Homes-Leighton had left a bunch of messages, when was it, the day before yesterday, but Leo hadn’t called him back. “I haven’t heard from the guy,” he said.
She started to thank him for hooking her up with Lawrence. He had gotten her some unpaid extra work on this movie he was shooting. Whitney was hurting his ears.
“I feel like I’m gonna pass out,” he said. “I’ll call you when I’m feeling better.” He was never going to feel well enough to call Whitney, but whatever.
He hung up and unplugged the phone. He wasn’t taking any calls today, he wasn’t making any calls, and nobody better show up at his door, that’s all he had to say.
He had divided another pile into four bumps when it hit him: The dining room was a very dangerous location. The edges of the curtains were framed with light, and if somebody had been looking in, they would’ve seen him with his plate and his straw and his finely chopped powder. The only place that was safe was the upstairs bathroom. Leo climbed the stairs, went in, and locked the door. Stepping into the tub, he pulled the shower door closed. He sucked up two quick lines, then two more. He took his toothbrush and scrubbed that tequila taste out of his mouth until the foam he spit into the sink was speckled with blood. Soon as he could find his car keys, he’d drive to the liquor store, stock up, and get himself set so there’d be no reason, no reason at all, for him to leave the house.
His mission succeeded, yielding a half-gallon of Cuervo and a carton of Marlboros. But the ride home just about made his heart stop. A white-haired police lady followed him for a two-mile stretch. She was driving an ’89 Grand Marquis, robin’s egg blue, the seat pushed forward as far as it would go, her head just peering over the dashboard and her wrinkled fingers gripping the wheel at the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions, just like they taught in Driver’s Ed, a deep-cover cop they were using to trick him.
Instead, Leo tricked her. He deliberately drove past his house, making a series of quick turns that got her confused. Losing the old bitch speeding through the back streets, he made a sharp turn into the driveway, and pulled the Jag all the way into the carport.
He supposed the coast was clear enough to prepare a cocktail, but what Leo could really go for right now was a nice hit off the pipe.
If he could figure out what he did with his pipe. He remembered hiding it from Whitney. It was under something. The kitchen sink. Behind the Ajax and the Drano and the Formula 409, wrapped in a remnant of a blanket he used to polish the Jag.
The house was getting dark, but Leo left the lights off. He secured himself in the closet of the spare bedroom. He had all the light he needed, right here in his palm.
He sparked a dime-sized boulder that almost didn’t fit in the bowl, sucking till the chunk glowed orange and the chamber was trapping a fearsome grey cloud. Smoke boomed into his lungs, right to the top of his throat. His ears crackled with a buzzing, like crickets on a crazy-hot afternoon. He held the hit, and when the buzzing died down, he let it go. Lights blinked. Lights winked and lights flashed at the edge of his peripheral vision.
The racket that echoed from every corner of the house forced him to investigate. Flashes followed him down the hall — that’s how he knew the lights were strobing inside his head, and not outside of it. Reconnoitering the living room, his back flush with a wall, he raked his shin against an end table. When he got to the kitchen, it went quiet, waiting till he got back upstairs before it started up again.
He sifted the bag for a tasty rock, but it was getting powdery in there. Selecting three pebbles, he cooked them and held the smoke, listening for that cricket buzz, but this blast was weak, just a hum, and it faded after a few seconds.
Now there was trouble outside. Big trouble in the form of a cop parked at the curb. The car was the same model as a police cruiser, without the gumballs and the splashy paint job. No tricks this time. The guy looked a lot more like a cop than any white-haired granny or sexy Cuban chick, that was for sure.
Leo could make out the cop’s profile in the streetlamp glow. High forehead, short cop’s haircut, squared-off jaw a few years from going jowly. He was holding a spray inhaler to his nose, took a blast in one nostril, then the other, just sitting there. Probably waiting for Leo to do something stupid, like flip on the lights, give the cop some kind of sign he was home. He retreated to the spare bedroom and slipped into his closet. He’d wait right here. He dared the cop to try to come in and find him. He dared him.
He was sure an hour had passed, but it might’ve been more, when he combat-crawled back to the master bedroom. He peeked over the windowsill. Leo had won. The cop was gone. The cop was gone and it was safe to go downstairs.
A good thing, too, because as Leo headed down the stairs to go switch this powdery bag for the chunky fat one in the freezer, he heard glass breaking. He traced it right away to the sliding door. A tiny crash, then the clink- clink of shards raining down on the linoleum. The definite click of the latch being turned. The heavy door slid a few feet on its track.
It couldn’t be the cop. This had to be a burglar, somebody thinking he wasn’t home because the house was so dark. Then, rounding the corner from the dining room to the kitchen, it wasn’t dark at all.
The lights popped on and Leo saw it wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t a burglar, it was that fat little fucker Negrito with some greaseball sidekick. He was taller than Negrito, like that was saying anything, and he was wearing a suit that was tight under the arms. His horrid tie featured diamonds, swirls, and stripes, red, blue and beige against a silver background. He had a gun in his hand and so did Negrito.
It dawned on Leo that he had made two very serious miscalculations. One, he should have run away from the sound of the breaking glass and not toward it. Two, he should’ve kept the gun he used to shoot Beaumond. He wasn’t looking all that bright right now, up against Negrito and this other spic with the shocking taste in neckwear, no weapon to protect him.
Leo said, “What the fuck’re you doing?”
The muzzle flash surprised him. He didn’t think you’d be able to see it in the light.
Negrito’s shot hit him in the shoulder. It spun him around and it took his legs and he cracked his head against the kitchen table. That hurt. He put his hand to his forehead, feeling for blood, thinking this had turned a lot more serious than it had originally seemed. The second shot went in below his fourth rib, and he wouldn’t swear to it, but he thought he heard a third. Leo Hannah left this world wondering why people always made such a big deal over dying. It was the easiest thing he had ever done.
Harry wanted to meet his brother somewhere far from his office, where the restaurants weren’t jammed with the cheap suits from Grand Street, guys who had two settings, overdrive and dead. Arthur had been one of those cheap suits in the ’80s, but he’d emerged from the decade a wealthy Healy, his heart still beating and his record unblemished. His wingtips had licked a crazy Fred Astaire on the outskirts of some headline-grabbing scandals, and he’d hustled with guys who did Fed time, but he’d steered clear himself, and the end result was he still had a desk at Salomon while his buddies had to content themselves with lecturing at universities.
Harry didn’t know exactly what his brother did, and he got further confused when Arthur tried to break it down for him. The bottom line was, if Wall Street was rocking in one direction or the other, Arthur got quoted in newspaper stories, and because he was good at describing the action in terms anybody but Harry could understand, he frequently popped up on cable TV shows like the one Aggie saw him on, holding forth on what it all meant. Arthur in suspenders and one of his monogrammed shirts, amused and giving the impression the subject was serious, but not too serious.
The restaurant he picked out was known for its sushi. Harry hoped they served something else. He wasn’t too big on raw fish.
Arthur was blowing out a cloud of cigarette smoke, sitting at the bar and chatting with the bartender. His suit was grey and his shirt was grey, and a burgundy pocket square peeked out of his pocket and matched his tie. He hugged Harry and kissed him on the cheek.
Harry followed him to a podium, where a guy with coal-black hair was waiting. He nodded at Harry and shook Arthur’s hand, then penciling a line thorough Arthur’s reservation, he said, “Right this way.” Their table was in a corner.
“Perfect,” Arthur said. He shook the guy’s hand again, this time with a folded bill in his palm.
Harry said, “I thought you had juice here.”
