Washington, disposing of the fast Muslin greeting, "Marhaba, sardeek," now frowned as he whispered, "Yo, man, you got trouble."
"What?" Boggs asked, feeling his heart sink.
"Word up they gonna move on you again. Serious, this time. I axed a moneygrip o' mine from the home block and he say he heard it for fucking certain."
Randy Boggs frowned. "Why, man? That's what I don't get. You hear anything?"
Washington shrugged. "Make no sense to me."
"Okay." Boggs's face twisted a little. "Shit."
"I'm putting out some inquiries," Washington said. "We'll find ourselves out what the fuck's going on."
Boggs considered this. He didn't go out of his way to look for trouble. He didn't give steely killer eyes to blacks, he didn't eye anybody's dick in the shower, he didn't get cartons of Marlboros from the guards, didn't look sideways at the Aryan Brotherhood. There was no reason he could think of that somebody'd want to move on him.
"I don't know what I did. I don't think--"
"Hey, be cool, man." Washington grinned. "You walk in what? Twenty-four months. Shouldn't be too hard to keep yo ass intact that long."
"This place, man, I hate it so much...."
Severn Washington laughed the way he always did when somebody expressed the obvious. "Got the antidote. Less play us some ball."
And Randy Boggs said, "Sure." Thinking, as he saw his reflection in a chicken-wire-laced window, that what he was looking at with the red-socketed eyes wasn't his living body at all, but something else--something horrible, lying cold and dead, as his blood fled from the flesh.
Thinking that, despite this huge man's reassurance, the only hope he now had was that slip of girl with the ponytail and the big camera.
chapter 11
THIS CITY WAS A PLAYGROUND YOU NEVER GOT TIRED OF.
Once you took the element of fear out of it (and there wasn't anything Jack Nestor feared) New York was the biggest playground in the world.
He felt the excitement the instant he stepped out of the Port Authority bus terminal. The feeling of electricity. And for a moment he thought: What was he doing wasting his time in piss-ant Florida?
He smelled: fishy river, charcoal smoke from pretzel vendors, shit, exhaust. Then he got a whiff of some gross incense three black guys dressed up like Arabs were selling from a folding table. He'd never seen this before. He walked up to them. There were pictures of men from ancient times, it looked like, dressed the same. The twelve true tribes of Israel. Only they were all black. Black rabbis ...
What a crazy town this was!
Nestor walked along Forty-second Street, stopped in a couple peep shows. He left and wandered some more, looking at the old movie theaters, the live play theaters, the angry drivers, the suicidal pedestrians. Horns blared like mad, as if everybody driving a car had a wife in labor in the backseat. Already the energy was exhausting him but he knew he'd be up to speed in a day or two.
He stopped and bought a hot dog and ate it in three bites. At the next street corner he bought another one. This time he asked for onions too. On the third corner he bought two more hot dogs, without onions, and stood eating them and drinking a Sprite, which wasn't a Sprite at all, which he'd asked for, but some brand of lemon-lime soda he'd never heard of. It tasted like medicine. As the vendor split a sausage to fill with sauerkraut, Nestor asked him where there was a hotel in the area.
The man shrugged. "Donoe."
"Huh?"
"Donoe."
"That's a hotel?"
"I donoe."
"Why don't you try learning fucking English?" Nestor walked off. Two blocks later he saw a sign, King's Court Hotel. Which was the same name as a motel he'd been to in Miami Beach once and which wasn't a bad place. He remembered it being clean and cheap. It must have been a chain. Nestor walked up to the door, which opened suddenly. He hadn't noticed a tall young man, dressed in black, standing inside. The man said, "Hello, sir, take your bag?"
The Miami branch didn't, Nestor recalled, have a doorman.
"Just wanted to ask the desk guy a question."