“Yipe!” he yelled. He leapt backward so violently that he almost fell. With his other hand, he reached at the counter behind him for balance, and felt a sudden prick, and looked down to discover he had stuck himself with the syringe lying there.
In alarm, he snatched it up and looked at it. “Alley Thing,” the label read, and beneath that someone had written, “B12.” He checked the vial. Its label read the same.
He thought for a moment and breathed a sigh of relief. That was all right, then, surely. B12, it was just some vitamins. Maybe Alley Thing was the brand name, though it did seem an odd name for a line of vitamins.
Maybe that was what the two women scientists were doing here: developing a line of health aids. Or maybe one of them took B12 for energy. It was supposed to be good for that, wasn’t it? And the pair often worked long hours. Sometimes they were still here when he came in to clean, so it made sense that they might very well need a pick-me-up from time to time.
The important thing was, whatever was in the syringe, it was surely nothing he need be concerned about. No doubt that was why it had been left out. Probably it was of no importance whatsoever. If you thought about it, they certainly wouldn’t have left it out otherwise.
The hand that the cat had bitten, however, was another matter. There was not much blood to be seen but her teeth were plenty long, and they must have gone pretty deep. And there was something downright unhealthy about her appearance, now that he thought of it.
He looked around for something to sterilize the wound with, and spotted a jar of alcohol on a shelf above the sink. Holding his hand over the sink, he poured alcohol onto the bite wound. Yow! He gave his hand a brisk shake. The alcohol stung, but heaven alone knew what that mangy looking cat might give him. Better a little alcohol burn than an infection.
He glanced again at the puncture wound the syringe had made. For such a tiny wound it looked awfully red already, and it was even swollen a little. For good measure, he poured some alcohol on that one as well. There was no sense in taking chances.
The cat gave a low mutter, as if she were warning him of something. “I hope you didn’t do me any damage, you devil,” Peter said. He flicked the cover back down over her cage, uncomfortable with her malevolent scrutiny. This time he took special care to stay out of reach of her nasty claws. She threw herself violently against the door as the cover descended over the cage, making the cage rock precariously.
“Golly, you are a vicious beast, aren’t you?” he said. “I hope this cage is well secured.”
Alley Thing. His thoughts went back to the syringe and he glanced at it again. That really is an odd name. Thing....
It was his last thought before he woke up in his own bed hours later.
After the Moes.
CHAPTER TWO
It was 3:00 a.m. in the hood, and the Moes were in their domain.
In the wee hours like this, you could almost smell the fog and taste the sea tang in it. Somewhere in the far distance a mournful foghorn lowed. Hector kicked an empty Pepsi can out of his way, and it rolled into the gutter. Clackety-clackety-clack. The racket shattered the stillness of the night. A loose sheet of newspaper sailed by on the wind and draped itself briefly around a telephone pole before billowing on its way.
Hector pulled the hood of his parka up. The pair walking alongside him followed suit. Not that it was cold, it wasn’t. It was a warm San Francisco night, late October, when the city got its real summer after the “June gloom” that generally lasted through September. The hoods were more a matter of style than comfort. Gangbangers all wore hoods.
“Getting late,” Archie said.
“You got that right,” Hector agreed.
“We did good, didn’t we?” Tom said.
“For sure,” Archie said. “We did real great.”
The three Moes honestly considered themselves good guys. Super heroes, sort of, like the guys in the comic books: Batman, for instance, who was their favorite, who prowled the streets at night and sorted things out. Which was kind of what they had been doing, as they saw it: sorting things out.
Of course, they didn’t wear Batman’s mask and cape, or tights like Spiderman. They were in their usual outfits: black bandanas around their heads—black was their color—and drooping black pants that clung perilously to scrawny hips and looked in danger of falling around their ankles at any moment. The extra large tee shirts they sported hung over their pants and halfway down their thighs and so spared anyone who saw them the glimpses of butt cracks that would otherwise have been revealed by the low-riding pants. Customarily, the gangbanger costume included boxer shorts under the low riders, to cover butt cracks, and the Moes would certainly have worn the prescribed boxers too, if Tom had not been caught trying to shoplift that package of them from Macy’s. As it was, he had barely gotten away from the security guards without getting busted, but he had gotten away empty-handed, the result of which was butt cleavage instead of boxers and overly large tee shirts to cover the cleavage—not to mention sparing their half-bare bottoms the chill of the night air.
They did not exactly fight crime, either, not the way Batman did, say, but, like, they did do their share to keep the streets safe from ragheads and slanty-eyes and “Meskins,” which, as they saw it, counted as doing good. Never mind that Hector’s father was from Tijuana. His mother was white and he had been born in the U.S. of A., so he considered himself totally American, and more than one guy who had suggested he was a beaner had ended up eating his teeth.
Unlike the guy they had left behind in the alley, who had beaner written all over him, whereas the chick had been a total Anglo. Meaning they had felt it their Moe duty to straighten the dude out. As for her, they figured they were doing her a favor by educating her. Plus, they figured they had made her happy whether she liked it or not. Getting porked by the Moes ought to be considered an honor in any chick’s book, the way they saw it, even if the chick sometimes didn’t appreciate it. They were convinced Batman would have done the same and, hey, what chick wouldn’t be proud to be porked by Batman?
Besides, they had let both of them live, hadn’t they? Which a lot of gangbangers wouldn’t have done, since they might possibly finger you later, but hell, the Moes didn’t mind that exactly. It just made their reputation that much tougher, which was how they liked it. When people knew you were badass, it kept them out of your hair.
Yeah, sure, they had broken the guy’s knee with a lead pipe, but just the one knee, and that had been to keep him off their case while they took care of his girlfriend. Archie had been all for just tying the guy up, but there was one flaw in that idea, as Hector had pointed out: “We got no rope.”
The way Hector explained it, breaking the guy’s knee was a lot simpler, and better for him, too. Better than, say, killing him.
As for the bitch, she would have gotten off with nothing but a good time if she hadn’t spit in Hector’s face. She did it for no good reason, too. All he had said while he was humping her was, “Now, ain’t this better than doing it with that pansy boyfriend of yours?” and she had hauled off and thwacked him with a big gob, splat, right in his face, so, sure he had busted her jaw. Which was strictly her own fault, anybody could see that. Some people just had no frigging gratitude, that was for sure.
It had totally pissed him off, though, because he had been having a hard time getting his rocks off and had just figured he would go for
