orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. The Sailor pressed the bulb, watching the solution rush into the boy-vein, sucked by silent thirst of blood.
“Jesus!” said the boy. “I never been hit like that before!”
He lit a cigarette and looked around the kitchen, twitching in sugar need. “Aren’t you taking off?” he asked.
“With that milk sugar shit? Junk is a one-way street.
No U-tum. You can’t go back no more.”
They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyretheum powder ( “Hard to get now, lady . . . war on. Let you have a little. . . . Two dollars.”) Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn’t you?
My present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the bodies but the “molds,” you understand—but I forget that you cannot understand. We have all but a very few. But even one could upset our food tray. The danger, as always, comes from defecting
agents: A. J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo (carrier of Chagas vectors, hasn’t taken a bath since the Argentine epidemic of ’35, remember?), and Lee and the Sailor and Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness looking for me. Because all Agents
defect and all Resisters sell out.. .