Willis knew how to play these two. Give them back the lip they gave you. That’s how you got respect from their kind.

“What were you gonna do with this, then?” said Durkin, holding the single stocking they’d recovered from Willis’s slacks.

“This girl I been datin’,” said Willis, “she left it over my crib. I was gonna return it to her.”

“What, this girl only has one leg?”

“She has one pussy. That’s all I need to know.”

“You’re a real stud. I’m just curious: You ever had a woman over the age of fourteen?”

“Your mother was,” said Willis.

Mahaffie, big and blond, slapped him viciously across the face. Willis put his tongue to the loose tooth, moved it, and tasted blood. He felt dizzy and hot.

“A gun and a stocking,” said Durkin. “You were on your way to knock over something when we nailed you outside your place. Isn’t that right?”

“Huh?”

“Tell us about your accomplice. Where were you headed when we picked you up?”

“I was just goin’ out for a walk.”

“Liar.”

“What’d you say?”

“You’re a lyin’ piece of black shit.”

“Fuck you, whitey.”

Mahaffie threw a deep punch into Willis’s jaw and knocked him off his chair. His arm twisted in the fall, and he felt an arrow of pain in the wrist still cuffed to the bar. Something had torn in his shoulder, too. Mahaffie righted the chair, and Willis struggled to his knees. He retched as he managed to get back in the seat. He spit blood and his tooth on the table. He looked them in the eye in turn.

“Hey, Jim,” said Durkin, smiling jagged teeth. “You see this?” He let the stocking dangle from his hand.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Stupid sonofabitch was gonna pull a robbery with a fishnet stocking. Oh, shit.”

Durkin and Mahaffie laughed.

“What’s the charge?” said Willis.

“That thirty-two you were carryin’,” said Durkin. “Big surprise, someone filed the serial number off it. Guy like you gets popped with a weapon altered like that, you’re lookin’ at a felony.”

“So? How come I ain’t been brought before no judge?”

“We’re gonna let you think about it.”

“I don’t need to think on nothin’,” said Willis. “I’ll take the charge.”

“You’re lookin’ at time,” said Durkin.

“I wanna speak to an attorney.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Mahaffie put his finger in the mess on the table and flicked the tooth against Willis’s chest. “Here you go. Put it under your pillow tonight. For the fairy.”

“I get a phone call, don’t I?” said Willis, over Mahaffie and Durkin’s laughter. He watched them walk from the room.

Later, Willis stood out in the hall, a desk sergeant nearby, and made his call on a pay phone. He spoke softly so the sergeant couldn’t hear.

“I’m in trouble, cuz.”

“You need to stand tall,” said Alvin Jones.

“You know I will.”

“They gonna try and make you talk.”

“They already did,” said Willis, sick from the coppery taste in his mouth.

“You got a lawyer?”

“They gonna give me one, I expect.”

“You can beat a little old gun rap.”

“Yeah, but they ain’t even charged me yet. They just gonna let me sit here for a while, I guess.”

“That ain’t legal.”

“Black motherfucker like me, legal ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.” Willis shifted his eyes to the sergeant, then back to the wall in front of him. “Thing of it is, they knew about our plan.”

“Say what?”

“The market,” said Willis. “They knew. Now, why you think that is?”

Alvin Jones let that lie in his brain.

“Kenneth.”

“Yeah.”

“You call here again, I might not be in, you understand?”

“You goin’ back with Mary?”

“Nah, man. That baby’s got the cryin’ disease, and I cannot take it. I’ll be at cousin Ronnie’s crib, over there off 7th. But that’s for you only. Don’t you tell no one where I went.”

“I won’t say nothin’.”

“I know it. You a soldier, Ken.”

Jones told his cousin to be strong, then hung up the phone. His eyes went narrow and he began to mumble. Sitting there in the living-room chair of Lula Bacon’s apartment, rattling ice cubes in a highball glass where bourbon had been.

They knew. His cousin’s words burned through his head.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Lula, standing over him, her hand on her hip.

“Nothin’,” said Jones.

“You talkin’ to yourself and your eyes are funny.”

“Go on, bitch,” said Jones, holding out his glass. “Get me another drink.”

Jones watched her head into the kitchen. He lit a Kool and dragged on it deep.

Okay. They knew. But how’d they know? Who the fuck would have the nerve to talk to the police about their plans, and why? Lula? Nah, he never told her anything. Only one he could think of… that smart-mouthed boy Dennis, one had the police brother. Yeah, he was the one. Had to be. Tryin’ to be all Dudley Do-Right and shit.

Jones remembered Dennis, right in this very spot, advising him on how to draw the number out the box score. Telling him that Frank Howard was seven ’cause he played left.

Jones grabbed the phone off the stand, dialed, and got his bookie on the line.

“Alvin,” said the bookie. “How’s it goin’, brother?”

“What the number was?” said Jones.

The bookie told him he hadn’t hit. The numbers that had come out weren’t even close to the ones he’d played.

Jones hung up the phone. He pictured Dennis Strange in his head. Acting superior, talkin’ all that clever shit, looking to play him. Defying him, sitting in the backseat of the Mercury the night before, holding one of his dumb-ass books, like he was better than him and Kenneth, his so-called friend. The friend that he’d betrayed. Boy gave out bad advice, too.

Alvin Jones watched his hand shake as he ashed his cigarette. He felt his blood go tick tick tick.

NINETEEN

DEREK STRANGE WAS listening to a Dial single, Joe Tex doing “A Sweet Woman Like You,” when Lydell Blue buzzed him from the lobby. Strange turned off the music, checked himself in the full-length mirror he had hung by the front door, and went down to meet Lydell. Night had fallen on the streets.

Strange dropped into the bucket of Lydell’s gold Riviera. Blue’s big arms and chest stretched the fabric of his shirt as he put the car in gear.

“Where we headed, Ly?”

“Barry Place.”

“Shoot, we coulda walked.”

“I walked a beat all day. Besides, we meet some girls tonight, you think they’re gonna want us to walk them home?”

“You got a point.”

“I ain’t makin’ payments on this Riv for nothin’.”

They went down the hill alongside Cardozo, then east on Florida. Blue punched the gas, and the car seemed to lift off.

“What you got in this thing, the Apollo rocket?”

“Four-oh-one Nailhead,” said Blue, stroking his thick black mustache.

Strange had a look at the interior of the car. Blue kept it spotless, in and out; you could groom yourself looking into the mirror finish on the body. It was the ’63, the first year Buick had offered the model. Auto turbine, power windows, power seats, even had an antenna went up and down when you pushed a button. He’d bought it used, off that little old lady from Pasadena that every car lover was looking for. Still, even though it was five years old, it hadn’t come cheap. Blue still lived with his mother and father over there in Petworth because he couldn’t afford both an apartment and the nut on this car.

“It is nice,” said Strange.

“What is?”

“Your ride. But the question is, you do meet a girl tonight, where you gonna take her later on?”

“Your place,” said Blue, like he was telling a stupid man his own name. He used Strange’s apartment regularly for just that purpose.

“Fine with me, long as it ain’t like it was with that last girl you had.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Y’all kept me up half the night.”