Elvis said, “Sure Man, I’m hip,” and walked off. Man was hard to take sometimes, think he own your life, he thought. On the other hand, now, he sound like he know what he doin’. Suddenly, Elvis realized what was about to happen to him. Almost all his short life he had worked to convey an image of murderous villainy. Twenty-four hours from now he would be a murderous villain in fact, or at least a murderous villain’s assistant. He gave a little skip of delight.
Man Louis watched the big youth turn the corner. He got into the Firebird and drove slowly down Lexington Avenue. At 135th Street, he spotted an open saloon, and cruised around until he found a legal parking space. In the saloon, he waited patiently until the man using the phone had finished placing a complicated bet, and then dialed a number.
Donald Walker jumped from his couch at the first ring of the telephone. “I’ll get it. It’s for me,” he cried.
The voice on the phone was that of the man Walker knew as Stack.
“How you doin’, Donald?”
“OK, just fine. What’s happenin’?”
“Everything set. How’s the car? You got the new plates?”
“Yeah. The kid came and brought them over last night, just like you said. I gassed it up and changed the oil. Checked the brakes, everything. I done it myself. It runs real good.”
“Yeah, that’s real fine, Donald. Now listen up. At ten-thirty tomorrow night you gonna be at the Fiftieth Street Lexington station. I mean ten-thirty, Donald, not ten fuckin’ thirty-one, we understand each other? Good. OK, me and my man Willy get in the car, and we drive real slow down Lex. We hang a right on Thirty-ninth and you park on the corner of Thirty-ninth and Madison, on the side street. Eleven o’clock, I get out of the car and go ’round the corner. The whole thing’ll be over in five.
“Then I get back in the car. We drive real slow again, back to the subway. Me and Willy get out. You drive to this hotel I got picked out, I’ll give you the address tomorrow night.”
“What’s this shit! You never said nothing about no hotel.”
“Donald, be cool-use your head. What if somebody see your car? You want to lead them right up your front walk? Wait a day, two days, see if there any heat …”
“What kinda heat? I don’t like this, Stack. What the fuck I gonna tell my wife?”
“Goddam! What you worryin’ about? You some kinda man can’t even lie to a woman. Make up something.”
“And you said I get paid right after. You said! When I’m gonna get my money?”
“You get it when I give it to you.”
“No way, man. I want it then.”
There was a pause on the line. When Louis began to speak again, it was in a low, whispery voice, slow and measured, like an adult recounting the crimes of a child to whom he is about to give a savage beating.
“Donald, let me explain something to you. You in this. You mind me now, cause if you crap out on me, if you mess with me now, you in more deep shit than you ever been in your whole life. Now you don’t know me Donald, but I know you. I know your little house out there in Queens. I know your pretty little wife and your three pretty little children. What you want, Donald, is you want to keep old Stack real happy with you, and with your house and your little family. So how you gonna keep me happy? It real simple. You do what I say, when I say it, and you keep your fat mouth shut. Now, do we have an understanding?”
Walker’s mouth was cotton-dry. He croaked out a sound.
“I didn’t get that, Donald.”
“Yeah, Stack, you know I didn’t mean nothing. I just strung out, is all. You said you gonna get me some …”
“That’s my man. I am gonna get you something to fix you right up, Donald. I got some bad shit, Donald, and a big piece got your name right on it. Now you fix it with the wife, and you be there, hear?”
“I be there, Stack. Don’t worry.”
“I got nothin’ to worry about, Donald.”
The line went dead.
“Who was that on the phone, Donald?” his wife, Ella, called from the upstairs bedroom.
Walker shivered and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dish towel. He walked slowly up the stairs.
“Donald?”
“It was Billy Cass, from the plant, he say they hiring up by that computer factory in Stamford. He say, maybe him and me should go up there, go for a job interview.”
His wife was in her robe, sitting at her vanity table and applying face cream. Walker started to get undressed. He was a poor liar and he kept his face averted as he spoke.
“That sounds great, Don. When were you fixing to go?”
“Well, he say we should leave after work tomorrow and drive up. His sister live somewheres around there-he said we could spend the night there and be first in line the next morning.”
Ella finished her face and got into bed. Walker joined her. “That sounds good, Donald. You be back Saturday, then?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. I’ll call you from there and let you know how it comes out.”
As he lay back and switched off the bedside light, Walker tried to compose his racing thoughts. Stack had promised him $500 for the job. That would be enough to pay off the two month’s arrears on the mortgage. He had a letter from the bank that told him that unless they saw some money by the end of the month-in less than two weeks-they would start foreclosure proceedings. Walker had busted his hump, working double shifts at the commercial laundry, to get together the down payment, but it wasn’t the thought of losing the house that bothered him as much as explaining to his wife where the mortgage money had gone.
Walker was an easygoing young man who had married into a family of strivers. In six years of marriage it seemed to him that he had not drawn an easy breath. His wife had a year of college and his in-laws were all civil servants of one kind or another. He had not finished high school himself, and Ella was bound and determined to show her clan that she had not made a mistake in marrying the good-looking but feckless Donald Walker.
So he worked like a dog, and got pushed harder, until each demand seemed like a razor-toothed little animal chewing away inside his skull. But lately he had found a way out. He would drive out for an evening after dinner and go to a local pool hall, and shoot a few games of eight-ball or snooker. After a while, a man named Paradise would come in, and Walker would follow Paradise into the men’s room and would give Paradise ten, or twenty, or fifty dollars, and Paradise would give Walker a glassine envelope filled with white powder. Then Walker would sit in his car and for a few hours he would be on top of things, in charge, together. He wasn’t a junkie, hell no! He could kick it easy after things settled down a little. But that’s where two months of mortgage had gone to, and that’s why Mandeville Louis had picked him, with the mystical vulturelike radar that led him to the Donald Walkers of this world, to be his wheelman.
Chapter 2
Walker had heard the expression “living hell” before, but he had never thought much about what it meant before the day he spent waiting for the night he was to debut as a wheelman for Mandeville Louis.
His environment helped. A commercial laundry would encourage even a soul washed white as snow to imagine the infernal realms. The air was gray with steam and thick with the sweetish reek of solvent. Periodically, there would occur a great hissing noise from the pressers, or someone would throw open a boiler hatch and release an even heavier cloud of vapor. Through this jellied air trudged indistinct figures dripping sweat, often stripped to their waists, bearing heavy loads or pushing carts heaped with bags. Urging them on were overseers in white, short-sleeved uniforms, with their names embroidered in red on their breasts.