Snitch Factory: A Novel (18 page)

The clients were looking at the bills he was dishing out, holding them up to the light, licking them, rubbing their fingers over them to see if they were legitimate. It would have been too cruel if this was a prank or some shoddy counterfeits.

Nothing doing. The man was distributing authentic U.S. Mint currency. He kept scooping his hand into the bag and ladling out the bills.

“There’s some for everybody,” he was saying. “Steady now, friends. We got plenty to go around.”

This went on for quite a spell. I was beginning to suspect the man was a magician and the money in the bag was endless. But the Pinkertons got hold of him and after he’d reached the last person in the back row, giving a woman with two kids four crisp twenties, he was escorted out of the complex.

On his way through the wire-mesh doors, he said over his shoulder, “Forget these turkeys. You wait and see, I’ll be back.”

The clients broke out in a ragged cheer.

I told you a change was going to come, didn’t I?

PETER PLATE taught himself to write during eight years spent living in abandoned buildings in San Francisco’s Mission district. A spoken-word performer, Plate possesses an eidetic memory that allows him to recite whole chapters of his books from memory.
Snitch Factory
joins
One Foot off the Gutter, Police and Thieves,
and
Angels of Catastrophe
to complete Plate’s Mission Quartet. His previous novels are
The Romance of the American Living Room
(1993),
Darkness Throws Down the Sun
(1991), and
Black Wheel of Anger
(1990). Peter Plate lives and writes in San Francisco.

Copyright ©1997, 2001 by Peter Plate

 

First published by Incommunicado Press in 1997
First Seven Stories Press edition November 2001

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Plate, Peter.

Snitch factory a novel / Peter Plate.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-609-80055-0

1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Women social workers—Fiction. 3. Married women—Fiction. I. Title

 

PS3566.L267 S65 2001

813’.54—dc21

2001041075

 

 

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