The dope dealer Larue Clarry was in the bedroom of his apartment with one of the fourteen-year-old white girls he fancied, and Booth, his old buddy, was in the living room watching Carson on the big TV and growing bored. Booth glanced at his imitation gold Rolex and adjusted his feet on the coffee table, a thick red marble thing four feet on a side. The couch was red too.

A compact, broad-shouldered man just past thirty, Booth was dressed for the summer as a semiprosperous Harlem player of the mid-seventies: peach cuffed slacks, a loose alpaca V-neck sweater in lemon yellow over bare brown skin, the showing V of skin adorned with three gold chains, from one of which depended a gold goat's head and a tiny gold spoon. His feet were shod in two-tone (green and red) bulbous-toed shoes with three-inch leather heels.

He fingered his little spoon and considered the bowl on the coffee table. It was a lidded crystal sphere containing approximately half a pound of the purest Bolivian flake cocaine in New York City. Always, when he waited for Clarry like this, he considered lifting the lid and taking a monster snort, and as always he declined. Larue knew it too, that Booth was reliable, that he wouldn't lift a man's blow when the man wasn't looking. A guy who would take a little snort without being asked would start bringing vials into the house, and then jam jars. Booth was not that kind of guy, which was why from time to time his buddy Larue would lay a baggie on him, holding a casual scoop of flake, maybe fifty grams, and so pure that Booth could step on it three times and move it to a couple of kids he knew for up to five large.

Booth himself was not a dope merchant, nor even much of a user. He did what he had to to survive, which was generally acting as a reliable assistant at various illegal activities; he was a street watcher, a follower of people somebody wanted followed, a deliverer of packages, a driver. From time to time he took people like Larue around town in their big cars. It was a living. He had been arrested fourteen times, convicted twice, and imprisoned once, a four-year stretch in Elmira for assisting at an armed robbery.