Кен Бруен - Tower

As the weeks passed, stuff happened, small signs of thawing that went barely noticed. She’d catch me staring at her and she would take an extra beat to turn away. We’d reach for the same section of the paper and our fingers would brush, linger. Pure fucking electricity for me. Indifferent expression from her. All quickly forgotten. Took her once folding my laundry as a declaration of love. A man looking for signs can find ’em anywhere.

Then there was the kissing. It’s strange, kissing her had become everything to me. Can’t explain it, but her lips touching mine had become more meaningful for me than any full blown sex I’d ever had and I’d had plenty. During the week when my instructors would begin to drone on, often found myself daydreaming about holding her in my arms, the feel of her cheeks against my palms, the taste of beer on her tongue. Eventually, it stopped mattering to me that none of it mattered to her.

One Friday night her cell phone rang just as we were headed out the door. She picked up. She barely spoke, nodded her head a few times, hung up. Knew better than to ask. Asked anyway. Got no answer. No shock there, yet something had changed. Her body language was different. The awkwardness to the kissing had returned. She was very distracted and apologized several times for asking me to repeat myself.

When we got back to the apartment, Leeza Velez, U.S. Marshal headed straight into her room. Didn’t think anything of it. Had grown accustomed to being shut out the second the front door shut behind us. But as I lay half asleep on the futon in the dark, my head digesting some bit of info my instructors had fed me during the past month, I heard her. Velez was sobbing. Tried to ignore it. Sure. Couldn’t. Shuffled down the hallway to the bedroom.

“Hey, Velez, you okay?”

“Come in.”

Leeza was standing naked next to the bed, her body backlit by the dim bulb of a small reading lamp. Her body was everything I had imagined it to be. She was muscular and well defined without distracting rips and cuts. Her muscles, curved and sloped, making smooth transitions from one to the next. Her nipples were hard and larger than I’d envisioned. Her breasts were on the small side, but round and free from the pull of gravity. Her legs were like a sculptor’s idea of perfection: taut, lean, long, curved. It took more than near darkness to hide beauty.

When I moved my lips to ask, she pressed her index finger across my mouth.

“Sssshhhhhh.”

It was more a plea than a command. Leeza knelt down and took me fully into her mouth. From that second on, kisses weren’t ever going to be enough.

When I rolled over the next morning, Leeza’s side of the bed was cold. And when I opened my eyes, O’Connor was staring back at me.

“Morning, lad,” he said as plainly as if this was how he started all his Saturdays. “Don’t bother looking for her. Seems you two have broken up. Pity that.”

“What?” I asked though I’d heard him perfectly well. And when I scanned the room, I could see that any trace of Leeza Velez had been removed.

“You’ve done well, son. Time to move on.”

“Move on where?”

“Southie, South Boston.”

“But—”

“Get packed, probie,” he said. “You’ve got a week back home before you head to Beantown. It’s there you’ll learn to be a man. I’ll get us some coffees while you shower up.”

After O’Connor left, I hesitated. Could still taste Leeza on my lips and smell her scent in the air. Showered, removing more traces of Velez, but not all. Have to scrub my soul for that.

“In the house of the hangman

do not talk of rope”

I was a zombie.

Before Philly, I may not have had a firm handle on who Todd Rosen was, exactly. No, I was dead inside. Not dead, exactly. The dead can’t feel the hurt the way I can. No, was like one of those patients on the operating table who wakes up in the middle of their surgery unable to move, but exquisitely aware of the scalpel. Christ, wished the doctor’d just cut my throat and gotten it over with.

It was impossible for me to believe how deeply I’d entwined Leeza Velez into the fabric of myself. Fucking crazy that I could feel so utterly emptied and alone over a woman who’d shared herself with me for a solitary night. For all I knew Leeza Velez wasn’t her name. Maybe that was it. Her distance had let me create a life for us, a life for her not only that didn’t exist, but would never, could never exist. All of it woven out of a dangerous smile, brown skin, and meaningless kisses.

Brooklyn, Nicky, my dad were strangers to me, worse than strangers. Guess that’s what O’Connor wanted: vertigo, discomfort, disorientation. Had never been so off balance in my life. Sidewalks where Nicky and I had scratched our initials in wet cement with a stick, seemed foreign to me now. For fuck’s sake, I was foreign to my own self.

It was Axel’s again. Nicky’s idea, of course. Said it was fine when he asked if that suited me. What did it matter? Once pain hits a certain threshold, you might as well see how much you can take. And man, I was like a flashing neon sign, alternating between deadness and the pain. On. Off. On. Off. On... But it was more than Leeza. It was what I’d become, what I’d let myself be turned into. Looked at myself in the mirror behind the bar. Christ, I thought, a cop, a fucking cop!

Nicky threw his arm over my shoulder, kissed me on the cheek. “C’mon, Todd, drink your beer and cheer up.”

“You ever meet anybody that cheered up on demand?”

“Griffin.”

We both had a laugh at that. Didn’t last long.

“Jesus, pal, I never seen you like this. Wanna talk about it?”

“What’s to talk, Nick? She walked out on me.”

“Did you see it coming?” he asked.

“Maybe. Guess I didn’t really know her.”

“Who knows any woman?”

Wasn’t inclined to argue.

He checked his watch. It was getting close to ten. On O’Connor’s orders I’d ask to meet with Boyle. Nick had made the arrangements. Shrugged his head that we better get moving. Stood with my beer glass in hand, prepared to chug the rest, when some drunk asshole stumbled into me. The rim of the glass smacked me in my teeth and the beer poured onto my jacket.

Next thing I knew, Nicky had me in a bear hug. The drunk was laid out, donating a generous amount of blood to Axel’s barroom floor. He made a feeble attempt to rise up on his elbows and knees. Kicked him full in the ribs as Nick tried forcing me to the door.

“Holy shit!” he said, struggling to get me into his car. “Are you like seriously deranged?”

Couldn’t answer, the adrenaline burning inside.

“That guy was six six and you dropped him with one punch.”

For the first time in my miserable life I was raging.

“Fuck on a bike, bro. Even I would be afraid to take your ass on. That bitch made a man of you. You’re one dangerous motherfucker all of a sudden.”

Dangerous, yeah, that was me. He only knew the half of it.

“Let’s go,” was all I said.

Riggio’s Clam House was a hole in the wall, but a legendary one. Situated at the corner of Emmons Avenue and Ocean Avenue, directly across from the footbridge that spanned the ass-end of Sheepshead Bay, Riggio’s had been the setting for countless shady deals and more than one mob hit. In the summer sometimes, Nicky and me used to take the bus down here and fish off the bridge. Seemed like a million fucking years ago. But so did every good thing in my life. Exercised the good sense not to try and recall what those were.

Although I had asked for the meet, it was Boyle picked the location. The prick had nothing if not a sense of drama. With him it was hard to know the reasoning behind his decisions. Him and his donkey-fucking logic. Did he just want to stick it to the guineas by talking shop on their turf? Did he already know I was a cop? Would Griffin be waiting to put one in my ear? The setting was convenient enough. Could dump my dead ass directly in Sheepshead Bay or haul it to the marshlands of nearby Gerritsen Beach. Maybe he had a boat waiting and would drop my weighted body in the Atlantic off Manhattan or Plumb Beach. There was no shortage of places to dump a body in this part of Brooklyn. Or maybe Boyle just liked raw clams.