Slide

Twenty

When Slide got back to the apartment, some Indian woman grabbed him and started screeching about an explosion in the basement and how she wouldn’t tolerate this type of behavior. Slide was tired, wanted to get inside, get a cold one, many cold ones, and here was this mad Indian cow yelling in his face. He was sorely tempted to off her right there, but he sighed, said, “Yeah yeah, I’ll take care of it.”

She was still hollering, pointing her finger in his face, saying, “I will not stand for this” and “This cannot happen under my restaurant” and a lot of other shite talk. Finally he got away from her, went down to see what the bejaysus was happening in the apartment.

First thing he smelled was cordite. He was confused-had Angela been in a shootout? Then he saw the empty pitchers of margaritas and, worse, his list, his whole game plan, was out on the table. The bitch had been going through his stuff.

She was in the bathroom, the door locked. Slide busted open the door-wait till the Indian cow saw that-and grabbed Angela, pulled her out into the kitchen area. He whacked her good and was about to lay on a whole lot more when she shouted, “Get your fucking hands off me,” and whipped out one of his handguns.

Stupid bitch couldn’t tell the safety was still on? He grabbed the gun by the barrel, wrenched it this way and that while she fought to pull the trigger. Eventually he tore it from her hand.

Angela shrank back against the wall, went, “Oh, Jaysus, please don’t kill me!”

Kill her? Slide wanted to ram her head into the wall a few hundred times, watch her bleed out. But he’d had a long, hard day-he’d killed a rollerblader in Riverside Park earlier-and he wasn’t in the mood to kill again, not right now, anyway.

“You didn’t call the police, did you?” he said, tossing the gun on the table.

“No,” Angela said. “I swear on me mother’s grave, no. Nor Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security?” he said.

Angela, trembling, went, “You’re in…Al-Qaeda, aren’t you?”

“Al-Qaeda?” Slide said. “Are you fookin’ mad?”

“ ’Cause what I’ve been through, with IRA guys…I can’t take another terrorist boyfriend.”

“Is that why you blew the place up? Cause you think I’m in with fookin’ Osama? Jesus wept, are you stone mad?”

“Well, you’re growing the beard…and you’re always talking about airplanes and-”

Slide went to the fridge, opened a bottle of Bud, sucked it down in one sloppy gulp.

Then Angela, who’d regained some of her composure and her earlier anger with it, went, “In that case, Mister Not-Al-Qaeda, what’s this list, then? You planning to dump me?”

Actually, especially after this, Slide was planning to do more than just dump her. But, because he loved to fuck with people’s heads-it’s what he lived for-he said, “Never, baby. We’re a team for life.”

Angela said, “Then why did you write those things?”

“It’s for me screenplay,” he said. “I have to have some way to get money for us, right?”

“A screenplay, my arse. Try again.”

“All right,” Slide said, smiling because a brainstorm had come to him just in time. “What can I say. You got me. I been havin’ an affair-but I’d already decided to break it off.” He picked up the list from the table, neatly tore it in two, put the pieces in his pocket. “It’s her I’d decided to dump. Not you.”

“You asshole,” Angela said, but there was a hopeful glimmer in her eye.

“I love you, baby,” Slide said. “You and me.”

“You mean it?”

“Cross me heart.”

“Who was she, Slide? Was she someone I know?”

“Who?” For a moment, he seemed completely baffled.

“The other woman, Slide. The one you’re dumping.”

Oh. “Nah,” he said. “No one you know.”

“Was she…younger than me?”

“Ah, fook, see why I didn’t want to tell you? Enough with the questions already. T’would only hurt you to know.”

She went over to him, wrapped her arms around him tightly, and said, “I just want things to work out for us so badly, and I don’t want any more trouble. I was thinking-maybe we should leave New York.”

“What do you mean? We just got here.”

“Yeah, but I’m tired of living this way, in this fookin’ coffin, with curry dripping from the ceiling. And I’m tired of the whole city grind. I want to move to the suburbs. I want to be a soccer mom. I want to have a big kitchen that I can cook in. I want to live in a big house in New Jersey, like the one the Sopranos have.”

He had to admit, the idea appealed to him. Operate in the suburbs, be Mr. Low Key Guy, hold down a job during the day, kill at night-yep, that worked. And the Sopranos’ house with that swimming pool! Angela, she could be like Mrs. Soprano. He could go around killing his arse off and she’d be there at the door at night to kiss him and say, How was your day, hon?

“I’d like that too, babe,” he said. “But we need a stake to make that happen. I’ve been trying to get it, but it’s just not coming together.”

“Well, then,” Angela said. “Take a look at this.”

She showed him a photo in the newspaper, some business fuck looking smug.

“And that is of interest fookin how?”

Which was when she told him the whole long story, how she got mixed up with Max Fisher before she went to Ireland, had even been engaged to him for a while, and now he’d been connected to some drug dealers.

“You sure it’s him?” Slide asked.

“I was engaged to the fooker,” Angela said. “You think I can’t recognize a snap of him in the paper?”

Slide said, “So he was arrested. What’s that gonna do for us?”

“If you actually read the article you’d see that he was released, along with his partner, this guy, Kyle Jordan. God only knows how he got mixed up with that crowd. Max dealing crack-Jaysus, I can’t even imagine that.”

Slide went, “So what do you want to do? Kidnap him?”

“Not him-somebody close to him, and then make Max pay,” Angela said. “See, I know how Max is. He talks the talk but deep down, when it counts, he’s what we in America call a wuss. You should’ve seen him when he found out he had herpes. He was crying like a baby.”

“Herpes?” Slide asked.

“Oh, no, he didn’t catch it from me,” Angela said quickly, obviously busted, trying to cover. “He got it from, um, a previous relationship. And he didn’t give it to me either. Honest.”

Slide suddenly felt the urge to scratch. He also had the urge to wallop her again, but the lure of money was stronger. He said, “So he’s a wuss. What does that do for us?”

“He’s in a very vulnerable position, cops breathing down his neck, and if he’s dealing drugs these days, he must be seriously loaded. It’s the perfect time to kidnap somebody close to him and the panicked bastard will pay.”

“I like it,” Slide said, “but who do we grab? He got a wife?”

Angela got a strange look on her face, said, “I sincerely doubt that any woman in her right mind would be with that man. But there’s this partner-Kyle from Alabama.”

“You know him?”

“Never heard of him before, and honestly I can’t imagine what Max is doing with somebody from Alabama. I mean, the article says he met the guy down there. When I was with Max he bitched about going to the West Side.”

Slide was playing with the idea, tossing it around in his mind. He wanted to get the kidnapping gig down and he knew it would pay serious wedge if only he could stop killing the victims so fast.

“The only problem,” Angela said, “is how we do the abduction. After all, Manhattan isn’t Backwoods, Ireland. You can’t just nab somebody off the street.”

“True enough,” Slide said, grinning. “But you can.”