Ten minutes later, he shot and killed a guy who was blowing his horn on the approach ramp to Hamilton Bridge.

The car looked as if it had just come out of the showroom. Black Richard had never seen it looking so good. He told the three rich white fucks they should go into the car wash business together. They all laughed.

In an open bodega not far from the car wash, they bought a can of starter fluid and then found a soot-stained oil drum that had already been used for fires a hundred times before. This neighborhood, when it got cold the homeless gathered around these big old cans, started these roaring fires, sometimes roasted potatoes on a grate over them, but mostly used them just to keep warm. It was warmer in the shelters, maybe, but in a shelter the chances were better of getting mugged or raped. Out here, standing around an oil drum fire, toasting your hands and your ass, you felt like a fuckin cowboy on the Great Plains.

They started the fire with scraps of wood they picked up in the lot, old newspapers, picture flames without glass, wooden chairs with broken legs, a dresser missing all of its drawers, curled and yellowing telephone directories, broomstick handles, whatever they could find that was flammable. On many of the streets and roadways in this city, in most of the empty lots, the discarded debris resembled a trail left by war refugees. When the fire was roaring and crackling, they threw in the bloody sheets and rags, and then stirred them into the flames with a

broomstick, Richard the First intoning, "Double double toil and trouble," Richard the Second chiming in with "Fire burn and cauldron bubble," which black Richard thought was some kind of fraternity chant.

They stayed around the oil drum till everything in had burned down to ashes. Well, not everything. some wood in there, turning to charcoal, beginning to smolder. But anything they were worried about was now history. No more bloody sheets, no more bloody rags. Poof. Gone.

"Time to celebrate," Richard the First said.

The man sitting at Meyer Meyer's desk was Randolph Hurd. He was a short slender man, almost bald as Meyer himself, wearing a brown suit and a muted matching tie, brown shoes, brown socks. An altogether drab man who had killed a cabdriver in cold blood and been apprehended by a traffic cop before he'd taken six steps from the taxi, The tagged and bagged murder weapon was on Meyer's desk. Hurd had just told Meyer about all the phone calls he'd made this morning. Brown eyes wet, he now asked, "Isn't horn-blowing against the law?"

There were, in fact, two statutes against the blowing of horns, and Meyer was familiar with both of them. The first was in Title 34 of the Rules of the City, which rules were authorized by the City Charter.

Title 34 governed the Department of Transportation. Chapter 4 of Title 34 defined the traffic rules. Chapter 4, Subsection 12(i) read:

Horn for danger only. No person shall sound the horn of a vehicle except when necessary to warn a person or animal of danger.

The penalty for violating this rule was a $45 fine. The second statute was in the City's Administrative Code. Title 24 was called Environmental Protection and Utilities. Section 221 fell within Chapter 2, which was called Noise Control, within Subchapter 4, which was called Prohibited Noise and Unnecessary Noise Standards. It read:

Sound signal devices. No person shall operate or use or cause to be operated or used any sound signal device so as to create an unnecessary noise except as a sound signal of imminent danger.

The fines imposed for violating this statute ranged from a minimum of $265 to a maximum of $875.

"Yes, sir," Meyer said. "Horn-blowing is against the law. But, Mr.

Hurd, no one has the right to take..."

"It's the cabbies and the truck drivers," Hurd said. "They're the worst offenders. All of them in such a desperate hurry to drop off a fare or a precious cargo. Other motorists follow suit, it's contagious, you know. Like a fever. Or a plague. Everyone hitting his horn. You can't imagine the din, Detective Meyer. It's ear-splitting. And this flagrant breaking of the law is carried on within feet of traffic officers waving their hands or policemen sitting in parked patrol cars. Something should be done about it."

"I agree," Meyer said. "But Mr. Hurd..." "I did something about it,"

Hurd said. Meyer figured it was justifiable homicide.

Priscilla Stetson thought she was keeping

Agnello and Tony Frascati as sex toys. Georgie

and Tony thought they were taking advantage of a beautiful blonde who liked to tie them up blindfold them while she blew them.

It was a good arrangement all around.

Anybody came near her, they would break his head. She was theirs. On the other hand, they were hers. She could call them whenever she needed them, send them home whenever she tired of them. It was an arrangement none of them ever discussed for fear of jinxing it. Like a baseball pitcher with a natural fast-breaking curve. Or a writer with a knack for good dialogue.

At eleven o'clock that Sunday morning, they were!

all having breakfast in bed together when Priscilla mentioned her grandmother.

Georgie and Tony hated eating breakfast in bed."

You got crumbs all over everything, you spilled coffee all over yourself, they hated it. Priscilla was between them, naked, enjoying herself, drinking coffee and eating a cheese Danish. The boys, as she called them,

had each and separately eaten her not twenty minutes ago, and they were waiting now for her to reciprocate in some small way, which she showed no sign of doing just yet. She did this to show the boys who was boss here. On the other hand, they occasionally beat the shit out of her, though they never hurt her hands or her face. Which she sometimes enjoyed, depending on her mood. But not very often.

It was all part of their arrangement.

Like the suite the hotel provided on the nights she played. That was another arrangement. It wasn't the presidential suite, but it went for four-fifty a night, which wasn't litchi nuts. They were in the suite now, which had been named the Richard Moore Suite after the noted Alpine skier who had stayed here back in the days when he was winning gold medals hither and yon, the Richard Moore Suite at the Hotel Powell, Priscilla naked between them, drinking coffee and munching on her cheese Danish, Georgie and Tony wearing nothing but black silk pajama tops and erections, trying not to spill coffee or crumbs on themselves. After breakfast, and after she had taken care of them, if she decided to take care of them, they might do a few lines of coke, who could say? Priscilla had connections. Georgie and Tony liked being kept in this state of heightened anticipation, so to speak.

Priscilla liked keeping them there. She might decide to send them home as soon as she finished the second pot of coffee room service had brought up, who could say? Out, boys. I have things to do, Sunday is my day off. Or maybe not. It depended on how she felt ten minutes from now.

"I know she had money," she said out loud.

The boys turned to look at her. Bookends in black silk. The sheet lowered to their waists, Priscilla sitting there naked, breasts exposed. The boys made sly eye contact across her.

"Your grandmother, you mean?" Georgie asked.

Priscilla nodded. "Otherwise, why'd she keep saying I'd be taken care of?."

"How about taking care of this a little?" Tony had glanced down at the sheet.

"She the one lived in the rat hole on Lincoln Street?" Georgie asked.

"Take care of this a little," Tony said, impressed by his earlier witty remark.

"She meant when she died," Priscilla said. "I'd taken care of her when she died."

"How?" Georgie said. "She didn't have a pot to piss in."

"I don't know how. But she said she'd take care of me."

"Take care of this a little," Tony said again.

"Maybe she had a bank account," Priscilla suggested.

"Maybe she left a will," Georgie said.

"Who knows?"

"Maybe she left you millions."

"Who knows?"

Tony was thinking these two had just escalated an old lady's empty pisspot into a fortune. "There are two old people in a nursing home,"

he said. "The man's ninety-two, the woman's ninety. They start a relationship. What they do, he goes into her room, and gets in bed with her, and they watch television together with his penis in her hand. That's the extent of the relationship. She holds his penis in her hand while they watch television."

"Don't you ever think of anything else?" Priscilla asked.

"No, wait, this is a good one. The woman is passing her girlfriend's room one night she's ninety years

old, too, the girlfriend and lo and behold, what does she see? Her man is in bed with the girlfriend. They're watching television, she's holding his penis in her hand. The woman is outraged. "How can you do this to me?" she wants to know. "Is she prettier than I am? Is she smarter than I am? What has she got that I