“Kick ass,” said McNair. “Get Terry’s money back. Dumb kid!” Biting down on the anger, he managed a little grin. “It’s not the principle of the thing, Norm. It’s the money, right?”
“I can save that much again, easy,” Terry put in. His left cheek was red and the ear real fiery red. I figured Pop had smacked him upside the head, a good one. “It’s only a hundred dollars.”
“The hell it’s only a hundred dollars; where d’you come off with the ‘only,’ Mr. Rockefeller?” McNair went, top of his voice. And to me: “Kid’s spent best part of a year saving that; he wants a motorcycle. Then he gets a better idea, whorin’ around this Limit place. Where’s it at, anyway?”
“You try kicking ass around the Limit, all they’ll find is your foot, they put that in some kind of museum,” I told McNair. “I mean it, Rick. Cops go in double-banked, riot guns for walking canes. You want the Limit that bad, ask some other sucker.”
Ten minutes later, out front, Rick McNair stopped fooling with what he calls wheels — little rust bucket near as old as his son — and came over. Me, I’m laid back on my reclining seat in reclined mode, nice tunes on the stereo, ready to motorvate, no particular place to go.
“Listen,” McNair said, “lend me your car, Norm. Please. Mine won’t start, damn it.” Naturally, on account of me fixing it that way.
“This fine car don’t go to no Limit,” I announced, giving him a little ethnic rasp in the voice. “But I’ll give you and Terry a ride.”
He nodded tautlike. “Get in the back,” he ordered Terry, and slid in beside me. It took a while to get to the Limit, plenty of home-going traffic that time of day. “When did he go, anyway?” I asked Rick McNair.
“This afternoon, fourish,” Terry supplied from the back. That struck me as a little early for the locality, like five, six hours early. The Limit’s hardly begun hopping by nine at night.
“I was just curious,” Terry mumbled. “And I heard about this ace girl there, she... well, you know... does it. I was curious.”
“A hooker,” his father snapped.
Not looking at either of them, I said, “Rick, you never had anything to do with a lady of the night, huh? Not in Nam or wherever? Real straight arrow, my man.”
“Not at Terry’s age,” McNair said shortly. “Not hardly ever. Never, once I’d met his mother, God rest her soul.”
“I was curious,” Terry whined. “All the guys were talking about the Limit, what goes on there.”
“They go all the time, huh?” I suggested.
Terry started to say yes, but he’s an honest kid and after a bit he said, “Well, some of them. One guy, anyway. His father’s a landlord there, so Mike gets left alone.”
“Fine friends you make,” McNair said.
“He’s not a friend, we were just hanging out, talking,” Terry explained miserably.
“This looks a decent area,” his father said, when I pulled in. “I thought the Limit—”
“This aint it,” I said. “From here we walk. Limit’s down there a ways, and one block over. Rick, either you let me lock that forty-five piece in the trunk or... put it this way, you pull it for any reason at all, I’ll bust your hand before you get to squeeze a shot off. You can bank on that in Denver, my friend.”
He just grunted and got out of the car. He thought I was bragging, but that was all right because I knew I wasn’t — and that left the pair of us happy.
Rule of thumb: Carry a piece and sooner or later you have to use it or get dead. Dumbest dumb in my book. Around the Limit, it’s likely to be sooner than later, at that. Plenty of mean characters there, choice of race and all three sexes, count ’em.
We went over to Republican and pretty soon the discount and novelty stores were empty stores, hole-in-wall head shops, peep shows, places showing triple-X movies and promising live action on stage between whiles. Dross City, no question.
Cross streets, being narrower and darker, were worse. But the quarter was empty, still asleep. Fairly safe, especially with three of us teamed.
“It was in there,” Terry said, after leading us down the wrong street and trying again. He pointed at a brownstone, some of the upper windows shuttered with marine ply sheets, ripe for the demo men. At street level, a dusty-windowed store showed a few items of the type of leisurewear that comes with spikes and studs. It hadn’t seen a customer since when and the lights were out.
“Not so fast.” I towed the pair of them into an alley beside the brownstone. “How’d you come to lose the money, get robbed, Terry? She do it up in her crib? You get mugged out here on the sidewalk? What?”
“I never saw the girl,” he told me. “Mike showed me where she operates, gave me a ride to school this morning, we cut through here on the way. I came back, solo, this afternoon. Street door doesn’t lock, you can shove it open. Her place is on the third floor.
“It’s dark, no windows on the stairs, the lights don’t work. I got to the landing, saw her apartment door. I was... um... getting up courage, I guess. Somebody jumped me from behind, slammed me against the wall so hard I saw stars, my nose bled. Uh, they twisted my arm, too, slammed me again, ran away. I heard them on the stairs. Then I found my money was gone.”
Rick McNair shook his head in disgust.
“Where was the wallet?” I asked.
“Back pocket of my jeans. I know, I know, it’s a stupid place to carry a wallet, Norm.”
“You learned that the hard way, it’ll stick.” It cheered him up some. “The guy who jumped you, what he look like?”
Terry’s blush made his whole face match the red ear. “All I know... it was a man. He was behind me all the time, then I was on the floor when he took off. You could tell it was a man, from the feel of his hands when he grabbed me, twisted my arm and all.”
“Okay, mystery man clobbers you. Maybe he was waiting, maybe he followed you in. What next? Hooker come out, ask what goes on? He’s bouncing you off walls hard enough to draw blood, must’ve been a ruckus.”
“I just wanted to get the hell out of there.” Terry turned to his father. “Look, Mike kind of dared me and... I was curious and I didn’t want to seem a nerd, you know? I took money to show her, string her along, but I meant to duck out before... well, anything. Then I could tell the guys I’d been there, prove it by saying what she and her place looked like.”
“We’re wasting time,” Rick McNair grumbled. “The girl’s pimp waits for morons like this one, too green and puny to matter, and roughs ’em up, lifts their dough. Let’s get to it, Norm. You stay here.”
“No way, José. We’ll all go up there, visit a spell.” I was thinking that Rick McNair might be hell on wheels as a carpenter but he couldn’t figure worth diddly. No hooker’s main man carries on that way. He do, word travels among the johns pretty soon his girl runs out of clients. For sure. Maybe he does knock over a fat-cat john every so often. But wise birds don’t foul their own nests and hookers’ men are real owls when it comes to their trade. They hit the john down the block a piece, never the doorstep.
Like Terry said, the street door looked solid but pushed open. By the second set of stairs, I was climbing them real slow, feeling less than good — and I’m in shape.
When I glanced back, Terry said, “Yeah, there’s a terrible smell. Plain dirt, I guess. That would have put me off, even if I hadn’t decided to duck out soon as I saw her, from the start.”
I hardly heard him. Rick McNair was staring up at me over the kid’s shoulder. He and I knew that smell, you never forget it. Somebody nearby was dead, and had been that way for too long.