Excerpt: Anarchy in Plum Street

"Yes, sir, Sergeant, sir!" we laughed and he rolled us up a joint and I put the Queen record on and we didn't talk anymore.

So that was how I first thought of my big project, and here I am about to execute it. My first Alley Snake is going to be a scavenger hunt: go to these places—like I said, leftist bookstores, cafes where students and intellectuals congregate, spots like that, spots where people can come together and talk about things without being afraid someone's going to come listen in on them and lock 'em up for refusing to tow the line. For enjoying a joint with their brew the way a fat cat would enjoy a cigar with his brandy. The social security numbers are going to be at the sites, not in the paper—printing them would be too risky, I talked to Perlman about it and he was willing to put the paper on the line for me, but I'm new here and I'm not ready for that. Plus, I think this is going to be a bigger deal than he thinks.

The plan is that Bus and I are going to break into the houses of the top detectives in the DPD, go through their paperwork, find their social security numbers—theirs, their wives', their kids'. All the detectives that work narcotics—we had to narrow it down and I figured that was as good a place to start as any. Doobie wants to maybe come along because he likes the anti-anti-narcotics angle, but I'm afraid he'll leave the detectives' houses stinking like a hotboxed VW. I want to keep it completely clean—no prints, no signs of entry, nothing--not a thing will be missing, since we'll just be writing their little numbers down in my notebook, and that will be that. They'll never know anyone was there.