I MADE my way back through the dirty marble corridors of the Criminal Court, thinking my thoughts. Wolfe reminded me of Flood-so did the Rottweiler.
It was late March, but the sun was already blasting the front steps of the court. Maybe a real summer this year, not like the whore's promise we'd been getting for the past weeks-the sun would shine but the cold would be right there too. Only city people really hate the cold. In the city, it gets inside your bones and it freezes your guts. In the country, people sit around their fireplaces and look at the white stuff outside-saying how pretty it is, how clean it looks. The snow is never clean in the city. Here, people die when the Hawk comes down-if the cold doesn't get them, the fires they start to keep warm will.
I reached in my pocket for a smoke, looking out over the parking lot across the street where I'd stashed my Plymouth. A black guy with a shaved head, resplendent in a neon-orange muscle shirt with matching sweatband, caught my eye. "Got a cigarette, pal?" he asked.
At least he didn't call me "brother." When I got out of prison in the late 1960s, that bullshit was all over the street. Being an ex-con was never too valuable a credential, but back then at least it was a guaranteed introduction to girls. And the Village was full of them-promiscuously sucking up every shred of revolutionary rhetoric like marijuana-powered vacuum cleaners.
I made a good living then. All you needed was some genuine Third World people for props and you could raise funds faster than Reverend Ike-telling hippie jerkoffs that you were financing some revolutionary act, like a bank robbery. It was open season in the Village. Better than the Lower East Side. The hippies who lived over there believed they were making a contribution with their plotting and planning and their halfass bombs and letters to the editor. They were too busy organizing the oppressed to see the value of cash transactions, but they never knew where to buy explosives, so I did business with them too. Good thing they never tried to take out the Bank of America with the baking soda I sold them.
That's how I got started finding missing kids. It may have been Peace amp; Love in the streets, but the back alleys were full of wolves. The worst of the animals didn't just eat to survive-they did it for fun. So I'd run some of the kids down and drag them home. For the money. Once in a while one of the wolves would try and hold on to his prey. So I made some money and I made some enemies. I used up the money a long time ago.
When the revolution died-when BMWs replaced jeeps and the hippies turned perfectly good lofts a human could rent for a little money into co-ops with six-figure down payments-I stopped being relevant. I was ready for it. Some of the Third World wasn't, and they took my place in the jailhouses. Those that didn't go quietly got the key to Forest Lawn instead.
When things got nasty in New York, I rolled the dice on Biafra. I figured I'd do the same thing over there I was doing in New York, only on a grand scale-save a bunch of kids and make myself a fortune in the process. I didn't do either one, but I beat the odds anyway-I walked away from it. It's what I do best.
That was then. The black muscleman asking me if I had a cigarette was now.
"You taking a survey?" I asked him.
Our eyes locked. He shrugged, shifted his position, and went back to scanning the street. He probably didn't even smoke-just keeping in practice. His act needed work.