Revolution Number 9 by Peter Abrahams Page A

Social Security cards. Chang knew what they were immediately, the same way he could identify a U.S. citizen from across the street. He toyed with the idea of drawing his gun and busting Brucie on the spot. But what was the point? They’d had more evidence the last time, and it hadn’t stuck. Chang sat quietly. This time he would build a case that no one could deal away.
    Brucie unchained his dog. Man and dog got into the Trans-Am. Brucie pulled away from the curb, burning rubber like an adolescent. Chang followed. The beer can soon came floating out of Brucie’s window, bounced on the pavement and off the bumper of Chang’s car. Chang, perched on the phone book he needed to see over the dash, his tiny feet on the blocks attached to the pedals, spoke aloud. “You’re dead meat, asshole,” he said. He didn’t let Brucie out of sight.

10
    B uffalo wings, two double cheeseburgers with fries, a sausage burrito, and a sixty-four-ounce pitcher of Bud. Yvonne laid it all in front of the men at the back table. Their eyes swiveled from the game on the big-screen TV and locked on her: various parts of her, that is. It was a lousy job. Yvonne went back to the kitchen and picked up the tray for table two: a Coors and a shot, three drafts, ribs for four. Paco was shaking the grease off a basket of onion rings. He saw her and got that pouting look on his face. Some kind of male contagionwas in the air. She’d seen epidemics like this before. “T-shirt fit okay?” Paco said, with a trace of accent; so
fit
sounded like “feet.”
    Yvonne shrugged. “I guess so.”
You leering bastard
, she added to herself. Last week he’d issued them all new T-shirts, black with “Paco’s Sports Bar and Restaurant” written in glitter. They fit tight, hers the tightest. Paco was delighted with the effect. Gave the place a little class, he thought. His kind of class was nipples pressing under black cotton. Yvonne didn’t care: Paco’s grubby bar was just a stage set, and Paco and his customers, speculatively watching the way her body moved under that T-shirt and her jeans, were without importance, bit-part actors in a play they didn’t even know was in performance. They didn’t count. Only Felipe counted.
    It was a Wednesday night. Felipe was off at seven, she was off at eight, and Delores was working four to midnight at the nursing home in Santa Whatever-it-was. That gave them four hours, less twenty minutes or so, which was the difference between Delores’s driving time and theirs.
    Felipe walked in at five after seven. He was wearing his uniform—“Armored Trucking Services, Inc.,” read the crest on his shirt—but he’d checked his gun at the garage, a few blocks away. He looked for her the moment he came through the door. He had no cool at all. He saw her, grinned like a boy on Christmas morning, and sat at table three, one of hers. Yvonne brought him a draft.
    “Hi, Carol,” he said. He rolled the
r
—his accent was a little stronger than Paco’s. Yvonne liked the sound and was glad she’d chosen a name with an
r
in it. She was Carol to Felipe and the gang at Paco’s, where she worked off the books, but it wasn’t her real name. Neither was Yvonne, if you wanted to be a stickler about it.
    “Hungry?” she said.
    He heard deep meanings in the word and answered with double underlinings. “You wouldn’t believe how hawngry.”
    Yvonne didn’t like too much familiarity in the bar and he knew it. She snapped out her pad. “What’ll it be?”
    Felipe looked crestfallen. He ran his finger down the menu and ordered ribs. Felipe was a carnivore. She could smell itthrough his skin when she got close enough. “Your nails are dirty,” she said, then returned to the kitchen and put in the order.
Hawngry tonight
. She almost laughed out loud.
    Felipe left a few minutes before eight. Yvonne balanced her receipts and went out the back door at ten after. Her car was parked in the alley. It was a blue Tercel. There were