Tim Green - Exact Revenge

A chair scrapes the floor, and the sergeant’s footsteps move toward the door. It closes and I get a whack from Bluebeard across my shoulder blades.

“Up, asshole,” he says.

They put on latex gloves. They strip me down and search my rear. Bluebeard whispers to me, calling me his girl, his razor stubble chafing my ear. My eyes water and I close them tight. This part is worse when you fight it. I know.

They make me shower, then give me a new set of clothes. Forest green.

Bluebeard leads me into the top of D block and the other guard uses his keys to open a box on the wall. Home to five levers. Two of them are covered with a red sleeve that tells the guard they belong to the cells of prisoners without recreation. The other guard pulls down the lever on the end and I hear a cell door begin to hum. I am shoved into a tank, a self-contained unit of five steel cells. My cell door clanks open.

From the darkness beyond the crosshatched steel bars of the cell next to mine appears the pale shape of a face. An old man with tufts of white hair and a hooked nose that he pokes through the bars. Two glowing blue eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Small growths of crud are attached to their whites, encroaching on the irises. He says nothing, but his lower lip disappears behind a crooked row of teeth. It might be a smile. Maybe he’s a bug. A nut. Something about these eyes is very different.

Bluebeard shoves me into my cell. His kick barely grazes my backside, and I don’t bother to even look back at him. I stand over the bowl and relieve myself, then I crawl onto the bunk and curl into a ball, trying hard not to think about how close I am to home.

IT WAS A SUNNY SPRING DAY, so bright the towering buildings of Manhattan seemed almost clean. Sunday. The streets free from the weekday clutter. Lexis looked out of the long dark glass of the window and saw empty parking spaces along Park Avenue in front of their building. Home for the past ten years, ever since Frank somehow worked his way into a casino partnership in Atlantic City. Allen was hunched over his Game Boy, his dark hair hanging straight down in front of his face, his thumbs working the controls with fevered excitement. Frank was on his cell phone, going over his last-minute bets for the basketball games that afternoon.

Their limousine cruised down Fifth Avenue and eased to a stop in front of Rockefeller Plaza. The party planner was waiting in a tuxedo with narrow shoulders. Frank referred to him as “the fairy,” but insisted they use him because he had planned the same kind of confirmation party for the governor’s nephew. There were others waiting too. The caterer. The florist. The business manager for the band.

Lexis hustled Allen inside, still bent over his Game Boy, while Frank opened the trunk of their Mercedes limo and began dispersing banded stacks of money. Cash was king. That’s what Frank always said, and when Lexis stepped inside the Rainbow Room on the top floor she couldn’t help feeling that in a way it was. Gold and silver balloons, bundled into columns, rose to the ceiling. The center of every table bloomed with a four-foot-high flower arrangement of white flowers, lilies, roses, orchids, and gardenias. Over the head table loomed a gold football goalpost. At each place was an NFL football personalized for the guests and signed by Joe Namath, who would be joining them at the head table. Cash was king.

Allen looked up from his Game Boy.

“Wow.”

He ran to his own place at the head table and rolled the football between his hands.

“It says, ‘Congratulations to my good friend Allen Francis,’” he said, looking up at her with his hazel brown eyes and blinking.

“That’s exciting,” Lexis said.

“Why did Dad have to tell him Allen Francis ?”

“Your father is very proud of you, Allen. This party cost him a lot of money, so please don’t act spoiled.”

“I’m not spoiled,” he said with a frown. “Here. Catch a pass, Mom.”

Allen threw a spiral across the room. Lexis made a breadbasket. The ball hit her in the chest and bounced out to the floor.

“Ha. Never throw a pass to a woman. How about this place?” Frank said in his loud low voice as he stepped into the room, arms spread wide, gut spilling out of his tuxedo jacket. “I had mine in the VFW hall. Throw me that other ball.”

Frank had grown steadily bigger over the past fourteen years so that he now weighed close to three hundred pounds. Lexis was pretty certain that the more of himself there was, the more he liked it. He still started every morning with a ten-minute gaze into the bathroom mirror, stretching back his lips to examine his teeth and toying with the thick curly locks that had recently gone gray at the temples. Allen took another ball from the table and threw a whistling spiral across the room to Frank. The ball smacked loudly into Frank’s hands but he held on.

“See that?”

Lexis dusted off the front of her dress and adjusted her two-karat diamond earrings. Frank tossed the ball back and took a long velvet box out of his coat pocket.

“I got this for you,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thank you,” she said. She had stopped telling him that she didn’t want any more jewelry years ago. It was a diamond necklace highlighted by a five-karat teardrop pendant.

“Thank you, Frank.”

“Hey,” he said, hugging her to him, then letting her go as she pushed away. “I’m not just a great father, you know.”

Lexis forced a smile.

The band began to play and the room soon filled up. Other big men in tuxedos with red ties and cummerbunds. Women with screechy voices, Brooklyn accents, high hair, and high heels. Frank’s business associates. Low-level politicians. Bookies. Judges. Some of Lexis’s friends from the board of the Guggenheim.

Lexis turned from her friend Marge to hear Frank greeting his old friend Bob Rangle. Rangle wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a gray silk tie. His long hands were clutched together and carefully manicured. He’d grown a neat thin mustache, maybe to make up for the gleaming baldness that shone through the long strands of hair swept over the top of his head. His frame was still straight, tall, and angular, and he seemed to have become infected with the same disease that caused his wife to walk with an arch in her back and her chin in the air.

“Sorry Dani couldn’t be here,” Rangle said, referring to his twelve-year-old daughter. “She had a sleepover. It’s hard enough to get Katie to a function on Sunday afternoon, but when I told her the governor was coming…”

Beside him stood Katie Vanderhorn, his tall wife. Old-money New York. Still pretty with her long auburn hair despite the heavy makeup, crow’s feet, and a nose that was so straight surgery wasn’t even a question.

“I just read his book,” she said, “otherwise, I promise you I wouldn’t be that interested.”

“Is that friend of yours from Merrill Lynch, Michael Blum, coming, do you know?” Frank asked.

“He said he’d try, Frank,” Rangle said, looking at his gold Piaget Emperador.

“You’d think having the governor here says something,” Frank said.

“In the world of finance, relationships are important,” Rangle said, squinting his close-set dark eyes at two loud men hugging and slapping each other’s back.

“There’s Joe Namath over there,” Frank said, pointing.

The Rangles’ faces went blank.

“You should try the cold lobster,” Lexis said, motioning toward the ice sculpture of a football player rising up in the middle of the hors d’oeuvre table.

“Thank you, dear,” Katie said, and off they went.

“God, he’s a flaming asshole,” Frank said. “But if I can get that financing…