Charlie Huston - A Dangerous Man

Oh. It’s.

– Please. If this is a joke. Please hang up. Is that? You sound.

Oh, Mom.

– You sound like.

Oh, Mom. You sound.

– Is that you?

You sound so old.

– Mom.

– Henry?

My phone beeps again, and dies.

THE FIRST CABBIE asks me where I want to go before I get in. When I tell him Brighton Beach, he screeches away. There is no second cab because it’s around 10:30 on a Saturday night in Midtown and the shows are all getting out and traffic is stacked up and all the tourists and the couples from New Jersey are fighting over every cab in sight. I walk back into Smith’s. The waitress is standing by my table with my food in her hand. She gives me a nasty what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing look, and I point at the food and point at my table and point at myself and point at the pay phone in the back.

I get change and a phone book from one of the bartenders and start making calls. The first three car services tell me it will be at least forty-five minutes before they can get me anything. I offer to pay double, triple, whatever, and they tell me it’s the busiest couple hours of the week and they just don’t have a car.

I have to get to Brighton Beach.

I have to get there now.

I have to get to Brighton Beach so I can tell David I’m sorry. So I can beg him to leave my parents. So I can beg him to kill me and just leave them alone. And protect them from Adam and Martin. Hearing my mom’s voice. I can’t. I have to stop this. It has to end. Now.

I start to dial another car service. I stop. I flip a couple pages. I dial.

– Mario’s personal car service.

– Yeah, do you have any cars free right now?

– There’s about a forty-five minute wait. You want to reserve?

– Uh. Is Mario there?

– Who’s calling?

– I’m an old friend and I’m in town and I’m trying to get in touch.

– You got a number he can call?

– No.

– He’s busy.

– This is really important. Tell him it’s Henry. Tim’s friend Henry. He’ll know who I am. He’ll want to talk to me. Just put me on hold and tell him and if he says he doesn’t want to talk you don’t even have to tell me, just disconnect and I’ll fuck off.

– Look, guy-Please, man. Please. I need to talk to him. Please.

– Jesus H. Hang on.

There’s a click. The hold music kicks in. Tito Rodriguez doing “Cuando, Cuando, Cuando.”

Will Mario want to talk to me? No. Why would he? All we had was a business arrangement; he gave me a couple rides and I gave him a bunch of money six years ago. What does he know about me since then? Just what he’s seen on TV. The bodies. If he’s smart, he’ll tell the guy to hang up on me. If he’s really smart, he’ll call the cops.

The music stops.

– Where are you?

– Place called Smith’s. Corner of-

– I know where it is. Be out front in ten minutes.

He hangs up. I hang up. I walk back to my table and poke my cold burger. I eat a cold french fry. I take a sip of my seltzer. I put a twenty on the table. I think about going out the back door. I look around. There is no back door. I think again that if Mario is really smart he will have called the cops. But if he’s really, really smart, he will have found out where I am and then called the cops and then he can collect on the huge reward that is available for information leading to my capture and conviction. The capture has always been the tricky part, conviction on at least a few of the crimes I’ve been accused of being a foregone conclusion. Which is only right, seeing as I have done some fucked-up shit. I think about what it would mean to get scooped up by the cops right now. As opposed to my other options. Which are?

Suicide by Branko.

Kill everyone.

I eat another cold fry and walk out the front door. It seems about as good an idea as any of the others. And maybe it is, because a brand-new black Lincoln Continental pulls smoothly to a stop just as I hit the curb and the driver side window zips down and there’s Mario, with his short Puerto Rican fro and his carefully etched beard, and he takes a look at me and nods and I get in the backseat and close the door.

He turns around.

– I’m gonna show you something, man.

I look out the back window to see if a squad of SWATs is surrounding us. Nope. I look at Mario and nod.

– OK.

He brings his hand above the seatback and shows me the little automatic resting in his palm.

– See?

– Yeah.

He points at the gun with his other hand.

– You try anything, I’ll use it. I never shoot anybody, man. But I got kids. You try anything, I’ll fucking do it. OK?

– OK.

He shakes his head and bites his lower lip.

– OK. OK then.

He puts the gun back in his pocket, turns to the wheel, drops the car into drive and rolls.

I lean forward and put my arm on the back of his seat.

– I need-

– You just sit the fuck back, man. Sit back.

His right hand has gone to his pocket.

I sit back.

– Right. It’s cool.

His eyes flick at me in the rearview mirror and he shakes his head.

– You just chill and I’ll take you to your money. Take you to the fucking money and then I’m through with this shit.

IT’S A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR self-service place on Third Ave., down near the Bowery. I watch from a couple hundred miles away as Mario slips a plastic card into the slot next to the door and enters a code. There’s a beep and he pulls the door open and it buzzes loudly. He walks through and looks back at me standing there, watching him.

– Come on, man.

I walk through the door and he lets it go and it swings shut behind me and the buzzing stops. He goes to the elevator, slips his card into another slot, enters his code again, there’s the same beep and the elevator doors slide open. He steps in, and again he has to prompt me.

– Son of a bitch. Move!

I get into the elevator. He pushes a button and we go up for a few seconds and the elevator stops and the doors open and he gets out and shakes his head at me standing there not moving and grabs my sleeve and pulls me along with him down the corridor of identical doors.

– You stoned, man? You on something?

I shake my head.

I am not on anything. But I can see where he got the idea. I’ve been acting like this ever since he said the magic words. Ever since he told me where we were going. I want to snap out of it, but I can’t. I know this feeling. I’ve had it before in my life. It’s the feeling you get when you realize nothing is going to be the way you thought it would be. When you realize nothing has been the way you always thought it was.

The first time I had this feeling was when I woke up after the surgery on my leg and saw the rods sticking out of it. The second time was when I plowed my Mustang into the tree and saw my friend smash through the windshield. The third time was in here in the City before I ran, when I found Yvonne’s beaten body. The last time I felt it was the first time I killed someone for David. The Kid. And now it’s here for one final visit.

Mario stops in front of one of the doors.

He slips the card into its slot.

He enters his code.

Beep.

He pushes the door open and steps back out of the way and I look inside the tiny storage unit and see the large, rectangular black travel box, the kind people use when they have to haul around expensive electronics and whatnot. I walk over to the box. It’s standing on end; its top reaches the bottom of my rib cage. I fumble with one of the key-shaped clasps. I fumble with it because my fingers are suddenly sausage-thick and about as useful. Except they’re not. Not really. They just feel that way. I manage to pop the clasp down and twist it. I repeat the action with the other three clasps. I wrap my sausage hand around the handle on top of the case and pull. It’s fitted tightly and sighs off. A little sand from a Mexican beach is caught in the cracks and rains down onto the concrete floor. I hold the lid in one hand and look inside the box.