"Whaddya mean?"
"I mean you're so out of it, you ought to be put out to pasture, Pappy." He pointed through the wire mesh of the playground fence across to the other side.
Past the seesaws and spring-mounted ducks were a large cluster of children waving money. In the center of the group was a tall gray-haired lady with glasses.
"Who's that?" Pappy asked, walking quickly toward the woman.
"Meet your competition," Frankie said.
The woman was handing out small glassine envelopes filled with brown powder and exchanging them for five-dollar bills.
"Is this any good?" one of the children asked.
"Folger's crystals," the woman said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes crinkled behind her bifocals.
"You got Maxwell House?" a boy wearing corduroy pants with a bear on the pocket asked knowledgeably. "My brother says Maxwell House is the best."
"I'll have some next week," the woman promised. "And Hills Brothers, too."
"Oh, boy!"
The woman chucked him gently under the chin. "And if you're willing to pay a little more, I've got some special edition A & P Fresh Ground for parties. Dynamite."
"I'll take some."
"Me, too," a little voice squeaked as the grandmotherly lady passed out her envelopes.
Pappy shook his head. "I can't believe it," he said disgustedly. "Selling nickel bags to schoolkids."
"What do you think you were doing?" Frankie said, sniffing deeply from his envelope of instant coffee and rubbing a little over his gums.
"I wasn't dealing coffee," Pappy said, indignant.
"They always say that smoking pot leads to bigger things."
Pappy looked carefully at the old woman. "Say, you look familiar," he said.
The gray-haired lady gave Pappy a shove. "Buzz off, turdbreath. This is my territory now."
"Hey, wait a second. I've been coming here for years. So now, I should let you horn in... in..." The words dried up in his throat. Pappy's eyes stared glassily ahead to a point beyond the old lady and the children— at a black Cadillac Seville rolling slowly down the street. And beyond it, a young man in a T-shirt walking toward him down the sidewalk, a man with brown hair and brown eyes and thick wrists.
"Excuse me, I gotta run," Pappy said, twirling abruptly in the other direction.
But the man with the thick wrists seemed to move without walking. And before Pappy, running at full speed, reached the corner, he found himself plastered against the playground fence, his forearms and shins woven deftly through the fence.
"Well, Pappy Eisenstein," Remo said. "Isn't this a surprise."
"Yeah, a regular barrel of monkeys," Pappy said. "How'd you find me?"
"Just luck," Remo said, smiling.
It had been luck. After leaving the warehouse, Remo felt that he was being followed. The same black Cadillac Seville with dark polarized windows had inched behind him for eleven random blocks, passing him only to permit what little traffic there was to go by, then circled the block and trailed him again. When he'd finally gone up to have a talk with the driver, the Seville spurted forward, slowing up only enough to give Remo a chance to catch up.
It was a game, Remo decided. Some rich old lunatic out for a drive, having fun with the pedestrians. The game had brought a piece of luck for Remo and, seeming to sense that the cat-and-mouse chase was now over, the driver gave up and the Seville turned the corner.
"I want to talk to you," Remo said. "Don't go away."
"Very funny. Ha, ha. I'm laughing," Pappy said bitterly, wiggling his feet through the wire fence.
The children were pointing at Pappy's ridiculous figure and giggling merrily. The old lady batted her eyelashes demurely behind her spectacles.
"I thank you kindly, sir," she said in a sweet voice. "That degenerate was beginning to bother the little ones, and as you can see, I'm just a helpless old widow..."
"...Who pushes dope to babies," Remo finished. With hands moving as fast as birds' wings, he grabbed every packet the children had and ripped them to shreds, sending the coffee flying on the breeze. Then, withut stopping, he snatched the roll of five-dollar bills from the old lady and tore that up, too. Finally he dumped the remaining supply of coffee from the woman's handbag and blew the powder out of sight.
Everyone except Pappy, who wept volubly, was too stunned to react. The old lady was the first to recover. With a disapproving "Tut-tut" she slammed a hairy fist in the direction of Remo's jaw. He caught the fist, flipped the old lady in a 360-degree arc, and yanked off the mass of gray hair. Beneath it was a crew cut.
"Why, hello, Granny," Remo said.
"Hector Gomez," Pappy shouted. "I knew it! I knew it! God, you smack pushers'll stoop to anything."
Hector shrugged.
The children screamed. They screamed even louder when Remo gave them each a hefty slap across the hindquarters and sent them racing down the street.
"You're wrecking my trade," Hector said reasonably.
"That's not all I'm going to wreck." Remo picked the man up by the belt and tossed him effortlessly over the fence into the playground. The pusher landed on one of the spring-based ducks. The fat steel coils contracted under the big man's weight, then sprang upward, pulling him through the air.
"This I don't have to watch," Pappy said from his position on the fence. "I seen it all before."
"He's not going to die," Remo said equably. "But he's never going to be in business again, either."
The splat told Pappy it was all over. Glancing behind him, he caught sight of the man in the granny outfit, who had landed headfirst on the roof of P.S. 109.
"That's what I thought I'd see," said Pappy, wincing.
"He's not dead," Remo insisted, brushing the coffee residue off his hands. "If I'd thrown him two or three degrees further in either direction, I'd have killed him, but..."
Pappy was staring at him with terrified eyes.
Remo cleared his throat. "Well, that doesn't matter," he said. "I thought you were going straight, Pappy. You promised me."
"Yeah, I will. I owe you one."
"You still owe me one from the last time I let you live. Ten years ago, remember?"
Pappy remembered Remo, all right. As if he could ever forget a killer like that. The biggest collection of drug dealers ever assembled, and Remo had gone through them like a hot knife through butter. Fifteen guys dead in eight seconds. And the guys had had guns. Remo and the old Chinese guy with him had used only their hands.
Pappy had been no more than a messenger then, a harmless old rummy whom the bosses allowed to be present at the big meetings to go out for ice or broads. And so when the holocaust had come, Remo let Pappy go to warn others in the profession.
"I tried to get a real job," Pappy pleaded. "But I can't do nothing else. To tell the truth, I ain't even much good at this."
"Save the sob story."
"All right, already," Pappy said, giving up. "So poke out my eyeballs. You want dope, you got the wrong guy."
"I don't want dope. I want a connection to Colombia," Remo said. "Pot smugglers do business in Colombia, I hear."
"You still got the wrong guy. Me, I'm a marijuana dealer. The last of a dying breed. Nobody's flying to Colombia for pot anymore. You want to get into Colombia without a passport, that's who you see." He pointed to Gomez on the school roof. "Only he's in no condition to talk now, smartass." Pappy straightened out his threadbare coat.
"What's he go to Colombia for?" Remo asked.
Pappy rolled his eyes. "For coffee, man. You blind or something? The kids all are stoned on heroin au lait. It's in the coffee. Don't ask me how it gets there, I don't know heroin from hamhocks, but that's what the smart pushers are running these days. Coffee."
"But coffee was just recalled today," Remo said. "Up to now, it was legal."
"You think these guys are idiots? The big dealers, the fat men with their Lincolns, the Mafia types with the warehouses full of horse— they're losing their shirts, just like me. We're out in the cold because we didn't see what was coming. Thought somebody would always be buying pot or straight heroin. But the smart guys, the independents, they see everybody getting zoned out on coffee, and what do they think?" Pappy tapped his forehead, "I'll tell you what they think. They think, hey, this stuffs too good to be legal. So naturally, it ain't going to be legal for long, get it?"