Frenzy

For a while Eichord thought she was going to say more but whatever she had been about to say she had changed her mind. He read it first in the eyes, which went absolutely blank, and next in the body language, and he felt it in the atmosphere as she metamorphosed in that heartbeat, changing back into the Mafia girl in front of him. Within that second she'd completely shut him out of it, come to the edge and almost almost opened the door for him and then, no, the years of habit and influence restored the adversarial climate in which such a woman existed. And he knew he was unwanted here and that any more conversation would be a waste of his time as well as hers, and he got up and left, letting himself out, hearing the solid door slam behind him, shut out of it by tough guinea anthropophagy.

As Eichord got in the car and left, a pair of eyes watched him from across the street through expensive surveillance equipment. They were sometimes greenish-blue in light, sometimes slate-gray, and cold as gunmetal. The eyes of a madman, a professional watcher, glad the girl was still inside.

These mad eyes did not see the girl as a grief-stricken sister and daughter. He, the silent watcher, was more interested in her living brother, Joe Russo. He was watching her because she was the sister of one Joseph Russo, eldest son of Jimmie the Hook, currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for second-degree murder. He was watching Angelina because she was his ticket to Joey Russo, a convicted murderer doing hard time in the same prison as the old man — Salvatore Dagatina.

But above, to the left, and behind him, there was another pair of eyes. Someone was watching the watcher. And when Frank Spain left the premises. Bud Leech of St. Louis Intelligence was tailing him.

Back inside the cop shop the word was that the mob had hit the streets in force. They were tearing up the city but in a way none of the coppers had seen before. Not faction infighting but a cooperative effort. As if all the brotherhoods had banded together and put out a contract on somebody. People who'd been feueding since the days of Tony Gee were suddenly spotted on the streets together. The mob was looking for somebody and the cops were asking each other, 'What the fuck is going on?'

Which is precisely the question Eichord wanted to ask Bud Leech when he showed up with a shit-eating look on his face and the bad news that'd he'd LOST his surveillance target. Jack looked up at the huge man and said, 'Tell me you're shitting me.'

'Yeah, well, I wish I was. I'm sorry, man.' Leech was so contrite Eichord would have laughed if he hadn't been so fucking pissed.

'How did it happen?'

'These fucking imbeciles . . . . ' He gestured out toward the traffic. 'Ah, why make excuses? I just fucked the duck. I was playing it by the book. Changing lanes. Staying back real good 'n' that. This fucking semi comes barreling out of nowhere, I'm in the middle lane, old mom and pop on the left in the passing lane and the fuckin' truck was gonna hit the goddamn car if I didn't get over, I hadda tap the brakes. The motherfucker cuts in,- by the time I can get around the dude on the right he's fuckin' gone.'

'What'd he look like?' Eichord said quietly.

'Shit, Jack' — he shook his head —'I never got any kind of look at his face. Ordinary build. Our age, maybe a little younger. Dressed real plain.'

'And of course you checked on the tags and it was on the hot sheet, right?'

Leech nodded. 'I'm sorry, babe. What can I say?'

'It happens. Fuck it.'

'Want me to put the van out there on the house?'

'No,' Eichord said. Another decision he'd regret.

BeBop Rutledge was about to get into his wonderful phoneman swindle and he figured it had to be not a penny less than four hundred dollars. He could get DOWN with four bills you can take that shit to the bank. BeBop snapped his fingers, jiving, gettin' it on with his bad self, diddy-bopping down the street, scattin' along and feelin' fine. BeBop Rutledge was not a black jazz musician. He was a very white, Anglo- Saxophonic person of your WASP-persuasion-type race. He was twenty-three, and he liked to smoke a little dope now and then, just some hash or whatever, and maybe snort some blow once in a while but nothing serious.

He was coming up on a fucking totally bogus Possession with Intent to Distribute in a few weeks and he had to come up with something. He thought about taking the four hundred dollars he was going to scam the phone operation for and head out West, but then u.S. Magistrate Wilma Smith was such a hard-bark old bitch she would definitely kick a hole in his ass the size of a fucking headlight if he split. All he needed was a federal fugitive warrant on top of that other Possession bullshit. BeBop wasn't going to let it bring him down.

The Possession thing was a total circle jerk. A guy he knew had come by BeBop's house with about two pounds of white powder in a plastic bag, it coulda been Comet or any damn thing in there, granulated Domino sugar — shit, what did he know, right? And the dude goes. Hey, BeBop, say hey, hold this for me an' I'll give you a trey. Shit, why not? What's a friend for? And then first thing you know Rabbit, which is his name. Rabbit's Foot, he boogies and these cops come pounding on the door 'n' shit, and they come in and find his stash, and there's this bag and he didn't know there was fucking two pounds of COCAINE in there. Damn. What a surprise, right? And then he's gotta draw Wilma Smith, her fucking ballbreaking honor the judgeship, and she just loves to step on BeBop's stones anyway, so first she sets a detention hearing and he has to make the fucking national debt in bail, and now she's gonna' try to slam him down for hard time on this absolutely bogus Possession with Intent to Distrib.

But he refused to allow this gloomy horizon to bum him out. He might just take that four hundred and get straight. Do himself a thing, you know. And it all fell together so beautiful for him, see, there he is bopping down the street when he sees this dude put a move on this other dude.

He was just about to phone The Man with a kind of bullshit thing about some fags who were into some B & E that he'd heard about, just a nothing little thing to lay some groundwork for the Possession number until he could come up with something for real, and he sees this shit. BeBop goes, 'Oh, WOW!' and 'Check it OUT!' when he eyeballs this one dude grab this other dude and kind of like shove him into the EGA theater. The EGA has been closed since the Last Supper, but like he sees them bop right on in there and he figures he'll see what's goin' down. Who ever knows, right?

And he pushes on in there and he can see the dudes have taken a bolt cutter or something to the big, thick chain that holds padlocks on the doors on each side of the EGA box office. And it's darker than the inside of Bessie Mae's pussy but he eases on in real quiet. Where the fuck is everybody? And he hears this mumbling shit coming from inside, and he moves on ahead, just about pissing his britches he's so scared.

The EGA — which was called the REGAL but over a period of time it lost its R and its L, and so everybody just called it EGA — it was gonna be torn down to put in another fucking condo or whatever, and it had been just this little ma-and-pa theater about a hundred years ago, and it held tops maybe 150 dudes in there go in see a fucking cowboy double feature. Lash Larue Whips It Out, one of them pictures, and BeBop eases on around so he can see the naps.

Two dudes down frost in the dark, like they got good seats you know, right in the middle, and he can barely see 'em from a little EXIT light thing over on the side, and the one dude says something and this other guy he goes, 'I want you to meet Mary Pat Gardner' — I think the name he said was, or maybe Mary Pat Garner. Something like that.

'Say hello Mary Pat,' he tells this other dude. And the other one goes. Yeah, cool, 'Hello, Mary Pat AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH!' And he screams like he just got a tit in the wringer, you know.

And it's quiet then and the first dude says, 'The bitch was real thirsty,' or some shit like mat, and he raises something that looked like a knife and sticks the other one again but there's no sound and, man, I just about shit my pants, BeBop tells The Man.

'That's when I phoned you, man. You better get out here right away. And bring a fucking ambulance, man. This ain't no wet dream either, my man. I'm givin' you a fuckin' MURDER ONE here.' And he was just starting in about the bogus Possession thing and how Her Honor U.S. Magistrate Wilma Fucking Smith was planning to put his stones in her pliers again and send him away to Springfield or somewhere and he'd come out in a couple of years with an asshole like a cannonball when the ungrateful fuckin' cop hangs up on him.

Which is how BeBop Rutledge of East Alton, Illinois, and parts unkown, got to make the acquaintance of a cop named Jack Eichord. And which is how BeBop had his day ruined, and his four-hundred-dollar scam fucked over, but which is also how he got his main man to promise he'd talk to Magistrate Smith, which was worth four hundred except for the fact that he probably wouldn't be able to sleep for a week.