When the Thrill Is Gone

23

“Do you mind if I borrow something from your mom?” I said to Theda. She and Fatima, and to a lesser degree Fatima’s nearest sibling, Boaz, were organizing the children around the living room’s plasma TV to watch the animated Disney film Ponyo on pay-per-view.

“’Course not, Uncle L,” she said.

Aura’s bedroom had the same sweet scent that I remembered from nearly two years before. I closed the door to the hall and then went to the wall-wide closet. Behind her clothes, underneath a silk scarf hanging, there was a wall safe. I knew the combination.

Inside there was an array of pistols and ammunition, among other things. One gun was a German Luger that had belonged to her father, a Togoan army officer who had gone rogue. He used that selfsame pistol to kill himself before he was to be tried for his crimes. There was a .22, a .32, and a .45 Aura had stockpiled from various offices and apartments that her crews cleaned out over the years. There was also a short-barreled .41-caliber sixshooter that belonged to me. I had left it with her one night when I was going out to meet with a man who had raped my client — Madeline Rutile.

His name was John Ball, and to most of the world he appeared to be an innocent. But when he got on the scent of a certain style of woman his gentility turned into regular intervals of bruising, biting, and humiliation that she would dread daily and carry with her for the rest of her life.

I had a meet set with John Ball one late evening — a job interview, you might say. It was the new, semi-rehabilitated me, pretending to be the old me. He was going to ask me to plant evidence on one of his victims. Her name was Jenna Rider. I had found out, from a weeklong investigation, that Jenna was another one of Ball’s victims. John typically picked women who had something to lose if they went to the police. That way he could rape them with impunity. John was in possession of evidence that Jenna had been involved in an embezzlement scam at a previous job. I convinced Jenna to pretend to have filed a complaint against her tormenter — John. Then I had Randolph Peel, a dishonorably dismissed NYPD detective, get in touch with Ball to tell him of the impending indictment. For twenty-five hundred dollars he turned over the falsified records to the rapist. After that he threw my name at him, told him I was the kind of guy who could whack the girl and plant evidence in such a way as to gut the case against him.

This was business as usual for a guy like me. I have never, in my life, colored within the lines.

The night I was going to meet with John I was first at Aura’s. My clothes and gun were on her pink-and-aqua chair. When I told her what I was going to do she made me leave my gun.

“You might lose your temper, Leonid,” she said, “and kill him.”

“He’d deserve it,” I replied.

“But you do not.”

I left the pistol and went to Ball’s office. When he put out a hand in friendship, I coldcocked him.

I had expected to come away just with the information he kept on Jenna but instead I hit the jackpot. John kept a file cabinet with two drawers in his office. The top stack was the evidence he’d gathered on more than thirty women. The bottom held pictures, videos, and other remembrances of his predatory romps. Six of the files were still active — including my client’s.

Aura was right. I would have killed him right there if I had kept my gun. Instead I relieved him of the contents of the top drawer.

I reported the attack on Ball to a cop named Willis Philby, whose specialty was sexual predation. I made my departure before the cops got there, leaving a couple of damning pictures out in plain view.

Charges were made and John, who has resources, is still on trial today. I returned the various files to their victims and bought Aura a single cabochon ruby depending on a slender 24-karat gold chain.

“Mom called,” Theda told me when I came out of the bedroom a couple of pounds heavier.

“What she say?”

“That we’d see when she got home. But I could tell that she’s going to say okay.”

On the street I felt safer with the pistol in my pocket. I had a carry license and reason to feel threatened. Beria might very well be looking for me. Maybe Shawna wasn’t actually dead, but I had to play it like she was. The children needed time to calm down and feel safe before I could question them; Aura’s presence would accomplish that end.

In the meantime I had to protect myself while roaming the streets of New York.

I’d been paid a lot of money, but for what purpose was not clear.

Shawna hired me to protect Chrystal, but now Shawna herself might be the victim. Cyril wouldn’t be climbing through eighth-floor windows to murder women, but his money could hire a whole regiment of black-ops mercenaries to accomplish such a task.

This speculation was all fiction, pulp fiction, not worth the calories it consumed.

Warren Oh, the Afro-Sino-Jamaican, was at the front desk of the Tesla Building. He was a beautiful man: sixty but looking forty, with two children, half a dozen grandchildren, and a mother who was pushing the century mark.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren said.

“Mr. Oh.”

“Are you in for the afternoon?”

A solitary note tolled. It was the sound of the bell that started or ended a round. I looked at my phone.

“Maybe not,” I told the security man. “Hello,” I said into the phone.

“There’s a couple’a guys here hasslin’ Iran,” the elderly Firpo said.

“I’ll be right there.”

Gordo’s gym was six blocks from my office. A cab would have taken too long, so I ran. Really, full-out ran. I bumped into people, veered into traffic, ran against red lights, huffing heavily as I went. I didn’t stop at the front door, either. I took the stairs two and three steps at a time until I was closing in on the fifth floor.

There I found two men dragging a slightly bloodied Iran Shelfly into the stairwell. The young ex-con wore the same clothes he’d been in the last time I saw him. The men were dressed in dark clothes that were not business attire or blue collar — more like thugland leisure wear. They were coming onto the landing while I was still two strides down. There was no time to get fancy or even try to fight. Iran was a good scrapper and they had obviously bested him.

So I reached into my pocket and came out with the revolver.

The two towering white men noticed the gun. They paid extra-close attention when I cocked the hammer.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that I needed to get to my calm place, that my violence was escalating at an alarming rate.

But the gun was out, so I had to go with the script as it was being written.

“Do I have to say any more?” I asked the man who was right there in front of me.

The ugly white man smirked. He moved as if he were going to take a step down.

“Gorman,” the other guy, who was standing behind Iran, said. “That’s LT McGill.”

Gorman’s eyes shifted, reflecting the knowledge that he was far too close to death.

“This ain’t none’a your business, McGill,” he said.

“Get the fuck outta here or make your move, man.” I’ve found that bad dialogue often accompanies stupid situations.

The standoff was no more than twenty seconds old, but it felt as if I had enough time to recite the Book of Genesis.

The guy behind Iran put up his hands and moved to the wall. I backed my way up around them, my gun leveled at Gorman’s chest.

“This is a mistake,” the headman said.

“Yours,” I agreed.

The toady started down the stairs, leaving Gorman alone with Iran and me. Even without a gun we could hurt him.

Realizing his untenable situation, the one named Gorman took a step down, hesitated, and then took another.

“I’ll be seeing you around, Iran,” he said before turning his back and picking up speed.