Red Baker by Robert Ward

trim off the fat.
    “Did you use a
gun?”
he said in a high-pitched voice.
    “Yeah, but without bullets. It was a gag.”
    “A gun,” he said. He seemed to be off somewhere by himself, in one of his Pete Porter fantasies.
    But he snapped back out of it quickly.
    “That’s all that happened? That’s not the way I heard it. I heard you were involved in some other robberies.
Real
ones. I mean, I don’t imagine they send boys to the state correctional institution for that kind of prank.”
    “You heard wrong,” I said, and there was menace in my voice. He had finally drawn it out of me. In another minute I was going to be across the desk.
    “Red
Baker,” he said, almost singing the words. “Redddd Bakkkkker. Well, I’ll tell you what, Red, I’m going to have to give this some thought. Yes, I’m going to have to give this some
careful
consideration.”
    “You are?”
    He turned and smiled at me slowly. “Don’t you approve of my methods? What do you think this is, Baker, high school?”
    I didn’t say anything. I knew he hadn’t wanted to say that. He was enjoying playing the big man, but it had slipped out anyway.
    “There’s no job, is there?” I said suddenly, knowing it as sure as I know steel. It caught him off guard, and he gave a nervous little laugh.
    “As a matter of fact, no, there isn’t,” he said with a look of surprise on his face. Then he started to laugh. A long, high whistle.
    I got up slowly, feeling my heart beating, a hot red flush in my face, adrenaline pumping through me. I turned and started to walk toward the door, knowing that if I didn’t go now, without saying anything, I wouldn’t leave until I broke his head.
    “Red Baker,” he sang in a high-pitched whistle as I swung the door open hard and walked out into that gray, long, mud-splattered hall.
    I must have been in a trance, some swirling blue fog, as I walked across the mushy lot to my car and climbed in, dripping on the frozen seat. I don’t remember starting my car, don’t remember much at all except going down Broadway past Lana’s Lingerie, where they had something in the window for THE GIRL OF YOUR DREAMS, black-lace panties with an open crotch. Another nightie with buckskin fringe said SAVAGE. Then the light changed, and I was turning down Madison and stopping the car and getting out, walking across the garbage-littered streets, and suddenly I knew I was heading for Dr. Raines’s.
    I didn’t want to be there, almost called it off, but once I was only a few houses away in the failing gray-slush light and saw the lines of men waiting there, I knew there was no turning back.
    I needed what the dead-eyed croak had to give me, wanted to feel the white pill dissolving in my blood; let it make me fly, Lord, out of the last five hours.
    No one knows what Dr. Raines puts in his pills, but it’s clear it’s the heaviest speed around. It takes maybe fifteen minutes for it to start, and then it can go either way, lift you out of the black-trash streets, give you the confidence to walk through walls, or it can turn against you, make you sweaty and clammy at the same time, cause a man to misinterpret the slightest smile or wave of the hand. Send you round the bend, oh Lord, yes. But now, with the day I had, I figured it was worth the risk. Ruby moving and the man with no nose and then Porter dumping on me, bringing up my criminal youth, working me like that, and me having to sit there and suck it in.
    Though the Good Book tells us to be humble, I’ve never taken much stock in it. I wanted to wait outside the mattress factory underneath the sleeping fifty-foot blonde and grind Pete’s face into the sidewalk. But then, what good would that have done me? The idea was a job, not revenge.
    I stood in the line of men in the gray twilight, watching the cars slide through the slush, sending a spray of it up on our pants legs, covering the white marble steps. If there was one thing I was grateful for it was the gathering