“Men aren’t our enemies unless they prove they’re our enemies,” she said.
“But if they hit, we hit back.” There was a picture of her, a big old nigger bitch who reminded Norman vaguely of that Chicago football player William “refrigerator” Perry.
“You ever try to hit me, sweetheart, I’ll use you for a trampoline,” he had murmured. But that stuff, interesting as it might be, was really beside the point. There might be men as well as women in this city who knew where the place was and were allowed to make referrals, and it might be run by just one New Age Fern-Sniffer instead of a committee of them, but in one respect he was sure they would be exactly the same as their more traditional counterparts: the death of Peter Slowik would have them on red alert. They wouldn’t make the assumptions the cops would make; unless and until proved otherwise, they would assume Slowik’s murder had to do with them… specifically with one of the referrals Slowik had made during the last six or eight months of his life. Rosie’s name might already have surfaced in that respect. So why did you do it? he asked himself. Why in God’s name did you do it? There were other ways of getting to where you are now, and you know what they are. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake, of course you do! So why did you put their wind up? That fat slob in the newspaper article, Dirty Gertie What’s-Her-Face, is probably standing in the parlor window of the goddam place, using binoculars to examine every swinging dick who goes by. If she hasn’t dropped dead of a Twinkie-assisted stroke by now, that is. So why did you do it? Why? The answer was there, but he turned away from it before it could do more than begin to surface in his conscious mind; turned away because the implications were too grim to look at. He had done Thumper for the same reason he had strangled the redheaded whore in the fawn-colored hotpants-because something had crawled up from the bottom of his mind and made him do it. That thing was there more and more now, and he wouldn’t think of it. It was better not to. Safer. Meantime, here he was; Pussy Palace dead ahead. Norman crossed to the even-numbered side of Durham Avenue at a leisurely amble, knowing that any watchers would feel less threatened by a guy on the far side of the street. The specific watcher he kept imagining was the darkie tubbo whose picture had been in the paper, a giant economy-sized bag of works with a pair of hi-resolution field glasses in one hand and a melting clump of Mallow Cremes in the other. He slowed down a little more, but not much-red alert, he reminded himself, they’ll be on red alert. It was a big white frame house, not quite Victorian, one of those turn-of-the-century dowagers that’s three full stones of ugly. It looked narrow from the front, but Norman had grown up in a house not so different from this and was willing to bet it went almost all the way back to the street on the far side of the block. And with a whore-whore here and a whore-whore there, Norman thought, being careful not to change his walk from its current slow amble, and being careful to swallow the house not in one long stare but in small sips. Here a whore, there a whore, everywhere a whore-whore. Yes indeed. Everywhere a whore-whore. He felt the familiar rage begin to pulse at his temples now, and with it came a familiar image, the one which stood for all the things he could not express: the bank card. The green bank card she had dared to steal. The image of that card was always close now, and it had come to stand for all the terrors and compulsions of his life-the forces he raged against, the faces (his mother’s, for instance, so white and doughy and somehow sly) that sometimes slipped into his mind while he was lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, the voices that came in his dreams. His father’s, for instance.
“Come on over here, Normie. I’ve got something to tell you, and I want to tell you up close.” Sometimes that meant a blow. Sometimes, if you were lucky and he was drunk, it meant a hand creeping in between your legs. But that didn’t matter now; only the house across the street mattered. He wouldn’t get another look this good at it, and if he wasted these precious seconds thinking about the past, who was the monkey then? He was directly opposite the place. Nice lawn, narrow but deep. Pretty flowerbeds, flushed with spring blooms, flanked the long front porch. There were metal posts dressed in ivy standing in the center of each bed. The ivy had been pruned away from the black plastic cylinders at the tops of the posts, though, and Norman knew why: there were TV cameras inside those dark pods, giving overlapping views up and down the street. If anyone was looking at the monitors inside right now, they would be seeing a little black-and-white man in a baseball hat and sunglasses moving from screen to screen, walking hunched and slightly bent-kneed so that his six-feet-three would look quite a bit shorter to the casual observer. There was another camera mounted over a front door for which there would be no keyhole; keys were too easy to duplicate, tumblers too easy to tickle, if you were handy with a set of picks. No, there would be a keycard slot, a numerical keypad console, or maybe both. And more cameras in the back yard, of course. As he walked past the house, Norman risked one final look into the side yard. Here was a vegetable garden, and two whores in shorts sliding long sticks-tomato-stakes, he supposed-into the ground. One looked like a taco-bender: olive skin and long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Dynamite body, looked about twenty-five. The other was younger, maybe not even out of her teens yet, one of these punky-grungy scumbuckets with her hair dyed two different colors. There was a bandage covering her left ear. She was wearing a sleeveless psychedelic shirt, and Norman could see a tattoo on her left bicep. His eyes weren’t quite good enough to make out what it was, but he had been a cop long enough to know it was probably either the name of a rock group or a badly executed drawing of a marijuana plant. Norman saw himself suddenly rushing across the street, ignoring the cameras; saw himself grabbing Little Miss Hot Snatch with the rock-star hair; saw himself sliding one of his big hands around her thin neck and running it up until it was stopped by the shelf of her jaw.