He looked at Jesus closer. “What’re you after? What did you want?”
“Money,” Jesus said sullenly. “What the hen you think?”
“What for?”
Jesus suddenly yanked up his long sleeves and held out his thin arms, vein side up. “Take a look, man; take a good look. You never seen tracks before?”
Something flashed in the man’s eyes for a moment; Jesus wasn’t sure what it was.
“Christ kid, you’re killing yourself,” the big man said softly.
Jesus was suddenly angry, angry at the city, angry at his mother for not being where she should have been, angry at the big man. “You think I should go to the clinic, right? There’s a waiting list at the clinic, man, there’s a fucking waiting list for six weeks!” His voice rose in pitch. “What do you think I should do? Go cold turkey in my stinking little apartment? My mother, she doesn’t even know! Her boy friend would throw me out on my ass!”
He was starting to feel sick again, the sweat creeping back. He started to shiver, his teeth chattering.
“Look, man, you know me; okay, I know you, too.
Twenty dollars, I need twenty dollars.” He arched his back slightly against the wall, pushing his pelvis forward.
“Twenty dollars. You want me?” His voice was almost a plea.
“I’m good. I’ve hustled before. I don’t mind.
There’s nobody here; I ain’t going to say nothing. Twenty dollars, you can have me, man!”
Again, there was something in the man’s face that Jesus couldn’t read. “What makes you think I want you?”
he asked finally.
“I know you,” Jesus said simply.
The big man shook his head. “I don’t want you,” he said quietly.
For the moment he seemed to be thinking of something and Jesus realized he had lowered his guard.
He lunged forward, jamming his shoulder into the man’s belly, then made a dash for the door. He could feel the big man reach for him but a second later he was out in the corridor, racing for the far end.
Once around the corner he stopped and listened for a brief second; nobody was following him. He crept to the elevator and pressed the button. Fuck him, Jesus thought, feeling the vomit start to well up again. Fuck him in the ass …
He found his mother on the eighteenth floor, at the end of the hall near the fire stairwell, dragging her wheeled mop bucket along the corridor. He hadn’t seen her for a week; she looked dead tired. Too bad’, he thought, she was tired and he was sick..
She looked up, startled, when she heard his steps.
“Jesus!” She broke into rapid Spanish. “What are you doing here?
You shouldn’t be here!”
He was shivering again. “For Christ’s sake, Mama, speak English.
I don’t understand you.” He paused for a moment to control his stomach.
“I need money, Mama.”
“No money,” she said firmly. She bent to lower the mop into the bucket.
He kicked the bucket away from her.
“Mama, I don’t wanna hurt you.” He licked his lips.
There wasn’t any other person he could turn to; there was no other place to go. “Mama,” he repeated quietly, “I need money.”
She backed away from him. “I said-no money.”
He was on her then, clutching at the shoulders of her blue uniform and shaking her. “You crazy old spic lady, I need money! I need it!
now, right now!”
CHAPTER 10
Dan Garfunkel said: “Arnie, I think I’m going to make a fire patrol.”
The guard let his eyes stray from the monitor tubes a moment to stare ‘at Garfunkel. “You checked in at eight, chief; that’s going to make it a long day for you.”
Garfunkel picked up the small clipboard he used when on fire patrol and started for the floor. “We’re shorthanded and what else is there to do? Go home and watch the tube? There’s nothing worth watching anyway except cops and robbers. See you in an hour; give me a call on the two-way if anything comes up.”
All of which was at least half a lie, he thought; he would’ve given almost anything to be able to sink back in an easy chair and loosen the laces of his shoes. C’est In vie….
The long night ahead, however, didn’t bother Garfunkel half so much as the thought of a four-day-holiday weekend, the only thing worse than a three-day-holiday weekend. He and Ellen had never had children and when she had died, it seemed like his job had assumed more and more importance in his life; he only felt alive and needed when he was at work, surrounded by the hundred and one problems that came up during the day and vicariously living the lives of those around him.
Jernigan’s family, he had once admitted to himself, were more real to him than his own relatives, though he had met Mamie only once and the rest of Jernigan’s family not at all.
He was, he had realized with growing bitterness, a lonely man.
just Garfunkel took a long flashlight from the rack outside the office and then checked the lobby briefly before catching the outside elevator up to the Promenade Room. Diners pressed in around him, exclaiming either in delight or fear as the city dropped away below them.
Garfunkel watched the scene clinically-it was one he had seen a hundred times before-and stepped quietly out into the waiting room on the sixty-fifth floor, most of his fellow passengers lining up to check their coats.
“You’re not going to be eating here tonight, are you, Dan?” Quinn Reynolds, the young hostess for the room, had come hurrying over the moment she spotted him.
Garfunkel smiled and shook his head. “Couldn’t afford it, Quinn-just on fire patrol. Looks like you’re going to have a full house tonight.”
She nodded. “There’ll be some no shows because of the weather so actually we’re booked over capacity.” She turned back to the entrance to the dining room. “Take care, Dan-have a nice holiday.”
Garfunkel found the exit stairs and walked up to the sixty-sixth floor, the floor that held the unoccupied penthouse and the room that housed the motor generators for the residential elevator bank. He flashed his light around the motor room, automatically searching for anything that didn’t seem to belong there-cans, packages, anything that might be a potential bomb or an arsonist’s rig. It wasn’t that he expected to find anything, though they had had more than their share of bomb scares, and building management had turned down all consular headquarters as possible tenants. But you never knew… .
He didn’t turn on the wall switch in the penthouse living loom but stood in the middle of the empty room and closed his eyes, letting himself “feel” the building as much as possible. It was - really blowing outside, he thought after a moment; he could sense the slight sway of the building itself. Other than that, there was the faint pulsing of the motors and electrical machinery below, the vague mechanical whisper that was the building talking to itself as it got ready for the evening. There was a difference between the dark and the daylight in the noises that the building made; there was a difference between when she was awake and when she was settling down for the night.
He opened his eyes and flashed the light around the empty rooms.
It would be easy for somebody to come up to the Promenade Room to eat and then slip up the stairs, he thought. But then, when it came to arson, any part of the building was vulnerable… ‘ He climbed back down the stairs, ducked in the restaurant kitchen for a moment where one of the chefs forced a chicken leg on him, then down to the observation deck, a circular sea of glass just beyond which the city below twinkled in the sleet and rain. The deck itself was like a huge circular moat.
On the other side of the inside wall, hidden from the tourists, were the gigantic tanks of water that acted as reservoirs for the internal standpipes as well as for the air-conditioning system and the sprinklered areas. Garfunkel let himself in and gave the room a cursory inspection, then walked down to the utility deck just below, a machinery room filled with generators and motors and huge fans, a ceiling laced with conduits and the walls filled with meters
