Police and Thieves: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

removed a doughnut from a paper bag and neatly took a bite, taking care not to get any crumbs on himself. Whenever Bobo was eating something, he fell into a trance, happy to be with himself. His colicky brown eyes were muddy with glee; the fjord-deep lines bordering his mouth softened.
    Eichmann and Loretta had gone down to the Otis Street DSS office to apply for food stamps. I thought about Flaherty, eager to torment myself about him. First, I had to consider the geography. Lexington, San Carlos, and Capp Streets teemed with dope dealers and their clients, hookers and their johns, and nine million cops on patrol in their black-and-whites—I might see him this very day. Every time I went outside, my chances of running into him increased. Everything was mathematics, from how you tied your shoelaces to when you went to jail.
    But business was business.
    Bobo told me we had to visit these people he knew. I asked him, “What people?”
    He shrugged, “I don’t know. Eichmann told me to see them.”
    The next thing I knew we were walking up Mission Street.Everything seemed normal. The crack hippies by Lady Seikko’s Japanese Restaurant were roasting like chestnuts in the sun. In the mouth of Sycamore Alley, one of the slimiest strips of paved road this side of Oakland, festooned with syringes, empty nickel bags and blood-spotted toilet paper, a man in a wheelchair was hanging onto a parking meter with one hand, screaming bloody murder at the top of his lungs, claiming a hooker had stolen his money.
    Bobo was three inches shorter than me, but he made up for the difference in height by wearing a pair of high-heeled light-brown Frye boots. His body language was dope dealer all the way, arrogant and riddled with cleverly disguised insecurity—showing no weakness, no hesitation, no loss of purpose, not for an instant. The sun was in his face, lighting up his pocked complexion. We were the only English-speaking nickel-bag dealers in the street and we stood out among the Salvadorenos like a pair of tugboats on the open sea.
    Three black dealers were hanging out next to the Mission News porno shop. Two of them were on foot, and the third, wearing his hair in long, carefully tended braids, was riding a repainted mountain bike. Their clientele was an older junkie population, mostly recidivist Latinos who hung out by the Wang Fat Fish Market when they weren’t in the doughnut shop down the street.
    One of the dealers resembled the pictures I’d seen in old
Life
magazines of George Jackson, the former Black Panther and famous prison writer. The kid had an aura, a you-can’t-take-me-down attitude. I was supposed to regard him as my competitor, but I admired him for his low-rent chutzpah.
    The junkies? I did not respect them as much. Home for them was the Thor Hotel up the block. The Thor was a residential hotel, an archetypal Mission single-room-occupancy tenement straight out of the late nineteenth century—soot-stained eaves with a gabled roof that hadn’t been repaired since World War II. It wasurban tundra.
    Bobo tapped me on the arm. “See the punk on the right, sitting on the hood of the car?”
    “You mean George Jackson?”
    “That’s his name?”
    “Yeah, it is. What about him?”
    “He owes me some money.”
    “Yeah, so?”
    “I want it!”
    “Let’s forget it,” I cajoled.
    “How come?”
    “I’m not feeling well.”
    “Come to think of it, neither am I. Let’s get a burrito. C’mon, we’ll go to Pancho Villa’s.”
    George Jackson didn’t know it, but I’d saved him from having to discuss economics with Bobo.
    The route to Pancho Villa’s was another story. The sidewalks were jammed with Catholic schoolgirls, the Salvadoreno ghetto dudes in their cowboy hats, and the Honduran ladies selling mangos and papayas. Vendors were hawking bananas, Panamanian-made radios, mariachi cassettes, and computer software in Spanish in front of Libreria Mexico, Roxanna’s Beauty Salon, McCarthy’s Bar, and Ritmo