It's an ill wind. I didn't want support.
He was coming back, the white man, someone with him, a woman. He shone the torch on me again and I contracted the facial muscles to bring the ears back and pushed some air into my mouth to fatten the cheeks, all I could do.
'Is this the guy?'
I couldn't see her face because of the glare.
In a moment: 'No.'
'Don't give me that shit!'
He shook the photograph.
'I haven't seen him before.'
'But he was there, for Christ's sake. At the apartment.'
'This is someone else.'
A hint of patchouli on the air.
'How long were you with him?' Anger in his voice, frustration, wanted his currant cake.
'Long enough to remember what he looked like. This isn't the man.'
'Well Jesus Christ this is the face of the guy in the photograph!'
'You'd better take care, Nicko. Don't kill too many, for your own sake.'
'Get back to the car.'
Walking away – 'I'm warning you, Nicko.'
The scent of patchouli… a link with Proctor, subtle and tenuous but a link. And a question: why had she lied? She'd said nothing more than good evening that night in the apartment but I recognised her voice, just as she'd recognised me. A black girl, petite, slender, more than attractive, vibrant, her arm hanging like a model's in the light of the brass lamps, the hand turned outwards a little for effect, her dark eyes taking me in. So why had she lied? I haven't seen him before.
'Out!' He jerked the door open. 'Out of the car!' He turned to the other man, the minion. 'Frisk him.' Then he squeezed himself into the car and rummaged around for guns, taking the keys from the ignition and opening the trunk and throwing things around, the jack and the breakdown kit and the fire extinguisher, half pleased with himself, I thought at this stage, and half worried that he'd got it wrong and I wasn't the guy, the guy in the photograph.
Don't kill too many, she'd said.
Had Nicko killed the man on surveillance in Riverside an hour ago? He couldn't have done it himself; he wasn't quick enough on his feet, with his hands. But I didn't think he'd even ordered it. The setup with 1330 Riverside and Erica Cambridge and Mathieson Judd and the cutter for the Contessa was strictly political. The setup here was cocaine.
'He's naked, Nicko.'
But there was the link with Proctor. Was Proctor on cocaine?
'Okay, take him down there and put him in the car. In the Line, not the Chewy. Keep the gun on him. You let him go, Roget, you're dead.'
That would explain Proctor's changed personality, if he'd got himself into cocaine.
We started walking and the black boy hit the muzzle into my spine two or three times because he'd seen it done in the movies I suppose but it was annoying because he could chip a vertebra and I was tempted to spin on him with the right forearm doing the work. There wouldn't be any risk because when a gun gives a man the type of cocky confidence this one was showing then you know he's not paying enough attention and you can take it away from him like a toy from a boy. But he wasn't alone here and it wouldn't do any good: I needed to get clear as soon as I could and I mustn't rush anything.
'Keep movin'!'
Another prod, though I hadn't slowed. He was young and fresh out here from Jamaica or Haiti, recruited from some cardboard city on a mudbank by an entrepreneur with a gold watch and a diamond pin and stories of fortunes to be made, hey big daddy here I come, and I didn't want to spoil everything for him but it would have to come to that.
Behind me I heard Nicko swinging the Trans Am straight and rolling it down the quay on the wall side, parking it and cutting the engine, slam of a door. Catching up with us, 'She's parked okay for you, limey, we don't want anything illegal going on around here,' a thin wheeze, something like laughter, pleased with himself. He was the pseudo manic-depressive type and I would have to watch him because they're the most dangerous, they'll kill out of caprice.
I said it was decent of him because I didn't like tickets and we reached the Lincoln and the black boy pulled the rear door open and pushed me inside and slammed it and stood away and his voice came through the glass – 'Stay in the car, mister, you wanna live, you know?'
He had a point because that Suzuki was big enough to blow the whole of the Lincoln through the wall without even being selective.
There wasn't anything I could do for the moment. There were three other man standing near the cars, all in dark clothing – a navy sweater, a jump suit, no shirts, nothing white. Two of them were smoking; they didn't talk; sometimes they turned slowly to look at Nicko and then they looked away again. It was important for me to get the hang of their relationships so that I could work with it; at this stage my thinking was that they were all traders except for the boy Roget, that Nicko was in charge but they didn't like him, were even afraid of him, perhaps because he'd killed people – don't kill too many, Nicko – and would be ready to kill more.
I couldn't see Monique; she must be in the Chevrolet parked in front of the Lincoln.
2:14 on the facia clock.
It looked as if they were waiting for a boat because they stood watching the sea, the strip of water between the dredger and the jetty. It wasn't dark out there; the moon was throwing a milky light across the swell left by the hurricane, and ships lay silhouetted at anchor. A helicopter was working a course from north to south across the Port to Virginia Key, presumably a US Coast Guard patrol. If these people were Lights and the squeal of tyres under the brakes and the three men stood back, nearer the wall, one of them bending to look through the windshield; then Nicko came past the Lincoln from behind and was there beside the grey Pontiac when it stopped rolling and a door came open and two men got out, one of them holding the other in a police grip with an arm twisted behind him, both Latins.
'Where's Martinez?' This was Nicko.
The driving window of the Lincoln was down and I caught most of what they were saying, patching a word in here and there to construct the sense.
'He's on his way. Toufexis had some business.'
'We're running late, for Christ's sake. Put him in the big one.'
'What's Roget doing there like that?'
With the gun.
'We've got someone else in the car, same kind of thing.'
For the first time I began to worry. It's easy to think, when there are guns around and the talk is tough and they're confident to the point of inattention, that you won't find it very difficult to get clear. I've got clear in situations totally controlled by field intelligence people, sometimes KGB, people trained and drilled and capable, so that in this kind of lax crime-world setup the danger was in under-estimating the odds. These men were shipping coke and they were doing it in competition with twenty or thirty major narcotic gangs and that meant they had to carry firearms, but they hadn't been trained to use them and they hadn't been through unarmed combat instruction and they wouldn't have fast reactions, but to underestimate them could be fatal because it only needed one stray shot and finis.
And there was the fat man, Nicko.
I knew his kind. He'd been spoiled by his mother and he'd grown up to take what he wanted and hurt if he had to hurt when they wouldn't give it up and later kill if he had to kill, and it had begun with cake and now it was wealth and power and women and sometimes death if someone's death would give him one of those things or all of those things. But the thing about him that warned me, frightened me, was that he'd started to enjoy killing and had probably begun to want only those things that would give him the excuse for doing it. This was my impression.