cut, but she might be able to squeeze a color in.”
“Cleo is a marvel at color,” Mr. Alexander said. “If anyone can help you, it’s Cleo.”
Three hours later, I was back in my apartment building, and I still had orange hair. Cleo had given it her best shot, but the orange had resisted change. It was a shade darker and perhaps not quite so bright, but it was still basically orange.
Okay, fuck it. So I have orange hair. Big deal. It could be worse. It could be ebola. It could be dengue fever. Orange hair wasn’t permanent. The hair would grow out. It wasn’t as if I’d wrecked my life.
I was alone in the lobby. The elevator doors opened, and I stepped in, my thoughts turning to Mo. Speaking of someone who’d wrecked his life. If Dickie could be believed, here was a man who’d lived his entire life selling candy to kids and then had snapped in frustration and made some bad choices. Now he was stuck in a labyrinth of judgment errors and terrible crimes.
I considered my own life and the choices I’d made. Until recently those choices had been relatively safe and predictable. College, marriage, divorce, work. Then, through no fault of my own, I didn’t have a job. Next thing, I was a bounty hunter, and I’d killed a man. It had been self-defense, but it was still a regrettable act that came creeping back to me late at night. I knew things about myself now, and about human nature, that nice girls from the burg weren’t supposed to know.
I traveled the length of the hall, searched for my key and opened my front door. I stepped inside, relieved to be home. Before I had a chance to turn and close the door, I was sent sprawling onto the foyer floor with a hard shove from behind.
There were two of them. Both in masks and coveralls. Both too tall to be Maglio. One of them pointed a gun at me. The other held a lunch bag. It was the sort of soft-sided insulated bag an office worker might use. Big enough for a sandwich, an apple and a soda.
“You make a sound, and I’ll shoot you,” the guy with the gun said, closing and locking the door. “Shooting you isn’t what I want to do, but I’ll do it if I have to.”
“This isn’t going to work,” I told him. “Mo is talking to the police. He’s telling them all about you. He’s naming names.”
“Mo should have stuck to selling candy. We’ll take care of Mo. What we’re doing is for the good of the community…for the good of America. We’re not going to stop just because an old man got squeamish.”
“Killing people is for the good of America?”
“Eliminating the drug scourge.”
Oh boy. Scourge removers.
The man carrying the lunch bag jerked me to my feet and shoved me toward the living room. I thought about screaming or simply walking away, but I wasn’t sure how these lunatics would act. The one seemed comfortable with his gun. It was possible that he’d killed before, and I suspected killing was like anything else…the more you did it, the easier it got.
I was still wearing my jacket, still carrying my shoulder bag, the warning of retaliation ringing in my ears. I still had the blister from my last meeting with Mo’s vigilantes, and the thought of being burned again sickened my stomach. “I’m going to give you a chance to leave, before you do something really stupid,” I said, working to keep the panic out of my voice.
The guy carrying the lunch bag set it on my coffee table. “You’re the stupid one. We keep reasoning with you and warning you, and you refuse to listen. You’re still sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You and that lawyer you keep visiting. So we figured we’d give you a product demo. Show you the threat firsthand.” He removed a small glassine packet from the lunch bag and held it up for me to see. “High-quality boy.” The next item to be removed from the carrier was a small bottle of spring water. Then a bottle cap with a wire handle fashioned around it. “The best cooker comes from a wine bottle. Nice and deep. The dopers like this better than a spoon or a soda bottle cap. Do you know what boy is?”
Boy was heroin. Coke was girl. “Yeah, I know what it is.”
The man filled the cap with water and mixed in some of the powder from the packet. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and held it under the cap. Then he produced a syringe from the carrier and filled the syringe with the liquid.
I still had my pocketbook on my shoulder. I ran a shaky hand over the outside, feeling for my .38.
The gunman stepped forward and ripped the bag off my shoulder. “Forget it.”
Rex was in his cage on the coffee table. He’d been running on his wheel when we’d come into the room. When the lights flashed on, Rex had paused, whiskers whirring, eyes wide with the expectation of food and attention. After a few moments he’d resumed his running.
The man with the syringe flipped the lid off Rex’s cage, reached in and scooped Rex up in his free hand. “Now we get to begin the demonstration.”
My heart gave a painful contraction. “Put him back,” I said. “He doesn’t like strangers.”
“We know a lot about you,” the man said. “We know you like this hamster. We figure he’s like family to you. Now suppose this hamster was a kid. And suppose you thought you were doing all the right things, like feeding that kid good food and helping with his homework and raising him in a neighborhood with a good school. And then some-how, in spite of everything you did, that kid got started experimenting with drugs. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you feel like going after the people who were giving him the drugs? And suppose your kid was sold some bad stuff. And your kid died of an overdose. Wouldn’t you want to go out there and kill the drug dealer who killed your kid?”
“I’d want him brought to justice.”
“The hell you would. You’d want to kill him.”
“Are you speaking from personal experience?”
The man with the syringe paused and stared at me. I could see his eyes behind the ski mask, and I guessed my question had hit home.
