Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [41]
A short blond hooker with thinning hair wearing a tight bustier and tighter cut-offs stood in front of the chef. "Are they serving?" he whispered to her. She turned around and whispered, "Yeah, they just opened it up again," showing the chef a glimpse of rotted teeth.
"Shut up in there!" yelled the man with the pistol from the hall.
The chef could see the occasional figure moving past the doorway in the hall, heading back to the street. The man with the pistol stepped into the holding room and directed another small group into a hallway to the right. As the chef moved closer, he could make out another group of dark figures lined up in a stairwell. Every few seconds, another dark silhouette, moving quickly, would hurry down the stairs and past the doorway, transaction completed. He could hear them stumbling and sloshing through the water on their way back to the street.
Finally the chef's small group was called. The line closed up, more junkies wandering in to take their place. The chef's group walked up the steps single file. "Watch the third step," said the man with the pistol. He shined a light on the missing step; inside the hollow space was a piece of plywood booby-trapped with razor blades and nails. The line moved up the steps at short intervals. At the top, the chef could make out a jerry-built barrier, lit from behind by a single burning candle. The hooker in front of him approached the barrier. The chef saw it was covered by a blanket. She whispered, "Gimme a deck," in the dark. The blanket moved a bit.
Behind it, he could see a cage built of chicken wire, corrugated steel, roofing material, and pieces of wood planking. A hand extended out from behind the blanket and took the hooker's money and reemerged holding a bundle of glassine bags held together by a rubber band. She turned and stumbled back down the stairs on high heels.
The chef stepped up to the barrier. A whispered voice from behind it said, "Cuánto?" He answered, "Dame dos grandes," and handed over his twenty-dollar bill. The hand reappeared holding two bags with EXECUTIVE stamped on them in smeared black ink. The man behind him on line growled, "Step off, chump," menacingly, and the chef had only a second to glimpse the two hunched, dark figures in the flickering candlelight behind the blanket before the blanket fell and he had to hurry down the steps.
He had just reached the last step, just outside the holding area, when he heard shouting below. From the roof came cries of "Bajando! Red light! Bajando!" There was the sound of the door to some secret escape hatch being opened as the two workers in the cage gathered up the drugs and the money; there was another sharper sound as the hatch shut behind them and they slipped into the dark bowels of the building. Suddenly panicked junkies were running in every direction. Frantic figures, looking for hiding places or a way to escape, pushed past him, banging into walls in the dark. He ran toward the only light, the holding room. People were clambering out the windows, jumping down a story into the trash-strewn lot. The chef saw blue uniforms down there standing over the prone figures of hapless junkies, putting on handcuffs, kicking legs apart.
The chef could hear them coming, the sound of their squawking radios getting louder and louder. Outside the holding room, he could see their flashlights moving toward him, reflecting off the water and through the holes in the crumbling plasterboard. One raggedy-looking man with his arm in a cast crawled under a rusting box spring to hide. Another struggled desperately to pull up a rotting floorboard, then disappeared down into the hole. A small, emaciated-looking man with an Orioles cap pushed past the chef and slipped whimpering into the narrow space behind the plasterboard in the wall. Without thinking, the chef squeezed in after him. He caught a last glimpse of the man's eyes,