In three minutes, Yolande would be dead.

The preppie whose cock was in her hand a minute ago now has her by the right wrist, and the one who was fucking her has hold of her left wrist, and now they all join in the fun, the three Richards, two of them keeping her pinned down, the third one making sure the bag is in place over her head and tight around her

neck. She is going to die, she knows she is going to die. She knows that in a minute, in thirty seconds,

two seconds, she will run out of breath and... "No, bitch."

And he yanks off the bag, and sticks his cock in her mouth again.

This is a game for them, she thinks. She hopes.

a game. Put the bag on, take the bag off. They read someplace that depriving a person of air heightens the sexual pleasure. She hopes. But why are they calling her cunt and bitch and shit face why is one of them pushing... "No!" she screams, but it is too late, he has shoved it inside her, whatever it is, hurting her, tearin her, no, please, and now the plastic bag is on her again, and she hears over the ringing in her ears Richard from across the room mumbling, "Hey, whut's... ?" and she screams inside the bag, tries to scream inside the bag, and she hears black yelling, "The fuck you doin?" and she thinks Help! and she screams "Help!" inside the bag, and this time she knows she is going to die, this time the pain is so overwhelming, why is he doing this to her twisting something jagged and sharp inside her, she is going to die, please, she wants to die, she breathes, she can't bear it a moment...

"No, cunt!" he shouts, and yanks the bag from head.

The rush of oxygen is so sweet.

She feels something Sticky,and wet on her lips.

She thinks this will be the end of it. They will leave her alone now.

She hurts too badly. She is too torn and

ragged below, she knows she is hemorrhaging below. Please, she thinks. Just leave me alone now. Please. Enough.

"You guys crazy?"

Richard.

Good, she thinks. This is the end of it. But the bag is over her head again. And they are holding her down again.

They were back in the car maybe two or three minutes when they caught a 10-29 to proceed to 841 St. Sebastian Avenue. The dispatcher wouldn't call this a homicide for sure because all she had was a dead body in the alleyway there and nobody yet knew what the cause of death was.

Could've been a heart attack there in the alley. So she told them the blues had a corpse there, and mentioned that she had also notified Homicide just in case, which is how Monoghan and Monroe got into the act for the second time that night.

The time was a quarter past seven, the sun was just coming up, sort of.

This wasn't going to be any rosy-fingered dawn, that was for sure. This was just the end of another hard day's night, the shift almost having run its course, except that now they did, as it turned out, have another homicide on their hands. The freezer bag over the girl's head told them that.

The girl looked like a hooker, but nowadays it was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. You got Hollywood starlets showing up at the Academy Awards wearing dresses that made them look like streetwalkers, but you also got bona fide prosties standing on the

corner looking like apple-cheeked college girls

Minnesota, so who was to say for sure? "A hooker," Monoghan said.

"For sure," Monroe said.

"Probably her pimp done her," Monoghan suggested.

"That's why her handbag's gone."

Which was keen deduction. Carella figured if he hung around long enough, he might learn something. He was wondering why, if this had been a pimp, why the guy hadn't simply stabbed her. Or shot her. Why fancy? Why a freezer bag over her head? It was obvious that someone, pimp or whoever, had dragged her into the alley. She was lying on her back in a pool of coagulating blood, but bloody smears led from the curb, where the track seemed to have begun. someone driven her here, and then dragged her to where she now lay beside a bank of garbage cans and stacks of black-bagged garbage?

"She might have been pregnant," speculated. "All that blood."

"Nowadays, people kill you so they can tear the baby out of your belly,"

Monoghan said.

"It's ancient times all over again," Monroe said.

"There's no civilization anymore," Monoghan said. "Fucking savages nowadays," Monroe said, with more feeling than Carella had ever thought he'd possessed.

In the dim light of a cold grey dawn, the girl's face under the plastic freezer bag was as white as the ice on the alley floor.

They had wrapped her in the sheet before carrying her down to black Richard's car, and then had driven a mile uptown on St. Sab's, where they'd dragged her into the alley still wrapped in it. But black Richard knew cops had ways of tracing sheets and shit, and he'd convinced the others to roll her out of it before they left her there by the garbage cans, rats big as cats running all over the alley, made him shiver all over

again just to think of them.

Fuckin honkies wanted no part of him once they'd used his car to drop the bitch off, but he reminded them it wasn't him had suffocated her, wasn't him had torn her open, was three fuckin rich guys named

Richard, from a school named Pierce Academy,

which was stitched on the front of all their fuckin P

parkas the fuckin football on the back, dig? So either they helped him clean up the car and the apartment and get rid of the bloody sheet, or whut he was gonna do,

ole black Richard here, would run straight to the cop shop. They believed him. Maybe cause he also showed them a switchblade knife bigger than any of their dicks and tole them he was gonna circumscribe them real bad if they tried to split on him now.

Ended up they'd tidied up the apartment like four speed queens come to work from a cleaning service.

Weren't no car washes open this time of night, day,

whatever the fuck, and Richard didn't want to go to no garage, neither, blood all over the backseat that way,

he never knew anybody could bleed that bad. He remembered a movie he'd seen one time, blood and shit all over a car from a shootin inside it, this wasn't like that, but there was plenty blood, anyway, and he

didn't know any big-shot gangster he could call come set it straight.

All he knew was these honkies better help him or their name was shit.

In movies and on television, blacks and whites all pals and shit, that was all make-believe. In real life you never saw blacks and whites together hardly at all In that movie where the guy's brains were spattered over the car, this black guy and this white guy two contract hitters tighter'n Dick's hatband. But was make-believe, callin each other "nigger" and that, black guy callin the white guy "nigger," guy callin the nigger "nigger" right back, break the fuckin head any white man called Richard "nigger," never mind that movie bullshit! Was a white wrote that movie, the luck he knew about black

What was real, my friend, was equality never come to pass here in this land of the free and home the brave, wasn't no black man ever trusted a man and vice versa, never. Richard didn't trust these three white bastards and they didn't trust him, but they needed each other right now cause a girl been killed in his apartment and they were the guy's who killed her. The white guys, not him. But it was his apartment, don't forget that. Cops had a way of never forgettin little black mishaps like that, fuckin cops.

So this was what you might call strange bedfellows here, which was what it actually was called in a book Richard read one time. Oh, he was literate, man, don't kid your fuckin self. Read books, saw movies, even went to see a play downtown one time had all blacks in it about soldiers. His opinion blacks were the best actors in the world cause they knew what sufferin was

all about. That movie with the brains all over the car, was the black guy shoulda got the Cademy Award, never mind the white guy.

So here they were, the four of them, three white guys didn't know shit about anything, and one black guy teachin them all about survival here in the big bad city. Thing they didn't know was that soon as they cleaned up his car and got rid of the sheet they'd wrapped the bitch in, he was gonna stick it to them good.

The girl's name was Yolande Marie Marx. Her fingerprints told them that. She had a B-sheet not quite as long as her arm, but long enough for a kid who was only nineteen. Most of the arrests were for prostitution. But there were two for shoplifting and half a dozen for possession, all bullshit violations when she was underage that had got her off with a succession of slaps on the wrist from bleeding-heart judges. When she turned eighteen, she finally did three months at Hopeville, some name for a female correctional facility. She worked under the name Marie St. Claire, which alias was on the record. Her pimp's name was there, too.

The shift had changed without them.

At fifteen minutes to eight, give or take, the eight-man team of detectives on the day shift had relieved six of the detectives on the morning shift, but not Carella and Hawes, who were still out in the field. They were there, instead of home in bed, because maybe they had something to go on in the murder of Yolande Marie Marx. Her death might never make