Charlie Huston - A Dangerous Man

– Yes.

– That wasn’t a bad idea.

– No.

– No, it wasn’t.

He takes a drag.

I blink. Wait to change my mind. But I don’t.

– A bad idea, was when you threatened to torture my parents.

The knife is very sharp. It pokes through his windpipe with great ease. I pull it out and blood sputters from the hole on a stream of cigarette smoke. His mouth opens and closes. The cigarette falls from his fingers. I bend over, grab his good leg, haul upward, and he tips over the rail into the bay. Martin turns his glazed, slitted eyes to me, but I am already pushing him back over the rail. He grabs at me, barely conscious of what is happening. His back is bent over the rail. He is held balanced only by the grip he has on my forearm. I rake the blade of the knife across his knuckles, and he falls.

I don’t bother to look. Adam with his slit throat, Martin with his lamed foot and knee and addled head, they will both drown. I turn and walk toward the bus, collecting Martin’s sap from the ground as I go.

Having made David’s end of the deal that much easier.

I climb into the bus. I close the door. I look at Miguel sitting on the floor next to Jay, holding a dirty T-shirt over his face.

– How is he?

Jay’s hand comes up and pushes the towel off.

– Fucking fine, Scarface. Fucking fine for a guy who’s gonna look worse than you.

And he passes out.

– You were fighting.

– What?

– You were fighting. You were drunk and you got into a fight with each other and you beat the crap out of him.

– Oh no. No, man. I don’t want to say that.

– Listen. If it’s a fight between friends, no matter how bad it is, the cops won’t fuck around if neither of you presses charges.

– Oh, man. That sucks. That just. It sucks. I don’t want people to think. Fuck! Who were those guys?

– They were. They’re like business rivals. Like people who have a problem with David.

– Shit! Oh, shit. Are they? What if they-Look. Don’t worry about those guys. I ran those guys off. They won’t be a problem.

I take a left on Maiden Lane, drive another couple blocks, and pull over on Gold Street.

– Come here.

Miguel gets up. I push the button that opens the door and get out of the driver’s seat. I try to lift the box, but it hurts my ribs too much.

– Pass me that thing.

I go down the steps. Miguel hands the box down. I set it on the curb.

– Thanks. There’s a hospital just up the street here. Beekman, I think, at the university. Just drive straight up and start honking.

– Right, OK.

– And, Miguel, it was a fight. You beat him up.

– Man.

– Do it. Handle it that way. Cops go poking into tonight and shit will hit the fan.

– OK. OK. Got it. What about. Wait. What about you?

– I took off when everybody else did.

– No. Where are you? What are you?

I put my hand on the box.

– I have to take care of this thing.

– OK, yeah, but you’ll be back. Here. You’ll.

– Just call your agent, OK. Him you can tell anything you want.

He won’t be letting your ass get in any trouble.

– OK. But what?

– Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK? At the game.

– Yeah. Yeah. OK, man. I. This is fucked up, man.

– Take Jay to the hospital.

– Yeah. Yeah, man.

He gets behind the wheel, looks at me, nods, and pushes the button that closes the door. I watch the party bus lurch down the street. Then I drag the box back to Water Street where I can find a cab.

It’s heavy.

The fucking box is heavy.

And it hurts me.

THERE WAS THIS bar Yvonne liked to go drinking at in Brooklyn. Nights when neither of us had to work at Paul’s, we’d sometimes take the A train over to the Heights. We’d walk up Henry Street to Clark, to this place. It was a dive, all our favorite places were dives. I’m not sure how she found it. We’d drink. I’d suck down bottles of Bud with a few Turkeys neat thrown in to keep me going. She’d have Corona and shots of tequila. Tequila made her crazy in bed. We’d play pool and darts, get good and drunk, and on summer nights we’d walk back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, stopping a couple times along the way to make out. Those were good dates.

The owner of the place was nuts. He was a bit of a hood. Yvonne told me he was the local loan shark or something. Whatever else he was, he was crazy. He had this big dog, a huge mongrel. The dog would wander around the bar, sniffing the floor, looking for a peanut or a piece of beef jerky that might have been dropped. The owner left the dog in the bar overnight as protection for the place. There was a big old hotel across the street, a transient hotel that was chock-full of crackheads. He worried about them breaking into the bar. He had a training program for the dog, a program designed to make it hate crackheads. He’d do it a few times a week, whenever one of the crackheads got hard up enough to need the cash.

One of them would come across from the hotel and knock on the window until he got the owner’s attention. The owner would ignore him for awhile, then finally look over and nod. The crackhead would start banging on the glass, and the dog would run over, barking. The crackhead would walk back and forth in front of the place, banging on the window and the door as the dog barked and the owner knelt down next to it and whispered in its ear.

– Kill. Kill the nigger. Kill.

The dog would be utterly spazzed out and the owner would nod at the crackhead again. The crackhead would come over to the door, edge it open, and stick his arm inside with a jacket or an old sweatshirt wrapped around it. The dog would latch on and jerk the arm back and forth as the crackhead struggled to keep from being pulled inside, and the owner laughed his ass off. After about a minute he’d stop laughing, drag the dog off, and pass the crackhead five bucks. The crackhead would wander off looking for his man, unwrapping his arm to check out the massive bruises that would be there for weeks.

After the show was over, anyone in the place who hadn’t seen it before would tend to put their drinks down and take off. It wasn’t the kind of joint most people felt comfortable in. But if you stuck it out, saw the scene go down a few times and kept coming back, the owner figured you must be his kind of people. We’d go in a couple times a month. Saw the whole thing three or four times. But I don’t think either of us ever considered ourselves the owner’s kind of people.

Anyway, if it wasn’t for that bar, I wouldn’t know about the hotel. So there’s that.

THE BAR IS gone. There’s something there in its place, some kind of cafe or diner. But the hotel is still across the street, right on the corner. I give the cabbie a couple extra bucks and he carries the box inside for me. The place is cleaned up. I see a kind of plaque above the check-in that tells me they’re using it as housing for the Brooklyn campus of Long Island City College, but the desk clerk is still housed behind a couple inches of Plexiglas, and there are still crackheads in evidence.

– I need a room.

She doesn’t say anything, just slips a registration card under the window. I find a pen on the end of a chain and fill in the information. I don’t have the energy to make up anything new so I just use the vitals from my Las Vegas identity.

– Can I pay cash?

She looks at me this time, takes in the dirty jacket and undershirt. I wiped my hands clean of blood in the party bus, but they’re still filthy.

– Yeah. Gotta leave a deposit.

– Sure.

I ask for a room next to the elevator and she gives it to me. I pay for the night, plus an extra night as the deposit, plus extra to have the TV switched on, plus another deposit to have the phone. I give her the cash. She gives me a receipt and a key and buzzes me into the lobby. I drag the box in, wait for the elevator, go up two floors, drag the box across the hall and into my room, close the door and do all the locks, collapse on the bed and close my eyes.