jeans, army-green-and-maroon shirt, leather bike-grip gloves, air-pump spaceman shoes. He checked his beeper and then took out a tiny cell phone, unfolded it, made a call. Meanwhile two more punks drifted in from down the street, shook hands with the dealer at the street-lamp, then walked over to the dumpster and hung out, talking casually, lighting each other's joint. Traffic continued down the street. Sometimes cars pulled up to the curb. Most just drove by.
I was lying not ten yards from a public street, doped to the gills, and nobody was paying me any mind. If anyone even noticed me, they probably figured I was just a wino, some derelict the punks had allowed to crash in their outdoor office. I wondered that no police cars went by, that they didn't rush in and find me and break up the dealing. But I knew better. If a police car had been anywhere close, signalmen armed with cell phones up and down the surrounding blocks would've been on to the threat instantly. Beepers would beep a warning code. The stash would get ditched in the dumpster and the kids would vanish down the side streets and I'd either get dragged back in the warehouse or, more likely, killed and left for the police to find - doped up and murdered, just another victim of another deal gone bad. Probably make an interesting feature on page A12, former sheriffs son OD'ed and killed at a West Side drug spot. The drug business would be back in swing on a different corner before my blood had even soaked into the stinking fabric of the couch.
Porkpie kept pacing back and forth. He glanced at me occasionally, but the fact that my eyes were open didn't seem to bother him. For all I knew my eyes had been open for days, glazed and useless while my brain had checked out. I tried to wiggle my toes, got excited when I felt the fabric of my socks against them. I tried to move a knee. I couldn't do that. My arms were dead weight. My head throbbed. I swallowed, then ran my tongue back and forth in my mouth, got a sensation like licking a sand castle. I was not going to leap up right away and tackle anybody. But at least I could form the idea of doing so. The detective as philosopher.
I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to shove Porkpie's state-of-the-art cell phone down his throat.
Another car slid down the block and pulled over - a blue Impala, '83, pretty badly banged up. The car windows were tinted and the interior pitch-black. The dealer disengaged himself from his two friends at the dumpster and took a wary step toward the Impala, his hand in his black coat.
The guy in the passenger's seat cracked open his window. "Azul rife! Y que?"
Old-style cholo greeting: The Blue rules. What're you gonna do about it?
The dealer and his friends relaxed. All flashed a hand sign at the Impala. The dealer walked toward the car's back window, which was just now rolling down. Then the dealer's black coat exploded like an air bag.
The high-caliber shot launched him off his feet into a reverse jackknife, the back of his coat shredding away in a spiral of blood and fabric. He hit the ground just as a shotgun blast from the Impala's open passenger window slammed into his friends by the dumpster - scouring metal and brick and bodies with buckshot. Someone shrieked. Porkpie dropped his phone and ran. He made it over the fence at the back of the lot in two moves.
Then it was quiet except for the sound of two men in misery by the dumpster. One of them kept crawling around, screaming. The other just twitched. The dealer never moved. The dumpster and warehouse wall behind them were freckled with blood and shot.
Ralph Arguello stepped out of the passenger's-side door of the Impala holding a high-powered over-and-under Mossberg. Erainya Manos came from the driver's side, her .38 up next to her ear. Another guy I didn't recognize got out of the back. He carried the snub-nosed .45 automatic that had just drilled the hole in the dealer's chest.
The round lenses of Ralph's glasses glinted in the yellow streetlight like coins. He planted his boot on the chest of one of the guys who was still alive, then lowered the shotgun muzzle against the kid's face. Erainya snarled: "No!"
Ralph glanced