"… some kind of heat inversion and the temperature never goes down at night, see. That's when things get weird," Fell said, gunning the car through the intersection. "I got a call once where this PR stuck his old lady's head…"
"A what?"
"Puerto Rican. Where this Puerto Rican dude stuffed his old lady's head in the toilet and she drowned, and he said he did it because it was so fuckin' hot and she wouldn't shut up…"
They rolled past the Checks Cashed and the Mexican and Indian restaurants, past the delis and the stink of a dog-'n'-kraut stand, past people with red dots on their foreheads and yarmulkes and witty T-shirts that said "No Farting," past bums and sunglassed Mafia wannabes in nine-hundred-dollar loose-kneed suits with shiny lapels.
Past a large woman wearing a T-shirt with a silhouette of a.45 on the front. A newspaper-style map arrow pointed at the gun's muzzle and said, "Official Map of New York City: You Are Here."
"There's Lonnie," Fell said, easing the car to the curb. A taxi behind them honked, but Fell ignored it and got out.
"Hey, whaddafuck…"
Fell made a pistol of her thumb and index finger and pointed it at the cabby and pulled the trigger and continued on around the car. Lonnie was sitting on an upturned plastic bottle crate, a Walkman plugged into his ear, head bobbing to whatever sound he was getting. He was looking the other way when Fell walked up and tapped the crate with her toe. Lonnie reared back and looked up, then pulled the plug out of his ear.
"Hey…" Lucas turned in front of him, on the other side. Nowhere to run.
"You sold three hundred hypodermic syringes to Al Kunsler on Monday," Fell said. "We want to know where you got them and what else you got. Medical stuff."
"I don't know nothing about that," Lonnie said. He had scars around his eyebrows, and his nose didn't quite line up with the center of his mouth.
"Come on, Lonnie. We know about it, and I don't much give a shit," Fell said impatiently. Her forehead was damp with the heat. "You fuck with us, we take you down. You tell us, we drive away. And believe me, this is something you don't want to get involved in."
"Yeah? What's going on?" He looked like he was about to stand up, but Lucas put his hand on his shoulder, and he settled back on the crate.
"We're looking for this fruitcake Bekker, okay? He's getting medical gear. We're looking for suppliers. You know at least one…"
"I don't know from this Bekker dude," Lonnie said.
"So just tell us where you got them," Lucas said.
Lonnie looked around, as if to see who was watching. "Atlantic City. From some guy in a motel."
"Where'd he get them?" Lucas asked.
"How the fuck would I know? Maybe off the beach."
"Lonnie, Lonnie…" said Fell.
"Look, I went to Atlantic City for a little straight action. You know you can't get straight action around here anymore…"
"Yeah, yeah…"
"… And I meet this guy at the motel and he says he's got some merchandise, and I say, 'Whatcha got?' And he says, 'All sortsa shit.' And he did. He had, like, a million sets of Snap-On tools and some computer TV things and leather flight bags and belts and suits and shit, and these needles."
"What was he driving?" Lucas asked.
"Cadillac."
"New?"
"Naw. Old. Great big fuckin' green one, color of Key Lime pie, with the white roof."
"Think he's still there?"
Lonnie shrugged. "Could be. Looked like he'd been there awhile. I know there was some girls down the way, he was partying with them, they acted like they knew him…" • • • They touched a half-dozen other fences, small-time hustlers. At half-hour intervals, Fell would find a pay phone and make a call.
"Nobody home?"
"Nobody home," she said, and they went looking for more fences.
Fell was a cowgirl, Lucas thought, watching her drive. She'd been born out of place, out of time, in the Bronx. She'd fit in the Dakotas or Montana: bony, with wide shoulders and high cheekbones, that frizzy red hair held back from her face with bobby pins. With the scar at the end of her mouth…
She'd been jabbed with the broken neck of a beer bottle, she said, back when she was on patrol. "That's what you get when you try to keep assholes from killing each other."
Babe Zalacki might have been a babe once, before her teeth fell out. She shook her head and smiled her toothless pink smile at Lucas: "I don't know from medical shit," she said. "The closest I got to it was, I got three hundred cases of Huggies a couple of weeks ago. Now Huggies, you can sell Huggies. You take them up to Harlem and sell them on the street corners like that…" She snapped her fingers. "But medical shit… who knows?"
Back on the street, Fell said, "Sun's going down."
Lucas looked up at the sky, where a dusty sun hung over the west side. "Still hot."
"Wait'll August. August is hot. This is nothin'… Better make a call."
Up the street, a bald man in a jean jacket turned to face a building, braced a hand against it, and began urinating. Lucas watched as he finished, got himself together, and continued down the street. No problem.
Fell came back and said, "He's home. Phone's busy."
They took a half hour, cutting crosstown as the light began to fail, through a warehouse section not far from the water. Fell finally slowed, did a U-turn, and bumped the right-side wheels over the curb. She killed the engine, put her radio on the floor in the backseat, fished a sign out from under the seat and tossed it on the dashboard: "No radio inside."
"Even a cop car?"
"Especially a cop car-cop cars got all kinds of goodies. At least, that's what they think."
Lucas climbed out, stretched, yawned, and ran his thumb along his beltline, under his jacket, until it hit the leather of the Bianchi holster. The street was in deep shadow, with doorway niches and shuttered carports in brick walls. A red brick cube, unmarked by any visible sign or number, loomed overhead like a Looney Tune. Rows of dark windows started three stories up; they were tall and narrow, and from the third to the eleventh floor, dark as onyx. Half of the top floor was lit.
"Lights are on," Fell said.
"Weird place to live," Lucas said, looking around. Scrap paper sidled lazily down the street, borne on a hot humid river breeze. The breeze smelled like the breath of an old man with bad teeth. They were close to the Hudson, somewhere in the twenties.
"Jackie Smith is a weird guy," Fell said. Lucas stepped toward the door, but she caught his arm. "Slow down. Give me a minute." She dug into her purse and came up with a pack of Luckys.
"You've got it bad," Lucas said, watching her. "The habit."
"Yeah, but at least I don't need an alarm clock."
"What?" He stepped into it.
"Every morning at seven o'clock sharp, I wake myself up coughing." When Lucas didn't smile, she peered at him and said, "That was a joke, Davenport."
"Yeah. Inside, I'm laughing myself sick," he said. Then he smiled.
Fell tapped a Lucky on the back of a pack of matches, stuck it in her mouth with a two-finger flipping motion, cupped it with her hands and lit it.
"You're not going to fuck me up, are you?" she asked, her eyes flicking up at him.
"I don't know what that means," Lucas said. He stuck a finger between his collar and his neck. His neck felt like sandpaper. If ring around the collar were a terminal disease, they'd be burying him.
"I saw the pictures of Bekker, after the arrest," Fell said. "He looked like somebody stuck his face in a blender. If you do that in New York, with somebody connected downtown, like Jackie is, your fuckin' career goes in the blender."