overdrive that way. I loaded it with names, places, pictures, faces, schemes, plans, tricks, hoaxes. I used to try this in prison but it never worked there. In prison the world is narrow and you can hold all the information you need to survive in a small part of your brain. Out here it’s different. I’ve tried to make my world as small as possible, but every once in a while someone like Flood comes along to screw it up. Soon I felt my eyes close and the room go away… When I woke up a few hours later I didn’t feel any better but I knew the sleep would help me later. I dressed slowly, loading up with a bunch of bullshit private-eye gear. If we got popped by the police tonight I’d tell some story about working on a case for the father of the kid I’d delivered to McGowan. He’d back me up on anything less than a felony-in-progress charge. He’s done it before.
Max was waiting just inside the warehouse. I showed him the picture of the Cobra again and he nodded to show it was already in his memory bank. Max wasn’t so good with faces (did all us Occidentals really look alike?), but once he saw a man move he could pick him out of a crowd at fifty yards.
It was dark by the time we turned the Plymouth toward Times Square. Where else to look for a freak with no address? We cruised Eighth Avenue, from the upper thirties to the fifties. The cold neon flashed on and off across Max’s face, his eyes hooded against the street’s night glare, with the sun-shield Lexan film on the inside of the windows, you’d need X-ray vision to see inside the Plymouth. That kind of stuff is illegal on the Coast but it’s okay here in New York. Cops hate it. It makes it hard for them to claim that the pistol (or bag of dope, or human head, or whatever) was in “plain view” when they stopped the car for a broken taillight.
We didn’t expect to spot Wilson just bopping down the street. He was moving now-out of his hole and running hard. But I already had the government to watching the airports and the bus stations for me. I had to do something, at least be in motion.
Garbage floated all around the cruising Plymouth-teenage girls working the streets with their built-up shoes and their broken-down spirits; the younger ones, the children who hadn’t had their first periods yet, they worked the inside-the massage parlors and the hotels. The older ones worked the bars and the clubs. Even the pit has its own sense of order-rough-off teams stalking the sidewalks and lurking near the corners, looking for an excuse to take a wallet or a life; gaudy pimpmobiles parked all around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, dumb iron horses that ate human flesh, waiting for the pilot fish in their zircon rings and fake-fur hats to bring them new little girls; the videogame parlors with their load of little boys waiting for the chicken hawks to come calling. Those little boys were just for rent-if you wanted to buy one for keeps you had to see a man in a brownstone office and pay heavy cash. No deposit, no return. Very little heroin for sale down here; uptown’s the stop for that stuff. But the streets were full of dirtbags in long filthy overcoats selling their methadone from the nearby clinic, and young hustlers were hawking ’ludes and speed everywhere. If you knew where to go, you could buy genuine prescriptions for Valium, or Percodan, or whatever travel ticket you wanted. The gold-buying shops stayed open late to accommodate the chain-snatchers. The gleaming windows of the electronics stores displayed giant portable stereos, the better to achieve self-induced retardation. And in the back rooms the same joints sold gravity knives and fake pistols to smooth the passage of the stereos from the retardates to the muggers. There were theatrical supply houses that would sell you all the goodies you’d need to disguise yourself if you were into armed robbery or rape. And little shops that sold “marital aids” that looked like tools for felonious assault. Bookstores sold crash-courses in achieving orgasm through torture, and films-documentary proof of things that shouldn’t exist.
When I was a little kid I once saw a bunch of men get together on the street in Little Italy. There was this vacant lot with all kinds of old rotting stuff in it, and rats were living there right out in the open. One of them had bitten a kid. The men surrounded the lot and poured gasoline all over the place and then set it on fire. When the rats poured out, the waiting men formed a line and tried to hammer them all to death with baseball bats. They killed a lot of them but a lot more got away. One poor bastard hadn’t been prepared-he hadn’t dressed for the part. A shrieking rat ran up his pants leg and tried to rip its way to freedom with its teeth. When they finally pulled off the guy’s pants there was only blood where his testicles should have been. If they ever started one of those fires down here it’d be worse than what happened to that poor guy.
No point in staying in the background any longer-too many people could catch wise by now anyway. Max and I hit the street with the Cobra’s picture at the ready, without much real hope, but we had to give it a try. Who knew?
The street didn’t look any better close up than it had from behind the car windows. Max and I stood near the corner watching the flow, me thinking of our next move, Max indifferent. I scanned the length of the block-the only living thing doing legitimate work was a seeing-eye dog that had no way of knowing his owner had 20/20 vision and a few dozen pills for sale in his tattered pockets.
I picked a dive at random. The side of beef at the door was wearing a skin-tight red muscle shirt under a pair of thick black suspenders and carrying a flashlight that did double duty as a night stick. He held out a beefy palm, and I gave him twenty to cover admission for Max and me. We found a table in the smoke-clogged darkness a few feet away from the long bar on which two tired-looking girls exposed themselves to music. It was about as sexy as a visit to the morgue, and nowhere near as clean.
The waitress took one look at us, saw we weren’t citizens, threw us the single obligatory shake of the silicone, and brought us the two lukewarm Cokes that came with the cover charge we’d paid at the door. The joint was useless-the Cobra could be sitting ten feet away and we wouldn’t spot him. I took out the picture, held it so the waitress would see it was something she was supposed to notice. She pretended to take a close look.
“Seen him recently?”
“Never saw him before, honey.” A waste of time.
Max and I got up to leave. We approached the side of beef and I took out the picture again and held it up. “You know this guy?”
“Maybe,” meaning, what’s in it for me?
“Maybe yes, or maybe no?”
“Just plain maybe, pal. We don’t like private cops asking questions in here.”
“Look, my friend has something to give this guy, okay? Maybe he could just give it to you instead.”
“You ain’t giving me nothin’,” he snarled. Max grabbed one of his hyperflexed biceps like he was feeling the muscle. The beef’s face shifted color under the greasy lights, his hand went toward his back pocket… until he looked at Max’s face and thought better of it.
“Hey, what is this? I don’t know the fuckin’ guy, all right? Lemme
I could see it was no use and signaled to Max. We walked out the door leaving the beef rubbing his bicep and muttering to himself.
We checked a couple of porno shops, admired the MONGOOSE stenciling of the Blood Shadows, drew nothing but more blanks.
Over on Forty-fourth we ran into McGowan. He flashed his Irish grin, but his partner hung back, wary. A new guy.
“Burke, how’s it going? And Max?”
I said, “Okay,” and Max bowed. I showed McGowan the picture but he shook his head.
“Seen the Prof?” I asked the detective.
“He’s around. I heard he had some trouble with a pimp, got slapped around a bit…”
“Yeah,” I said, “I heard that too.”
McGowan just nodded. He just wanted to be sure I had the information-whatever happened to a pimp wouldn’t cost him any sleep.
Another two hours on the street and we could see we weren’t going to score. We found the Plymouth, rolled over to the Village, checked a few of the leather bars, even the one that specialized in police costumes. Nothing. We tried a few of the sleazo hotels off West Street, but the desk clerks were their usual fountains of information. Even with flashing some fairly serious money, we kept drawing blanks.
But the Cobra was out there-I could smell him. He hadn’t left. Not yet. Going underground was impossible for him-I lived there and he’d just be a tourist. But time was pressing against us and we weren’t any closer. All he had to do was go hop a Greyhound to anyplace and he’d be out of our reach. My one hope now was that the cub reporter would do a newspaper number in his column by tomorrow’s edition and Wilson would snap at the bait. He didn’t have the credentials to work professional crime-no working thief would include a freak like him as part of a team. He’d need the VA money soon. Did he have a passport? And if the government bagged him before I did, could I work something out? Getting him canceled in prison was no problem, but it would be too long a wait. For Flood. For me too.
