Free A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block

forced himself to be calm while Shank ordered a glass of draft.
    “Man,” the boy said. “Man.”
    Shank looked at him.
    “I been waiting an hour,” the boy said. “An hour in this hole. A fucking hour, you dig?”
    “Shut up.”
    “An hour. And—” Shank started to stand up. The alarm in the boy’s face was so great Shank wanted to laugh. Instead, he leaned over and placed his hands on the table in the booth, peering down at the boy.
    “You want to play? You want to talk? Or maybe you want to deal,” Shank said.
    “All right. Cool. Sit down,” the boy said.
    Shank sat down. “An hour is an hour,” he told him. “I’m the one who holds. I’m the one with the world looking at him hard. You can sit in this hole till you rot and you won’t get busted for it. Perfectly legal. You’re hardly even drinking.”
    The boy started to say something, but Shank motioned him to shut up.
    “You wait for me,” Shank went on, “and everything’s fine. Everything stays fine. I ever have to wait for you and it’s bad. Very ugly. So you do the waiting and you keep cool about it. You dig?”
    The boy nodded.
    “How much?” Shank asked.
    “Twenty cents,” the boy said.
    Shank nodded. He took out a manila envelope containing two-thirds of an ounce of marijuana and one-third of an ounce of catnip. The boy was a steady customer and bought an average of an ounce a week. It wouldn’t do, Shank thought, to put him on a Bull Durham mix. But cutting it slightly with catnip hurt nobody, Shank judged, confident that neither the boy nor the boy’s customers, whoever they might be, could tell catnip from marijuana.
    “The bread,” he said.
    A hand reached under the table. Shank took four bills from the hand. He glanced at them. Four fives. Twenty cents, in his parlance. Twenty dollars to the square world. He folded the money and pocketed it. Then he passed the envelope back the same way. The boy took it and found a pocket for it. Shank noticed the automatic and unconscious change in the boy’s expression. He was holding now, violating the law, and a mask of wariness jelled on his face. The boy was the hunted one now.
    He made as if to rise.
    “Sit down,” Shank said. “You waited an hour. Another minute won’t hurt.”
    The boy looked uncomfortable.
    “It’s good stuff,” Shank assured him. “The Mau-Mau’s final batch. You don’t have to worry.”
    “Solid.”
    “About selling it, I mean. Your customers will dig it. You never get beat stuff from the Mau-Mau.”
    The boy flushed. “I don’t sell, Shank.”
    “Sure, I’m hip. You smoke an ounce a week all by yourself. Solid.”
    “Shank—”
    “You want to lie, it’s your business. But don’t expect me to believe you.”
    The boy had a red face now. “Just to come out even,” he said. “So my own stuff doesn’t cost me anything. That’s all.”
    “I’m hip.”
    “I don’t make a profit. I’m not a…pusher, for Christ’s sake.”
    Shank smiled, happy. “Nobody’s a pusher,” he said. “We’re all connections. Just a big string of connections from the top to the bottom. You’re part of a system, my man. That’s all. How does it feel to be a little cog in the world’s roundest wheel?”
    Shank walked out first, letting the kid worry about it. He felt good getting outside. It was the second sale of the night and also the last. He was not holding and he was not hustling anything. Just relaxing. Just walking around and having his own private laughs.
    Like the chick. Anita. That was a laugh, a big round one. The two of them balling now, with the chick scared out of her bra and Joe looking like Papa Professor with phallic overtones. Oh, that was a gas.
     
     
       But the chick was nice. Fine stuff. Choice. He liked the type—the face, the whole flip structure. And he liked the fear. The scared ones were the most fun. Pretty soon, he thought, he would have to try his luck with her. And he laughed a loud laugh echoing in an alleyway and