“I’m sorry, Mr. Sanson, how can I help you?”
“My people are worried about the laminates.”
“Worried?”
“When and where do we pick them up?”
“Oh. Just a moment, please, I’ll put you through to our security division.”
The Deaf Man waited. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to anyone in the security division. In the corporate world, it was always best to deal with lower-level twerps because twerps always wanted to make themselves seem important even if they had to give away the store to create the impression. Someone in Security might…
“Hello?” a voice said.
“This is Sonny Sanson,” the Deaf Man said. “Who am I speaking to, please?”
“Ronnie Hemmler.”
“Mr. Hemmler, I’m handling the arrangements here in the city for Spit Shine? For the weekend gig? My people are wondering about the laminates. Would you know what the plans are?”
“Plans for what?” Hemmler asked.
Note of suspicion in his voice, not for nothing was he a Security person.
“For picking them up. My people are getting nervous.”
“What people?”
“Spit Shine?” the Deaf Man said patiently. “The group?”
“Yeah?”
“We want to pick up our laminates.”
“Didn’t you get anything in the mail on this?”
“Not yet.”
“Something went out on this last week.”
“From you?”
“No, no, it would’ve come from Artco.”
“Artco? Is that another company?”
“No, it’s a department here. Artists Coordination. They’re in charge of things like that.”
“Who do I talk to there?”
“Just a second,” Hemmler said.
The Deaf Man waited.
When Hemmler came back on, he said, “Sonny?”
He hated it when people who didn’t know him called him by his first name—even if it wasn’t his real name.
“Yes?” he said, not having to feign irritation this time.
“You can try Larry Palmer up there, I’ll give you his extension number.”
“Can’t you just switch me?”
“I’ll try, but it doesn’t always work. Let me give you the extension in case you get cut off.”
“Thank you,” the Deaf Man said.
Hemmler gave him the extension number and said, “Now hang on.”
The Deaf Man listened while Hemmler told the operator to transfer the call to three-nine-four, and then he waited again, certain he would be disconnected and surprised when a woman’s voice said, “Artco.”
“Larry Palmer, please,” he said.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Sonny Sanson. Ronnie Hemmler in Security asked me to call.”
“Just one moment, please.”
He waited again.
“Larry Palmer.”
The Deaf Man went through the whole drill yet another time. Palmer listened patiently.
“So what is it you want to know?” he asked.
“We haven’t got our laminates yet. My people…”
“You’ll get those at the site. You managing Spit Shine?”
“No, I’m just smoothing the way for them while they’re here.”
“Well, when they get to the park…they’ll want to do a sound check, I guess, make sure everything’s the way they want it…”
“Oh, sure.”
“So just have your road manager stop in the trailer, let them know who he wants around the act. In the stage area, you know? How many people he wants there. They’ll give him the laminates he needs.”
“What trailer would that be?” the Deaf Man asked.
“The production trailer,” Palmer said, sounding somewhat surprised. “On the site. Windows’ll have a stage manager in there.”
“Who do we talk to if the stage manager’s out to lunch?” he asked, smiling, keeping his tone light.
“Well, there’ll be a secretary in the trailer, two or three assistants, you know how these things work.”
“Sure. What’s a good time to stop by?”
“Once they start setting up, they’ll be going day and night.”
“When will that be?”
“Listen, don’t you know all this?”
“There was a foul-up,” the Deaf Man said.
“What kind of foul-up?”
“Long story,” he said. “i still don’t know when we’ll be setting up, or when we can do our sound checks, or…”
“Well, the unions’ll be loading in at six tomorrow morning, but you won’t want to pick up your laminates then, there’ll be a mob scene at the trailer. You won’t need them till your act gets there, anyway, so what’s the hurry?”
“No hurry at all,” the Deaf Man said. “Thanks a lot.”
“No sweat, Sonny,” Palmer said, and hung up.
IN RIVERHEAD early that afternoon…
The name Riverhead came from the Dutch, though not directly. The land up there had once been owned by a patroon named Ryerhurt, and it had been called Ryerhurt’s Farms, which eventually became abbreviated and bastardized to Riverhead. Over the years, this section of the city had been inhabited sequentially by Jews, Italians, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and—most recently—Koreans, Colombians, and Dominicans. If ever there was a melting pot, Riverhead was it. The only trouble was that the melting pot had never come to a boil.
In Riverhead early that afternoon, two young men crouched behind the stairs in the ground floor hallway of the parole office on Edgerley Avenue, whispering in their native tongue about April Fools’ Day. In Colombia, April Fools’ Day was called el día de engañabobos , and whoever was made a fool of on this day was called un inocente. Today, the two young men planned to make a fool of a parole officer named Allen Maguire. The way they planned to do this was to kill him.
In this city, killing someone wasn’t such a big deal. In the first quarter of the year, for example, five hundred and forty-six murders were committed, which might have sounded like a lot when you compared it to the mere fifty blankets stolen from DSS TEMPLE in three months last year, but all it really came to was a scant nine murders a day, not bad when you considered all the guns out there. Sixty-one percent of all the murders in this city were committed by firearms, but that was no reason to take guns away from people, was it? After all, in eight percent of this city’s murders, feet or fists were the weapons, but did anybody suggest amputation as a means of control? Of course not.
The two men planning to kill the parole officer did not plan to use their fists or their feet. They were both armed with Intratec nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols capable of laying down a barrage of fire at the rate of five or six rounds a second. The Intratecs were part of the April Fools’ Day joke. The two Colombians had been hired by a Riverhead drug dealer named Flavio (Fat Boy) Garcia, who’d been convicted two months ago for a parole violation, namely for having in his possession a firearm, namely an Intratec nine. Maguire was the person who’d brought the parole violation charges after Garcia’s arrest, and now Fat Boy was languishing upstate in a delightful little cell at Castle-view Penitentiary, from which he’d ordered the two Colombians to “seriously injure” the parole officer. They took this to mean kill him.
They had not been instructed to kill him on April Fools’ Day, however, nor had they been instructed to use Intratecs on him, but they both felt that since an Intratec had been the instrument of Garcia’s embarrassment, it should now be the instrument of his revenge. They were quite looking forward to doing the parole officer, not the least because Garcia had promised to give both of them promotions if they succeeded in carrying out his instructions. At the moment, they were both clockers, who were low-level people who sold cocaine on street corners. A clocker in the drug world was somewhat higher in status than a toy in the world of graffiti writers. Manuel and Marco planned to change their status within the next twenty minutes.