“You running out of underwear?” she asked.
“No, I got plenty underwear.”
“So why were you looking for underwear?”
“I wasn’t. I was looking for the diamonds.”
“What diamonds?” she asked, and flopped down on the mattress.
“In Livvie’s report.”
“Livvie, right.Ihaven’t worn underwear since I was seventeen,” she said. “No bra, no panties, either.”
“That’s evident,” he said, and glanced over at her where she lay somewhat carelessly on the mattress. Aine smiled like a blushing maiden, and pulled her skirt down over her knees.
“You still looking for that bar near a police station?” she asked.
“I am.”
“I think I found it.”
“Really? Where is it?”
“It’s not called O’Malley’s, though. It’s called Shanahan’s. And it ain’t two blocks from the Oh-One, which as I suspected don’t exist. It’s two blocks from the Eight-Seven.”
“The Eight-Seven,” Emilio said, trying to place it. “On Grover Avenue?”
“Facing the park, yeah. But the bar ain’t on Grover. It’s on St. John’s Road, two blocks over.”
“Too many streets in this damn city,” Emilio said.
“It’s easy to find,” Aine said. “I’ll take you there, if you like. You ever feel like fucking anymore?”
“Not very often, no.”
“Neither do I. Smack’s the best fuck I ever had.”
“Me, too.”
“Yeah,” she said.
They both fell silent, thinking about this basic truth, almost cherishing the knowledge that they were each and separately married to heroin.
“I think there’s a big drug buy going down soon,” Aine said out of the blue.
“Good,” Emilio said. “How do you know?”
“I heard these people talking in a cuchi frito joint on Culver. This Spanish broad, she looks Spanish, is selling ten-kilo lots at twenty large a lot.”
“That’s a lot of lots,” Emilio said, making a joke, but Aine didn’t catch it because she was doing arithmetic.
“Selling it for three hundred thou, that comes to fifteen lots.”
“That’s a lot of lots,” Emilio said again, but she still didn’t catch it. “When’s this gonna happen?”
“That’s the only thing I don’t know,” she said. “A basement at 3211 Culver is where the buy’s going down. A hundred and fifty keys of cocaine.”
Emilio looked at her.
“You don’t think all that stuff’s already down there in that basement, do you?” he asked.
THE BASEMENTwas clean.
A table, four chairs around it, a wash sink in the corner.
Door at the back leading to the alley outside.
Steps coming down from the ground floor of the building above.
Eileen figured it’d be best to come in through the back door. Bust it open with a battering ram, surprise them at the table testing the dope and handing over the money. Rosita Washington wouldn’t be coming here alone, that was for sure, not if the story about the Miami boys ripping her off was true. Her people would be armed. And so might the three grifters buying the stuff. She planned to ask Byrnes for a full-force raiding party, Kevlar vests and assault rifles, never mind any heroics Parker might have in mind.
She walked over to the back door, confirmed that a Mickey Mouse lock was on it, looked around the room one last time, and then pulled the chain on the hanging overhead light bulb. In the scant daylight spilling from the narrow street level windows, she found her way to the steps, and climbed them to the ground floor. She listened at the door there before letting herself into the building. A woman carrying two bags of groceries and climbing the steps to the first floor gave her only a backward glance. Eileen walked to the entrance foyer and let herself out into the street.
A young Hispanic male and an Irish-looking female were just approaching the building. The male stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open. He looked directly into Eileen’s face and said, “Livvie?”
“Sorry,” Eileen said, smiling, and walked on past him.
Emilio turned to Aine and said, “It was her, wasn’t it?”
Or even she.
THE GIRLSusually started their stroll at nine, nine-thirty, sometimes even later. They’d learned from experience that nobody wanted to get laid too soon after dinnertime. These men were different from the ones who frequented the massage parlors. Those guys went upstairs at any time of day, whenever the urge hit them, some of them for quickies on their way to the train station before going home to their sweet little wives in the burbs. The johns here in Ho Alley were different.
You rarely saw a man on foot here. First off, it was too dangerous, and secondly you had to accommodate somebody like that with a room, and a room cost money, not to mention all the bother of finding one, it just didn’t pay. The men looking for tail here usually cruised by in automobiles, casing the merchandise, and then drove up to the curb and parked, and waited for a girl to come over, and lean into the window, and talk business. The price of a handjob was fifty bucks. A blowjob cost a hundred. Nowadays, you couldn’t get laid for less than three, and most girls didn’t want to bother with intercourse at all. Most girls found intercourse too complicated, what with having to take off their panties and lift their skirts and place themselves in a vulnerable position on the back seat of a car in case the law showed. A handjob or a blowjob, you could perform on the front seat, sitting like a lady, fully clothed. Besides, most girls found intercourse too intimate. It wasn’t any different on the street than in high school. Nowadays, in high school, a blowjob was the equivalent of a goodnight kiss.
Except for cops they knew, who were on the take and who would look the other way in return for any quick sex they could get, the girls were ever on the alert for the law. You got some jackass uniformed cop who didn’t know how the system worked, he’d come around like some dumb preacher spouting hellfire and damnation, and next thing you knew you were in a holding cell waiting for night court. Or sometimes even a detective, although most of them knew better, they’d been around a long while, they knew how it worked, they couldn’t care less if you blew the Mayor in broad daylight on the steps of City Hall. It was the young cops you had to watch out for. The ones who still believed.
The girls on stroll that night spotted Ollie for a cop the moment he entered the street. Maybe it was the arrogant stride, or the know-it-all look on his face. Or maybe it was because, first of all, he was on foot, and next he didn’t seem to be seriously looking for a piece of ass. The hungry, desperate, guilty appearance of a bona fide john just wasn’t there. In ten seconds flat, half the girls on the street disappeared into doorways, or walked around the corner, or simply went home for the night, they didn’t need trouble from a fat flatfoot. The other half were otherwise engaged in parked automobiles all up and down the street. Ollie floated up Ho Alley like an aircraft carrier steaming into the Persian Gulf. He was looking for a blond Puerto Rican cross-dressing hooker named Emilio Herrera.
The first girl he talked to was just coming out of a parked Caddy near the closed Korean nail place up the block. She swung her legs out of the car, adjusted her short skirt, waggled her fingers goodbye to the white man behind the wheel, and turned to find a person who weighed perhaps a ton and a half standing there in her path, oh shit, she thought, a cop. The Caddy pulled away from the curb in a wink.
“Hi,” she said cheerily. “You lost?”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” Ollie said.
“Oh?” the girl said, and looked him up and down. “Maybe I can help instead.”
Maybe he wasn’t a cop after all. Though a quick glance up the street revealed an amazing lack of pulchritude on display, a sure sign that the other girls on stroll had made him for what he was and had split the scene toot sweet.