And that was how it was, for a couple of weeks, but then she started holding back on him, and her looks began fading more rapidly than even he had expected as her addiction deepened. People sometimes forgot that the shit sold in New York was stronger than just about anywhere else: even heroin was about 10 percent pure, as against three to five in places like Chicago, and G-Mack had heard of at least one junkie who arrived in the city from the sticks, scored within an hour of getting there, and was dead of an OD one hour after that again. Alice still had that great bone structure, but it had become just a little too obvious without a decent cushion of flesh over it, and her skin was growing increasingly sallow in complexion as the junk took its toll. She was willing to do just about anything for her supply, so he sent her out with the worst kinds, and she went to them smiling, didn’t even ask most of them if they’d put a rubber on before she went down. She ran out of vitamin E, as it cost her money that she needed for junk, so she started injecting between her toes and fingers. Soon, G-Mack realized, he would have to cut her loose, and she’d end up living on the streets, toothless and killing herself for ten-dollar Baggies down by the Hunts Point market.

Then the old guy had come cruising in his car, his big-ass driver calling the women over as he slowed. He’d spotted Sereta, she’d offered him Alice as well, and the two whores had climbed in the back with the withered old freak and headed off, once G-Mack had taken note of his plate. Didn’t make no sense to be taking chances. He’d talked to the driver too, just so that they were all clear on how much this was going to cost, and so the whores couldn’t lie to him about the take. The driver brought them back three hours later, and G-Mack got his money. He searched the girls’ bags and found another hundred in each. He let them keep fifty of it, told them he’d look after the rest. Seemed like the old guy liked what they’d shown him, too, because he came back again a week later: same girls, same arrangement. Sereta and Alice enjoyed it because it got them off the streets and the old man treated them nice. He fed them booze and chocolates in his place in Queens, let them fool around in his big old tub, gave them a little extra (which G-Mack very occasionally let slide; after all, he wasn’t no monster…).

It was all nice and easy, until the girls disappeared. They didn’t return from the old man’s like they were supposed to. G-Mack didn’t worry about them until he got back to his place, then an hour or two later he took a call from Sereta. She was crying, and he had trouble calming her down enough to understand what had happened, but gradually she managed to tell him that some men had come to the house and started arguing with the old guy. The girls were in the upstairs bathroom, fixing their hair and reapplying their makeup before heading back to the Point. The new arrivals started shouting, asking him about a silver box. They told him they weren’t leaving without it, then Luke, the old man’s driver, came in, and there was more shouting, followed by what sounded like a bag bursting, except Alice and Sereta had spent enough time on the streets to know a gunshot when they heard one.

After that, the men downstairs went to work on the old man, and in the course of their efforts he died. They started tearing the house apart, downstairs first. The women heard drawers being opened, pottery breaking, glass shattering. Soon they would make their way upstairs; and then there would be no hope, but suddenly they heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Sereta risked a glance out of the window and saw lights flashing.

“Private security,” she whispered to Alice. “They must have set off an alarm somehow.”

It was one man, alone. He shined a flashlight on the front of the house, then tried the doorbell. He returned to his vehicle and spoke into the radio. Somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. It was the only sound in the house. The men downstairs were now silent. After a couple of seconds, Alice and Sereta heard the noise of the back door in the kitchen opening as the men left. When they were certain that all was okay, the women followed, but not before they had erased all traces of themselves from the upper rooms, wiping wood and faucets, even retrieving the rubbers and tissues from the trash. Alice ripped her stockings climbing a wall, and Sereta cut her side, but they got away.

Now they were scared, afraid that someone might come after them, but G-Mack told them to be cool. Neither of them had ever been printed by the cops, so even if any prints were found, there was no way to link them to anything unless they got into big trouble with the law. They just needed to stay calm. He told them to come back to him, but Sereta refused. G-Mack started shouting, and the bitch hung up on him. That was the last he heard of her, but he figured she’d head south, back to her own people, if she was scared. She was always threatening to do that anyhow, once she had enough money saved, even if G-Mack figured it was just the empty posturing and pipe-dreaming that most of these whores went in for at some time or another.

The death of the old man-his name was Winston-and his driver made the news, big-time. He wasn’t real wealthy, not like Trump or one of those guys, but he was a pretty well-known collector and dealer in antiques. The cops figured it for a robbery gone wrong until they found some cosmetics in the bathroom, left by the women in their panic to flee the house, and they announced that they were looking for one, maybe two women, to help them with their inquiries. The cops came trawling the Point, after it emerged that old man Winston liked to take a ride around its streets looking for women. They asked G-Mack what he knew, once they tracked him down, but G-Mack told them he knew nothing about it. When the cops said that someone had seen G-Mack talking to Winston’s driver, and maybe it was his women who were with him that night, G-Mack told them that he talked to a lot of people, and sometimes their drivers, but that didn’t mean he made no deals with them. He didn’t even bother denying that he was a playa. Better to give them a little truth to hide the taste of the lie. He had already warned the other whores to keep quiet about what they knew, and they did as they were told, both out of fear of him and out of concern for their friends, because G-Mack had made it clear to them that Alice and Sereta were safe only as long as the men who did the killings didn’t know a thing about them.

But this wasn’t any botched robbery, and the men involved tracked down G-Mack just as the police had done before them, except they weren’t about to be fooled by any show of innocence. G-Mack didn’t like to think about them, the fat man with the swollen neck and the smell of freshly turned earth from him, and his quiet, bored friend in blue. He didn’t like to remember how they had forced him against a wall, how the fat man had placed his fingers in G-Mack’s mouth, gripping his tongue when he uttered the first of the lies. G-Mack had almost puked then on the taste of him, but there was worse to come: the voices that G-Mack heard in his head, the nausea that came with them, the sense that the longer he allowed this man to touch him, the more corrupted and polluted he would become, until his insides began to rot from the contact. He admitted that they were his girls, but he hadn’t heard from them since that night. They were gone, he said, but they’d seen nothing. They had been upstairs the whole time. They didn’t know anything that could help the cops.

Then it had come out, and G-Mack cursed the moment he had agreed to take Sereta and her junkie bitch friend into his stable. The fat man told him that it wasn’t what they knew that concerned him.

It was what they had taken.