Dog Day Afternoon by Patrick Mann Read Free Book Online

song, something about a man who played a piano in old Hong Kong, but the music never made any more sense than the words. Littlejoe started toward her. She had decided to strip now. She was a tall girl, almost six feet in height, which Joe loved, and she was slender, poured into a gold lamé dress that sparkled in the dim light and barely covered her shoulders and breasts. She pulled one shoulder strap free and her left breast popped out, firm, lush, big, with a nipple as hard as a bolt screwed into her rather small areola.
    People at other tables were clapping now and yelling encouragement. A woman against the wall had tucked two fingers in her mouth and was producing a shrill wolf whistle in time to Lana’s sinuous movements.
    Littlejoe stopped a table away.
    He didn’t mind her theatricality. After all, that was what she was all about. A lot of people badmouthed her for the way she dressed, that spun-sugar wig she flaunted, with its long back flip and bangs, those huge upcurling fake eyelashes flecked with glitter, the dark eyeshadow, the dark lipstick, rouged out to make her mouth bigger than it was, the hectic spots of color on her cheeks. But that was Lana. Take her or leave her.
    She had worked her other breast loose and was stroking it admiringly. People began to hoot and yelp like dogs. She was wriggling up out of her golden sheath now, pulling it down over her hips while she writhed and mouthed nonsense words to the rhythm of the clapping.
    Her navel came into view and, an instant later, the top of her muff, flaxen and flat, like an expensive linen towel. She turned and stuck out her ass at the crowd, slowly unveiling it with a back-and-forth bump in time to the clapping. “Kiss, kiss.” Then she turned back and her penis, engorged, arose from between her legs like some primeval sea monster searching for its mate.
    The crowd went wild. Littlejoe glanced proudly around him. He had no idea how many of the people here tonight had known Lana was a man. A few. Himself, of course, included.

5
    E ven at midnight, the apartment on East Tenth Street was hotter than the street outside. Or so it seemed to Joe.
    The damned trouble, he told himself as he lay beside Lana on the old king-sized mattress shoved into a corner of the living-room floor, was that they had no cross-ventilation. Few of these tenements had been built to let air flow through from front to back. Or, if they had, over the years greedy landlords had so chopped and walled them off into cheap little apartments that the air had long ago stopped moving, stopped clearing out the stink, stopped cooling people on hot August nights like this one.
    It was, nevertheless, not a bad little pad for what he wanted. He needed it as an address for the welfare people and as a place to bring Lana after he’d gotten her high. He’d been pretty selective as to whom he brought here. This wasn’t just any of his welfare pads. He’d even brought his mother here. This was where he crashed in the Village, even though it was a little too far east for the real action.
    “Unreal,” Lana muttered, rolling over on her back and snuffling.
    “What, baby?”
    Littlejoe liked it when Lana was stoned out of her skull and nine-tenths asleep. He’d brought her home in something like a fireman’s carry, her long, slender body half draped over his shoulder. He might be a head shorter than she, but he knew how to handle weights, always had. She lay naked now in the darkness, only a faint glow coming through the grimy front windows from the street lamps three floors below on Tenth Street, her lovely breasts firm and young. He stroked her face for a moment. She needed a shave again.
    Joe grinned to himself in the darkness as he stroked Lana’s long, slender flanks. Sam had called her an animal, and he was right, of course. She was like a racehorse, a thoroughbred animal, fast and a little wild. He understood why people like Sam hated people like Lana. There had been a whole change among