The Old Turk's Load Read Free Page B

chance of staying out of fate’s way.
    Eight days before, outside the Five Spot, a statuesque hooker and her john had brushed past.Tight dress, big hair, long legs, fuckme heels—perfect except for her Adam’s apple, but there was nothing to be done about that. When Kelly spotted the hooker at New Lefty’s later that night with another guy, he was curious enough, in an amused sort of way, to sit a few seats down the bar from them and listen, checking them out every so often in the mirror behind the bottles. The new john had a heavy accent and was seriously drunk. He was a head shorter than the impressive she-creature and kept putting his face into her chest as he spoke, trying to nuzzle her. They disappeared after a while. Not long after, Kelly paid for his drink and departed, figuring that was that.
    But it wasn’t. As he passed the alley outside, he heard a noise that stopped him because it was not the noise that would’ve been made by a German tourist with an ampoule of amyl nitrate in his nose being blown by a good-looking transvestite who’d already slipped his wallet out of his pocket and was figuring how to peel off his Rolex while he came. It was a squeak of mortal terror.
    Something different was going down. Instantaneously Kelly had the image of the other guy, the first john he’d seen with her, no john at all. The two of them were working the German over, going for the hotel key, passport, and traveler’s checks. It seemed perverse to Kelly, using violence where sex would do. It called out for correction. He turned down the alley and found the hooker in front of a Dumpster with the now-limp German in a headlock, blood running from his nose. Her partner was going through his pockets.
    The hooker saw him first. “Fuck off, asshole.”
The other guy turned to face him. Kelly was in the groove now, and events were proceeding in slow motion, like the beginning of a car crash. He could see the punk trying to make him, trying to decide if he was a cop or not, and rendered that question moot by kicking him in the groin.The hooker dropped the German and came around in front of Kelly with a knife. She was headed for the end of the alley and slashed at him to clear her path. He stepped out of the blade’s way, but the other guy rolled under his knees and Kelly fell back on the cobblestones, knocking his head
18 GREGORY GIBSON
so hard little stars came out. He knew he might go under. Then they’d do him.
    That was when it dawned on him that he should have let it be, left it alone. The whole intervention had been a result of too much time on his hands; this was the kind of thing that happened when you forced matters. He pushed fast with his arms and legs, crabbing himself across the alley on his back. But they didn’t come after him. The hooker and her buddy were long gone. He realized he was yelling, “Hey! Help! Hey!” like a human car alarm. People were gathering.
    It took another hour to get the German sorted out. He was a businessman named Kramer, over here on some kind of real estate deal. Kelly gave him his card, and on the back he wrote whom to call at the cop shop, in the unlikely event the guy wanted to report the incident. Then he took a cab back to his place. His jacket was shredded, his shoulders were raw, his head was pounding, and his left ankle hurt.
    He went to sleep for a couple of days, took hot baths for a couple more, then engaged in some light work at the gym. The ankle tended to get sore when he was on it for a while, but things were nominally okay. It just felt like he’d lost the beat, as if one unfortunate episode had knocked him off the wave.
    Now he was headed for Sammy’s Undersea Lounge,walking to get the ankle back in shape. The click of his heels on the pavement took on a reassuring rhythm and his surroundings reconstituted themselves as the known world. At Sixty-Second and Lex he ducked into comfortable darkness. Nets festooned the ceilings and the walls were hung with giant