City on Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

doors jammed, leaving only the narrowest space to exit through. And of course, being a gentleman, he let her go first, not that there was any kind of thank-you. Then it was onto the local for one stop and up at Christopher Street. Before he’d gotten busted, they used to hang out here eating ice cream and ’ludes and drinking her dad’s whisky. Half-bombed in the afternoon, he’d goof on the homos passing into the sex shops, as away to the south, buildings rose like kingdoms. The sky that had stretched over them like a great throbbing orangeblue drumhead was now flaking off in little pieces and falling. And he was burning up in his double-layered pants. He told her he had to pee.
    “We’re on kind of a schedule here, Charlie.”
    But he ducked into a pizzeria toilet with a sign. With the door locked, he stripped off his pants and pajama bottoms, wadded the bottoms into his jacket pocket, and put the pants back on. The counter guy glared as he made his way back outside.
    “You know, if you’re going to be like this …,” she started.
    “Like what?”
    “Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me. And would you pay attention? You’re blocking the sidewalk.”
    As indeed, he saw, he was. The crosstown blocks, West Village to East, were jumping with tourists and freaks and other NYU kids. But when had she ever cared about courtesy? “Sam, I feel like you’re pissed off at me, and I didn’t even do anything.”
    “What is it you want from me, Charlie?”
    “I don’t want anything,” he said, dangerously close to whining. “You called me, remember? I just want to be buds again.”
    She thought about this for a second. If there had been some sign he could have given her, one of the recondite handshakes of third graders, spitting in a palm, inscribing a cross, he would have done it. “Okay,” she said, “but let’s just get where we’re going, can we?”
    Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, its columned portico swimming with graffiti she would once have insisted on photographing. The line spilled out of a side door, and they took their place at the back, under an erratic streetlight. A safety pin winked at Charlie from the face of a tall guy a dozen spots ahead; he resembled an ogreish friend of Sam’s he’d met once, not far from here. Charlie became conscious of his hat. He wanted to take it off before the guy, if it was the guy, could spot them, but the light had cut out. When it buzzed back on, he nudged Sam. “Hey, don’t you know him?”
    She looked around edgily. “Who?” But the safety pin had been swallowed by the building, and her gaze fell on another man, the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator, who opened and closed the steel fire door without appearing to see the people passing through it. “Oh, that’s just Bullet.” She seemed almost to collect these obscure connections with older men. This one was heavily tattooed—blades of black ink that extended from his neck all the way out onto his toffee-brown face, like warpaint—and dressed head to toe in leather, with an earring shaped like a shiv. “He’s the bouncer.”
    “I don’t have an ID,” Charlie hissed.
    “What do you need ID for? Just be cool. Follow my lead.”
    He tugged the fur hat down over his eyes and forced himself to stop slouching. His efforts to look grown-up turned out not to matter; the bouncer was lifting Sam off the ground in a bear-hug, his face splitting into a broad, pink grin. “I thought we weren’t going to see you tonight, sugar.”
    “Places to go, people to see,” she said. “You know how it is.”
    “Who’s the beanpole?” He nodded in Charlie’s direction without looking at him.
    “This is Charles.”
    “Charles looks like a narc in that hat.”
    “Charles is cool. Say hello, Charles.”
    Charlie mumbled something but didn’t put his hand out. He was a little scared of black people in general,