CTW Boulevard: 11/6

Press clippings lined the wall: "Frog, Pig Squirm as 'Street' Reveals Love-Pad Pix," "What Makes Grover Super? Hop Den Demon Gets High as a Chinaman!" "One Good Citizen: Bird Vows to Clear Street of the Riff-Raff" Missing: quashed info from the private file - Bird as flamboyant swish with hallucinations.

Call at 10:00. Double homicide on the Street. Two John Doe muppets stuffed in a dumpster. Both faces shades of deep blue - though that was true before they were shot six times.

Drove over. Sunny day. On my way to where the air is sweet. Slum city - kids running around in fire hydrant spray. Sitting on a front stoop. Animals.

One of them pointed to the dumpster behind Hooper's. I double parked.

The dumpster taped off. I pushed through a crowd of foam-rubberneckers.

Inside the dumpster. Two stiffs. Eyes wider than when they first learned to count ten. White plastic with big irises. Foam rubber leaking from the heads, dry. Dead at least three hours, my guess.

I hit up the on-duty cop. No prints or hair fibers, not even a nylon fiber. Weird.

Fuck it. Let them kill each other, down to the last stripe-shirted, giddy ex-couch. I started walking back to the car.

Then I saw it. Mixed in with the trash near the dumpster:

A chocolate chip. Single. Perfect.

Grabbed it.

I braced the kids at the hydrant. Then the ones on the stoop. Felt scared vibes as I closed in on the stoop.

"Who knows what they found in the dumpster?"

Seven or eight hands went up. Brats yelling "Me. Me."

I pointed at one. "You."

"I know that they were bad."

"Bad how?"

More hands. Kids all started at once:

"They were just bad, they -"

"They couldn't make the B sound right."

"Didn't jump rope."

"Didn't play -"

Kids getting louder. I took out my piece. Warning shot. Street lamp exploded. Kids jumped.

"Now tell me. Who were they?

One kid raised his hand. "Yeah?"

"I gotta go to the bathroom!"

Kids. Fucking idiots.

Trying to trace a cookie crumb on the Street is like trying to find one of those no-name beaners they funnel across the border to boost local color on The Electric Company. But it's my case, and I've got two more years to go as a good boy. Been dry five years. And clean, if you forget my IA bust - running shakedowns in the Magic Garden. Easy money: Carol and Paula, hot, heavy and their hands in each other's chucklepatches. Flowers weren't the only things squealing. Made the slides, threatened a special delivery to a CTW board meeting. Golden, until the fucking squirrel sang that he saw my flash bulbs go off from his hollow tree.

IA found out everything, buried it, in exchange for my keeping my mouth shut about Fred Rogers and the contents of his daily "Speedy Delivery." Jabbing a spike in his boney thigh to get to the Land of Make Believe. Trying to work the King Friday Doll when he was so stoned all he could do was make the puppet's head nod back and forth. Pathetic.

I put in a call to Gordon, had him question The Count.

Forensics shot me the results, inter-office envelope:

Dig it: Googly-eyed blue-furred mutant. Leaving the chip as his mark, like a hyena pissing on a carcass.

Part II, The Boneyard