Afterburn

Near Thirteenth Street and Tenth Avenue, Manhattan September 21, 1999

To do nothing is to do something. So say the Colombians, had said Tony Verducci, and now Rick was using the Colombians against Tony himself. He was doing nothing, and doing it very carefully, thank you. The truck sat in the garage across the street from his gym on Lafayette, parked not in the grease-pocked basement but on the grease-pocked second floor, all arrangements there made with a Russian guy who'd left a few teeth back in Moscow and just nodded when Rick explained his deal. Russian guys in New York saw the world in a certain way; they believed that the true path was the corrupt one. He parked parallel to the pigeon-smeared windows fronting the avenue so he could watch the street below or, alternatively, use the StairMaster in the front of the gym and check out who might be up on the second floor of the garage looking at his truck. Moreover, the gym-blending and synergizing its functions like any respectable up-to-date capitalistic enterprise-sold workout clothes, juices, protein-rich sandwiches, muscle-building candy bars, and powdered supplements with labels that said these statements not evaluated by the food and drug administration; Rick could exercise, watch the truck, shower, use a toilet, and buy lunch all in the same place. He didn't really blend in with the yuppie kickboxers and the black guys with Chinese symbols tattooed down their arms, and the women in their sports bras huffing importantly on the chrome-plated treadmills, trying to pretend that they weren't checking anyone out, especially black guys with Chinese symbols on their arms. He spoke with no one, instead pacing his way from one machine to the next, the towel around his neck, stepping past the worthies peddling away on their exercise bicycles while touch-screening through the Internet. Overhead hung dozens of television screens, and nearly every day the gym hosted either a photo shoot or a movie scene. No one cared, not in New York. Entertainment merely provided a creation-consumption loop that hurried doom forward, and people earnestly wished to escape their awareness of the ironic nature of things. Sweating away their media saturation even as they watched the Dow flicker up and down, while outside summer finally gave way to fall. He missed his garden, his sunflowers bowing toward the earth, their season's performance done, fat seeds dropping like tears. But that's not where I am right now, Rick told himself as he curled a hundred-pound barbell in the mirror, I'm here, I'm getting myself ready. I'm pumping. Already the three or four hours a day were cutting the old edges back onto him. The swollen arms, the flaring back, the armored chest. He was eating with metabolic aggressiveness, too. Protein for muscle mass, stacked carbs for energy.

Doing nothing was taking a lot of that energy, however. Christina wasn't just visiting the Jim-Jack but working there, he'd discovered, and at noon on the last two days he'd strolled to the corner of Bleecker and Broadway and hungrily bought lunch at the dollar-hot-dog place, where, if the sun was not too bright, he could look across the Broadway traffic and see her waiting on customers. Just a glance. Carrying the food, the bean burrito plate, the stir-fry vegetables, the Coke-no-ice. How he wanted to walk right in. Sit up at the bar, wait for her to come over to him. Hey, babe. She'd look away. If she bothered to look back, he'd just fall into her eyes. But it was a bad idea. They wouldn't be able to talk. He'd get only silence and its accusations. No, he needed to find a way to let her know that he was around. That he was different now. Maybe meet for dinner. Very civilized, dinner. The streets at night were full of people peering at menus in windows and then stepping in for the candlelight and salmon grown in a bucket. That appealed to him, and he thought it would appeal to Christina, too. They could talk about who they'd been in those years past, how things had gone bad. He'd take responsibility for everything, he'd apologize, he'd tell her he'd help her out with money, he'd be a fucking prince. Talk about his time out on the East End, the ocean, the barn, his garden, his romantic windblown cottage. And let's go to the SoHo Grand Hotel tonight.

But not yet. Instead, he would eat his hot dog and force himself to turn away. Then he'd take an hour to get back to the truck, making sure no one followed him-which was the other reason he had not yet stepped across the street into the Jim-Jack. He was being followed. Definitely. Not all the time, not even regularly, and not by the same person. Somebody a block behind him, matching his stride. You turn around and they're looking into a window. A man staring at a drugstore window. What's in a fucking drugstore window? You turn around and it's a woman messing in her purse. Women in New York don't look through their purses on the street. Or a taxi repainted green passing too slowly. He felt presences, disturbances in the field, just as he'd felt them five years ago, one time on Crosby Street below Houston, when he'd gotten a bad feeling, kicked the van into reverse, flown against traffic a block, hit the avenue, then abandoned the van and its full load of CD players next to the Grand Street subway stop, where he'd cooled a D train to Brooklyn and from there hopped one of the casino buses to Atlantic City. Won money there, too.

He'd left the truck in the new garage the whole time, keeping it locked, wedging matches in the cracks of the doors. The cops could open any kind of vehicle if they felt like it, especially an old truck, and Tony Verducci had a guy who did that, too. Regular job as a mechanic, but ran a twenty-four-hour beeper service, would open any car anytime so long as the money smiled. When Rick returned to the truck after the gym, he'd circle it, seeing if any of the matches had fallen out. He needed every advantage. Patterns, Paul had warned. He was trying to get inside a pattern that protected him. What was he waiting for? A good question. He was killing time, waiting for the bell to go off, waiting to know.

Then, on the third day, a windy and warm afternoon that fluttered the shoe-sale fliers out of the overflowing Broadway trash cans, he noticed Christina step out of the Jim-Jack. She slipped on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Even across the traffic he could feel her attitude. Oh, baby, kill me now, he told himself, get it over with. You didn't score a smile too often from Christina, but when you did and she held your gaze, then all manner of indecencies were proposed, approved, and scheduled. Her eyes said, It's just a matter of time, boy. Until then, why don't you keep your hand out of your pants? She carried a paper shopping bag from one of the big bookstore chains. Head down, she crossed at the light on the other side of the street and stalked past him in her jeans and thick-heeled boots. He remembered the bite of hot dog in his mouth and swallowed. Did she always move her butt like that? He watched the other men notice her. But he could also tell she didn't want to be bothered. She'd been on her feet for hours, drunk too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, wanted to get at her books. He eased out to the street, began to follow her. Now is the time, he told himself, now.

She walked briskly, cutting north on the Bowery two blocks, then east again on East Fourth Street. He followed from half a block away, his neck and armpits getting sweaty, darting in and out of the shadowed awnings of the bodegas and hardware shops and other marginal businesses along the avenues, then up and down and behind the stoops on the streets. A couple of junkies enjoying the sun inquired as to his propensity to invest in a shopping cart full of copper cable stolen from the subways. He waved them off. Nice neighborhood she lived in. Half the buildings looked ready to collapse. He glanced back anxiously and saw no one following. No cars easing down the street, no one trailing down the block behind him on either side. He continued after her. He considered running up to her, surprising her. Christina, it's me, Rick. He could almost do it. But she was thinking about good things. It was in her shoulders, her neck, the way she was making the hot wind catch her hair. Maybe Paul's wife is right, maybe she met somebody already, some guy giving her beef injections. Don't get mad about it, he told himself, be cool. Do the cool thing. She stopped and fished into her bag, went inside a blue apartment building. She's doing okay, he thought, she's got a place. He eased up the other side of the block, staying at an acute angle to the building so that if she had windows onto the street she couldn't see him.

He'd check the mailboxes. He stepped up to the building and cupped his hand against the glass of the front door. Not much: a long tiled hallway, dim, littered with giveaway newspapers and takeout restaurant menus, the lip of a stairwell protruding past the plane of the hallway. On the intercom, the apartments were tagged 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 2A, 2B, 2C, and so on. He inspected the name tags. Christina's was not there. But five of the apartments had no identification on them; although it was possible that she was living under someone else's name, hers was probably one of these unknown ones: 3A, 4C, 5D, 6C, 6D. And, he noticed, these were generally higher apartments, perhaps toward the rear, if the front apartments were A and B. He stepped back across the street and examined the building. Six floors, four windows across each floor. From the differences in curtains and window plants, he guessed that the four windows were split between two apartments. Two apartments front, two back. The front apartments were the more desirable, which meant that it was less likely that Christina was in one of them. The pattern of the absence of name tags corroborated this. The less desirable apartments would have a higher turnover rate, and therefore be more likely to be either unoccupied or so recently occupied that no one had put a name on the intercom yet or, last, occupied by the type of people who did not want their presence announced on the front of the building. Perhaps.

Or perhaps he was full of shit for trying to have X-ray vision.

He waited long enough that anyone climbing to the top floor would have reached it. No one came to any of the windows. He waited longer. The angle of the sun changed. He noticed that the apartments had various makes of air conditioner. Fucking air conditioners, the whole reason Christina went to prison in the first place. My fault, he told himself, it was my fault she got arrested. A trailer full of lousy air conditioners and she spends four years in prison.

He returned his attention to the building. The difference in the makes of the air conditioners probably meant the landlord hadn't provided them. Bought by the tenants. This, in turn, suggested that each apartment had its own electric meter, since no landlord in his right mind would provide air conditioners for apartments that were not metered. A big air conditioner pulled more juice than a washing machine. Both front apartments on the third floor had air conditioners in the window, nice ones, which, again assuming that the A and B apartments were the front ones, meant that Christina did not live in 3A, the sole untagged apartment on the third floor. That left the four untagged apartments on the top three floors. He could ring the untagged ones and see if she answered. This he did: 4C offered no response; 5D was answered by a little girl saying, "Mom, Dad also wants cigarettes"; 6C provoked a bout of godawful coughing and then one word, "?Si?"; with 6D there was no answer at all.

He retreated across the street, frustrated but also nervous that someone might be watching him. If anyone had successfully followed him, they would be very interested in Rick's behavior. Three more minutes, he told himself. He noticed that the window on 5A or 5B was all the way open and a towel rested on the ledge, something pink peeking over the side. Drying in the sun. Pink, maybe underwear. That could be Christina. She wouldn't be wasting her tip cash on dryers in a Laundromat if she could help it. But this was a front apartment, which did not conform to his speculations.

He crossed the street again and checked the name tag on 5A. It read M. Williams. 5B was marked H. Ramirez. He backed up onto the street. Now the underwear window opened. A woman's left foot stretched out, waggled in the air. Drying the nail polish. Christina? The foot disappeared. If he knew her, then the other foot would soon-there it was! Yes! Waggling, toes pointed! Her lovely little foot, size eight; he'd spent at least three thousand bucks on shoes for her over the years. She was in there doing her nails. Was that apartment 5A or 5B? He pushed 5B. No answer. He pushed again. Nothing. He darted out of the vestibule and looked up. The feet were still there. He returned to the vestibule and rang 5A. He jumped out of the vestibule and looked up. The feet were gone from the window.

"Yes?" came her irritated voice from the intercom.

Rick looked at the mailbox. "Mr. Ramirez?"

"That's 5B," Christina said.

"Okay."

"Try reading," she added.

Try not to be your old bitchy self, Rick thought triumphantly, even though I love it. But now he was stuck in the vestibule. If she looked out the window, she'd see him. He eased out the front door. The feet were back, both paddling the air softly. Let's go, Rick, you got what you needed. He slipped down the street a block, two, the sweat seeping through his shirt, then slowed. His plan was working. He had money, he'd pulled himself together, he'd found her. Now he wanted to think about the approach. You had to consider what kind of life she had now. Building her existence back up. He was standing there, with his hand in his pocket, playing with his dick. Stop thinking about the sex, Rick. What would Paul do? Paulie would say, If you have to approach her, if you really must do it, then do it with a clear head. Don't be thinking about sex or love or forgiveness. She'll see that right away. She'll know you're thinking about yourself and not her, and she'll tell you to get the hell out of her life. The thing is a long shot anyway, so why not play it right? He needed to make himself ready for her. If he was going to talk and to listen, then he couldn't be thinking about the other thing.

An hour later, standing in an apartment building on East Fifty-second Street, not so far from the UN, he peered into a security camera and announced his name.

"You have an appointment?" crackled a woman's voice through the intercom.

"Yes, I just called."

"Just a moment."

He'd found one of the advertisements and called from a pay phone. They told you to go to a certain corner, to another pay phone, and to call again for further instructions, which he had just done.

"What's the name again?"

"Rick."

The buzzer sounded and he pushed through the door and climbed three flights of stairs. Another door, another buzzer, and he stepped into a reception lounge. The bouncer sitting on a sofa across the room glanced up, didn't like the size of Rick, and stood.

"Hey," Rick said, "it's cool."

"May I ask your name?" asked a woman behind a window.

"Rick."

"We need a complete name and a major credit card."

He handed her the American Express card that Paul had given him.

"Okay."

"How does that appear on the bill?" he asked.

"It goes down as a travel agency."

"Good." Paul didn't need to know.

She nodded at the bouncer. He came over and patted Rick down. "He's okay."

"We have a lot of very nice girls."

He doubted that this was true, for if they were nice girls, then what were they doing here? He was buzzed through a second door into a larger room decorated in leather and chrome. Seven girls, each wearing a bathing suit and high heels, sat around in oversized chairs, reading the paper or watching the television. The room smelled like Chinese takeout.

"I need two," Rick told the woman, noticing the hallway that led to a series of rooms, each of which had a red door.

"Two? We can do that. Who do you-"

"You pick," Rick sighed. "I just need two."

She started to tell him that he had to pay her the house charge and each girl negotiated her own fee.

"Fine, fine." The whole tab came to nine hundred bucks. "Put it all on the card."

She looked him up and down. "I think I better give you LaMoyna. You don't mind a black girl?"

"It's fine."

"Some men don't want the black girls, they get intimidated."

"It's fine."

"The other girl's going to be Kirby," she said as if picking for him a kindergarten partner.

"Kirby?"

"It's one of those California girls' names."

THE BLACK GIRL had enormous breasts that had long ago proven the existence of gravity and a skin problem he didn't understand. The small blond girl's hair reached her waist. Tiny shoulders, tiny ass. Lips like boiled shrimp. He felt attracted to neither.

"What do you want, sweetie?" asked the black girl, leading him by the hand to the room, her blue robe open, its belt trailing along the floor. Her feet had heavy calluses, the skin dry and cracked.

"I want to switch off, back and forth," he answered.

The bed was large and clean, with sheets but no blanket.

"You want us to do the switching or you to do the switching?"

"I don't care."

"What's the other gal supposed to do when she not doing you?"

"I don't care." He wondered if maybe he should just leave. "Have fun," he answered. "Have fun with me, have fun with each other."

"Sort of just mix it up, like?"

"Yeah, fine." They asked him if he would put some drinks on his tab and he said fine and they made a call.

"You paid for two hours?" asked the black girl.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

He shrugged apologetically. "Seemed right."

"We gone wear you out sooner than that, guy."

A knock at the door. Another girl came in with a tray of drinks and a bottle.

"We ordered kind of a lot," giggled Kirby. "Okay?"

"That's fine."

The girl with the tray waited. He got up and handed her a ten.

"You don't talk much, do you?" Kirby teased.

"I can talk."

"Come here, I have to check you out."

He walked over to the black girl, and she turned on a lamp next to the bed and pulled him close to the light. She slipped a thumb under the elastic of his underwear and pulled it down.

"You're all folded up." She moved the light closer. "Like one of those accordions." She pulled at him until he began to fill a bit. He breathed in through his nose. "There, now we can see." She pointed to a raised circular scar, ran her thumb over it. "What's this?"

"Cigarette burn."

"Mmmn, what happened, baby?"

"A girl burned me there with her cigarette."

"She was mad at you?"

"Very mad."

She continued to work him, her fingers tight. She knew what she was doing and he closed his eyes. "Didn't want you sticking this in somebody else?"

"Right."

"Kirby, this going to be a problem?"

The blond girl came over, looked. "Yes." She smiled at Rick. "But I kind of like this guy."

"You play football?" LaMoyna asked. "You remind me of that guy, some guy who came in here, said he played for the New York Jets."

"I played in high school, that's all."

While the women finished their drinks, he went to the window and watched the traffic three stories below. The sky looked heavy, rain coming. On the sidewalk an old man consulted his watch, walked a few steps, glanced at his watch again. At the corner a woman in a yellow dress stood holding the hand of a small boy, waiting for the light to change.

Just do this and clear your head, Rick told himself.

Eighty minutes later, the black girl announced, "My time now."

"Not yet," cried the blond girl.

"No, no, it's my time now."

He heard these things but as if from a great distance. The black girl was whacking him on the ass playfully, so he got off the blonde, who immediately curled into a ball and rolled onto her side. The black girl spread her legs and presented him with a full beard, two dark lips, and something that could almost be the pink tip of a tongue. I've only studied four things in my life, he thought to himself as he shoved in, I have studied how to steal big things, how to get fish into a boat, how to lift weights, and how to fuck. Only the fishing is good for society. With each topic you studied it and then it got frustrating and then you unexpectedly learned more. With fucking, if you could keep from ejaculating for the first half hour, you passed into a zone where you could get the real work done. This was where he was now. He was driving the black girl hard, as hard as he wished, but with no rising pleasure for himself. Just driving, minute after minute. Her head was thrown back, eyes shut, and when he pushed, her brow furrowed. She made little analytical grunts. The bigger the thrust, the more animated and inflected the grunt. "Huh. Hu- uh uh." It might have been pain but it wasn't. She hooked her legs up over his shoulders and ran her hands over his thighs like someone dreamily feeling the finish on a new car. The cadence was steady and she had a moment to recover before he went back in, and every three or four strokes her cunt rippled out the air being pushed in. It was an embarrassing, flatulent noise, but they were well beyond that now; questions of embarrassment and identity and power and race and who is the President of the United States and what day of the week is it had all been obliterated by the idiot donkey machine of lust, to which he was helplessly shackled, waiting for it to release him, not yet ready for it to release him, and so he drew a breath that cleared his wind-he was running six or seven miles on the treadmill these days-and kept on, not knowing why exactly, and the black girl rolled her head left and right on the pillow, talking to herself in a demented, hallucinatory whisper, her lip caught up in an angry sneer, her tongue tasting the sweat dripping off his chest, and sometimes her right hand would ride up and down the thick pillar of his arm, squeezing or shaking it, and other times she made a fist and punched his chest in weak protest, frowning with her eyes closed, as if to press wordless unanswerable questions upon him. Why are you doing this to me? Why do I want you to? How do I know you and how do you know me? And then she would give up the interrogatory and lapse back into herself, her hand falling back against the pillow. He glanced over at the blond girl, who had slowly lifted herself to her hands and knees, perhaps to crawl off the bed and go pee, and that-that sight of her, unthinking of him, lost in her own vulnerable moment-was what he wanted. He wanted her disinterest in him. He wanted to destroy it. His mouth filled with spit. He pushed away from the black girl, who covered her breasts and moaned in relief, and then he grabbed the blond girl from behind with two hands, one on each hipbone, and dragged her back across the bed toward him. "I can't again," she cried, arms above her head, "I'm sorry." He didn't care-no, not at all, too bad, nothing to do about it-and she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds, and he lifted her and stuck her on himself, and for a moment she was a screaming rag doll, thrashing and weeping and fighting him. Then he pushed her legs farther apart with his knees and lay down fully on and well up into her. She spread flat on the bed, hands outstretched on either side. He slid his arms under her to support himself, which let her breathe better, and when she felt his thumb near her mouth, she seized it with her teeth and sucked on it spitefully, whimpering and biting him as he rode up into her, mashing himself at the end of each thrust. Maybe I can hold this, he thought, but she began to wiggle her tight little ass against his weight, forcing her own renegade rhythm against his, tightening herself, defying him his control of himself, and then she wrenched one of her arms free and thrust it under her belly and past where he was going into her, stretching her fingers so that her fingernails raked his balls from underneath, and that and her defiant butt-wiggling made the nerves in his face go funny, and he went at her, went maximum, clutching her hips as the yard-long rope was pulled from him, gobbing and spasmed, and then, breath shrinking, his mind was blanketed by softness.

His desire was dead, his hatred gone.

The blond girl pushed her way out from beneath him. "That hurt, you fucker."

But the black woman laughed. "Nah, Kirby, I seen you, that hurt good."

The blond girl smiled. "Yeah, but I can't fucking walk."

But he was not listening. He wanted only to put on his clothes and step out into the late afternoon. His mind was clear. It had worked-perfectly, in fact. He was ready to talk to Christina now. He'd shower at the gym and have a cup of coffee, get a new shirt out of the truck, then walk over to her building and press the M. Williams buzzer and be able to speak to her. Without fear, with clearness.

He sat up with his underwear and pants. The blond girl left, keeping the door open. He found his shirt and socks. The black girl lit a cigarette. She cupped her left breast and lifted it, examining the sweaty crease beneath it.

"What're you looking for?" Rick asked as he pulled on a boot.

"I get these things, they called skin-tags. From the rubbing. These little pieces of-" She looked up and took a sharp breath. "Do something for you fellows?"

Her voice was different and Rick turned.

Three men stood in the doorway. The short one sported a silky green baseball jacket, argyle socks, and good shoes. The other two, each almost Rick's size, wore double-breasted suits.

"You must be Rick," said the one in the green jacket. "My name's Morris."

"You are-?" he began.

"You know who we are, Rick." He pointed a soft pink finger. "Get your other boot on there, no hurry." He looked at the girl. "Pardon us, miss," he said with gentle authority, "we don't wish to compromise you."

She didn't move. "Where's Jason at?"

"He's out there."

She was trying not to look scared. "Bring me Jason in here and I'll get out of bed."

Morris nodded to the older man in the suit.

I can't jump out of the window, Rick thought, too high.

The bouncer came into the room and picked up a blue robe. "Let's go, baby."

LaMoyna threw back the covers and stood regally as the bouncer held the robe. She wasn't beautiful. The other men waited impassively, as if for a train they knew always to be late. Morris unzipped his jacket and opened his wallet.

"Miss," he said to her, "this is for your trouble." He handed her a new one-hundred-dollar bill. He pulled out another, gave it to the bouncer. "You're a champ."

Rick stood. The two other men stepped forward and put handcuffs on him. Morris motioned toward the door. "Let's go. Just a bunch of guys, right?"

"Right," whispered Rick, his voice grieving.

They were not cops. With cops there was a lot of sitting around. Things need to get written down, and someone always has a radio. They walked him down the stairs without speaking and outside to a taxi repainted green. In the backseat, the two big men sat next to him. Morris drove. Two large carpenter's toolboxes were stacked on the passenger seat.

"Hey," Rick breathed out, "just tell me."

"We'll talk when we get there," Morris answered. "Just relax, it's all fine. Really, this is not a big deal."

"You work for Tony?"

"Yes, that would be correct." Morris turned down Second Avenue. The rain had started. He looked at Rick in the rearview mirror. "These other guys are Tommy, to your left, and Jones."

Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of an old factory off Tenth Avenue downtown. Rain battered the windshield and they waited in the car, steaming up the windows. His wrists hurt from the handcuffs. A wet dog nosed through some garbage next to a brick wall.

"He's got a little greyhound in him," Morris said. "You can tell by the curved back."

"He's just starving," said Jones.

"I don't think so." Morris opened the driver's door and whistled. The dog's ears jerked and he looked up. Morris whistled again, but the dog trotted away.

"Tommy, grab this other box, please."

They got out in the rain and this time Jones had a hand behind Rick. Tommy carried one box, Morris the other, each heavy.

The door that Morris unlocked was rusted at the bottom from men pissing there, but the lock was expensive and new, Rick noticed. They walked heavily up one flight of cement stairs and across a ruined wooden floor the size of a basketball court. Enough light came in through the yellowy, broken-pieced windows high up on the wall that Rick could see the room had lost function upon function, been inhabited, vacated, and reinhabited, only to be vacated again, the screw-holes in the floor from one grid of machinery superimposed upon the previous, the activity leaving a crazy quilt of paint-gun stencil edges, rub patterns, oil seepings. Failure and disinterest. Bat-shit drop-dripped on all the ledges. A room no one remembered, a room no one needed. In the gloomy far corner a mattress had gone rotten, spilling a soft pile of foam. Next to it a clatter of bottles, a pile of ghost's clothes.

In the corner stood a worktable, three chairs, and some clip-on work lights.

"Okay," said Morris. "We want you on the table. Sit up."

"Like the doctor's office," noted Tommy.

Morris unzipped his silk baseball jacket and folded it over the back of one of the chairs. He had a doughy body in a green sports shirt. "I'll be asking some questions, Rick. You're okay with that, right?"

Rick nodded, sitting awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. Tommy was looking inside one of the big toolboxes.

"Where is she?" Morris asked. "This Christina Welles." He smiled. "I'm sort of interested in meeting her, keep hearing things about her."

"She's something," Rick agreed, watching Tommy pull out a long heavy-duty extension cord.

"So…" Morris waited. "Will you please tell us where she is?"

"I don't know."

Morris fiddled with a ring on his finger-a wedding ring, Rick noticed.

"I admit I've been looking for her," he went on. "I think she's in the neighborhood down in the Village somewhere, but…" He shrugged. "I think I'm close."

Morris slipped his gold watch off his wrist and put it in his front pants pocket. "You're close, you think?"

"Yeah."

"How close?"

"I'm getting there, you know."

"Right." Morris pointed at the toolbox. "Tommy, I want the quarter-inch."

"Wait, wait," Rick said quickly.

They held him down and Morris started the drill.

"Wait, wait!" He struggled but Tommy calmly poked the barrel of a. 38 in his eye and he froze. "Okay, okay."

Morris stopped the drill, let it whine down. "Okay, what?"

He was panting, neck suddenly hot. "Okay. Fine. So let's talk."

Morris stared at Rick now. "You're sure?"

"Yes."

"Everything is cool?"

"Yes."

"Shall I put my watch back on?"

"Why not?"

They were still holding him down. "I usually take it off, see."

"No, no," said Rick, understanding now, "you can put it back on."

"Okay," said Morris. "In a second."

The drill started suddenly and Rick felt it go straight through his left boot, a hot nail plunging down through his foot, come out the bottom as he screamed, get caught in the sole of his boot, be yanked out.

"Fuck! Fuck! Okay, okay!"

They let him go and he curled up mournfully, clutching his boot with his shackled hands. Blood oozed up through the hole in the leather. He pressed his fingers against the hole. Paul, I need you, he thought.

Morris was holding the drill in front of him, the red bit whining to a stop. "We're serious here, Rick." He handed the drill to Tommy and took out his watch and slipped it back on. "We have something to accomplish."

"Right, right," cried Rick, squeezing his foot. "Okay, I get it. Really."

Morris removed a paper from his breast pocket. Rick's foot felt tight inside his boot. Swelling already. It hurt to move his toes. A bone feeling, pieces not fitting right. You're going to be okay, he told himself, you are. This is just to scare you.

"I got these worked out in an order," Morris began. "Give us the answer and we'll all get out of here soon as we can." He put a tape recorder on the table. "First thing, please tell me everything you know about Christina's method of encryption that you and she used."

"Okay." Rick tried to control his breathing, hoping to sound cooperative. "We had these trucks that we-"

Morris frowned, slipped off his watch, and took the drill from Tommy.

"Fuck, wait! Wait!"

The drill went into the outside of his left ankle, just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. "Oh, God, please," Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. "Oh! Fuck, fuck!" He tried sitting up, and when they punched him he kicked furiously and even bit Jones's palm until Tommy choked him with both hands and he went slack.

The drill burned into his ankle again. "Fuck! Fuck!" He twisted in agony, hollering incoherently.

"You ready?" yelled Morris.

"Yes, yes! I'm ready!"

Morris pulled the drill out, blood spackling Rick's pants and shirt, Morris's arms and face.

He lay rigid on the table, not yet believing it, knowing it was true, his hands shaking as he tried to breathe through his nose to calm down. His ankle felt destroyed. He sat up. Blood filled his boot now. He bent forward and grabbed it, squeezing against the wounds. Right through everything, tendon, bone, the sock. His back was drenched in sweat and he smelled piss. A warm stain spread across his crotch.

"That's fine, just catch your breath." Morris wiped himself off while Tommy held the drill. "Just catch your breath and then tell us, Rick."

Everything except where she is, he decided. Everything but that. I promise you, Christina. They can kill me and I won't say it. "We had trucks," he began, clutching his ankle as tightly as he could. "We had to get into the city… The problem was-this fucking hurts — the problem was the cops had all our phones tapped, which we knew, we could deal with that. Also, maybe the pay phones around our truck dispatch office. We knew we couldn't trust the phones… Also, Tony didn't want to get the cellular phones that encrypt the call, okay? He didn't trust them. So I was explaining this to Christina one day and she said she could come up with a system." He didn't know what he was saying. "Tony kind of liked this idea. But he said he also wanted it done so that as few people as possible had the information. He didn't want to have to know it, because he didn't want to have to give it up, okay? Like that." He moved one hand to his foot wound. "So the system-we worked it out-was this. Let's say it was with Frankie, one of Tony's regular fences-"

"We were busy with Frankie after Christina got arrested."

"So?" Rick cried anxiously.

"So we thought he was the one who did it," said Morris.

"What?" He looked into the faces of Jones and Tommy. Nothing. Men waiting for a late train.

"You don't get it?" Morris asked.

"No." His foot felt stinging, hot. "What? What?"

Morris smoothed the front of his green shirt. "He didn't do it. It took a long time to figure that out."

"What?"

"Like you don't know, or who."

"Who?"

"Maybe you, maybe Christina."

"What? No! No way!"

Morris rubbed the face of his watch. "All right, keep talking."

"The shipments were monthly… we couldn't risk any more than that, we were always trying to be careful. So Christina and the fence had to both know where the shipment was coming in. We had a numbered list of drop-off spots. Warehouses and loading docks that were safe. We were usually using a plain thirty-foot truck, not a tractor trailer, so we could actually get it in during the day, which is actually better, you don't look so fucking suspicious…" He stopped. What else did they want? He pulled the lace out of the shoe of his good foot and tied it tightly around his ankle above the wounds to pinch off the blood flow.

"That's smart," Morris said. "Not too tight, though."

"What we wanted was a way so that Christina and the fence knew which drop-off place. We needed what Christina called a 'random number generator.' That's a real term, you can look it up. The number you got gave you the drop-off place. We needed a way for each to get the number, the same number, without talking to each other. It had to be a public place. That way, if you have guys watching you, all they see is that you're walking around some public place, looking at all the things everybody usually looks at." He felt a little calmer. "What we needed was-Shit, can I at least have something to drink?"

"Tommy, get the man a drink. We got some stuff in the car."

"All right."

"Will you at least put that thing down?" Rick pointed at the drill.

"More talk, Rick, we need more talk."

He nodded in miserable compliance and drew a breath, but not a good one. "Also, it had to be a reasonably big place, because that way Christina and the fence are not close together. So Tony liked the idea, but he said they couldn't go to the same place each time. They had to go to a different place. So Christina had to come up with different public places in the city, in Manhattan, where you could get a random number generated." He looked at the men, told himself to keep talking. Fill up the room with talk, you bastard, and make sure you don't tell them where Christina is. "So what you do is you agree ahead of time what day you're going to both be there looking to get the number. Same day, same exact moment. You also had to have a number that stayed the same for a little while, like at least ten seconds, to account for human error. But you also wanted the number to change pretty frequently, too, so that it would be difficult to catch, so that if Christina was standing in front of the generator for like a minute, then maybe five numbers go by and somebody watching her can't tell which one it is."

"Go on."

"I am, I fucking am," Rick breathed, trying to move his foot. Impossible. Still bleeding, but not dangerously. Tommy returned and handed him a bottle of iced tea. Why was he talking so much? What else would he say? "It's been a few years, you know? So Christina explains this and he says, Fine, but come up with a bunch of different places, I want a way so that you and the fence don't have to talk to each other. So Christina figures that one out, too."

"But how do you know what time to go to the same place?" said Morris. "You got to decide on that every month."

"You could just set it at a regular time… but that makes you predictable. So Christina put a wrinkle in for that, too. You get the time and day from the numbers themselves. You combine the last number with the new number," he remembered out loud. "The last number gives you the hour and the new number gives you the day. So if the old number was three and the new one was four, then you met at three o'clock on the fourth day of the next month to get the next number."

"What about the numeral zero?" Morris looked at his piece of paper. "How do you handle that?"

"Zero was ten. Also, she made a rule that numbers seven through nine were a.m., zero was 10:00 a.m., and numbers one through six were in the afternoon… that way she was always out when lots of other people were around, didn't look strange. Now, with the date, zero was also treated as ten. So that gave you the date of the next meeting. It was always in the first ten days of the month, that way."

"What about the time and date of the drop-off? You can't just make that any old time, with traffic and parking and all. Plus fucking parades and shit."

"That's true. She had some kind of trick for that."

"You could just set a regular time for a particular date, taking into account the traffic for the truck."

"You could," Rick agreed, "but if the same drop-off-place number came up twice in a row, which can happen, then you have the truck appearing in the same place at the same time on the same date two months in a row, which was too risky. No, she had something in there for that, but I can't remember."

Morris consulted his piece of paper. "What about the places where you got the numbers?"

"I remember a few," he said, feeling tired. The pain from the foot wound was indistinguishable from the ankle pain. "One of them was in Penn Station, looking at the train board. Another was that big stock market board they got over on Times Square. Then I think a third was the digital thermometer on the top of the Gulf amp; Western Building, probably the last digit, since that would-"

Morris took off his watch.

"Hey," yelled Rick, "I just gave you everything!"

"You didn't give us Christina."

"I told you, I'm looking for her myself. I'm getting-"

"Drill."

He fought them as hard as he could now, butting with his head, whipping his feet out, but they'd kept his cuffs on, and while Tommy pulled his arms over his head and Jones sat on his feet, Morris touched the drill against Rick's rib cage. He could feel it powdering the bone, vibrating his whole chest.

"Rick," Morris hissed next to his ear. "Come on, be a champ here, tell us where she is, guy."

He breathed as best he could. "I don't know," he cried in misery. "I-wait, I-oh…" Suddenly he found his hatred. "Oh, you cocksuckers can fucking go to hell."

Morris nodded to Tommy and Jones. "The jaw."

He felt their fingers grab his neck and head and shove it down on the old wooden table. He fought with everything he had left, kicking with his good foot, hitting one of them hard in the chest, not even feeling his foot, his rib, but just fighting blindly, fighting against them and his own fear, fighting for the idea of survival, and they snatched his hair and lifted his head up and pounded it against the table and he fell asleep for a moment, and that was when the drill started again and went in and through his unshaven cheek and destroyed one of his upper teeth. The pain burned through into his eye and ear and neck, and he saw hot white lights in his head yet held his mouth open and kept his tongue pressed down to avoid the drill. It stayed in there, whirling blood and tissue inside his mouth, riding back and forth across the destroyed roots of the tooth, killing his head with pain. He may have been screaming, he didn't know. He went limp, eyes shut, mouth filling with blood. Morris pulled out the drill, not cleanly but dragging it over the bottom tooth, and again the pain cabled into Rick's eye socket and pushed outward along the ear canal and even into his nose. He felt air coming in coolly through his cheek. The blood was sticky and warm in his throat, and he tentatively closed his mouth and opened it, tonguing little pieces of tooth against his gum.

" That, I will freely confess," said Morris, "was a mistake."

"Why?" asked Jones.

"You want a guy to talk, you don't drill his mouth."

"Got a point there."

Morris drew close and whispered, his breath metallic, like the side effect of medication. "You're all over the Village, Rick. You been snooping around, looking in shops and talking to people. Right? You think we don't know this?"

"Ha-wait, wait," he breathed thickly. "She probably down there-could be anywhere… I don't know — "

Morris wasn't listening. "Tommy, you pack the ice chest like I told you?"

"In the car."

"Go get it."

"Right."

"Also bring the camera."

"You got it."

"Hey, Rick," Morris said, "you know, she's not worth it, okay? I mean-hey! — we're reasonable people. You tell us, we drop you at the hospital, they patch you up. You're bleeding now, see. You're in a little bit of trouble. Tell us now and it's the emergency room."

He made a noise with his mouth.

"It's not a big problem. It's like five minutes."

His groin felt wet, his head hot. His hands were cold, and he wanted to sleep. Maybe they would take him to the emergency room. Of course. He couldn't really die now, it wasn't time.

Morris started the drill.

Rick shut his eyes. "Jim-Jack," he called, mouth a socket of agony. "Bleeck-er."

"What about it?"

"Work there."

"What days?"

He didn't know, but they would not believe him if he said so. "Mon-day to Sat-day."

"Nights, day?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Downtown-we can pick her up anytime," said Tommy.

"Right." Morris turned back to Rick. He looked at the drill, then started it. "Where's she living?"

"I–I don't-" He didn't want to say it. He was sorry. He was sorry for everything, and he closed his eyes, choking.

"It's coming, I can tell," Morris narrated. "I've seen this."

"I love her… I love that girl!" The drill started near his ear and he began to cry, convulsing in despair at how worthless and weak and broken he was, a nobody afraid of dying. "I loved…" He sobbed shamefully and covered his eyes with his shackled hands.

"No, no, Rick," explained Morris, "not that, not yet, you can't break down yet. You have to just hold on now, say the address. Just say it-you can. Just let it out."

"I love her, I do!" he cried, hating himself.

"I know you do," came Morris's voice of understanding. "That's admirable, I respect you for that, but it doesn't help anything. You have to tell us the address now, Rick. You have to say it. If you don't, then I'll give you the drill again. You know I will. Right? I know what I'm doing, Rick. I worked as a paramedic for nine years, I've seen everything. I have control of you, Rick. I have control of your body and your mind, and I have more things in my box that hurt. Now, you need to give me her address or it will get very bad for you."

" Ah…" he breathed, not knowing what to do.

The drill started. His eyes were closed, but the drill was so near he could smell the burn of the electric motor. The noise was close to his nostril, just inside, tickling-"East Fourth!" he cried. "East Fourth… First Avenue. Blue building. The mailbox says Williams."

"Williams?" said Morris, withdrawing the drill.

"Yeah."

Morris let the drill stop. "Good, very good."

A few minutes passed. He dribbled spitty blood from his mouth. He didn't care about the ankle or the rib, it was the tooth, all gone, all drilled away, the roots sensitive to the air, his tongue feeling the hole in his cheek. They sat him up again and gave him a carton of orange juice. He spilled some of it down his shirt. It burned his tooth but cleaned out his throat.

"Okay?" asked Rick finally. "Thah's it?"

Morris shook his head. "You didn't tell us about the money."

"What?"

Tommy dragged a large ice chest across the floor. A Polaroid camera swung from his neck.

"The big money, the boxes."

"There's no money like that!" cried Rick. He tried to stand but fell to the floor. "You gotta take me to the hospital now!"

"We're not quite done here," Morris noted. "Tommy, show Rick the ice chest."

Tommy pulled over the cooler. "I usually take this on my boat."

"We've got this thing under control, Rick," said Morris. "Help him back up on the table." He wet his finger in his mouth, then pulled off his wedding ring and slipped it into his pocket. "Okay, so now we're going to find out if you know where the money is."

"Nah-" He didn't understand.

"This is under control, Rick, you don't have to worry."

He couldn't really talk, his mouth was so swollen and thick. Morris pointed to his arms.

"We're going to cut one off."

"Nah! Please!" He checked Morris's eyes.

"Tommy, you put film in that fucking camera?"

"'Course."

"Tony wants proof, see."

"Fuck!" yelled Rick. "What? What?"

"Left or right? We'll accommodate."

He didn't believe them, did he?

"Which?" asked Morris.

"Need the right!"

"It'll be the left, then." He pointed to Rick's handcuffs. "Take it off the left, and cuff his right to the table."

Morris opened one of the carpenter's boxes while the men held Rick and moved the handcuffs. "I have an arterial hemostat I'm going to put on your upper arm," he said softly. A sweetness, even a calm appeared to pass into him. "Nobody is going to bleed to death. And no problem on the limb recovery. Cooled, you've got four hours maybe. So there's no problem."

"I fucking told ev-thing!" Rick cried.

Morris came over and sat down. "See, this is what we're going to do, Rick. We had a good discussion, but now we have to talk about the big topic. If you tell us where the money is, we stop right now."

Rick searched Morris's face for an explanation. He didn't understand anything anymore.

"But if you don't, then my procedure keeps going. Once it goes far enough, though, we have to keep going. I'm not leaving a messy job. So that's where we are. Okay, also, listen to me, because the more anxiety you allow yourself, the more unfortunate everything gets." Morris's eyes moved closer to Rick. No redness, no fatigue in them. "First I'm going to start a saline IV on your other arm. This allows me to compensate for the blood loss, which really should not be excessive if I get the artery clamped quickly enough-"

"No, no!"

"I'm figuring that I really must have that artery closed off in sixty seconds, forty-five being optimal," Morris explained. "On the IV, I'll use a fourteen-gauge, which is big enough to give you a liter a minute if I have to. It also lets me administer morphine as necessary. We'll be starting you off at fifteen milligrams, but watching to see if your respiration drops. I usually give the patient five milligrams, but with this, I think fifteen is warranted." Morris nodded to himself, satisfied by his own analysis. "I'll be cutting through the upper arm, through the biceps muscle and the humerus-just one bone-and then through the triceps. It's easy. Muscle and bone. I don't feel like going through the elbow joint, see. The joint is very complicated-lot of nerves and blood vessels running through there. I do have enough morphine for the pain that would cause-that's not the problem, it's that if it got messy I might have a little difficulty finding the artery." He was a man in his element. "If it takes me ninety seconds to get you clamped, then we might have a bleed-out. Upper arm, the artery is no problem. Also, if we cut through the elbow, your arm is damaged forever. But the upper arm-should be fine. The boys at the replantation center at Bellevue are magicians if they've got a clean cut. So the key to this whole deal is the aforementioned hemostat." He held up a stainless-steel needle-nosed clamp with locking finger grips. "More effective than a tourniquet. Once we get the arm off and the clamp on, you're in good shape, Rick. You're not going to die. You might feel that way, you might go into shock, but you are absolutely not going to die. The body's ability to recover is astounding. The body protects itself. We'll make sure the wound is washed with betadine and bandaged so that the boys are working on a wound that is clean. Tommy will take pictures of each step. As for the arm itself, I'll be putting a piece of Saran Wrap on the cut surface and then will wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and put it on the ice. It won't be in direct contact with the ice. I don't want you worrying about that, either. We want that arm cool but not frozen. That arm, once chilled down rapidly in a sanitary environment, is going to be good for three, four hours. You'll be in Bellevue by then and they'll be sewing it back on. I'm making it easy for those guys."

Morris appeared to wait for Rick to protest, but he felt despondent, exhausted, the pain sawing across his bleeding tooth stump, his eyesight purpled and darkening.

"I'm going to take good care of you, okay? But if you try to resist me now, start calling me names or fighting, then I'm going to give you Narcan. What is that, you might ask? I call it God in a syringe. It blocks the reception of morphine. The antidote. You can make guys who look dead from an OD get up and sing. I've done that, a real crowd-pleaser, let me tell you. You start giving me shit, Rick, then I'm going to give you two milligrams of Narcan and that is going to block the fifteen milligrams of morphine that I gave you before. It takes twenty seconds to work. All right? Which is to say that your arm is going to go from feeling not bad at all to feeling like someone just cut it off, which"-Morris calmed himself-"of course, someone did." He looked at Tommy. "Get my circular saw. Also, I folded some plastic overalls in there. Okay, we'll put that music on."

"You got tapes?" Tommy's voice echoed in the cavernous room.

I love my hand, my fingers, Rick thought with strange detachment. "Wait, wait," he said weakly. "Wait-"

"I've got the Rolling Stones, I've got Salt-N-Pepa, the Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson-you know, 'Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain'-all kinds of good music." Morris turned back to Rick. "You got a request?"

Rick made a fist with his left hand, just to remember. Oh, Paul, he thought, please do something.

"Make your pick," ordered Morris.

He spittled a piece of tooth onto his lower lip. The pain came back to his rib. "Give me the Bruce."

"Great choice." Morris nodded his approval. "Fine. Make it loud, Tommy. Good. Yes. I'll take the saw." He looked at Rick, his mouth a tight slit of concentration. "This goes quick, man, just listen to the music."