From the shadows, a pair of eyes watched. A pair of legs moved slowly toward the two men who remained in the warehouse. A pair of gray-gloved hands raised a Browning Automatic and screwed a large webbed silencer over the barrel.
Two small pops sounded. Ty and Sloops lay together in a heap, the wounds in their foreheads not bleeding. The eyes on both the corpses stared in the same direction, and the expression in them was one of wonder.
?Chapter Seven
Paul "Pappy" Eisenstein was an optimist. Even though his livelihood had disappeared from under him, he had faith in the future of America. And that future, he firmly believed, lay in the hands of the children inside the hallowed walls of P.S. 109.
He waited hopefully, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as the final bell sounded inside the old brick building and the fifth and sixth graders whose classrooms were located nearest the entrance poured out, shrieking with their usual jubilation.
"Hey, Frankie... Frankie," he whispered hoarsely, trying to manage a smile as he shuffled toward a tough-looking twelve-year-old. "Got some good stuff. Panama red. Blow your socks off."
"Get out," Frankie said loftily. "Marijuana's uncool. Nobody smokes reefer these days."
"Come on, kid. Just an ounce or two. As a favor, for old times' sake."
"I'm not running a charity," Frankie said, holding his fists firmly over the fifty-dollar allowance in his pockets.
"I'll give you a discount," Pappy pleaded. Frankie strutted away. Pappy chased after him. "Hey, how about a referral, huh? You send over a couple of kids, maybe some bozos don't know what's in, what's out, and I'll give you a cut of the action. What do you say, Frankie, huh?"
The child considered. "Nope," he said with finality, shaking his head. "Nobody's tubular enough to think marijuana's in. Besides, coffee's better. You can mix it with ice cream."
Pappy played his trump card. "Oh, yeah? Well, you can forget about getting zonked on coffee malteds, because coffee has been recalled. You got that? There ain't no more coffee." He smiled triumphantly.
Frankie sneered. "There's nothing sadder than an old pusher," he said.
"Whaddya mean?"
"I mean you're so out of it, you ought to be put out to pasture, Pappy." He pointed through the wire mesh of the playground fence across to the other side.
Past the seesaws and spring-mounted ducks were a large cluster of children waving money. In the center of the group was a tall gray-haired lady with glasses.
"Who's that?" Pappy asked, walking quickly toward the woman.
"Meet your competition," Frankie said.
The woman was handing out small glassine envelopes filled with brown powder and exchanging them for five-dollar bills.
"Is this any good?" one of the children asked.
"Folger's crystals," the woman said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes crinkled behind her bifocals.
"You got Maxwell House?" a boy wearing corduroy pants with a bear on the pocket asked knowledgeably. "My brother says Maxwell House is the best."
"I'll have some next week," the woman promised. "And Hills Brothers, too."
"Oh, boy!"
The woman chucked him gently under the chin. "And if you're willing to pay a little more, I've got some special edition A & P Fresh Ground for parties. Dynamite."
"I'll take some."
"Me, too," a little voice squeaked as the grandmotherly lady passed out her envelopes.
Pappy shook his head. "I can't believe it," he said disgustedly. "Selling nickel bags to schoolkids."
"What do you think you were doing?" Frankie said, sniffing deeply from his envelope of instant coffee and rubbing a little over his gums.
"I wasn't dealing coffee," Pappy said, indignant.
"They always say that smoking pot leads to bigger things."
Pappy looked carefully at the old woman. "Say, you look familiar," he said.
The gray-haired lady gave Pappy a shove. "Buzz off, turdbreath. This is my territory now."
"Hey, wait a second. I've been coming here for years. So now, I should let you horn in... in..." The words dried up in his throat. Pappy's eyes stared glassily ahead to a point beyond the old lady and the children— at a black Cadillac Seville rolling slowly down the street. And beyond it, a young man in a T-shirt walking toward him down the sidewalk, a man with brown hair and brown eyes and thick wrists.
"Excuse me, I gotta run," Pappy said, twirling abruptly in the other direction.
But the man with the thick wrists seemed to move without walking. And before Pappy, running at full speed, reached the corner, he found himself plastered against the playground fence, his forearms and shins woven deftly through the fence.
"Well, Pappy Eisenstein," Remo said. "Isn't this a surprise."
"Yeah, a regular barrel of monkeys," Pappy said. "How'd you find me?"
"Just luck," Remo said, smiling.
It had been luck. After leaving the warehouse, Remo felt that he was being followed. The same black Cadillac Seville with dark polarized windows had inched behind him for eleven random blocks, passing him only to permit what little traffic there was to go by, then circled the block and trailed him again. When he'd finally gone up to have a talk with the driver, the Seville spurted forward, slowing up only enough to give Remo a chance to catch up.
It was a game, Remo decided. Some rich old lunatic out for a drive, having fun with the pedestrians. The game had brought a piece of luck for Remo and, seeming to sense that the cat-and-mouse chase was now over, the driver gave up and the Seville turned the corner.
"I want to talk to you," Remo said. "Don't go away."
"Very funny. Ha, ha. I'm laughing," Pappy said bitterly, wiggling his feet through the wire fence.
The children were pointing at Pappy's ridiculous figure and giggling merrily. The old lady batted her eyelashes demurely behind her spectacles.
"I thank you kindly, sir," she said in a sweet voice. "That degenerate was beginning to bother the little ones, and as you can see, I'm just a helpless old widow..."
"...Who pushes dope to babies," Remo finished. With hands moving as fast as birds' wings, he grabbed every packet the children had and ripped them to shreds, sending the coffee flying on the breeze. Then, withut stopping, he snatched the roll of five-dollar bills from the old lady and tore that up, too. Finally he dumped the remaining supply of coffee from the woman's handbag and blew the powder out of sight.
Everyone except Pappy, who wept volubly, was too stunned to react. The old lady was the first to recover. With a disapproving "Tut-tut" she slammed a hairy fist in the direction of Remo's jaw. He caught the fist, flipped the old lady in a 360-degree arc, and yanked off the mass of gray hair. Beneath it was a crew cut.
"Why, hello, Granny," Remo said.
"Hector Gomez," Pappy shouted. "I knew it! I knew it! God, you smack pushers'll stoop to anything."