Hardy turned on his stool. He slapped the bar. “Okay, guys, let’s suck ’em up,” he said. “We’re closing early.” He got up, went behind the bar and sat Moses down on the stool back there. He was hearing the beginnings of the usual drunks’ stupid moanings about how they needed last call and it wasn’t fair. He lifted the shillelagh, an end-knotted, two-foot length of dense Kentucky ash, from its hook under the counter and ducked back out front of the bar.
He tapped the bar a couple of times, hard. Making sure he had their attention. “Don’t even suck ’em, then. We’re closed and you’re all outside. Now.”
Everybody moved. Hardy had wielded the stick before, and most of them had seen it. He glanced at Moses. “Let’s go, buddy,” he said quietly. “Let’s go tell Frannie.”
Chapter Three
ALL TWELVE trucks were parked in their spots behind the squat building that was the office of Army Distributing.
At a backboard against the building, a tall black man named Alphonse Page shot hoops. He was a rangy semi-youth, with a hair net wrapped around his head, his shirt off revealing a hairless and flat chest, and high-topped generic tennis shoes. His fatigue pants were doubled up at the cuffs, showing six or seven inches of shiny thoroughbred leg between his white socks and his knees.
The backboard was set flush against the building, making lay-ups all but impossible, although if you swished the basket just right you could get a reasonable bounce back into the key and follow up with maybe an inside hook.
A fading orange Datsun 510 pulled into the lot, around the trucks, then behind the building back by the wrapping shed. Alphonse stopped shooting and began dribbling, all his weight on his right foot, bouncing the ball slowly, about once a second, and waited for Linda Polk to appear from around the building, which she did in under a minute.