Dark Maze

favor from the outfit is some kind of a major hood. The Mafia Writers of America.“
    “Don’t take it so personal, Inspector. Just tell me how Halo was connected.”
    “Strictly errand-boy, that’s all the guy ever was, Hock. The biggest thing he ever did was run cash through his bar once in a while that a friend maybe didn’t want to put in the bank. He’s forever a small-time wise-guy. He never had the cojones to make the big score.”
    Neglio paused. Then he asked, “Or was that about to change?”
    “Yeah, I think it was.”
    Neglio waited for me to say something, but I did not feel like elaborating since we were now headed up Tenth Avenue and I was intent on looking east down the side streets.
    Finally, Neglio said, “You’re just going to leave it like that?”
    “For now,” I said.
    At the corner of Thirty-eighth Street, I saw what I had hoped to see. I had the driver stop. “Here’s where I get out,” I said.
    Neglio took a long look down the black street full of dark shapes and said, “So it’s back to your briar patch, Hock? Lots of luck.”
    “Go tell the mayor he shouldn’t worry, that I’m closing in,” I said, starting out the door. “Meanwhile, Inspector, with all due respect, if I were you I would get myself and my big black car out of this part of Hell’s Kitchen.”

    I walked slowly down Thirty-eighth, stepping over and around broken glass and used condoms and bullet casings and smashed syringes toward the gang of junkies I had seen from the comer. They were lounging in the same doorway where I saw my snitch, Rat, only the other night, the night Benito Reyes was killed, seven blocks up Tenth Avenue.
    Once again, here was I—a perfect slob of a detective. Once again trusting in the uncertain rhythms of luck and instinct. Because I am an artist among cops, not a scientist.
    It turned out to be my night.
    There was Rat himself, nestled contentedly in a tangle of ten or so ragged men and women nodding off to communal oblivion that had come from what the heroin mainliners in my neighborhood call “passing the prick”—the needle.
    Rat is the ultimate fatalist of his breed; even worse, he is out of fashion. Today’s politicians and journalists are appalled by crack cocaine, and something called “ice” looks to be next season’s dread. But old-fashioned dopers like Rat have never gone away, and old-fashioned cops see that their ranks are hardly thinning. They are still out there injecting every day, seeking the rush of yesterday’s horror; they stare at their own blood filling a syringe, mixing with silvery junk. And thousands and thousands of Rats do not give a drug czar’s damn whether they live or die after pushing the plunger down.
    I stood across the street from the doorway where Rat and his gang lay like dying horses in their wary junkie sleep: eyelids at half-mast, hands clutching valuables and tucked into armpits, knees loose and feet ready to run. I made a smacking sound with my lips. Heads rose in response, sniffing the air.
    “Rat!” I called.
    I saw him put his hands on his chest, as if saying, Who, me? He looked my way. Again I called, “Rat!”
    Then he picked himself up and stepped away from the pack, rubbing his nose with a sleeve. He did not look as he crossed the street. A taxi nearly struck him down; the driver shouted a curse at his dark shape.
    “Hello, my friend,” I said, taking his thin, cold fists into my hands. I opened the fingers of one fist and laid a crisp twenty-dollar bill across the palm. “I need your help tonight.”
    It had grown chilly and my words were followed by puffs of frosted air. Rat looked at these puffs with his liquid eyes, black and dilated. Then he looked up at me, trying to understand this reversal of our custom; it was usually he who came to me.
    Rat was a head shorter than me and only a few years younger. His hair was black and gray, tied back in a ponytail. His rough and reddened face was high-boned, spotted by grime that had worn into the creases of his skin over the years. His thin brown lips puckered over parts of his mouth where teeth were missing.
    Rat bent at the waist, as if he had suddenly broken. He slipped the twenty into his shoe and stood back up again.
    “I am already fixed for the night, Hock,” he said in his soft, slurry voice. “But I thank you for tomorrow’s stake. I’ll think of you in my technicolor dreams.”
    He gave me a mock salute.
    “I’m looking for somebody in the cracks,” I