Afterburn

Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Brooklyn September 28, 1999

If he was the coward he suspected himself to be, he'd get the truck and drive back out to Orient Point, using his right hand for the steering as well as the shifting. Stay in the slow lane. Not so hard. Then bump along past the farms and the pumpkin stands, past the ice cream shops and gas stations and public beaches, until he found his hidden dirt lane. He'd get out and with one arm patiently cut the scrub oak he'd dropped before he'd left, then park the truck next to the cottage. And look at the tomatoes and the corn. Look at the purple honeysuckle on the near side of the barn. He'd feel good. The grass would be tall and wet. He'd pick up his key under the oyster shell and poke around the cottage, then get hungry and drive out on the main road, avoiding the farm tractors, to the diner with the school bus in back full of firewood. He could go in, coward that he was, and sit down and of course they'd stare at his stump and maybe ask what happened and maybe they wouldn't and he wouldn't care either way. Just give me the chicken dinner, please. After a few days no one would care anymore and he could be alone. He'd sit by the window of the cottage and watch the day and the night move over the ocean, and conclude that, as a coward, he'd left the thing unfinished. He'd decided to come back into the city because of Christina, and so far as he understood, she was in more trouble than ever now-a problem with some money-and here he had not yet talked to her, not yet helped her. He could argue to himself that he'd had his goddamn arm cut off and one foot almost ruined and lost a tooth, and that meant he didn't have to help her. That he'd made a valiant attempt and failed. Lost all his cash but gotten out before it'd cost him too much. Gotten out with enough to go on. He could tell all these nice things to himself and they would be lies.

An hour later, at seven in the morning, he looked at the stump while the nurse changed the dressing. They'd cut a couple of pieces of skin off his ass and used them to make a little flap that they sewed across the wet part of the slice.

"It's healing well," the nurse said.

"When do the stitches come out?" Rick asked, his cheek still hurting.

"Two weeks. No sooner than that. There are a lot of dissolving stitches inside, too."

"There's nothing else that happens here, right?"

She looked at him, not unkindly. "They have new prosthetic arms that respond to the nerve impulses in the stump," she said. "That requires some physical therapy to-"

"No, no," Rick muttered. "I'm just asking if it's all set to go."

She understood. "The doctors fixed the artery so that the blood turns around and goes back," she explained. "Once they do that, the tissue normalizes pretty quickly. It's the nerves that take a while." She pulled off the mesh booty they'd put on his left foot and inspected the small dark scabs left from the drill. The flesh around the punctures remained puffy and sensitive, but there'd been no infection. The ankle and foot would need bone surgery, of course. The doctors and nurses had asked him how he'd been injured, but he explained that it'd be better if he didn't explain. Should we call the police? No, he'd said.

After the nurse left, he reached over to the table next to the bed with his right hand, opened the drawer, and pulled out the Bible. It seemed heavy enough. He whacked the stump a couple of times just to see how it felt. Not too bad. He hit it hard a few times more, at different angles. It hurt, but no bleeding.

By ten o'clock, he had checked out of the hospital and reached his truck. There he found they'd spent a few minutes tearing up the seats and glove compartment looking for Easter Bunny gifts and Cracker Jack prizes. The money and traveler's checks were gone, as he expected. He slipped in the key, wondering if they'd fucked with the engine. Started right up. He drove to Macy's, where his mother used to take him each fall before school began. He used his brother's American Express card to buy shoes, socks, underwear, a dress shirt, a suit, and a tie. He put on all these things in the Macy's dressing room, hobbling on his sore foot. The saleslady who was helping him was very nice, stared at his bandage but didn't ask. Wearing the new clothes, he walked gingerly up Broadway through the New Jersey shoppers and black kids from Harlem looking for action. I need cash, he thought. Or something I can trade, no questions asked. He stepped into an electronics store run by some Iranians. They noticed his good clothes and called him "my friend." He told them his father had just retired and he, Rick, wanted to give him something special, something that would last forever. How much are you looking to spend? they asked, rubbing the chests of their silky European shirts. Rick said he didn't care about the cost, he just wanted the best. Nothing but the best for my father. They started him off on a three-thousand-dollar wide-screen television, and he announced that he wanted only the best, and they said, I strongly agree, my friend. Very good television, the best. I'll pay Paul back later somehow, he told himself. He spent ten minutes pretending to choose between the eight-thousand-dollar television and the eleven-thousand-dollar television. Both excellent price, my friend. For you we make very good price, first time you buy with us. You are happy, you come back. This we know. My family, they have been selling for two hundred years. He chose the eleven-thousand-dollar television and asked them if they thought it was a good choice. Very good. They carried it to the truck for him. You have very good taste, they said.

By noon, he was sitting in a bar in Queens, where he exchanged the television for lunch, three thousand dollars in cash, a Ruger. 22 pistol, a 12-gauge Winchester pump shotgun, and a box of shells for each gun. Then he purchased several other items: a stylish long winter coat, a pair of leather gloves, a stapler, an electric razor, an AC/DC adapter that ran off his truck's cigarette lighter, a box of cotton wadding, a roll of duct tape, a Swiss Army knife, and a hacksaw. Sitting in his truck under the FDR, not far from a man throwing bags of construction debris into the East River, he measured the shotgun carefully against his stump. Then he opened the door of the truck, wedged the gun under his boot, and cut about a foot off the barrel. Then he put the gun in the left arm of the coat, stuffing it with the wadding, and stapled the left glove, also stuffed, to the cuff. Using the knife, he slit the arm of the coat, so that he could reach it with his right hand. Last, he awkwardly taped the butt of the gun to the end of his stump and pulled the coat on over it. The gun was hidden. Using his right hand, he set the stuffed gun-arm into the deep left pocket. He loaded the pistol and put it in the right. Rick Bocca, he whispered, botta-bing, botta- boom.

Next he tilted the rearview mirror toward himself and shaved his head and beard, being careful around the gouge in his cheek, the hair falling on his shirt and pants. Just like the old days, before a bodybuilding contest. It took longer than he expected. No hair, one arm-he looked like a fucking old man. He'd go find Paul and Paul would help him with the next move. He punched the stump again to test the pain. It was all right. So they had cut off his fucking arm. All right. They should have killed me, he thought, they really should have done that.

He left the truck in yet another parking garage and boarded the ferry to Staten Island. On the boat he stood at the rail thinking about Mary, Paul's wife. She was a good woman, a good mother of two sons. She probably knew what Paulie did. How could she not? One of those women who'd made their deals. The world was full of them, and sometimes things worked out fine. The shopping and the birthday parties and the underwear folded in Paul's drawer. The dog food, the lunch boxes, the bags of groceries. The particular kind of beer in the refrigerator. The stack of household bills on the little table next to the television so Paul could pay them while he watched football on Monday nights. She did this, she did everything.

Thinking of Mary made him think of Christina, who had insisted that she would never get married, that she could never be faithful to one man indefinitely, not even Rick. He'd had enough sense just to nod appreciatively. A lot of women had said this to him, just so he wouldn't make any assumptions. They wanted to be sure he didn't think he had power over them. So, no assumptions. That was fine. You assumed that women could leave you at any time. If you remembered that, you paid attention. And maybe they left you anyway. Like his mother. He had adored her and she'd died.

On Staten Island, he had the taxi drop him a few blocks from Paul's house. The shotgun stuffed in the arm of his coat felt heavier than he expected, either that or his left shoulder was weaker now, and he walked awkwardly. He covered the distance slowly, a man in no hurry, stopped in front of Paul's tall hedge, which looked trimmed five minutes prior, and turned to see if anyone might notice him slip down the driveway. A bicycle lay on the asphalt. He eased around the corner of the garage and looked in the window. No Town Car; Paul wasn't home yet. He pissed in the bushes, then inspected the garage window for security system contacts and noticed a tiny set on the inside middle pane, one for movement of the window itself, the other for breakage of the glass. A good system, the kind Paul would have.

Just then, the interior door from the kitchen to the garage opened, and ten-year-old Paul Jr., already home from school, appeared. He slapped a button next to the kitchen door, making the garage door rumble up. He dragged the bicycle into the garage.

Mary's head appeared in the kitchen doorway. "If you leave it there, Dad'll hit it with the car."

"No, he won't."

"He could easily run over it."

"Dad is a good driver," the boy protested.

"Dad is a very good driver, but he's tired at the end of the day and he expects that the bike will be against the inside of the garage, not thrown in the middle of it."

The kitchen door closed. The kid moved the bike as instructed and hit the garage door button. The door clunked downward. Inside the garage, as Rick watched through the window, the boy picked up a garden hoe and swung it like a baseball bat. "McGwire drives it… into

… the second deck!" He took a cut through the air, admiring his own strength. Then he spied an unopened thirty-pound bag of peat moss and swung the hoe viciously, sinking its blade into the plastic packaging. A puff of dried moss smoked up at the impact. This simulacrum of violence thrilled the boy, and he abandoned himself to a series of deadly swings of the garden hoe into the peat moss, gutting the bag so that it bled dried brown moss from half a dozen wounds.

"Paulie!" came his mother's exasperated voice.

"All right, all right!" The boy took one last cut at the bag, missing, instead clanging the hoe off the lawn mower. He threw the tool into the corner of the garage and dashed into the kitchen.

Paul, Rick thought, smiling to himself, would pull in and see the peat moss all over the floor, and there'd be hell to pay. That was just who Paul was, maybe because of the chaos of their family growing up. Two mothers dying, the old man irritable and unpredictable, drinking too much, unable to get out of bed for weeks sometimes, pissing in a cup he left by his bedroom door. I get my depression from him, Rick thought. Paul had just sucked it up. You had to hand it to him, starting to run their father's business while still in college, making sure Rick had enough money for baseball cleats, movies, whatever. Made the right career decisions, the right woman decision. I'll never be that good, Rick told himself.

He hunched against the garage for an hour. He didn't want to present himself at the front door, in case the boys saw his arm and cheek and got scared. He wondered if Tony had found Christina yet.

He heard the car pull into the driveway, pause, then proceed as the garage door opened. Coming home early-maybe the other boy has a school football game, he thought. He stepped around the corner of the garage as Paul switched off the car.

"Paul."

Paul looked up, eyes scared. "Rick?"

"You got to help me, Paulie."

Paul stared at him, assessing the situation. "Rick, hey, I'm-What happened to your face? And your arm looks-?"

Rick pulled his coat back and showed Paul the bandaged stump. "I'm in a lot of trouble here, Paulie."

"We'll take a drive," he said.

On the way out of the neighborhood Paul called Mary from the car phone and said he'd been pulled away on business. Sorry, he said. He hung up. "She's pretty pissed off."

"Did one of the boys have a football game?"

"No." Paul breathed uneasily. "No."

"What?"

"We had a doctor's appointment. I was going to take her."

"She okay?" Rick asked.

Paul nodded. "Yeah. It's just a little-whatever. Don't worry about it. She's fine."

A few minutes later they were headed toward the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn. Rick started to breathe heavily. "They cut off my fucking arm, Paulie. They fucked up my foot, too."

Paul said nothing but kept glancing at Rick. "Where we going?" he finally asked.

"I don't care."

"I'll get on the drive," Paul decided. "Take in the view."

The southern Manhattan skyline appeared to their left like a huge pile of shiny toys, little boats scattered across the harbor.

"I think they could have her, Paul. You know, Tony and Peck and this guy Morris."

"Why?"

"They got it out of me."

Paul just listened, watched the traffic on the bridge.

"I need you to take me to Christina," said Rick.

"I don't know where she is."

"C'mon, Paulie, help me."

"I can't."

"Wait a minute." Rick felt confused and almost sad.

"What?" Paul kept looking ahead.

"You didn't ask."

"What?"

"How they found me."

Paul sat rigidly. "Yeah," he said with disgust now. "That's right, Rick." He took the car onto the elevated expressway through Brooklyn toward Manhattan, past treetops and flat tar roofs. "I didn't ask."

"You knew?"

"Yeah," he said casually. "Sure."

"You knew about my arm?"

Paul looked at Rick, his voice cold. "They were supposed to put it in the cooler."

Rick lifted the shotgun up, cocked it, pointed the stuffed left glove at the back window, and fired. The gun blew a grapefruit-sized hole in the safety glass, cratered it outward. Through the window, sunlight and blue sky. The glove was shredded.

"Rick, for fuck's sake!"

"They cut off my arm, Paul! You didn't stop them?"

"Because I thought you fucking stole five million dollars from me and Tony!"

"The fuck I did."

"You stole it, man!" Paul pounded the steering wheel, and the horn sounded. "Don't tell me you and Christina didn't steal that money! She took the walk and you've been out there waiting for her."

"I fucking didn't, Paul!"

"Don't lie to me, goddammit!"

"I swear, Paulie, I don't know anything."

"Come on, Rick, the last job! You don't remember?"

"The air conditioners?"

"Yes."

"Bunch of fucking air conditioners. What's the big money?"

Paul sighed. "There were ten boxes of cash on that truck, Rick. We needed to move the cash out of Miami. It was getting hard to launder down there. It was piling up. We were behind fifty or sixty million. The guy doing it down there had some health problems. Skin cancer. Just a little black mole and the next day they say he's dying. So Tony decides to do the cash in New York for a little while. We got it as far as Virginia with two cars and switched it into the truck with the air conditioners."

"I didn't know!"

"There was no reason for you to know. It was all small bills. I mean fifties and hundreds. Old money. The boxes were marked. You couldn't just tell, you had to know what to look for. The plan was that Frankie was to pick them up." Paul slowed to let a private carting-service truck pass him. "Then the deal was fucked up, the cops started appearing out of nowhere, and we still don't know why. After they seized the truck and the air conditioners, we found Frankie an hour later, and he turned over the boxes he'd been able to off-load. He said he'd only found eight of the ten. He swore it. We believed him. We had no reason to doubt him. He was right on time, and the mileage on his van was right. We had a video camera inside the van that he didn't even know about. Also, there was a security camera outside the loading dock, down the street, and we got hold of the tape. We grabbed that before the cops found it. It showed him taking eight boxes out of the truck and then looking for the others. You can actually see him looking."

"So? I didn't know any of this," said Rick.

"You were so fucking depressed, you didn't know anything, Rick." Paul glanced at him. "It took us three months to get that tape. Frankie lived in his house the whole time, by prearrangement. He said he had nothing to hide. He gave us his car and his passport and his bank numbers. It all checked out. Then we figured that the two boxes of cash somehow got mixed up with the ones seized by the police. It took us a hell of a long time to get someone inside the evidence room to look. They had to go into a police warehouse. I still don't know where it is. They counted the boxes. Two were missing. That meant that Frankie's story didn't hold up. We told him we would kill his kids. He just fucking wept. Swore he was innocent. We decided to believe him. Maybe a cop stole the boxes, right? Maybe in the confusion they got moved. We let him go and he came back to work. So we're wondering, Where the fuck are the two boxes? Four hundred and something boxes, maybe they didn't look inside every one. Nobody heard anything about a bunch of money. So we paid the guy to go back to the warehouse and look again. This took time. We were worried the police would sell the air conditioners at a sheriff's auction. We'd have to buy them all back, maybe. So we paid the guy to actually go rip open all the fucking boxes, every one. We got him a staple gun so he could close them up again. No cash. So we went back over it, slow and careful. Christina was in prison, she wasn't going anywhere. And you were whacked out and half drunk all the time. We followed you, we knew where you were. Tony said, Let's just watch him. We knew you'd put some cash in Aunt Eva's basement, but we knew that wasn't our money. Yours was all in hundreds. We watched you out in that fisherman's shack next to the ocean, working on the boat. You were fucking some divorced housewife with a fat ass. We knew everything. We paid her to tell us everything you said. We also bugged her phone in case she was lying. It made no sense to us. You weren't acting like you had any money at all. You spent hours in your garden with the tomatoes. We checked, we watched. We bribed the prison to tell us about Christina's phone calls. Nothing. She didn't tell anyone about any money, not even her mother. Who had the money? Nobody heard anything. Usually you hear something. Maybe nobody had the money. It was a big problem. We're talking five million dollars. Meanwhile, Frankie started acting funny. Wigged out. Couldn't take the pressure. He moved to Phoenix. Started driving to Las Vegas. We followed him, checked him out. I talked to him. He said, Audit me, go through every fucking piece of paper, Paul. Turns out he kept very good records. I'm an accountant, I should know. He could reconcile every dime of expense with every dime of income. We followed it back to the origin. He was clean."

Rick watched Paul exhale, blink, their eyes avoiding each other. He knew all his mannerisms. Paul was getting old enough that he looked a lot like their father when Rick was young. We were all related, Rick thought, but not really family. We didn't know how to be together.

"So," Paul continued, moving the car toward the Manhattan Bridge, "we kept studying it. Tony had videotaped the money going into the boxes, the boxes being marked, the boxes going into the truck. Somewhere between Virginia and New York, the boxes disappeared. We didn't have a satellite beeper on the truck, because other people could track it that way. We thought that would be creating evidence. We didn't ask you because we had you being watched and we didn't want you to think we were suspicious. We knew the mileage on the truck when it left and had to find out what was on it now. We bought back the truck at a sheriff's auction. But some fucker had driven it something like three hundred miles over what the expected mileage would be. There was no time for you and Christina to put those kinds of extra miles on the truck. We figured that the police used the truck in one of their setups, and this accounted for the extra miles. Anyway, we tore that truck apart looking for something, some hidden compartment, whatever. Nothing."

Rick remembered now. They'd pulled off the interstate west of Philadelphia and eaten an early lunch with Christina's parents. Never told Tony, since he'd have forbidden it. But Christina had said, We're so close, ten miles. I miss them, I miss my father. Her father hadn't looked too good. Thin, coughing in the summer heat. But big on moving to Florida soon. Christina clearly worried about them. Rick had taken a nap in the back bedroom, tired from the drive. Maybe an hour, not much more. Then they had pulled back on the road to New York and driven right into the fucked-up situation. The cops came out of nowhere. Just a load of air conditioners, and all this.

They reached the Manhattan Bridge, which would take them into Chinatown. Bumper-to-bumper traffic. Paul cleared his throat. "She took the two boxes, Rick."

"I don't believe it."

"She took the boxes off the truck, hid them, figured out a way to flag the cops, and went to prison. You never knew. That's what we found out with your arm. You never knew. She was smart enough not to tell you."

"That's bullshit," said Rick, feeling cold and alone.

"Hey, we cut off your arm to see if you knew! I told Tony that you didn't know, but he didn't believe me! I tried to give you a way out!" cried Paul. "I gave you the card and the money. I had the card set up so I'd be informed of all your charges within ten minutes. You can set it up that way, say it's a minor's account. I thought I could track you like that, if I had to."

"That was how they got me at the fucking whorehouse?"

"Yeah, yeah. Tony insisted." Paul eased up behind a cab. "I figured sooner or later we'd find her, but you had to stay in it."

"You knew I would."

"I figured, yeah." Paul sounded tired now. He didn't like problems and messes. He liked money. You traded one for the other, round and round.

"They were really supposed to put the arm in the cooler?" Rick asked, shifting the shotgun.

"Yes."

The exhaust from the traffic was coming in the broken rear window. "They didn't."

"That was Tony fucking with me personally." Paul rubbed his eyes. "We've been having some problems. He's getting erratic."

"Maybe he's the guy I need to shoot."

" No." Paul was emphatic. "We're going to talk this out and then go home, Rick." Paul glanced in the mirror. "At the end of the day everybody gets more or less something and then we go home. I go home, you go home. You gotta understand that you're out of it now. You paid for what you did do and what you didn't do. You got to step out of it now. Tony will come up with some kind of payment, some kind of job."

"He'll kill her, Paul. I don't care what he says to you."

There was no answer from Paul.

"Do you know where she is?" Rick asked.

"Not exactly."

Rick picked up the car phone. "Find out."

"Wait, wait."

"You've been talking to them, right?"

"They don't have her," Paul said. "Not yet. But they're waiting for her to show up with a bill of lading that pays off the money."

"Why is she going to show up with that?"

"Because right now they have her boyfriend on the same table you were on. He put up the money."

"She cares about him that much?" It didn't sound right.

"No, they also have her mother down in Florida."

"What did they do to him?" Rick asked.

"I don't know except that he's a tough fucker. An old guy, too. He was still alive half an hour ago. I told Tony to fucking take him to the hospital." Paul shook his head in disgust. "These people have no judgment." He looked at his watch. "She was supposed to get back to them like four hours ago."

"Why's it taking so long?"

"Because Tony is unrealistic about how paperwork in the real world works," Paul said bitterly.

They were off the bridge, onto Canal Street heading west. Chinese people everywhere. "Take me there now," said Rick.

"Why? You can get out of this," Paul argued. "I can say to Tony, We fucked up, his arm is gone, we have to give him some money so he can go away."

Rick lifted the gun and blew out the rear passenger window on his side. The sound hurt his ears; the car filled with smoke that was soon sucked out through the broken glass. He reached in his pocket for two more shells.

"What?" Paul screamed. "What?"

Rick breathed heavily, as if to set himself toward the next task, then touched the warm barrel to his brother's neck. "I already went away, Paul. I didn't like it."

M and R Bar-Dining Room

264 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan

September 28, 1999

A simple document, and finally, hours and hours too late, she was holding it in her damp little hand. Didn't look anything like five million dollars. Merely a triplicated form, containing its own serial number, sequentially date-stamped and signed by the shipping agent, the captain of the container ship itself, a vessel of South Korean registry, then the spot-buyer, and now one Sally Rahul. Transferable by endorsement. Various customs stamps were affixed. It stated that container NZ783A1490RF, manufactured in Beaumont, Texas, packed in Seoul, contained two thousand three hundred Nikon camera bodies and sixteen hundred 200-millimeter telephoto lenses. The shipment had been paid for and, upon presentation of the bill, could be picked up at a certain loading dock in Newark within ten days. Like picking any item up at a warehouse, just that the numbers were bigger. The paper didn't have Tony's name, it didn't have Charlie's name, it didn't have Christina's name. Of course, you could trace the bill number back to the spot-buyer's office on lower Broadway, and then you'd have Charlie's name and the record of the letter of credit. But if you could sell the cameras immediately, then, well-you were rich. How could she do that? She didn't know. She needed a truck. Given a day or two, she could find a guy with a truck, she was sure of it. The city was full of guys with trucks.

She'd been hiding in the restaurant's shady patio in the back, which this late in the afternoon was almost deserted. Now it was time to move. The latest arrangement-the day had been a series of pleadings and bitter arguments with Tony about the impossibility of getting the papers as fast as he wanted-was to check in with him at 3:30 p.m., at which time he'd tell her where to bring the bill of lading. She hadn't spoken to Charlie in hours. But the electronic transfer of his funds from Citibank had come through without a hitch, so perhaps-well, she didn't know how much faith she had that he was still alive.

She paid for her meal, correcting the incorrectly figured tax on the check, slipped through the dining room, which featured oil paintings of naked women, and exited out the front. She turned north toward Houston Street, drifted west, then remembered two pay phones she used to pass on the walk home when she worked at the Jim-Jack. Tony had given her a local seven-digit number, not his cell phone, and insisted she had to use that one now. This meant that the call went through all the regular wires. He's going to trace me, she thought, even though I'm using a cell phone. He wants to trace me because he thinks I'm going to run. He thinks I'm going to run and he might be right. He's thinking that I was a little too obvious about his name being on the bill of lading, and he was right about that, too. So he's thinking that I'm thinking what I'm thinking. The pawn is not Charlie anymore. We both know that. Charlie forgot the phone number, and so Tony couldn't find the location of the spot-buyer's office. I'm very sorry about that. I didn't want Charlie to get caught up in it, I didn't expect it. If he hadn't called her mother… the one pawn left, her mother. Whom she was not going to sell out. Christina had tried calling her mother all day, but gotten no answer. Which was good. Tony wouldn't be thinking that I could run with the bill of lading if he really had her, Christina thought. That means he figures that I can find out that he doesn't have her. By indicating his fear, he's indicating his vulnerability.

She dialed her mother one more time, using Rahul the Freak's phone. The low-battery light came on. Nothing. Then the answering machine. That's it, Christina told herself. Maybe Mom talked to Charlie this morning, then left on a trip with one of her old, rusted-tomato-can men. I think I'm free.

But she was still due to call Tony in four minutes on his funky number. The two pay phones stood at that same corner. She checked the dial tone of each phone, bought a role of tape from the hardware store on the corner, and taped the two pay phones together, mouthpiece to earpiece. I have to keep this straight, she told herself. If I screw up one step, I'll have to start all over. She hoped the cell-phone battery would last. She took the change out of her purse and slipped in two or three dollars' worth into each phone. More than enough for her purposes. She looked at the phones one last time. The cell phone she called A. The pay phone on the left she called B, and the one on the right C. The phone she was going to dial was D.

"Yo, baby, you doing something illegal?"

Two black guys from the newsstand half a block away sauntered up. They walked slowly, in order to scare her.

"You guys are exactly who I need to see," she said.

"Why?"

She beckoned them closer. "You want to make a little money and learn a trick you can use in your business activities?"

"What you mean, our business activities?"

She smiled.

"Well, all right."

She pointed to the phones. "You watch, okay? See, I have a little problem. Some people want me to call them and they gave me a number. Problem is, soon as I call them, they're going to know where I am."

The two guys liked this. "Police."

"Right. Some kind of police number. They can get the trace in five or ten seconds. Maybe faster, for all I know. So, with this phone"-she pointed to pay phone C-"I'm going to call the bad number. With the other pay phone, I'm going to call my cell phone." She checked to see that they got it. "I call my cell phone first so that is the existing connection."

"I get it, smoke them fuckers."

"Listen, guys," said Christina, "I want you to stand here for five minutes and look like big bad black guys, okay? Because, if you do, then you're going to see something very funny."

"What?"

"You're going to see some guys scream up in some kind of car and be looking for-"

"You."

"Right."

He nodded solemnly. "It's cool."

Now she dialed her cell phone using pay phone B. The low-battery light blinked steadily. The phone rang, and she punched the talk button. She could hear her own voice coming out of the earpiece of the other phone. "Okay, this connection is made. Now I dial the other one." Which she did. "You guys stand here." She positioned them in front of the phone booths. As long as they stood there, no one would mess with the phones taped together.

"Yeah?" came a voice in her ear.

"Okay, I'm calling in," she said. The connection worked, but there was a lot of garbage in the sound. She patted one guy on the cheek, winked at the other. "I'm calling, like I said."

"Where are you?"

"I'm in midtown, Forty-second and Broadway."

"Okay."

She started walking.

"You said Forty-second and Broadway?"

"Yeah, what do you want me to do?"

"I got to check, hang on."

Stalling. They already knew she was lying, of course. She turned the corner onto Bowery, wondering how long the cell-phone battery would last.

"Yeah, okay. What we'd like you to do," came the voice, "is set up a way so that we can get this piece of paper."

"All right," she said.

"What?"

"I said all right."

"Connection's terrible."

"I'm at a pay phone." They probably had a car on the way. She had to stay on the phone long enough so that they thought she was there.

"We want you to suggest a way of meeting, a place," came the voice.

"How about at the top of the Empire State Building?" she said.

"Well, no… maybe. I got to check. What about somewhere near where you are?"

"That's a good idea," she said.

Suddenly the phone filled with ripping static.

"Hey!" a voice called.

"Hello? Hello?" came another.

"She fucked us!"

Christina turned off her phone and kept walking, the bill of lading securely in her bag. I'm free, she told herself. I'm just going to go back to the Pioneer Hotel and think of a way to survive a few more days. But then there was the question of her mother. If her mother answered the phone and was fine, then she wouldn't have to worry. She could figure out what to do next. I'll try one more time, Christina decided. She turned on the phone. The battery light blinked constantly. She punched in the number.

"Hello?" came her mother's voice, full of fear.

"Mom?"

"Please do whatever they say, Tina," her mother cried. "There are three of them here in the living room. They turned this place upside down."

Christina sagged in dismay. A man came on the phone. "Tony says he's starting to chop up your boyfriend. Go to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirteenth Street. Bring the piece of paper." He hung up.

She collapsed against the wall. I'm so bad, she thought, so bad.

A few minutes later she stood at the corner of Tenth and Thirteenth. The meatpacking district, the buildings boarded up, gutters filled with glass and garbage. A cab sat at the corner with a flat tire, the driver staring at it in disgust. A door opened on the other side of the street. She walked across.

"All right, I'm here," she said hatefully. "You have to let my mother go."

She recognized Peck. He pulled her inside and marched her up the steps into a huge room. The floor was rough, the high windows broken and streaked. She could see Tony in a chair, speaking into a phone, food cartons around his feet. He hung up. "Paul's coming," he announced, looking up. He saw Christina. "You got it?"

"Yes."

A man in a green baseball jacket stood next to Tony. Something was laid out on a table in front of them. "We have your rich boyfriend here," the man called.

She stopped. "Where?"

Peck pushed her forward across the wooden floor.

"Right here. Tough old guy, too." He switched on a bright work light. "Want to see?"