on them?
Eddie only looked back at him, not scratching now, not moving at all.
A faint breeze blew a Ring-Ding wrapper across the park- ing lot. The scratchy sound of its
skittering passage and the wheezy thump of the pizza truck’s loose valves were the only
sounds.
Col’s knowing grin began to falter.
“Hop in, Eddie,” Jack said without looking around. “Let’s take a ride.”
“Where?” Eddie asked, knowing.
“Balazar’s.” Jack didn’t look around. He flexed his hands on the wheel once. A large ring, solid gold except for the onyx stone which bulged from it like the eye of a giant insect,
glittered on the third finger of his right as he did it. “He wants to know about his goods.”
“I have his goods. They’re safe.”
“Fine. Then nobody has anything to worry about,” Jack Andolini said, and did not look around.
“I think I want to go upstairs first,” Eddie said. “I want to change my clothes, talk to Henry—”
“And get fixed up, don’t forget that,” Col said, and grinned his big yellow-toothed grin.
“Except you got nothing to fix with, little chum.”
Dad-a-chum?the gunslinger thought in Eddie’s mind, and both of them shuddered a little.
Col observed the shudder and his smile widened. Oh, here it is after all, that smile said. The good old Junkie Shuffle. Had me worried there for a minute, Eddie. The teeth revealed by the smile’s expansion were not an improvement on those pre- viously seen.
“Why’s that?”
“Mr. Balazar thought it would be better to make sure youguys had a clean place,” Jack said without looking around. He went on observing the world an observer would have believed
it impossible for such a man to observe. “In case anyone showed up.”
“People with a Federal search warrant, for instance,” Col said. His face hung and leered.
Now Eddie could feel Roland also wanting to drive a fist through the rotted teeth that made
that grin so reprehensible, so somehow irredeemable. The unanimity of feeling cheered
him up a little. “He sent in a cleaning service to wash the walls and vacuum the carpets and he ain’t going to charge you a red cent for it, Eddie!”
Now you’ll ask what I’ve got, Col’s grin said. Oh yeah, now you’ll ask, Eddie my boy.
Because you may not love the candy-man, but you do love the candy, don’t you? And now
that you know Balazar’s made sure your own private stash is gone—
A sudden thought, both ugly and frightening, flashed through his mind. If the stash was
gone—
“Where’s Henry?” he said suddenly, so harshly that Col drew back, surprised.
Jack Andolini finally turned his head. He did so slowly, as if it was an act he performed
only rarely, and at great personal cost. You almost expected to hear old oilless hinges
creaking inside the thickness of his neck.
“Safe,” he said, and then turned his head back to its original position again, just as slowly.
Eddie stood beside the pizza truck, fighting the panic trying to rise in his mind and drown
coherent thought. Sud- denly the need to fix, which he had been holding at bay pretty well,
was overpowering. He had to fix. With a fix he could think, get himself under control—
Quit it!Roland roared inside his head, so loud Eddie winced (and Col, mistaking Eddie’s grimace of pain and sur- prise for another little step in the Junkie Shuffle, began to grin
again). Quit it! I’ll be all the goddamned control you need!
You don’t understand! He’s mybrother! He’s my fucking brother! Balazar’s got my brother!
You speak as if it was a word I’d never heard before. Do you fear for him?
Yes! Christ,yes!
Then do what they expect. Cry. Pule and beg. Ask for this fix of yours. I’m sure they
expect you to, and I’m sure they have it. Do all those things, make them sure of you,
andyou can be sure all your fears will be justified.
I don’t understand what you m—
I mean if you show a yellow gut, you will go far toward getting your precious brother
killed. Is that what you want?
All right. I’ll be cool. It may not sound that way, but I’ll be cool.
Is that what you call it? All right, then. Yes. Be cool.
“This isn’t the way the deal was supposed to go down,” Eddie said, speaking past Col and directly at Jack Andolini’s tufted ear. “This isn’t why I took care of Balazar’s goods and
hung onto my lip while some other guy would have been puking out five names for every
year off on the plea-bargain.”
“Balazar thought your brother would be safer with him,” Jack said, not looking around.
“He took him into protective custody.”
“Well good,” Eddie said. “You thank him for me, and you tell him that I’m back, his goods are safe, and I can take care of Henry just like Henry always took care of me. You tell him
I’ll have a six-pack on ice and when Henry walks in the place we’re going to split it and then
we’ll get in our car and come on into town and do the deal like it was supposed to be done.
Like we talked about it.”
“Balazar wants to see you, Eddie,” Jack said. His voice was implacable, immovable. His
head did not turn. “Get in the truck.”
“Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, motherfucker,” Eddie said, and started for the doors to his building.
8
It was a short distance but he had gotten barely halfway when Andolini’s hand clamped on
his upper arm with the paralyzing force of a vise-grip. His breath as hot as a bull’s on the
back of Eddie’s neck. He did all this in the time you would have thought, looking at him, it
would have taken his brain to convince his hand to pull the door-handle up.
Eddie turned around.
Be cool, Eddie,Roland whispered.
Cool,Eddie responded.
“I could kill you for that,” Andolini said. “No one tells me stick it up my ass, especially no shitass little junkie like you.”
“Kill shit!”Eddie screamed at him—but it was a calcu- lated scream. A cool scream, if you could dig that. They stood there, dark figures in the golden horizontal light of late spring
sundown in the wasteland of housing developments that is the Bronx’s Co-Op City, and
people heard the scream, and people heard the word kill, and if their radios were on they turned them up and if their radios were off they turned them on and then turned them up
because it was better that way, safer.
“Rico Balazar broke his word! I stood up for him and he didn’t stand up for me! So I tell
you to stick it up your fuckin ass, I tellhim to stick it up his fuckin ass, I tell anybody I want to stick it up his fuckin ass!”
Andolini looked at him. His eyes were so brown the color seemed to have leaked into his
corneas, turning them the yellow of old parchment.
” Itell President Reagan to stick it up his ass if he breaks his word to me, and fuck his fuckin rectal palp or whatever it is!”
The words died away in echoes on brick and concrete. A single child, his skin very black
against his white basketball shorts and high-topped sneakers, stood in the playground
across the street, watching them, a basketball held loosely against his side in the crook of
his elbow.
“You done?” Andolini asked when the last of the echoes were gone.
“Yes,” Eddie said in a completely normal tone of voice.
“Okay,” Andolini said. He spread his anthropoid fingers and smiled . . . and when he
smiled, two things happened simultaneously: the first was that you saw a charm that was so
surprising it had a way of leaving people defenseless; the second was that you saw how bright he really was. How dangerously bright. “Now can we start over?”
Eddie brushed his hands through his hair, crossed his arms briefly so he could scratch both
arms at the same time, and said, “I think we better, because this is going nowhere.”
“Okay,” Andolini said. “No one has said nothing, and no one has ranked out nobody.” And without turning his head or breaking the rhythm of his speech he added, “Get back in the
truck, dumb wit.”
Col Vincent, who had climbed cautiously out of the delivery truck through the door
Andolini had left open retreated so fast he thumped his head. He slid across the seat and
slouched in his former place, rubbing it and sulking.
“You gotta understand the deal changed when the Cus- toms people put the arm on you,”
Andolini said reasonably. “Balazar is a big man. He has interests to protect. People to protect. One of those people, it just so happens, is your brother Henry. You think that’s
bullshit? If you do, you better think about the way Henry is now.”