Chapter 44
I pulled my trench coat tight as I moved with the foot traffic down West Thirty-third. The Knicks were set to lose another one at MSG tonight, and the weather reminded me why I didn't live here, despite my love for New Yorkers. Had to appreciate their brutal honesty in a world full of spineless liars. I jaywalked across the street over to One Penn Plaza, darting under the construction scaffolding and through the entrance as renovations took place.
I entered the FedEx Office, milling amongst the Manhattanites as I searched for a certain someone. A cute young thang with “Smart” on her nametag zigged and zagged around store displays and supplies, oblivious to the customers as others attended to them. Kinda young for store manager, but there it was on the eyeglass wearer's tag.
“Excuse me, ma'am,” a man offered in a broken English dialect as she tried to hurry by. She held up a sole finger, indicating that she was speaking on her headset. Cute that no one here knew her true nature, possessing a façade like so many of mine.
“Sir, just take a place in line and someone will be right with you.” Although different in tone, her voice was unmistakable as that with which I'd conversed once beforeâwhen I'd begged her to back off.
“Just need a moment of your time, miss. I need to know if your store provides this service,” the elderly man said as he unfolded a tiny slip of paper and handed it to her. Lorelei Smart, the MIT dropout from the Jacob Riis projects on the lower East Side, read the single phrase:
4Shizzle
. I watched her jaw tighten as her engineer's mind tried to anticipate three steps ahead.
“I don't know what this is,” she lied. “Sir, this . . . is . . . a . . . FedEx Office.” She spoke deliberately for the man's benefit. She handed the paper back to him, ensuring it looked like a common mistake to her customers. The nice gentleman departed the store having done his part. And all it took from me was a cup of coffee and a bagel from the Dunkin Donuts in the same building.
I'd watched it all, observing the observant, four steps ahead of her three. When she retreated to the manager's office in back, I was already seated at the powerful computer she used for much more than “your shipping or business needs.”
“Hi,” I said with a grin. “Why don't you have a seat?” I offered just as I cracked her computer password, her mother's name with numbers substituted for the vowels. She wasn't the first person whose ego made them sloppy on their turf. “What's the scoop today? Some star popped with a DWI? No, wait. Somebody's register came up short on last night's shift. Or are you two reams short on copier paper?”
“Sir, we don't allow customers back here. I'm about to call the police,” the editor of 4Shizzle said straight-faced, still playing her role. She'd done so well hiding her true identity behind the older, wise-cracking, sexy online persona she'd cultivated. Yet here I was, staring down the real item.
“Why? Lorelei, you offered to make me famous. Remember? Or was that just when you were safe behind your screen name 'n shit? I'm here to make you famous instead. No instant messaging or all that stuff. No tweets. Face to face. You get the exclusive today . . . if you don't pee on yourself first.”
“I ain't afraid of you,” she snorted, trying to convince one of us in the tiny room.
“Maybe you should be these days. Things haven't been going so good for me, thanks in no small part to you. Killing Loup Garou has gone a long way toward calming my nerves, so that's a good thing . . . for you.”
“Oh my gawd,” Lorelei gasped. My joke about her peeing on herself almost came true. “You're making that up to scare me. They said it was a gang hit. Finishing what they started.”
I chuckled. “Hope you didn't pay them for that story.”
Her reflexes probably screamed at her to run, but she indulged me. I figured her greed for the scoop would override her fears. “You're lying,” she pushed.
“Wouldn't you prefer the truth? Or are you comfortable going with what they're feeding you? I thought 4Shizzle prided itself on the truth.”
“Lor, you in there?” her co-worker called through the door. “Juan gotta leave early. Again.”
“Your decision,” I mouthed softly. She had a clear shot to run for it and risk that I was telling the truth about not being here to kill her.
“I'm on a conference call. Get someone else to cover for him,” she shouted back, making her choice.
“Okay, but that's some bullshit,” the co-worker griped, ending their dialogue with her and storming back to the front.
“Just another day, huh?” I said while browsing through her files. I smiled, recognizing a few random tidbits courtesy of me, and seeing who were some of her other sources.
“You wanna get away from my computer?”
“Touchy. I used to be like that with mine. Before it took a bullet meant for me. Does your mother know about your real career?”
“No. That's why I do this shit. It was hard enough getting her to let me come home after I skipped college. Wait. How did youâ”
“After all this time, do you have to ask?” What we didn't get into was how Lorelei used most of her earnings from 4Shizzle to pay for her mother's cancer treatment and support her crackhead sister with three kids in Jersey. That rare bit of goodness and her being just a kid herself spared Lorelei the fate of so many others who'd crossed me.
“I got work to get back to. What is it you want to tell me?” She sighed.
“Everything,” I offered as I gave up the chair in front of her prized repository of scandal. “Wanna cue the Usher music? 'Cause these are my confessions.”
I talked while 4Shizzle's enigmatic editor listened, filling her in on the back story behind so much of the dirt I'd funneled her way. Every time she tried to type or write down what I was saying, I would stop her, leaving her to fidget nervously in her chair.
“How much do you want for all this?” she asked, sitting still for the first time and shifting back into the business mode of a person older than what she was.
“Nothing. I just figured I'd give you as much as I reasonably could and let you make up your mind about getting dragged down where I'm at right now.”
“Why do I get the feeling I'm never going to hear from you again?”
“Don't fight that feeling, Ms. Smart. Is this more than you bargained for?”
“Yeah,” the young girl answered solemnly. “She didn't tell me all this about you.”
“Because Sophia didn't know me long enough to tell you.”
“Who?”
“The person who gave you those unedited photos of Penny Antnee and Andre Martin.”
“That wasn't her name.”
“I didn't expect her to use her real name with you.”
“No. That wasn't her name at all. I ain't dumb. I can find out things too, y'know.”
“Then who was it?” I barked, dreading what she might say.
“Shit. What's her name?” she cursed to herself, fumbling with her thoughts. “That one they accuse you of kidnapping.”
“Collette.”
“Yeah! That's it!”
“
She gave you those photos
?”
“Yeah. We spoke on the phone and then I got the e-mail. So?”
“Maybe . . . maybe Sophia put her up to it,” I tried to reason with myself as I began pacing. “Doesn't matter anyway. She's dead now. That's why I killed Loup Garou.”
“Okay, this shit is getting too crazy for me now. You need to leave before I get fired. Please.”
“What's wrong?” I asked. “You're hiding something.”
“C'mon, can you please leave already?” she pleaded.
“Are you really going to make me go back on my promise ?” I threatened, fed up with the bullshit I'd been through.
“All right! All right! I don't want to die. Sheesh. I'll tell you,” she yelped, exiting her chair and heading toward the door. In a frantic huff, she opened it before turning back toward me.
Lorelei's lip trembled. “That girl. Collette.”
“Yeah? What?”
“She called me yesterday,” she whispered, almost embarrassed. “She's not dead, man.”
I held the chair to steady myself as Lorelei darted out the door, leaving me alone in her office.
Alone as the walls closed in.
OMG, I would've typed if communicating over our usual medium.
Chapter 45
I came back.
One mo' gain.
Back to T or C, the town that birthed me and the desert that almost claimed me.
Maybe I should've let it be. The dramatic turn of events had me at wit's end. My last time here, I was off my game. Delirious flights of fancy had me not seeing the next move until it had occurred. I'd operated so long in lies that maybe the field had caught up with me. Like a typical old man being caught up in a young man's game, waking up one day and realizing that there just
might
be someone out there betterâfuck thatâ
maybe almost as good
as you.
Despite what I'd heard in New York, I had to see things yet again, but with eyes wide open. Needed to focus on the chessboard without benefit of forked tongue in my ear or pussy on the brain. I stood there in the cool early morning on the parking lot of the Asilo Rojo Inn, and although I dreaded replaying that critical time, I did what I had to do. I walked outside the door of the room we'd shared, imagining all the blood I saw. Remembered the streaks on the ground and the pain I felt when I thought Collette was lost to me.
Then I rewound back to when that particular day began, skipping past the mad dash for my life. Back to when Daniel asked me to assist him with the pool. I remembered his dreams of how he wanted kids frolicking in it while their parents looked on. From where I stood, I could see the yellow tape was absent from it. I walked closer, still unnoticed. The repairs to the pool were almost complete, its rehabilitation a reality.
Just add water
, it advertised. Impressive for such a short period of time and on the limited budget Daniel professed to have.
If Daniel was around, there were none of the normal indicators. A brand new truck sat where his old beat-up one was usually parked, suggesting change was afoot. That and the pool answered a lot for me. Either someone new had taken over the motel, or I was headed for a reckoning. I walked briskly, prepared to confront either.
As I entered the office, the bell rang. Daniel was busy on the phone, arguing in Spanish about the new sign that was to have been delivered yesterday. When he turned around to greet me, we made eye contact. He froze before hanging up, ending his argument abruptly. I rewound back to when I found Collette suspiciously talking to him at this very spot. She was negotiating with him.
He is not so blind who cannot see, but who refuses to see.
“Damn. She paid you well,” I commented, seeing it all laid out before me.
I'd barely uttered the words before Daniel reached for a shotgun from behind the counter and drew it on me, reflexes faster than I'd guessed. Adrenaline or sheer fear will do that though.
“I told you not to come back, amigo,” he hissed nervously. I reflected on the seemingly innocent conversation he was having with Collette when I walked in on them. Remembered how Penny's boys happened to arrive while Daniel had me occupied. Remembered his desperate insistence that I get out of here when I found the bloodied, trashed room minus Collette.
As calm and pristine as things were now, you'd think all that was a figment of my imagination. Except the gun barrel pointed at my center mass was a friendly dose of reality to remind me that I wasn't wrong about all this.
My phone rang and Daniel flinched. I showed it to him and slowly raised it to my ear. Careful not to have Daniel mess up his lobby with parts of me just yet. I'd put all my contacts into play before boarding the plane from New York, and one of them was calling me to report in.
“Did you find her?” I asked loudly for Daniel's benefit. He'd begun sweating, and the barrel of the gun wobbled ever so slightly. Somehow that made me calmer.
“Yeah. And it wasn't hard either,” the boisterous hairdresser in Allen, Texas, a northern suburb of Dallas, replied on the other end of the phone. “You still owe me the agreed upon amount, right?”
“Yes,” I replied with a sigh. My life was in jeopardy again, so quibbling over money was a low priority. “Where is she?”
“Here,” she replied. “She's on all the channels. You watching?”
“I'll have to call you back,” I said. Daniel had lowered his aim to wipe the sweat off his forehead, his eyes twitching now. He made the sign of the cross as I hung up. “You might need that divine intervention; especially if you miss your shot,” I said to him, aiming an empty finger at him with a smile and gesturing as if it were a gun of my own.
He looked puzzled for a moment by my gall before focusing on his aim, preparing to match my imaginary shot with one of more substance. If Collette had just surfaced like my caller said, I was probably confirmed as her kidnapper. Daniel would be the hero, having taken out the big bad man. Maybe even reap more than whatever he'd been paid by Collette to manipulate me during our stay.
Checkmate on my ass.
Daniel was sweating more profusely now. I took a deep breath, but refused to close my eyes as he squinted to get off a good shot. Just as his finger squeezed the trigger, he seized up, suddenly gasping. The shotgun rang out, peppering the lobby wall two feet to my left, a stray pellet hitting me in my arm. Daniel dropped the gun, gripping his chest in agony.
The divine intervention was on my behalf.
“My . . . heart. I need my pills,” he wheezed as he tried to brace himself on the counter. “They . . . they're over there. Por favor.”
“And you want me to get them?” I pondered.
“SÃ, sÃ. You're Leila's son. I loved her. I . . . I wasn't going to shoot you.”
“Could've fooled me,” I said, coming around the counter to kick his shotgun farther beyond his reach. He tried to clutch my arm, but I backed away. When he tumbled onto the floor, I watched him for a moment, listening to his groans until they ceased. My mother's soap opera lover and Jasonâthe rare potential father figures I'd had in my lifeâhad all been major disappointments. Daniel was no different.
I left the Asilo Rojo Inn and its foolish old proprietor, free of any childhood delusions that held me back, for the small town held neither truth nor consequences for me.