“Why don’t you just put that thing away, you little scuzz?” Eddie asked. “Or do you maybe want Balazar to send someone down here and cut your eyes out of your head with a rusty knife?”
The sallow thing smiled. The gun was gone like magic; in its place was a small envelope. He handed it to Eddie. “Just a little joke, you know.”
“If you say so.”
“I see you Sunday night.”
He turned toward the door.
“I think you better wait.”
The sallow thing turned back, eyebrows raised. “You think I won’t go if I want to go?”
“I think if you go and this is bad shit, I’ll be gone tomorrow. Then you’ll be in deep shit.”
The sallow thing turned sulky. It sat in the room’s single easy chair while Eddie opened the envelope and spilled out a small quantity of brown stuff. It looked evil. He looked at the sallow thing.
“I know how it looks, it looks like shit, but that’s just the cut,” the sallow thing said. “It’s fine.”
Eddie tore a sheet of paper from the notepad on the desk and separated a small amount of the brown powder from the pile. He fingered it and then rubbed it on the roof of his mouth. A second later he spat into the wastebasket.
“You want to die? Is that it? You got a death-wish?”
“That’s all there is.” The sallow thing looked more sulky than ever.
“I have a reservation out tomorrow,” Eddie said. This was a lie, but he didn’t believe the sallow thing had the resources to check it. “TWA. I did it on my own, just in case the contact happened to be a fuck-up like you. I don’t mind. It’ll be a relief, actually. I wasn’t cut out for this sort of work.”
The sallow thing sat and cogitated. Eddie sat and concentrated on not moving. He felt like moving; felt like slipping and sliding, bipping and bopping, shucking and jiving, scratching his scratches and cracking his crackers. He even felt his eyes wanting to slide back to the pile of brown powder, although he knew it was poison. He had fixed at ten that morning; the same number of hours had gone by since then. But if he did any of those things, the situation would change. The sallow thing was doing more than cogitating; it was watching him, trying to calculate the depth of him.
“I might be able to find something,” it said at last.
“Why don’t you try?” Eddie said. “But come eleven, I turn out the light and put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and anybody that knocks after I do that, I call the desk and say someone’s bothering me, send a security guy.”
“You are a fuck,” the sallow thing said in its impeccable British accent.
“No,” Eddie said, “a fuck is what you expected. I came with my legs crossed. You want to be here before eleven with something that I can use—it doesn’t have to be great, just something I can use—or you will be one dead scuzz.”
7
The sallow thing was back long before eleven; he was back by nine-thirty. Eddie guessed the other stuff had been in his car all along.
A little more powder this time. Not white, but at least a dull ivory color, which was mildly hopeful.
Eddie tasted. It seemed all right. Actually better than all right. Pretty good. He rolled a bill and snorted.
“Well, then, until Sunday,” the sallow thing said briskly, getting to its feet.
“Wait,” Eddie said, as if he were the one with the gun. In a way he was. The gun was Balazar. Emilio Balazar was a high-caliber big shot in New York’s wonderful world of drugs.
“Wait?” the sallow thing turned and looked at Eddie as if he believed Eddie must be insane. “For what?”