tepped out of the alley to the curb and flagged down a
cruising 'copter. He made me get in first, which gave me a chance
to turn, when I sat down, and see who had been holding the gun on
me from behind. The gunman had sure drifted in one awful hurry.
There wasn't a soul except Lefty around.

He hopped in after me. The turbine howled as the driver gunned us up on the
air cushion and sent us skimming away. The trip lasted only four or five
minutes through the thinning traffic of late evening. We pulled up in front
of a brownstone house in the upper Eighties that reared up four stories
among a string of three-story neighbors.

I limped to the top of the steps after Lefty. He let us in with a
key. We were in a dimly-lit hall that had a staircase against its
left wall and an open door at its right, leading into a darkened
room.

A tall skinny girl was sitting about a third of the way up the
carpeted flight of steps. Her face was drawn out to a point by a
long, thin nose. "Here they are," she called up the stairway,
showing braces on her teeth. She stood up and came down the hall.
She was clad in a shortie wrapper that showed off her race-horse
legs.

"Billy Joe," she said to Lefty. "I _told_ them you were coming."

"Hi, Pheola," he said. "Good for you." He sounded pleased.

There were steps above, and two others joined us. First came a
short square man with gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows. He was
wrapped up in a flannel robe that had once been maroon and was
now rusty with age and wear. It only served to confirm that he
had just been yanked out of bed. He hadn't bothered to put
anything on his bare feet or to comb his hair. A pretty wild
looking old man.

Behind him stumped a chunky woman, crowding fifty. She was in a
worse state of dishabille. She hadn't quite made it to bed and
was still in her slip. Her stockings had been unhitched from her
garters and hung in slack transparency around her fat calves,
like the sloughed-off skin of a snake.

"I _told_ you," Pheola said to the gray-haired man.

"It's nice that you're right once in a while," he said in a
scratchy, sleepy voice, walking past her to switch on the ceiling
of the room on the right side of the hall.

She didn't like that. Lefty stopped her reply. "Will it be PC?"
he asked her.

"No," she said.

"You missed that one," Lefty said.

"Didn't neither!"

"Well, sit in with us and see," he suggested.

"What for?" she asked. "I know what's going t