After a visit to his Gramercy Park flat for some gear, Shad slipped back into his adjoining room at the hotel a little before ten o'clock, knocked on the door to make sure Shelley was okay, and found her in bed watching a movie on TV He carefully bugged Shelley's room, including a video camera that he aimed through a fish-eye lens he installed in their adjoining door.
"Here's what happens from this point on," Shad said. "We don't see each other till the meeting's over. They may be watching your room. You take the money now, you make the meet, you do what they tell you. Afterwards you come back here, and if things are clear, we'll talk."
"What if they ask me where I got the money?"
"Tell them you stole somebody's jewelry, then sold it." Shelley pulled her wrinkles up out of her soft brown eyes and looked at him. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
"I don't know"
She gave a nervous little laugh. "Which question did you answer?"
Shad looked at her. "Both."
The jumpers called Shelley at four-thirty in the morning. Evidently they'd got an early edition of the paper. They ordered her to meet them at eight, standing right out in the traffic circle at Chatham Square, with the twenty grand in her handbag. Shad watched her leave on the TV screen, called Croyd, turned on the VCR, and headed downstairs. He got on his motorcycle-a Vincent Black Shadow, natch, restored for No Dice by the Harlem Hammer-and headed for Chatham Square.
He wished the jumpers hadn't set the meet for broad daylight.
Before eight, he was on the rooftop of an apartment building on Baxter Street with Croyd. He could see Shelley standing nervously in the traffic circle a half block away. The morning rush-hour traffic was almost gridlocked around her. "Can you fly with one of these around your neck?" Shad asked.
Croyd eyed the walkie-talkie carefully. Shad looked at the pink hairless body and wondered where Croyd's excess body mass had gone.
"I don't think so."
"I'll leave one here, then. After you're done, you can report."
"walkie-talkies don't work so good around here. Too many tall buildings with metal inside."
"These are police walkie-talkies. There are repeaters set up everywhere."
"Where'd you get police walkie-talkies?"
Shad shrugged. "I dressed up as a cop, walked into Fort Freak, and took a couple from the charging rack."
Croyd gave a nasal honking laugh and shook his head. "Gotta admire your style, homes."
"Shucks. Ain't nothin."
He went down the stairs, then walked past where his motorcycle was parked. He put on a navy-blue beret, settled in a doorway where he could keep an eye on Shelley, and chewed a toothpick for a while.
Black men hanging out in doorways are not unusual in America's teeming metropoloi. He concentrated on not being unusual. He concentrated on being Juve, and Juve was checking out the scene, with long Yardbird Parker riffs, all staccato, in his head.
Juve tried real hard not to notice the little pink guy flapping through the air about five hundred feet up.
It was almost eight-fifteen when he saw the powder-blue Lincoln Town Car easing through the gridlock a second time. His nerves started humming. Nouveau-riche criminals, he had often observed, often gave themselves away when it came to personal transportation. But the Lincoln went out of sight, and then Shad's attention snapped to Shelley. She was moving, walking with the light in the direction of the East River.
Damn. She wasn't supposed to leave yet.
Juve ambled out of the doorway, straddled the Black Shadow, and kick-started it. Shelley was disobeying instructions, and this couldn't be good. It wasn't until he eased the bike out into traffic that he realized what had just happened. His nerves began to sizzle. He cast a wild look down Worth Street, then Park Row, just in time to see the blue Lincoln turn right on Duane.
Shelley was in the Lincoln. She'd just been jumped. Croyd was following the wrong body, damn it.
Shad clutched and shifted, and the Vincent's engine boomed in synch with his thrashing heart. He raced down St. James Place, elbows and knees tucked in as the bike dived between stationary gridlocked vehicles. Leaving a trail of booming decibels, he performed a power slide behind One Police Plaza, then crossed Park Row without waiting for a break in the traffic, and felt as if he were saved only by some abstruse corollary of particle physics: He wasn't in the same state, particle or wave, long enough for anyone to hit him.
Once onto Center, he saw the Town Car in the distance and throttled back. Center joined Lafayette, and the powderblue Lincoln turned right on Houston, then made another right on First, heading back into Jokertown. The streets were choked, and Shad had no trouble following.
The Lincoln made a few more turns once it entered Jokertown, then turned off into a nineteenth-century brownstone warehouse with its tall windows closed off by more recent red brick. The electronic garage door closed behind the Lincoln, and Shad passed slowly on the motorcycle, turning neither left nor right, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. He wouldn't show up on this block again, certainly not on the bike. He'd be someone else entirely by the time he came back.
He turned, positioning himself to see the Lincoln if it headed back east, then pulled over to the curb and tried to contact Croyd-nothing. He searched the sky for a flapping pink figure, saw no one.
Time passed. Juve jacked a set of earphones into the radio and bobbed his head to a Kenny Clarke beat.
Two Werewolves stood on the corner, wearing gang colors but only ski masks, which gave them a better field of vision than Liza Minnelli or Richard Nixon, a precaution in case any Asians with guns showed up. The gang war seemed to be proceeding nicely. They scoped Shad out, offered him procaine cut with baby laxative, were ignored.
"Yo. Homes. This is Wingman."
Juve straightened, reached for the police radio. The tw dealers saw him raise it and split.
"Homes here."
Undercover cops used the same sort of elliptical language, Shad knew-he hadn't been challenged with these radios yet, even though the police were listening. If anyone questioned him, he planned to be Detective-Third Sam Kozokowski of the Internal Affairs Division, and what was your name and badge fucking number? Which should shut them up in a hurry.
"She just wandered around for a while," Croyd said, "then passed her handbag to a boy on a scooter. Then she wandered some more. Now she's in a restaurant, eating an Egg McMuffin. Anything I should do?"
"She's been jumped. There's somebody else in there."
"Shit."
"I need you to follow a powder-blue Lincoln Town Car."
"Snazzy wheels."
Shad paused. This was the first time he'd heard the word snazzy in decades. He told Croyd where the car was, then went back to being Juve. A little shift in the infrared spectrum showed him where Croyd was hovering.
It was almost one in the afternoon before Shad saw Croyd begin to move. Shad paralleled him on the bike. The zigzag course took him and Croyd back to Chatham Square.
The dog body waited on the traffic circle. Shad pulled up behind the Lincoln, memorized the license plate, then parked where he'd been that morning. He went into the doorway and became Juve again.
There was a new chalk drawing there, right on the stoop.
It showed Shad and Shelley having breakfast in the Jokertown coffee shop. Shad looked at the picture and felt an eerie wind crawl up the back of his neck.
He forced himself to stay in the doorway till he saw Shelley hail a cab. Then, checking behind himself constantly for tails, he headed for the hotel.
"Yo. Wingman."
"Hi, homes. The dog-faced joker I was following earlier collapsed-I think she got jumped again-but I saw her getting up as I followed the car. The Lincoln went back to the warehouse."
"Thanks. I'll talk to you later."
"We'll do some beer and bugs. Wingman out."
Shad sped back through the tape he'd made of Shelley's room. Two people had scoped the place. They were in their late teens, by the look of them, the boy in stylish leathers, the girl in denim and an eye patch. She seemed to have only one hand. The boy had got them through the lock with a raking gun. The one-eyed girl put something on top of the tall cabinet that held the TV Then they both left the way they had come.