I went over and plucked it out. “Far out,” I said.
“The bag was over my right shoulder,” Herbie said.
“Far out,” I said again.
“I believe you owe me an apology,” Herbie said.
And then I began to laugh. “I owe you more than that,” I said. “I owe you the biggest smoke of your life.” I got a piece of newspaper and tore off a quarter, and pulled off a chunk of brick and began to roll it into a joint.
As Herbie watched, he said with a small smile, “All in all, it was pretty exciting, wasn’t it?”
An hour later, we were still in the kitchen, drafting the statement. We were both very stoned and very happy. I was writing and Herbie was dictating. I said, “How about ‘Please release her tomorrow morning’?”
“No,” Herbie said. “Make it strong. ‘I want her released tomorrow morning’—and then put in the D.A. and the Globe and all that.”
I nodded, and made the changes.
“Is that it?” Herbie said.
“That’s it,” I said, and picked up the phone to call. The first three times I dialed, I got the siren whine of a nonexistent number. Finally, the fourth time, it began to ring. I was very, very stoned.
A woman’s voice: “Hello?”
I said, “Lieutenant Murphy, please. This is Captain Fry of the Narcotics Division.”
“Just a minute, Captain.”
A long silence at the other end of the phone, presumably while Murphy tried to figure out who the hell Captain Fry was—or who would be calling saying he was Captain Fry. Or what Captain Fry would want at this time of night, if indeed there really were a Captain Fry, whom he had never heard of… God, I was zonked.
Finally: “Murphy here.”
I jumped at the sound of his voice, the familiarity of it. For a moment I flashed back to Alameda County and the interrogation room, the kneeing, the whole riff. Then I got hold of myself. “Yes,” I said. “This is a mutual acquaintance. I thought you would appreciate knowing that I have acquired twelve kilograms of marijuana that have an interesting set of fingerprints on them.”
“Who is this?”
“The kilograms are stamped with a peace symbol and the numbers eight nine oh, which allows their California origin to be quite reliably established. The fingerprints,” I continued, “are yours and Susan Blake’s. That is an interesting combination. It is easy to explain how that combination of fingerprints got there. But I wonder, is it possible to explain how they came into my hands?”
“Who’s calling?” Murphy said, his voice tense.
“I think that a lot of people would be curious enough to be interested in my explanation,” I said. “I have one very curious acquaintance in the district attorney’s office, and another at the Boston Globe.”
There was a long, taut silence. Murphy was thinking it over. And he was going to play it our way, I knew. He had no choice. He’d have to drop charges on Sukie.
“What do you want?” he said, finally.
“I want the girl released and all charges dropped.”
There was a long, slow sigh at the other end. The bastard obviously wasn’t used to having other people play as rough as he did. Finally he cleared his throat.
“Now you listen to me, punk, and listen good. You can’t touch me, you can’t even rile me. You go near the D.A.’s office with those bricks and I’ll see to it personally that you get busted. Now. As far as I’m concerned, you can go right ahead and do anything you want. I’m going back to bed.” Click!
Herbie had been sitting across the table from me. He must have seen my face fall. “What happened?” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking my head, absolutely not believing it. “He didn’t go for it,” I said.
49
I WAS SUDDENLY GHASTLY SOBER, the kind of sober where the room lights seem brighter and the shadows sharper and everything is a little bit uglier. I got up and poured myself a Scotch—some of John’s Chivas this time, the hell with him. I felt it slosh down in my stomach over the Perugina chocolate, and I thought about Speedy shooting at us, and I began to feel sick. I spent a few hours standing there, leaning against the wall, trying to decide whether I would make it or not, and finally decided I wouldn’t. I jumped for the sink.
“Flawless,” Herbie said.
I turned and looked back at him. The world was green. “Thanks,” I said.
“I meant the plan,” Herbie said, ignoring me as I wiped my mouth with a towel. He ticked the points off on his fingers. “Murphy is fronting bricks. His prints are on them. We recover the fronted bricks. We threaten to expose him unless he releases the girl. He releases the girl. We expose him anyway. A flawless plan.”
“It didn’t work,” I said again. “You can’t bust pigs, no matter how fucked-up they are.”
Herbie nodded in a puzzled way. “He must have protection,” he said. “That’s the only answer.”
I laughed, and as I did the green world shifted back to glaring white. “Uh-uh,” I said. “He doesn’t give a crap, that’s all. He knows that a couple of punk kids are trying to rip him off, and he doesn’t mind a bit. He knows they can’t touch him. The day when freaks bust wrong pigs is the day that—”
“I find that difficult to believe,” Herbie said, sounding for all the world like my old man.
“Yeah, well, that’s what’s happening.” I was beginning to see what it meant, from Murphy’s viewpoint, to be hassled by a couple of kids. And I began to see just how little power we had. Nobody ever had power unless someone gave it to them. Murphy wasn’t giving us an inch.
“Maybe he doesn’t think we can do it,” Herbie said.
“Maybe we can’t,” I said. It had all been an enormous bluff. We didn’t know anybody on the newspapers, or at the D.A.’s office. We didn’t know anybody, period.
John chose that happy moment to walk in with Sandra. She ran for the John, and he came into the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Jesus, it stinks in here.” He walked over to the sink, took a look, and shook his head. “Harkness, you never could—”
“And you couldn’t either,” I said. “Get bent, or get lost, or preferably both.”
John paused to savor the atmosphere. “What’ve you dudes been up to?”
“The impossible,” Herbie said.
Then John saw the bricks on the kitchen table. His spirits rose. “My, my, what have we here?”
Nobody said anything.
“Fine stuff,” he said, crumbling a bit between his fingers. “Almost as good as—” He stopped, looked at another brick, at the stamp on the wrapper. “Where’d you pick this up?”
He looked over at me. I didn’t say anything. So he looked over at Herbie. “Three guesses,” Herbie said. John just stood there, totally out of it, and then Sandra walked in and began clucking about the smell. I was feeling a little sick again. John saw the bottle of Chivas out and began bitching about my drinking his stuff again. All I could think of was how we couldn’t touch Murphy. It didn’t seem possible that he was untouchable. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible.
“Herbie,” I said, “we can do it.”
“How’s that?” Herbie sounded bored.
“We could arrange a trade.”
“No!” He sat suddenly upright. “That ruins everything. The whole point of the plan—”
“I know,” I said. “But the flawless plan didn’t work. We already know that. The only thing we can do is trade.”
“You mean,” Herbie said, his mouth turning down in distaste, “give him the bricks?”