Dressed entirely in black, a black cotton jumpsuit, black socks and jogging shoes, black woolen ski hat pulled down over the ears, sweltering in the woolen hat, but it covered the hair, concealed the color of the hair, no stray pedestrian or motorist would later be able to come up with a good description.
He came out of the building at two minutes to nine, eight fifty-eight on the digital watch, said something to the doorman who was out taking the air, and then started toward the corner, leading his dog. Eight fifty-nine now, and a dark empty street. No cars, no people. Even the doorman had gone back inside again. Go\
Cross the street diagonally . . .
Gun out and ready . . .
Step onto the sidewalk and into his path and level the gun at him . . .
"Are you crazy?" he said.
"Yes."
Calmly.
And shot him four times in the head.
And shot the whimpering dog, too, for good measure.
The neighborhood was still largely Italian, the bakery shop wedged between a grocery store and a sausage shop that had an Italian sign in the window, salumeria. Two- or three-story buildings along the street here, clapboard and frame, stores on the ground-floor level, owners usually occupying the upper floor or floors. There were still trees along this street. No graffiti on the buildings. Still something Old World about it.
Carella could remember growing up in this neighborhood when many of the cadences were still Italian, when Italian-language radio stations still played songs like "La Tarantella" and "O Sole Mio" and "Funiculi-Funicula," the music floating out on the summertime air through open windows all up and down the street. He could remember helping his father in the bakery shop on weekends, when the crowds were thickest, kneading the dough for the bread while his father handled the more delicate art of pastry-making. Carella's hands would be covered with flour. Kneading the dough. When he turned fourteen, fifteen - who could remember now, he'd been a late bloomer - he began to think the dough felt exactly like a girl's breasts. Kneading the dough. Well, exactly like Margie Gannon's breasts, in fact, because this was after he'd experienced his first heavy petting session with her. Or with anyone, for that matter.
Margie Gannon.
Freckled all over, including her breasts, which he'd released from her blouse and her bra one Saturday afternoon while the rain and her breasts came tumbling down, he and she feverish and intent in the living room of the two-story brick house two houses down from his own, her parents out doing the marketing or the shopping or wherever they were, the only thing that mattered was that they'd be gone all afternoon - They won't be back till four or five, she'd told him, come in out of the rain, Steve.
He had gone there to read comic books with her. Margie had the best comic-book collection in the neighborhood. Kids used to come from blocks away, boys and girls, all of them barely pubescent, to read Margie Gannon's comic books. Her parents encouraged it as a nice clean way of socializing. But they should not have left their lovely young daughter (heh-heh) in the clutches of the mad beast named Stephen the Horny, certainly not on a sultry afternoon in August, with lightning flashing and thunder booming outside, and with all his adolescent juices coming to a boil, not to mention hers.
Alone with Margie Gannon in the ground-floor living room of her house. Parents gone. Rain pelting the windows. Their heads bent over the comic book. Heads almost touching. His arm on the couch behind her. She was holding one side of the comic book in her right hand, he was holding the other side in his left. Heads together. There was the sudden feel of her hair against his cheek. Long reddish-blonde hair. Silken hair against his cheek. Green-eyed, freckle-faced, Irish Margie Gannon sitting beside him with her hair touching his cheek. He was suddenly erect in his pants.
He could not remember now which comic they were reading. Something to do with cops and archcriminals? He could not remember. He remembered what she was wearing, though, still remembered that. A short, faded blue-denim skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse buttoned up the front. Freckled pretty Irish face, freckled slender arms, freckled everything, he was soon to discover, but for now there was only the tingling thrill of her silken hair touching his cheek. She reached up with her left hand, brushed the hair back from her face. Their cheeks touched.
It was as if an intensely sharp light suddenly spilled onto the open comic book. Not daring to look at her, he concentrated his vision on the brilliantly illuminated pages, alive now with pulsating primary colors, red and blue and yellow outlined in the blackest black, focused his white-hot gaze on the action-frozen figures and the shouted oversized words, POW and BAM and BANG and YIIIIKES leaping from the pages, repeating in print the trip-hammer of his heart, POW, BAM, BANG, echoing the fierce erection in his pants, YIIIIKES!
