"My wife, she's what you call high-maintenance," said the silver-haired troglodyte in the out-dated tux as he gestured to the car-wreck blonde who was trawling the other end of the hall. She'd snagged a few things: a blond pretty-boy with cheekbones only a little more delicate than the wire frames of his glasses, a stony-faced mannequin with dull eyes who sipped his drink with the intensity of someone engaged in one of the few actions they're good at and determined not to screw it up, and finally a type that I did not like by a long shot.
"The boy with the pony-tail looks ready to maintain her," I said and took a hit off my vodka and tonic.
"He's got that hungry look about him doesn't he?" the troglodyte said, smiling sheepishly.
"He's got the look of an aspiring actor without much talent, and that there's a dangerous animal."
"Oh?"
"Sure," I took another sip and felt more confident of my mental acuity. "He knows he's not going to get anything through the front door, so he'll find another way in. I'm betting he's used to batting his baby-blues and dropping his drawers and finding a whole host of open windows are suddenly revealed to him. Probably picked up quite a few supporting roles that way."
"There's nothing more dangerous than a hungry animal, is there?" the troll said rhetorically, gesturing at his wife and her entourage with a short wave of his soda glass which told me he was quite used to watching the animals circle his wife. I wondered which of the happy couple handled them better, and how they handled them at all. "Sierra attracts all kinds of animals, Mr. Callow. This one isn't a new species. She's a trophy for his wall, isn't she?"
"Headboard is more like it. And you can call me Parker as long as I'm drinking and most likely going to do something to embarrass myself." The troll chuckled at this.
"I know things, Parker. That's the tiny advantage about being short and ugly--you're dismissible. People think you're not listening when you're in the room, because you don't look sharp enough. They don't notice you watch because they don't like looking at you. But I know things, Mr. Callow."
I nodded, then killed my drink, my mind already sidling away from the depressing little hobbit, his inflatable-doll wife, and they're loveless, sexless marriage. It was pointing to Andy's Colonial Tavern and telling me how much more enjoyable this evening would be if I was spending it there with Martin, discussing jazz while the proprietors conducted illegal business around us.
Then the troglodyte startled me by bending in and whispering. "I know you think I married her because she's a blonde bombshell and she me for my money. I also know you're not Laurie's boyfriend, because Laurie doesn't like boys. You must be something to her, though, for her to ask you to do something like this."
I recoiled in surprise and the guy grinned like a Jack-o-Lantern and
toasted me with his soda.
"So what did you and my mom's cousin Don talk about?" Laurie asked as she stretched out on her couch. She'd traded the lame dress she'd worn at the reception and had showed off a lot of her fine, pale skin for a pair of colorful sweats and thick socks. I suppose I should have been relieved to have the forbidden fruit stowed, but it had been nice to have a lovely thing to look at for the evening. I, on the other hand, could only undo my bow-tie and lose the coat.
"Your Uncle Don," I said as I slumped down on the floor and leaned back against the couch, "knows you're a lesbian."
"Doesn't surprise me. He always was a sharp old guy." Laurie blew on her mug of cocoa.
"Aren't you worried about him cluing in the rest of the family?"
"He wouldn't. There's no reason for him to say anything, and he won't divulge a secret unless he's got something to gain. I told you, he's sharp." She sipped her cocoa, then touselled my hair. "Besides, with the performance you turned tonight, no one would believe him."
"Yeah, you know I meant to ask you about that? Didn't you ever mention my name to anyone in your family? Your parents? Your sister?"
She blinked at me with her large, olive, eyes. "Why would I do that?"
"We worked together for three years. We were the only agents who shared a Supervisory position. I saved your life once."
"Must have slipped my mind." She retreated behind the steam of her cocoa. I reached for my drink which invited me from a comfortable estate atop a week-old TV Guide. Laurie pulled my hand away. "Park, I brought you here, because I wanted to tell you something."
"If you profess your undying love for me, my ego will be shattered."
Her fingers wound soothingly through my hair. Whatever it was, it was bad. "Ashley Johnson was released from psychiatric. The Bureau chose not to press criminal charges."
The words, blunt like hollow-tipped bullets, exploded inside of me and suddenly Laurie's long studio apartment began to collapse in around me, the walls blurring the way they had in Indiana after I took her bullet into my lung. I shut my eyes and saw all of us--Laurie, myself, Pereau and his SWAT team--storming the construction site. Laurie wore a black nightfighting suit with a blue FBI windbreaker. I'd gone in my suit, eschewing any fatigues that might display my allegiance or afford me any protection. Why not? I wasn't a warrior, I was a savior.
"It was a year and a half ago," I said. "And a long way away. Should it bother me that much?"
"She purchased a mailing list with your address two weeks ago and twelve hours later bought a bus ticket here."
"How long have you known?"
The fingers smoothed my hair now. "About a week. A former roommate from Quantico who's now in DC gave me a call. I did the investigative work. If you act fast, we can get a restraining order against her. If she comes within spitting distance we can legally arrest her and criminally prosecute her. We couldn't do that before. Since she's been given a clean bill of mental health, the Helsinki syndrome defense won't work."
I leaned forward, pulling away from her touch, and firmly clasped my drink. I drank half of it, then returned it to its home atop the magazine. "A restraining order? Aim, it's me. Park. I was a federal agent once. As in law enforcement. I know restraining orders are bullshit. I know they're a fallacy, a placebo we peddle off on the gullible public to give them peace of mind in the face of imminent personal danger. If she gets within spitting distance, she's within shooting distance, and then there is no 'we' to prosecute her. You and whatever Monday-night-poker-game-loser from the prosecutor's office can do that while get used to the heft of my new portable respirator. That is, of course, assuming her aim hasn't improved."
"Do you need a gun, then?"
"No, Jimmy keeps sending his spares to me."
"I can put a tail on you, you know. On or off the record, no one's going to throw much flack at me for protecting a former agent. There are still some people who consider you a hero for killing Nathanial Haig."
Just what I always wanted to be revered for: emptying a .38 into the eye of a survivalist. My high school guidance counselors had told me I was best suited for a career as a bus driver. "I'm not taking a bodyguard. I'm not going to have two armed men following me to protect me from a seventeen year-old girl."
"Why not?" Her eyes sliced through me.
"I'd like to think I have some pride left."
"Do you want her to shoot you again?" The question was dead serious. "Do you want her to kill you this time?"
"On the whole, I'd rather she didn't."
Laurie's hand slid down to my cheek, strong fingers trained to cradle a .357 Magnum automatic cupped my chin. "I don't believe you. Someplace in that tenement of a mind you think you deserve this. You declined to press charges after the incident--"
"What would have been the point?"
"--and you never testified at her sentencing. You canonized her during the investigation. I remember talking you down from the roof when you were up there shooting out streetlights. She was what? Salvation? Affirmation? I remember thinking that maybe you'd fallen in love with her, you were so obsessed."
"Jesus, Aim, a sixteen year-old valedictorian and cheerleader gets kidnaped. If that isn't the raw essence of why we become FBI agents, I don't know what is. Fuck the ISU and their sub-terrainian psycho-profiling. Fuck the crime lab boys who think they can divine the exact content of a killer's wallet from a footprint he may have left behind. Fuck the counter-intelligence guys whose job has never been very clear to me. Fuck the OPR who watch over us all. Fuck them all, Aim, they're ascetics. They've pledged themselves to some false god or other, habitually making sacrifices to the golden calf of behaviorism or raw data or whatever. We're the true believers, God's army. We strap on our guns, pocket our creds and go out there so that when a larger-than-life evil descends upon one good citizen or other a larger-than-life agency of justice can protect, prevent, or when all else fails, avenge them. Ashley Johnson was the purist form of this calling. Someone took her, enslaved her, and it was our job--my responsibility--to get her back."
"Except when you did she shot you."
I showed my drink no mercy, killing it with a single, quick motion of
my wrist. Then I let my head fall back and nuzzled Laurie's thigh, feeling
the concrete muscles beneath the soft fabric. "Hell, maybe she just wants
to see Cats."
There is a bar in East Harlem called Andy's Colonial Tavern, and in that bar is a fixture called Martin Vele who bestows unsolicited wisdom on the two casual bartenders, Edward and Peter, long after the state-mandated four AM closing time. All of these features stem from a common source--the DeLambry organization, which was once the Moscotti mob before Josefina DeLambry, Moscotti's accountant and confidant, wrested control of the organization from old Antonio, restructured it, and made it more civilized--after incinerating Antonio in his car, of course. Andy's is their headquarters in East Harlem, where they control the loan-sharking, gambling, and prostitution that they operate behind fronts of bodegas, video stores, and various funeral homes. Martin Vele is their lead centurion in this farthest-flung colony of New York's Holy Roman Empire.
Martin's a good guy, a tormented soul who never had quite the chances to make as much of his life as he should have, he's nonetheless a dedicated worker. In part because he wants to sleep with his boss, Josefina, and in part because it's part of his code. I can respect that. I saved Martin's life once, and he shot a sleazy politician for me, so I guess that makes us friends. He was the one who opened the door for me this particular night, as the three AM darkness hardened for its last hurrah.
"You're out late," he said as he closed, locked, and deadbolted the door behind me. Then he activated the security system I'd never seen used before. I gestured to it.
"What's up with that? Edward sticking someone's hand in the piranha tank upstairs or something?"
"It's getting close to Halloween," Martin explained, running one hand through his short, bristly hair. "The animals in this neighborhood get antsy this time of year. You got some protection?"
And to think, to most people that means a condom.
"Of course. It's not like I have a set of FBI credentials to protect me anymore." I lifted my coat so he could see my P7 in its leather holster clipped at the small of my back.
"Nice piece," Martin nodded approvingly. "German engineering at its finest. And most expensive. Over a grand. How'd you afford it?"
"One of my former partners sent it to me. He belongs to the Gun of the Month Club or something, and I think when he gets doubles he sends them to me, usually with a holster and a couple of spare clips, and sometimes new grips or something. Jimmy means well, but at some point in his formation, he really never learned how to express affection to other men on any other level."
We walked over to the bar. Martin already had a dark rum and coke standing guard along the length of mahogany. He poured me a vodka gimlet.
"You get that squeeze-cocking mechanism down? It took me a while."
I tested the drink and decided Martin was a better shooter than he was a bartender. I had another sip and decided Martin was probably a better jockey than he was a bartender. "No," I said, pushing the gimlet slightly aside, "came easy as pie to me."
"Some people have a knack for it. It's like a garrote. Give it to some guys and in two seconds they'll tied their hands together with it, other guys, you give it to them and they can strangle an elephant."
"That's very interesting."
"Took me a week before I was confident enough with the thing to pop Joe Lovello through the window of a moving bus from a falafel stand."
I sipped the gimlet to be polite and because it's sometimes helpful to have a healthy brace of alcohol when you deal with Martin. "Why'd you shoot him?" I asked to distract myself from the taste.
"I don't know. I wasn't questioning my orders back then. That was under the Moscotti regime."
There were two large, leather gym bags sitting between us on the bar. I peeked over and looked into one. They were filled with heavy, blued guns. "Christmas shopping early?" I said, gesturing to the bags.
"John Mako scored them off a Chechin hit team that came after him and Karl Shuster. Mako's cold: blew them all up, cut them all down, et cetera. But why let good guns go to waste? Anyway," he leaned over the bar, a doleful expression clouding his dark, sad eyes, "I got a situation here."
"So do I. Yours first."
"Well, you know I've been kind of doing this thing with this music instructor at NYU, right? I mean, we sort of like each other and we're trying to see where that goes. Well, tonight she invited me to go to a seminar-slash-concert on the progression of the rhythm of jazz. Follow its course from the New Orleans sounds through when Brubeck complete changed it all and then into the modern sound. Anyway. It's next week Tuesday night at The Village Vanguard. That's an old Thelonious Monk haunt on seventh avenue."
I shrugged. "Sounds like a good opportunity to me, what's the problem?"
Martin's long face tightened as if to convey to me that the situation was self-explanatory, and I must be complete and utter moron not to see it. "That's the West Village, Park!" And suddenly I felt like a complete and utter moron. Due to his work affiliations, Martin is somewhat limited in his access to the city. In East Harlem Martin is a king, in other places he's a dead man breathing. The West Village is uncomfortably close to Chinatown. And if Martin were to inadvertently find himself on the wrong side of Canal Street alone, he'd have about thirty seconds before the tongs would be serving him as mu shu pork all over the lower West side.
"The tongs are always problematic," he explained, "but the Angelo's are worse. They're already losing their minds over Rudy's waterfront crackdown, and then to make matters worse a couple of our guys got into it with them at some bar on the upper West side."
"Got into it?"
"Some beers got downed, some comments got thrown around, one things leads to another. Somebody's car gets firebombed. Bullshit really. Now, I don't care much about my safety, but with her around..."
"You have to protect her."
"Which I can do, provided I bring enough ammo. But that's not the thing. The thing is, if someone shoots at me, I'll probably have to shoot back."
"Probably," I nodded.
"Which I don't want to do. I mean, I told her I'm in security, but that doesn't necessarily mean I want to be shooting people in front of her, you know?"
"Well, I can't really say I've ever found myself in that situation, but I imagine it'd probably be detrimental to the construction of a romantic evening, yes. Look, why don't you ask her if you can bring a few friends. Say they're big jazz enthusiasts. Then I can con Laurie into going with us. We go to the thing, you're flanked by FBI agents--nice and safe, then we head back to the upper East side for dinner, Laurie and I get beeped--John Dillinger's on the loose or something--we leave you two alone and in terra cognita. Sound good?"
Martin chewed on his lower lip, working the intricacies of it through his mind. "Yeah, I suppose...You'd really do that?"
I gave him a Fairfax avenue shrug/palms up gesture. "What do I have going next week? Besides I used to pull this shit all the time in college. Granted some of the nuances were a bit different."
Martin clinked his glass against mine. "You're a good man, Parker."
"Horse shit."
"So what's you're dilemma?"
I sloshed the silver liquid around in glass, enjoying the way the fluorescent light from behind the bar caught it and made it sparkle. "The girl who capped me in Indiana is in town."
Martin straightened up. "Looking for you?
I nodded.
"You want me to get some of the guys and make a posse?"
"Protect me by putting a hit out on a seventeen year-old girl from the suburbs? I think not. Let me preserve some of my dignity."
"Doesn't have to be a hit," Martin protested, "we could just take her to a garage someplace and threaten her. You know, scare her. Point guns, flash knives."
I sipped the gimlet, then raised the glass. "Better yet, make her one
of these. Put the fear of God in her."
The nice thing about working for yourself is that you can adjust your hours according to your presence of mind in the morning. The not-so-nice side of that equation is the fact that if you've got enough time on your hands to sleep in, you shouldn't be sleeping in, but thinking up good excuses to tell the landlord. This once, however, I was lucky enough to have made enough money last month to carry me through this particular dry spell. I could sleep in and nurse my hangover and ponder Ashley Johnson. At noon, I sat at my small table, feasting on a breakfast of Tums and black coffee, watching the rain attack the city.
I had a strumming headache, a new pistol, a seventeen year-old girl hunting me, and three different colored antacids arranged in a loose wedge before me. I wasn't sure if empires were forged from such things, and I didn't feeling like trying. I turned on the TV. At one-thirty my phone rang. I picked it up, but the line clicked dead before I could even say hello. At two-fifteen the same thing happened. At three I managed to spit out a quick, "What do you want?" The caller left the line open for a few tantalizing seconds--just long enough for me to wonder if I'd hear anything this time--before hanging up. I unplugged my phone and cleaned my new gun.
The day passed without incident, but I didn't go out much. Why tempt fate? Instead, I settled down at my IBM PC and played around on the Internet, chasing down some leads on another case. At ten o'clock the next interesting thing happened. The doorbell rang and the intercom squawked, "Parker? It's Don Amery, remember me? I need to talk to you."
"People look at me and Sierra and they think they know what the score is exactly. It's humorous in a way. Sad in another. And in another it's enough to piss you off bad enough to punch them in the nose, you know? What gives them the right to pass judgement on me or my wife or our relationship? What do they know about me or her or goddamned anyone for that matter? See, that's what the great irony is, that we don't know anybody. Someone comes up to my neighbor and says: 'Do you know Don Amery?' And my neighbor, of course, answers 'Sure I do.' And then he talks about how I live next door to him and keep a nice yard and have a standard-sized poodle whose tail we cut in a little ball. And he talks about how I'm in some good money and always have been. And he'll probably throw in under that subject that all my money allowed me to marry a twenty-six year-old blonde bimbo with nice legs and big tits who has affairs left and right, but the sugar daddy doesn't mind. He tells this man that, but he really hasn't a clue the truth of the situation. He doesn't know me."
The wet pavement caught the candy-hued glow of a hundred lightbulbs, of miles of neon strip, and flattened cones of headlights. The girls who marched between the layers of light were made up as gaudily as the signs above their heads and the distorted reflection of them beneath their clattering heels. The men in the cars were, by contrast, almost aggressively matte.
"They don't know, for example, that three and a half years ago I sat in my empty living room with a .45 caliber pistol I've had since my Army days trying to muster the courage to slide it between my teeth and pull the trigger." He looked over at me, grinning macabrely, his round, ball-shaped head suddenly washed with hot white light from a XXX theater marquis he'd piloted us under as he wove between the sluggish, expectant cars all around us.
"They don't know the emptiness of my life. Maybe it's a cliche, Mr. Callow, but my money bought me very little happiness. To be successful in business meant sacrificing the few friends I still had. I never married. My family doesn't like me very much. I was a lonely person, but that wasn't even all. I run a very successful consulting firm, Mr. Callow. Do you know what they do? They walk into a situation, talk about it very knowledgeably, throw out advice, then collect exorbitant amounts of money. We don't make anything, we don't really do anything, we don't serve people. We give advice, that is all. The success or failure that may come from following our advice isn't even ours, because ultimately the ones who carried it out are the dedicated employees, the workers who're hungry enough to do whatever it takes it to keep their company from going down the tubes. I was fifty-three years-old, Mr. Callow, very wealthy, very alone, and very insignificant."
We escaped the neon-encrusted streets by pulling into an underground parking lot which bathed us in intense, white fluorescent light. Don killed the engine and stared at the wall head of us. "She was working for an escort service when I hired her. I purchased her for a full weekend. What can I say about that weekend? Everything sounds like a line from a romance movie. Corny and impersonal, so you'll just have to take my word for the electricity I felt when she touched me or kissed me. I bought her from the agency that employed her, married her a few months later and I've never been unhappy since. I've given her a home, a new life, an education--she has her bachelor's in business you know--and she's given me more than I could ever express in words. I don't mind if she has affairs. I'm not much of a prize, in case that missed your perception. If she left me tomorrow, I would be heartbroken, Mr. Callow, but I would survive, because for the first time in my life I truly did something. Do you understand?" He passed me a small sheet of paper folded once.
"Please contact that man at this time tomorrow, arrange for a meeting between you and he. He'll explain the situation. I'm trusting you to make sure that everything works out smoothly."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"You will," the man said. Under the fluorescent lights he looked grey and sick, the lines under his eyes seemed etched there. He produced two gold subway tokens. "Please," he said, "I'd like to be alone now." I got out and he drove off, leaving me alone, in a parking garage on a rotten side of town with two tokens and my brand new gun. At least I had that.
Twelve hours later Laurie called me, her throat tight from sorrow. She
told me her mom's cousin Don had thrown himself on the electric rail of
a subway train in Grand Central Station.
I stayed with Laurie for a few hours that afternoon until I could convince myself that she was in fact as together as she seemed. Most of her grief had been the residue of the rest of the family's, and my job turned out to be little more than propping her up while she did her best to prop up the rest of the family through those first frantic hours. I told her about the meeting between Don and myself that evening, but she seemed unconcerned. It didn't shed any light on why he did what he did, and I doubted it would until I made the call.
"The fuck is this?" The voice had an edge like a hacksaw. I imagined the owner: tall, wide, a head like a cannonball after it had been blasted through a stone wall and hands like cinderblocks.
"My name is Parker Callow,. and I was given this number by Don..."
"Son of a bitch," it didn't seem an affectionate expletive. "I've been waiting for you, goddamn it. We have some business to do."
"We do?"
"Not over the phone. There's a parking garage on 43rd and Broadway, know it?"
"I got kicked out of a car there a few nights ago."
"Tonight. Nine-thirty. Be there, and we'll work all this out. You gonna be sure to show up? You're not gonna dis ol' Don after he did himself in such a spectacular manner are you?"
"I guess not."
"You best not. Nine-thirty." The last two syllables were the hacksaw
raking across aluminum.
Martin had emptied the gym bags onto the oak tables behind the divider that separated the bar from the restaurant, creating a veritable maze of firearms from the kitchen to the front door. Martin stood as near the center as I could figure, dangling a small machine-pistol from his trigger finger. "What the hell is this? Park, do you know what this is? Me and Eddie were trying to figure it out. There's some sort of writing on the side, but the goddamn thing is too beat to hell to read it."
"It's a Czech Skorpion, " I said from the periphery of the gun maze, next to a table of Glocks. "Takes a 7.62mm pistol round. Ten or twenty to a clip. Very big in what used to be the USSR."
Martin sniffed disdainfully and tossed the little thing onto a pile of revolvers. "Commie crap. The Russkies were probably going to flood the streets with these things. Sell them cheap and make a quick buck. I tell ya, Park, there's something seriously wrong when even the Saturday Night Specials aren't made in the USA anymore."
I hefted a Beretta from the pile near my right thigh. The serial numbers had been cut away, exposing the mainspring. Very professional. I slipped the gun under my coat. You never know when you're going to need an untraceable gun. "So what are you going to do with these things?" I asked, eyeing the Skorpion. "They're obviously hotter than hell's boiler room. God know what kind of Slavic disagreements they've been instrumental is resolving."
"I don't know. Dump them in the Harlem River, maybe."
"You don't have any, like, orders on these things?"
"No," Martin said ruefully as he looked over a Glock, "they just gave them to me for, uh, disposal. I'm the gun guy, so I get this particular detail."
"The gun guy?"
"I'm their best shooter, therefore I am put in charge of all matters pertaining to guns. When I die, they'll plant me under a slab of marble that says, 'Here lies Martin Vele, he knew guns and shot well.' Now you see why I'm getting into this jazz thing? Be sort of nice to expand my horizons a tad."
I nodded. "Follow your dreams, my child. Hey while we're at it, what do you know about a guy named Joel Fikkis?"
"Joelsy. He's a pimp, numbers runner, low-level jack-off."
"Yeah, but what do you know about him?"
Martin gave me an exasperated stare. "Like what's he take in his coffee?"
"Like what am I in for when I meet him tomorrow night?"
Martin shrugged. "I dunno. I know who the guy is, not what he does on a date."
"I'm trying to figure out what he has to with Don Adams. Sierra Adams was a prostitute, but according to Don, she worked out of a service."
"What's she look like?"
"She's beautiful."
Martin shook his head. "Then she didn't work for Joel. Joelsy's not one of those cute, nice-guy pimps from the movies. He works his girls hard and burns them out fast--sometimes literally."
I blinked. "He's tough."
"His girls don't retire with a nest-egg, Park. They end up on welfare with slashed faces and cigarette burns from the johns. Joelsy rents out to the lowest of the high-class customers. You know the type: businessmen who like to beat the shit out the women they're fucking, politicos who like to avenge the proliferation of women in congress with leather and studs. If this woman had some problem with the management of the escort service they may have handed her over to him. Or if they owed Joelsy some money they might have given him the girl as collateral."
"They can do that? Without the girls' say?"
Martin stared at me as if I'd just asked him what air was. "Where are you from? Wisconsin?"
I should have learned from my junior prom, when I took Helen Mcready, the only sixteen year-old I've ever known to outweigh the high school gym coach, without meeting her first--a decision made on the basis of her Faye Dunaway voice and the delightful huskiness the cheap Louisiana phone lines gave it. Joelsy Fikkis was a sawed-off little runt with a slimy, slicked-back hairdo and wispy goatee. There were lines and knife scars radiating outward from his cloudy brown eyes, making him look like a college date-rapist someone had put through a blender. The white lights that had drained Don Adams of life forty-eight hours ago didn't seem to affect Fikkis or the army of high-school kids who got out of the follow-car. They were neujacks and wannabes, mostly, sharp-eyed, scowling kids who didn't so much walk as lope in their sagging jeans and thigh-length starter jackets. They were used to carrying .25s and .32s, palm-sized toy guns which gave them the only sense of power that matters in the neighborhoods where Fikkis had collected them. I counted seven of them.
"Callow," Fikkis announced for somebody's benefit. "We got business Mr. Callow. More business than you think."
"Considering I haven't a clue who you are, why I'm here, or what you're talking about, any business is more business than I think."
Fikkis smiled widely, showing off teeth like crumbling tombstones. The kids circled me like lawyers around a maiming accident. Two of them had produced guns, TEC-9 machine-pistols giving them a greater sense of power than anything they'd probably ever felt before. One of the kids guarding the car made a point of showing off the sawed-off, cut-down double-barreled shotgun he was secreting.
"Well, then, you're in for a little treat."
"Oh?"
Fikkis ran his long, pointed fingernails through his greasy locks. "Yeah, you gotta come up with fifty Gs. Got that much on you by any chance?"
"Left it in my other wallet. This has something to do with Don Adams committing suicide, I take it?"
"You could say that. His life insurance policy didn't quite cover the amount he was into me for."
"Don Adams was into you?"
"Well, I guess you'd have to say he, ah, acquired that debt. See, that little quim he married was promised to me--part of a business arrangement I had with the bitch who ran her escort service. Suddenly Donny-boy walks in, buys the chick, and I got nothing."
"That would suck, I suppose."
"Fuckin'-A it sucked. Now, I can't stand for that shit--not from some hopped-up modeling school teacher who thinks she play the sidelines and make her own rules. Needless to say, Queen Bee got stomped out. And her little bees starting working for another hive."
"Nice simile, but if you absorbed this woman's staff, why are you getting so bent over one of them that got away?"
The pimp's cloudy eyes narrowed. "You seen her? There's a reason I asked for her as payment. She's primo fantasy material--a nice round set of tits attached to a natural blonde cunt. She's the girl you always wanted to do when you were in high school who pretended you didn't exist, or the stuck-up rich bitch on the subway who doesn't take her eyes off the paper for the whole ride. I got customers lined up around the block for her ass. I talked to Adams about this fact, introduced him to my posse here. He said he could make it up to me. He said two million. Old fart almost delivered, too."
"By killing himself and making it look like an accident."
"Yeah, should have paid off right, too, except something went haywire. Some glitch in the clause or something. Man's five-hundred G's short. He named you as the man who'd take care of things, make sure everything went smooth, that I'd get my money, you name it. So I ask again, you got five-hundred grand?"
"For Sierra? What makes you think she's going to go with you if I don't pay?"
Fikkis laughed, a phlegmy, rattling sound. "You give these little twats more credit than they're worth. Ain't hard to get them to do what you want, and they're too dumb to get away with any plan they come with on their own. She runs, I know where she's going. Hell, I need to, I can find out where she is right now. She's doing one my joy-boy hustlers, probably gettin' AIDS from his infected dick."
I thought of the pony-tailed kid at the reception. Slick.
"You got twenty-four big ones, pal. After that it's a war."
"What if I give her a plane ticket? Get her out of this city. Are you going to come after me?"
"You bet your tight, white ass, motherfucker."
"What if I'm not as easy to push around as one of the women you beat down?"
The kids moved in around me. One of them looked at my hip, then at Fikkis, who stepped back from the hood of the car. "You think you're a tough-ass because you carry a gun? I could have my boys take it from you, but you'd just get another, wouldn't you?"
"That's right."
Fikkis nodded, but not at my comment as I had thought. He was nodding to his boys. One of them put the barrel of his big, flat automatic to my temple while two more grabbed my arm and yanked me forward, spreading my hand on the hood of the car. The fourth moved in, swinging his TEC-9.
In the next moment I experienced a strange moment of almost ethereal tranquility--a moment in which the minutiae stood out against the overwhelming. I heard my hand shatter with a noise as fragile and delicate as a windchime, and even heard the faint tearing sound, like heavy-bond paper being ripped, as the bones pierced the skin before the pain blasted through me, sucked the air from my lungs and drove me to my knees. The kids sneered down at me and were joined by Fikkis. "Consider yourself lucky," his voice seemed to crank the volume on my pain, "I don't believe that shit about one hand getting stronger when the other's been messed up."
And then I threw up and passed out. I think in that order.
Laurie was the one who picked me up at the hospital after the rescue squad, responding to the anonymous 911 call. She got most of the details while I faded in and out of consciousness and shuddered with every rush of nausea. It was a lot like when were partners.
"So how's the hand?" she asked when we got back to her place. She was setting a steaming cup of some sort of fruity tea down on the coffee table in front of me. I inspected the braced and bandaged club at the end of my wrist with exaggerated surprise.
"Why Laurie, it appears to be shattered. I'll bet I'll have to be in therapy for several weeks."
She smiled tolerantly and settled down next to me on the floor. Not so long ago we'd done this as she told me about Ashley Johnson. Before the troglodyte, the pimp, the kids with guns. "You don't have to do this," she said. "You didn't know the man--I hardly knew him. Whatever problems he had in his life...it was unfair of him to pass them along to you."
"He trusted me to look after things."
"Not to pay for his mistakes. That wasn't what he wanted or what he had a right to ask of you."
I went to rub my eyes, thumped myself in the forehead with my club, gave up and just sipped my tea. "It doesn't matter. I can't let Fikkis take out the debt on Sierra. I have enough trouble sleeping at night as it is."
Laurie nodded behind her veil of steam. "And you have two-hundred grand where? Stuck in the dry wall of your bathroom? Collected in pennies in a jar on your dresser? Or were you going to win big at OTB?"
"I'll think of something."
"Jesus, Park, why are you doing this? She's not helpless. She has his money. She can go to the cops..."
"I have to finish this."
Laurie put her mug down with a crack. "Why? They already broke your hand, Parker, what are they going to break next? Your skull? Your neck?"
I clubbed myself in the head again, then scowled at my wrapped hand long enough so that it knew how displeased I was. "You ever notice how we're always better at handling other people's problems than we are our own? I was thinking of that when I lay on the floor of that parking garage, bleeding into the drain. We do this, I think, to avoid dealing with our own problems. It's sort of like proving you've got it all together without having to make an emotional connection. You face this personal entropy--the barbarians knocking at the gate--and you think you can stave it off by solving everyone else's crises. It's like when the gunfighter does all these little tricks like shooting out the lightbulbs in the saloon chandelier to scare off his opponent. Never works, though."
"How potent are the painkillers they gave you?"
"But if you make that emotional connection when you work through it, you can face anything. Even your own problems."
"Is this about Ashley?"
I scratched my cheek with the fastener of the bandages. "Ashley who?"
The van looked sad and weary beside the gleaming Audis, and the comparison probably could have been extended to me with my club, my battered leather jacket, and my boots which helpfully didn't have laces. Fikkis was draped in a camel-hair jacket which was probably as prized to him as the warm-up jackets and guns were to the eight kids who surrounded him in a loose cloud of malevolent stares and side-ward turned hats.
"The fuck is this?" Fikkis stabbed his cigar at the rear of the van. "You bring the cash in dimes here or what?"
"I need a little more time to get things squared away with Sierra and the money," I said, walking a few more steps toward Fikkis, dragging my heels on the cement floor of the parking garage. Fikkis looked even more unreal this evening--washed-out and waxen. The kids who loped in place around him could have been dogs.
"Fuck that!" Fikkis flicked his cigar at me. It bounced off the sleeve of my jacket. "I gave you all I'm gonna give, now unless you got that bitch in the back of the van, you better get used to scratching your ass with that fucking bandage, 'cause DiVonne and Ritchie are going to do a little dance on the other one."
I held up my club in a placating gesture. "Hey, I only need twelve more hours, okay? In the meantime, I have a little something to soothe your troubled brow. You know what a Siralatus is?"
"Sound like something I picked up off a twenty-dollar whore back in the Seventies." He whooped at the joke. His goblins didn't seem to get it.
"Yes, well, it's part of the reason Don couldn't come up with the money. Jonathan Siralatus is a sculptor, he's new on the scene and very big. Don has four or five of his works. They're worth five figures apiece. I got three in the van to buy me twenty-four more hours."
Fikkis looked at me edgily. "I still get the money, right?"
"Of course."
"So I come out ahead? What's that about?"
"It's about not getting my other hand smashed. You want to see the things? Here, I'll show you..."
Fikkis's hand clamped over my forearm. "Don't fucking move," he growled, then turned his cloudy gaze to one of the kids cradling a TEC-9. The kid nodded and moved to the van. "Security's sake," Fikkis said with an oily grin. "You understand. Could have a shotgun or an Uzi in there giving you bad ideas."
"Oh," I said as I heard the latches on the van's rear door clicking, "I hadn't thought of that."
For the second time in as many days, I had a moment of perfect clarity. It was as if time had slowed enough to allow me to hear what was between the frames of existence, and there I heard the tinny sound of music filtering through a walkman's headphones. Wild music. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew.
The kid flew backward with one blast of Martin Vele's .40 Glock automatic, allowing him to burst from the back of the van and begin. Martin used the Skorpion to set down a backbeat of 7.62 mm, fanning it with his left hand, his weaker hand, sending the kids scrambling for cover as chrome, aluminum and safety glass flew in a stinging spray. With the Glock he laid out his solo, a punching, driving, staccato melody that tore at flesh and bone and sent the kids flailing and falling even before they could think of using their prestigious guns. Fikkis tried to throw me out of the way and run, but I body-checked him with my right shoulder and forced him into the side of the car, while with my left hand I pulled the P7 out of my belt, squeezed the cocking-lever in the handle, then reached it over my head, flush with Fikkis's face and pulled the trigger until I'd emptied the gun into the man's mouth and eyes. By the time it was just smoke and echoes, Fikkis's body was dead weight half-slumped inside the shattered-out window of the Audi. I looked at Martin who stood on the bumper of van breathing a little hard, and staring at the scattered bodies with an expression that worked the territory between calm reflection and piercing realization.
"Martin Vele," I said to the encroaching quiet, "he shot well."
Martin shook the Glock. "Watch your mouth Park, there's still bullets
in this one."
It's difficult to say that everyone lived happily ever after when you're talking about an affair which left nine people dead in a parking garage, but they turned out not-to-badly. Martin wiped down the guns and left them there, implicating the Chechins in Fikkis's murder. The FBI is investigating the Russian Mafia in the Brighton Beach area, and it looks like they'll take them apart, even if they'll never quite pin the Fikkis murder on them.
Sierra took her husband's money and vanished. She didn't say goodbye to me, I'm not even sure she knew who I was.
I convinced Laurie to accompany me and Martin and Martin's date to the jazz lecture. I didn't have to tell her that it was payback for Martin's work in the parking garage, but I think she knew it.
I still get notes from Ashley Johnson and the occasional phone call,
but I don't worry too much. I go to my physical therapy for my hand, ride
the subway, walk the streets. I carry the P7 Jimmy sent me, it's ideal
for one-handed shooting, but I doubt I could hit the broad side of a bus
shooting with my left hand. It doesn't matter, though. If Ashley finds
me, shooting her ranks pretty low on the list of things I want to happen.
Just above getting shot again by her.