Ringing the doorbell, then sneaking in? It didn’t follow. But what in this sequence did follow? I palmed another Castle out of the paper sack-six burgers to restore order in a senseless world.
More muffled footsteps, a door closing. A clunk, possibly a bottle and glass, a poured drink. Wine. I wouldn’t have minded a beverage myself. I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going
Bailey was a name embedded in my Tourette’s brain, though I couldn’t say why. I’d never known a Bailey. Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in
“Eat shit, Bailey!” The tics were always worst when I was nervous, stress kindling my Tourette’s. And something in this scenario was making me nervous. The conversation I overheard was too knowing, the references all polished and opaque, as though years of dealings lay underneath every word.
Also, where was the short-dark-haired girl? In the room with Minna and his supercilious conversational partner, silent? Or somewhere else entirely? My inability to visualize the interior space of One-oh-nine was agitating. Was the girl the “she” they were discussing? It seemed unlikely.
And what was
I glanced at the door. Presumably Coney was still behind it. I wanted to hear
I was startled by a knock on the driver’s window. It was the doorman who’d been watching. He gestured for me to roll down the window. I shook my head, he nodded his. Finally I complied, pulling the headphones off one ear so I could listen.
“What?” I said, triply distracted-the power window had seduced my magpie mind and now demanded purposeless raising and lowering. I tried to keep it subtle.
“Your friend, he wants you,” said the doorman, gesturing back toward his building.
“What?” This was thoroughly confusing. I craned my neck to see past him, but there was nobody visible in the doorway of his building. Meanwhile, Minna was saying something over the wire. But not
“Your friend,” the doorman repeated in his clumsy Eastern European accent, maybe Polish or Czech. “He asks for you.” He grinned, enjoying my bewilderment. I felt myself knitting my brow exaggeratedly, a tic, and wanted to tell him to wipe the grin off his face: Everything he was seeing was not to his credit.
“What friend?” I said. Minna and Coney were both inside-I would have noticed if the Zendo door had budged
“He said if you’re waiting, he’s ready,” said the doorman, nodding, gesturing again. “Wants to talk.”
Now Minna was saying something about
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I said to the doorman.
“Hey, hey,” the doorman said. He held up his hands. “I’m just bringing you a message, friend.”
I zipped down the power window again, finally pried my fingers away. “No problem,” I said, and suppressed another
“No, no. He said come in.”
“Get his name, then,” I said, desperate. “Come back and tell me his name.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“Okay,
I opened the car door and pushed the doorman out of the way, went to the Zendo door and knocked, six times, hard. “Coney,” I hissed. “Get out here.”
Over the headset I heard Minna shut the bathroom door behind him, begin running water.
Coney popped out of the door.
“He’s coming out,” I said, pulling the headphones down around my neck.
“Okay,” said Coney, eyes wide. We were in the thick of the action, for once.
“You drive,” I said, touching my fingertip to his nose. He flinched me away like a fly. We hustled into the car, and Coney revved the engine. I threw the bag of cooling Castles and paper wreckage into the backseat. The idiot doorman had vanished into his building. I put him out of my mind for the moment.
We sat facing forward, our car shrouded in its own sam, waiting, vibrating. My brain went