“Goddamn …” the wop said.

I opened my teeth.

His cock fell against his pants.

From the big nozzle, drops of come rolled down the wet cloth of his thigh. Then a drop of something darker welled, staining the dark cloth black and losing its edges on the wet. He let go my head and shoved his dick back in his fly, taking deep breaths.

“Come on.” Hogg ran his hand through my wet hair, closed his fingers in a fist. “Look, you motherfuckers! I got some work for you to do!” I leaned against Hogg’s leg, put my arm around it. My knees were sore, so I rocked back to a squat. “I got an envelope here with the names of some bitches with some sloppy pussies that gotta be wrung out and knocked into shape.”

Across the floor, a trickle of piss wormed and widened. The nigger, leaning now on the wall, moved his black foot aside. (A red bulb burned in the wall socket above his head.) The trickle changed direction. When it reached his foot this time, he just looked down and spread his big toes.

I looked down.

You could see the bulb reflected.

“You get your usual bread,” Hogg was explaining. (I slipped one hand under his wet foot. The urine on the floor was warm.) “You guys with me on this job? What about you, Denny?”

Denny was sitting on a crate, running his hand, underhand and overhand, along his cock. It curved up higher than his bottom shirt button. “What …?” He looked up but didn’t stop rubbing.

“I said, you wanna go along with us on the job?”

“Where?”

“In the truck,” Hogg said. “To do some cunt bustin’—you can get yourself maybe forty or fifty dollars.”

“I don’t know how to drive,” Denny said. “I can handle a shotgun pretty good—but I never did learn to drive, you know?”

Which cracked the wop up laughing.

“Now come on,” Hogg said. “Shut up. You gonna come with us on this job, Denny? I told you how we do before—”

“Oh,” Denny said. “That … yeah, sure. I told you before too, I’d like to see some of that.”

“It’s a good profession, boy,” Hogg said. “Like the man says, ain’t nothin’ you can do in this world today—go to the pictures, buy some food, or even throw away the package it come in—that don’t bring somebody closer to hurt. At least this way you know that you ain’t makin’ your money by makin’ them pictures or packages. And when you’re hurtin’ someone, you’re hurtin’ ’em. You look ’em right in the eye and do it. You can’t very well fuck somebody without lookin’ ’em in the eye, unless—” Hogg chuckled—“you do it doggy-style. Even so, you ain’t droppin’ no bombs on five hundred people you ain’t never seen. You ain’t signin’ no papers that’s gonna put a thousand people who ain’t never heard your name out of a house and a job. You ain’t enjoyin’ no benefits that come down the pike three years after you finished with hurtin’ folks you didn’t even know existed, much less you was hurtin’ them. And you can look at any TV newscast or listen to any radio report, even if it’s about somethin’ you just done—and I had that happen to me three times now—and know you got more sense of duty than they do!”