Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

Then she was alone. No, there was one person left. It was Kendrick, more than six feet tall, towering over her as she lay on the mattress. He spit on her, and the saliva landed on her breasts and stomach.

“You ain’t so uppity now. Am I right?”

Then he too was gone.

It was almost dark. There were sounds of rustling in the weeds, the rats that lived at the edge of human society. Thousands of them were all around the Robert Taylor Houses, maybe millions of them, feeding off the garbage of more than twenty thousand people. She didn’t want to stay there a moment longer. She didn’t want to see the rats, of course. But at night, back in that horrible lot, there were worse things than rats. Anybody might come along. Somebody worse than those boys, even.

Her clothes were all around her, on the mattress and on the ground. They at least had the decency to leave her something to wear home. She got dressed, went back to the trail, gathered up her books, and went on home.

Smoke lay in bed, enjoying the bright play of light, and the cool breeze coming through the open window. Both Lola and Pamela were out somewhere.

Sunday was the day Smoke most loved to sleep in. It had little or nothing to do with it being a day of rest after a week of labor. Smoke’s schedule was his own. No, it was a sense of nostalgia, of romance.

And football.

It was already noon. In an hour, the Patriots would come on TV. Smoke had adopted them since he had been here in Maine. He would spend the day with them, sipping his wine, and perhaps enjoying a cigar on the deck during half-time. He might watch the second game, he might not – but for three hours, the New England Patriots would command his complete attention.

He lay there and relished this thought.

Then he remembered sitting in the darkened living room.

It was a sunken living room in another life, when he wasn’t yet Smoke. It was the kind of living room in the kind of house that middle class housewives looked at and salivated over in glossy magazines. Black leather furniture converged in the center of the room. At the far end, there was a fireplace that was as clean as a hospital floor – split logs were piled inside it, but it probably hadn’t been lit in years. Floor to ceiling windows looked out across the patio and the sloping lawn to the Long Island Sound. To the left of the patio, blue and red lights beamed up from the floor of the in-ground swimming pool. Behind the sofa Smoke sat on, there was a huge canvas – a giant orange dot on a white background.

Modern art. The fat man was a collector.

Presently the fat man came out of the nearby bedroom wrapped in a thick terrycloth robe. He wore slippers and walked through the shadows of the living room, headed toward the kitchen. Must’ve heard something in his sleep, Smoke mused. Decided to eat something. Smoke noted that his hair was greased, even now.

Smoke reached inside his jacket and fingered the Taser pistol strapped there. Before he came he had popped eight new Energizer AA batteries in it. It was ready to fry.

The fat man waddled along like he wasn’t going to stop.

“Roselli,” Smoke said.

The fat man stopped, did a double take, looked again at Smoke sitting there on his couch, legs folded, cane in hand.

Give Roselli credit. He was half-asleep, no reason to expect anyone, no way anyone could get in, the whole house alarmed, yet he didn’t look frightened or even all that surprised. The fat fuck never lost his composure – if he had, Smoke had never seen it. Roselli was like all the rest. When it came right down to it, it was hard to scare these guys. The only emotion you could get from them was anger.

“O’Malley? What the fuck are you doing in my living room? At…” he looked at the clock on the opposite wall. “Three-thirty in the morning?”

“I came to talk. Why don’t you sit down?”

Smoke gestured at one of the leather chairs.

“Sit down, shit. How the fuck did you get in here?”

Smoke offered the chair again.

Something in Smoke’s eyes registered with Roselli. The fat man walked over and eased his weight down into the chair. He pulled the robe tight around his belly. He ran a beefy hand through his hair, making sure it was slicked back. He stared at Smoke across the short distance between them. He squinted.

“O’Malley? I wanna say something to you right now. I known you a good long time. You were always a good kid. This ain’t right, you being in my house like this. People eat shit for this kind of thing. Less than this. What if my wife was here? My kids? It don’t look right.”

“Your wife and kids live in Florida, Roselli.”

Roselli stabbed the air with a finger. His face turned red. “Don’t fuck with me, O’Malley. You know that’s not my point. You want me to come over there and wring your neck? Is that why you’re here? You’re in my fucking house, you fuck. And you got exactly three seconds to explain what you’re doing here.”

Smoke took a deep breath. “Flight 1311,” he said. “New York to Helsinki with ninety-seven people on board.”

Roselli stopped. He shrugged. His hands floated upward in the air, palms toward the ceiling. They lingered there, and a long moment passed.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Roselli said. “You wanna talk about that, I got no problem. But now ain’t the time. And this ain’t the place. You got a work related problem, you need to call me and set up a meet. Go home, O’Malley. Call Angela on Monday, she’ll set you up with a time. Then we can talk.”

Smoke didn’t move. “In 1978, I torched twenty-one buildings up in the Bronx. Remember? That was 1978 alone. We did buildings starting in ’74, and I did my last one in ’80. It was a brisk business there for a while. You know how many people died in all those buildings I did? You know how many?”

Roselli waved his meaty hand. “O’Malley,” he said. “I’m telling you. You go on out the way you came in. If you disappear right now, I’m gonna forget this ever happened. You call Angela on Monday, and we’ll set up a time and place. We’ll talk all you want.”

“None,” Smoke said. “That’s how many. We spread the word, cleared everybody out, and nobody died. We even cleared the bums and the junkies out of the real shit-holes, didn’t we? Even gave them a chance to live, right?”

Roselli cleared his throat. “That’s right, we did.”

Smoke reached inside his jacket again. “So what changed? What changed so much that you’re willing to blow planes out of the sky, with women and children and goddamn fucking exchange school students on board? What happened, you fat piece of shit?”

Roselli was silent for a time.

“Times changed, O’Malley. And money changes things. You know that. It was the Russians. You know how those motherfuckers are. There was a guy on that plane, a Moscow guy on his way home. They couldn’t get near him on the ground, so… Listen, O’Malley. Somebody tells you the biggest score out there is you bring down a plane. They’re gonna pay you, maybe you owe them a favor and this is a way to get out of it. Maybe there’s even more to it than that. I don’t give a shit who you are. You do it.”

“You told me it was a bank job. You told me you needed some C-4, a timer, and a blasting cap, something to detonate with. Did I have the stuff? Could I put it together? You said you had some guys who needed to bring down a cinderblock wall.”

Roselli stood from his chair. He sighed, and then managed a small smile. He seemed to like the smile, so he tried on a bigger one. It worked for him. He showed his teeth.

“I didn’t think you’d do it if you knew what it was for.”

Despite the grin, his eyes flashed malice. They said he would never forget this intrusion, that as far as he was concerned, O’Malley had signed his own death warrant.