Afterburn (25 page)

"Come here. Step back," Ronnie said to Beth.

"What?" she cried. "What are you going to do? Don't hurt him!"

"Get up the fucking stairs, bitch!"

"Ronnie, wait a minute—"

"You can fucking just walk out of here, right now," Ronnie ordered Rick. Holding the gun with one hand, he opened the front door with the other. "Go. Get out."

"Wait, I can't do that," Rick said. "I need all of that cash, man, I'm in trouble—"

"It's his money," Beth said.

"Shut up!" Ronnie screamed. "Get up the stairs." He motioned to Rick with the gun. "Get out. Get the fuck out of this house now."

Rick looked back toward the basement stairs.

"I mean it! Get the fuck out now!"

"You got to let me have some of it, at least," he said.

"I don't have to let you have shit!"

"Just let me have sixty or seventy thousand. You can have the rest."

"No!"

"It's my money!"

"It's in my house."

"The house actually belongs to me," Beth cried.

"Shut up, I said, shut
up
!"

"Let him have forty thousand," came Beth's voice. "It's his money, Ronnie."

Ronnie didn't answer. Instead he advanced toward Rick, leveling the shotgun at his head in the narrow hallway.

"Get down. Get down on your stomach."

Rick knelt down.

"I said stomach."

He got on his stomach, face touching bits of plaster and paint. It would take Ronnie a good ten minutes to tear apart the chimney with a sledgehammer and crowbar, looking for money that wasn't there. By then Rick would be on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in his truck, the money a fat pad in the glove compartment.

"Crawl. Crawl to the door."

He wormed along Aunt Eva's old patio-turf runner that Uncle Mike had trimmed with a box cutter thirty years ago, until he got to the door, knowing that Ronnie couldn't see the cash in the front of his pants. He looked up at Beth, who was still cowering in the stairwell. She looked like hell, even taking into account that it was six-thirty in the morning.

"Beth—"

She shook her head, eyes fearful. "I can't do anything, Ricky."

Ronnie came over and put the gun into Rick's face. "You come back, I'm going to do
this
."

Ronnie lifted the gun and blasted the hallway again. The sound of the gun hit Rick in the head, and for a moment he felt deaf and sick, but then he realized Ronnie had emptied the second barrel. He jumped up and grabbed Ronnie by the throat. He drove him backward against the stairwell, knocking his head on the wall, with Beth screaming, and he took his other hand and slipped a thumb under Ronnie's lip and pulled upward.

"What?"

Ronnie couldn't talk.

"What was that, Ronnie? Say it again, what?"

Ronnie made some kind of noise when Rick pulled again.

"You're tearing his face!" cried Beth.

He looked at her.

"Please, Rick."

He let go. Ronnie collapsed to the floor holding his mouth.

AN HOUR LATER
he found a parking garage that was just right—in Chinatown, tucked into the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. Unless you were looking for it, you'd never find it, which was the idea. He could sleep in the truck or move around the cheap hotels nearby, and if he had to get out of the city fast, then all he had to do was pull out of the parking garage and keep turning right until he was on the bridge. He eased the truck in next to a phone-booth-sized bunker made out of construction block. The attendant, a black man with a Knicks baseball cap, sat in an old bucket seat, eating sweet pork and watching television. The man turned, eyes dull, face diseased by car exhaust. "How long?"

"A week, maybe. Could be longer."

"Put you down two weeks."

Something was wrong with the man's breathing, and it was hard to hear him. Rick cut the engine. "You want to stick it in back, I don't care."

The man nodded contemplatively. "You want it in the back? Most people want it out front so we don't have to move ten cars."

"I don't care if you bury it back there."

The attendant leaned forward and turned the television off, and, as if the box had been sucking the life out of him, now his gray face brightened strangely. "You trying to
hide
this truck, my brother?"

"It's my truck."

A smile of brown teeth, pork wedged against the gums. "Question still pertains."

"Yes, the answer is yes."

"Repossession? We get that a lot."

"Nope. Wife's attorney."

The attendant frowned. "Them fuckers gone want
every
dollar—yes sir, I see you got yourself a situation. You want me, I can stick it down in the basement. Way in the back."

"As a favor?"

The man rubbed his chin theatrically. "See, I always thought a
situation
require a
consideration
."

"I need access."

"What you mean by access, my brother?"

"I want to be able to get to it. Not move it, just get to it."

He shook his head. "We don't do that. I'll stick the truck in the basement for you, but I can't have you coming and going ten times a day, chicks back there, parties, barbecue, whatnot."

"It wouldn't be ten times a day. Just once."

The attendant picked up his food. "I suppose we was discussing the consideration."

"Hundred bucks a week, you keep the truck way in the back, let me go in and out."

The man stirred his fork around in the carton. "Now, hundred dollars a week is just fine for me, buddy, but I's the day man. Six to six. There's also the night man. Big dog like you coming in here at night's going freak him out. He going think you going kill his ass. If you explain your deal with me, he ain't going believe you, and if
I
explain it, he's going want his cut."

"I'll go one-fifty, seventy-five for each of you. But I get to sleep in the truck."

"You can go ahead and take a shit in there, far's I's concerned. Just keep the windows rolled up."

"What about the air down there?"

"It's bad."

"You better show me."

They walked into the car elevator and descended to the basement. The dark space stretched about half the size of a football field, and the status of the cars went up appreciably: Mercedes, three Lexuses with dealer stickers on them, Cadillacs like Tony Verducci drove, a cherry-red Hummer, a vintage T-bird.

"You've got some
nice
cars down here."

"Yo, this ain't
parking
down here, this is security."

They walked to the far corner.

"Here."

"Air's pretty bad down here."

"It's for cars, not people."

He wondered how well he would sleep. "How do I get up and down? Take the elevator every time?"

"Nah, there's a stairway in the front, comes up right next to the booth. My name's Horace, in case you ask."

Rick handed the man his spare key, then peeled off some bills. "Hope you have fun with that, Horace. I had to go through some trouble to get it."

The attendant pocketed the money. "Nah, you? You kidding!" He threw back his head and burst into rotten-toothed laughter. "Yeah, I expect you
did
go through some kind of trouble, I expect you did. You think I don't know who you is? I seen
everybody
, man, I seen them all! Everybody comes down here sooner or later, every kind of people, the good people and the bad people, the rich people and the poor, yeah." His breath was coming in wheezes. "Telling
me
about some kind of trouble? I
know
that, man, I know
just
who you is, my brother, you is trouble coming and trouble going!" His laughing became a raspy cough. "Can't get no air down here!" he croaked. "Can't breathe, my brother." He hurried toward the elevator, his hack echoing through the cavernous space.

THE NEXT THING
Rick needed was a quiet pay phone, not on the street. He walked west on Canal through Chinatown, then north toward the art galleries, enjoying the morning sun, glad to be free of the truck. The city had a lot of money in it now. The galleries and shops and restaurants were busy, full of Europeans and girls in tight dresses who thought they were doing something new. He noticed that people were getting out of his way on the sidewalk, including the black guys. He'd forgotten about that. At the corner, a cop on foot patrol watched Rick pass by and lifted his brow as they made eye contact.
Take it somewhere else, pal, take it out of my beat
. I've got to change my look, Rick thought, I'm not fitting in here. I look like a Hell's Angel or pro wrestler or somebody. He found a restaurant with a pay phone in the back, got a coffee cup full of quarters, and called information in Sarasota, Florida, for Christina's mother, a woman he'd met exactly twice, the last time the day that Christina was arrested.

"Mrs. Welles?"

"Who's that?"

"Rick Bocca, Mrs. Welles."

"You looking for Tina?"

"Yes."

"She's not here, Rick. She's in prison."

So, he thought, the mother doesn't know. "Well, I was wondering how she's been doing. She won't answer my letters, you see."

"Last time we spoke was the winter. I've been traveling quite a bit. Just got back last night, and I'm leaving again soon."

"How's Mr. Welles?"

"He's lying down—"

"Tired?"

"—and he's smiling."

"Smiling?"

"He's lying down in the cemetery about eight miles from here, and he's smiling because he doesn't have me hollering at him."

"I'm sorry," Rick said. "He was a pistol, I always thought."

"Yes, he was, sugar, that's why I kept forgiving him."

"He go out easy, Mrs. Welles?"

She inhaled. "No, afraid he didn't. He missed Tina so much, you know, he used to have me come bring all her old high-school report cards and then he'd read them in his hospital bed. He missed her terribly, see. She got his mind, you know. My brain was no good, but Mr. Welles was quite something. I ever tell you why I married him?"

He was listening to a lonely middle-aged woman. The decent thing was to humor her. "He was so good-looking?"

He heard her take a drag on a cigarette. "No, it wasn't that. It was the Mustang."

"I heard this once."

"Mr. Welles bet a fellow that he could take apart a Mustang convertible and put it back together in two days. Not the seat cushions and not the inside of the radio, but all the engine pieces and the brakes and the body and the door and everything."

"They got a lot of bedsheets, is the way Christina told me. And it had to be able to drive."

"Yes, they taped a couple of old pink sheets down on the floor of the garage so they wouldn't lose any parts. He was allowed to have one friend put parts in little piles."

"He won the bet."

"He won more than that—he got me, too. I thought, Now, there's a man who can do things. We dragged that car around with us for the next thirty years."

"I'm sorry he's not around."

"I am, too, but I'm not letting it slow me down."

"So you don't know how Christina is doing."

"Haven't heard from her. Wish I did."

"Okay, then."

"I always liked you, sugar, just wished everything had turned out for Tina better. She got mixed up with the wrong people. That's all I ever knew about it."

"She never told you what happened?"

"No. Just said she made a mistake. But I knew she got mixed up with the wrong people. That's always the story."

He said goodbye. Christina's father had died while she was in prison and she'd never said goodbye to him. Carry
that
, you fucker, you have to carry that one, too, it belongs to you. He looked at his coffee cup of change, then pulled out Detective Peck's card. One ring, and he heard the man's voice.

"It's Rick Bocca."

"Yeah?"

"I'm having trouble finding her. She was already gone from the prison."

"They let her out downtown."

"You didn't tell me."

"I had bad information."

You had bad intentions, Rick thought.

"You looking the right places?" said Peck.

"The old places, you know."

The question was what the level of the game was.

"You try her mother?" asked the detective.

The question could be a coincidence. But they could be monitoring her phone, too. Grabbing the numbers called in and out. "Yeah. Nothing."

"Maybe she was lying."

"Maybe." Why would Peck think this? "But I doubt it."

"Why?"

"It didn't sound like that." He waited a moment. Peck had to keep him involved. "So she's out there and I have no idea—"

"Her mother's been getting some other calls," interrupted the detective.

"Where from?"

"They came from the Jim-Jack Bar, down at Broadway and Bleecker."

Same part of town where he was now. "How do you know?"

"We just know. We have advantages."

Such as the knowledge that Rick was calling from a restaurant on Thompson Street. The police used all kinds of computers now, could match phone numbers with locations instantly. He hung up. So they were watching for her. All he had wanted was to talk to her again. You make a mistake, you want maybe to redeem yourself. He'd thought that she was in Tony Verducci's game, but now he saw that he was in Peck's game. Paul always said that if you play the game, the game plays you. He needed to call Mrs. Welles back. But if he called from where he was, they'd know he'd called her after talking to Peck. Maybe Paul could figure this out for him; he'd call him, too. He walked north, then east on Bleecker until he came to the Jim-Jack. A greasy-spoon place on Broadway with big windows, cheap food, Mexican busboys. The Mexicans were everywhere in the city; it was getting to be like Los Angeles. The pay phone hung on the wall next to the bar. If Christina had called her mother from here, then his call might be mistaken for one of hers, assuming the police were not actually bugging the line. That was pretty smart. But it had only been ten minutes since he'd talked to Peck—too soon, they'd figure it out.