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"One joint," the man snarled. "All's I had was one fuckin‘ joint." But even as he spoke, his right hand moved to cover the barely scabbed tracks on the inside of his left arm.
"So what about it?" she asked. "Did you see ‘em or not?"
"What the fuck business is it of yours?" the man countered, but the aggression in his voice had given way to a faint whine.
"You got your job, I got mine. So what's the big fuckin‘ deal?" Her confidence restored, Jinx's eyes locked onto the man again.
"I ain't seen ‘em," he said, his eyes shifting to the subway tu
The whine in his voice was more prominent, and then Jinx understood. He was scared of her now. He didn't know who she was or who she might be working for. But he knew exactly what would happen to him if he fucked up-the hunters would turn on him, and instead of having an easy source of the cash he needed for whatever he was shooting, he'd be ru
"Like I care what happened yesterday," she said, seizing the opportunity. "What they want to know is where they are now."
The last of the man's junkie confidence crumbled. "I don't know-I'm tellin‘ you, I don't know nothin'." Then, as if searching for something, anything, that might make Jinx say something good about him to whomever she was working for, he said, "They found Crazy Harry this morning."
Crazy Harry? Who was he? She had never heard of him, but she said nothing, certain that her silence would be enough to keep the man talking. Sure enough, he started up again. "He was in his room, down near where Shine's bunch hangs out. Someone cut him last night." His voice dropped. "The guy that told me said it looked like they jammed a railroad spike in him." The man's head shook from side to side as if he could hardly believe what he'd heard. "Who'd do a thing like that? Shit, Harry was crazy, but he never hurt no one. Why'd anyone want to cut him up?"
But Jinx had stopped listening.
A railroad spike. The guy with Jeff Converse-Jagger, that was his name-had carried a railroad spike.
"Where'd he live?" she asked.
"Who?" the man countered.
"Crazy Harry!" Jinx replied. "You said he lived down near Shine. Where's that?"
The man shook his head. "How do I know? Down below somewhere-down where all the crazies live."
"How do I get there?" Jinx asked.
Now the man's eyes changed again, turning suspicious. "Thought you just wanted to know about them guys the hunters are after."
He started to reach for her arm, but with instincts honed by years on the streets, Jinx spun away before his huge hand closed on her. Flipping him the bird, she darted toward the stairs and was halfway up to the surface before the man had even moved. By the time she got to the surface, she knew exactly where she would go next.
Sledge.
She'd known Sledge almost as long as she'd known Tillie, and if anyone would know where this guy called Shine lived, he would. Sledge talked to everyone, and everyone talked to him.
Emerging into the afternoon sunlight, she headed north, abandoning the tu
The man called Sledge thought he was somewhere around seventy years old, though he wasn't quite sure and he didn't really care. His real name was Charles Price, but he hadn't used it for so long that if someone had spoken it, he probably wouldn't have responded at all. He'd grown up in West Virginia, and after a year in the coal mines had decided that there had to be more to life than breathing dust and dying young.
As it turned out, that wasn't quite true.
For a long time he drifted from one job to another, always managing to drink his way out of them. Finally the day came when there were no more jobs, and Sledge found himself on the streets. It wasn't much of a comedown, since the free flophouses and missions weren't much worse than the rooms he'd been paying for. Then one night someone tried to roll him in one of the missions-it was the third time-and Sledge decided he'd had it. That was when he started looking around for a better place to live, and discovered the tu
He started out in a nest on one of the catwalks above the tracks under Grand Central, using the washrooms to clean up and doing some panhandling in the huge waiting room. But the transit cops kept giving him a hard time, and finally he migrated north. For a while he lived in a really weird place- a little forgotten subway station that he'd stumbled into one night when he was really drunk. He'd thought the walls were all paneled with wood, and it hadn't looked like any subway station he'd ever seen before. He'd passed out, of course, but when he awoke the next day it turned out he hadn't been hallucinating at all. There really was paneling on the walls, and a grand piano on the platform, and a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. If he'd kept his mouth shut about it, he might still be living there, but he told too many people, and one night some people from the surface showed up, and the next time he tried to get in, it was all locked up. He'd heard it was part of some kind of museum now, but wasn't sure and didn't care.
He just moved farther north.
He lived under the park now, in a railroad tu
Now, he was on his third or fourth barbecue barrel and thinking it might be getting time to start looking for a new one. On a day like today, with a brilliant blue sky overhead- far brighter than the sky over West Virginia had ever been when he was a boy-and sunlight streaming through the grated skylight overhead, Sledge thought life had turned out pretty good after all. He had lots of friends, and his friends knew they could count on him. He was always home, his fire was always lit, and pretty much anyone was invited to sit down and have a bite to eat. When he saw Jinx coming down the tracks, his smile widened. "Hey, young lady, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" He flipped over a piece of chicken that looked to be done just about right, transferred it to one of the mismatched but not too badly chipped plates that someone had just washed, and held it out to her. "Just in time for some hot lunch."
Jinx took the plate, and when she told him she was trying to find out where Shine lived, his smile faded. "You don't want to be goin‘ anywhere near those folks."
"I'm lookin‘ for someone," Jinx replied.