Hells Kitchen

break through. He leaned down and peered through the window. He’d wondered if the pyro could have thrown the bomb through the bars. But they were too close together for anything but a beer bottle; the wine jug never would have fit. Somebody would have to’ve let him in.
    “The back door was locked, right?”
    “Yeah, they try an’ keep it locked. But, shit, there a lotta traffic, you know what I’m saying? In that back place there, see it, Pellam? This fag doing business, you know? Givin’ head and all. He a cluckhead too.”
    A male prostitute . . . “So people’d come through the back door? His customers?”
    “Yeah, we’d sit outside, some of us, what it is, and these guys’d come out the back door and we’d say, ‘Fag, fag . . .’ And they’d run away. Shit, that was fun!”
    “You seen that guy around lately?”
    “Naw, cuz. He gone.”
    Pellam picked up the building directory, lying where he’d let it fall after Ramirez had tossed it to him the other day. “You know this Ramirez?”
    “Shit, Hector Ramirez? His crew be the Cubano Lords. They bad motherfuckers too but they don’t give this nigger no shit. Not like Corcoran. He’s sprung, cuz, Corcoran is. Man be a hatter. But Ramirez, see, he’d wax you but only if he had to.”
    Even this ten-year-old was better patched in to the Word on the street than Pellam. He glanced at the name E. Washington on the directory and tossed it to the ground.
    A police car cruised slowly past the building and paused. The officer in the driver’s seat was looking his way. He gestured Pellam out of the police tape.
    “Ismail—”
    The boy was gone.
    “Ismail?”
    The squad car drove on.
    He searched for several minutes but Ismail had vanished. A brittle sound of falling brick and hollow metal filled the night. A soft grunt followed.
    “Ismail?” Pellam stepped into the alley behind the building and saw a boy, about eighteen, blond, in faded blue jeans and a dirty white shirt. He crouched beside a pile of trash. He was digging something out, occasionally dislodging a small avalanche, leaping back like a spooked raccoon then digging again. He had fine, baby hair, self-cut, ear length. The obligatory Generation X goatee was anemic and untrimmed.
    He glanced at Pellam, squinted then returned to his task.
    “Gotta get some stuff, man. Some stuff.”
    “You lived here?”
    The boy said gravely, “In the back.” He nodded toward where the rear basement apartment had been. “Me and Ray, he was like my manager.”
    Me and Ray, he was like his pimp.
    This was the one Ismail was talking about. The male prostitute. He seemed so young for a life on the street. Pellam asked, “Where’s Ray now?”
    “Dunno.”
    “Can I ask you some questions about the fire?”
    With a grunt of exertion he pulled what he’d been looking for from beneath the pile and wiped at the cover of the book. Kurt Cobain—the Final Year. He gazed at it lovingly for a moment then he looked up. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about, man. The fire. You Pellam, right?” He flipped through the book.
    Pellam blinked in surprise.
    “So, here’s the deal. I can tell you who started the fire and who hired them. If you’re, like, interested.”

TEN
    “How’d you know about me?”
    “Just did.” The boy caressed the glossy cover of the book with a filthy hand.
    “How?” Pellam persisted, as curious as he was suspicious.
    “You know. Like, you hear things.”
    “Tell me what you know. I’m not a cop.”
    His laugh said he already knew this about him.
    The Word. On the street.
    The boy’s attention returned to his book, like a child’s Golden Book, just a photo laminated on a cardboard cover. The type was large and the words sparse. The photos were terrible.
    Pellam prompted, “So who set the fire? Who hired him?”
    In a very young face, the very old eyes narrowed. Then the boy broke out into a laugh.
    Gear-greasing is expensive work.
    Pellam mentally totaled his two savings accounts and an anemic IRA, penalty for early withdrawal, and some remaining advance money from WGBH. The figureeighty-five hundred floated into his mind. There was a little equity left in the house on Beverly Glen. The battered Winnebago had to be worth something. But that was it. Pellam’s lifestyle was often liquid but his resources largely were not.
    The boy wiped his nose. “A hundred thousand.”
    He thought a grunge-stud like this would have more modest aspirations. Pellam