She got it just right. And that wasn’t easy, because the last time he got in a cab with her and she decided where they went he wound up having to kick the asses of two guys and getting more than a little whupped himself. She picked a place just off Chinatown, and it took so long to get there in the cab that by the time they walked in he was too drunk on a bottle of Jack they bought that he couldn’t read the name on the door. It had a name on the door, which clocked up more points still, and he got let in without a cover charge and wearing a T-shirt with a hole in it.
He was laughing as they fell into the ladies’ room together, actually laughing, with his girlfriend and his kid maybe dead and gone and the undercover cop who was going to put him in a fucking jail cell for a decade hanging off his arm, doing coke off the counter under the mirror, not bothering to watch if she did it, too.
They went out onto the floor together and every woman in the place was looking at him, and maybe word got around that Andy was his sister or something, because those women were slipping into his arms and grinding their hips on his and running their hands up his chest and through his hair and Andy was doing nothing at all about it.
She’d been right, of course, about the dancing. He could move it. Okay so he hadn’t, in years, no more than to twirl Luna around the kitchen; half because she was the mother of a three-year-old and staying out past ten was her idea of a nightmare, and half because if the guys found out they’d never let him hear the end of it. He’d picked it up somewhere, in some foster home maybe or some school, the footwork, and the rest of it was just having a firm grip on the girl and having eyes only for her.
Andy kept handing him drinks and he kept sinking them, and once or twice he looked over and saw her dancing with some guy, and the rage flickered in him, right in the middle of his chest, like something knocking on his sternum, asking to be let out. And Jesus Christ, could she move it, too. What she was doing was nothing picked up at a school or in a home; it was slithery and wet and wicked and only worked when she paired up with another woman, because men couldn’t move like that. And so she did, a bunch of times. The women came for her like they were coming for him, out of nowhere, beautiful girls with long hair. He went to the bar and stood there and watched because he had to, Jesus he had to, and Andy and this one girl worked each other so deeply and so seriously that the girl went for it and gripped Andy’s head and planted an unexpected kiss right on her mouth. Nobody saw it coming. Not Andy, or Ben, or the girl herself, and suddenly the three of them were laughing about it, pink and purple light washing over them, the coke shimmering through his brain and making everything glow with hope.
Andy slipped between him and the bar and dragged his arm around her waist, and he bent around her and smelled her neck and hair and pressed his hard cock against her ass because he couldn’t figure out who the hell he was supposed to be right now, her partner or her victim, the good guy or the bad guy. It was badness that was in him; hurt and anger at himself for forgetting all about Luna in this moment, guilt about the things Andy didn’t yet know about him, fear that she did, in fact, know them and had something terrible in her pocket for him now or in the next minute or the one after that. The music was suddenly so loud he could barely hear his own voice. Had to yell into her ear.
“Is this real, or not?”
She turned and looked at him. He was still pressed against her. She wasn’t moving away. Had her arms around his waist, in fact. Ben felt like every cell in his body was on fire. Fever hot, pouring sweat. That sweat mixing with hers.
She was about to answer him when the fucking bartender set up her drinks. Two tequila shots. They threw them back. He thought he caught something in her eye over the top of her glass, a menacing glint that made all the sweat grow cold at once.
When she led him toward the door he followed and wondered what the hell she had waiting out there for him this time; a street full of cops, guns pointed at his face?
He lost time between the bar and the cab, the cab and some random corner where she ordered the taxi driver to pull over and got out. He stood in the cold of the wind off the river and waited, watching rats, while she slid into some cramped and brightly lit bodega. He had his hands stuffed in his pockets, the breeze bringing uncomfortable levels of sobriety into him. They walked and she lit a cigarette, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her smoke before. Was this real? Not just the feel of her body in the bar, but all of it; the cigarette and her hand wandering down his arm and gripping his hand. He was looking for another cab when something in the lay of the land snapped him back into reality. New York did that to him sometimes. Aligned itself in a particular way like a Magic Eye, the buildings, the angles; this sparkling souvenir shop and that Dunkin’ Donuts popping out of the flatness and reminding him of his place on the map. He stopped dead in the street, felt like he’d been hit with a battering ram in the chest.
“What?”
Ben looked at her. Dropped her hand. Smiled.
“Amazing,” he said. He actually laughed. “Amazing, Andy.”
“What?”
“Don’t give me that.” He kept walking. Because fuck it: if she wanted to do this now, he’d do it. “This is the street. Up here, on the corner. The Book Bonanza. You think I don’t know where we are right now? We’re a hundred yards from the Willstone murder scene.”
She followed, should have had that look on her face like she’d been caught out but didn’t. He walked right into the side street, stood waiting for her to join him, looking up at the building etched across the yellow-clouded night sky. There were lights on up there. Ben didn’t know which window was the Singaporean gangster’s place, and which belonged to the apartment where they’d put out the kitchen fire.
“Okay, so I’m here.” Ben turned to Andy. “Lay it on me. Tell me how it went down. Or do you want me to do that? Huh? Because that’s the whole point of this. You get me drunk and you bring me here and you see what happens. Okay. Sure. Better get your phone out, Andy, or whatever your fucking name is. Here I am, this is me. I’m coming through this door here. The whole crew is. Me, Jake, Engo, Matt. We’re wheeling a big fucking safe we just stole down on a trolley.”
He went to the big steel fire door at the back of the apartment building, banged on it with his fist, pantomimed pushing a trolley. Andy was standing by, her arms folded, the cigarette poking out from between her fingers, trailing smoke across her unreadable eyes.
“Here we go.” Ben acted out the maneuvering of the safe to the back of the van. “We’re loading up the van. Jesus Christ, fellas! I sure hope we’re not walked up on by a fucking cop right now. That would be crazy, right? Oh, shit, there’s one!”
He pointed at Andy’s chest, his arm outstretched, three fingers fashioned into the shape of a gun.
“Bang, bang.”
A slow smile crept over Andy’s face. He knew what it was about, could tell from the deep sadness that was badly disguised behind it. Because his angry little reenactment included a couple of things she’d been watching for. The positioning. The angles. Where Willstone had been standing. Which end of the street he came from. The two shots—not three, not one—that had taken him out. Ben stood there fuming and waited for her to ask him how he knew all these particulars, whether he’d heard them on the first responders’ grapevine or guessed them wildly or knew them because it was him. Because all this time she’d been lying in bed next to a cold-blooded cop-killing monster, the night hours ticking away and the beats of their two hearts getting in sync; one Colgate white and one black as tar. And she didn’t ask him. Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to shatter that vision of him that she had, as a hero, a firefighter, a scared and grieving boyfriend and wannabe daddy, a good brother, a criminal, yeah, but an otherwise okay kinda guy.
And not a bad man.
Because whoever had ended Ivan Willstone’s life, everything that he was and could have been, in this lonely, empty street was one of the bad ones. One of the unredeemable ones. Maybe Andy didn’t really want to know that about him. Maybe she liked him enough, not in the fantasy they’d constructed but in the real world, to not want to know.
His phone rang. Matt.
“Are you with Andy?”
Ben looked at her. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I’m trying to save myself a phone call, dumbass,” Matt huffed. “Fifty-four’s got a car rammed into a shopfront on the Square. They’re calling a 10-18 for nearby stations in case it becomes something.”
“I’m drunk as shit, Matt.”
“Did I ask you how you were?”
Matt hung up. Ben started walking to the end of the street without looking to see if Andy was following. A cab was waiting outside a hotel. Ben waved. They slid into the cab together, saying nothing, and he looked out the window and felt numb; no annoyance about the return-to-quarters call that was probably nothing, or trepidation that it might turn into something. The fury from the street behind the bookstore was gone. The hard-on from the nightclub was gone. He might have been sharing a cab with a stranger at that moment for all he felt, and that was bad, because on a completely emotionless level he knew that she was the most dangerous person he’d ever shared a cab with in his life.
Engo was climbing out of his car in the back parking lot of the station. Jake was sitting on his hood, smoking. As the cab pulled away, Ben was walking between them toward the back doors, eyes ahead, looking for Matt.
He heard Andy yelp first. Ben turned in the gravel and caught a glimpse of her in Jake’s arms before Engo snaked his arm around Ben’s neck from behind and wrenched him backward and all he saw was sky. Ben recognized the squeeze. Engo had tried to put it on him before. Kung fu shit. Ben even knew, on the same cold, rational plane his brain had been traveling along, how to get out of it. Twist sideways. Go for the balls. He even had enough mental power left underneath the booze to remember the sore or weak arm Engo had, the one he noticed yesterday or whenever it was. And yet his world folded in on itself, and slammed shut like a laptop, with only Matt’s heavy approaching footfall in the gravel and his words to whisper away his consciousness as Engo pinched his jugular off like a garden hose.
“Her in the back. Him in the trunk.”