And lo and behold!
It seemed that in the month of January, which was as far back as the good sergeant wished to go, the precinct had dispatched Charlie Two to the shelter a total of eight times, three of those times to investigate reported assaults, five of them to investigate emergencies that subsequently required hospitalization for rat bites and/or drug overdoses.
The activities log showed an increase in Charlie Two responses for the month of February, with a total of twelve visits to the shelter, most often in the dead of night, for causes similar if not identical to those reported in January.
For the month of March, Charlie Two—which of course was the radio car patrolling the sector in which the shelter was located—had been there only seven times, but one of those calls had been occasioned by a homicide that took place in the shelter’s men’s room.
In short, DSS TEMPLE was no different from any of the city’s other shelters, and Harold Laughton was full of shit, so Meyer called Cotton Hawes at once and told him not to shave over the weekend. Now, at one-thirty that Tuesday morning, a tall red-headed man wearing a tattered brown sports jacket and threadbare blue jeans, his face sporting a three-day beard stubble, his hands encrusted with grime, walked into the shelter and approached the registration desk. He was carrying a duffel bag presumably containing all of his worldly belongings, and he stank so badly of booze that the admissions clerk virtually reeled when the man told him his name was Jerry Hudson and he needed a place to stay for the night.
Hawes signed the register under that name, was handed first the key to a locker and next an index card with the number 104 written on it…
“Lucky number,” Hawes said boozily and grinned at the clerk, showing greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth.
…was told that 104 was the number on his cot—he’d find a cardboard thing with the number on it, hanging from the foot of the cot and was directed to a room across the drill hall floor, where he picked up a pillow, a blanket, and a toilet kit. Contributed by Halligan Food Stores, it said on the kit’s flimsy blue plastic case. Walking with the uncertain step of a drunk, the blanket and pillow clutched to his chest, the duffel hanging halfway down his back, the toilet kit dangling by its cord from his right wrist, he made his way slowly across the huge room to the battered green lockers lining one entire wall. The place echoed with the snores and groans and nocturnal mumblings of hundreds of sleeping men, resonated as well with the voices of men who were wide awake at this hour of the morning and talking loudly to themselves or to others, the drone counterpointed by the mutterings and murmurs of yet more men trying to sleep. He located the locker corresponding to the number on his key, unlocked the door, tossed in his duffel, locked the door again, and pulled the key’s elasticized loop over his right wrist. Five minutes later, he found the cot marked 104, put the blanket at the foot of it and the pillow at the head of it, and sat down heavily on its edge. He was just about to lie down when a voice said, “Up, Mac.”
Hawes turned.
A man shorter than he was, but brimming with more muscles than should have been allowable by law, was standing at the foot of the cot, scowling. He was wearing khaki undershorts and a khaki tank-top undershirt that Hawes guessed was regulation military gear. He was tattooed all over his muscles and in some places where there weren’t any muscles, including the top of his bald head.
“I said up, ” he said. “Offthe cot.”
The last thing Hawes wanted in this place was an argument. He was here to get a line on whoever had stolen a blanket subsequently wrapped around an old lady now deceased. But people had been hurt here, some of them badly, one of them so badly that they’d had to bury him afterward. Hawes wondered if it would appear convincing for a drunk to sober up in ten seconds flat. He decided it would.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
Cold sober.
Alert to any danger.
Was the impression he hoped to create.
As an afterthought, he hiccuped.
The man with all the muscles and tattoos smiled.
“My cot,” he said reasonably.
“One-oh-four,” Hawes said, equally reasonably, and showed the index card and his greenish-yellowish-brownish teeth in a smile that would have made the lab exceedingly proud.
The repulsive coloration had been created by a dentist the lab had called in. The dentist had first cleaned Hawes’s normally pristine teeth with polishing cups, using dental toothpaste, and asking him to rinse afterward. The dentist had then dried off the teeth and painted them with a weak solution of acid to take off the shine. He had let the acid stand for some fifteen to thirty seconds, had washed it off, and had then painted on the Taub stains normally used to match dentures to the natural teeth in the mouth. Discolored teeth were usually green around the gum, brown in the middle, and yellow near the tip. He painted Hawes’s teeth accordingly, coated them with clear plastic, light-fused them, and promised him the process could be reversed whenever Hawes decided to give up his new profession. Hawes hoped so. But he had to admit he looked disgusting.
“One-oh-four is always my cot,” the man said.
Still reasonably. Smiling in return.
“My ticket,” Hawes said, and again showed him the index card with the handwritten number 104 on it.
“A mistake. They must’ve meant one-oh-five.”
Hawes looked over at the cot on his left.
Someone was sound asleep in it.
“Man in it,” he said reasonably.
“One-oh-threethen,” the man said.
Hawes looked at the cot on his right. Someone was sleeping in that one, too. This was getting to be Goldilocks .
“Up,” the man said again, and jerked his thumb over his tattooed shoulder. Hawes saw the head of a dragon glaring at him in reds, blues, and greens. He wondered if the man was a former marine.
“Fuck off, sonny,” he said.
The man blinked.
“What?”
“Or you’re dead fuckin meat,” Hawes said, and lay down again, and closed his eyes in dismissal.
He could hear the man’s sputtering astonishment at the foot of the cot. He kept his eyes closed, tensing for an attack he hoped would not come. In a little while, he pretended to be instantly asleep and snoring.
“Fuckin asshole,” the man muttered at last, and Hawes heard his bare feet padding away from the cot.
He’d slept all that day in preparation for tonight. Now, after he was sure Mr. Muscles was gone for good, he gathered up his things and went into the men’s room, where the voices seemed to be loudest. Carried the blanket and the pillow with him, too, so they wouldn’t be stolen.
There were half a dozen grizzled men gathered near the sinks, talking to a pair of square shields in blue uniforms. Either one of the guards could have been the man Charlie had described as driving him. One a bit shorter than the other, but each in the five-nine to five-eleven range, each in his mid-forties, with brown eyes and dark hair. The conversation stopped for just an instant when Hawes came in, and then picked up again as he went over to one of the urinals. There were no doors on any of the stalls in here, the better to keep the place as drug-free as Harold Laughton had told Meyer it was.
One of the guards was saying that some off-track betting parlors were ritzier than others. That was the exact word he used, ritzier. Hawes had never seen an OTB parlor that could be called ritzy. But the guard went on to say that the parlor he preferred over all the others, the really ritzy one, was the one on Rollins and South Fifth.