They walked slowly down Broadway, back toward 82nd Street. Keeping to the shadows, smoking carelessly, their nubby tweed topcoats collared-up, their heads bare, conversing casually. Typical. Two typical men walking on Broadway.
"Good show," said Terry, lighting a cigarette.
"Mmm," Vince agreed. Then he changed the subject quickly: "Lord, but I'm hungry. Want to stop in at Schrafft's?"
Terry shot him a quick glance, the smoke from his cigarette blowing back in a fine, vaporous trail. "You must be losing your mind. That's the second time tonight you've suggested something as ridiculous as that. Why don't we just walk into the 20th precinct station and turn ourselves--"
"Okay, okay!" Vince cut him off with a smile. "Sorry, my stomach blocks off my brain sometimes.
"But listen, it's too late for anyone at that flea circus to go out for us. They all go off at ten. We'll have to wait till tomorrow morning, and frankly, friend, you know what a splitting headache I get when I'm hungry. In fact," he said, licking his lips in seriousness, "I'm starting to throb a little right now."
They turned into a crosstown street--88th, it was--toward Amsterdam. As if the talk about being spotted had driven them off the main artery.
The streets were almost pitch-black, with the feeble yellow of a distant lamppost casting a watery pool of light on the front of a tenement halfway up the block.
The wind had risen off the Hudson, was whispering up the hill into the crosstown streets. Vince and Terry hunched lower in their topcoats. A young boy was sitting on the tenement's steps, hunched forward, toying with an identification bracelet on his right wrist, his hands down between his legs.
The boy looked in their direction, and his head came up abruptly. He stared at the two men as they approached. Terry nudged Vince with an elbow. "There's our bus boy," he said.
"Should have thought of that myself," Vince grinned back. They walked toward the boy.
He seemed to be about seventeen, short for his age, with a face full of blemishes. His cheekbones were hardly noticeable, and his mouth was a tight, thin line. His hair was black and long. He slouched easily in the tight-fitting blue jeans and Ike jacket, and continued to finger the chain bracelet on his wrist.
He watched them carefully as they moved in on him.
"Want to earn yourself five bucks?" Terry asked, leaning against the stone railing of the stairway. The kid looked up at him with caution in his eyes.
)
