Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Free Page B

with Animal, listening to the guy rapping on him, some game of the soul that Animal was playing with him. “Shit, man,” the Dude said, “
you
get him,” looking at the tall white guy poking his way down the street easy as you please, quick glance at the trash cans, peek into an alley, finger rubbing behind his ear, free hand jammed in his pocket. Looked like he was just rambling through the territory, that was how he looked. “Son of a bitch,” the Dude said, trying to get his point across, “what’s this wasting him? The guy might be a narc, for one thing.” Or one of the special attack force on drugs, the governor’s shit, he thought. Hell, they were in enough trouble anyway.
    “Waste him?” the Dude said, coming to a point of decision right then, feeling everything clicking into place like little wheels and tumblers getting together in his mind, “I’m not going to waste him, I’m going to get the fuck out of here.” He jiggled the keys in the ignition lock of the Electra, trying to get them through the ignition point. Everything moved much more slowly when you were high, seemed to be taking place under water. He could not, somehow, get the keys out of the lock position. He wrenched at the wheel, bringing his right knee up to brace against the shock, trying to tear the thing into gear.
    Animal’s hand was suddenly on his, the fingers almost caressing the back of his own hand, a curious intimacy in the gesture that made the Dude realize something: he had never
liked
Animal. They had taken highs together, they had swung a little bit, but that didn’t mean that he had to like the man. And to tell the truth of it, he did not; the Animal was crazy in a dark way, some fascination with death in the man, here he was looking at this white fucker dragging ass down the street and thinking about wasting him and that was not just sensible, no sense to it at all, hard high or not you just did not go around thinking about wasting people on sight. “Let’s
go
,” the Dude said, talking less to the Animal than to his fingers, “let’s go, let’s go,” shouting, the keys finally driving through, and the starter of the Electra ground alive, but stupidly the weight of Animal’s elbow pressing on his right knee drove his foot all the way down into the accelerator, mashing it into the floorboards, and the car started with an enormous, surprised bellow, like a lion caught sleeping by gunfire, and then promptly stalled, the cylinders screaming as raw gas flooded them. Still, Animal would not release his elbow from the Dude’s knee, the Dude could not pull his leg off the damned gas pedal, and this position somehow struck the Animal as funny. He was very high, spitting, coughing, wrenching into laughter, and the Dude felt himself turning toward panic.
    Horse-high always did it; you were supersensitive to lights, sounds, noise, heat, one minute floating easily, painlessly, above the whole motherfucking, gangbusting world, the next minute you were ditched, brought low, something in the air, some sound for which you had not accounted driving a nail through the pane of consciousness, and you were brought down again, plunged into the stinking, sinuous bowels of the earth itself where the real fucking was going on. This was where the Dude now found himself, some collaboration between the white man still walking, walking toward them and Animal’s crazed laughter bucked him all the way down. The car was an intestine; red, white, and black it writhed around him. Animal was some crazed devil of the bowels trapped within. And even as the Dude was telling himself to keep it down, keep quiet, lay low, it will pass, he was scrambling out of the car, wrenching himself away from the wheel and out into the street, standing, weaving dangerously, struck by some aspect of the sunlight. He had the feeling that he was being observed, that they were pouring out of the shooting gallery to watch him, that Animal himself was pulling himself