Uncle Janice (21 page)

“I need it today,” she said.

“Well, good luck,” he told her. “But you’re gonna want to be real careful,
just saying. Keep your eyes open, yeah? Where there’s some cops there’s more cops, and they’ll bust you for nothing.”

She didn’t even thank him. But that was all right: he was the Godfather, Saint Dwayne, protector of dumb bitches the world over. After K-Lo dragged her away, Dwayne pushed the last two of his baggies through the hole in his pants pocket. It’d be a loss of forty dollars, but since they cost him only ten dollars per, it really was only a loss of twenty, the cost of doing business, a small price to pay for peace of mind. Plus, truth be told, he needed to justify his sore asshole. Why straddle this construction horse if he wasn’t going to make use of its crater? The baggies dropped down next to one of his sweatshirt sleeves and a bag of Cheetos he’d emptied earlier. He wiped his hands together, problem solved, nothing to worry about. Before crossing the street and walking past that gauntlet of cops, he pulled out his cell to call his connects, the dudes who’d driven back up to Queens from North Carolina.

“Hey, yo,” Dwayne said. “You know that Indian chick you was telling me about? Did she have short hair or long?”

It was the day after the Tevis breakup. For this afternoon’s shift, Gonz had been ghosting her, not a permanent arrangement, God willing, and not by request, either—she hadn’t talked to Prondzinski yet—but because it was his turn in the preestablished rotation to work the 115. As if in apology, the Big Bosses also teamed her up with K-Lo, the superstar CI who’d dragged her to all the neighborhood parks, where somehow they just kept striking out. Hardly any of the dealers were where K-Lo had said they’d be, and when they were, they weren’t selling what K-Lo said they’d be selling.
Uncle continues to be hopeless
, Gonz probably said into the Nextel. And when she at last did come close to making a buy, the investigators of course spoiled it by accidentally parking across the street. Yeah right. Accidentally, her ass. Ten minutes later, five blocks south of Roosevelt, off the grid and away from the dealers, she shoved her face close to Hart’s through his open driver’s-side window.
She called bullshit. The investigators made a mistake? Parked on the wrong corner? Hadn’t noticed her talking to Dwayne? Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Spittle flew out of her mouth. She accused Hart of sabotaging her out of some sausage-club loyalty to Tevis, and she wanted to know what the fuck. Inside the Impala, Cataroni and McCarthy and Duckenfield all gawked with disbelief. Gonz and K-Lo slithered closer behind her, as if to eavesdrop, which was unnecessary since she was shouting. When Hart opened his mouth to respond, his breath punched her with acid reflux.

“Who do you think you are?” he said.

“I—”

“Who do you think you
are
?” he said again, the implication being
I’m a sergeant, your superior, capable of stripping your vacation days, writing you up for insubordination, killing your career with a bad annual review, kicking your thick ass back to patrol. That’s me. Who are you?
It was a question she didn’t know how to answer. To move her face away from his own, he powered up the window. His door swung open and smashed her knees. He stepped out of the car, unfolding himself to full height, waiting for her to say something, anything, and when she didn’t, when she did nothing except pedal backward, he pointed a finger at K-Lo and barked, “You! J-Lo, K-Lo, whatever the fuck … you wanna get paid in cash?”

Always prepared, K-Lo said, “Or?”

Hart picked three crack rocks out of his Altoids tin and dropped them one by one into K-Lo’s palm. She’d never seen anything like it. K-Lo’s face registered zero surprise, though, as if this had happened plenty of times before, but then again maybe not: he kept his body half turned, ready to take off and run in case Hart changed his mind. Gonz, meanwhile, was staring at a plastic bag wrapped around a telephonepole wire. She probably should’ve looked away, too, for the purposes of plausible deniability. Paying CIs with drugs—or failing to report an officer who paid CIs with drugs—was not only against departmental regulations but illegal, obviously, potentially punishable with jail time. Hart would keep the cash, K-Lo would sell the rocks for more money
than he would’ve been paid for today’s services, and everybody everywhere would win, except Janice, of course. For cues on how to behave she turned to the investigators in the Impala, but she couldn’t see them anymore from where she was standing. Bright sun inflamed all their windows.

“Gonz,” said Sergeant Hart. “You want a ride back to the uncle car, or what?”

Hopeful, Gonz looked at her—a chance to listen to WFAN sports talk with the investigators!—and she waved him along. Their shift, and by extension his ghosting responsibilities, had ended five minutes earlier. Now at least she could walk back to the uncle car by herself, without him snarking next to her the whole way.
What were you thinking, Itwaru? You on your period or something?
They’d have the drive back to the rumpus for all that. Assuming he waited for her at the uncle car. Assuming he didn’t ditch her completely, although not even Gonz was that much of a prick. He’d probably wait for her at one of Woodside’s Irish pubs, probably Saints & Sinners, where he’d have enough time for a beer and a couple of shots, lucky him. What was she waiting for? Standing here for? K-Lo had already left: he went east with one hand protectively plunged into his pocket, his fist presumably curled around the rocks. And so she went the other way: back toward Woodside and the uncle car, solo, just like Tevis the day before. As always she moved quickly, even outpacing the Impala for half a block before it left her behind. The Nextel in her purse put the time at exactly 3:40. The nineteenth of March, a Wednesday. She’d never forget it. On Judge Street, between Britton and Vietor Avenues, she paused to watch a little black kid practicing his killers, hitting a handball off the side of an apartment building, down where the bricks met the sidewalk so the ball would dribble back to him, unreturnable. The Latino with the flaming eyeball grabbed her from behind.

Before she recognized him, she recognized the tattoo: a bright blue iris, burst capillaries, flames trailing down his neck, as if the eye had combusted
straight out of its socket. She recognized, too, the awkward angle of his jaw, the small white nubbins of his teeth. Acne scars—something she hadn’t noticed before, but then again she hadn’t been this close before—pocked his cheeks, over which he’d applied a thin layer of flesh-colored foundation. Other than the makeup, he looked exactly the same, his goatee as finely groomed as it was the only other time she’d seen him, two Saturdays ago, on line at the taco cart. Now he had a hold of her elbow. Behind him, as if she were living a daylight nightmare with all her secret monsters collected on one sidewalk, stood Korean Marty, miserably coughing into his armpit. Since last she’d seen him, he’d grown a hard dark walnut of a hematoma above his eyebrow. Marijuana fumes wafted off his big body, but his apparent friend, the Latino, smelled strongly, overwhelmingly, of baby powder.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” she said.

“Oh, jeez,” he said. With both his hands raised in apology, he leaned slightly backward at the waist without actually stepping away from her. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was hurting you. Was I? Come on, was I hurting you?”

Korean Marty pressed two fingers to the base of his throat and in a raspy voice said, “That’s her, man.”

“You got a haircut,” the guy said.

Again: why was she still standing here? She stepped around the little black kid, who like all city kids knew how to mind his own business. He was bouncing life into his handball, getting it warmed up for another practice serve. If she told him to call 911, she knew it would only provoke them. At the end of the block, with her arm clamped over her purse, she turned onto Britton Avenue, which seemed wider, more open. The bright afternoon sun blanched the sky. Deep in her ear she heard the voice of her father, who used to hang his head out her bedroom window to watch her come home from school. Walk calmly, not quickly. If you gotta look back, then take a peek, once, over your shoulder, but don’t ever turn around.

She turned around and saw the two of them three paces behind her. The skinny Latino nodded at her, smiling. Her elbow still felt hot where
he’d grabbed it. She walked faster, did everything wrong, hunched her shoulders and tightened the struts in her neck. On the opposite side of the street, three teenage girls sat on a stoop, two of them texting, the third staring at Janice with an inexplicably sour expression, as if she held her responsible for something. A block away past Ithaca Street, Janice passed a tall brick building with the penitential air of an elementary school. An hour earlier, she could have sought refuge in a crowd of mothers waiting for their kids to be released. She could have disappeared inside their haze of perfume, their chattering gossip and complaints, but by now that final school bell had already rung.

She reached into her purse for the Nextel. Unsure of the men’s proximity, she did not dare ask for backup. Instead she slipped the rubber hair band off her wrist and double-wrapped it around the Nextel’s silver transmitter button. Communication could go only one way now, from herself to the ghost. Gonz couldn’t chirp her back, ask her why she was tying up the line, but she didn’t need him to chirp her back. She needed him to listen. She hoped the sports talk on the Impala’s radio wasn’t playing too loudly. The purse hung unzipped off her shoulder. A foot clipped her heel and she stumbled forward before catching herself.

“Careful!” the Latino said.

Without turning around, she said, “You two better stop following me.”

“We better,” he said.

At the next intersection, she turned off Britton Avenue and onto a long and narrow one-way, Gleane Street, where two- and three-family homes crowded one another. Metal bars protected the windows and air conditioners. Thick trees shaded the sidewalk. To caution drivers, city workers had written
SCHOOL X-ING
in bright white letters, but to Janice, walking against the nonexistent traffic, it appeared mirrored and upside down. She hoped she was going the right way. She wanted to get onto Roosevelt, but here in Elmhurst, away from the easy crosshatch grid of Jackson Heights, her sense of direction tended to wobble. It seemed familiar, though, this Gleane Street, or at least she thought she’d heard of it before. But where were all the people? A hose seemed to have recently
washed down this section of sidewalk, but where was the hoser? Somewhere nearby the 7 train rumbled, the best noise she’d heard all month, for she could assume at least that she was getting closer to Roosevelt and the protection of all its commuters. She couldn’t see the avenue or the train yet, but she did see, a full block ahead, a red-and-black flag saying
TERRAZA CAFÉ
. When she slowed down, the Latino made no effort at all to keep himself from bumping into her.

“Oh, jeez,” he said. “I’m sorry. You okay? I didn’t hurt you again, did I?”

“I’m going to the Terraza Café,” she told them, her mouth turned toward the shoulder with her purse. “My man’s waiting for me there, okay?”

“And I bet he’s real big. Is he? Do you think he’d maybe want to have a word with us?”

“Now?” Korean Marty said in his hoarse voice. He looked at his watch, a Movado, the schmancy kind without any numbers on the dial. Most likely a Chinatown knockoff. He was squinting at it, as if that hematoma had doubled his vision, or maybe he hadn’t yet figured out how to read its dark, empty face. Two fingers once again went to the base of his throat. “I don’t know, Pauly. At
Terraza
? I don’t think so.”

“Don’t be difficult,” Pauly said. Probably the Cerebral Pauly she’d heard about at Marty’s, the one who’d hidden the kung fu dummy. He said, “We’ll dip in real quick is all, get you one of them hot teas for your cold.”

“But—” Korean Marty said.

“The kind with the whiskey and lemon,” Pauly said. He turned to Janice and told her, “We gotta meet the mans, right? The big muscular mans? I bet he’s just pissed off all the time. Is he? Does he, like, talk with his fists? Oh, forget it, don’t tell me. I don’t want to go in there with any, like … you know. You know what I mean.”

She walked slowly to give the investigators more time. She even thought about stopping to pick a penny up off the sidewalk, but she decided to step over it instead. The three seconds it would’ve bought her wasn’t worth the possibility of a brain-sloshing kick. Farther down
the block a sudden storefront appeared, the Dream Hair Salon, wedged between houses. Its tough women in pink curlers might’ve harbored her nicely, but she’d already told Gonz where to go. She kept walking. Past empty beach chairs on the sidewalk. Past four blue dumpsters in a dead-end alleyway that separated an apartment building from, at last, the Terraza Café. As was typical for places around here, dark cellophane covered the windows. On the bar’s brick front a bright mural depicted a neighborhood landscape of squiggly 7 trains and golden saxophones and a long line of multicolored children holding hands. When she reached the entryway, Pauly and Korean Marty separated so as to position themselves on either side of her. When she tried the door, it was locked.

MIERCOLES
said the sign.
CLOSED
.

Korean Marty’s thick arms cinched around her, his hands locked beneath her breasts. When he lifted her up off the sidewalk, she pedaled on air. Nervous, looking for witnesses, Pauly had his head turned toward a sliver of Roosevelt Avenue, where pedestrians on the early side of rush hour walked home along the grid. Not a one of them would be able to see her. Not on this little veinlet of a street, which branched away from Roosevelt at an angle that would keep her obscured. Her shoe had fallen off. With Pauly’s head still turned, she kicked the side of his knee. He crumpled to the ground, but that didn’t help her with Korean Marty. Not at all. He still had his arms wrapped tightly around her from behind, his struggled breathing wet against her ear. She snapped her head back, hoping to explode his nose, but instead hit the sharp bone of his chin. A light burst. Dark squiggly flyspecks floated past her eyes. Her feet still couldn’t find the ground. He held her out in front of him and they moved quickly backward, together, away from Pauly picking himself up off the sidewalk, away from Terraza’s front door. With a groan, Korean Marty turned and by necessity she turned with him and was tossed. She weighed nothing. Beyond the rooftops, the blinking lights of an airplane moved by degrees closer to somewhere. Beyond the plane, a white and tumbling sky.