Plainclothes Naked (26 page)

Halfheartedly, McCardle tugged the pipe out of his pocket and wodged in a whitish crumb. Before he could raise it to his mouth, Zank snatched it away. “I found it, I get the first taste. Beam me up, Scotty!”

Sighing, McCardle sparked the Bic and held the flame to the stem while Tony sucked for all he was worth. Finally a thin spindle of smoke billowed in the glass and he crashed against the counter, eyes popping out of his head.

“Fuck,” Tony sputtered and exhaled a small puff of smoke.
“Strong.”
Mac had a feeling it was pipe residue, not the pallid nugget he’d fired up. But he knew better than to cross Tony when he was enthusiastic.

“Bag it,” Tony chirped. “Sooner we get it bottled up and hit the street, the sooner we get some cash money.”

“But
Tony,
” McCardle tried not to whine. “What about the photo?”

“We’ll get it.You gotta be flexible, man. That’s the key to bein’ suc cessful in business. Opportunity knocks, you don’t slam the door on its fingers. Read Og Mandino.
Greatest Salesman in the World.
”

While Mac was busy bagging the contents of the urn, Zank had another idea. He rifled the kitchen drawers until he found a hammer, then plucked a choice morsel out of the urn and placed it on the counter. With a happy whoop, he brought the hammer down, then brought it down again, until he’d reduced the solid nugget to a batch of chalky powder.

Using his shiv, Tony worked the mound into four straight lines, then leaned down and rhinoed two enormous snorts.

“Oh yeah,” he said, pinching his nose when he’d horned up the deuce. “This shit’s off the hook! We got
tootonium
here. I left a bump for you.”

“Not right now.”

McCardle hoisted the four stuffed sandwich bags. Tony grabbed one and hooted. “All
righty!
Let’s make tracks. We sell this shit fast, we can come back in time to torture the broad before dinner. Find out what she did with the happy-balls. Two fortunes in one day, not too shabby.”

“No, it’s not,” Mac admitted, though, deep down, he had a feeling shabbiness was going to be the least of their problems.

It had been over an hour since they’d left Chez Dendez, and Manny was still smarting. But not, for better or worse, because of what happened with Carmella’s sons. Heinous as it was, that kind of weirdness tended to dissipate once you left the scene. On an average day, a cop saw more lives ruined than saved. Saved was the exception.
‌

By comparison to some of the shattered worlds Manny’d walked in and out of, what Louie, Hector, and Gordo had to deal with was relatively benign. True, the trio might be psychologically shattered—especially when they got details of the murder. (Bad enough their dad was a woman; now they’d start wondering if maybe she was some kind of slut.) But still, no body was bleeding brown from their liver, nobody

picking brains out of the playpen. He’d witnessed both and wished he hadn’t.

Not for the first time, Manny realized that what constituted tragedy, in his mind, was a few notches beyond what most souls would consider endurable. Except, of course, when it came to his own feelings, tender waifs that they were. In spite of all the plates he had spinning—the Zank and McCardle show and Fayton and Krantz, Dr. Roos and the wrath of Mayor Marge, not to mention George W. and his smiling tes ticles—the only thing Manny could think about was Tina calling him a tight-ass. That hurt. He knew he was overreacting, but each time he recalled her words, he had to bite the insides of his cheeks to create a pain big enough to blot out his anguish.

He assumed that his current moodiness was due to drugs. Or lack thereof. Not that knowing helped. It was Newton’s Law of Applied Narcotics: The higher you got, the lower you fell. And he’d gotten pretty blitzed, what with the Percodan he’d added to his usual breakfast of codeine and coffee. Whenever he started jonesing, he tended to get emotional. That was the first phase. Which was fine, if you were home alone and weeping at a Volvo commercial. But here he was, with the first woman who’d stopped his heart since forever, and he was acting like a twelve-year-old girl who’d been cut from the pep squad.

“Pathetic,”
he muttered, before he realized Tina would hear him talking to himself. He tried to play it off by squeezing the wheel and setting his jaw in a manly fashion, but Tina wouldn’t let it pass.

“What’s pathetic?” she asked, clearly glad to be speaking after his sulky lull. “That you’ve been taking every back alley in Butt-burg at eighty miles an hour? Or that I’m riding around with a guy who pulls down dead she-male’s underpants? Not that I’m criticizing. I’m a live-and-let-live kind of girl.”

Manny stole a glance at her, and she met his eyes as if daring him.

But daring him to what?

“Lighten up, cowboy. You want to do strong and silent, that’s fine. Girls love that. Some girls. Me being newly widowed and all, I wouldn’t say no to a little social intercourse. But hey, it’s your car. You wanna go all broody and mumble ‘Pathetic!’ every couple of minutes, knock yourself out. My house is being overtaken by killer crackheads. It’s not like I can throw a snit and say ‘Take me home!’ ”

“Look,” said Manny. “I know I’m being weird.”

Tina smiled. “It’s okay. I was you, knocking around with a hot chick who probably offed her husband, I’d get the clam-ups, too. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re conflicted. Your right brain says, ‘I really like her.’ The left is like, ‘What are you, insane? She made the last guy gargle glass!’ So where are we going again?”

“What?” Manny glanced over just in time for Tina to dive sideways and turn the wheel a foot before they rammed an oncoming mail-truck.

“That was exciting,” she said. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I have great reflexes. I’ve heard cops were lousy drivers.”

“I don’t mean that,” said Manny, feeling retarded but forging on, in the grips of some narcotically deprived need to express himself, a stress-fueled combo of terror, lust, and all-purpose emotional confu sion. Even as he spoke, he knew he’d probably regret it, but regret not saying anything even more. Every thought in his head was like a fork in a toaster. “I mean, I’m not used to this.”

“To what?”

“To feeling anything. Okay? I
feel
something for you. You know how unfucking likely that is? Most of the time I don’t feel. I don’t want to. The life I live, it’s better not to. But now, I mean, looking at you. ... From the minute I walked into your kitchen, it’s like, I don’t know, I won the lottery and forgot how to cash a check.”

He went back to watching the road and felt his whole face burn. Tina’s silence was crushing. Air whistled through the back window that never closed all the way. He steered blindly, seeing but not seeing: warehouse, stop sign, bar; vacant lot, gas station, red light, church.... His grip was slick on the steering wheel. He more or less knew the way to Dr. Roos’s office and trusted his car to get him there.

After what seemed like months,Tina spoke. “Give me your hand.” “My hand?”

“Your hand. Give it to me.”

He reached over and she took it, her own fingers warm around his. She studied both sides intently, following the groove of his knuckles with her fingertip, the play of dead veins leading down from his wrist.

He used to shoot there, in his fun-filled youth, and his sclerosed vessels had never forgiven him. The effect was tantalizing and clinical at once. “What are you,” he asked finally, slowing as the light went yellow to

red. “A palm reader?”

“More of a palm taster. You can find out a lot about a person with your mouth. Ask any hooker. You must know a few, in your line of work. Screwing is one thing. Even giving head—but that doesn’t count. That’s the job. But kissing, going mouth-to-mouth—no way. That’s way too intimate.”

As if to emphasize her point, she gave his palm a teasing lick.

Manny shivered. The sensation was so dizzying, he had to speak to keep from driving into a tree. “Tell you the truth, I never had anybody lick my hand. Is that a Guru Marv thing?”

She dropped his hand and glared.
“Fuck you!”
“Sorry! I was just trying to make conversation.” “Forget it.”

Manny stared at the road, sensing the creature beside him moving away as surely as if she’d boarded a train going the opposite direction. Suddenly he understood.
This is as hard for her as it is for me
....

Maybe that’s what love was: damage loving damage, and in the process turning itself into something else, something—he heard the word in his mind and fought to keep from choking—something
beau tiful.
Something—again his mind recoiled—something
pure.
Which felt like dying.

That was the truth. Despite the teasing, despite the sharp mouth and the swagger and the attitude for days,Tina was struggling the same way he was, trying to violate the bone-deep rule she’d made for herself to survive what she’d had to survive: Don’t let anybody in.

She had opened the door, against all that life had taught her, and he had stood in the doorway, babbling.

In that instant, Manny knew, he had to make a move or lose her. And he made it, without knowing he was going to, just as the light changed to green. He reached for her, loving the feel of his hand on the back of her neck as he pulled her toward him.
Finally
. Her skin was so soft it startled him. A hard-ass with soft skin....

The first car started honking as soon as his lips found hers. He kept one foot on the brake. The harder he pressed down, the deeper he

kissed her. It was rougher than he intended. He had meant to seduce, and instead he pounced. Tina didn’t resist, but she didn’t burst into pas sion, either. It was as if, he somehow understood, she was waiting to see if she felt anything—or maybe to see what the fuck he’d do next.

Shouting began to accompany the horns, but the noise sounded far away. The part of his mind that considered odds and consequence had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together onto the Impala’s sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he’d macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he’d said “Fuck it” to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.

Tina tasted like honey and cigarettes. The flavor lingered as he slid south over her throat. She undid her blouse and he kissed her nipples, accidentally biting the left, feeling it harden between his lips as she cried out. He raised his face, just to see her. Then he plunged under her skirt, up along her damp thighs where her panties had soaked through to the wet heart of her sex, like some small, throbbing animal waiting to be born on his tongue.

Tina began to murmur and Manny recognized a language he thought he’d lost forever.
“Anything,”
she whispered, as he breathed her in.
“Anything
. . . .” He knew her words had nothing to do with him, which made him want her more. In some strange way, they sounded like prayer.

Tina was almost there.
Almost.
Until, in a lightning flash of unwel come awareness, Manny pushed off her, bolted upright, and blinked until he knew where he was. He looked down and saw Tina’s eyes shining with the same wild excitement he felt himself. She met his gaze, then let loose the most crazed laugh he had ever heard.

Manny watched her, stunned—he realized he’d never heard her laugh—and when he saw that she was looking past him he raised his gaze to the faces looming outside all four of the Impala’s windows. A pair of grinning old geezers, an outraged African-American lady in a

flowered hat, some giggling punkettes wielding Cherry Big Gulps, and a pack of squealing, freckled boys mashing their faces against the glass on the driver’s side. It was like
Night of the Living Dead,
with live peo ple from Upper Marilyn, all watching him emerge, dazed and sticky-lipped, from beneath Tina’s rumpled skirt.

“Jesus,”
Manny heard himself mutter. He hadn’t noticed that he’d popped out of his pants, which only made Tina howl more insanely.

“Oh God, I’m going to pee,” she stammered, hugging herself, until she saw Manny’s expression and touched his lips. “Relax, Detective, they can’t arrest you. You’re a cop.”

He was still absorbing this when, out of nowhere, he heard a voice he recognized but couldn’t place. That’s when he saw Krantz, mullet tucked safely under his police hat, tapping on the window, mouthing “Open up!”

Dr. Willard Roos poured his protein-and-hormone shake into a sixteen-ounce 7-Eleven Slurpy cup and checked his breasts in the mirror. A stoop-shouldered, mousy fel low who wore his hair in a Giuliani sweep, Roos favored lab coats and short-sleeve white shirts from Penneys.
‌

He didn’t particularly want breasts, but as a money-maker, Tits-in-a-Cup—that was his private name for the powder, which he planned to market as Fem-Fem— could be just the thing to bring in the cash he needed to hire a top lawyer or, if necessary, disappear and start his practice all over again in South Africa or Rio. So far nobody’d connected him to the Carmella Dendez thing, but if they did, he had his bag packed. In the lop-job business, you didn’t rustproof a scalpel until you had an escape plan and an attorney on retainer.

It was Chooch, the day man at Pawnee Lodge, who’d called to inform him that the police had found Carmella’s body. The surgeon had helped him with a stubborn goiter, and Chooch owed him a favor. Roos could guess what happened, but decided not to think about it. He focused instead on measuring the slight increase in nipple girth and fat content around his aureole. At this point he had the budding mam maries of a pubescent thirteen-year-old girl. When they grew in all the way, he planned on reversing the procedure with equivalent doses of testosterone. He knew it was risky—one wrong move and he’d end up with big breasts
and
extra chest hair—but he was confident he could pull it off. If not, he told himself bitterly, he could join a carnival or try for an Internet start-up: Hairy Men with Tits dot Com . . . “Products for the Man Who Has Everything.”