Afterburn (42 page)

His desire was dead, his hatred gone.

The blond girl pushed her way out from beneath him. "That
hurt
, you fucker."

But the black woman laughed. "Nah, Kirby, I seen you, that hurt
good
."

The blond girl smiled. "Yeah, but I can't fucking
walk
."

But he was not listening. He wanted only to put on his clothes and step out into the late afternoon. His mind was clear. It had worked—perfectly, in fact. He was ready to talk to Christina now. He'd shower at the gym and have a cup of coffee, get a new shirt out of the truck, then walk over to her building and press the M. Williams buzzer and be able to speak to her. Without fear, with clearness.

He sat up with his underwear and pants. The blond girl left, keeping the door open. He found his shirt and socks. The black girl lit a cigarette. She cupped her left breast and lifted it, examining the sweaty crease beneath it.

"What're you looking for?" Rick asked as he pulled on a boot.

"I get these
things
, they called skin-tags. From the rubbing. These little pieces of—" She looked up and took a sharp breath. "Do something for you fellows?"

Her voice was different and Rick turned.

Three men stood in the doorway. The short one sported a silky green baseball jacket, argyle socks, and good shoes. The other two, each almost Rick's size, wore double-breasted suits.

"You must be Rick," said the one in the green jacket. "My name's Morris."

"You are—?" he began.

"You know who we are, Rick." He pointed a soft pink finger. "Get your other boot on there, no hurry." He looked at the girl. "Pardon us, miss," he said with gentle authority, "we don't wish to compromise you."

She didn't move. "Where's Jason at?"

"He's out there."

She was trying not to look scared. "Bring me Jason in here and I'll get out of bed."

Morris nodded to the older man in the suit.

I can't jump out of the window, Rick thought, too high.

The bouncer came into the room and picked up a blue robe. "Let's go, baby."

LaMoyna threw back the covers and stood regally as the bouncer held the robe. She wasn't beautiful. The other men waited impassively, as if for a train they knew always to be late. Morris unzipped his jacket and opened his wallet.

"Miss," he said to her, "this is for your trouble." He handed her a new one-hundred-dollar bill. He pulled out another, gave it to the bouncer. "You're a champ."

Rick stood. The two other men stepped forward and put handcuffs on him. Morris motioned toward the door. "Let's go. Just a bunch of guys, right?"

"Right," whispered Rick, his voice grieving.

They were not cops. With cops there was a lot of sitting around. Things need to get written down, and someone always has a radio. They walked him down the stairs without speaking and outside to a taxi repainted green. In the backseat, the two big men sat next to him. Morris drove. Two large carpenter's toolboxes were stacked on the passenger seat.

"Hey," Rick breathed out, "just tell me."

"We'll talk when we get there," Morris answered. "Just relax, it's all fine. Really, this is not a big deal."

"You work for Tony?"

"Yes, that would be correct." Morris turned down Second Avenue. The rain had started. He looked at Rick in the rearview mirror. "These other guys are Tommy, to your left, and Jones."

TEN MINUTES LATER
they pulled up in front of an old factory off Tenth Avenue downtown. Rain battered the windshield and they waited in the car, steaming up the windows. His wrists hurt from the handcuffs. A wet dog nosed through some garbage next to a brick wall.

"He's got a little greyhound in him," Morris said. "You can tell by the curved back."

"He's just starving," said Jones.

"I don't think so." Morris opened the driver's door and whistled. The dog's ears jerked and he looked up. Morris whistled again, but the dog trotted away.

"Tommy, grab this other box, please."

They got out in the rain and this time Jones had a hand behind Rick. Tommy carried one box, Morris the other, each heavy.

The door that Morris unlocked was rusted at the bottom from men pissing there, but the lock was expensive and new, Rick noticed. They walked heavily up one flight of cement stairs and across a ruined wooden floor the size of a basketball court. Enough light came in through the yellowy, broken-pieced windows high up on the wall that Rick could see the room had lost function upon function, been inhabited, vacated, and reinhabited, only to be vacated again, the screw-holes in the floor from one grid of machinery superimposed upon the previous, the activity leaving a crazy quilt of paint-gun stencil edges, rub patterns, oil seepings. Failure and disinterest. Bat-shit drop-dripped on all the ledges. A room no one remembered, a room no one needed. In the gloomy far corner a mattress had gone rotten, spilling a soft pile of foam. Next to it a clatter of bottles, a pile of ghost's clothes.

In the corner stood a worktable, three chairs, and some clip-on work lights.

"Okay," said Morris. "We want you on the table. Sit up."

"Like the doctor's office," noted Tommy.

Morris unzipped his silk baseball jacket and folded it over the back of one of the chairs. He had a doughy body in a green sports shirt. "I'll be asking some questions, Rick. You're okay with that, right?"

Rick nodded, sitting awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. Tommy was looking inside one of the big toolboxes.

"Where is she?" Morris asked. "This Christina Welles." He smiled. "I'm sort of interested in meeting her, keep hearing things about her."

"She's something," Rick agreed, watching Tommy pull out a long heavy-duty extension cord.

"So . . ." Morris waited. "Will you please tell us where she is?"

"I don't know."

Morris fiddled with a ring on his finger—a wedding ring, Rick noticed.

"I admit I've been looking for her," he went on. "I think she's in the neighborhood down in the Village somewhere, but . . ." He shrugged. "I think I'm close."

Morris slipped his gold watch off his wrist and put it in his front pants pocket. "You're close, you think?"

"Yeah."

"How close?"

"I'm getting there, you know."

"Right." Morris pointed at the toolbox. "Tommy, I want the quarter-inch."

"Wait, wait," Rick said quickly.

They held him down and Morris started the drill.

"Wait, wait!" He struggled but Tommy calmly poked the barrel of a .38 in his eye and he froze. "Okay, okay."

Morris stopped the drill, let it whine down. "Okay, what?"

He was panting, neck suddenly hot. "Okay. Fine. So let's talk."

Morris stared at Rick now. "You're sure?"

"Yes."

"Everything is cool?"

"Yes."

"Shall I put my watch back on?"

"Why not?"

They were still holding him down. "I usually take it off, see."

"No, no," said Rick, understanding now, "you can put it back on."

"Okay," said Morris. "In a second."

The drill started suddenly and Rick felt it go straight through his left boot, a hot nail plunging down through his foot, come out the bottom as he screamed, get caught in the sole of his boot, be yanked out.

"Fuck! Fuck! Okay, okay!"

They let him go and he curled up mournfully, clutching his boot with his shackled hands. Blood oozed up through the hole in the leather. He pressed his fingers against the hole. Paul, I need you, he thought.

Morris was holding the drill in front of him, the red bit whining to a stop. "We're serious here, Rick." He handed the drill to Tommy and took out his watch and slipped it back on. "We have something to accomplish."

"Right, right," cried Rick, squeezing his foot. "Okay, I get it. Really."

Morris removed a paper from his breast pocket. Rick's foot felt tight inside his boot. Swelling already. It hurt to move his toes. A bone feeling, pieces not fitting right. You're going to be okay, he told himself, you are. This is just to scare you.

"I got these worked out in an order," Morris began. "Give us the answer and we'll all get out of here soon as we can." He put a tape recorder on the table. "First thing, please tell me everything you know about Christina's method of encryption that you and she used."

"Okay." Rick tried to control his breathing, hoping to sound cooperative. "We had these trucks that we—"

Morris frowned, slipped off his watch, and took the drill from Tommy.

"Fuck, wait! Wait!"

The drill went into the outside of his left ankle, just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. "Oh, God, please," Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. "Oh! Fuck, fuck!" He tried sitting up, and when they punched him he kicked furiously and even bit Jones's palm until Tommy choked him with both hands and he went slack.

The drill burned into his ankle again. "Fuck! Fuck!" He twisted in agony, hollering incoherently.

"You ready?" yelled Morris.

"Yes, yes! I'm ready!"

Morris pulled the drill out, blood spackling Rick's pants and shirt, Morris's arms and face.

He lay rigid on the table, not yet believing it, knowing it was true, his hands shaking as he tried to breathe through his nose to calm down. His ankle felt destroyed. He sat up. Blood filled his boot now. He bent forward and grabbed it, squeezing against the wounds. Right through everything, tendon, bone, the sock. His back was drenched in sweat and he smelled piss. A warm stain spread across his crotch.

"That's fine, just catch your breath." Morris wiped himself off while Tommy held the drill. "Just catch your breath and then tell us, Rick."

Everything except where she is, he decided. Everything but that. I promise you, Christina. They can kill me and I won't say it. "We had trucks," he began, clutching his ankle as tightly as he could. "We had to get into the city . . . The problem was—this fucking
hurts
—the problem was the cops had all our phones tapped, which we knew, we could deal with that. Also, maybe the pay phones around our truck dispatch office. We knew we couldn't trust the phones . . . Also, Tony didn't want to get the cellular phones that encrypt the call, okay? He didn't trust them. So I was explaining this to Christina one day and she said she could come up with a system." He didn't know what he was saying. "Tony kind of liked this idea. But he said he also wanted it done so that as few people as possible had the information. He didn't want to have to know it, because he didn't want to have to give it up, okay? Like that." He moved one hand to his foot wound. "So the system—we worked it out—was this. Let's say it was with Frankie, one of Tony's regular fences—"

"We were busy with Frankie after Christina got arrested."

"So?" Rick cried anxiously.

"So we thought he was the one who did it," said Morris.

"What?" He looked into the faces of Jones and Tommy. Nothing. Men waiting for a late train.

"You don't get it?" Morris asked.

"No." His foot felt stinging, hot. "What? What?"

Morris smoothed the front of his green shirt. "He didn't do it. It took a long time to figure that out."

"What?"

"Like you don't know, or who."

"Who?"

"Maybe you, maybe Christina."

"What? No! No way!"

Morris rubbed the face of his watch. "All right, keep talking."

"The shipments were monthly . . . we couldn't risk any more than that, we were always trying to be careful. So Christina and the fence had to both know where the shipment was coming in. We had a numbered list of drop-off spots. Warehouses and loading docks that were safe. We were usually using a plain thirty-foot truck, not a tractor trailer, so we could actually get it in during the day, which is actually better, you don't look so fucking suspicious . . ." He stopped. What else did they want? He pulled the lace out of the shoe of his good foot and tied it tightly around his ankle above the wounds to pinch off the blood flow.

"That's smart," Morris said. "Not too tight, though."

"What we wanted was a way so that Christina and the fence knew which drop-off place. We needed what Christina called a 'random number generator.' That's a real term, you can look it up. The number you got gave you the drop-off place. We needed a way for each to get the number, the
same
number, without talking to each other. It had to be a public place. That way, if you have guys watching you, all they see is that you're walking around some public place, looking at all the things everybody usually looks at." He felt a little calmer. "What we needed was—Shit, can I at least have something to drink?"

"Tommy, get the man a drink. We got some stuff in the car."

"All right."

"Will you at least put that thing down?" Rick pointed at the drill.

"More talk, Rick, we need more talk."

He nodded in miserable compliance and drew a breath, but not a good one. "Also, it had to be a reasonably big place, because that way Christina and the fence are not close together. So Tony liked the idea, but he said they couldn't go to the same place each time. They had to go to a different place. So Christina had to come up with different public places in the city, in Manhattan, where you could get a random number generated." He looked at the men, told himself to keep talking. Fill up the room with talk, you bastard, and make sure you don't tell them where Christina is. "So what you do is you agree ahead of time what day you're going to both be there looking to get the number. Same day, same exact moment. You also had to have a number that stayed the same for a little while, like at least ten seconds, to account for human error. But you also wanted the number to change pretty frequently, too, so that it would be difficult to catch, so that if Christina was standing in front of the generator for like a minute, then maybe five numbers go by and somebody watching her can't tell which one it is."

"Go on."