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“I told you it is now next week!” he snapped. “I had something come up!”

“But it’s, like, warm there,” Janice went on. “And I’m so, like, sick of this snow.”

“And it will still be warm there next week,” he said impatiently.

“I’m tired of being cold, too, Ricky,” Shanika, a nineteen-year-old who had pale, freckled skin and her hair dyed ruby red, chimed in.

Jasmine, the bleached blonde in her mid-twenties sitting beside him, joined in, “Why are we missin’—”

“Will you all just fuckin’ shut up?” Ramírez said.

Jasmine turned toward him. “But—”

He raised his right hand to backslap her, then realized they were in heavy stop-and-go traffic and quickly lowered it.

“Shut up!” he said. “Now!”

The girls finally got the message and, after leaning their heads against the windows, slept the rest of the trip to Fishtown.

It had taken more than three hours to cover the sixty miles. He did not want to think how long driving south would have taken.

And now I got to change the ads on that escort website. Take the ones off the Miami pages, put them up on the Philly ones.

Then change it all back next week?

Maybe just change the dates on the Miami ones, and leave them up?

Damn! Keepin’ these putas moving around is too much work!

—

At Players Corner Lounge, it had taken the better part of an hour to get the girls, sleepy and dragging their feet, out of the minivan and settled in the rooms above the dive bar. Then Ramírez hopped back in the minivan and headed up Frankford Avenue.

Near the circular building that was Horatio B. Hackett Elementary School, he turned onto Trenton Avenue and followed it three blocks, looking in his mirror for anyone following him, as Dmitri had taught him. He made a right turn. At the second intersection he made a left onto Tulip Street, and again checked the mirror as he drove. After three blocks he made a right onto Sergeant, found the first open spot along the curb, and parked.

Ramírez got out and pulled his coat closed aga

inst the cold. The icy breeze carried with it a sharp industrial smell. The metallic burning odor—which he guessed came from the auto salvage yard just across Lehigh Avenue, or maybe from the old distillery down the street—irritated his nostrils.

A couple hits of that blackberry brandy they make would be good to cut this damn cold, he thought, then rubbed his nose. And this smell.

He turned back a block—crossing the street with the flophouse that he realized he had not visited in a couple of months—then quickly went over two more blocks. As he walked, he hit some slippery spots on the sidewalk, recovered before actually falling, and wished he could have parked closer. But Dmitri had said to always park at least three blocks away from the grow house and approach it on foot so that he would not draw any extra attention to it. The worst thing he could do was park right out front. Cars coming and going wasn’t good, Dmitri said.

Almost to the next intersection, he saw across the street three men in their thirties sitting on the stoop of a boarded-up row house. They were all brown-skinned and gaunt and looked like they hadn’t had a bath in a long time. The tallest one, with a scraggly beard and hair matted in dreadlocks under a dirty, multicolored knitted cap, had to his lips what at first glance appeared to be a cigarette. But then Ramírez recognized it, and caught in the air the unmistakable pungent smell of marijuana.

The three, who Ramírez decided had to be from one of the nearby flophouses, did not pay him any attention as he passed.

That was not the case with the pair he encountered next.

On the opposite corner, Ramírez came up on two Hispanic teenagers—they looked maybe sixteen and were probably Puerto Rican—with a battered gray Yamaha FZ1 motorcycle on its stand between them. They wore bulky dark coats, their hands stuffed in the deep pockets, and had black stocking caps pulled down low on their heads. They talked to each other as their eyes darted between the three brown-skinned men sharing the joint and the approaching Ramírez.

The teenagers didn’t recognize Ramírez, nor he them. But he knew what they were.

Some of Héctor’s halcónes.

And he knew that the “hawks” had more than their hands in their coat pockets. Lookouts always carried a disposable cell phone, of course, and often a pistol.

Ramírez turned the corner, and midway down the street he crossed over. He went up to the door of the last of the five rough-looking row houses on the block. The first two houses, tagged with graffiti, had realtor signs nailed to their doors that read FOR SALE—BANK FORECLOSURE. There was chain-link fencing, eight feet high, vine-covered and topped with coils of razor wire, blocking off the side and rear yards.