Grip arrived at Crippen’s around midnight, carrying his sweat-wilted jacket over his shoulder. The streets in this part of town were mostly deserted tonight. People were just too goddamn exhausted, Grip thought. Himself included. He’d grabbed a shot and a beer with Morphy at a dive on the edge of the Hollows, fending off the local working girls and trying to shake the weird sensation lingering from the empty streets of Godtown; the strangeness brought into relief now by what empty streets really felt like: not really empty, not really quiet. But Godtown, if there were crickets in that part of the City, you would have heard them tonight.
Whatever attempt had been made to clean the skull-and-top-hat graffiti from Crippen’s door had been largely unsuccessful, and it stared back at Grip as he approached the door. The bar was nearly empty, just a couple of old-timers with crew cuts sitting at one table and a geek named Reinholdt—or something like that—talking with the bartender, waving his free hand about while cupping his beer like the Holy Grail itself.
Grip nodded to the old-timers, wondered if Reinholdt would come over to him if he sat alone at a table, and decided that if Reinholdt did, he would just drink up and leave. Grip was exhausted, probably wouldn’t have even come here if he’d given it any thought.
He threw his jacket over a chair and sat down in another, resting his forearms on the table. He looked over to the bartender and was a little annoyed when the guy waved him over. Grip shot him a pissed-off look, but the bartender persisted and Grip hauled his ass out of the chair and over to the bar. At the bar, he stood with his back to Reinholdt, cutting him out of the conversation.
The bartender looked at Reinholdt and then at the old-timers, who had stopped their conversation and were watching Grip.
“This afternoon I come in to open the bar, yeah? Door’s locked, same fuckin’ skull shit on the front, couldn’t get it off yesterday. So I come in—door’s locked right, have to open it with my key—and guess what I find on the bar, set up so it’s greeting me?”
Grip held his hands up, how could he possibly know?
The bartender stepped aside and gestured with his hand as if he were a magician introducing his assistant. Behind him, on the back bar, was arranged a shot glass filled with something amber—maybe whiskey—in front of a pair of dark sunglasses against which leaned, pointing forward, three black feathers. A half dozen human teeth were arranged in a semicircle in front of the shot glass.
“The hell’s that?” Grip asked.
Reinholdt started laughing, a little too loud.
The bartender shrugged. “That’s it. Don’t know what it means, yeah? Who put it here, how they got in. None of it.”
“Who else has a key?”
“Owner upstairs. I talked to him. He don’t know anything.”
“You think the guy who painted the skull?”
The bartender shrugged again, finding this amusing; Grip not sure that he should. “That’d be my guess.”
Grip decided to have a shot along with his beer.
Grip ended up having several shots and several beers. He’d felt his thinking go fuzzy and his stress grow, and, therefore, his anger, until he finally snapped and pushed the yammering Reinholdt so hard that the geek flipped off his chair and fell into an empty table. He stood up moaning something about his ribs. The bartender sent them both home, making Grip wait ten minutes so that Reinholdt could get good and clear.
Grip made his unsteady way home, wishing he would come upon Reinholdt; feeling as if a good workout with his fists would restore some normalcy to his life, cleanse his psyche. But Reinholdt’s place wasn’t on his route home. He found himself on his own block, surprised in that he didn’t recall parts of the trip, as if he somehow managed to skip five blocks. An elderly Asian couple walked on his side of the street, as they often did at early hours of the morning. Beyond them, and across the street, a Negro man stood beneath a streetlight. Grip saw him with great clarity: very dark skin, skinny, wearing a thin white shirt unbuttoned to his stomach, threadbare pants, and some sort of sandals. His face had wide cheekbones above sunken cheeks, and large eyes, whites showing all the way around the pupils. Fuck. Grip recognized the guy who’d looked in at Wayne, Koss, and himself at the Uhuru Community headquarters. Him again.
Grip shuffled to the door of his building and the man still stood there, maybe thirty yards away, maybe watching Grip. Grip froze at his door, not sure of his next step, his back tense, some instinct telling him not to go over to the Negro, not to pound him into the sidewalk. Without warning, the man turned and walked away with a strange, jangly-limbed gait, as if he were a marionette. Grip had never seen anyone move like that and he stared, transfixed and troubled.