Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [89]
I dropped Max at the warehouse where I used a pay phone to call Flood and tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her until very early the next morning. I told her I’d ring her from downstairs before I came up.
My face hurt a bit and I wanted to change the dressing—and I wanted to sleep. But when I got back to the office I had to explain the whole race again to Pansy and feed her too, so it was after four in the afternoon when I finally lay down.
34
THE TINY BATTERY-POWERED alarm woke me just past eight. When I picked up the desk phone to call Flood I heard some freak yell, “Hey, Moonchild, are you on the line?” and hung up quietly. I could have used another shave for cosmetic purposes but it wasn’t necessary for the role I had to play. I had to be a guy waiting around the night court for a friend or a relative. I didn’t want to look too much like a lawyer—I don’t work the Bronx courts (neither does Blumberg or any of my regulars—you have to be bilingual to do it), and I didn’t want people talking to me. I didn’t want to look too much like a felon either—some smartass rookie might decide to ask me if there were any warrants out against me. There weren’t but I had to time things right. I had to be in front of the court at eleven-thirty like I’d been told, so I had to get there earlier to make sure. But not too early—I didn’t want to be hanging around there either.
I got out a pair of dark chino pants, a dark-green turtleneck jersey, a pair of calf-high black boots, a fingertip leather jacket, and one of those Ivy League caps. I changed quickly, shoved a set of I.D. in my pocket, added three hundred bucks, and snapped a second set of I.D. papers into the jacket’s inner sleeve. No weapons—the court’s full of metal detectors and informants, and Pablito’s people might have even a worse attitude than the law. So no tape recorder either, not even a pencil.
Now for the bad part—riding the subway without nuclear weapons, or at least a flamethrower. But it was early enough and I walked until I came to the underground entrance. I played with the local trains for a while, backtracking and crisscrossing until I got to the Brooklyn Bridge station. I found a pay phone there and called Flood—she said she was doing okay and she’d stay there until I called her, sounding subdued but not depressed. It’s bad to be depressed at night—that kind of thing is easier to handle in the morning. That’s why when I’ve only got a couple of bucks in my pocket I get some action down on a horse or a number or something before I go to sleep—something to look forward to. And if it doesn’t come through for me, at least it’s another day where I beat the system—it’s daylight, I’m not looking out through prison bars, the suckers are getting ready to go to work, and there’s money for me to make. It works for me, but I don’t think Flood’s a gambler.
I grabbed the uptown express, rode it to Forty-second Street, and crossed the tracks like I was looking for the local. I took a look around. Lots of freaks working the second shift tonight—chain snatchers, child molesters, flashers and rubbers, the usual. No Cobra, though. Sometimes you get dumb-lucky, not this time. I waited for two more express trains to come on through and took the third one.
A guy in the seat across from me was wearing a tattered raincoat buttoned to the neck, denim washpants, new loafers with tassels, no socks. He had neatly trimmed hair and crazy eyes. Nice disguise, but he’d left the plastic hospital tag around his wrist when he’d gone over the wall. He had one hand in his pocket and his lips were moving. I got up quietly and moved to another car.
A kid about the size of a two-family house was standing in the middle of the next car, playing his giant portable stereo loud enough to crack concrete. Everybody was looking the other way. A citizen with a delicate beard and a belted trenchcoat was complaining