I was in the waiting area of the VA hospital emergency room off North Capitol Street, seeing to my father, when Detective Tony Barnes hit me back on my cell. My father had his head down on the crossbar of his walker, and it was going to be a while before someone came and called his name. I walked the phone outside and lit myself a smoke.

“What’s goin on, Verdon?” said Barnes.

“Need to talk to you about Rico Jennings.”

“Go ahead.”

“Not on the phone.” I wasn’t about to give Barnes no information without feeling some of his cash money in my hand.

“When can I see you?”

“My pops took ill. I’m still dealin with that, so… make it nine. You know where.”

Barnes cut the line. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and went back inside.

My father was moaning when I took a seat beside him. Goddamn this and goddamn that, saying it under his breath. We’d been out here for a few hours. A girl with a high ass moving inside purple drawstring pants took our information when we came in, and later a Korean nurse got my father’s vitals in what she called the triage room, asking questions about his history and was there blood in his stools and stuff like that. But we had not seen a doctor yet.

Most of the men in the waiting room were in their fifties and above. A couple had walkers and many had canes; one dude had an oxygen tank beside him with a clear hose running up under his nose. Every single one of them was wearing some kinda lid. It was cold out, but it was a style thing, too.

Everyone looked uncomfortable, and no one working in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to do something about it. The security guards gave you a good eye-fuck when you came through the doors, which kinda told you straight off what the experience was going to be like inside. I tried to go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, but nothing they had was appealing, and some of it looked damn near dirty. I been in white people’s hospitals, like Sibley, on the high side of town, and I know they don’t treat those people the way they was treating these veterans. I’m saying, this shit here was a damn disgrace.

But they did take my father eventually.

A white nurse named Matthew, redheaded dude with Popeye forearms, hooked him up to one of those heart machines, then found a vein in my father’s arm and took three vials of blood. Pops had complained about being “woozy” that morning. He gets fearful since his stroke, which paralyzed him on one side. His mind is okay, but he can’t go nowhere without his walker, not even to the bathroom.

I looked at him lying there in the bed, his wide shoulders and the hardness of his hands. Even at sixty, even after his stroke, he is stronger than me. I know I will never feel like his equal. What with him being a Vietnam veteran, and a dude who had a reputation for taking no man’s shit in the street. And me… well, me being me.

“The doctor’s going to have a look at your blood, Leon,” said Matthew. I guess he didn’t know that in our neighborhood my father would be called “Mr. Leon” or “Mr. Coates” by someone younger than him. As Matthew walked away, he began to sing a church hymn.

My father rolled his eyes.

“Bet you’d rather have that Korean girl taking care of you, Pops,” I said, with a conspiring smile.

“That gal’s from the Philippines,” said my father, sourly. Always correcting me and shit.

“Whateva.”

My father complained about everything for the next hour. I listened to him, and the junkie veteran in the next stall over who was begging for something to take away his pain, and the gags of another dude who was getting a stomach tube forced down his throat. Then an Indian doctor, name of Singh, pulled the curtain back and walked into our stall. He told my father that there was nothing in his blood or on the EKG to indicate that there was cause for alarm.

“So all this bullshit was for nothin?” said my father, like he was disappointed he wasn’t sick.

“Go home and get some rest,” said Dr. Singh, in a cheerful way. He smelled like one them restaurants they got, but he was all right.

Matthew returned, got my father back into his street clothes, and filled out the discharge forms.

“The Lord loves you, Leon,” said Matthew, before he went off to attend to someone else.

“Get me out this motherfucker,” said my father. I fetched a wheelchair from where they had them by the front desk.

Evangelos “Van” Lucas was behind the wheel of a Land Cruiser, his wife, Eleni, beside him. They were driving home from a Sunday barbecue in Upper Northwest hosted by a business associate of Van’s. Most of the guests were people Van and Eleni had not met before. There had been polite conversation, food eaten off paper plates, and a bit of afternoon drinking.

“You know that lady I was speaking with by the food table for a long time?” said Van. “With the sweatshirt falling off her shoulder?”

“The Flashdance woman. She was nice.”

“She was all right. But why’d you have to go and tell her about our kids?”

“She asked to see photographs,” said Eleni. “Once I pull those out, there are questions. It’s easier just to tell people.”

“But see, then I had to continue the conversation with her.”

“You didn’t look like you minded.”

“Please. She wasn’t my type. That lady was all angles and bones. It would be like doing a skeleton.”

“How would you know what that’s like?”

“My point is, I’m into a woman who looks like a woman. A woman with curves. Like you.”

“I think there’s a compliment in there.”

“And you’re smart.”

“Thanks loads.”

“Not, like, mousy smart. Don’t get me wrong; I like a smart woman. But I also like a nice round ass and a beautiful rack. Which, thank you, Jesus, you happen to have. Matter of fact, you’ve got the whole female package.”

“You’re about to make me blush.”

“But that woman, she just bothered me.”

“I noticed.”

“Not like that. She wanted to talk about our kids, how wonderful it must be to have a rainbow family, how I was doing God’s work, all that bullshit. What a good man I am. Like, just because I adopted a bunch of kids, that makes me good.”

“As you were trying to look down her sweatshirt.”

“Exactly.” Van looked over at Eleni. “You saw me?”

“From across the room.”

“She’s too skinny for me.”

“You like a nice round ass and a beautiful rack.”

“Don’t forget smart,” said Van.

“I know,” said Eleni. “The whole female package.”

They were coming out of the city, going up Alaska Avenue near the District line. Soon they would cross into Maryland and arrive at the close-in neighborhood where the Lucas family made their home. Van and Eleni were in their early thirties. They had four children, ages seven, six, two, and one. All but the oldest had been adopted. It seemed to have happened very fast.

Van Lucas was a big man of Greek descent with the kind of open, honest facial expressions that could be read with ease. The Reagan generation baffled him, and he did not feel he was a part of it. His black curly hair was unfashionably long at a time when the hard-chargers kept theirs short and spiked. He wore a heavy black beard when most went clean shaven and some reached for androgynous. He had the beginnings of a gut inching over the belt line of his Levi’s. His appearance suggested casual good nature and a lack of vanity. He was as advertised.

Eleni reached across the buckets and squeezed Van’s right hand, which rested on the console between them.

“You are good,” she said.

“Ah,” said Van, “knock it off, Eleni.”

He felt electricity when she touched him like that. They’d been together many years and it had never subsided. For a moment he thought he might get lucky that night. But it was false optimism. There was little spontaneous lovemaking between them these days, what with all the commotion around their house. What with all those kids.

When he was single, he had never looked forward to a family. He had no daydreams of watching his children play sports, reading to them at night, helping them with their homework, or kissing the tops of their heads before they left the house. Van Lucas didn’t have a great need for fatherhood, and he didn’t think he would be particularly good at it. But when it happened, he took to it. It was chaotic at times, but it was manageable. He liked being a father, and he loved his kids. Later, he would look back on that time of his life and think: It was easy when they were young.

Washington, D.C., 2001

Down around my way, when I’m not in school or lookin out for my moms and little sister, I like to run ball. Pickup games mostly. That’s not the only kind of basketball I do. I been playin organized all my life, the Jelleff league and Urban Coalition, too. Matter of fact, I’m playin for my school team right now, in what used to be called the Interhigh. It’s no boast to say that I can hold my own in most any kind of game. But pickup is where I really get amped.

In organized ball, they expect you to pass a whole bunch, take the percentage shot. Not too much showboatin, nothin like that. In pickup, we ref our own games, and most of the hackin and pushin and stuff, except for the flagrant, it gets allowed. I can deal with that. But in pickup, see, you can pretty much freestyle, try everything out you been practicing on your own. Like those Kobe and Vince moves. What I’m sayin is, out here on the asphalt, you can really show your shit.

Where I come from, you’ve got to understand, most of the time it’s rough. I don’t have to describe it if you know the area of D.C. I’m talkin about: the Fourth District, down around Park View, in Northwest. I got problems at home, I got problems at school, I got problems walkin down the street. I prob’ly got problems with my future, you want the plain truth. When I’m runnin ball, though, I don’t think on those problems at all. It’s like all the chains are off, you understand what I’m sayin? Maybe you grew up somewheres else, and if you did, it’d be hard for you to see. But I’m just tryin to describe it, is all.

Here’s an example: earlier today I got into this beef with this boy James Wallace. We was runnin ball over on the playground where I go to school, Roosevelt High, on 13th Street, just a little bit north of my neighborhood. There’s never any chains left on those outdoor buckets, but the rims up at Roosevelt are straight, and the backboards are forgiving. That’s like my home court. Those buckets they got, I been playin them since I was kid, and I can shoot the eyes out of those motherfuckers most any day of the week.

We had a four-on-four thing goin on, a pretty good one, too. It was the second game we had played. Wallace and his boys, after we beat ’em the first game, they went over to Wallace’s car, a black Maxima with a spoiler and pretty rims, and fired up a blunt. They were gettin their heads up and listenin to the new Nas comin out the speakers from the open doors of the car. I don’t like Nas’s new shit much as I did Illmatic, but it sounded pretty good.

Wallace and them, they with a dealer in my neighborhood, so they always got good herb, too. I got no problem with that. I might even have hit some of that hydro with ’em if they’d asked. But they didn’t ask.

Anyway, they came back pink-eyed, lookin all cooked and shit, debatin over which was better, Phillies or White Owls. We started the second game. Me and mines went up by three or four buckets pretty quick. Right about then I knew we was gonna win this one like we won the first, ’cause I had just caught a little fire.

Wallace decided to cover me. He had switched off with this other dude, Antuane, but Antuane couldn’t run with me, not one bit. So Wallace switched, and right away he was all chest-out, talkin shit about how “now we gonna see” and all that. Whateva. I was on my inside game that day and I knew it. I mean, I was crossin motherfuckers out, just driving the paint at will. And Wallace, he was slow on me by like, half a step. I had stopped passin to the other fellas at that point, ’cause it was just too easy to take it in on him. I mean, he was givin it to me, so why not?

Bout the third time I drove the lane and kissed one in, Wallace bumped me while I was walkin back up to the foul line to take the check. Then he said somethin about my sneaks, somethin that made his boys laugh. He was crackin on me, is all, tryin to shake me up. I got a nice pair of Jordans, the Penny style, and I keep ’em clean with Fantastik and shit, but they’re from, like, last year. And James Wallace is always wearin whatever’s new, the Seventeens or whatever it is they got sittin up front at the Foot Locker, just came in. Plus Wallace didn’t like me all that much. He had money from his druggin, I mean to tell you that boy had everything, but he had dropped out of school back in the tenth grade, and I had stayed put. My moms always says that guys like Wallace resent guys like me who have hung in. Add that to the fact that he never did have my game. I think he was a little jealous of me, you want the truth.

I do know he was frustrated that day. I knew it, and I guess I shouldn’t have done what I did. I should’ve passed off to one of my boys, but you know how it is. When you’re proud about somethin you got to show it, ’specially down here. And I was on. I took the check from him and drove to the bucket, just blew right past him as easy as I’d been doin all afternoon. That’s when Wallace called me a bitch right in front of everybody there.

There’s a way to deal with this kinda shit. You learn it over time. I go six-two and I got some shoulders on me, so it wasn’t like I feared Wallace physically or nothin like that. I can go with my hands, too. But in this world we got out here, you don’t want to be getting in any kinda beefs, not if you can help it. At the same time, you can’t show no fear; you get a rep for weakness like that, it’s like bein a bird with a busted wing, sumshit like that. The other thing you can’t do, though, you can’t let that kind of comment pass. Someone tries to take you for bad like that, you got to respond. It’s complicated, I know, but there it is.

“I ain’t heard what you said,” I said, all ice cool and shit, seein if he would go ahead and repeat it, lookin to measure just how far he wanted to push it. Also, I was tryin to buy a little time.

“Said you’s a bitch,” said Wallace, lickin his lips and smilin like he was a bitch his own self. He’d made a couple steps toward me and now he wasn’t all that far away from my face.

I smiled back, halfway friendly. “You know I ain’t no faggot,” I said. “Shit, James, it hurts me to fart.”

A couple of the fellas started laughin then and pretty soon all of ’em was laughin, I’d heard that line on one of my uncle’s old-time comedy albums once, that old Signifyin Monkey shit or maybe Pryor. But I guess these fellas hadn’t heard it, and they laughed like a motherfucker when I said it. Wallace laughed, too. Maybe it was the hydro they’d smoked. Whatever it was, I had broken that shit down, turned it right back on him, you see what I’m sayin? While they was still laughin, I said, “C’mon, check it up top, James, let’s play.”

I didn’t play so proud after that. I passed off and only took a coupla shots myself the rest of the game. I think I even missed one on purpose toward the end. I ain’t stupid. We still won, but not by much; I saw to it that it wasn’t so one-sided, like it had been before.

When it was over, Wallace wanted to play another game, but the sun was dropping and I said I had to get on home. I needed to pick up my sister at aftercare, and my moms likes both of us to be inside our apartment when she gets home from work. Course, I didn’t tell any of the fellas that. It wasn’t somethin they needed to know.

Wallace was goin back my way, I knew, but he didn’t offer to give me a ride. He just looked at me dead-eyed and smiled a little before him and his boys walked back to the Maxima, parked along the curb. My stomach flipped some, I got to admit, seein that flatline thing in his peeps. I knew from that empty look that it wasn’t over between us, but what could I do?

I picked up my ball and headed over to Georgia Avenue. Walked south toward my mother’s place as the first shadows of night were crawling onto the streets.

The woman in the aisle seat to the right of John Moreno tapped him on the shoulder. Moreno swallowed the last of his Skol pilsner to wash down the food in his mouth. He laid his fork across the segmented plastic plate in front of him on a fold-down tray.

“Yes?” he said, taking her in fully for the first time. She was attractive, though one had to look for it, past the thick black eyebrows and the too-wide mouth painted a pale peach color that did her complexion no favors.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, in heavily accented English. “But you’ve been making a lot of noise with your food. Is everything all right?”

Moreno grinned, more to himself than to her. “Yes, I’m fine. You have to excuse me. I rushed out of the house this morning without breakfast, and then this flight was delayed. I suppose I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

“No bother,” she said, smiling now, waving the manicured fingers of her long brown hand. “I’m not complaining. I’m a doctor, and I thought that something might be wrong.”

“Nothing that some food couldn’t take care of.” They looked each other over. Then he said, “You’re a doctor in what city?”

“A pediatrician,” she said. “In Salvador. Are you going to Bahia?”

Moreno shook his head. “Recife.”

So they would not meet again. Just as well. Moreno preferred to pay for his companionship while under contract.

“Recife is lovely,” the woman said, breathing out with a kind of relief, the suspense between them now broken. “Are you on a holiday?”

“Yes,” he said. “A holiday.”

“Illiana,” she said, extending her hand across the armrest.

“John Moreno.” He shook her hand, and took pleasure in the touch.

The stewardess came, a round woman with rigid red hair, and took their plates. Moreno locked the tray in place. He retrieved his guidebook from the knapsack under the seat, and read. Brazil is a land of great natural beauty, and a country unparalleled in its ideal of racial democracy…

Moreno flipped past the rhetoric of the guidebook, went directly to the meat: currency, food and drink, and body language. Not that Brazil would pose any sort of problem for him; in his fifteen-odd years in the business, there were very few places in the world where he had not quickly adapted. This adaptability made him one of the most marketable independents in the field. And it was why, one week earlier, on the first Tuesday of September, he had been called to the downtown Miami office of Mr. Carlos Garcia, vice-president of claims, United Casualty and Life.

Garcia was a trim man with closely cropped, tightly curled hair. He wore a wide-lapelled suit of charcoal gray, a somber color for Miami, and a gray and maroon tie with an orderly geometric design. A phone sat on his desk, along with a blank notepad, upon which rested a silver Cross pen.

Moreno sat in a leather chair with chrome arms across from Garcia’s desk. Garcia’s secretary served coffee, and after a few sips and the necessary exchange of pleasantries, Moreno asked Garcia to describe the business at hand.

Garcia told him about Guzman, a man in his fifties who had made and lost some boom-years money in South Florida real estate. Guzman had taken his pleasure boat out of Key Largo one day in the summer of 1992. Two days later, his wife reported him missing, and a week after that the remains of his boat were found, along with a body, two miles out to sea. Guzman and his vessel had been the victims of an unexplained explosion on board.

“Any crew?” asked Moreno.

“Just Guzman.”

“A positive identification on the body?”

“Well. The body was badly burned. Horribly burned. And most of what was left went to the fish.”

“How about his teeth?”

“Guzman wore dentures.” Garcia smiled wanly. “Interesting, no?”

The death benefits of Guzman’s term policy, a $2 million payoff, went to the widow. United’s attorneys fought it to a point, but the effort from the outset was perfunctory. The company absorbed the loss.

Then, a year later, a neighbor of the Guzmans was vacationing in Recife, a city and resort on the northeast coast of Brazil, and spotted who she thought was Guzman. She saw this man twice in one week, on the same beach. By the time she returned to the States, she had convinced herself that she had in fact seen Guzman. She went to the widow with her suspicions, who seemed strangely unconcerned. Then she went to the police.

“And the police kicked it to you,” Moreno said.

“They don’t have the jurisdiction, or the time. We have a man on the force who keeps us informed in situations like this.”

“So the widow wasn’t too shook up by the news.”

“No,” Garcia said. “But that doesn’t prove or even indicate any kind of complicity. We see many different kinds of emotions in this business upon the death of a spouse. The most common emotion that we see is relief.”

Moreno folded one leg over the other and tented his hands in his lap. “What have you done so far?”

“We sent a man down to Brazil, an investigator named Roberto Silva.”

“And?”

“Silva became very drunk one night. He left his apartment in Recife to buy a pack of cigarettes, stepped into an open elevator shaft, and fell eight stories to his death. He was found the next morning with a broken neck.”

“Accidents happen.”

Garcia spread his hands. “Silva was a good operative. I sent him because he had a history of success. But I knew that he had a very bad problem with alcohol. I had seen him fall down myself, on more than one occasion. This time, he simply fell a very long way.”

Moreno stared through the window at the Miami skyline. After a while he said, “This looks to be a fairly simple case. There is a man in a particular area of Recife who either is or is not Guzman. I will bring you this man’s fingerprints. It should take no more than two weeks.”

“What do you require?”

“I get four hundred a day, plus expenses.”

“Your terms are reasonable,” Garcia said.

“There’s more,” Moreno said, holding up his hand. “My expenses are unlimited, and not to be questioned. I fly first-class and require an apartment with a live-in maid to cook and to clean my clothes. And, I get two and one half percent of the amount recovered.”

“That’s fifty thousand dollars.”

“Correct,” Moreno said, standing out of his seat. “I’ll need a half-dozen wallet-sized photographs of Guzman, taken as close to his death date as possible. You can send them along with my contract and travel arrangements to my home address.”

John Moreno shook Garcia’s hand and walked away from the desk.

Garcia said to Moreno’s back, “It used to be ‘Juan,’ didn’t it? Funny how the simple change of a name can open so many doors in this country.”

“I can leave for Brazil at any time,” Moreno said. “You know where to reach me.”

Moreno opened Mr. Garcia’s door and walked from the office. The next morning, a package was messengered to John Moreno’s home.

And now Moreno’s plane neared the Brasília airport. He closed the guidebook he had been reading, and turned to Illiana.

“I have a question for you, Doctor,” Moreno said. “A friend married a first-generation American of Brazilian descent. Their children, both of them, were born with blue-black spots above their buttocks.”

Illiana smiled. “Brazil is a land whose people come from many colors,” she said, sounding very much like the voice of the guidebook. “Black, white, brown, and many colors in between. Those spots that you saw” — and here Illiana winked — “it was simply the nigger in them.”

So much for the ideal of racial democracy, Moreno thought, as the plane began its descent.

I was always cool with Mrs. Sullivan. I been knowing her son, Pat, since we were in the same kindergarten class. His mom had one of those houses that were open to the kids in the neighborhood, and me, Pat, and some of the other fellas around our way hung out there often. Playing Xbox, going on Facebook to check out the females, shit like that. I spent the night a few times, and when I’d wake up in the morning, a blanket had been put on top of me by Pat’s mom. She always asked after my mother, and when she talked about my younger brother, she knew what grade he was in. She was thoughtful like that.

I called her Miss Mary, which is how we do around here to adults when we want to show respect. My name is Tim, but she called me Sleepy, the street name I got on account of my half-mast eyes. I guess I thought of Miss Mary like family. I mean that in a good way, not in the way that I think of family when I think of my own situation at home.

We had free rein in the Sullivan house. I mean, we knew our boundaries, but still. Miss Mary trusted us boys so much that she left her open purse and wallet on the kitchen counter when she visited a neighbor or went for a walk. I know for a fact that none of us ever took a dollar. A couple of times we snagged a little liquor from that rolling cart she had and swiped beers out the refrigerator, but there was certain lines we wouldn’t cross. Another one was, none of Pat’s friends would ever go in her bedroom.

I remember it, though. From the hall, up on the second floor, I sometimes looked through her open door.

It was small bedroom. It had a double bed, which seemed to take up most of the space. I don’t recall seeing no dresser. The wallpaper was busy with some old-timey pattern, looked like those ink tests the shrink gave me that time I set a trash can on fire in our middle school. What I remember most, beside the bed, was a fireplace mantel with no fireplace underneath it. It was just sort of mounted on the wall, framing the wallpaper. On top of the mantel was some kind of candle holder thing, a snow globe, and what looked like a painted rock. Above the candle holder was a crucifix that had been mounted on the wall. Also on the wall, two icons: Madonna and the baby Jesus, and Jesus grown up.

Miss Mary was straight Catholic. One time, from in the hall, I saw her praying the Rosary, holding those beads she had, looking up at the bearded Jesus picture on the wall. I had to look away. Didn’t seem right somehow to be looking at her while she was doing that private thing.

This wasn’t long after Pat’s dad had died of a cancer. I don’t even remember him much ’cause I was too young. Around that time, me and Pat were in a talent show together at our elementary. Up on stage, doing that “Jump” joint. Two tiny white boys in bow ties, lip-synching to Kris Kross. The crowd, kids and parents, went off. My mother was there, and one of her meth-tweak boyfriends, too. Man with a ponytail and a skinny behind.

Me and Pat was tight all through elementary, middle school, and high school, until I moved over to the tech high to learn the electrician’s trade. We played rec league football and basketball as youngsters, but once we got to high school, neither of us had the grades to qualify for athletics, so we stopped. The way it is where we live, there are smart kids and tough kids, and they get separated early on. The smart kids, they get recognized as such in elementary. They’re put in special classes and are protected all the way in magnet and AP programs on their paths to college and beyond. Dudes like me and Pat got identified way back as unmotivated students with behavior problems, and all the kids like us got thrown together in another group. We were put on what they call a different “track” than those nerd kids. Our track was the one that leads to nothing much. Those people at the schools wished it on us, in a way, and it became so.

Our neighborhood could be tough. A mix of colors, immigrant cabbies, on-and-off laborers, fathers who worked with their hands and backs if they were still around. Wasn’t like us kids were gonna prove ourselves on the debate team, so what it came down to was, be willing to steal someone in the face or get stole, or be a punk and walk away. We did get tested and sometimes we were outnumbered. Pat had my back most times, and it wasn’t easy for him to step up and fight. He did it, but he was on the soft side. That happened to some who didn’t have a man around the house. Though, I got to say, it didn’t happen to me.

Me and Pat started smoking weed when we were fourteen years old. This boy named Rollo, a dealer with a genuine rep who lived down in the apartments, turned us on to it. Rollo was twenty at the time. I guess I was ready to try marijuana. Ready or no, I wouldn’t have turned down Rollo’s offer. I didn’t want to look like a faggot in his eyes.

As we got older, Rollo began to front us pounds of weed that we would split into ounces and sell off to our friends. In that way, Rollo expanded his business in our neighborhood, and me and Pat got free weed to smoke. It was a good deal for all of us.

Pat really loved being high. He’d get real quiet and happy after firing up. He was a big boy with black hair he kept shaved to the scalp. He had braces on his teeth, but he wasn’t pressed by it. Matter of fact, he smiled a lot. Like his mother, Miss Mary, he had green eyes.

The deal between us was, I kept our scale and Baggies at my house, in my bedroom. My mother hardly ever went in my room, and if she had found anything, I don’t believe she would have cared. Pat made the calls to kids we knew who were potheads, and both of us did what we called the transactions. Any conversations we had on our cell phones, we used codes. Money was Kermit, meaning green; an ounce was an osmosis; marijuana was M.J., for Michael Jordan. We weren’t stupid.

We never moved product through the Sullivan house. Pat’s place was for relaxing and being up. Miss Mary must have known me and her son was blazed most of the time, because we were always eating stuff from out the pantry and watching TV and laughing at it even when the shit was not funny, and the shows we were watching were like, UFO shows and shit. I think she was all right with it because her son was safe in the house. Having lost her husband and all, I believe she feared losing Pat to the street. So she knew we were smoking weed. What she didn’t know was that we were dealing it, and all the complications that come with that.

The police in this county here are all about catching kids in the act of smoking, like it’s some kind of high crime. They even got plainclothes Spanish guys, young dudes who look like they could be in high school, busting Latino kids who smoke in the woods. Young black and white police who do the same to their own kind. Meantime, if you are one of those nerd boys, you are pretty much safe, even if you partake in the sacrament yourself. The smart kids, the ones who been protected their whole lives, can go off to college and smoke all the weed they want in their dorm rooms. Shit is damn near legal for them. Just like it was for their parents.

Turns out, the police had been watching Rollo for some time. He had two possession charges on him. The first had been dismissed, but he had a court date coming up on the second and an expensive lawyer to represent him. We found out later from this same lawyer, he had been under suspicion as a known drug dealer by one of them county task forces they had. I’m thinking that some kid who got busted for possession identified Rollo as his dealer once the police got that kid under the hot lights.

The night the bad thing went down, we were driving around in Rollo’s car, an old Mercury Marquis which has the same platform as a Ford Crown Victoria and a Lincoln Continental. What they call the sister car. I didn’t mention that Rollo is black. Means nothing to me, but it’s part of the story. Police see a black dude and a couple of white dudes rolling around in a Crown Vic look-alike, they see, what do you call that, misadventure, and they are going to pull you over to the side of the road. That came later.

We had gone down to the Summit apartments, which people around our way called Slum It. Blacks and Spanish lived there, many females with their single mothers. There was this one chick I liked to bang whose name was Lucia, and we stopped by her spot. Lucia had told me her mom was out with her boyfriend for the night, so it was a perfect setup. We all sat around in her living room and got smoked up, listening to go-go and some Latin stuff to make Lucia happy, and then me and Lucia went to her bedroom and Rollo and Pat stayed where they was at. Back in the bedroom, Lucia said she was on her period, so I told her to suck it. After I busted a nut, me and her went back out to the living room, and I told my boys that it was time to go. I put a little weed on the coffee table for Lucia, and we left out of there.

Rollo said he needed to make a quick delivery in the building. We got in the elevator, which smelled like fried chicken and cigarettes, went up a few floors, and followed Rollo down a hallway where he knocked on a door. Behind it someone said, “Who is it?” and Rollo said, “UPS man,” which was the answer they had agreed on. The door opened, and we went inside.

It was just one person in there, a dude named David, who went by Day. He was on the small side, but cocky. Had braids, like most dudes do these days, trying to be Gucci Mane. He was wearing hundred-dollar jeans, Air Force Ones, and a Blac Label T-shirt. It’s like a uniform around here.

He said to Rollo, “You got it?”

Rollo said, “You got the Kermit?”

Day said, “I’m good.”

And Rollo said, “Then I got it.”

We sat around a cable-spool table that had a bong on top of it, matches, an ashtray, and a shoe box top Day used to clean the seeds away from the buds. Day wanted to try the weed. Rollo handed him the Baggie, and Day kind of hefted it in his hand and said, “Feels light.”

“You think so?” said Rollo.

Day fired up a piece and poked it through the bowl with a thin rod. He sat back on the couch, holding his breath, and coughed out a stream of smoke. His eyes were already pink.

“Good funk,” said Day.

“I know it,” said Rollo.

“But light.”

“Now you gonna negotiate.”

“I could get my scale, you want me to.”

“You prolly don’t need a scale. With your superpowers and shit, you can just, you know, weigh the bag in your hand.”

“I’m sayin.”

“It’s an ounce. I scaled that shit my own self two hours ago.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m lyin?”

“We got a difference of opinion, is all. Thinkin, we can meet each other halfway.”

“ ’Nother words, you want a discount.”

“This here ain’t no O-Z, Rollo. I just want to pay you for what it is.”

“Okay,” said Rollo, standing from his seat. “I’m a let you set the price.”

“Ain’t you want to discuss it?”

Rollo, his eyes empty, shook his head.

Day straightened his legs so he could get a hand inside the pocket of his jeans, then pulled out a roll of bills. He began to peel off notes, soundlessly counting with his lips. When he was satisfied, he held the bills that he had separated from the roll out to Rollo. That was when Rollo pulled a nine-millimeter Beretta from out of his dip.

Rollo swung the heater fast and hard. Its barrel connected high on Day’s cheek. A worm of blood appeared immediately beneath his eye socket. Day touched the wound, split open wide, with his fingers. Rollo laughed.

“Take the money, Sleepy,” said Rollo, snicking back the hammer on the nine. “All a that shit.”

I went to Day and grabbed the money from each of his hands. I was excited, I got to admit. I had never robbed no one.

Pat had stood up and backed away. The color had drained out his face.

Rollo picked up the Baggie off the cable-spool table, resealed and rolled it, and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans.

“Now you gonna take that, too,” said Day, in a low voice. He was trying not to cry. He looked small on that couch. “You not gonna leave me anything?”

“Leave you with your life,” said Rollo. He eased the trigger down and holstered the Beretta behind his back. He pulled his shirttail out to cover it and said, “Let’s go.”

We were out of that building quick.

On the way to the Marquis, Pat said, “Why’d you do that, Rollo?”

Rollo shrugged and said, “That little muthafucka just aggravate me, man.”

“Bad for business,” said Pat. He was still real nervous, you could tell. “I’m sayin, if it gets around.”

“Day ain’t gonna say shit to anybody,” said Rollo. “Day’s a bitch.”

When we got into the downtown area of where we lived, where they got the restaurants, pawn shops, and movie theaters and shit, we saw lights flashing behind us and heard the burst of a siren. We were being pulled over by the law.

Rollo cut the Mercury to the curb and killed the engine. He put the gun under the seat. He handed me the bag of weed, and I laid it up under the dash where he had a small space for it in a cradle of wires.

“They just gonna talk to us,” said Rollo. “It’ll be all right.”

But the police officers in the patrol vehicle didn’t get out and approach our car. They sat where they were and waited, and soon many other squad cars, their light bars afire, began to appear from different directions. Several uniformed officers came upon us then, their weapons drawn. They screamed at us and ordered us out of the car, telling us to keep our hands raised, and then we were pushed down on the ground and cuffed with plastic bands.

Day had called 911 on us. I couldn’t believe it. You always left the police out your business. I mean, that shit was just not done.

The officers found the weed. They found the gun.

Lying facedown on the street beside me, I heard Pat say, “Mom.”

All of us were arrested and spent the night in the county lockup. We were charged with drug possession, unlawful possession of a firearm, and using a firearm in the commission of felony robbery. Me and Pat were eighteen, so we were charged as adults. The felony gun charge carried a five-year mandatory sentence if we were convicted of it. Because of the gun thing, the commissioner set our bails high. Rollo stayed in jail several days until his supplier bailed him out with drug money. My mother got a bond somehow. Pat’s mom, Miss Mary, had to put her house up for collateral to get him released.

I was assigned a public defender. When I saw how young he was, and his cheap suit and wrinkled shirt, I knew I was in trouble. Rollo had his expensive lawyer, who he was more and more in debt to by the day. I heard from this fellah I knew that Pat had got some well-known criminal defense attorney in the county, a man Miss Mary knew from her church.

I say “I heard” because I had not spoken to Pat since the night of the arrest. Well, not more than a few words. Once we were released, I had called him on his cell.

“Can’t speak to you, Sleepy,” said Pat. “My lawyer says we shouldn’t be talkin to each other. ’Specially not on a cell. Could be our phones are tapped.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Huh?”

“You ain’t give no statement or nothin, did you?”

“Nah, man…”

“Did you?”

Pat said, “I gotta go,” and the cell connection went dead.

That was our conversation. He sounded scared.

Time passed and nothing happened. That is how these things go. You get charged and then you wait. We didn’t even have a trial date. But I couldn’t relax. Personally, I felt that I was in a tight spot. I wasn’t gonna cut no deal with anybody, cause that meant I had to roll over on my boys. And yet, I didn’t trust my rookie lawyer to make a good case for me at a jury trial. I could do prison for a short stay, but I didn’t know if I could do the full nickel.

One day, I saw Rollo out on the street, sitting curbside in his idling Marquis. I slid into the shotgun seat and dapped him up. Rollo had that skunky smell on him. He had been getting his head up, but his high had not taken him to a good place. His face said grim.

“What you think, Sleepy?”

I knew he was talking about our chances. “I don’t know.”

“I need money,” said Rollo. “My lawyer’s costin me. My man put up my bail and I owe him big, too. What I got to do is, I got to be back in business so I can get in the flow.”

“You can’t do that now.”

“I know it. But I can’t get back to doin what I do best if I’m incarcerated.”

“Maybe we’ll walk. If Day don’t show up to testify, they got no case.”

“I’m tryin to take care of that. What I’m stressed on is Pat. If he flips on us—”

“Pat’s my boy.”

“I’m sayin, if he does testify against us, to keep his self out of the joint—”

“He wouldn’t. He’ll stand tall.”

“Okay,” said Rollo, looking at me full for the first time, his eyes flat and waxed. “I’m bringin it up, is all.”

“Pat’s straight,” I said, but my voice sounded weak, like I didn’t believe my own words. Rollo had put a cold seed in my stomach.

Not long after, I was walking through the business district of our neighborhood, when I saw Pat, Miss Mary, and their attorney, a slick-looking dude in pinstripes, sitting in the local coffeehouse at a window-side table. Pat had grown his hair out some, which made him look less hard. He was wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. He looked like one of those prep school boys the two of us had hated on all our lives. He was smiling. I stood on the street, watching him. It was September, still warm out. But I felt cold.

Later in the evening I tried to phone his cell, but he didn’t pick up. He had caller ID, and he knew it was me. It was plain to me that he didn’t want to talk to me no more. I got the feeling that, far as he was concerned, we were through.

He was coming home from work, this hardware store they got downtown, the next time I saw him. This was in November. He was on foot. Since our arrest he had gotten a job, his first. He was wearing a red shirt with the store logo on the front of it under his North Face fleece, and he had his head down, his arms pumping at his sides, the way he had always moved since we was kids. I had gone to the store earlier in the day, looked through the plate glass that fronted it, and seen him in there, talking to a customer. I figured he was on till closing. And I knew the way he’d walk home after he got off, through that alley that cuts down toward his mother’s house.

I was sitting beside Rollo, who was under the wheel of his Marquis. In the backseat was JoJo, this man Rollo knew from where he grew up, in the housing units deep in the city. JoJo had been in lockup for a time, but he was home now. Me and Pat had got smoked up with him before, a while back.

When Pat saw Rollo’s car in the shadows of the alley, he stopped walking. He didn’t back up or nothin like that. But he didn’t come forward, neither.

“Fellas,” he said, with that easy smile of his. Like he had done no one dirt.

“Waitin on you,” I said, leaning out the window. “Let’s get our heads up, man.”

“I’d like to,” said Pat. “But I can’t be dropping a positive if they make me pee.”

“I got some shit can fix that,” I said, meaning this drink I got up the health store that could erase the marijuana in your urine. Pat knew what it was. He had told me about it originally.

“I better not.”

“Come on and visit, son,” said Rollo, his booming voice coming genially from inside the car.

Pat shook his head, relaxed his shoulders, and walked to the Marquis. He got in the backseat, next to JoJo. Pat recognized him and they pounded fists.

“How you doin, young?” said JoJo.

“Working,” said Pat, with a shrug. “You know what that’s like.”

“Not really,” said JoJo, and everyone laughed.

“You been all right?” said Rollo, looking at Pat in the rearview.

“I’m straight,” said Pat.

“Nothin to report?” said Rollo.

“My lawyer said I ain’t supposed to talk about the case with you guys.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m a listen to my lawyer,” said Pat.

“Right,” said Rollo. “You should. I guess what I’m askin is, though, have you heard anything about our chances? ’Cause none of us have heard shit.”

“I don’t know any more than y’all do,” said Pat, with a shrug.

Looking at him, knowing him as long as I did, I almost believed him.

“Thought you guys had some pieces,” said Pat.

“I got some bud will make your dick hard,” said JoJo.

“We can’t smoke it in my car, though,” said Rollo. “I ain’t tryin to get pulled over again.”

“I heard that,” said Pat.

“Let’s go over to the school,” I said.

Rollo pulled down on the transmission arm and gave the Mercury gas. We rolled down the alley with the lights off until we hit the main road.

It was full night. Rollo parked in the lot of a garden-style apartment building. We looked around, saw no one, and got out of the car and crossed the street. We passed under a lamp and then into shadows. Then we went up a grassy hill covered in fallen leaves, and into the woods that bordered the elementary school where me and Pat had gone to kindergarten and beyond.

In the woods it was plenty dark. There was not much of a moon overhead, but our eyes adjusted quick. The branches of the trees were damn near bare. JoJo had freaked a Black ’n Mild with his weed, and he lit it from a Bic and passed it around. It wasn’t long before we got up on JoJo’s hydro. We started laughing and stuff. Pat got to giggling, like he did when he got blazed.

“Hey, Sleepy,” said Pat. “You remember that time, in elementary, when we got up on stage and did that song?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Kris Kross,” said Pat, blowing off the embers of the blunt. “What happened to them?”

“They grew up,” I said.

“We were wearing bow ties, man,” said Pat. “My mom was there, watching us. Yours was, too. Remember?”

“I do.” My voice cracked some when I said it. The branches above us were like black arms. Rollo nodded his head, just a little. Pat didn’t notice, but I did.

“We were kids,” said Pat, as if in wonder.

JoJo shot Pat in the back of the head. Pat said “Uh,” and fell forward. His blood, like one of them ink drawings, bloomed in the night. There wasn’t no gunshot sound. JoJo had one of those suppressors screwed into the barrel of his heater. He was a professional. He owed Rollo a favor, and now his debt was erased. Rollo put another one into Pat’s head, and we walked real quiet out the woods.

Days later, at the funeral home, there was police in vans, taking pictures from out in the lot. It was an old scheme of theirs, trying to see if the killer would show up at the viewing for his victim. Me and Rollo had been questioned right away, but they had nothing. What they needed was a weapon or a witness. The gun was gone forever, and we damn sure wasn’t gonna talk. So on the murder, they had no case.

It was a big turnout for Pat: kids from our high school, relatives, people from the Sullivans’ church. Miss Mary was in the viewing room, standing by Pat’s casket. I avoided her at first, but I had to go up there. Pat did not look as bad as I thought he would. They had done a good job on him with makeup and shit. He was wearing a suit.

I stood before Miss Mary, stepped into her arms, and gave her a hug. She looked wasted, her skin the color of putty. Her hair was tangled, and lipstick was uneven on her mouth. She stood back from me and took my hand and squeezed it.

“Sleepy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Look at me, Sleepy,” she said, staring deep into my eyes. “Do you know who did this?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “But I’m gonna find out.”

“I want you to promise me something,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t want any retribution for this. I don’t want another young man to die. I don’t want you or your friends to murder someone over my son and go to prison for it. This all… this has to stop.”

“Okay.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

I couldn’t believe it. In spite of all that had gone down, she was thinking of me.

Funny thing is, I don’t even know for sure if Pat was gonna flip. It might not have mattered, because Rollo had been right all along about Day. He turned out to be a straight bitch. Day did not show up to testify in court, and the hard felony charges against me and Rollo were dropped. I got probation on the possession and walked out of that courtroom free. Rollo got a little bit of time.

I should be relieved, but I’m not. I can’t stop thinking on Miss Mary. She was always real kind to me, and it hurts to picture her now. ’Cause in my head I can see her, sitting on the edge of her bed. Praying the Rosary, up in her room.

I am writing this down now for her. I ran into Rollo once or twice since he been out, and I did not like the look he had in his eyes. In case something happens to me, I want Miss Mary to know that I was involved in this thing. The truth is, I got no deep remorse for what got did to Pat. Pat was in the game, and he knew what time it was. But I’m real sorry for what I took from his mom.

“I hate Arabs,” said Paddy.

A guy sat facing a good-looking blonde in a booth against the far wall. The guy was minding his own business. He and the girl were splitting a pitcher of draft and smiling at each other across the table. He would say something, or she would, and the other one would laugh. It looked like they were having a nice time. Paddy was staring at the guy like he wanted to kick his ass.

“How you know he’s an Arab?” I said.

“Look at him,” said Paddy. “Looks like Achmed Z-med, that guy on T. J. Hooker.”

“Adrian Zmed,” said Scott, the smart guy of our bunch.

“Another Arab,” said Paddy. This was five or six years after the Ayatollah, Nuke Iran, and all that crap. Paddy was the only guy I knew who hadn’t given that up.

Me and Paddy and Scott were in Kildare’s, a pub up in Wheaton we used to drink at pretty regular. Wheaton was our neighborhood, not too far over the D.C. line, but a thousand miles away from the city, if you know what I mean. It was a night like most nights back then: a little drinking, some blow, then more drinking to take the thirst off the blow. Only this night ended up different than the rest.

I’d put the year at 1985, ’cause I can remember the bands and singers that were coming from the juke: Mr. Mister, Paul Young, Foreigner, Wham. Hell, you could flush the whole Top 40 from that decade down the toilet and no one would miss it. Also, Len Bias was lighting it up for Maryland on the TV screen over the bar, so I know it couldn’t have been later than ’85. Maybe it was early ’86. It was around then, anyway.

Paddy was up that night, and not only from the coke. He always seemed angry at something back in those days, but we had chalked up his behavior to his hyper personality. Just “Tool being Tool.”

O’Toole, I should say. Up until he was twenty-three, Paddy’s name was John Tool. Most everyone who knew him, even his old man before he kicked, called him Tool. It was a nickname you gave to a fraternity brother or something, like Animal Man or Headcase, which was all right around the fellas, but didn’t go over too good with the girls. Paddy liked it all right when he was growing up, but when he got to be a man he suddenly felt it didn’t suit him. Still, he wanted a handle, something that could make him stand out in a crowd. He wasn’t a guy you noticed, either for his character or his appearance. I think that’s why he changed his name. That and his women problem. He’d never had much success with the ladies, and he was looking to change his luck.

What he told us was, he’d paid to have one of those family-tree things done, and found that he was all Irish on his mother’s side. Turned out that his great-grandfather’s name was O’Toole. A lightning-strike coincidence, he said, that Tool and O’Toole were so similar. So he made the legal switch, adding Paddy as his first name. He said he liked the way Paddy O’Toole “scanned.”

It was around this time that he went Irish all the way. Started listening to the Chieftains and their kind. Became a Notre Dame fan, got the silver four-leaf clover charm on a silver-plated necklace, and had that T-Bird he drove, the garbage wagon with the Landau roof, painted Kelly green at the body shop where he worked. Then he fixed a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” sticker on the rear bumper, which totally fucked up what was already a halfway fucked-looking car.

Paddy began to drink more, too. I guess he thought that being a lush would admit him to the club. When he got really torched, he talked about his mother’s cooking like it was special or something, and referred to his late father as “Da.” His eyes would well with tears then, even though the old man had beat him pretty good when he was a kid. We thought it was all bullshit, and a little off, but we didn’t say nothin to him. He wasn’t hurting anyone, after all.

We didn’t say anything to his face, that is. Scott, the only one of us who had graduated from college, analyzed the situation, as usual. Scott said that Americans who had that Irish identity thing going on were Irish the way Tony Danza was Italian. That most Americans’ idea of Ireland was John Ford’s Ireland, Technicolor green and Maureen O’Hara red and Barry Fitzgerald, Popeye-with-a-brogue blarney. And by the way, said Scott, John Ford was born in Maine. I didn’t know John Ford from Gerald Ford, but it sounded smart. Also, it sounded like a lecture, the way Scott always sounded since he’d come back home with that degree. Scott could be a little, what do you call that, pompous sometimes, but he was all right.

So back to Kildare’s. For years we had gone to this other joint around the corner, Garner’s, made your clothes smell like Marlboro Lights and steak-and-cheese. But Paddy, who before he went Irish had never moved up off of Miller Lite, said the Guinness there was “too cold,” so we changed locales. “Kildare is a county in Ireland,” said Paddy, the first time we went in there, like he was telling us something we didn’t know, and Scott said, “So is Sligo,” meaning the junior high school where all of us had gone. Paddy’s mouth kind of slacked open then, like it did when he thought Scott was putting him on. I said, “Dr. Kildare,” just to hear my own voice.

Kildare’s wasn’t anything special. It was your standard fake pub, loaded with promotional posters and mobiles, courtesy of the local liquor distributors. The sign outside said “A Publick House,” like you could fool people into thinking Wheaton was London. I don’t know, maybe the hometown rednecks bought into it, ’cause the joint was usually full. More likely they didn’t care what you called it or what you dressed it up as. It was a place to get drunk. That was all anyone in these parts needed to know.

So the three of us were sitting at a four-top in the center of the room. I was hammering a Bud and Scott had a Michelob, another way he had of wearing his “I went to college” badge. Paddy was on his third stout, and there was a shot of Jameson set neat next to the mug. I didn’t know how he afforded to drink the top-shelf stuff. He made jack shit at the body shop and went through a gram of coke every few days. But he still lived with his mother over on Tenbrook, and it didn’t look like he spent any money on clothes. I guess his paycheck went to getting his head up.

“I Want to Know What Love Is” was coming from the jukebox. Lou Gramm was crooning, and I was thinking about my girl. I had met this fine young lady, Lynne, worked an aluminum siding booth up in Wheaton Plaza, who I thought might be the one. She had dark hair and a rack on her like that PR or Cuban chick who played on Miami Vice. I wanted to be with her but I was here. It was partly out of habit, and mostly because I knew Paddy would be holding. Also, Paddy had practically begged me to come. He didn’t like to drink alone.

“You guys ready to do a bump?” said Paddy.

“Shit, yeah,” I said. I mean, what did he think? Hell, it was why I was sitting there.

“I gotta work tomorrow,” said Scott.

“What’s your point?” said Paddy.

“It’s a real job,” said Scott. At the time, Scott was putting in hours at a downtown law firm and studying for what he called the “L-sats.”

Paddy looked over at the booth where the Arab dude sat, smiled kind of mean, then moved his eyes back to Scott. “Like my job isn’t real?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not the kind of job where you can just fall out of bed, stumble into a garage with a headache, and start banging out dings.”

“Oh, I get you. Big smart lawyer. What you makin down at that law firm, Scott?”

“Nothing. It’s an internship.”

“Better get in there refreshed in the morning, then. You wouldn’t want to lose a gig like that.” Paddy turned his attention to me. “Meet me in the head in a few minutes, Counselor. Okay?”

I had just dropped out of community college for the last time and had gotten this job at a local branch of a big television-and-stereo chain. The company called us “Sales Counselors,” like we were shrinks or something. Paddy thought it was a laugh.

“Okay,” I said.

“Watch this,” said Paddy, and he got out of his seat.

Paddy navigated the space between the floor tables and headed for the booth where the guy was drinking with the blonde. He walked right up to their table and bumped his thigh against it, hard enough to rattle their mugs and spill some of their beer. The guy looked up, not angry, just surprised. Paddy pointed his finger at the guy’s face and said, “Pussy.” Then Paddy made a beeline to the men’s room, which was down a serpentine hall. The doorman, one of three cousins who owned the place, was standing nearby. He saw the whole thing.

“That was smooth,” said Scott.

The guy at the booth was staring at us, like, what’s up with your buddy? Funny, with his face square on us, he did look like that Achmed Z-med dude. The blonde was busy mopping up the spilled beer with some napkins. I thought of going over to apologize, or shrugging to let them know that we were innocent in whatever had just happened, but I didn’t, ’cause it would have been a betrayal of my friend. I just looked away.

“The lucky leprechaun’s in rare form tonight,” said Scott. “You guys drop me at my parents’ place after this, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You want to get busted for something, that’s up to you, but I got too much to lose.”

“I said we would.”

Scott’s eyeglasses reflected neon from a Bud Light sign up on the wall. His hair was curly and short, and he was soft-featured and overweight. He had rose-petal lips, like a girl’s. Scott was one of those guys, you could tell what he was gonna look like when he got to be an old man, even when we were kids.

I pushed my chair away from the table, got up, and walked toward the head. The doorman was giving me the fisheye, his arms folded across his chest. I didn’t look at the Arab guy or the blonde.

I made it through the hall, black-paneled walls lit by a red bulb, and knocked on the locked men’s room door. Paddy opened up and I slid in. The room held a toilet, a stand-up urinal, and a sink, all on the same wall. The toilet didn’t have a door on it or nothin like that, so if you had to take a shit you did it in front of strangers. There was a casement window by the toilet, always cranked open some to let out the smell. Everything was filthy in here. Paper towels overflowed the plastic trash can by the sink and were crumpled like dirty white carnations on the tiled floor.

“Here you go, Counselor,” said Paddy. He held a small amber vial in one hand and a black screw-on top in the other. Inside the top, a small spoon dangled by a chain. He dipped the spoon into the vial and produced a tiny mound of coke that he held to my nose.

I could see that there wasn’t hardly any coke left in the vial. I knew if I did one jolt I’d be hungry for it the rest of the night. Even if we could find someplace to cop, I didn’t have the dough to buy any more, and I didn’t know if Paddy did, either.

I was thinking of this as I pressed a forefinger to one nostril and snorted the mound into the other. A good cool ache came behind my eyes.

Paddy produced another mound, and I did it up the other nostril the same way. He scraped out what was left in the vial and did that himself. He found some more in there somehow and rubbed that on his gums while I ran water from the faucet, wet my fingers, tipped my head back, and let some droplets go down my nose. Then I took a leak in the stand-up head.

“Hurry up,” said Paddy. “Everyone’s gonna think you’re in here suckin my dick.”

“No they won’t. ’Cause everyone knows you don’t have one.”

“Axe your mama if I have one.”

“Look, you gonna be a good boy out there?”

“I was just fuckin with that guy.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

I tucked myself back in and zipped up my fly. I was already speeding and there was a drip, tasted like medicine, back in my throat. I wished my girl was out there; I could break away with her if she was. But it wouldn’t be cool to split now, seeing as Paddy had just got me lit up. And by the time I got to her place, I’d be crashing. I’d hang with Paddy for a while, cop some more someplace, then knock on Lynne’s door later on.

We walked out into the hall. “Everytime You Go Away” was playing in the house. I felt tall and funny. Our waitress was going to the girls’ room, and I reminded her to wash her hands. She edged by us in the narrow passageway without even giving us a smile.

Good as I felt, I had forgotten about the doorman. My stomach flipped some as I saw him standing by our table. Our bill was on the table, and Scott was kinda slumped in his seat. We went there, and Paddy spread his hands, like, What’s going on?

“Pay your tab and get out,” said the doorman, pointing at the bill.

“We’re not finished drinking,” said Paddy.

“You’re finished,” said the doorman. “Pay your tab and get out.”

“What, ’cause of that guy?” said Paddy, jerking his head toward the Arab and the blonde. “He was bothering me. Sayin shit, and stuff. I wasn’t just gonna let it pass.”

“I saw the whole thing,” said the doorman. His face was ugly and it was stone. “Pay up and get out. You’re not welcome in here anymore.”

The doorman was short and wore one of those Woody Allen hats to cover his hair plugs. Basically, he was an insecure guy who liked to act tough. We all knew he couldn’t walk it, and he knew we knew, and it just made him more mean. He was not a physical problem, but the Harris brothers, a couple of guys worked nights in the kitchen, were. They had been wrestlers at our old high school, and there was no love lost between them and Paddy.

We dropped some money on the four-top. Scott stood and put some green in, too. A few of the drinkers at the tables and booths were checking us out with anticipation, waiting to see what we would do.

I already knew we weren’t going to do a thing. Paddy’s face had gone pink and he was just standing there, swaybacked, staring at his shoes. He was a pale-skinned strawberry blond who could have been handsome if his features had been hooked up better. I couldn’t say what made him unattractive exactly, but there was something off about his looks. Scott called him an inbred Redford.

The three of us walked out, slow enough to salvage some dignity. But we kept moving, and we didn’t give any more lip to the little doorman with the hair plugs. I locked eyes for a moment with the guy in the booth. He didn’t smile or anything, and he wasn’t gloating about us getting tossed, either. He handled it all right. It was us that came off looking like assholes.

Out in the lot, walking toward Paddy’s T-Bird, Scott said, “Say good-bye to Kildare’s, boys. We’ll never drink in there again.”

“No loss,” said Paddy. “We’ll just drink at Garner’s.”

“Aye, Garner’s,” said Scott. “I don’t think so, lads. The Guinness is too cold.”

“Big college smart-ass, now.”

“How green was my valley,” said Scott, with a lilt.

“Fuck you,” said Paddy.

“Suck what? ” said Scott.

They went on like that until we dropped Scott at his father’s house on Gabel. I didn’t get in on the conversation. I was too busy thinking of my next bump.

Paddy left rubber on the street, hard to do with that heavy car, as we drove away from Scott’s. He said that he was tired of Scott, how he wasn’t the same since coming back from that fancy school, how he only tolerated him ’cause Scott and me went back to elementary, all that.

“I ain’t goin drinking with him again,” said Paddy.

I didn’t comment, thinking that they would kiss and make up and we’d be up at Garner’s or someplace like it the next week. But it turned out Paddy was right.

We picked up a six of domestic in Four Corners and cracked a couple of cans straightaway. Both of us had a terrific thirst. Paddy drove down University Boulevard, then cut a left onto Piney Branch Road and took it to New Hampshire Avenue. We listened to a tape Paddy’d made, a balladeer named Christy Moore. He had a nice voice, with those whistles and pipes and shit like that in the background, but it sounded like something my father listened to, Vic Damone with an accent. I really thought Paddy had taken this Mick thing too far.

I saw where he was going as he cut up New Hampshire. They had garden apartments up along there where I’d heard you could cop. It was just above Langley Park — not as dangerous as Langley with the El Salvies and those crazy-assed Jamaicans, but still kinda grim. All varieties of Spanish here and a lot of blacks. Not that I was scared of ’em or nothin like that.

Paddy turned into the parking lot, found a spot, and cut the engine and the lights. We sat there killing the rest of our beers.

“Who we gonna see?” I said.

“Some girl,” said Paddy. “This guy I know at work hooked it up.”

“You don’t know her?”

“It’s just a girl. Don’t worry, nothing could happen. I called her before I met you guys and she said it was cool. She sounded all right.” Paddy grinned. “I bet she’s fine, too.”

The way he said fine, like “foyne,” I knew she was a black girl. Paddy had a thing for black chicks, though I don’t think he’d ever had any. Except for that one time, when that girl down at Benny’s Rebel Room jacked him off for forty-five bucks.

“What’re we getting?” I said.

“An eight ball.”

“Shit, Paddy, c’mon.” I had, like, sixteen bucks in my wallet, and next to nothing in the bank.

“I got you, man.”

So he was dealing. Small-time, but there it was. That’s how Paddy always had coke. It was the first time he’d let me know, even if it was in a backdoor way. Because I was still high and feeling bold, it excited me some that he had let me in on his action. Also, I was a little bit scared.

“This your regular connection?”

“Nah, uh-uh, he’s out of town. This is a one-time deal.”

I looked up at the apartments and the grounds. Some of the balconies were sagging, and fast-food trash was strewn about the lot. “Maybe we oughta wait until your man gets back.”

“You wanna get high, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah.” I was at that stage; I was hungry for more.

Paddy threw his head back to drain his can of beer. He lofted the can over his shoulder. It hit some dead soldiers on the floorboard and made a dull metallic sound. I killed mine and dropped the can between my feet.

We got out of the car and walked across the lot. There were a couple of guys wearing mustaches, sitting in a black late-model Ford parked nearby. Their heads were moving to music; the bass was up so loud I could hear it behind the closed windows of their car. I didn’t make eye contact with them or anything. I figured they were doing some blow. Hell, everyone was rocking it back then. They were a little old for it, but it wasn’t any business of mine.

We went up a stairwell, one of those open-air jobs with cinder-block walls. Paddy stopped on the second-floor landing. It was dark when it should have been lit. Then I saw the busted-out lightbulb hung in a cage. I wondered if the girl dealing the blow had deliberately broken the light, made it so you couldn’t see her apartment too good from the parking lot. Paddy knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again.

In a little while, a girl’s voice came forward, muffled over some music that was playing inside the apartment. Paddy put his face close to the door and said his name, and also the name of his coworker at the body shop. The door opened, and Paddy stepped inside. I followed him. The girl stepped back against the wall to let us pass.

The girl was black, on the short side, with all the woman parts in place, including her black girl’s onion. She wore Jordache jeans and a jean shirt unbuttoned kinda low. I could see one of her tits hanging in a loose white bra. She caught me checking her out as I squeezed by. She didn’t seem to care. It was hard to read anything in her hard, unfriendly face and dark, almond-shaped eyes. I didn’t say “hey” to her or smile or anything like it. She took a deep cokehead’s drag off the cigarette she was holding and closed the door.

Paddy put out his hand. “C’mon,” said the girl, ignoring his gesture. We followed her down a short hall.

The music got louder as we walked. It was rap music, some black guy shouting over hard chords of electric guitar. We entered a living room/dining room arrangement, two small rooms, really, separated by nothing, where all the curtains were drawn tight. The place stunk of cigarettes, and smoke hung in the room.

A light-skinned black dude sat on the couch, dragging on a smoke, jonesing for the nicotine like the girl. On the table before the couch was a mirror holding a largish mound of coke heaped beside a single-edged blade. An ashtray sat beside the mirror and was filled with butts. The dude raised his head as we came into the room and sized us up the way guys do. The way he looked at us, you could tell he wasn’t too impressed.

Another black guy, darker skinned with ripped arms, sat at the dining room table. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt to show off his guns. He was rapping along to the guy shouting from the stereo. There was a large amount of cocaine on the table, along with a scale, a big mirror, some blades, plastic Baggies of various sizes, and Snow Seals. The Snow Seals were real, the pharmaceutical kind, not just paper ripped from magazines and folded to size.

The coke was a mountain. I mean, it was Tony Montana big. I’d never seen so much shit before in my life.

A stainless-steel pistol, a short-nosed revolver, sat on the table. The guy touched the grip, turning it just an inch so that the barrel pointed our way. He looked at us, and his eyes were laughing and bright. As the voice came from the stereo, he kept his gaze on us, and shouted along: “It’s like that, and that’s the way it is.”

It’s real clear, even today, what I was thinking: You just got your life started, and this is how you die. All you want to do is get your head up, nothing more than that. You walk into the wrong apartment, there’s guns, and you fucking die.

“You got it?” said Paddy, to the girl. I had to hand it to him. He was acting pretty cool. Knowing Paddy, he was trying to keep himself together to impress her. For a guy who got no play, Paddy was an optimist. He always thought he had a chance.

The girl went and turned down the stereo to almost nothing. The guy at the table kept rapping to the song.

“An eight, right?” said the girl to Paddy.

“That’s right, baby.”

I was thinking, Nah, don’t go there, Paddy. Don’t put on that bullshit black-talk of yours, not here. But she didn’t even blink. She went down another hall and into a kitchen that was visible through a cutout in the dining room wall. I watched her ratfuck through the freezer.

The guy at the table stopped rapping and said, “Y’all want a taste?”

Paddy smiled friendly and put up his hands. “That’s all right,” he said. I’d never seen him turn down a blast of coke.

“Ain’t like I’m asking you to drink out the same bottle as me.”

Paddy chuckled unconvincingly. “It’s not that. I just don’t want any right now.”

“Well, I’m a little surprised, ’cause you look like a pro. Don’t you always check out what you’re buyin?” The guy glanced at the dude sitting on the couch, then back at us. “C’mon over here and give it a road test.”

Paddy shrugged and moved over to the table. I stayed where I was.

The guy at the table dipped a blade into an open Baggie that held some coke. I wondered why he didn’t take it off the Everest that was in front of him. He dumped some powder off the blade and tracked out four thick lines on the mirror without giving it any chop. He handed a short tube of plastic, the cut-down barrel of a Bic pen, to Paddy.

When Paddy leaned over the table to do his lines, his four-leaf clover pendant fell out of his shirt and hung suspended between the zippers of his Members Only jacket.

“Irish, huh?” said the guy.

Paddy said, “All the way.” He did a line and made a show of rearing his head back to take it all in.

“They call me Carlos. What do they call you? ”

“Paddy.”

“No last name?”

“O’Toole.”

“Wow. That damn sure is Irish.” Carlos’s voice was almost musical. “Been to the motherland?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell the truth, man: that can’t be your real name, right?”

“I changed it,” said Paddy, real low. The room was quiet, but you could barely hear him. He bent forward and quickly snorted the other line.

“You’re like, fake Irish, then. That’s what you tellin me?”

Paddy cleared his nostrils with a pinch of his fingers. His eyes narrowed some as he straightened his posture. “I’m Irish.”

Paddy said it real strong, like he was looking to make something of it.

“All the way,” said the guy on the couch.

Carlos looked Paddy over real slow. Then Carlos smiled.

“Plastic Paddy,” said Carlos. The guy on the couch laughed.

Paddy’s face grew pink, like it had gotten at Kildare’s. The girl came back through the hall with a Baggie in her hand and stood near the table. The cigarette still burned between her fingers; it was down to the filter now. Paddy turned to me, his face flushed, and held out the tube. I waved the offer away with my hand.

“Take it,” said Paddy. He sounded kinda mad.

I was frozen. I didn’t want any coke. I was thinking of my parents and my kid sister. I just wanted to get outside.

“What’s the matter with your boy?” said Carlos. “Can’t he find his tongue?”

“Give it to me,” I said to Paddy. The sound of my own voice was a relief. I walked a few steps and took the Bic from Paddy’s outstretched hand. I did the lines fast, one right behind the other, and dropped the plastic tube on the table.

“Here you go, ace,” said the girl, speaking to Paddy. She handed him a Baggie that I guessed she had gotten from the freezer. I could see grains of rice in there with the coke.

“This from the same batch I just did?” said Paddy.

“Yeah,” said Carlos. “It’s good, right?”

Good. It wasn’t even close. I knew right away that this shit was wrong. A curtain had dropped throughout my body, and everything had gotten pushed down into my bowels. I was speeding without the happiness, and I had to take a dump. This was bullshit coke. They had stepped all over it with baby laxative and who knew what else. Paddy had to be feeling the same way I was. He knew he was getting ripped off. It was like the guy was asking, “You don’t mind if I fuck you, do you?”

But Paddy didn’t complain. He reached into his jeans and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed the bills to the girl, who counted out the money with dead eyes.

“Ain’t you gonna weigh it out?” said Carlos, chinning in the direction of the Baggie. “I got a scale right here.”

Paddy didn’t answer. He rolled the Baggie tight and slipped it in the inside pocket of his Members Only.

“You just gonna eyeball it, huh? ” said Carlos.

“Let’s go,” said Paddy. He turned and began to walk. I followed him back down the hall toward the front door. We heard the guy on the couch say, “Plastic Paddy,” in the voice of a game-show host, and then all of them laughed. I didn’t care because it looked like we were going to get out of there alive. But I know Paddy must have been hurting inside, ’cause they’d ripped something out of him. Also, it was the second time he’d been shamed that night.

We took the stairwell down toward the lot. As we crossed the sidewalk, Paddy said, “Fuckin niggers,” and right about then the guys I’d noticed in the Ford came out of nowhere, holding guns on us, shouting at us to lock our hands behind our heads and drop to the asphalt and kiss it. I went down shaking, seeing other men running around in the dark, hearing their adrenalized voices and the screech of tires and the closing of heavy car doors.

As I hit the ground, I lost control of everything and crapped my pants.

Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud.

Last night I had a dream.

In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cut into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands.

My mother told me once: every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason.

I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, nineteen hundred and thirty-three. The temperature got up to 100 degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat.

Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterward I hang the roúcha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes, pantalóni and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks, on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner-Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good, but it was hard to get it all.

It’s five, five thirty in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight.

What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride, so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America.

When I got to Ellis Island, I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband, Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt.

Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks, and Greeks lived there, too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves.

Toula’s apartment was in a house right on H Street. You had to walk up three floors to get to it. I didn’t mind it. The milkman did it every day, and the old Jew who collected the rent managed to do it, too. I figured, so could I.

My room was small, so small you couldn’t shut the door all the way when the bed was down. There was only one toilet in the place, and they had put a curtain by it, the kind you hang on a shower. You had to close it around you when you wanted to shit. Like I say, it wasn’t a nice place or nothing like it, but it was okay. It was free.

But nothing’s free, my father always said. Toula’s husband, Aris, made me pay from the first day I moved in. Never had a good word to say to me, never mentioned me to no one for a job. He was a sonofabitch, that one. Dark, with a hook in his nose — looked like he had some Turkish blood in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gamoto was a Turk. I didn’t like the way he talked to my cousin, either, ’specially when he drank. And this malaka drank every night. I’d sit in my room and listen to him raise his voice at her, and then later I could hear him fucking her on their bed. I couldn’t stand it, I’m telling you, and me without a woman myself. I didn’t have no job then so I couldn’t even buy a whore. I thought I was gonna go nuts.

Then one day I was talking to this guy, Dimitri Karras, lived in the 606 building on H. He told me about a janitor’s job opened up at St. Mary’s, the church where his son, Panayoti, and most of the neighborhood kids went to Catholic school. I put some Wildroot tonic in my hair, walked over to the church, and talked to the head nun. I don’t know, she musta liked me or something, ’cause I got the job. I had to lie a little about being a handyman. I wasn’t no engineer, but I figured, what the hell, the furnace goes out you light it again, goddamn.

My deal was simple. I got a room in the basement and a coupla meals a day. Pennies other than that, but I didn’t mind, not then. Hell, it was better than living in some Hoover Hotel. And it got me away from that bastard Aris. Toula cried when I left, so I gave her a hug. I didn’t say nothing to Aris.

I worked at St. Mary’s about two years. The work was never hard. I knew the kids and most of their fathers: Karras, Angelos, Nicodemus, Recevo, Damiano, Carchedi. I watched the boys grow. I didn’t look the nuns in the eyes when I talked to them so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Once or twice I treated myself to one of the whores over at the Eastern House. Mostly, down in the basement, I played with my poutso. I put it out of my mind that I was jerking off in church.

Meanwhile, I tried to make myself better. I took English classes at St. Sophia, the Greek Orthodox church on 8th and L. I bought a blue serge suit at Harry Kaufman’s on 7th Street, on sale for eleven dollars and seventy-five. The Jew tailor let me pay for it a little bit at a time. Now when I went to St. Sophia for the Sunday service I wouldn’t be ashamed.

I liked to go to church. Not for religion, nothing like that. Sure, I wear a stavro, but everyone wears a cross. That’s just superstition. I don’t love God, but I’m afraid of him. So I went to church just in case, and also to look at the girls. I liked to see ’em all dressed up.

There was this one koritsi, not older than sixteen when I first saw her, who was special. I knew just where she was gonna be, with her mother, on the side of the church where the women sat separate from the men. I made sure I got a good view of her on Sundays. Her name was Irene, I asked around. I could tell she was clean. By that I mean she was a virgin. That’s the kind of girl you’re gonna marry. My plan was to wait till I got some money in my pocket before I talked to her, but not too long so she got snatched up. A girl like that is not gonna stay single forever.

Work and church was for the daytime. At night I went to the coffeehouses down by the Navy Yard in Southeast. One of them was owned by a hardworking guy from the neighborhood, Angelos, lived at the 703 building on 6th. That’s the cafeneion I went to most. You played cards and dice there if that’s what you wanted to do, but mostly you could be yourself. It was all Greeks.

That’s where I met Nick Stefanos one night, at the Angelos place. Meeting him is what put another change in my life. Stefanos was a Spartan with an easy way, had a scar on his cheek. You knew he was tough, but he didn’t have to prove it. I heard he got the scar running protection for a hooch truck in upstate New York. Heard a cheap pistola blew up in his face. It was his business, what happened, none of mine.

We got to talking that night. He was the head busman down at some fancy hotel on 15th and Penn, but he was leaving to open his own place. His friend Costa, another Spartiati, worked there and he was gonna leave with him. Stefanos asked me if I wanted to take Costa’s place. He said he could set it up. The pay was only a little more than what I was making, a dollar-fifty a week with extras, but a little more was a lot. Hell, I wanted to make better like anyone else. I thanked Nick Stefanos and asked him when I could start.

I started the next week, soon as I got my room where I am now. You had to pay management for your bus uniform, black pants and a white shirt and short black vest, so I didn’t make nothing for a while. Some of the waiters tipped the busmen heavy, and some tipped nothing at all. For the ones who tipped nothing, you cleared their tables slower, and last. I caught on quick.

The hotel was pretty fancy, and its dining room, up on the top floor, was fancy, too. The china was real, the crystal sang when you flicked a finger at it, and the silver was heavy. It was hard times, but you’d never know it from the way the tables filled up at night. I figured I’d stay there a coupla years, learn the operation, and go out on my own like Stefanos. That was one smart guy.

The way they had it set up was, Americans had the waiter jobs, and the Greeks and Filipinos bused the tables. The coloreds, they stayed back in the kitchen. Everybody in the restaurant was in the same order that they were out on the street: the whites were up top and the Greeks were in the middle; the mavri were at the bottom. Except if someone was your own kind, you didn’t make much small talk with the other guys unless it had something to do with work. I didn’t have nothing against anyone, not even the coloreds. You didn’t talk to them, that’s all. That’s just the way it was.

The waiters, they thought they were better than the rest of us. But there was this one American, a young guy named John Petersen, who was all right. Petersen had brown eyes and wavy brown hair that he wore kinda long. It was his eyes that you remembered. Smart and serious, but gentle at the same time.

Petersen was different than the other waiters, who wouldn’t lift a finger to help you even when they weren’t busy. John would pitch in and bus my tables for me when I got in a jam. He’d jump in with the dishes, too, back in the kitchen, when the dining room was running low on silver, and like I say, those were coloreds back there. I even saw him talking with those guys sometimes like they were pals. It was like he came from someplace where that was okay. John was just one of those who made friends easy, I guess. I can’t think of no one who didn’t like him. Well, there musta been one person, at least. I’m gonna come to that later on.

Me and John went out for a beer one night after work, to a saloon he knew. I wasn’t comfortable because it was all Americans and I didn’t see no one who looked like me. But John made me feel okay, and after two beers I forgot. He talked to me about the job and the pennies me and the colored guys in the kitchen were making, and how it wasn’t right. He talked about some changes that were coming to make it better for us, but he didn’t say what they were.

“I’m happy,” I said, as I drank off the beer in my mug. “I got a job, what the hell.”

“You want to make more money don’t you?” he said. “You’d like to have a day off once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

“Goddamn right. But I take off a day, I’m not gonna get paid.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that, friend.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Do you know what ‘strength in numbers’ means?”

I looked around for the bartender ’cause I didn’t know what the hell John was talking about and I didn’t know what to say.

John put his hand around my arm. “I’m putting together a meeting. I’m hoping some of the busmen and the kitchen guys will make it. Do you think you can come?”

“What we gonna meet for, huh?”

“We’re going to talk about those changes I been telling you about. Together, we’re going to make a plan.”

“I don’t want to go to no meeting. I want a day off, I’m just gonna go ask for it, eh?”

“You don’t understand.” John put his face close to mine. “The workers are being exploited.”

“I work and they pay me,” I said with a shrug. “That’s all I know. Other than that? I don’t give a damn nothing.” I pulled my arm away, but I smiled when I did it. I didn’t want to join no group, but I wanted him to know we were still pals. “C’mon, John, let’s drink.”

I needed that job. But I felt bad, turning him down about that meeting. You could see it meant something to him, whatever the hell he was talking about, and I liked him. He was the only American in the restaurant who treated me like we were both the same. You know, man to man.

Well, he wasn’t the only American who made me feel like a man. There was this woman, name of Laura, a hostess who also made change from the bills. She bought her dresses too small and had hair bleached white, like Jean Harlow. She was about two years and ten pounds away from the end of her looks. Laura wasn’t pretty, but her ass could bring tears to your eyes. Also, she had huge tits.

I caught her giving me the eye the first night I worked there. By the third night, she said something to me about my broad chest as I was walking by her. I nodded and smiled, but I kept walking ’cause I was carrying a heavy tray. When I looked back she gave me a wink. She was a real whore, that one. I knew right then I was gonna fuck her. At the end of the night I asked her if she would go to the pictures with me sometime. “I’m free tomorrow,” she says. I acted like it was an honor and a big surprise.

I worked every night, so we had to make it a matinee. We took the streetcar down to the Earle, on 13th Street, down below F. I wore my blue serge suit and high-button shoes. I looked like I had a little bit of money, but we still got the fisheye, walking down the street. A blonde and a Greek with dark skin and a heavy black mustache. I couldn’t hide that I wasn’t too long off the boat.

The Earle had a stage show before the picture. A guy named William Demarest and some dancers who Laura said were like the Rockettes. What the hell did I know, I was just looking at their legs. After the coming attractions and the short subject, the picture came on: Gold Diggers of 1933. The man dancers looked like cocksuckers to me. I liked Westerns better, but it was all right. Fifteen cents for each of us. It was cheaper than taking her to a saloon.

Afterward, we went to her place, an apartment in a row house off H in Northeast. I used the bathroom and saw a Barnard’s Shaving Cream and other man things in there, but I didn’t ask her nothing about it when I came back out. I found her in the bedroom. She had poured us a couple of rye whiskies and drawn the curtains so it felt like the night. A radio played something she called “jug band”; it sounded like colored music to me. She asked me, did I want to dance. I shrugged and tossed back all the rye in my glass and pulled her to me rough. We moved slow, even though the music was fast.

“Bill?” she said, looking up at me. She had painted her eyes with something and there was a black mark next to one of them where the paint had come off.

“Uh,” I said.

“What do they call you where you’re from?”

“Vasili.”

I kissed her warm lips. She bit mine and drew a little blood. I pushed myself against her to let her know what I had.

“Why, Va-silly,” she said. “You are like a horse, aren’t you?”

I just kinda nodded and smiled. She stepped back and got out of her dress and her slip, and then undid her brassiere. She did it slow.

“Ella,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Hurry it up,” I said, with a little motion of my hand. Laura laughed.

She pulled the bra off and her tits bounced. They were everything I thought they would be. She came to me and unbuckled my belt, pulling at it clumsy, and her breath was hot on my face. By then, God, I was ready.

I sat her on the edge of the bed, put one of her legs up on my shoulder, and gave it to her. I heard a woman having a baby in the village once, and those were the same kinda sounds that Laura made. There was spit dripping out the side of her mouth as I slammed myself into her over and over again. I’m telling you, her bed took some plaster off the wall that day.

After I blew my load into her, I climbed off. I didn’t say nice things to her or nothing like that. She got what she wanted and so did I. Laura smoked a cigarette and watched me get dressed. The whole room smelled like pussy. She didn’t look so good to me no more. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and breathe fresh air.

We didn’t see each other again outside of work. She only stayed at the restaurant a coupla more weeks, and then she disappeared. I guess the man who owned the shaving cream told her it was time to quit.

For a while there, nothing happened and I just kept working hard. John didn’t mention no meetings again, though he was just as nice as before. I slept late and bused the tables at night. Life wasn’t fun or bad. It was just ordinary. Then that bastard Wesley Schmidt came to work and everything changed.

Schmidt was a tall young guy with a thin moustache, big in the shoulders, big hands. He kept his hair slicked back. His eyes were real blue, like water under ice. He had a row of big, straight teeth. He smiled all the time, but the smile, it didn’t make you feel good.

Schmidt got hired as a waiter, but he wasn’t any good at it. He got tangled up fast when the place got busy. He served food to the wrong tables all the time, and he spilled plenty of drinks. It didn’t seem like he’d ever done that kind of work before.

No one liked him, but he was one of those guys, he didn’t know it, or maybe he knew and didn’t care. He laughed and told jokes and slapped the busmen on the back like we were his friends. He treated the kitchen guys like dogs when he was tangled up, raising his voice at them when the food didn’t come up as fast as he liked it. Then he tried to be nice to them later.

One time he really screamed at Raymond, the head cook on the line, called him a “lazy shine” on this night when the place was packed. When the dining room cleared up, Schmidt walked back into the kitchen and told Raymond in a soft voice that he didn’t mean nothing by it, giving him that smile of his and patting his arm. Raymond just nodded real slow. Schmidt told me later, “That’s all you got to do, is scold ’em and then talk real sweet to ’em later. That’s how they learn. ’Cause they’re like children. Right, Bill?” He meant coloreds, I guess. By the way he talked to me, real slow the way you would to a kid, I could tell he thought I was a colored guy, too.

At the end of the night the waiters always sat in the dining room and ate a stew or something that the kitchen had prepared. The busmen, we served it to the waiters. I was running dinner out to one of them and forgot something back in the kitchen. When I went back to get it, I saw Raymond, spitting into a plate of stew. The other colored guys in the kitchen were standing in a circle around Raymond, watching him do it. They all looked over at me when I walked in. It was real quiet and I guess they were waiting to see what I was gonna do.

“Who’s that for?” I said. “Eh?”

“Schmidt,” said Raymond.

I walked over to where they were. I brought up a bunch of stuff from deep down in my throat and spit real good into that plate. Raymond put a spoon in the stew and stirred it up.

“I better take it out to him,” I said, “before it gets cold.”

“Don’t forget the garnish,” said Raymond.

He put a flower of parsley on the plate, turning it a little so it looked nice. I took the stew out and served it to Schmidt. I watched him take the first bite and nod his head like it was good. None of the colored guys said nothing to me about it again.

I got drunk with John Petersen in a saloon a coupla nights after and told him what I’d done. I thought he’d a get a good laugh out of it, but instead he got serious. He put his hand on my arm the way he did when he wanted me to listen.

“Stay out of Schmidt’s way,” said John.

“Ah,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “He gives me any trouble, I’m gonna punch him in the kisser.” The beer was making me brave.

“Just stay out of his way.”

“I look afraid to you?”

“I’m telling you, Schmidt is no waiter.”

“I know it. He’s the worst goddamn waiter I ever seen. Maybe you ought to have one of those meetings of yours and see if you can get him thrown out.”

“Don’t ever mention those meetings again, to anyone,” said John, and he squeezed my arm tight. I tried to pull it away from him but he held his grip. “Bill, do you know what a Pinkerton man is?”

“What the hell?”

“Never mind. You just keep to yourself, and don’t talk about those meetings, hear?”

I had to look away from his eyes. “Sure, sure.”

“Okay, friend.” John let go of my arm. “Let’s have another beer.”

A week later John Petersen didn’t show up for work. And a week after that the cops found him floating down river in the Potomac. I read about it in the Tribune. It was just a short notice, and it didn’t say nothing else.

A cop in a suit came to the restaurant and asked us some questions. A couple of the waiters said that John probably had some bad hooch and fell into the drink. I didn’t know what to think. When it got around to the rest of the crew, everyone kinda got quiet, if you know what I mean. Even that bastard Wesley didn’t make no jokes. I guess we were all thinking about John in our own way. Me, I wanted to throw up. I’m telling you, thinking about John in that river, it made me sick.

John didn’t ever talk about no family and nobody knew nothing about a funeral. After a few days, it seemed like everybody in the restaurant forgot about him. But me, I couldn’t forget.

One night I walked into Chinatown. It wasn’t far from my new place. There was this kid from St. Mary’s, Billy Nicodemus, whose father worked at the city morgue. Nicodemus wasn’t no doctor or nothing, he washed off the slabs and cleaned the place, like that. He was known as a hard drinker, maybe because of what he saw every day, and maybe just because he liked the taste. I knew where he liked to drink.

I found him in a no-name restaurant on the Hip Sing side of Chinatown. He was in a booth by himself, drinking something from a teacup. I crossed the room, walking through the cigarette smoke, passing the whores and the skinny Chink gangsters in their too-big suits and the cops who were taking money from the Chinks to look the other way. I stood over Nicodemus and told him who I was. I told him I knew his kid, told him his kid was good. Nicodemus motioned for me to have a seat.

A waiter brought me an empty cup. I poured myself some gin from the teapot on the table. We tapped cups and drank. Nicodemus had straight black hair wetted down and a big mole with hair coming out of it on one of his cheeks. He talked better than I did. We said some things that were about nothing, and then I asked him some questions about John. The gin had loosened his tongue.

“Yeah, I remember him,” said Nicodemus, after thinking about it for a short while. He gave me the once-over and leaned forward. “This was your friend?”

“Yes.”

“They found a bullet in the back of his head. A twenty-two.”

I nodded and turned the teacup in small circles on the table. “The Tribune didn’t say nothing about that.”

“The papers don’t always say. The police cover it up while they look for who did it. But that boy didn’t drown. He was murdered first, then dropped in the drink.”

“You saw him?” I said.

Nicodemus shrugged. “Sure.”

“What’d he look like?”

“You really wanna know?”

“Yeah.”

“He was all gray and blown up, like a balloon. The gas does that to ’em, when they been in the water.”

“What about his eyes?”

“They were open. Pleading.”

“Huh?”

“His eyes. It was like they were sayin please.”

I needed another drink. I had some more gin.

“You ever heard of a Pinkerton man?” I said.

“Sure,” said Nicodemus. “A detective.”

“Like the police?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“They go to work with other guys and pretend they’re one of them. They find out who’s stealing. Or they find out who’s trying to make trouble for the boss. Like the ones who want to make a strike.”

“You mean, like if a guy wants to get the workers together and make things better?”

“Yeah. Have meetings and all that. The guys who want to start a union. Pinkertons look for those guys.”

We drank the rest of the gin. We talked about his kid. We talked about Schmeling and Baer, and the wrestling match that was coming up between Londos and George Zaharias at Griffith Stadium. I got up from my seat, shook Nicodemus’s hand, and thanked him for the conversation.

“Efharisto, patrioti.”

“Yasou, Vasili.”

I walked back to my place and had a beer I didn’t need. I was drunk and more confused than I had been before. I kept hearing John’s voice, the way he called me “friend.” I saw his eyes saying please. I kept thinking, I should have gone to his goddamn meeting, if that was gonna make him happy. I kept thinking I had let him down. While I was thinking, I sharpened the blade of my Italian switch knife on a stone.

The next night, last night, I was serving Wesley Schmidt his dinner after we closed. He was sitting by himself like he always did. I dropped the plate down in front of him.

“You got a minute to talk?” I said.

“Go ahead and talk,” he said, putting the spoon to his stew and stirring it around.

“I wanna be a Pinkerton man,” I said.

Schmidt stopped stirring his stew and looked up my way. He smiled, showing me his white teeth. Still, his eyes were cold.

“That’s nice. But why are you telling me this?”

“I wanna be a Pinkerton, just like you.”

Schmidt pushed his stew plate away from him and looked around the dining room to make sure no one could hear us. He studied my face. I guess I was sweating. Hell, I know I was. I could feel it dripping on my back.

“You look upset,” said Schmidt, his voice real soft, like music. “You look like you could use a friend.”

“I just wanna talk.”

“Okay. You feel like having a beer, something like that?”

“Sure, I could use a beer.”

“I finish eating, I’ll go down and get my car. I’ll meet you in the alley out back. Don’t tell anyone, hear, because then they might want to come along. And we wouldn’t have the chance to talk.”

“I’m not gonna tell no one. We just drive around, eh? I’m too dirty to go to a saloon.”

“That’s swell,” said Schmidt. “We’ll just drive around.”

I went out to the alley where Schmidt was parked. Nobody saw me get into his car. It was a blue ’31 Dodge coupe with wire wheels, a rumble seat, and a trunk rack. A five-hundred-dollar car if it was dime.

“Pretty,” I said, as I got in beside him. There were hand-tailored slipcovers on the seats.

“I like nice things,” said Schmidt.

He was wearing his suit jacket, and it had to be 80 degrees. I could see a lump under the jacket. I figured, the bastard is carrying a gun.

We drove up to Colvin’s, on 14th Street. Schmidt went in and returned with a bag of loose bottles of beer. There must have been a half-dozen Schlitz in the bag. Him making waiter’s pay, and the fancy car and the high-priced beer.

He opened a coupla beers and handed me one. The bottle was ice cold. Hot as the night was, the beer tasted good.

We drove around for a while. We went down to Hains Point. Schmidt parked the Dodge facing the Washington Channel. Across the channel, the lights from the fish vendors on Maine Avenue threw color on the water. We drank another beer. He gave me one of his tailor-mades and we had a couple smokes. He talked about the Senators and the Yankees, and how Baer had taken Schmeling out with a right in the tenth. Schmidt didn’t want to talk about nothing serious yet. He was waiting for the beer to work on me, I knew.

“Goddamn heat,” I said. “Let’s drive around some, get some air moving.”

Schmidt started the coupe. “Where to?”

“I’m gonna show you a whorehouse. Best secret in town.”

Schmidt looked me over and laughed. The way you laugh at a clown.

I gave Schmidt some directions. We drove some, away from the park and the monuments to where people lived. We went through a little tunnel and crossed into Southwest. Most of the streetlamps were broke here. The row houses were shabby, and you could see shacks in the alleys and clothes hanging on lines outside the shacks. It was late, long past midnight. There weren’t many people out. The ones that were out were coloreds. We were in a place called Bloodfield.

“Pull over there,” I said, pointing to a spot along the curb where there wasn’t no light. “I wanna show you the place I’m talking about.”

Schmidt did it and cut the engine. Across the street were some houses. All except one of them was dark. From the lighted one came fast music, like the colored music Laura had played in her room.

“There it is right there,” I said, meaning the house with the light. I was lying through my teeth. I didn’t know who lived there and I sure didn’t know if that house had whores. I had never been down here before.

Schmidt turned his head to look at the row house. I slipped my switch knife out of my right pocket and laid it flat against my right leg.

When he turned back to face me, he wasn’t smiling no more. He had heard about Bloodfield and he knew he was in it. I think he was scared.

“You bring me down to niggertown, for what? ” he said. “To show me a whorehouse?”

“I thought you’re gonna like it.”

“Do I look like a man who’d pay to fuck a nigger? Do I? You don’t know anything about me.”

He was showing his true self now. He was nervous as a cat. My nerves were bad, too. I was sweating through my shirt. I could smell my own stink in the car.

“I know plenty,” I said.

“Yeah? What do you know?”

“Pretty car, pretty suits… top-shelf beer. How you get all this, huh?”

“I earned it.”

“As a Pinkerton, eh?”

Schmidt blinked real slow and shook his head. He looked out his window, looking at nothing, wasting time while he decided what he was gonna do. I found the raised button on the pearl handle of my knife. I pushed the button. The blade flicked open and barely made a sound. I held the knife against my leg and turned it so the blade was pointing back.

Sweat rolled down my neck as I looked around. There wasn’t nobody out on the street.

Schmidt turned his head. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand and straightened his arm.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I just wanna know what happened to John.”

Schmidt smiled. All those white teeth. I could see him with his mouth open, his lips stretched, those teeth showing. The way an animal looks after you kill it. Him lying on his back on a slab.

“I heard he drowned,” said Schmidt.

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess he couldn’t swim.”

“Pretty hard to swim, you got a bullet in your head.”

Schmidt’s smile turned down. “Can you swim, Bill?”

I brought the knife across real fast and buried it into his armpit. I sunk the blade all the way to the handle. He lost his breath and made a short scream. I twisted the knife. His blood came out like someone was pouring it from a jug. It was warm and it splashed onto my hands. I pulled the knife out, and while he was kicking at the floorboards, I stabbed him a coupla more times in the chest. I musta hit his heart or something because all of the sudden there was plenty of blood all over the car. I’m telling you, the seats were slippery with it. He stopped moving. His eyes were open and they were dead.

I didn’t get tangled up about it or nothing like that. I wasn’t scared. I opened up his suit jacket and saw a steel revolver with wood grips holstered there. It was small caliber. I didn’t touch the gun. I took his wallet out of his trousers, pulled the bills out of it, wiped off the wallet with my shirttail, and threw the empty wallet on the ground. I put the money in my shoe. I fit the blade back into the handle of my switch knife and slipped the knife into my pocket. I put all the empty beer bottles together with the full ones in the paper bag and took the bag with me as I got out of the car. I closed the door soft and wiped off the handle and walked down the street.

I didn’t see no one for a couple of blocks. I came to a sewer and I put the bag down the hole. The next block, I came to another sewer and I took off my bloody shirt and threw it down the hole of that one. I was wearing an undershirt, didn’t have no sleeves. My pants were black, so you couldn’t see the blood. I kept walking toward Northwest.

Someone laughed from deep in an alley and I kept on.

Another block or so I came up on a group of mavri standing around the steps of a house. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer. I wasn’t gonna run or nothing. I had to go by them to get home. They stopped talking and gave me hard eyes as I got near them. That’s when I saw that one of them was the cook, Raymond, from the kitchen. Our eyes kind of came together, but neither one of us said a word or smiled or even made a nod.

One of the coloreds started to come toward me and Raymond stopped him with the flat of his palm. I walked on.

I walked for a couple of hours, I guess. Somewhere in Northwest I dropped my switch knife down another sewer. When I heard it hit the sewer bottom I started to cry. I wasn’t crying ’cause I had killed Schmidt. I didn’t give a damn nothing about him. I was crying ’cause my father had given me that knife, and now it was gone. I guess I knew I was gonna be in America forever, and I wasn’t never going back to Greece. I’d never see my home or my parents again.

When I got back to my place I washed my hands real good. I opened up a bottle of Abner-Drury and put fire to a Fatima and had myself a seat at the table.

This is where I am right now.

Maybe I’m gonna get caught and maybe I’m not. They’re gonna find Schmidt in that neighborhood and they’re gonna figure a colored guy killed him for his money. The cops, they’re gonna turn Bloodfield upside down. If Raymond tells them he saw me, I’m gonna get the chair. If he doesn’t, I’m gonna be free. Either way, what the hell, I can’t do nothing about it now.

I’ll work at the hotel, get some experience and some money, then open my own place, like Nick Stefanos. Maybe if I can find two nickels to rub together, I’m gonna go to church and talk to that girl, Irene, see if she wants to be my wife. I’m not gonna wait too long. She’s clean as a whistle, that one.

I’ve had my eye on her for some time.

I was up in my suite in a residence hotel, where the production housed out-of-town talent and department heads, when I heard a knock on my door. It was late, around two in the morning, but we had wrapped less than an hour earlier, and crew kept different hours than straights. Few of us went to sleep as soon as we got home. We had to have a snack, or a couple of drinks, or some smoke, a little television, sex if we could get it. Anything to make us feel normal at the end of the day. Anything that would make us feel that we led normal lives.

I looked through the peephole. Annette was standing out in the carpeted hall. She’d called me minutes earlier on the house phone and asked if I wanted some company. I was expecting her, but still, I liked to watch her out there, waiting for me to open the door. It made my pulse run. Both of us had been single for a long while, but our relationship was private.

I let Annette in and closed the door.

“Hi,” she said, her mouth curved up in a sweet smile. She stepped out of her sandals.

“Hi.”

I kissed her soft lips, held her and stroked her bare arms. She was warm to the touch. She wore tailored velour sweats and a cutoff tee, and her copper-and-brown hair was up and back in a soft band. She was in her early forties, a large-featured woman with green eyes. She was curvy, big-breasted, thick in the thighs, and generous in back. She was olive-skinned and exotic, a Mediterranean girl built like a black woman. She was exactly what I like.

“Good day?” she said.

“Fourteen hours. The director shot too much stuff we’ll never use. Anyway, we got the pages. You?”

“A little rough.” It was all she needed to say. I knew she was under the gun. “I could use a glass of wine.”

I opened a bottle of Rodney Strong, a good everyday Merlot that Annette liked, poured it into two short hotel-issue glasses, and took it over to the living room couch, where we had a seat. I lit a couple of candles and programmed my phone to play some tunes through a Bluetooth speaker I took from job to job. The phone and speaker arrangement was my portable stereo. Everything I owned was portable: the push-up stands, my shaving kit, my fold-up Beats, my Swiss Army knife. Everything. I owned a condo in a Mid-Atlantic city, but I lived in hotels.

Annette and I drank wine and talked about our day. We laughed about the bosses, though she was a department head, and technically, I was management, too. Typically, I was on set call-to-wrap, and she popped in at various locations before rehearsal to check out the work of her crew. Then she’d go off to prep the next episode. Seeing her arrive on set wearing one of her many cool, understated outfits was always the highlight of my day. Hats were her trademark. She walked like a cat. She was smart and talented, a true artist. Annette was our art director and she had style.

“You mind if I take this off?” she said, her hands going up under her shirt. “It’s too tight.”

“I like tight things.”

“Stop.”

She unfastened her bra, produced it like a magician, and dropped it on the carpet beside the couch.

“Don’t forget this.” I took liberties and pulled her T-shirt up over her head.

“You too, Buster.”

“Don’t call me Buster. That’s a name for a dog.”

“Come on.”

I removed my shirt. We embraced and kissed, both of us naked above the waist, skin to skin. I caressed her and squeezed one of her dark nipples, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger until it was a pebble.

Our tongues mingled. I felt a catch in her breath and heard her moan. She gently pushed me away and chuckled.

“Who’s this?” she said, nodding at my speaker.

“The new xx,” I said, and shrugged sheepishly. “Not very original of me, I know.”

“Wine, candles, and make-out music.”

“I’m not as creative as you.”

“It’s perfect.”

We kissed some more and had a few laughs. While we talked, I slid my hand beneath her sweats, pushed the crotch of her damp lace panties aside, slipped my longest finger inside her, and stroked her clit. It got warm in the room. She lay back on the couch and arched her back, and I peeled off her pants and thong. Now she was nude. I stripped down to my boxer briefs and crouched over her. I let her pull me free because I knew she liked to. She stroked my pole and took off my briefs, and I got between her and spread her muscular thighs with my knees and rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide, and then I split her. We fucked for a while, slow and deep, with my feet against the scrolled arm of the couch for leverage. Neither of us allowed ourselves to come. It was too good to end.

“Let’s go to my bed,” I said. We were pretty sweaty by then.

I brought the candles, the speaker, and my phone. Annette followed with the glasses and the bottle of wine. Entering my bedroom, I switched the music over to an Anthony Hamilton mix and let that ride. Anthony was our favorite, spiritual and secular, authentic and sublime.

My room was large, with a four-poster bed and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave to a view of the street below and the city skyline. Because it was on the top floor of the hotel, and because there were no nearby buildings as high as mine, it was completely private. Moonlight and candlelight are a heady aphrodisiac, and I kept the curtains open at all times.

I pulled her to me. I took her band off, and her hair fell free about her shoulders. I cupped my hand around the back of her neck, and we made out standing beside my bed. It felt good to both of us, pressed together, her body lush, soft, and hot against mine. She was a good kisser; our mouths fit.

She got onto the bed, atop the blankets, and I spread her out. I held her hands and raised them above her, and I kissed her. I kissed her chest and her inner thighs and everywhere. Her pussy was clean, with a five-o’clock shadow and just a hint of smell. I penetrated her with my thumb while I licked and kissed and pressed my tongue into her swollen button. She talked to me and told me what to do. “There,” she said, and “Yeah,” and she said my name, and then her thighs tensed and shuddered. She spasmed and pushed my head away. I lay back and left her alone to enjoy her last rippling throes. But I only left her for a minute. She was ripe, and I pulled her to the edge of the mattress and stood beside the bed and spread her legs. I fucked her like that, me, looking down and watching myself, thick, plunging into her velvet, standing on the carpet with great purchase, her lying there, her knees bent, taking me in. I turned her face to lick inside her ear and kiss her neck, and then her mouth, and she said, “God,” and said it louder, and I controlled it, and she bucked as she came, this time harder than the last.

When her heart had slowed down, I withdrew from her and handed her a short glass. I took mine off the dresser, and both of us drank some wine.

“Now you,” she said.

I lay on my back, and Annette put a pillow under my head. She spread my legs as I had done for her before, and got between me and played with my dick. She knocked the head of it against the nipples of her pendulous breasts and hit it on her tongue like a hammer to a bell.

“I love your cock,” she said.

“It loves you.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Touch my ass.”

She tickled my anus as she licked my balls and shaft, and slathered her tongue on my helmet. I laced my fingers through her hair and closed my eyes.

“Go,” I said.

I stopped breathing and, like her, invoked a higher power. My orgasm was eye-popping, as I blew a hot load into her mouth. It seemed to last forever, and she took it all.

“Thank you,” I said, my hand still in her hair. I must have been twisting it. It was a mess.

“My pleasure.”

“Sorry. I know that it was a lot. It felt like a lot.”

“You could help me out and empty that thing once in a while.”

“I don’t care to spill my seed. I like to save it all for you.”

She moved up and came beside me, rested her head on my chest. It was quiet now, with just the soul music playing in the room. She blinked slowly and shut her eyes, and I listened and waited for her breathing to slow down. Soon, with each of her inhales, I heard a small click. That was the sound of her in sleep. In the candlelight, I watched her.

I checked my wristwatch. It was nearly four a.m. We had a short turnaround, a nine-o’clock call, which meant I had to be up at eight. Four hours’ sleep for both of us, but that was workable, and not unusual. It was late in the shoot, and all of us were running on fumes.

A little while later, I touched her shoulder and said, “Annette.” Her eyes fluttered open. I hated to rouse her, but I knew she liked to wake up in her own bed.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She looked up at me without raising her head. The moon had dropped, and its light came full into the room and it was in her eyes.

“That was nice,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I love you, Vic.”

I made no comment. I studied her face, a mix of affection and disappointment, and felt a rush of emotion. When production wrapped we’d go our separate ways. “If it happened on location, it didn’t happen.” That’s what was said in our line of work. Maybe it would be like that with me and Annette, too. She’d move on, and so would I. But I knew that she’d always be deep in my head.

Many thanks to my longtime editor, Reagan Arthur, of Little, Brown, and my literary agent, Sloan Harris, of ICM. Thanks go out as well to James Grady, Otto Penzler, Johnny Temple, Dennis McMillan, and John Harvey, who were the original editors of several of these stories. This collection is dedicated to Charles C. Mish and Estelle Petrulakis. Charles Mish taught a class in crime fiction, which I took as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland in 1979. He turned me on to novels and convinced me that all good writing, regardless of subject, has worth. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mr. Mish changed the course of my life. Estelle Petrulakis taught Sunday school with my mother at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral for more than twenty-five years and was an elementary school teacher in some of D.C.’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Mrs. Petrulakis gave me books throughout my childhood and always encouraged me to reach for something greater than I thought I could achieve. There is usually one teacher who makes a difference in a person’s life. I had two.