Maus raised his brows and pressed his ear more tightly to the door. "You think so? Making a lot of noise, ain't he?"
"You think that 'cause you unfamiliar with the sexual habits of my people. Being naturally more attune to the physical propensities of life, we get more juice out of the berry, so to speak, in the way of hump. Therefore the noises of ecstasy which we hearin now."
"Yeah, you keep telling me that, but I got to take your word for it, since I notice you haven't fixed me up with any of your sisters yet."
Jeffers laughed softly. "You not ready for that, boy. I got to bring you along slow, got to pace you."
Maus said, "1 appreciate that, Mack, I do, and meanwhile I'm working hard to overcome my objection to miscegenation. Meanwhile, what the fuck are we doing here? I'm getting horny listening to this shit."
"My plan, little man, is to wait until Tecumseh have pop his rocks and then we gonna swoop him up while he lie in the sweet afterglow. Besides, he ain't gonna be getting none of that for a long time where he goin. It's my act of Christian charity for the month."
They waited in the hall until the sounds stopped. Then Jeffers pounded mightily on the door and shouted, "Open up! Police!" He pressed his ear to the door again.
"Are they coming?" asked Maus.
"So to speak? No, I hear escapin noise. I think he's goin out the window."
"You going to take the door down?"
"Don't be funny, son. This a steel door. I go through a door like this, they better have my momma's ass on fire on the other side. No, we just gonna go downstairs again. Tecumseh ain't goin nowhere."
And indeed, when they arrived back on the street, they found Tecumseh Booth facedown on the ground, dressed only in a pair of slacks, with his hands cuffed behind him. Art Dugman had picked him up easily as he dropped from the fire escape.
Jeffers stooped and jerked Booth to his feet with a single yank on the handcuff chain. Booth yelped sharply and said, "Hey, what the fuck you want with me? I ain done nothin!"
Jeffers popped the rear door of the Plymouth open and threw the prisoner in. He got in himself and Dugman went around to the other side. Maus drove the car south toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct.
Booth sat between them calmly with his hands cuffed behind his back, waiting. He had learned, from a lifetime of arrests, the wisdom of the sages, that silence was the ideal state of being. He had also learned that cops made mistakes, and that in some mysterious way these mistakes had the power to cancel guilt, so that you could walk away from a crime that the cops and kids on the street and old ladies knew you had done, and they couldn't do shit to you. This had happened to him a number of times. The main thing was to shut up.
Booth became aware that the two cops on either side of him were staring at him. He looked straight ahead. After a while the older one said, "Turn off here."
The driver swung left, heading toward the blackness of Colonial Park. He stopped the car in the dark of a big tree.
The older cop said, "Look at his head. It's the perfect shape."
"Don't start that again!" the big cop said nervously.
"I'm telling you, it'll work this time," said the older detective. Booth felt the older cop's body shift, and looked to see why. He had drawn out his pistol.
The driver turned around in the front seat. "Damn it, not in the damn car! The last time it took me three hours to clean all the blood and crap off of the upholstery. You want to play games, do it outside!"
Booth felt a cold touch at his right ear. His head jerked away by reflex, only to be stopped by a similar but harder pressure on the other ear. The big cop said, "Boss, I sure hope you know what you doin. You say this really works?"
"I know it," affirmed the older cop. "Now, just get it stuck in there solid, and don't be twitchin like you done last time."
Booth now could not move his head. He understood why. He had the muzzle of a.38-caliber revolver stuck firmly in each ear.
"Hey," he said. "Hey, what…?"
The driver leaned over the front seat and addressed him conversationally. "See, what he says, is if you do this just right, the two bullets will meet in the middle and cancel out. The same slug, the same load, same gun, understand. It's like physics. I happen to think it's horseshit, myself, but try and tell him anything!"
Booth's face twisted in a ghastly smile. "You shittin me, man. They can't do that. They's cops, they can't…"
The smile faded and Booth's jaw went slack, as if something more frightening than having a pistol in each ear had just occurred to him. A trickle of sweat fell into his eye. The older cop caught the change in expression.
"Say what? What can't cops do, brother?" Dugman asked.
Booth opened a dry mouth as if to say something, then shut it.
The cop in the front seat began to talk again, in the same tone of calm explanation. "Yeah, see, we know you killed Clarry, and we know there was cops involved. Now, ordinarily we would take you in, book you, and question you. We would figure, maybe we can make a deal-you give us the guy, we put in a good word with the D.A., and so on.
"But the word is, you don't deal. You're a stand-up dude. Fine. The problem is, we really need this guy. So we figured, you're no good to us on that, the best thing we could do is, maybe if we ace you out, your guy will-I dunno-get a hair up his ass. Do something dumb. Maybe he'll think we're in the same business, and he'll come after us. Or whatever. I mean it's pretty thin at this point, but I don't see the percentage in doing anything else, if you catch my drift-"
The older cop broke in, "That's enough. God damn, man, you ain't got to ask his fuckin permission!" He addressed the big cop on the other side of Booth. "OK, we gonna do it now."
"Just a second, lemme shift around here. Is this gonna fuck up my suit?"
"Not if you do it right. You lined up good?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"OK, squeeze off on the count of three," said the older cop.
"Um, hold it… you mean, right on three, or just after? Like, one-two-bang? Or one-two-three-bang?"
The older cop sounded exasperated. "Damn! I told you before; take up all the slack, then let go as soon as I say 'three'!"
Booth could hear surprisingly well, considering that his ears were full of gun. He understood the explanation given by the man in the front seat, and even sympathized with it, as much as he could, considering his position. He would have used the same reasoning himself. He heard the count, as from a great distance. Closer, more intimately, he heard the whisper of the revolver mechanisms as they brought the new bullets around to be fired. He seemed separated from his trembling body, floating above his own head. He heard the cop say "three" and, a pulse-beat later, the tiny snicks as the mechanisms released their hammers.
The hammers took a long time to fall. By the time they did, Booth was already far away.
"I don't think he believed us," said Maus, looking down at Booth's flaccid body.
"He ain't dead, is he?" asked Mack. Booth's head was resting on his knee.
Dugman reached out and touched Booth's neck. "Naw, he just fainted. God damn! He let go his business too!" Dugman flung open his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. In another second, Mack cursed and did the same. They stood on either side of the car hooting and waving their hands past their faces.
"Say, Maus," said Dugman, "why don't you drive on down to the precinct and book the prisoner. Me and Mack got to do some detective work here on the street."
"Yo," said Mack. "We got to stay close to our people."
Maus rolled down his window. "Fuckin guys. I knew I was gonna have to clean the fuckin car again."
Marlene's bed sat on a high sleeping platform at one end of her loft, and from this vantage, at six-thirty on a workday morning, she watched the naked Karp drink water from her sink. He chugged a glass down, then filled another. Karp drank a lot of water, like a horse. It was the only healthy aspect of his diet, which consisted otherwise of junk food from cancer wagons and takeout windows-soggy pizza, elderly gray hot dogs, orange-colored knishes heavy as cinderblock, souvlaki oozing toxic oils, lukewarm eggrolls packed with substances mysterious as the East. Karp ate these in combinations and in quantities that would gag a wolverine, and washed it down with colorful, bubbled sugar-water.