Buffalo Jump (16 page)

They had known each other for nearly forty years— though both would probably reel at the thought—meeting in high school and staying friends through college, marriages, children and careers. Well, Marty’s career anyway. Rich wasn’t sure the dogged yet unfulfilling path he had pursued since earning his journalism degree could properly be called a career. Rich and Marty had discovered rock music together in the early sixties, when the potent Buffalo scene was presided over by legendary DJs like Tom James and George Brand, a generation of mesmerized teens following them like rats after plugged-in pipers. Rich and Marty formed their own group in high school—Contraband—with Marty on guitar and vocals and Rich on keyboards, trying to work his long-ignored classical piano training into some sort of blues-based attack. They discovered drugs together, beginning with pot, for which a lifelong affinity would develop, as well as acid, the latter experiment ending abruptly, and almost fatally, when the boys discovered that tripping on blotter was fundamentally incompatible with swimming in the Buffalo River. They had gone on road trips to Manhattan together, spiralling through the Adirondacks in the dark with Dylan’s new electric sound blasting out the speakers and thick smoke trailing out the window. They had tried dealing dope briefly. Extremely briefly, it turned out, as the first toes they stepped on belonged to big, hairy-assed motherfuckers who could rip out their throats with one hand. And those were just the girlfriends.

Asked who his best friend was, Rich would say Marty without hesitation. But he wasn’t sure Marty would say the same. He knew Marty had a lot more friends than he did, a lot more going on in his life, and felt sometimes that Marty looked at him more as a sidekick than an equal. He had to admit Marty was the more accomplished of the two: he hadn’t worked any harder than Rich had in school, but did well enough to get into
law school. Back then, Marty’s intention (at least his stated intention) was to practise storefront law, help the underprivileged stick it to the man. Now billboards and bus-stop ads hawked his firm’s personal injury services. Helping people stick it to the man’s insurance company was more like it.

Rich took pride in the fact that he earned his living by writing, even if most of the work was corporate and catalogue copy, and the odd ghost-writing job for local luminaries who thought their lives worth documenting. He did well enough to keep his first and only wife, Leora, and daughter Leigh-Anne in a detached brick house south of East Ferry, but had never kept pace financially with Marty. Rich drove a sensible car that got good mileage, an Acura he’d found in the
News,
three years old with barely thirty thousand miles on the clock. The Leckies took car trips to visit family and the occasional all-inclusive at a beach resort, thanks mainly to his father-in-law, who was determined that his daughter and granddaughter should have a decent vacation whether or not Rich could provide one.

Marty had a sprawling home east of the Delaware Park golf course, where he lived with his three kids from the first marriage and a foxy second wife half his age. Marty had three imports just for himself (a sleek Jag sedan, a two-seater Benz convertible and an Accord he used strictly for lousy driving conditions or parking in dicey parts of town). The fox had a top-of-the-line minivan for ferrying the kids and a Miata for her downtime. Marty was always leaving for or coming back from some killer holiday. Now that he was managing partner, he let the young associates put in the hours, or made them do it if letting them didn’t do the trick. Just a few weeks earlier, Marty had flown the fox out to San Diego to watch the Buick Invitational, Tiger Woods’s favourite tournament. A few weeks before that it had been a two-week cruise in the Caribbean, with a nanny to run after the kids while he rubbed sunscreen
into the fox’s haunches, all while Buffalo was digging out of four-foot lake-effect drifts.

Both men would turn fifty-five this year but only Rich looked it. He had lost his hair early and what little there was left around the ears was grey and coarse. He was five-seven and thirty pounds overweight (forty if you believed Leora). The extra weight made his face look pouchy and he couldn’t wear jeans anymore without looking like a tourist or a narc.

Marty, on the other hand, probably didn’t weigh ten pounds more than he had in high school, right around six feet and one-eighty stripped. He’d be shiny with sweat after a game but not drenched like Rich, who looked like a mouldy gourd left out in the rain. Marty’s arms and legs were toned and his pecs hadn’t turned into tits. And if he had ever lost one lustrous hair from his head, two had probably grown in its place.

“I need fluids,” Rich said.

Marty handed him a water bottle.

“There beer in that?”

“No.”

“I can wait.”

There was a knock on the glass door to their court and they looked out to see a young couple holding racquets. They wore expensive-looking outfits with matching headbands and wristbands. Marty looked at his watch, saw their time was up and waved the couple in. He and Rich collected their gear and headed to the showers.

They stood under their showerheads a long while, Rich rolling his shoulders forward and back under the hot water to loosen his muscles. Marty, damn him, had to tend to his hair like it was school picture day, washing it, rinsing it, rubbing in conditioner that smelled like coconut, rinsing it again.

When they were done they sat on a narrow pine bench in front of their lockers. Rich laid a clubhouse towel under his feet
while he dressed—God knew what crawled around the carpets in this place—and used another to dry himself.

“So where to?” Marty asked.

“I was thinking the Drift.”

“Really?”

“Why really?”

“Nah, it’s just—well, they don’t have much of a single malt list.”

Christ. Marty could be a jerk sometimes. Worrying about single malts while Rich had to count his beers to keep expenses down. “Olmsted’s has a better whisky selection,” he admitted. “But their food’s not worth the price.”

“And the Drift’s is? They deep-fry everything. Even the menus, I think. Aren’t you watching your cholesterol?”

“I get it checked every year.”

“And?”

“And it’s always high.”

“Your doctor put you on anything?”

“No.”

“Why not? Murray Lightman’s cholesterol was through the roof last year. He takes Contrex now and eats whatever he wants.”

“Can we just get a beer, please? Believe me, I need beer more than Contrex.”

“Joke all you want, but go see your doctor. Or mine, if you want. I’ll get you in to see him.”

“Marty, please. Drop it already!”

“Okay, okay. Fine. Sue me for caring.”

The irony was, Rich’s doctor had written a goddamn prescription. He just hadn’t filled it, not at six bucks a pill every day for the rest of his life.

“What the hell,” Marty said. “Let’s make it the Drift. You did pretty well there last time, I recall.”

“Oh, please.”

“She liked you, Rich. What was her name?”

“Holly.”

“Holly, right. Great name. Great gal. I still don’t understand why you never called her. She was bright, she was cute. She practically made you take her number.”

“I’m married, okay? Isn’t that reason enough?”

“It hasn’t always been.”

“Trudy, you mean.”

“Yes, Trudy. And wasn’t there a proofreader you were after for a while?”

“Yes. I made a complete fool of myself and never even got to first base. Please, Marty. All I’m after right now is a burger and a beer.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m hungry and I’m thirsty and not necessarily in that order.”

“I mean why settle for so little?”

“So little what!”

“Remember what you told me at the cottage on Labour Day?”

“About what?”

“You and Leora.”

“What about us?”

“You don’t remember this?”

“Vaguely.”

“Christ. Well, you told me—ah, jeez—you told me you stopped having sex like a year ago. ‘She’s frozen me out,’ you said.”

“I said that?”

“Your exact words.”

“I was exaggerating,” Rich said. “I was drunk.”

He had been drunk, so much so that he’d wound up puking in the bushes outside Marty’s cottage in the Finger Lakes, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes as he hunched over, helplessly
retching. But he hadn’t been exaggerating. His sex life with Leora was over and he couldn’t care less, with all her dislikes and inhibitions, her rules and regulations, her no man’s land and no-fly zones. He had liked the girl at the Drift. The woman. Holly. In her early forties, nice-looking, with a warmth and ease to her that suggested she’d be Leora’s polar opposite in bed. But he couldn’t chance it. The embarrassment and awkwardness were too much for him. Even if she said the right things, told him it was okay,
let’s just cuddle and see what happens,
he’d lie there rigid, not knowing what to say, wanting to try again but dreading being exposed. Viagra would help but each baby blue pill was just another luxury he couldn’t afford. Christ, his arteries were choking on their own plaque because he couldn’t afford the Contrex.

“What’s the matter?” Marty asked. “You look down. More than down. Depressed. You know, no one has to live with depression anymore. There are pills now that have virtually no side effects.”

“Of course there are,” Rich said. “There’s a pill for everything. One for depression and one to lower my cholesterol. One to give me enough of a hard-on that I can try to pick up a woman without worrying she’s going to laugh me out of bed. One pill to make you larger and one to make you small, remember? There’s a pill for fucking everything, Marty, but my problem is I can’t afford them. Just my luck, right? The only baby boomer in town who isn’t sitting around pondering which of his residences to retire to.”

“Nobody lives like that.”

“You do.”

“Practically nobody. And you’ve done fine for yourself. You have a nice house, a car—”

“And you have what, three of each?”

“Forget me for a minute. Compared to most of the world’s population, you lead a charmed life.”

“Great. Next to some guy in a rice paddy in Bangladesh, I’m a stunning success. It’s only among the guys I grew up with and went to school with that I suffer by comparison.”

“You chose an honourable path and stuck to it. You wanted to be a writer and that’s what you are. I respect you for that. We all do.”

“Yeah? I don’t remember ever staggering drunk through campus saying one day I’d write the Great American Annual Report.”

“Forget it. Let’s go to the Drift and throw down a few. Make a move on a girl. Get laid. It’ll do your self-respect a world of good.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said before? Things aren’t working. And I really can’t afford the cure.”

“Maybe you can,” Marty said with a smile.

“What are you talking about?”

“You remember Barry Aiken?”

“Sure. He was at college with us. Tall guy with long hair … he was an artist of some kind.”

“That’s him. He’s a designer now.”

“Married a really cute girl who played piano.”

“Amy Farber.”

“I always liked her. Didn’t he wind up moving back to his dad’s house?”

“That’s right.”

“On Lincoln Parkway?”

“Good memory. So Barry has a situation I think you’ll find intriguing.”

“What kind of situation?”

“I got the weirdest call from him just before I left work. Suppose you could get prescriptions at less than half the price? Maybe a third.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Barry’s holding.”

“Holding? Christ, I haven’t heard that expression in a million years. What are you saying, he has prescription drugs to sell? How did he—”

“I didn’t ask, Richie. A lawyer never asks unless he already knows the answer.”

“I wouldn’t need a prescription?”

“Just cash.”

“Well, that’s a problem right there.”

Marty leaned in a little. “Not if you do me a favour.”

“What favour?”

“As a lawyer,” Marty said, “there are boundaries I can’t cross. Situations I can’t be found in.”

“I don’t like where this is going. You want me to do something illegal because you’re afraid to get caught.”

“No one’s getting caught, Nelliebelle. It’s just that
if
something went wrong, no matter how unlikely, the consequences for my career could be fatal.”

“But not for mine because I don’t have one.”

“I didn’t say that. But as a lawyer I have to at least project a facade of integrity.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Go to Barry’s and pick up a package. Stop at my house. Go home. That’s it,” Marty said.

“Let me think about it.”

“Sure,” Marty said. He looked up for the waitress and caught her eye immediately, something Rich had never mastered.

It wasn’t until after Holly came in and ordered a drink and gave Rich some eye contact and a wave that he leaned across the table and told Marty he would do it.

“Yeah?” Marty said. “You remember which house on Lincoln Parkway, or you need me to write it down?”

T
he pain in my side woke me before any bad dreams could. I was up before six, drinking coffee and waiting for a fresh round of Percocet to take effect. I checked the wound for signs of infection. None so far. Good to know Marco kept a clean blade. If my luck held, he’d scrub every bullet before he and his boys loaded their guns.

At six-thirty I opened my front door and looked up and down the hall. No werewolves, vampires or gunmen. I reminded myself to call a locksmith and get something sturdy installed, then took the stairs down to 16 and summoned an elevator from there.

The underground parking garage was cool and quiet at that hour. I walked softly toward the spot where my car was parked and waited a moment behind a bright yellow concrete pillar. Still quiet. I moved out to my car and looked at the hood. There were handprints on the dusty front end that showed the hood had been lifted and my heart started to pick up speed. Then I remembered Joe Avila had worked on it the other night; the prints were probably his. I unlocked the car and released the hood. I wasn’t sure what to look for. Stray wires? Sticks marked TNT? A round black bomb bearing the trusted Acme label? Nothing seemed out of place. I eased the hood closed,
then knelt down and peered under the chassis. A sharp pain shot through my side and I drew breath through clenched teeth. I got up slowly and leaned on the driver’s door, trying to control the pain through measured breathing. Four in. Four out. Four in. Four out.