‘I tagged urgent on it and I got a flash back. They’re gonna pull the package for me tonight, if there’s anything to pull.’
‘Okay,’ Anderson said. His curiosity was aroused, but before he could pursue the subject further, The Nosh said, ‘If you should run out of the house for anything, you might swing by Grady morgue. Twigs has a tape over there for me.’
The coroner had called a few minutes earlier to report that he had completed the autopsy on Domino. But, he had added, there was little in the post mortem that would help the Machine.
‘I’ll just go on over now,’ Anderson said. ‘I need a little air.’ And he left.
The Nosh slipped the earphones back on and was immediately lost in his electronic fantasy world. Somewhere in that Chinese orgy, he thought, there’s a word or two, something, that’ll make sense to somebody. All he had to do was lift them out, get rid of the background noise. Eagerly he returned to his dials.
Sharky was stamping his feet in a phone booth near the Peachtree-Battle shopping centre when the phone rang. He lunged for it.
‘That you, Sharky’?’ Ben Colter asked.
‘Right.’
‘I got lucky.’
‘Good! Give it to me.’
‘There’s a pusher named Gerald Lofton, a regular in the place. I got enough shit on this guy to bury him. But I can’t move on him yet. There’s a lot more where that came from. Anyway, right after you called, Lofton came in and we had a drink together and I moved the subject around to speed. I mentioned a friend of mine in Chicago told me something about red devils and was he hip to them and Lofton’s eyes lit up like a church steeple and he tells me red devils are dynamite but expensive. ‘Then he tells me a friend of his just moved — are you leaning on something?’
‘I’m leaning on something.’
‘Fifty pills. At ten bucks a jolt!’
‘Ten bucks!’
‘I say this buyer must work for the mint and Lofton tells me he don’t know who the big score was, but during the conversation he dropped the name of the connection.’
‘And...’
‘The pusher’s a first-class asshole who uses the name Shoes.’
‘Shoes? Like on your feet?’
‘Right. Shoes. Anyway this Shoes, you gotta watch him. What he does, he plays the redneck joints out near Inman Park on payday. Does some heavy over-the-counter trade in pills and even some nickel bags.’
‘The red-devil buy was made in Inman Park?’
‘No. He also has some select clientele out this way.’
‘What’s he look like?’
‘Hell, you won’t have any trouble there. Tall, all bones. Has long white hair, almost like a high yellow, only he’s white. Dresses like a cowboy. Also he never holds. He usually pays a teenager or some wino to carry the shit for him. He makes the deal, goes out in an alley, puts the stuff in a paper bag, and then the customer picks it up from the decoy. By that time Shoes is half a block away.’
‘Neat.’
‘Tonight’s a good night to dump him. It’s payday.’
‘Good.’
‘What’s comin’ down, anyway? I thought you got dumped off the dope squad?’
‘I did. This is something else. In fact you can do me a favour and forget we even talked.’
‘That’s cool. One more thing about this Shoes. He was dropped twice in New York state, both felonies. The last time he did a nickel-dime and went thirty-three months before parole. He’d put his own mother on ice to stay out of the slams. But Oglesby doesn’t want him busted right now. He’s hoping the son of a bitch’ll lead us upstairs.’
‘Thanks, Ben.’
‘Anytime, Shark. Everybody on the squad owes you one. You took a bad rap. Anyone of us woulda done the same thing in your boots. I guess we’re all just glad i1 wasn’t us The Bat dumped on.’
‘See you in the lineup, Ben.’
Sharky returned to the car.
‘We scored,’ he said to Livingston. ‘You know a pusher does the country-music scene name of Shoes?’
‘Nope.’
‘Tall. Beanpole. Mulatto-white hair. Dresses like a rodeo rider.’
‘Sounds like we could make him in the dark.’
‘He just dumped fifty red devils on somebody at ten bucks a hit.’
‘Holy slit!’
‘Yeah.’
