One hundred and ten total.
What a gig.
He took a threesome from the Palladium to the Empire Diner near Twenty-third Street. A miniskirted, Afroed transvestite who changed outfits in the backseat and emerged a business-suited yuppie on West and Morton. A Wall Street type with two female companions who somehow managed to use three condoms.
He ran two red lights and nearly got front-ended on Third Avenue, but his skills were improving by the block. With his profits he decided to upgrade his customers’ experience with a fancier selection of condoms, assorted snacks, and—for the car—a spray bottle of Febreze.
At the corner of First Avenue and Sixth Street, Byron took his first break. The car’s clock read 1:55. He was amazed at how much ground he could cover in a half hour. Taking out his cash to count, he kept the money low and out of sight of the street. Around him, spiky post-punks and middle-aged Indian-restaurant customers milled around happily ignoring one another among the open outdoor shops.
He was reaching four hundred dollars when a girl peeked in and said, “Can you help me?”
Byron stashed the money in his pocket. The girl’s breath reeked of alcohol, and her eyes were slits. She had a thick head of hair that looked blond under a not-too-skillful orange dye job. Despite the tongue piercing, studs, and tight black clothes, she sent out strong Midwesterner signals. “Sure,” he said tentatively. “Where are you going?”
“Avenue A and Eleventh? I gotta get away from somebody. I don’t have much money. Wait.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out two dollars.
Byron sighed. “Keep it. Get in.”
“Really? You are soooo sweet!”
She plopped into the backseat, smiling at him into the rearview mirror. But the moment he turned the ignition, she was fast asleep.
35
WAITS
October 18, 1:34 A.M.
“Do you know when you’re going to find your bag?” the coat room girl asked. “’Cause Bentley says I’m not supposed to allow anyone back here.”
“You didn’t see a black shoulder bag, kind of thick and heavy?” Waits asked.
Where was it?
The girl rolled her eyes. “Well, that narrows it down to maybe a hundred bags….”
Was Reina lying? Was she sending him on some fucked-up wild-goose chase, to teach him some kind of lesson? He’d been looking for twenty minutes. This place was total chaos.
“Do you know Reina Sanchez?” Waits asked.
“Uh-huh. Gino’s cousin, right?” the girl said.
“Have you seen her?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“If you do, tell her Waits wants to see her.”
“Uh-kay.”
Waits ran back out of the room. He would pull Reina in here, make her find the fucking bag herself.
The club was more crowded than ever, the music cranked to ear-shattering volume. Waits made his way to the bar, where he’d last seen Reina.
He didn’t have much hope of finding her. If she was scamming him, she’d be gone by now.
And Ianuzzi would find him.
Unless…
Cam.
The big moose owed him. Waits would have to get his money from Cam, and now.
Waits pulled out his cell, sent him a text message, and prayed the asshole would get back to him before Waits was being loaded into the trunk of a black Hummer.
36
JIMMY
October 18, 1:34 A.M.
“Son of a bitch!” The limo driver leaned on his horn, careening onto the entrance ramp of the Saw Mill Parkway. “Look at this guy! Ha! The trick to driving in New York City—don’t blink. You have to assert yourself!”
Jimmy clutched the rear armrest of the limo. A Volvo sedan was trying to merge into traffic from a ramp to the right, but the limo driver wasn’t letting him in. He sped up, narrowing the gap to inches with the car in front of him.
Cam moaned, holding his side. “Slow down, Richard! I’m in a fragile state and you’re making me sick.”
“It’s Ripley,” the driver said. “Wait your turn, you fucker! Not you kids, the driver. Ripley. Rip… Lee. You know, like, Believe It or Not?”
Jimmy’s fingers were frozen white. It was his first time back on the highway since the accident. It had taken forever to get Cam released from the hospital. All Jimmy wanted to do was get home, but Cam was dead set on finding Byron. Somehow.
The woods seemed to have changed since the last time he’d seen them. Behind every passing tree, in every shadow, he saw deer. Calculating. Waiting. Huddled in their hidden deer terrorist cells, waiting for one brave four-legged martyr to commit the ultimate sacrifice and jump out onto the road.
The driving habits of Ripley were not making things any easier. People who drove Toyota Highlander limos were not supposed to be like this.
BEEEEP!
Cam’s cell was ringing again.
“Tell them I’m not home,” Cam muttered, pulling out his phone and silencing it. “Tell them I’m dead.”
Jimmy glanced at the screen:
where ru????—w
“It’s ‘w’ again,” Jimmy said. “Who is that—and why are we doing this?”
Leaning across the backseat, Cam squinted at the screen. “It’s Waits.”
“The guy with the sunglasses, who hangs out by the school? You know that guy?”
“Know him? He’s the reason we’re here.”
Jimmy put the phone down. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, Jesus.” Cam sank back into the seat and let out a long, slow breath. “Jimmy, you are so fucking naive. We were going to the party to make a sale, so I could pay Waits back.”
Jimmy’s mouth fell open. “Drugs?”
“No, you douche—aspirin.”
The words caught in Jimmy’s throat. Drugs. They had been carrying contraband—in the car. Which he had been driving. Without a license.
The mind reeled.
His head spun momentarily, and everything around him receded—the trees, the hidden kamikaze deer—all blotted out by the explosion of bad memories into fragments slowly rearranging into something worse.
“I owed Waits some cash,” Cam went on, “and he called in the loan. He needed to pay his people. I had heard about this party, so I told him I would unload some pills, sell them at a huge markup. I wasn’t expecting this to happen.”
“So that’s why you wanted my money?” Jimmy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “To pay Waits?”
“It’s an emergency,” Cam said. “Byron and I were supposed to split the seller’s percentage and give the profit back to—”
“Byron knew about this?” Jimmy blurted out.
Cam nodded. “He was too scared to drive, and I can’t drive worth shit. So he figured he’d ask you.”
“And neither of you told me?” The last few days were flashing through his mind in a new harsh light. “And that scene outside the Speech room after school… when you stuck up for me… that was all a setup, to get me to drive while keeping this whole thing a secret?”
“Fuck no, I am not smart enough to do that. That was Byron’s call. I didn’t care one way or the other if he told you about the plan. He thought that if you knew, you wouldn’t agree to go.”
“Right,” Jimmy said. “And then none of this would have happened!”
Cam yawned. “Dude, that’s why I’m telling you. Now maybe you won’t feel so bad for what you did to me when I was unconscious. I mean, that wasn’t a real stellar moment in the moral history of the world either.”
Jimmy sat back, trying to sift it all. “You both led me into this. You lied. You made me an accessory to a crime I didn’t even know I was committing.”
“I guess deep down inside, babycakes, we’re all… basically… shit.”
Cam was mumbling now, his head lolling to one side. As he dozed off, Jimmy fought back the urge to ask Ripley to stop the car so he could get out and walk home from Riverdale.
BEEEEP!
The phone was lighting up again.
Jimmy picked it up and looked at the screen:
cam u slanty-eye mfokker where ru with my $????—w
The fucking nerve.
Did Waits have any idea? Did he know what had happened, how many lives had been screwed up tonight—by his stupid deal-gone-wrong?
The message seemed to be glowing at him defiantly, daring him to answer.
Cam was starting to snore.
And Jimmy began to type:
jimmy here. bad accident. cam is dead.
37
REINA
October 18, 1:39 A.M.
“I—I’m really sorry,” MC said, dabbing Reina’s eyes with toilet paper. “I didn’t know you knew these guys so well.”
“He told you that name—Cam? He said Cam was…?”
MC nodded. “I didn’t… I wasn’t sure if he was just, you know… goofing, or making up a name.”
“Cam is real,” Reina said softly. “Oh God, no wonder Byron sounded so upset when he called me at work.”
The bathroom tiles were swimming in Reina’s vision. Why hadn’t Byron told her the story over the phone?
Cam was dead.
Dead.
You thought of someone—his laugh, his smell, the way his hair fall across his face—and then that word just wipes it all away. Like it never existed.
And why? Over a drug deal? Cam?
Byron?
“It doesn’t make sense,” Reina said. “Those guys weren’t like that.”
“I’m sorry,” MC replied, tears now streaming down her face. “If I’d known… if I’d only known how serious this all was. I didn’t mean to do what I was doing. I got carried away. And Byron never told about Cam until he’d already split…”
The girl’s words were diffusing into the air, weightless and without meaning. Soon she stopped talking altogether and put her arm around Reina’s shoulder.
They sat like that, silent on the bathroom floor, as clubbers came and went, no one noticing a thing was wrong.
38
WAITS
October 18, 1:45 A.M.
He sagged against the bar, trying to make sense of it all.
He stared the message for what seemed like the hundredth time:
jimmy here. bad accident. cam is dead.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. It had started as a goof. It was fucking aspirin.
Waits began to return Jimmy’s text message but didn’t know what to say. He was feeling sick, his mind firing and misfiring with memories, images.
Can you see the little boy’s face—oh yes, indeedy, he is soooo scared. Iz was talking to him, but his voice was muddy and his face was leering, his smile revealing teeth sharp as knives. Ha-ha, you have no idea! The boy isn’t me, it’s YOU, my child, and his beady eyes are following those dollah bills, all the way to the Big Time. Just like yours, you little prick…
Out. He had to get out. He would make up for this. If it took him the rest of his life. He began to text back, but his fingers were shaking:
what happened???? where r
“Yo, you… dude…” came a vaguely familiar voice.
Waits looked up to see the coat-check babe walking past. “I found ya girlfriend. She’s in the bathroom. Crying.”
It took a moment for Waits to realize what she was talking about. “Reina?”
“Yeah.”
Waits shoved the phone into his pocket and hurried to the bathroom. As he pushed the door open, he saw Reina sitting on the floor, arm in arm with a tough-looking chick in a flower-print dress. He hadn’t taken Reina for being that type.
“This is the women’s room,” Reina murmured, her face streaked with tears. “Can’t you read?”
“This is a club, it doesn’t matter,” Waits shot back. Tears always got to him, but not now. Now everything was different. Lives had been ruined, and now Waits had to get out. The only thing in his way was Reina. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but where is my shoulder bag? It’s not in the coatroom.”
Reina spun around to face him. “I never said it was.”
“Don’t play with me, Reina. Do you know what happened tonight?”
Reina’s eyes spat ice. “I’m not sure if I heard that correctly, Waits. Are you referring to the fact that you killed Cam?”
The walls began to tilt, and then to spin. “I did not kill Cam,” he said. “I had nothing to do with—”
Reina turned into one of the stalls. A girl and a guy came scrambling out, looking disoriented and vaguely coitus interruptus. From inside, Reina called out, “You want your shoulder bag, Waits? You want your money? Here’s your fucking money!” She emerged with his bag over her shoulder but marched right past him.
He reached for her, but she shook loose. “Reina? Where are you going?”
Waits ran after her as she barreled through the throng, pushing aside dancers, causing drinks to crash to the floor.
In the middle of the club, under a pulsing red light, she turned to face him. By now, a circle of mildly stunned people had gathered around them. “You know, Waits,” she said with a disarmingly calm smile, “I really like this shoulder bag. It must have cost you a fortune. Do you think I could keep it?”
“Yes, Reina, it’s all yours,” Waits said, walking toward her patiently, not trusting the tone of her voice. “Just as soon as I get my stuff out.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” Reina replied. “Let me do it for you!”
She unzipped the bag and turned it upside down.
“What are you doing?” Waits shouted.
“Woooo-HOOOOOO!”
People were running toward them from all directions as masses of cash flew out across the dance floor. They were diving, grasping, laughing. Reina stood among them, tears running down her face.
This was not happening.
He was a dead man.
39
BYRON
October 18, 1:59 A.M.
“No. No. Stick your head out of the car,” Byron said. “Do it on the sidewalk.”
He held the girl’s shoulders as she struggled out of the backseat and onto Eleventh Street. Her name was Cleo, he’d gotten that much out of her. And the last thing he wanted to do at this point was become an amusing part of the gazillionth Wisconsin girl’s Sex and the City blog.
Still, he felt bad for her as she threw up into the gutter, sobbing. “I’m—I’m usually not like this… ohhhh, I’m sooo sooo sorrryyyy. Did I mess up your car?”
“Nope,” Byron said, lifting her to her feet and putting an arm around her shoulder.
“I have money upstairs,” she said. “I can pay you.”
He began walking with her toward a dark tenement building. “Don’t even think of it. Let’s get you to bed.”
“I don’t want to have sex.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t want to either.”
“So you’re gay?”
“No! Look, I just want you to be safe. And home.”
“You are the best man ever!” She was struggling with a set of keys now, forcing one and then another into the front door, until it finally pushed open. “I’m on the second floor. Apartment 2E.”
Byron helped her up the stairs and into her apartment. It was one room, crammed with boxes and clothes strewn all over. In the center was a queen-size bed, relatively clear, and Byron set her gently down on it. “Okay, look,” he said, “whatever happened to you tonight, just don’t worry about it. It’ll be better in the morning.”
Cleo smiled at him, her lips swollen and her eyes peering from behind a scrim of sweat-soaked orange hair. “What about you?”
“Me?” Byron cocked his head. “I’m great.”
“Great…,” the girl said, her eyes closing as she snuggled into a pillow. “It’s great that you’re great… but you don’t sound great… so if you want to talk…”
Byron exhaled and turned away. He was exhausted and achy and tense. He hadn’t had a chance to tell Reina anything—and who knows what happened be
tween her and MC.
Cleo was fast asleep. But her invitation to talk was too hard to resist. The whole crazy night was all bottled up inside him.
“I—I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he began rambling, taking comfort in the sound of his own words. “The market, I guess. I was burned on a margin call—I know, stupid move. So, you know, desperate times… I broker this fifty-fifty drug deal with some jock in our school. I even trick a good bud into driving us to a party upstate—and he doesn’t even know the plan. But we hit this deer, total the car, and now the jock… Cam… is dead. I hide the drugs inside the deer’s mouth. My friend and I go to the party but the cops take him and I drive back to the scene, just as this weird chick is putting the deer in her pickup. I follow her and when she realizes what I’m doing, she thinks, hey, cool, let’s sell the drugs together, at Blowback. So we go there and I see the dealer, I freak, and I run outside. I spot this tow truck—but when I move my double-parked car, this couple jump in, thinking I’m a cab, and they pay me a hundred bucks. I figure I can keep that up all night, to make my nut. So that’s what I’m doing—running an illegal car service in a stolen car to pay back a drug dealer for a botched sale in which my friend was killed and his car totaled.”
Saying it all just made it worse, the night’s horror darkening with every sentence, and Byron began to cry.
Cleo sat up and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek. “That sucks. If it’s true.”
Startled, Byron flinched. “You heard me?”
“It sounds like a novel, except you can’t make up this shit,” she said, fading back onto the bed, her words slurry. “I’ve got people chasing after me, too.”
“The thing is, if I get enough money, it’ll all be over.”
“It’s never enough. A shitty bargain’s a shitty bargain. I think… um, stop driving, dude. Go back to the guy… give him whatever. Tell him you’re out of the deal, Byron. You’re too good for this.”
“You think?” Byron said.
“I know.”
Byron leaned into her and gave her a big hug. Her clothes were wet and she didn’t smell particularly fresh, but it felt good. “How did you get so smart?”