by Peter Plate
Take thirty rows of clients, twenty people in each; he was giving out anywhere between forty and eighty dollars per person—it adds up to some beaucoup money in a few minutes.
You hear of curbside inner-city philanthropists like him. They emerge on a seasonal or annual basis, coming out of nowhere. He was just a wizened darling with a gilt-edged touch.
The clients were looking at the bills he was dishing out, holding them up to the light, licking them, rubbing their fingers over them to see if they were legitimate. It would have been too cruel if this was a prank or some shoddy counterfeits.
Nothing doing. The man was distributing authentic U.S. Mint currency. He kept scooping his hand into the bag and ladling out the bills.
“There’s some for everybody,” he was saying. “Steady now, friends. We got plenty to go around.”
This went on for quite a spell. I was beginning to suspect the man was a magician and the money in the bag was endless. But the Pinkertons got hold of him and after he’d reached the last person in the back row, giving a woman with two kids four crisp twenties, he was escorted out of the complex.
On his way through the wire-mesh doors, he said over his shoulder, “Forget these turkeys. You wait and see, I’ll be back.”
The clients broke out in a ragged cheer.
I told you a change was going to come, didn’t I?
PETER PLATE taught himself to write during eight years spent living in abandoned buildings in San Francisco’s Mission district. A spoken-word performer, Plate possesses an eidetic memory that allows him to recite whole chapters of his books from memory. Snitch Factory joins One Foot off the Gutter, Police and Thieves, and Angels of Catastrophe to complete Plate’s Mission Quartet. His previous novels are The Romance of the American Living Room (1993), Darkness Throws Down the Sun (1991), and Black Wheel of Anger (1990). Peter Plate lives and writes in San Francisco.
Copyright ©1997, 2001 by Peter Plate
First published by Incommunicado Press in 1997
First Seven Stories Press edition November 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plate, Peter.
Snitch factory a novel / Peter Plate.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-609-80055-0
1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Women social workers—Fiction. 3. Married women—Fiction. I. Title
PS3566.L267 S65 2001
813’.54—dc21
2001041075
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