Vast fucking city of the mind. Los Angeles was not a place but a mental state, the mental state of a severely deranged person. The roads ran like clotted arteries in search of a head; the smog nestled little ropes down over those arteries and drew tight. Wulff hated it. Los Angeles and New York were nominally both American cities, but New York was a great, steaming, dying beast whereas Los Angeles was merely vapor. He hated it but good. Still, it was good to be back in the States again. Not three days ago he had doubted that he would ever see his country again. It still was his country, of course. King America. Where everything began and where someday soon it would end.

Wulff found himself tenanting a residence hotel in a suburb. Everything in Los Angeles was a suburb. The residence hotel had an elegant name like the Actor’s Home or the Colony Quarters, something like that; the kind of address which when put on mail would give out-of-towners the impression that the tenant was really making it out in the Golden West. In truth, the average age of the Actor’s Home or Colony Quarter tenants was somewhere over fifty. A couple of them had busted out from being extras or stagehands. These were the top-flight residents of the home but the majority of them had come no closer to the movies than going to the movies themselves and they seemed to be merely a step above the derelict class. There were a sprinkling of women who were in even worse shape than the men, but the sex of the Actor’s Home or Colony Quarters seemed mostly to be neuter. They were scoring a little shit in the hallways, of course, and pot blew out of the rooms like breeze at night, but Wulff was not interested in that kind of stuff. That was nickels and dimes; he had long lost any passion for complete extermination. If people wanted to blow a little pot then that was their prerogative, at least until the big squeeze could be put on. He was after much bigger game. He and a big sack of shit were waiting for a two million dollar rendezvous.

Someone was going to make contact with him at the Actor’s Home for the ostensible purpose of scoring the bag. They weren’t going to score the bag. They were going to lead him right up the chain to the head and eventually back to Chicago but they did not know that. Wulff had put the word out that he was in town; there had been little trouble in making contact. By this time everybody knew who he was and the fact that he had a two million dollar sack wouldn’t hurt his social standing at all. And the fact that he was Calabrese’s game, Calabrese’s marked man, even kept him safe in this city, at least until Calabrese could get organized, get some orders through. So he hung tight in the Actor’s Home, the Colony Quarters. Two days, three days; it made no difference at all. He had all the time in the world now; he could wait them out. Waiting was the least of it. It was the confrontation that made life difficult.

There was a girl stashed in San Francisco under a different name, but Wulff knew her as Tamara. He had seen her a few months back, and she had reached him in a way that no one else during his Odyssey had; maybe she was the reason that he had come back to the coast from El Paso. He could have scored New York again or Minneapolis, anything but Chicago; it made no difference. But Los Angeles sounded good. It was close enough to San Francisco to be less than a day, fast car, and the country was the same. He didn’t think that he ever wanted to see San Francisco again though. Los Angeles was close enough.

He called the girl, reaching her at her parents’ house where she had been stashed, and she came down to see him. Wulff really had not expected anything different. If he had thought that the girl would not be anxious to see him he never would have come here, never would have made the call. She took a bus down to the Colony Quarters, walked straight in, probably the first young, attractive girl that had been in this dump in forty years, went straight to the little room where Wulff and his sack had huddled up, and came in. He spent the next twelve hours fucking the shit out of her. Why not? He was entitled. Not that his feelings about her were really that crude, not that simple fucking would have appealed to him without a kind of emotional context at this point … but keep it straight. Keep it simple. He banged the hell out of Tamara, fulfilling a promise that he had made in Las Vegas, and quite reciprocally she banged the hell out of him. She was a nice girl, not without feeling and genuine emotional range, but the really nice, uncomplicating factor about her was that she liked to screw too. She saw nothing wrong with it. Besides, Wulff had saved her from nearly OD’ing out back in San Francisco. She owed him her life. Wulff had a knack for finding pretty girls who were OD’d out. Sometimes they were alive. Sometimes they were dead. This one had been alive.

On the morning after the night the girl Tamara came, Wulff awoke after an hour’s doze lying naked against her, reached for her while half asleep, and felt her immediately curve like a bow into his arms, her body ripe for the springing … and as he leaned to take her he heard a pounding on the door and knew with a sense of regret that his Odyssey was over. Calabrese’s men or the contact point? Either way the jig was up. Twelve hours, though, was not a bad Odyssey. At the pace his life had been going in recent months it was downright exceptional.

He told her to watch it and he got a gun and then throwing a robe around himself he opened the door. She leaned back in the bed, half-closing her eyes, looking at the wall, unmoving. She certainly had a lot of faith in him. Maybe he rated it.

The revision in the New York State narcotics law went into the books on September 1st.

For Evans, everything on his first bust after that date went like clockwork, and then abruptly all of it fell apart. Motherfuckers. All of them. Maybe he wasn’t thinking of a narcotics bust here but of the country itself. You never could tell. It was easy to get confused.

Evans was supposed to score the deal at the prearranged corner, 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, while Finch, the senior man in undercover garb, covered him from across the street. The minute that Evans had paid the dealer with the marked bills Finch would move in, gun drawn, while Evans went for his own pistol. Then they would take the kid downtown. A little crowd noise might develop, but against two drawn service revolvers and identification nothing was really going to happen. Routine shit. He had gone through this ten, fifteen times before, and the only scary time was wondering if the dealer would show up to begin with or whether he, Evans, would be walking into an ambush. Once he had walked into something like that. Of course, Evans had never tried the gig in this neighborhood before. That was simple, reasonable policy: never pull the same trick twice in the same neighborhood. All of it was on the same chain. Word would get around.

Everything, to a point, went just the way it was supposed to. Finch, a young black dressed like a bum, was nodding away in his place fifteen minutes before the rendezvous. The kid himself showed, overanxious probably, five minutes early, talking to himself in a brisk distracted way … sampling his own goods. Evans bought three decks for a hundred apiece, cheap stuff he was sure. He was already looking forward to the lab report on this; probably it was sugar. He passed over the six marked fifties to the kid, the kid taking them with eyes half-closed, nodding away saying, “Good shit, good shit, man.” He might have been nineteen years old. “You’ll love this shit,” the kid said dreamily and put away the fifties, heaving from a crouch to take himself out of the scene, and then Finch was sprinting across the street, reaching for his gun.

Evans at that moment moved for his own revolver and the kid, seeing the situation collapse in front of him, was already backing into the near wall, hands up, terror leaking from the open spots on his cheeks. Evans could have laughed with the ease of it: how well it was going, how much he had it all under control now and then. Just like that it broke open.

Finch was no longer running. He was being swarmed on the street. No traffic here to block his view. Three men had come from hidden doorways and had pinned Finch, and as Evans watched this Finch went down screaming, the bellow of pain quite distinct in the thick air, the sound of bone shattering as a foot went into his skull. Evans was still working with his pistol, the tube of his attention narrowed down in that way. He almost had it out and was starting to bear down on the three men for a series of shots that would get them and yet not kill Finch. But as he was concentrating something hit him on the side of the head, opening up an empty place in the skull that he had never before known to be there, and Evans fell to the ground, the vague impression that bodies were swarming over him mingling with the pain of concrete against his knees. Then the pistol was yanked from his hand, and he could see faces looming over him.

Two of them: hard, bitter, implacable, street faces these. God knows where they had come from. Like all of the street faces they simply were there, and Evans, turning instinctively, trying to pull himself into a standing position, was kicked hard in the ass, the contact striking bone, bringing undignified tears, and he went down to the street again. He was crying. No one had kicked him in the ass since the fifth grade. This could not be happening. He was a five year veteran. It could not be happening to him. Laughing; they were laughing all around, and then Evans was yanked upwards, felt himself moving through dense layers of space to confront the man who had kicked him, and as he thrashed in that grip it occurred to him that he was probably going to die. He was helpless; they had given him no lead time. The decks of heroin were pulled from his pocket by one of the men and then they were filling the air, tossed around, disappearing somewhere. The two looked the same: somewhere in their twenties, nondescript clothing, closed-in faces. Neither had a gun. They had taken him that easily. “You stupid son of a bitch,” one of the men said.

Evans looked for Finch. Where the hell was Finch? The last time he had looked the man had been covered on the street and surely he must be there somewhere. Even swarmed under bodies Finch had to be there, struggling, reaching for his own revolver, trying to dig out the killing shot … but Evans could not see him. Nothing was on the street whatsoever, nothing in Harlem: no traffic, empty stones, the perspective seeming to have narrowed to a radius working within three feet out There were only the two men and himself and then as Evans looked, everything swinging into slow motion, trying open-mouthed to focus the situation, the kid from whom he had scored came into view, his face still leaking that terror, his eyes perfectly blank. “Kill the son of a bitch,” the kid said above Evans, “you’ve got to kill him now. Kill him for this.”

The unreality was still probing at him, but seeing the kid caused the angles to harden once again. Evans felt that the kid must be the pivot of the situation; if he could get a grip of some sort he could swing out from there. Grab the wheel and turn. “Cut out the shit,” he said weakly, “just cut it out. I’m a police officer. Now let me go before it gets much worse.” He had a pregnant wife and a three-year-old girl. His wife had begged him to get out, but he was going for the good twenty.

“Fucking cop,” one of the men said. He tightened his grip, banged Evans into a wall. He could feel the stones coming into him like so many fists and he would have hit ground again, but something was holding him up now, and then the two were in even tighter focus. “Fucking son of a bitch cop.” He turned toward the other, the man propping up Evans, needing confirmation of some sort but there was nothing doing there at all. The other man said nothing. “You know what fucking kind of trouble you’re in, cop?” he said. “Do you know now?”

He guessed he did. Oh, yes indeed, he did. Evans tried to say something, felt his throat constricting, dry, croaked, decided to say nothing. Everything had reared out of control like a crazed horse off the rein. Here had been a nice, tight, simple score and bust which had broken away from him and now it had turned into something else. He might, he thought, even have gone on to deal with that. These things, he understood, happened, but what he could not deal with was the hatred of the two men pinning him and his growing sense that what he did would have no consequence; he was going to die here and now in Harlem. It was not fair; that was about the only thought which persisted. He knew his business, he had been in narco long enough, there was nothing that was supposed to shake him at this point. Nevertheless, here it was. Where the fuck was Finch? Where was traffic in this area, had they sealed off the streets to get him? Surely they could not have anticipated this so tightly. Everything was crazy, that was all. The kid who he had scored off had now closed the last of the ground between them. He was staring at Evans. Sweat came off his face in little chains.

The other two smiled then and stood aside as if they had been the official greeters, the kid being the celebrity, set up. “You fucking cop,” the kid said, “I try to score you a little shit and you pull a badge on me. That’s rotten. That’s really rotten.”

“You’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Am I?”

“A lot of trouble,” Evans repeated. He tried to make the words come out evenly, aiming for some menace, but they did not. Nevertheless. Stick with it. No choice otherwise. “You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“You’re in more, cop.”

“Give up,” Evans said. “It isn’t worth it If it’s a first offense they’ll go easy on you.” He thought he had been doing well but his voice broke on the
easy
. “Easy on you,” he said again, keeping his voice flat this time. Something was wrong with his breath. It leapt and stirred in his chest, out of synch with his attention. It could not be a heart attack. He was twenty-seven years old.

The kid reached out a hand, and one of the others handed him the pistol
slap!
just the way operating room nurses handed scalpels to surgeons on television. The kid pointed it at Evans. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. You set me up. You set me up for a life bust.” The kid’s voice was breaking too but he made no effort to control it. Why the hell should he? He was the one with the gun. “No one does this to Willie,” he said.

“Now listen here, Willie,” Evans said, seizing the name for the contact. He had to establish some connection. Maybe Finch was struggling with the other two at this moment; maybe Finch was in the process of pulling free, coming to bail him out at just this moment He had never believed that he could die. “Listen, Willie, it doesn’t have to be this bad. Give up. Give me the gun. Give me the gun, Willie. Using a weapon on a police officer in the performance of his duty—”

“I ain’t using no fucking weapon, man. I’m going to kill you.”

“Killing a cop is death, Willie,” Evans said. “It’s death in this state, the only capital punishment left. It’s much worse than scoring shit, Willie.”

“Is it?” Willie said. “Is it?”

The gun was steady in the kid’s hand, and at that moment Evans knew he was going to be shot. Funny, you could live on the borderline of death for years and years. Every cop or cardiac did, thinking that it might be stalking you, too, but its presence when it came was unmistakable. It was the difference between swimming and drowning, dreaming and happening. He knew that his death was coming at him out of that hand.

“It’s after September 1st, you son of a bitch,” Willie said. “I’m going to go up for life, mandatory, no appeal, no parole for selling. So what the fuck’s the difference between life and capital anymore? Capital’s a better deal.”

“Listen—”

“And besides,” Willie said, looking cunning, “this way I got at least a chance; you take me in I got no chance at all. I’ll be looking out bars for fifty.”

“There are ways—”

“There are no ways,” Willie said quite matter of factly. The two men beside him seemed to nod solemnly; he gave them a checking glance, looked back at Evans. “You see, your fucking white man’s law has given me no choice,” Willie said.

He pulled the trigger.

Evans saw the fire and then something strange happened as the bullet hit him; the bullet gave him an altered perspective, a feeling of vaulting insight, and suddenly he was no longer himself, he was Finch. He was Finch and he was somewhere in an alley across the street, and just as Evans had been shot, Evans/Finch had been shot, too, in the chest, a killing slug for him under the heart. Evans/Finch bellowed with the pain of it, Evans/Finch slumped and then he was only Evans again, locked into his own flesh forever. He saw the kid’s face in the aftermath of the discharge streaked by terror again, looking the same as it had when he had been caught with the score, and Evans thought, my God, he really doesn’t want to do this; he wasn’t lying, he doesn’t want it anymore than I do. We’re both trapped, trapped by what they’ve done to us, trapped by the law. He thought he might say this to the kid, point it out to him in a casual, courteous way—hey, don’t you understand; we’ve got nothing against each other, it’s just the law that they put between—but the hell with that, the hell with casual, courteous conversation. He was falling crosswise, arching into the pavement.

Funny, Evans thought, still thinking, thinking all the way down the pipe until the end, he had expected that his body would collide with one of the other two but it did not. Instead of striking flesh he went through the point of prospective contact, sliding smoothly, and then he was on the stones, stone puncturing his throat. He must have been shot in the heart, he thought, and everything was vaulting upward.

Evans lay there, face down in a sewer. Thought slowly chased itself out of him with the pulses of blood. Then finally he heard, or thought he heard, the sound of sirens. They were coming up Lenox Avenue to save him, the governor and his legions were coming to put the shitseller into prison for life, but too late, governor old man, too late. Evan’s last thought as he died, oblivious of what was around him (but he knew the men had probably run away) was that he hoped the wagon would take Finch first. Finch certainly had more of a chance than he did, that was for sure, and regardless of chances it was not fair that all efforts were not made to save Finch since Finch had just been the sidesaddle man. The bust was Evans’s, the true responsibility his. Sidesaddle Finch, helping Evans on a score, Evans himself sidesaddle to the damned narcotics laws which had killed him.

Life without parole for dealing. Better to kill a cop
.

Evans died.

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