He was little, but Poole could tell that he was tough. Scar tissue above his eyebrows and a bent nose. He was a gangster. Poole shook the offered hand, engulfing it with his own.
“I want to thank you. You made me a mint when you were at State.”
It was this again. His notoriety in some circles. Throwing games on the gridiron and making the mobsters some scratch. All for walking-around money. Every reminder of it was like an abscessed tooth.
McIntyre was still talking in that weird, high-pitched voice some tough guys had. “You had moxie, chum. All those other fellas, they did what they were asked to do, but you had goddamn moxie.”
Poole smiled out of politeness. He hadn’t enjoyed throwing games. He’d even resisted the idea at first. But with half a dozen others already on the take, why shouldn’t the star running back cash in on a lost cause? It made sense at the time.
McIntyre droned on about games that Poole had tried to forget. Finally, Poole saw the mark emerge through the glass double doors. He was talking to another man, who, at that distance and through the rain-streaked window, was nearly his double—tall, fat, slightly hunched with age. They both wore dark suits. The mark made a gesture with his hands, then put on his hat and trotted over to a waiting cab. The other man put on his own hat, opened an umbrella, and walked down the block. Poole blurted a thanks to McIntyre, handing him his nearly empty glass, then ran to his car, parked at the curb.
Poole had the Ford running as the cab pulled away. Traffic was sparse. He followed the cab across town, through block after block of brick row houses in Capitol Heights, then the claustrophobic streets of Chinatown—where he momentarily lost them behind an electric trolley, and finally down to the Hollows. As always, the Hollows made Poole uneasy. Blocks of warehouses were occasionally interrupted by a bleak brick-and-cement apartment building, inevitably with broken windows and bars on doors. Most eerily, and Poole found this to be true even when the weather was more agreeable, no life was to be seen. No one on the sidewalks. No grass lawns. No trees planted in boxes on the sidewalk. Just asphalt, brick, and cement.
Few cars were on the streets, which made tailing the cab more difficult. Poole hung a few blocks back and kept his fingers crossed that the hack would not lose him with a quick succession of turns. He didn’t. Eventually, the cab stopped at a nondescript, eight-story apartment building. The mark got out of the cab and paid his fare, not waiting for change. The cab drove off. The mark walked briskly toward the building, shoulders hunched against the drizzle. Poole parked his car a block away, waited until the mark had disappeared inside, then jogged—the collar of his trench coat pulled high around his neck, his hat pulled low—to the building’s entrance.
The glass in the front door was a web of cracks from where someone must have smashed it with a brick or a rock. Food scraps, old newspapers, and broken glass were strewn across the lobby’s threadbare brown rug. Cockroaches scuttled along the walls. The two elevators wore OUT OF ORDER signs pasted on their doors. The paint was old and cracked. Poole located the door marked STAIRS and headed up.
A rhythmic thumping came from above. Poole took the stairs by twos. On the landing for the third floor he found a kid, maybe early teens, sitting with his back to a wall, tossing a rubber ball at the opposite wall and catching it on the rebound.
“Fat gink come up these stairs?”
The kid gave Poole an assessing look and nodded. Poole was big—six foot five inches, a few pounds over 220—but the kid did not seem intimidated.
“Know where he went?”
The kid shrugged and returned to his game with the ball. Poole reached into his inside jacket pocket and took a dollar bill from his wallet. He folded it lengthwise and tossed it into the kid’s lap.
“Miss Baker’s.” Poole got a look at the kid’s mouthful of rotten teeth.
“Number?”
The kid hesitated.
“You’re not getting any more money.” Poole moved slightly closer to him, casting his shadow on the kid’s body.
“Six oh two.”
Poole nodded and continued up the stairs.
“Hey,” the kid called after him, “what you got in that bag?”
Poole put his bag down outside apartment 602. He fished out a bandana, which he tied around his nose and