Flood

moving even as she was turning away.

I got to the highway before she did and turned downtown, feeling the chills in the back of my neck like the time I had malaria. I put my gun back where it belonged, kneading my left forearm with my right hand to restore the circulation. I had been holding the piece like it was a lifeline-with JoJo so close to me, I guess it had been.

After a few blocks, I felt a stabbing pain in my chest and realized I hadn’t drawn a breath for too long. I got my breathing under control, checked my hands for the shakes-I had them, all right-and started to look for Michelle.

44

I DREW A total blank for a while-then I spotted Michelle working the other side of the highway. I hooked the Plymouth into a rolling U-turn and watched her face as I wheeled up alongside her. As soon as she saw it was me she started to run to the car. I pushed the passenger door open and she was in and we were moving again.

“What’s on, honey-somebody chasing you?” she asked.

“I got to talk to you. Not around here.”

“I know a spot,” she said, and directed me down by the Municipal Building-she sent us east like we were headed for the drive but told me to pull up short near Pearl Street. It was a big construction site with no workers around. No police patrols either, but lots of citizen activity a few blocks away. Safe and quiet.

I rolled down my window, offered a smoke to Michelle, who declined in favor of her own brand. She smokes these long skinny things with pink paper and black filter tips she gets from Nat Sherman’s. I tried one once when I ran out of my own-they don’t taste bad.

“You know JoJo?” I asked her.

“Everybody knows JoJo, baby. Why?”

“I’m still looking for that maggot, right? The Cobra?”

“So you went to JoJo? Are you completely bonkers?”

“Maybe I am. I know she’s a rough-off artist. I never met her before today but I know her rep. I thought I’d run the thing by her, tell her about the bounty and-”

“What bounty?”

“A grand cash, no questions asked, no testimony needed.”

“And you told JoJo?”

“Yeah. How could I know she’d go into the fucking Twilight Zone on me?”

“Burke, you didn’t show her a picture, did you? Or an artist’s sketch?”

“Yeah, I did. How did you know?”

“And then she just went off, right?”

“I said yeah. What’s the story?”

“Sweetheart, I thought you knew about JoJo. Sometimes I don’t see how you can do your work, ignorant as you are. JoJo used to be a sweet young thing. One of those country broads-got tired of the farm and turned tricks back home down in Cornballsville. So she comes up here to make money in the big city, right? And where do you think she decides to set up shop? Delancey and the Bowery, if you can believe it. And she’s out there without a daddy, thinking those double-sawbuck tricks are major bucks, you know? Now there’s nothing down here but experienced black ladies, honey, plus a few little white-bread runaways that the pimps are afraid to let work near the Port Authority because there’s warrants out on them, and all.

“And the working girls don’t tell her nothing about the Life, you know-they just try and pull her into one of their old man’s stables. But JoJo’s not going for that-she’s going to do a solo act. So one night this freakmobile shows up on the corner-two punks in front, another pair in the back. Ain’t no working girl with any smarts getting in that car-but the other bitches play like it’s no big deal and old dumb JoJo goes for it and they take her away to some room one of them had and they keep her there for three whole days-tie her up and fuck her and do a bullwhip number on her and make her spread for some Polaroids-they just go the whole freako hog. And after they pull a couple of trains on her they send out for pizza and let the delivery man have a shot. They call up all their friends and invite them too. And when they’re finally going to leave, JoJo’s a bloody mess and she ups and asks them for the money. Can you believe that? Well, one of them just goes nuts behind that and he takes a baseball bat to her and when the cops find her half her skull is caved in.

“They take her to the hospital and put a steel plate in her head and get her patched up and then some detective comes in with one of those mug-shot books and shows them to her and she starts screaming, “That’s them,” and points to all of them and jumps right out of the bed and they have to knock her out with the needles… JoJo ends up in the psycho ward for a year or two until she learns how to play the game and they spring her. Now she just gets even-every day, every way. Baby, you show her anything that even looks like a mug shot and it’s Psycho City.”

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that for myself. She doesn’t recognize any of the pictures?”

“JoJo doesn’t recognize anything period. She runs a fifty-fifty blend of hate and crazy. I can’t even tell you some of the things she’s done to johns. You go into a hotel room with JoJo and you’re not walking out under your own power.”

“I think she’s not waiting for hotel rooms anymore, Michelle-she’s packing. I think she would’ve blown me away right in the car if she’d had the chance.”

“It’s so sad. I talk to her sometimes, Burke, but I can’t help her. Those freaks put her on another planet, what they did to her.”

“Pass the word on the bounty, okay?”

“It’s for real?”

“You bet your ass,” I said, opening the door for her.

“Baby, please, not for a lousy thousand dollars,” said Michelle, stepping out of the Plymouth to do her work.

I set out to make a few more stops, spreading the word. I wanted every dope addict, every hustler, every take-off artist in our area to be looking to score on this one.

As I rolled back uptown I looked across the highway and saw JoJo, still sitting on the same piece of concrete, smoking her cigarette and waiting for her connection. I thought about the steel plate in her head and got another chill. I’d never show her another picture-of anybody-ever.

I found the industrial building on West Twenty-fifth Street, took the freight elevator to the roof, walked across to what looked like a pair of greenhouses stacked side-by-side. The hand-lettered sign on the door said PERSONALIZED GRAPHICS: SAMSON/LTD. I rang the bell and waited. I heard the click that told me the door was open, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Two men working at individual drafting tables-one in his late thirties, very short hair, tight tanned skin with prominent cheekbones and delicate clean hands, wearing a blue oxford-cloth buttondown shirt with narrow rep tie-the other, shorter and heavily muscled, long blond hair and an earring in his left ear. He was wearing a cut-off dungaree jacket with no shirt underneath, showing a giant tattoo of a daisy on one bicep. The clean-looking one said “Burke?” and I walked in and laid the photo of the Cobra on his drafting table. “He been in here?”

“I never talk about my clients.”

“Neither do I.”

He looked back up at me, down again at the picture, and said no in a quiet voice. I said, “Call me if he does,” and walked out. One of the “personalized graphics” they did was passports.

The next stop was a print shop I know where they would let me use their machinery and pay for whatever I did without looking at it-they didn’t want to know. One of the few legitimate things I’d learned in reform school was how to run a printing press. Making up some WANTED posters with enlargements of the Cobra’s mug shot was no problem. The photo blew up nice and clean, hard to miss. I set the type so the posters read WANTED FOR GENOCIDE AGAINST HISPANIC CHILDREN in bold red type and added a long list of the Cobra’s alleged rapes.

Pablo’s people would put them up all over town, especially in Times Square. Una Gente Libre wouldn’t put their own name on anything like this, especially after Goldor, but the word would get around and the Cobra would know there were some serious people on his trail.