EXCERPT

Chapter One

Later Debbie would figure that it didn't begin with Jeremy's planned party, nor with the book—not really. It started with that stupid fool Susan, and everything else just followed from that.

Debbie got into the car with Jeremy after school, still angry. Even with the forty-four-caliber in her pocket, the weight of the stares from the kids on the lawn and the street was heavy. They knew what Jeremy did, but didn't know anything about her...yet.

"It's a nuisance, isn't it?" Jeremy laughed. "You have to put up with little kids."

"Don't worry about it," Debbie replied. "I can take care of myself."

He nodded. "Right, right. So, Debbie, what're we going to do about getting me my money from the lottery I've been running?"

"I told you. We'll get your money tonight. Let's just lay low until then. I got nothing to do."

"My place?"

"Unless you know some place better."

Jeremy drove them on downtown. "When you get those new numbers ready?"

"I left them in the photo album from last time," Debbie replied, "page eighty-one."

"Damn, you—"

"I didn't know if that cop was coming after you or not. McGuire's a pretty bad guy. You shouldn't screw with him like that, just keep going."

On Delain Avenue and Trenton Street, Jeremy parked on the curb and stepped out of the car.

"You want to get anything?" he asked, pointing out the town's only Korean market, which stood right in front of him.

Debbie said, "Give me a Coke or a Pepsi and some Juicy Fruit. Get me the new Vanity Fair, also. Your man Austin really did the layout?"

Jeremy just grinned at her.

Debbie looked offended. "No? You're such a friggin' liar! Why the hell did you say that?"

"You still want that Cindy Crawford cover with K.D. Lang, or what? You changing your…uh, preferences or what?"

"Just get it!" Laughing, Debbie tossed Jeremy a ten-dollar bill. "My change...."

She stepped out behind him as he trotted off and slammed the door. He'd be in the store for a while talking to that guy Jack and his kid Philly. Nice people at least, she thought, not like those jerks Jeremy usually had for friends.

Debbie headed down Delain Avenue to some of the burnt out buildings. Everything was falling apart—that curio shop where a still unknown assailant butchered that poor old man, the high school that fell victim to a suspicious fire a few months back. Chaos. This part of Delain was beyond the central business district and had been brushed by such tragedies too many times within the past couple of years to count. No one was in a hurry to clean it up either. Thank God this isn't LA, Debbie thought. Nineteen-ninety-three had been bad for business, what with people around here distraught over Rodney King and the resulting riots, and it had been felt around here as if the cancer that poisoned South Central LA had reached its tentacles across the country.

Debbie checked her revolver chamber and stepped into one store. The last fire had totally destroyed the interior and stunk it up. They said it was an accident, but Debbie didn't think so. Mayor Penderson had opened up the whole west side of town to new opportunities for Blacks, and nobody from the north side of town liked that except Puerto Ricans, who for generations had lived among the "regular" townsfolk and so were considered acceptable to "normal" Rocksdale citizens—they didn't care one way or another. The blacks that had run this store and all the others on this street for a few uneasy months were gone for good. Nobody else would be moving in for a while. Chances were the township had become more cautious and sold the store to whites on the east or north side of town for a healthy profit. The blacks would watch the situation and hate it, but what could they do?

Debbie kicked blackened woodpiles and other debris around while going through the shop. The walls separating the storage room from the main buying area had been partially knocked down by both the fire and some of the firefighters. Last week the town finished the job and left the shop like this, not even bothering to board it up—after all, the central district was not very close to here, over a mile away. Whoever owned the shop now wouldn't be here for at least another year, and then he'd be set up before you knew it. When it rained, it poured. Imagine Jeremy in here running his lottery every Friday night or so.

Debbie herself never doped out numbers, that was for idiots and losers. She had plenty of money as it was, what with her carting stuff around for Jeremy and other guys down in the Strip and running card games in the Pit, that social club nestled in the eastern extremity of South Rocksdale people loved to frequent after work hours. The numbers for Jeremy were collected from the citizens of the 'Docks and the Strip on Wednesday afternoons and played Friday nights. For some reason Debbie couldn't divine, Jeremy's operation had a reputation as an honest one—funny, because in the last, say, three or four years only four 'Dockers had won big jackpots (a grand or more). It must be like the Lotto: nobody you knew won the prizes, but "it could happen to you." You never knew.

The back of the store loomed before Debbie like a great square of light. They'd knocked out this wall also, probably because it'd been crumbling badly when the fire was through with it, though the flames had chosen to leave it somewhat intact. Debbie peered down at the twisted moonscape streets of South Rocksdale, at the broken cobblestone tenements with jagged holes for windows, with blood and graffiti for color. Even the sky seemed darker over this part of town, sadder, grayer. Debbie gazed upon it for a short while and then turned away. There wasn't any use in staying here. Jeremy would have liked this place so much, though.

The street was becoming flooded with kids going home from school, and the stores filled. People were just hanging out, talking up a storm. Debbie didn't recognize any of the kids, who were Blacks and Puerto Ricans from the west district of town. She pushed her way through various patches of crowds as she made her way back to the street corner. Nobody looked at her twice, for she was just another kid and apparently not one of the rich brood. She looked like anyone else in her plain blue jeans, man's white polo shirt (her father's) and Reebok sneakers. Her hair was long (it reached just past her shoulder blades) and very dark.

Her mother was from the old country, Italy. She was of Neapolitan stock. Brian A. Crosby's family came from a lower middle-class, very blue-collar environment. He processed personnel records for a small law firm in Manhattan and occasionally caught bail-jumpers for Victor Cedar's Bond Services over in Fishdale. The contrast between the two parents could not have been greater. Amazingly (to Debbie anyway), Brian got along well with Louise, and they clearly loved each other, though he was contemptuous of her beloved parties and outings with the town's socialites and she knew it. Despite her coarse manners, Louise Crosby was small and frail at five-one and a hundred and thirty pounds, and with her short, mussed, dark-brownish hair from Grandpa Puzo (dead for seven years now) and pinched flat face, not beautiful. Daddy, on the other hand, was six-five and some full three hundred pounds of nearly pure muscle. His hair was light brown and always shaped in a buzz cut. He'd given his eyes to his daughter—dark, flashing, with a hint of a bright brain's goings-on—as well as his hustle. Neither parent liked to stay on their haunches very long, though—paradoxically, since both parents possessed patience capable of waiting out the Holocaust. His behavior toward her was gentle, as hers was to him, but in dealings with other people they proved rough and laconic. For her part, Debbie had never known a great love in her life, and she thought Daddy hadn't either. What drove Brian Anthony Crosby and Louise together was an enigma Debbie didn't care to guess at. The reason was probably too disgusting.

Delain Avenue stretched across the entire urban portion of Rocksdale, neatly slicing the town in two. Debbie figured it was as long a street as Times Square. She'd never had a real occasion to go east of First Avenue (except when she was going home)—let the respectable ones like Mom spend their time around there—because the landscape was really suburban and, to her, the people were narrow-minded. All the houses had white picket fences, dogs, well-cut lawns, the whole bit. Right now the streets of South Rocksdale were quiet also, but even at the deadest of times they seethed with an undercurrent of something waiting to burst out. Once nine in the evening hit, even in the dead heat of June, the South's citizens would pour into its streets: prostitutes and pushers plying their trades, their customers, hobos, etc. The heart of this dark life lay twenty blocks southwest of here, in the Strip. Thinking about it, Debbie felt her heart swell with pride. This part of town wasn't as vast as New York City, but it did all right by itself. And with hardly any cops about bothering anyone, the town had a nice advantage over the bigger city. The Strip had its own self-contained brand of justice, and Sheriff Thompson's crew didn't care about much as long as whatever happened within its wasteland borders stayed there.

Rocksdale had two zip codes, 40028 and 40031, dividing the town into eastern and western sides. Delain Avenue had four post offices, three east of First Avenue and one on the west side. Debbie had to walk down five blocks because she'd forgotten some letter Daddy asked her to mail today. His handwriting was as illegible as any doctor's, but that wasn't her problem. Really, she was sick of going to the post office for him and Mom (even Arthur had attempted to get in on the action, though what he could have to mail was a mystery), but the hell with it.

The only Delain Avenue post office in the 40028 zip code was a huge yellow brick building that also kept all the local mail trucks in a large adjoining garage around back. At first Debbie couldn't see how to get in, or if there was any office to get into. There were no windows, and as far as she could ascertain, no doors were around. The place looked like an airplane hanger to her. For a minute Debbie just looked at the gray-suited men hanging around on the curb—drivers and mechanics, presumably about to change shifts with another crew. Nobody seemed to be going out or into the building; the men just stood there smoking and talking. Like DC's life, their lives were controlled with the brutality of a tight narrative.

One of the group glanced over at her. "It's around back—you looking for the post office?"
"Yeah. Is it closed?"

Another guy spoke up, "No, not for another couple of hours yet. The door's around back."

The inside of the office was gray, generic, and sterile. There was only one line, consisting of an old man who took much too long mailing his money order.

"You got IRCs or Canadian stamps?" Debbie asked the postal clerk when she came up to the window. The clerk was a young black woman who had Big Daddy Kane's rap hit "Very Special" playing in the background.

"Uh—lemme see. We haven't had any international reply coupons in a very long time."

Debbie nodded. "Oh."

"No, not in a very long time."

"Well, you got any Canadian stamps?"

"Why don't you just let me mail it?"

"This SASE is a return envelope and I need to put stamps on it."

"I see. Sorry, we're out of the kind you can use in Canada."

"All right, forget it then."

Debbie walked out of the post office and started back for the car. Angrily she thought, I should have known better, being on their side of town and all. And everybody wondered about segregation. The whole world is one big irritation, a house of continual pain, so who could expect anything from anybody? Like today, with that jerk Susan. Unbelievable.

Buses were crawling up and down the streets now, dropping off kids. Debbie never understood why the blacks didn't get mad about the fact that none of the drivers would usually go below Delain Avenue to the rough neighborhoods where a lot of the kids lived. They just seemed to accept it. Well, it wasn't her business anyway. She wasn't supposed to even hang out at the Strip or anywhere else in South Rocksdale anyway. Daddy wouldn't care if he found out, but Mom swore her only daughter should act as snobbishly as she and Arthur did.

Debbie got a can of beer and a pack of gum. Usually she never touched anything containing alcohol, and when she did she only took enough to pee badly afterward. There was no use in losing control of your body and senses. Debbie had to maintain her composure especially around this type of neighborhood—why, just two weeks ago, a thirteen-year-old girl had been stabbed beside the bread section of this store by her ex-boyfriend. Debbie heard that the man sliced a six-inch blade right across his victim's breasts, all because he'd caught her talking to another boy. The whole thing was absurd.

"Here it is—exact change, G." Debbie didn't have to talk, the guy could count, some smartass told her, smiling.

"Why don't you mind your own business?" Debbie told the fool without looking at him. The boy was standing off to her right, near the door, some witless looking white or Hispanic kid—she couldn't tell his race and didn't really care. The guy slid up next to Debbie and leaned on the glass counter as the counterman looked at her purchases.

The boy raised his voice, "Screw you, girl, who the hell you think you are?" He had a deep voice with hints of mirth in it, like an adolescent who had parts of him growing up too quickly for the rest of him and was happy about it.

All the kids in the store turned their eyes to Debbie; she felt the stares. "Why don't you get your white peckerwood ass out of here and go back to Sunnybrook farms, Rebecca?" someone else murmured, and all the kids started laughing. "How in the hell do you know Julio behind the counter there anyway?"

Debbie turned her eyes to the first speaker, hardly bothering to take him in with her sight. The boy had deep black eyes, like she and Daddy had, yellow, clean skin and plain jeans and a blue tee shirt. Was he a fighter or what? Debbie wondered.

She herself was a fighter.

She hit him straight in his Adam's apple with a short jab. To the guy behind the counter and the kids in the store and the people now crowding the doorway it seemed as if she hadn't moved at all. The smart mouth just went dancing back, clutching his throat. Nobody said anything as he tried to speak. Debbie breathed hard and slowly.

"You...you bitch," the boy gasped. "Look at what you did!" He groaned and jumped at her.

Debbie pulled her forty-four-caliber and cocked the hammer, keeping quiet.

"A...a...a...a, it's cool, girl." The boy's eyes were so big while they were fixated on her. The boy and Debbie stared at each other for a long time, and then he left the store, passing the crowd at the doorway, which had instantly diminished when Debbie showed her gun.

Jeremy was standing on the curb when Debbie stepped outside. Debbie ignored the question on his face and gestured toward the car, putting away her gun. "Let's get out of here," she said.

Debbie had to walk slowly, of course, to show everyone she was not afraid. The people in the store were watching her back now. Besides, she was a tough and had to let everyone know it. It was a matter of pride. Debbie did the walk fine and got into the car.

"You pay me tomorrow morning, I guess," she said. "Let's hang out at the pier, make it an early date."

Jeremy nodded and started up the car.