For Henry Bright. Ah, yes, the famous writer , do you mean?

“What I think,” Ephraim said—EB was his marker, for Ephraim Beame, the only black kid in the Alliance—“is we should wait a while before going out again, venturing out, you know, because I like agree with Larry that this person is really some kind of vigilante nut who’s out to get us all, eliminate us, you know, cleanse the city, purify it, is what I think. Of writers, that is,” he added. “Cleanse it of writers.”

“So suppose this guy continues for a month, two months, a year, what ever ,” Henry said, “are we supposed to hide from him all that time? Stay underground all that time? I really find that extremely chickenshit, Eph, I really do.”

“Thing is,” Ephraim said, “he’s like going around shooting people, Henry. It’s one thing to take a stand for what you know is right…”

“Throwing up the marker is right, you’re damn right,” Henry said.

“Am I saying no?” Ephraim asked. “I’m saying what’s right is right, is what I’m saying. But I’m also saying might makes right, you know, and this man is out there shooting real bullets. And dead is dead,” he added.

“The thing we’re discussing here,” Joey said…

Joseph Croatto, whose marker was JC, though sometimes he felt sacrilegious throwing it up.

“…is not whether we’re brave enough to go out there in the middle of the night to get stalked by some madman who doesn’t recognize what we’re trying to accomplish in this city…”

“Hear, hear,” Ephraim said.

“…but whether it’s wiser to wait a little while before we continue the work.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Because I personally don’t want to wake up with a bullet in my head, thank you,” Joey said, and nodded at Larry, who nodded back.

“Here’s the way I see it,” Larry said.

Sixteen years old with peach fuzz on his face, bright blue eyes, cheeks like a Cabbage Patch doll.

“I think you’re the only one who doesn’t want to cool it awhile, Henry,” he said, and hastily added, “and i admire that, I really do. But this man isn’t playing around. And what’s been happening the past week or so has been scaring other writers off the streets. So if this man is out there looking for writers, and there aren’t any out there, wouldn’t it be dumb of the Alliance to give him exactly what he’s looking for? To provide him with the targets he wants? We go down to Hall Avenue, like you suggested…”

“I can taste that fuckin bookstore window,” Henry said.

“Me, too,” Larry said, “don’t you think we all want to do that window? That window is aching to be done. Just across the street from the jewelry store? One of the busiest corners downtown? We do that window you’re right , it’ll be Alliance Alley down there, we’ll be famous! But not now , Henry. Give this guy a little time to burn himself out….”

“I don’t see any sign of that happening,” Henry said.

“Then give the cops time to catch him….”

“Ha!”

“He’s killed three people already, the cops must have some kind of line on him,” Ephraim said.

“Just give it a little time,” Joey said.

Henry shook his head and shoved his glasses up higher on his nose. Behind the glasses, his eyes expressed disappointment more than they did anger. He’d been depending on these people, hoping that their vision would match his own. As the oldest person in the Alliance, he had become their natural leader, even if he was shorter than any of the others. Short and a bit squat. In fact, with his spiky hair and his rotund shape, he somewhat resembled a startled porcupine. Sixteen-year-old Larry was taller and much handsomer than Henry was. And now it seemed that he had swayed the others into thinking the way he did.

“If you won’t come with me, I’ll do the window alone,” he said.

They all looked at him.

“And I’m not waiting till the weekend. I’m doing it tonight.” They kept looking at him.

“So who’s with me?” he asked.

No one said a word.

“Okay, the meeting’s over,” Henry said.

It never occurred to him that wanting to carve his name all over the world had something to do with being only five feet six inches tall.

SHE WAS RIGHT, of course, there had to be another one.

He had planned to stop at three, but as usual she was right. You stop at three, she said, they’ll zero in right away. Why would anyone do three and then suddenly quit? This isn’t like deciding to retire after you’ve won three Academy Awards or spent three years on the best-seller list. This is killing graffiti writers, don’t forget. That’s your mission , remember? And a person with a mission doesn’t stop after the third one.

This was in bed last night.

Lying in bed talking about what they would do after the final murder. Her wondering out loud if there should be five, maybe six of them. Lying there in the purple baby-doll nightgown he’d given her for Christmas, no panties under it, one leg straight out, the other bent, lying on her side that way.

“It might be a trade-off,” she said. “You do five or six of them, you run the risk of them zeroing in, anyway. But…”

“You don’t know how scary it is out there,” he said. “Middle of the night.”

“I’m sure it is,” she said. “But you also let them know this is a real mission, you’re not just somebody fooling around out there.”

“Not a dilettante,” he said.

“A dilettante, right. You let them know this is a serious thing with you.”

“Do you see what the papers are calling me?”

“I like that,” she said, and grinned and moved her knee a little, the knee on the bent leg, just moved it slightly to the left.

He got excited just thinking about her. He was excited now, thinking about last night, about her in the short purple nightgown and the way she just sort of carelessly moved her knee back and forth so that the gown sort of fell away from her, exposing her, the grin on her face saying You want some of this, baby? Come take it, sweetheart.

Got excited all over again just thinking about it.

She wanted him to do five of these fucking vandals, he’d do five. Six, he’d do six. A dozen? Name it. Doing them was her idea to begin with. If he had to do a hundred of them, he’d do a hundred. If he could find them.

One o’clock in the morning, the streets were deserted.

It was trying to second-guess them that was difficult. Figuring out where they’d hit next. What he did was drive the car around till he found an area with a lot of graffiti on the walls, figuring this was a happy hunting ground with good buffalo, they’d be back for more, right? Tried to find a pristine wall in a neighborhood flowering with graffiti. Figured the wall would attract them.

Tonight he was midtown.

Not much graffiti down here, but he’d read in today’s paper about a gang scratching their names onto a plate-glass window down here, and he thought Hmm,this is something new, maybe there’s opportunity here.

That was after they’d made love all night long. That purple gown, Jesus. He’d left her early this morning, bought a newspaper in the corner candy store and read it on the taxi ride back to his own place. The newspaper was full of stories about the graffiti killer. One of the accompanying stories was about the jewelry-store hit this past Saturday night, though, big initials scratched into the plate-glass window fronting Hall Avenue, the letters PPWA in the lower right-hand corner, whatever that stood for, the police weren’t speculating. The story said this was a new wrinkle, defacing glass or plastic surfaces.

He’d thought about that in the shower, thought about it while he was putting on fresh clothes, thought about it in the deli around the corner from his apartment, where he had breakfast, thought about it on the subway ride downtown.

Wouldn’t the graffiti killer be attracted to this new development? he wondered.

Nip it in the bud, so to speak?

Show the world he was after anyone vandalizing this city in a serious way?

Show them he was serious?

So he’d driven uptown tonight and circled the blocks looking for anyone who seemed suspicious in any way, hoping to catch anyone writing on a store window, stop him dead in his tracks, blow him away while he was committing the act.

Nothing.

No one.

He’d been too successful, scared off all the punks.

Didn’t want to get out of the car and walk around, this was Silk Stocking territory here, a cruising cop spotted a man alone they’d think he was about to carve up a goddamn shop window. So he just kept cruising. No pattern to the way he drove, drifting down Hall for a few blocks, then turning North toward Detavoner and then driving uptown and turning south again, all the way to Jefferson, watching all the while for someone standing in front of a window doing his thing.

He spotted a man on Jefferson, standing against a window, all right, but he was just taking a leak.

Nature calls, he thought, and smiled in the darkness of the automobile.

Police car up ahead. MS letters on its side. Midtown South.

He made a right turn on the next corner, heading up to Hall again, and then continued across the avenue and on to Detavoner again, Midtown North territory, wouldn’t do to have the same police car spotting him twice in the rearview mirror, now would it?

Uptown again for six block hung a right came down to Hall again, hung a louie, and was approaching the big intersection where the jewelry store had been hit, when across the street he saw a kid with hair like a picket fence standing in front of the window of the bookstore there.

He slowed the car to a crawl.

Slid down the electric window on the passenger side, purred up the street to where the kid was busily scratching away at the plate glass.

The kid turned when he heard the car stopping. Too late.

“Here, kid!” he said, and fired two shots into his head and another into his chest and then he fired a few into the window, too, just for good measure.

WHEN A MAN tells you, quote…

“I run one of the best shelters in this city.”

Unquote.

And he also tells you, quote…

“I run a good shelter.”

Unquote.

And goes on to say, “Other shelters, you have men getting beaten at night, other men using pipes on them, or sawed-off broomstick handles, but not here in my shelter….”

Well, one could possibly forgive an experienced cop for wondering if perhaps the gentleman didth protest too much. Especially when he went on to give you, in fits and starts, other little quotable tidbits like “Mind you, we don’t have a security problem as such” and then goes on to say that fifty blankets were stolen during the last quarter of the preceding year and twenty-six stolen so far in the first two months of this year, but “we can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know….”

Wellllll…

Meyer was certain that Harold Laughton would forgive him for marching straight over to the Sixteenth Precinct last Saturday after his visit to the shelter. And then, since he was already there, where he felt comfortable in surroundings very much like those at the old Eight-Seven, and so it shouldn’t be a total waste of time, Meyer asked the desk sergeant to check the activities log for the past several months, just on the off-chance that maybe —listen, who could tell, stranger things had happened—just possibly everything wasn’t quite so kosher at DSS TEMPLE as the protesting Mr. Laughton had claimed.

And lo and behold!

It seemed that in the month of January, which was as far back as the good sergeant wished to go, the precinct had dispatched Charlie Two to the shelter a total of eight times, three of those times to investigate reported assaults, five of them to investigate emergencies that subsequently required hospitalization for rat bites and/or drug overdoses.

The activities log showed an increase in Charlie Two responses for the month of February, with a total of twelve visits to the shelter, most often in the dead of night, for causes similar if not identical to those reported in January.

For the month of March, Charlie Two—which of course was the radio car patrolling the sector in which the shelter was located—had been there only seven times, but one of those calls had been occasioned by a homicide that took place in the shelter’s men’s room.

In short, DSS TEMPLE was no different from any of the city’s other shelters, and Harold Laughton was full of shit, so Meyer called Cotton Hawes at once and told him not to shave over the weekend. Now, at one-thirty that Tuesday morning, a tall red-headed man wearing a tattered brown sports jacket and threadbare blue jeans, his face sporting a three-day beard stubble, his hands encrusted with grime, walked into the shelter and approached the registration desk. He was carrying a duffel bag presumably containing all of his worldly belongings, and he stank so badly of booze that the admissions clerk virtually reeled when the man told him his name was Jerry Hudson and he needed a place to stay for the night.

Hawes signed the register under that name, was handed first the key to a locker and next an index card with the number 104 written on it…

“Lucky number,” Hawes said boozily and grinned at the clerk, showing greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth.

…was told that 104 was the number on his cot—he’d find a cardboard thing with the number on it, hanging from the foot of the cot and was directed to a room across the drill hall floor, where he picked up a pillow, a blanket, and a toilet kit. Contributed by Halligan Food Stores, it said on the kit’s flimsy blue plastic case. Walking with the uncertain step of a drunk, the blanket and pillow clutched to his chest, the duffel hanging halfway down his back, the toilet kit dangling by its cord from his right wrist, he made his way slowly across the huge room to the battered green lockers lining one entire wall. The place echoed with the snores and groans and nocturnal mumblings of hundreds of sleeping men, resonated as well with the voices of men who were wide awake at this hour of the morning and talking loudly to themselves or to others, the drone counterpointed by the mutterings and murmurs of yet more men trying to sleep. He located the locker corresponding to the number on his key, unlocked the door, tossed in his duffel, locked the door again, and pulled the key’s elasticized loop over his right wrist. Five minutes later, he found the cot marked 104, put the blanket at the foot of it and the pillow at the head of it, and sat down heavily on its edge. He was just about to lie down when a voice said, “Up, Mac.”

Hawes turned.

A man shorter than he was, but brimming with more muscles than should have been allowable by law, was standing at the foot of the cot, scowling. He was wearing khaki undershorts and a khaki tank-top undershirt that Hawes guessed was regulation military gear. He was tattooed all over his muscles and in some places where there weren’t any muscles, including the top of his bald head.

“I said up, ” he said. “Offthe cot.”

The last thing Hawes wanted in this place was an argument. He was here to get a line on whoever had stolen a blanket subsequently wrapped around an old lady now deceased. But people had been hurt here, some of them badly, one of them so badly that they’d had to bury him afterward. Hawes wondered if it would appear convincing for a drunk to sober up in ten seconds flat. He decided it would.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

Cold sober.

Alert to any danger.

Was the impression he hoped to create.

As an afterthought, he hiccuped.

The man with all the muscles and tattoos smiled.

“My cot,” he said reasonably.

“One-oh-four,” Hawes said, equally reasonably, and showed the index card and his greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth in a smile that would have made the lab exceedingly proud.

The repulsive coloration had been created by a dentist the lab had called in. The dentist had first cleaned Hawes’s normally pristine teeth with polishing cups, using dental toothpaste, and asking him to rinse afterward. The dentist had then dried off the teeth and painted them with a weak solution of acid to take off the shine. He had let the acid stand for some fifteen to thirty seconds, had washed it off, and had then painted on the Taub stains normally used to match dentures to the natural teeth in the mouth. Discolored teeth were usually green around the gum, brown in the middle, and yellow near the tip. He painted Hawes’s teeth accordingly, coated them with clear plastic, light-fused them, and promised him the process could be reversed whenever Hawes decided to give up his new profession. Hawes hoped so. But he had to admit he looked disgusting.

“One-oh-four is always my cot,” the man said.

Still reasonably. Smiling in return.

“My ticket,” Hawes said, and again showed him the index card with the handwritten number 104 on it.

“A mistake. They must’ve meant one-oh-five.”

Hawes looked over at the cot on his left.

Someone was sound asleep in it.

“Man in it,” he said reasonably.

“One-oh-threethen,” the man said.

Hawes looked at the cot on his right. Someone was sleeping in that one, too. This was getting to be Goldilocks .

“Up,” the man said again, and jerked his thumb over his tattooed shoulder. Hawes saw the head of a dragon glaring at him in reds, blues, and greens. He wondered if the man was a former marine.

“Fuck off, sonny,” he said.

The man blinked.

“What?”

“Or you’re dead fuckin meat,” Hawes said, and lay down again, and closed his eyes in dismissal.

He could hear the man’s sputtering astonishment at the foot of the cot. He kept his eyes closed, tensing for an attack he hoped would not come. In a little while, he pretended to be instantly asleep and snoring.

“Fuckin asshole,” the man muttered at last, and Hawes heard his bare feet padding away from the cot.

He’d slept all that day in preparation for tonight. Now, after he was sure Mr. Muscles was gone for good, he gathered up his things and went into the men’s room, where the voices seemed to be loudest. Carried the blanket and the pillow with him, too, so they wouldn’t be stolen.

There were half a dozen grizzled men gathered near the sinks, talking to a pair of square shields in blue uniforms. Either one of the guards could have been the man Charlie had described as driving him. One a bit shorter than the other, but each in the five-nine to five-eleven range, each in his mid-forties, with brown eyes and dark hair. The conversation stopped for just an instant when Hawes came in, and then picked up again as he went over to one of the urinals. There were no doors on any of the stalls in here, the better to keep the place as drug-free as Harold Laughton had told Meyer it was.

One of the guards was saying that some off-track betting parlors were ritzier than others. That was the exact word he used, ritzier. Hawes had never seen an OTB parlor that could be called ritzy. But the guard went on to say that the parlor he preferred over all the others, the really ritzy one, was the one on Rollins and South Fifth.

“That’s where I go all the time,” he said. “It attracts a much better crowd.”

The half-dozen grizzled men clustered around him agreed that the parlor on Rollins and South Fifth attracted a much better crowd.

“Very ritzy,” one of them said.

“Who do you like in the third tomorrow?” the other security guard asked.

“Pants on Fire,” the first one said.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Good horse,” the first guard said.

“He runs like he’s got a load in his pants, never mind a fire.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” one of the men chanted, and everyone laughed.

One of the other men asked the guards about something supposed to’ve happened here at Temple only the week before. Man named Rudy Price had gone apeshit, tried to drown himself in the toilet bowl. Stuck his head in one of the toilet bowls, tried to drown himself. The guy was asking the guards if it was true. Everybody seemed to think it was comical, man trying to drown himself in a toilet bowl. The guard who liked Pants on Fire said Yeah, it was true, they caught him just in time. One of the men said they shoulda let him do it, he was a no-good fuck, Price.

Hawes zipped up his fly, and shuffled over to the group.

“What time’s breakfast?” he asked the guard.

“First time here?” one of the men asked him.

Big burly black guy with a beard like Brillo. Wearing jeans and combat boots and a beaded vest and a scarf. The vest looked as if he’d got it in India someplace.

“Yeah,” Hawes said. Briefly.

“Breakfast starts at six-thirty,” the guard told him.

“Yuppie commuters in here got to catch they trains,” the black man said, and grinned at his own little joke. His teeth were a lot whiter than the ones the lab had given Hawes. He was tempted to smile back. He didn’t.

A man wearing a blue watch cap pulled low on his forehead, coal-black eyes burning in his skull, said, “Lots of crazies here tonight.”

Hawes thought he looked crazy himself.

“Keep you awake all fuckin night, their screamin,” he said.

“Whyn’t you guys try to get some sleep?”

This from the guard who thought Pants on Fire was a dog.

Hawes had the feeling the guards wanted these guys out of the men’s room here, where they could get in trouble shooting dope, or fighting, or whatever. Didn’t want to have to divide their time between here and the drill floor outside. This was a shelter with a heart, Laughton had told Meyer, but things happened here. Hawes didn’t know how many square shields there were on the job—he’d seen four or five of them outside when he was collecting the blanket and stuff—but there were more than nine hundred cots out there, and it seemed just possible that more guards were needed on the floor than here in the head. Hence the eagerness to get all their chickens in one coop.

“Quieter in here than out there,” the man with the crazy eyes said.

“Well, let’s turn in, anyway, huh?” the guard said, gently but pointedly.

The men began moving out. The two guards walked out behind them, like shepherds nudging their sheep to pasture. The big black guy fell in beside Hawes. On the drill floor just outside the men’s room, a naked man was pacing back and forth, yelling, “This is a case for the Supreme Court! I cite Wagner v. Wagner, 238 Alabama, 627, 184, South Dakota, wherein it was ruled and upheld on appeal…”

“More of them on the streets than there is in the hospitals,” the black man said.

Hawes said nothing.

“I’m Gleason,” the man said.

“Hudson,” Hawes said.

The guard drifted off, walking to where two other guards were standing near the registration desk. There was still a hum in the room. Lights turned low, the room humming with the sound of hundreds of men asleep or awake.

“You dealin?” Gleason asked.

Hawes looked at him.

“Get guys in here lookin like they been through all kinds of shit, they really dealin.”

“Not me,” Hawes said.

“You fuzz then?”

“Sure,” Hawes said and rolled his eyes.

Gleason studied him, still not certain.

“Lydia brace you yet?” he asked.

“Who the fuck’s Lydia?”

“The tattooed lady.”

“Guy in army undershorts?”

“Queer as a fuckin geranium.”

“He told me I was in his cot.”

“He wishes .”

Hawes began walking away. Gleason fell in beside him again. “I’m here all the time,” he said. “How come I never seen you here before?”

“I like it better on the street,” Hawes said.

“What street? What’s your corner?”

“Lewis and North Pike.”

“Then what you doin here now ?”

“I came south for the winter.”

“Too bad it’s already spring, man.”

“Too bad it’s none of your fuckin business,” Hawes said.

“You sure you ain’t fuzz?” Gleason asked.

Hawes turned to him, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “Say it just one more time, man.”

Gleason nodded.

“I think you are,” he said, and walked off.

THE CLUB was called Eden’s Acre.

It opened for business at twelve noon, at which time free lunch was served in what was called the Snake Pit. Chloe didn’t start work till around ten each night, and then she worked straight through till four in the morning, when the club closed. On a good night, she averaged something like a hundred and fifty bucks. A lot of the girls made twice that amount. But Chloe wasn’t doing hand jobs in the Pit.

The first thing you saw when you walked into Eden was a stage shaped like a half-moon on the left side of the room. Flanking the stage on either side was a giant television monitor showing pornographic movies in full color. Some ten to twelve live girls in various stages of undress were dancing on the stage. Eden claimed that a hundred girls danced for the club, which was true. A hundred girls did work here, but there were never a hundred girls in the place all at once. Instead, there were four shifts: noon to four, four to eight, eight to midnight, and midnight to four. The girls could work whichever shifts or combinations of shifts they wanted, three or even four shifts a day if they so chose. Usually, most of the girls worked some six hours a day, overlapping one shift into another. The busiest shift was the eight to midnight. Sometimes on the eight to midnight, there were forty or fifty girls milling around the place topless.

The club advertised itself as a totally nude club, but you never saw anyone strolling around bare-assed here. What the girls did, they tugged aside the leg holes of their panties while they were dancing, exposing their genitals to the men sitting at the bar drinking nonalcoholic drinks at five bucks a throw plus tip. In this city, you couldn’t serve alcoholic drinks in a so-called totally nude club. The waitresses were quick to tell you that they worked on tips here. The dancers didn’t have to tell you because you could see the bills tucked into the waistbands of their bikinis or, if the girls were wearing garter belts and sheer silk stockings, the bills were visible inside the stockings, where men tucked them while simultaneously copping a feel of sweating naked flesh.

The stage was some twenty feet deep, which gave the girls plenty of room to maneuver from back to front where the half-moon became a bartop flanked by those huge television screens flashing men and women in various compromising positions. The girls danced right onto the bar top, gyrating into the faces of the customers, shaking their silicone breasts and tugging aside their panties to show the real thing, quite often shaved. All of the dancers on the stage were available for private one-on-one sessions in the Snake Pit. Little Lucite holders spaced along the bar top advised:

Tickets cost ten dollars for three minutes, twenty dollars for seven minutes, and so on. For fifty dollars, you could be alone with the dancer of your choice for a full twenty minutes. The way it worked, the dancers on the bar top wiggled and jiggled in your face while you kept slipping dollar bills into their panties or stockings, and when they took their break they circulated around the room, working it, sidling up to you and saying Hi, mind if I join you, and pulling up a chair. A waitress came over very quickly, asking if you’d like to buy the lady a cocktail—they called them cocktails even though there wasn’t any booze in them—and this would cost you five bucks plus the tip, of course, and the girl would climb onto your lap and wiggle around there, sipping at her drink and chatting you up for a while before she asked if you’d like to go back to the Pit with her. If you said Yeah, that sounds nice, she’d lead you over to a cash register where you then purchased your ticket or tickets and then you went back with her to this dimly lighted room some twenty feet wide by thirty feet long.

One side of the room—the side on which you entered—was entirely open except for two dozen or more plastic shrubs and trees lined up in a double row where the wall might have been. Through the fake leaves and fronds and stalks you could still see the stage and the girls dancing on it and the monitors displaying fellatio and cunnilingus and other refined sexual acts while you were back there in the Pit enjoying your one-on-one.

In the corner to your right as you came in, a fully clothed man and a girl wearing only a bra, panties, and spike heels sat at a card table. The dancer you’d chosen handed your ticket or tickets to the man—the tickets rather resembled utility bonds, though they were longer and narrower—and he scribbled her initials on the back of each ticket, and then she came over to you, smiling, and took your hand again. There was plush carpeting on the floor of the room, and the carpeting continued up from the floor to cover the banquettes that lined the other three sides of the room. Fastened to the floor at spaced intervals in front of the banquettes were carpet-covered platforms some three feet square and a foot and a half high. If you were sitting on the banquette, a girl dancing on one of these platforms had her crotch virtually level with your face.

For ten dollars, the girl danced on the platform for three minutes, first taking off her bra top, and then lowering her panties for you more recklessly than she had on stage. This was theTABLE TOP DANCING promised in the little Lucite holders outside. Twenty dollars bought seven minutes ofCLOSE DANCING, which required the man at the card table to strategically place three or four of the fake plants and trees around you and the girl on the platform so that you could nuzzle her breasts and clutch her buttocks and kiss her nipples if you were so moved. For twenty minutes ofDIRTY DANCING, you and the girl moved to the far end of the room, where you were surrounded by a virtual jungle of plastic plants that thoroughly screened you from view. You sat on the banquette, the girl sat on the platform before you, unzipped your fly, slid your penis out of your trousers, and masturbated you to climax.

So far, Chloe Chadderton hadn’t done any dirty dancing, even though she knew this was where the real money was. The trouble with the three-minute or seven-minute stints was that you had to do a lot of them to make any money. A girl’s take was half the price of the ticket. Five bucks on a ten-dollar ticket, ten bucks on a twenty-dollar ticket, and so on, all the way up the line. You did a three-minute dance, you got five bucks plus tip, which was usually a deuce, although some cheap bastards slipped you a single. But then maybe it’d be another half hour before some other guy wanted to go back with you, so if you made twenty, thirty bucks an hour, that was a lot.

On the other hand, if you talked some guy into the dirty dancing, you got half of the fifty, which was twenty-five first crack out of the box, plus he usually tipped another ten or sometimes even twenty, from what the girls told her, which meant in twenty minutes a girl could make something like forty bucks for a mere hand job. So even if you did only one of those in an hour, you multiplied that by six hours, which was how long Chloe worked each night, and you went home with close to two-fifty for a night’s work, which was a hell of a lot better than the five and dime, Jimmy Dean.

Tonight, as Chloe stood on the platform doing a seven-minute close dance for a white Yuppie wearing a three-piece suit and sweating profusely as he touched her breasts and her hips and her thighs and tried to slip his hand into the panties low on her crotch, her mind was a hundred miles away. Silver had called her this afternoon, to ask her to dinner tonight. She’d told him she was busy. He’d said, “How about tomorrow night then?” She said she had another date, but maybe she could break it. She’d cornered Tony Eden né Ederoso sitting at his card table in the Pit the minute she’d come in tonight, asked him if he could do without her tomorrow. Most times, there were plenty of girls ready to work the eight to midnight, but Tony didn’t like to find himself in a position where there’d be a hundred guys in the place and only a handful of dancers. He said he’d let her know what it looked like later on tonight. Ten minutes ago, he told her it’d be okay.

First thing tomorrow morning, she’d call Sil, tell him it was okay for dinner.

“And by the way,” she’d say, “when do you think I’ll be getting my check?”

He’d promised her twenty thousand for the rights to “Sister Woman,” but so far she hadn’t seen a nickel. The big concert in the park was scheduled for this coming weekend. His crew would be performing the song then, but meanwhile no bread. Until his call asking her to have dinner with him, she’d thought this was a strictly business thing, lawyers’d draw up the papers, she’d sign them, the check would change hands, good luck and goodbye. Now a dinner invitation. But still no check. She wondered if dinner was some kind of stall. But he wouldn’t just do the song without paying her for it, would he? Wouldn’t that be dangerous for a group as well known as Spit Shine? She’d talk to him about the check tomorrow morning. The check was her way out of this. Before it got too late.

“Careful, man,” she told the Yuppie. “I don’t dance dirty.”

AT SIX-THIRTY that morning, the first of the shelter’s hot meals was served. It consisted of orange juice, coffee, scrambled eggs with bacon, two slices of white bread, and a pat of butter. The eggs were somewhat runny, but otherwise breakfast was pretty good. Somewhat better than jail-house grub, somewhat worse than what Hawes used to eat when he was in the navy. The meals were served in the big dining hall on the second floor of the armory. Upstairs, fluorescent lighting bathed the tables and benches. Later on in the day, the windows would stream natural light that would be denied to the level below by the new floor installed when the place was turned into a shelter. Once upon a time, the armory had been a wide open space where reserve soldiers drilled. Now, it was a two-level sanctuary for the homeless. It was estimated that a third of those men and women had mental problems. The man with the crazy eyes was sitting opposite Hawes at the table.

“So how do you like it here?” he asked.

“Fine,” Hawes said.

“Good grub, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jerry Hudson.”

“I’m Frankie. You got to be careful here, Jerry.”

Hawes nodded.

“Lots going on here, you got to be careful.”

“Like what?” Hawes asked.

“Dope, all kinds of shit. They look the other way. The guards. The psychologist is crazy, did you know that? The social worker, too. They’re all crazy here.”

Yep, Hawes thought.

“They got a ring here.”

“Um-huh.”

“They steal things,” Frankie said.

“Who does?”

“The guards.”

“What do they steal?”

“All kinds of things. Food. Medicine. Soap. Toothpaste. Blankets. Everything,” Frankie said.

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