“So what do you use?” Hawk said.
“Beverage, Fro. I already tol‘ you that. Some Mogen, some Juke, hot day maybe, some six. You use something?”
“I drink the blood of my enemies,” Hawk said and smiled his wide happy smile. His eyes never left Major.
“Whoa,” Major said. “That is dope, man!” He turned toward the others. “Is this a fresh dude? Did I tell you he was bad? The blood of the fucking enemies-shit!”
“How many people you lined?” Shoe asked Hawk.
Hawk looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken.
“I killed me a Jeek, last month,” Shoe said. “Motherfucker tried to stiff me on a buy and I nined him right there.” Shoe nodded toward the barren blacktop playground across the street. There were iron swing sets without swings, and a half-moon metal backboard with no hoop. The metal was shiny in the rain, and the blacktop gleamed with false promise.
“Doing much business since we here?” Hawk said.
“Do business when we want to,” Major said.
“Who’s your truck?” Hawk said.
Major looked at me for a minute and back at Hawk.
“Tony Marcus,” he said proudly. Hawk smiled even more widely.
“Really,” he said.
“You know him?” Major said.
“Un huh,” Hawk said. “My associate here once punched him in the mouth.”
The entire semicircle was silent for a moment. For all their ferocity they were kids. And a man who had punched Tony Marcus, and survived, got their attention.
“You do that?” Major said.
“He annoyed me,” I said.
“I don’t believe you done that,” Major said.
I shrugged.
We were quiet for a while standing in the rain. “Where the sly?” Major said. “She don’t like us no more?”
“Why should she be different?” Hawk said.
“This mean we not going to be on TV?”
Hawk was quiet for a moment. He looked at Major while he was being quiet.
“We need to talk,” Hawk said finally.
“What the fuck we doing, man?”
“Now, right now, you’re profiling,” Hawk said. “And I’m being bored.”
“You bored, man, whyn’t you put your motherfucking ass someplace else, then?”
“Why don’t you and me sit in the car, out of the rain, and we talk?” Hawk said.
You could tell that Major liked that-he and Hawk as equals, the two commanders conferring while the troops stood in the rain. Besides, it was a Jaguar sedan with leather upholstery.
“No reason to get wet,” Major said.
Hawk opened the back door and Major got in. Hawk got in after him. He grinned at me as he got in. I stayed outside the car, with the shotgun, staring at about nineteen hostile gangbangers, in the rain, which was coming harder.
CHAPTER 25
We were at the other end of life. Susan and I and Hawk and Jackie were sharing a bottle of Iron Horse champagne and having dinner on the top floor of the Bostonian Hotel. Hawk had on a black silk suit and a white shirt with a pleated front. I was wearing my dark blue suit, which I almost always wore, because it flattered my eyes, and because I didn’t have another one. I was sure we didn’t look like people who spent their days sitting with guns in the middle of a housing project. And the women we were with didn’t look like they’d date such people.
Jackie was wearing a little black dress with pearls. She rested her forearm on the back of Hawk’s chair and traced small circles between his shoulder blades with her forefinger.
“You talked with the boy?” she said… “Actually talked?”
“Un huh.”
“And are you going to tell me what he said?”
“Background only,” Hawk said.
Jackie nodded.
“You notice,” I said to Susan, “that the Kingfish accent seems to go away when he talks to Jackie?”
Susan smiled, which is something to see. “Yes,” she said, “but I am far too delicate to mention it.”
“That is mostly for you honkies,” Hawk said in a kind of David Niven accent, “so as not to confound your expectations.”
“What did you and Major talk about?” Jackie said.
“Woman is not easily distracted,” Hawk said.
“As you have every reason to know,” Jackie said.
“I wasn’t talking about that,” Hawk said.
There was a moment of silence while Jackie smiled at him and Hawk gave her the same kindly look that he gave everyone.
“Major got in the car,” Hawk said, “and I said to him, `We can go two ways. We can talk, and work out an arrangement, or we can pop the cork on this thing.‘ Major looking mostly at the car while I’m talking. And when I say that, he sort of nod and keep looking at the car. And I say, `I will kill you if I need to.’ And he stop looking at the car and he sort of laugh.”
“Really intimidated,” I said.
“Yuh. He must know your reputation, too, ‘cause he say I be dead and the Mickey, which is you, be dead long time ago, except he says no.”
“We’ve had two encounters and come out first both times,” I said. “Doesn’t that tell him anything?”
“No shooting,” Hawk said. “Kids only impressed with shooting. Everybody got a gun. What you and I would punch somebody on the chops for, these kids shoot you.”
“Makes you nostalgic for street fighters,” I said.
Hawk nodded.
“Mickey?” Susan said.
“Irish,” Hawk said, “means white.”
“All whites?” Susan said.
“Un huh.”
“Would I be Irish?” she said.
“You’d be slut, or sly, or wiggle,” Hawk said. “Women’s race don’t matter.”
“Sexism again,” Susan said.
“You might be an Irish slut, though,” I said.
“Gee,” Susan said, “my chance to pass.”
“Make you an IAP,” I said.
“There’s no such thing,” Susan said.
Hawk had some champagne. He drank it the way people drink Pepsi-Cola. I had never seen it change him. Actually I had never seen anything change him.
“I ask him why he hasn’t given the word already, and he say he trying to give me some respect, ‘cause everybody know ’bout me.”
“Everybody?” Jackie said.
“He mean everybody on Hobart Street,” Hawk said.
“Which to him is everybody,” I said.
“Say everybody wondering why I am there with a flap,” Hawk said and nodded at me. “They trying to figure that out. And he say, why am I? And I tell him it seem like a good idea at the time. He doesn’t like the answer, so he sit a minute and he think about it. And then he say, `So what you going to do?‘ And I say they can do what they want to do somewhere else, not my problem. I say they can’t do it here, in this project. And he say if they just move someplace else and do it, what’s the point of moving them out, and I say the point is, I said I would. And he sit there awhile, and then he say, `I can dig it.’ And he sit awhile longer and he say, `But I can’t let you and the Mickey chase me out, you understand. I can’t let you dis me.‘ And I say, `You willing to die for that?’ And he say, `What else I got?‘ ”
We were all quiet. The waiter came silently by and poured champagne into our glasses and returned the bottle to the ice bucket. It was a quiet room. The tables were spaced so that everyone had space around them. The conversation was muted. There was thick carpeting on the floors so that the waiters in tuxedos moved as silently as assassins among the patrons, their shirtfronts gleaming in the soft light.
“I can dig it,” I said.
CHAPTER 26
Belson called me at 6:30 in the morning while I was making coffee.
“Piece you gave us doesn’t check out,” he said.
“It didn’t kill the kid and her baby?”
“No.”
“Got a next of kin?” I said.
“No. Only way we ID’d her was that the kid was born at Boston City and they had a footprint.”