The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [73]
I winced inside at that, but tried not to show it. “Things’ll be even tougher at the Dusters’.”
“Unh-unh,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m gonna have my pick of customers there. My new man says so.”
“New man? And who’d that be?”
“Ding Dong, that’s who.” She put her hands proudly on her hips. “How do you like that, Mr. Errand Boy?”
If her previous remark had brought a wince, this one hit like a sledgehammer. “Ding Dong,” I whispered. “Kat—you can’t—”
“And why not? If you’re thinkin’ he’s too old, the fact is he likes his ladies young—told me so. And since he’s one of them what started the gang, I’ll have protection all over the city. I don’t service nobody without he says it’s okay, neither.’
I didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I’d crossed paths with this Ding Dong many times during my days with Crazy Butch: he ran the kids’ auxiliary of the Hudson Dusters (whose turf was the West Side and the waterfront below Fourteenth Street), and he did it through the simple but brutal trick of turning kids into cocaine fiends and then controlling their access to the stuff. The Dusters were all what we called burny blowers, addicted to snorting powdered cocaine, and a few of them even jabbed the drug: it tended to make them wild, reckless, and violent, so much so that most other gangs just steered clear of them altogether, since none of their territory was what you’d call vital. They were darlings of the moneyed Bohemian crowd, who shared their craving for cocaine and liked to come down and slum it in their headquarters, an old dive on Hudson Street; and the sickening sight of the Dusters’ leader, Goo Goo Knox, having his praises sung in ditties and poems dashed off by educated but misled fools was, I’m sorry to say, not uncommon.
The blood I’d seen on Kat’s glove the night we’d run into her on Christopher Street had clued me in to how she’d been enlisted by the Dusters; and if that hadn’t been enough, she now sat on the bed and produced a sweets tin what was filled to the brim with the fine white powder.
“Want some?” she said, in that half-ashamed way that all drug fiends do when they can’t resist going to the well in front of another person. “I can get all I want.”
“I’m sure of that,” I said. Then urgency set my blood afire. “Listen, Kat,” I said, sitting on the bed next to her. “I’ve got an idea. It could get you out of all this. The Doctor needs a maid—a regular, live-in housekeeper. I think I could convince him, if you’d be willing to—”
I was interrupted by the loud sound of her snorting the burny off her wrist. Her face winced with the sting, then settled into relief. Finally she began to laugh. “A maid? Stevie—you ain’t serious!”
“Why not?” I said. “It’s a roof over your head, a good roof, and steady work—”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “and I can just imagine what I’d have to do for this Doctor to keep it.”
A sudden wave of anger flashed through me, and I grabbed her wrist hard, spilling the cocaine off of it. “Don’t say that,” I growled through clamped teeth. “Don’t ever talk about the Doctor like that. Just because you never met people like him—”
“Stevie, goddamn it!” Kat cried, trying to salvage the cocaine I’d spilt. “You never get it, do you? So I never met people like him? I got news for you, boy, I met people like him ever since I came to this town, and I’m sick of it! Old gents ready to give you something, yeah, I’ve met ’em—but they always want something back! And I’m sick of it! I want a man, Stevie, a man of my own, and Ding Dong’s gonna be it! He ain’t no boy, no silly little kid with foolish ideas—” She stopped herself there and tried to catch her breath. “Ah. I’m sorry, Stevie. I like you, you know that—always have. But I’m gonna be somebody—maybe, I don