Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [139]
Max was waiting just inside the warehouse. I showed him the picture of the Cobra again and he nodded to show it was already in his memory bank. Max wasn’t so good with faces (did all us Occidentals really look alike?), but once he saw a man move he could pick him out of a crowd at fifty yards.
It was dark by the time we turned the Plymouth toward Times Square. Where else to look for a freak with no address? We cruised Eighth Avenue, from the upper thirties to the fifties. The cold neon flashed on and off across Max’s face, his eyes hooded against the street’s night glare, with the sun-shield Lexan film on the inside of the windows, you’d need X-ray vision to see inside the Plymouth. That kind of stuff is illegal on the Coast but it’s okay here in New York. Cops hate it. It makes it hard for them to claim that the pistol (or bag of dope, or human head, or whatever) was in “plain view” when they stopped the car for a broken taillight.
We didn’t expect to spot Wilson just bopping down the street. He was moving now—out of his hole and running hard. But I already had the government to watching the airports and the bus stations for me. I had to do something, at least be in motion.
Garbage floated all around the cruising Plymouth—teenage girls working the streets with their built-up shoes and their broken-down spirits; the younger ones, the children who hadn’t had their first periods yet, they worked the inside—the massage parlors and the hotels. The older ones worked the bars and the clubs. Even the pit has its own sense of order—rough-off teams stalking the sidewalks and lurking near the corners, looking for an excuse to take a wallet or a life; gaudy pimpmobiles parked all around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, dumb iron horses that ate human flesh, waiting for the pilot fish in their zircon rings and fake-fur hats to bring them new little girls; the videogame parlors with their load of little boys waiting for the chicken hawks to come calling. Those little boys were just for rent—if you wanted to buy one for keeps you had to see a man in a brownstone office and pay heavy cash. No deposit, no return. Very little heroin for sale down here; uptown’s the stop for that stuff. But the streets were full of dirtbags in long filthy overcoats selling their methadone from the nearby clinic, and young hustlers were hawking ’ludes and speed everywhere. If you knew where to go, you could buy genuine prescriptions for Valium, or Percodan, or whatever travel ticket you wanted. The gold-buying shops stayed open late to accommodate the chain-snatchers. The gleaming windows of the electronics stores displayed giant portable stereos, the better to achieve self-induced retardation. And in the back rooms the same joints sold gravity knives and fake pistols to smooth the passage of the stereos from the retardates to the muggers. There were theatrical supply houses that would sell you all the goodies you’d need to disguise yourself if you were into armed robbery or rape. And little shops that sold “marital aids” that looked like tools for felonious assault. Bookstores sold crash-courses in achieving orgasm through torture, and films—documentary proof of things that shouldn’t exist.
When I was a little kid I once saw a bunch of men get together on the street in Little Italy. There was this vacant lot with all kinds of old rotting stuff in it, and rats were living there right out in the open. One of them had bitten a kid. The men surrounded the lot and poured gasoline