Sleeping Dogs (11 page)

The salesman didn’t seem to recognize the absurdity of the theory that twelve pellets in a five-inch pattern had left only a single small puncture. “It’s just down there,” he said.

“Pull over,” said Ackerman.

“What for?”

“Do it. We’ve got to go through their pockets. If they’ve got drugs or too much money on them they’ll have to answer different questions.” The salesman coasted to a stop, then executed a perfect unconscious parallel-parking job, backing right to the curb. But then he forgot to take the car out of gear and it lurched into the car in back with a crack, rocking it a little. The man in the front seat seemed to understand what was happening to him and pointed to the pockets he couldn’t reach. In the back seat, Ackerman found that the unconscious man was more difficult. His limp, dead weight was enormous. There were little glass tubes of crack hidden in all his pockets, and a huge roll of bills in his jacket. The last thing Ackerman found was an automatic pistol at the small of the man’s back, unfired and probably forgotten in his terrified dash to get away. He slipped it into his coat pocket.

He was aware as each second passed that he could easily raise the .357 Magnum and kill the salesman, then the man beside him, and walk away. Drug dealers had always been crazy and unpredictable, and he had stayed away from them. They always seemed to him to be driven by some horrible, aching greed that would make them feed until they burst, like ticks. He had never heard of one who had stopped because he had decided he had enough money. They just kept getting more bloated and voracious until they died in some violent explosion of overconfidence or madness, or the sheer physical principle that when a hoard of money got big enough it created its own predators to disperse it.

His reluctance to be rid of them had something to do with how young they were, and how spectacularly inexperienced. They were so alien to him, he sensed that the environment that would allow them to survive was a place he had never been. In the old days—he recognized that his urge to use that phrase trapped him in the past and made him only a visitor in the present, but he had no choice—these small entrepreneurs would have been co-opted and trained in the iron discipline of the local organization, or else swept away. The only explanation for these tiny gangs of boys in the streets was that anarchy must have descended on the world.

The salesman stared at him over the car seat, and Ackerman could see that he was sweating and frightened. He took pity on him. “Okay. Here’s what we do: you pull up the driveway where the ambulances go. Get as close to the emergency-room door as you can, and keep the motor running.”

The salesman drove to the blue sign that said E
MERGENCY
and A
MBULANCES
but nothing else. As he took the turn, he swung wide and had to jerk the car to the right to avoid an ambulance with its lights off gliding down the drive to return to its garage. “I’ll kill that fucker,” he hissed.

Ackerman knew that if he allowed the salesman to get frightened enough, his deranged mutterings might develop into a real intention, but he decided to ignore them for the moment because the Jaguar was now moving up into the bright yellow glow of the sodium lights. As soon as the car coasted to a stop, Ackerman got out, pulling the wounded man out behind him by the ankles. As he stepped back to duck under him for a fireman’s carry, he stepped on the foot of a man behind him. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder.

As he turned back toward the car he still held the image of the man, a tall, barrel-chested policeman wearing a light blue shirt with little epaulets on the shoulders, and such a burden of metal and black leather around his waist that he looked a yard wide. There were a flashlight, a nightstick, a canister of mace, a pocketknife in a black leather case, ammunition and the heavy black knurled handgrips of the service revolver, all creaking and clicking as he bent to look inside the car. He heard the policeman say, “What’s wrong with him?” and he answered, “I can’t tell, but he’s bleeding, and so is his friend. My driver found them lying in the street.”

The policeman moved to the double doors, which hissed open as soon as he stepped on the black rubber mat, and grabbed an orderly who was pushing a gurney around the corner to the next hallway. He could hear the policeman’s voice. “I don’t give a shit who you work for. I got gunshot wounds out there.” He had his hand on the orderly’s back, so it looked as though he were pushing the man and his gurney out the door.

The policeman and the orderly hauled the man the rest of the way out of the back of the car and lifted him onto the gurney. As the orderly wheeled him into the building, the policeman walked over to an ambulance driver who was just putting his oxygen bottle back into its carrying case inside his parked rig. As he and the ambulance driver pulled a stretcher out of the ambulance, its legs swung down and locked. By now the second wounded man was out of the front seat and standing beside the car unsteadily, and he gladly flopped onto the stretcher for the short ride inside. The policeman muttered, “You two park the car over there and come back. I’ll need you for a few minutes,” then pushed the stretcher to the door.

Instantly Ackerman was in the passenger seat beside the salesman. “Drive. Get out of here,” he said. The salesman had been sitting motionless, not even daring to glance at the policeman in his rearview mirror. Ackerman knew it must have taken a great act of will for him. Since childhood he had undoubtedly survived the way the thieves in the old days had, scattering at the first sign of the uniforms, each one scrambling in a different direction, down alleys and over fences, each of them alone and hoping that he wouldn’t be the one they picked to chase down. Now the salesman was released from whatever had held him. His instincts, temperament and ability to calculate all urged him away, and he let them carry him. He stepped on the gas pedal and the car was in motion.

A hundred feet away, an old man was shuffling across the drive toward the emergency room, staring down at the pavement with a contemplative look on his face. He took each little step carefully, with intense concentration, satisfied with the almost invisible progress it represented. The old man was caught in the lights for a moment and looked up defiantly, squinting a little, then stopped walking as though he intended to make this young fool wait as long as possible.

“You see the old guy?” Ackerman asked.

“Sure,” said the salesman, but he didn’t slow down. Ackerman could see the old man judging the distance to the curb and estimating the damage he would sustain if he made a dive to the pavement. The old man’s decision was conservative. He aimed himself at the curb and began to shuffle toward it, faster now than before, in a strange little dance that looked as though he were going down invisible stairs. The car shot past him, the slipstream blowing his coattails up and sending a ripple of wind to flutter his baggy pants. Then he was visible for a second in Silhouette against the yellow light of the hospital entrance, still standing.

The Jaguar spun around the corner and its arc carried it into the next one, heading south again. Ackerman turned to the salesman. “Do you know where you’re going?”

The salesman shrugged. “Can’t stay out alone. Got to get with my friends. The Jamaicans will be hunting me.”

“Let me out at the corner.”

The salesman’s eyes narrowed and he glanced at him quickly. “We still need to talk.”

“What about?”

“I need the gun back. They’re looking for me.” He had obviously been thinking about the predicament he was in. He had emptied the clip in the Uzi and sold his pistol, and now he still had to make it across the city to whatever stronghold his friends maintained. He wasn’t sure he would be able to do that unarmed, and even he knew he couldn’t stay out in a car as memorable as a Jaguar and not be caught by the police.

Ackerman was surprised to detect in himself a certain sympathy for the salesman. “All right. Pull over up there.”

The salesman steered his car to the side of the street and let a taxi go by. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the five hundred-dollar bills. Ackerman accepted them, then got out and leaned back into the car to look at the salesman.

The salesman was agitated. “Where is it? Where’s my gun?”

Ackerman pulled the big nickel-plated pistol out of his coat and laid it on the floor behind the passenger seat, out of the salesman’s reach. “If I were you I’d drive around the corner to a dark spot before I tried to pick that up.”

The salesman looked hurt at the lack of trust, or perhaps disappointed that he wasn’t going to get the five hundred dollars back. “You have another one, don’t you? You took one off B-Man.”

Ackerman answered, “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have. Don’t try to follow me. I can still kill you any time I want to.” He closed the door and watched the Jaguar move off into the night.

He walked quickly down the street past a hotel, a bar and two closed stores before he ducked into the next doorway. He looked out at the street for the Jaguar, his right wrist beside his coat pocket, feeling the weight and square corners of the small automatic inside without letting his hand pat it or touch it. The Jaguar didn’t reappear, even after he had watched the traffic signal change three times. The salesman had decided to forget about the money, and had gone to find whatever form of safety and shelter home could offer him.

A
ckerman grasped the big wrought-iron handle, pulled the heavy plank door open and entered. There was a podium with a book of reservations on it, but the kitchen had been closed for hours and the hostess had been replaced by a bouncer who sat in an alcove with a pilsener glass half full of flat beer. He was a melancholy weight lifter recruited from a local gym, a thirtyish man with a cap of black, curly hair and a management-owned blue suit that had been let out to accommodate his squat, thick upper torso. He let his dark eyes stray upward to determine that the man coming through the doorway was alone, and therefore probably quiet; wearing a clean shirt and sport coat, and therefore probably not insane; and of average height and weight, and therefore manageable for the bouncer if he had been overly optimistic about either of the first two.

The bouncer took a birdlike sip of his beer and returned his eyes to a sad survey of the rest of the patrons sitting at tables ranged around the dark interior of the bar. Behind the eyes he was a small, shy little introvert who had inherited the body of generations of brawlers and laborers, then with introspective concentration had built it into a comic-book picture of a man, with muscles that he compared each day, one by one, with a series of photographs in a glossy magazine. He saw himself as a kind of lifeguard who was always in attendance at a scene of continuous and foolhardy revelry that he was never moved to join.

Ackerman walked past the bouncer to the bar, edged onto a stool and found that he had immediately intersected with the bartender’s orbit. “Perrier,” he said. The bartender’s answer was a warning and a challenge: “That’ll be three-fifty.” He reached for his wallet to signal that he was aware he was going to pay that much for a glass of water, and the man moved to the cooler.

Ackerman placed a five-dollar bill on the bar, then moved toward the sign that said R
ESTROOMS.
There was a dark little hallway, and two doors with the international symbols for the sexes, two gingerbread people so nearly alike that they signified nothing until compared for differences. He had been glad to see the bouncer because it meant that the pay telephone would still be firmly attached to the wall, and the book would be intact. The bouncer was the sort who would have considered the destruction of a telephone book an infraction that required his regretful attention.

He had no difficulty finding the home address. There were only four Talarese numbers, and only one Antonio. But then he noticed the business numbers. The first was Talarese’s Bella Italia, then a number for catering, and one for reservations. The address was on Mott Street in Little Italy. It had to be the same place, the little catering store where he had met Tony T years ago. He walked back to the bar and sipped his bubbly water. The antique clock on the wall over the bar, a plain black face with glowing green numbers and a green neon ring around it, said that it was ten minutes to one.

He sat in the subway car looking at the spray-painted graffiti on the walls. The colors had gotten better, the viridian greens and new shades of orange, and the gold and silver metal-flake, but the script was now so ornate that he couldn’t read any of it. When it occurred to him that it might be a different language, he decided it should still be organized into words. It looked more like the samples of Sumerian and Phoenician in the books he had found in his house in England than like any modern language. The British were always complaining that London was no longer an English city. They should see New York. It had always been a few steps closer to chaos than London was, but now no European would recognize it as having any historical relationship with anything he knew or understood. It was as though the Indians had returned to claim it after a three-hundred-year sojourn in the woods.