‘Then he’s just the trigger. Somebody else wants you scratched and that’s the somebody I want.
‘it sounds personal.’
‘Well, it got that way...’
‘Why? Because of me, Sharky? Because you thought I was dead?’
Livingston saved him.
‘You gonna be okay?’ he asked Domino.
‘Yes. And I thank you.’
‘Sure.’ He turned to Sharky. ‘I’m gonna check in with Friscoe but I’m not givin’ him this number. I’ll set up a phone drop, have him leave a number. For now I’d like to keep this place between the four of us.’
‘Good idea,’ Sharky said. ‘What we should do, I can stay here with her. You meet the Machine someplace and fill them in. Everybody needs to know.’
‘Right. Be back in a minute.’ He went in the other room to make the call.
Sharky moved the suitcase off the chair and dropped into it like a sack of cement.
‘You look like something out of a horror movie,’ Domino said. ‘When’s the last time you were in bed?’
‘I forget.’
‘Come here.’
‘If I lay down on that bed, I won’t get up until Easter.’
She looked at him and mischief played at her lips. ‘Wanna bet?’
Sharky thought about it. He wasn’t too tired to think about it. Then she held out her foot. ‘Would you mind helping me off with my boots?’
He went over, turned his back to her, and took the boot by the instep and heel and pulled it off. She watched him and when he had pulled the other off, she said, ‘Anybody ever tell you you’ve got a beautiful ass?’
Sharky turned around and looked down at her. ‘That’s supposed to be my line,’ he said.
‘Oh, piffle. Haven’t you heard? Times are changing.’ Livingston called to him from the other room and she sighed.
‘Saved by Ma Bell,’ she said ruefully as he left the room. Livingston handed Sharky a slip of paper with a phone number on it. It was a drop, the P in front of the number indicating a phone booth.
‘You got two urgents from The Nosh,’ Livingston said. ‘The first one was at six-ten, the other one about ten minutes ago. He says he’ll be at this number until seven-thirty.’
A warning bell went off deep inside Sharky, but he didn’t stop to analyse it. It was seven-thirty already. He grabbed the phone and dialled the number.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The apartment houses along Piedmont Road facing the sprawling inner city park were a tawdry souvenir of more elegant times. Once, near the turn of the century, the park had hosted the International Exposition and on one brilliant afternoon John Philip Sousa had introduced ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ before an assemblage that had included the President of the United States. But the grandeur of Piedmont Road was long gone. The lawns in front of the apartment buildings had eroded into red clay deserts infested with old tyres and broken bottles. Behind paneless windows covered with old blankets derelicts of every kind huddled together in the agony of poverty, cooking over cans of Sterno or, worse, drinking it to forget their lost dreams.
The Nosh sat huddled behind the wheel of his Olds watching one of the battered apartments up the street. He was getting nervous, even a little scared. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty. Time for the meet. Why the hell didn’t Sharky call?
He reached under the seat, got his flashlight, and climbed out of the car. And then, with blessed relief, he heard the phone in the booth ring.
lie caught it on the second ring.
‘Hello.’
‘Nosh? It’s Shark.’
‘Hey, man, I was gettin’ worried. I’m runnin’ outa time.’
‘What do you mean, runnin’ outa time?’
‘I got this weird phone call about six o’clock, Shark. Guy tells me he can identify the voice on the tape. “What tape?” I says and he says, “The Chinese tape.” So I says to him, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about” and he says, “Don’t be dumb — the one from Domino’s apartment” and then be tells me he can identify the guy on the tape for a hundred bucks, but I gotta come to this apartment on Twelfth and Piedmont alone before seven-thirty. So I argued a little, you know, told him I ain’t goin’ no place alone and then he says I can bring you along.’
‘He said me? He said my name?’
‘Yeah. So anyways T went by Tillie the Teller and got a hundred bucks and I’m here now, right up the street from ...‘
‘Nosh, don’t move. Get back in your car and wait right there. I’m on my way.’
‘But he’s gonna leave at seven-thirty and it’s —‘
‘Nosh, you’re not listening! Don’t go near the fuckin’ place. Stay there. Wait for me, okay?’
‘. . . Well, okay. ..‘
‘Nosh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You stay there, you hear me?’
‘Okay.’
‘Gimme fifteen minutes. I’m leaving now.’
The Nosh hung up and stepped out of the phone booth. He paced back and forth in front of the car for several minutes, watching the building.
He ambled-up Twelfth Street to the front of the building. There were no lights. The street was black, the streetlamps broken or burned out.
If the canary splits, The Nosh was thinking, I can at least nail him when he comes out.
Paint curled from the windowsills of the three-storey building and broken windows stared bleakly out at the dark street. Here and there lights flickered dimly behind old blankets.
The pits. The absolute pits, thought The Nosh.
He stood at the doorway, waving his light around, checking it out.
A furry night scavenger dashed from the doorway into the sanctuary of the bushes. It crouched there, peering out, its amber eyes glittering in the beam of the flashlight.
The Nosh stamped his foot at it and the creature ran off up the street, its ugly hairless tail dragging behind it.
He turned the light back to the doorway and approached it. The front door was gone. Inside was a small vestibule.
The inside door was propped open by a cement block. The vestibule was a litter of empty wine bottles in brown paper sacks, broken glass, crushed beer cans. Someone had dropped a sack of garbage down the stairwell. It lay just inside the main door, a splash of refuse, well nibbled-over.
The Nosh shuddered.
There were sounds inside the building, but he could not believe that people actually lived there.
Night creatures scurried into cracks in the wall. A twenty-five-watt bulb cast dim shadows on the stairwell, which smelled of rotten carpeting and sour cooking. The Nosh patted the tape in his inside pocket for reassurance and stood at the bottom of the stairs. High up, towards the third floor, the hallway lights were burned out. Somewhere in the building a radio blared Static and country music. A child was crying behind one of the doors.
At first he hardly heard the voice. He thought it was the radio or something moving in the shadows or his imagination. He looked up into the darkness.
‘Abrams...’
A whisper, barely audible.
He went up a couple of steps and listened.
Nothing.
He Looked at his watch. Another five minutes and Sharky would be there.
‘Abrams...’
The Nosh looked up again and pointed the finger of light into the blackness.
‘Down here,’ he said.
Nothing.
He went up to the first floor. The child stopped crying and started to laugh. A woman’s nasal voice joined Dolly Parton on the country-music station. The Nosh felt more secure. How could there be any danger in a building where children were laughing?
He went to the second floor.
‘Up here Abrams ...‘
‘Who’s there?’
Silence.
The stairs groaned with age as he climbed to the third floor and stood at the head of the steps in the darkness, probing the dank hallway with his Light. Apartment 3-B was at the end of the hail, the number painted sloppily on the door with house paint. He walked slowly towards it and stood outside the apartment.