“People change.”
“Sure,” Angie said, “but attraction doesn’t.”
“Oh, man,” he said, and he suddenly looked forlorn and cast-off. “Man, I dunno, I dunno.”
“What don’t you know?” Angie asked.
When he looked at her, his hair was damper, his eyes had picked up a milky film. “I don’t know why I keep fucking myself
We shook our heads. “Drugs?” I offered.
“Well, sort of. I wasn’t addicted to them or anything. It wasn’t that. I met a girl. Russian girl. Well, Georgian. Svetlana. She was, whew, she was everything. Crazy in bed, crazy out of it, too. So beautiful you wanted to eat your hand just looking at her. She…” He dropped his right foot back on the floor, sat there looking down at it. “One day she asks me to write her a scrip for Dilaudid. I say, Of course not. I quote the Hippocratic oath, the Massachusetts statutes prohibiting doctors from writing scrips for anything but diagnosed medical conditions, blah, blah, blah. Cut to the chase, she wears me down in less than a week. Why? I don’t know. Because I’ve got no center. Whatever. But she wears me down. Three weeks after that, I’m writing her OxyCon scrips and scrips for fucking fentanyl, for Christ’s sake, and pretty much anything else she wants. When that starts leaving too much of a paper trail, I start clipping the shit outright from the hospital pharmacy. I even took a moonlighting job at the Faulkner so I could do it there, too. I didn’t know it, but they were already investigating me by that point. Svetlana, God love her, she’d noticed how much I liked playing blackjack at Foxwoods the couple times we went, so she hooked me into this game over in Allston. They played it out of the back of a Ukrainian bakery. First time I played, I cleaned up. Good, fun guys, great-looking women hanging around, all of them probably stoned on my shit. Next time I go, I win again. A lot less, but I win. By the time I start losing, they’re all nice about it-they’ll accept more OxyCon in lieu of actual money, which is good, because Svetlana’s pretty much cleaned me out of money. They give me a grocery list-Vicodin HP, Palladone, Fentora, Actiq, boring old Percodan, you name it. By the time the state medical board has me arrested and files charges, I’m already in the hole twenty-six grand to Kirill’s sharks. But twenty-six grand is like tip-jar money at a coffee shop compared to what’s on the horizon. Because unless I want to do three- to-six at Cedar Junction, I got to come up with money for good lawyers. Another two hundred fifty grand in the hole to pay Dewey, Screwum and Howe, but at least I only get my license revoked, no jail time, no criminal finding. Kirill slides up to me at one of his restaurants a couple weeks later, tells me that the ‘no criminal finding’? That was his doing. And that costs another quarter-million. I can’t prove he
“Five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars,” I said.
“Exactly.”
My cell phone vibrated and I took it out, looked at the screen, saw a number I didn’t recognize. I put it back in my pocket.
“Pretty soon, one of Kirill’s guys-Pavel; I think you two met-he comes to me and says I should apply for a job opening at the Department of Children and Families. Turns out they got a guy in HR working off his own debt. So I apply and he waives the CORI check, and I get the job that I’m eminently overqualified for. A few weeks later, after a particularly attractive fourteen-year-old pregnant girl leaves my office, my phone rings and they tell me I have to present her with an offer.”
“What do you get per baby?” Angie’s voice was weary with contempt.
“One thousand off my debt.”
“So you’ve got to get them five hundred and twenty-six babies before you’re off the hook?”
He gave that a resigned nod.
“How close are you?”
“Not close enough.”
My phone vibrated again. I looked at it. Same number. I put it back in my pocket.
My wife said, “You know even if you got them five hundred and twenty-six babies to sell on the black market…”
He finished the sentence. “They’ll never be done with me.”
“No.”
My cell vibrated a third time. I had a text message. I flipped the phone open.
Hey guy. Anser your
fucking phone. Sincerely
Yefim.
Dre took another hit from his flask. “You’re like a fifteen-year-old girl with that thing.”
“Yeah, well, you’d know all about that.”
My phone rang again. I got off the couch and walked out to the front porch. Amanda was right-from here, you could hear the brook gurgle.
“Hello.”
“Hello, my good guy. What you do with the Hummer?”
“I drove it over to the stadium and left it there.”
“Ha. That’s a good one. Maybe I see Belichick driving it one day in his hoodie.”
In spite of myself, I smiled.
“What’s up, Yefim?”
“Where you at, my friend?”
“Around. Why?”
“I thought maybe we could talk. Maybe we could help each other out here.”
“How’d you get my phone number?”
He laughed, a deep, long belly chuckle. “You know what day it is?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“It is Thursday, yes, my friend. And Friday is a big day.”
“Because you wanted Kenny and Helene to find you something by Friday.”
I could hear the snort through the phone. “Kenny and Helene couldn’t find a chicken in the chicken soup, my man. But you? I look in your eyes after I shoot that faggot car and I see you’re afraid-you’d be one icy fucker if you weren’t-but I also see you’re curious. You sitting there thinking, If this crazy Mordovian don’t pull this trigger, I’ve got to know why he points it at me in the first place. I see that in your eyes, man. I see it. You a type.”
“Yeah, what type?”
“The type keep coming. What’s that saying about size of the dog?”
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s-”
“The size of the fight in the little dog. Yeah.”
“Close enough.”
“So, I’ve got to figure you already know where this crazy Amanda is.”
“What makes you think she’s crazy?”
“She stole from us. That makes her fucking cuckoo clock, man. And if you don’t know where she is, I bet a bag of mice you’re close.”
“A bag of mice?”
“Old Mordovian expression.”
“Ah.”
“So where’s she at, my friend?”
“Let me ask you something first.”
