I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I hated hearing about that day and she knew it.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just want us both to remember why we got out of the rough-stuff business. It wasn’t just because you got shot. It was because we were junkies to it. We loved it. We still love it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was not put on this earth just to read
“I know,” I said.
And I did. No one was less built to be a stay-at-home mom than Angie. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it-she was-it was that she had no desire to define herself by the role. But then she went back to school and the money got tight and it made the most sense to save on day care for a few months, so she could go to school nights and watch Gabby days. And just like that-gradually and then suddenly, as the man said-we found ourselves here.
“I’m going crazy at this.” Her eyes indicated the coloring books and toys on our living-room floor.
“I gather.”
“Bat-shit fucking crazy.”
“That would be the approved medical terminology, sure. You’re great at it.”
She rolled her eyes in my direction. “You’re sweet. But, baby? I might be doing a great job faking it, but I am faking it.”
“Isn’t every parent?”
She cocked her head at me with a grimace.
“No,” I said. “Really. Who in their right mind wants to have fourteen conversations about trees? Ever? Never mind in one twenty-four-hour period. That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”
“But that old life was killing us.”
“It was.”
“I miss it so much,” she said. “That old life that was killing us.”
“Me, too. One thing I learned today, though, is that I’ve turned into a bit of a pussy.”
She smiled. “You have, uh?”
I nodded.
She cocked her head at me. “You were never
“I know,” I said, “so imagine what a lightweight I am now.”
“Shit,” she said, “I just love the hell out of you sometimes.”
“Love you, too.”
She slid her legs back and forth across my thighs. “But you really want your laptop back, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“You’re going to go get it back, aren’t you?”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
She nodded. “On one condition.”
I hadn’t expected her to agree with me. And the small part of me that had sure hadn’t expected it this quickly. I sat up, as attentive and obsequious as an Irish setter. “Name it.”
“Take Bubba.”
Bubba wasn’t only the ideal wingman on this because he was built like a bank-vault door and had not even a passing acquaintance with fear. (Truly. He once asked me what the emotion felt like. He was also baffled by the whole empathy concept.) No, what made him particularly ideal for this evening’s festivities was that he’d spent the last several years diversifying his business to include black-market health care. It started as a simple investment- he’d bankrolled a doctor who’d recently lost his license and wanted to set up a practice servicing the kind of people who couldn’t report their bullet wounds, knife wounds, head wounds, and broken bones to hospitals. One, of course, needs drugs for such patients, and Bubba was forced to find a supply for illegal “legal” drugs. This supply came from Canada, and even with all the post-9/11 noise about increased border control, Bubba got dozens of thirty-gallon bags of pills delivered every month. Thus far, he hadn’t lost a load. If an insurance company refused to cover a drug or if the pharmaceutical companies priced the drug out of wallet-range of working- and lower-class folk in the neighborhoods, street whispers usually led the patient to one of Bubba’s network of bartenders, florists, lunch-cart drivers, or corner-store cashiers. Pretty soon anyone living off the health-care grid or near the edge of it owed a debt to Bubba. He was no Robin Hood-he cleared a profit. But he was no Pfizer, either-his profit was in the fair range of 15 to 20 percent, not in the anal-rape range of 1,000 percent.
Using Bubba’s people in the homeless community, it took us about twenty minutes to identify a guy who matched the description of the guy who stole my laptop.
“You mean Webster?” the dishwasher at a soup kitchen in Fields Corner said.
“The little black kid from ’90s TV?” Bubba said. “Why would we be looking for him?”
“Nah, man, I most definitely do not mean the little black kid from ’90s TV. We in the oh-tens now, or ain’t you heard?” The dishwasher scowled. “Webster’s a white boy, on the small side, got a beard.”
I said, “That’s the Webster we’re looking for.”
“Don’t know if it’s his first name or last, but he cribbed up at a place on Sydney round-”
“No, he blew out of there today.”
Another scowl. For a dishwasher, he was kind of prickly. “Place on Sydney up by Savin Hill Ave.?”
“No, I was thinking of the other end, the place by Crescent.”
“You ain’t thinking then. You ain’t know shit. Clear? So just shush it, boy.”
“Yeah,” Bubba said, “just shush it, boy.”
I wasn’t close enough to kick him, so I shut up.
“Yeah, the place he staying is at the end of Sydney. Where it meet Bay Street? There. Second floor, yellow house, got one of them AC units in the window stopped working during Reagan, look like it gonna fall out on someone’s head.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Little black kid from ’90s TV,” he said to Bubba. “Man, if I wasn’t fifty-nine and a half years old? I’d profoundly whoop your ass over that shit.”
Chapter Seven
Where Sydney Street crosses Savin Hill Avenue, it becomes Bay Street and sits on top of a subway tunnel. About every five minutes, the whole block shudders as a train rumbles beneath it. Bubba and I had sat through five of these shudders so far, which meant we’d been sitting in Bubba’s Escalade for nearly half an hour.
Bubba does not do sitting still very well. It reminds him too much of group homes and orphanages and prisons, places he’s called home for roughly half his time on earth. He’d already fiddled with the GPS-punching in random addresses in random cities to see if Amarillo, Texas, had a Groin Street or Toronto sent tourists traipsing along Rogowski Avenue. When he exhausted the entertainment value of searching for nonexistent streets in cities he never intended to visit, he played with the satellite radio, rarely landing on a station for more than thirty seconds before he’d let loose a half-sigh, half-snort and change the channel. After a while, he dug a bottle of Polish potato vodka out from under the seat and took a swig.
He offered me the bottle. I declined. He shrugged and took another pull. “Let’s just kick the door in.”
“We don’t even know if he’s in there.”
“Let’s just do it anyway.”
“And if he comes home while we’re in there, sees his door kicked down and takes off running, what do we do then?”
