and a bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold. The gun was supposed to be for show. Nobody said anything about murder.
Fernandez was taking a break. He’d cleared out the end of a Newport and was loading a pebble of coke into it, crushing it up so the coke and tobacco mixed. He twisted it closed, lit a lighter that had a flamingo decal on it, and sucked. The paper went like a fuse. The stink of burning cocaine hung over the table. Fernandez held his hit, then exhaled a thin stream of grey.
Leo met Alex Fernandez on a high school all-star team. He had the livest arm Leo ever saw, but every schoolboy had a fastball, it was the amazing assortment of junk Fernandez worked around his heater that made him so special. He threw a sinker, a sharp-breaking curve no lefthander could touch, and a slider, all for strikes, plus a screwball his coach wouldn’t let him use. Then he entered USC, where every guy was an all-star. He didn’t earn a spot in the starting rotation, and just walked away from the game.
Leo’d never forgiven him for that. You didn’t walk away when you had the stuff like Fernandez had it. Leo didn’t have half the raw talent Fernandez had, but he’d been disciplined, had thrown a baseball every day except the day after a start, and he’d been undefeated in Dade County his senior year. Of course, after the injury, none of that mattered. Leo remembered the afternoon. His elbow felt like a cherry bomb had exploded under his skin, but every pitch was working, so he kept throwing. Never threw any harder in his life. The next day, he couldn’t raise his arm to scratch his head, and after two surgeries and two rehabs, the scouts stopped calling.
“How’d you make out?” Fernandez wanted to know. He was puffing the tobacco part of the Newport.
“Not too good,” Leo said, grabbing his lighter and sparking a Marlboro. “The Quiet Man is reported to be totally pissed off, and I’m supposed to meet El Negrito in a little while.”
Though the central air was set at sixty-five degrees, the sight of all that coke and the scales and the baggies scorched Leo with a hot, dry feeling. He wondered if he was coming down with something besides a chicken heart.
“What’re you gonna tell him?” Beaumond asked. He was using a yellow sandbox shovel to blend baking soda and cocaine. He dumped a heaping tablespoon of the jarred powder into the batch.
Leo said, “What is that shit?”
“Procaine,” Beaumond said. He stuck a pinky into the glistening heap that wasn’t yet cut and swiped the finger over his gums. “Gives ’em that sting they expect. The numbness. Masks the other cut.”
He had a down-home panhandle twang. He was Alex Fernandez’s buddy from Leo forgot where, and as Leo watched Beaumond’s fat, bone-white arm working the shovel, he wondered how it was that Beaumond had been staying in his house so long.
“The bigger the count, the less we step on it,” Fernandez said. “Fifty-fifty an ounce, sixty-forty a half, so on down the line, to grams. But that’s the smallest we’re doing. Grams.”
Fernandez had unraveled into a full-on fashion victim, sporting white hip-hugger bellbottoms, and a belt that fastened with a circular buckle. His long-collared shirt was unbuttoned, a pattern of crimson and gold revealing a stripe of hair in the center of his chest. Rocking a blown-out afro, doing that 70s thing from a few years ago. There was an oily sheen on his forehead and nose. The last few drags of that Newport hung from his lips, and he was generating a rancid, chemical smell.
“Grams,” Leo said. “You guys are doing grams. A kilo of top shelf rock, and you’re gonna knock it down till you’re dealing what, ten percent product?” Welcome to Amateur Hour, with your host, what was that guy’s name? Not Arthur Godfrey. Some old-timer like that. “The whack you’re selling, who’s gonna come back?
“Don’t need ’em coming back,” Beaumond said. “Move it down to Big Black Mule and Statsonic, three, four in the morning. Snowbirds. Who’s gonna see ’em again?”
Beaumond’s face was shaped like an upside-down pyramid, the low, wide forehead giving way to a flattened cranium. He reminded Leo of the guy on the descent of man timeline, the one a generation or two away from the dude who first walked upright, not quite monkey, not quite man yet, either.
“Tell you the truth,” Leo said, “I don’t give a shit what you do with it. This — ” He waved his cigarette at the table and cut himself off.
Beaumond said, “You never answered my question, Leo. What’re you gonna tell Nigger-ita?”
“Negrito,” Leo corrected. “I think he knows I was in on it, but I’m gonna deny everything.”
Fernandez said, “You think that’ll work?”
“What choice do I have? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m too fucking young to die.”
Beaumond finished bagging an ounce. He sealed it with two strips of tape. “Never woulda happened a’tall, ’cept that German queer hadda go and get brave on us.”
“Dutch,” Leo said. “Manfred was Dutch.”
Beaumond took a rat-tail comb out of his back pocket and dragged it across his hair. The comb made a ripping noise as it tore through his split ends.
Leo knew Beaumond was lying. He couldn’t imagine Manfred doing anything but surrendering the second he saw the gun. He would’ve been scared, and no matter how fucked up he was, he wouldn’t have done anything reckless. He liked his life too much to have it end over 2.2 pounds of totally replaceable white powder.
Vicki tapped on the sliding door, stark fucking naked. After Leo hurried over to let her in, she sprinted through the kitchen on her toes, through the dining room and up the stairs, trailing water, cradling Mimi, seized with a spasm of modesty.
Her footsteps faded. “We have got to do something about that girl,” Leo said. “She’s nothing but a liability.”
Beaumond said, “A what?” He was looking at Fernandez.
“Vicki’s cool,” Fernandez said. “She can hang.” He wiped some oily sweat on the back of his hand, and shook another Newport out of his pack.
“She sucks my dick good,” Beaumond said. He had his sandbox shovel in the coke. He lifted some up and vacantly dropped it back in the pile.
“Look,” Leo said, “the party’s over here. We’ve got some serious fucking trouble on our hands. She’s gotta find some other place to stay.”
Beaumond’s narrow eyes turned to yellow-brown slashes. “There’s where you’re wrong, dude. My Victoria ain’t going nowhere.”
His Victoria. So it was like that, was it? Okay.
“Anybody leaving this house, it’s gonna be you. Want you to keep that right here.” Beaumond stabbed an index finger into the center of his forehead. “Don’t fuck with me.”
He screamed the word fuck. Leo flinched. He said, “Take it easy, big guy.”
Leo figured Beaumond probably thought he’d be easy to get over on, with his soft skin and his high-fashion cheekbones, but Leo wasn’t about to get vic’d by this white trash piece of shit, not in a million years.
There was something about him Beaumond didn’t understand. Leo was as tough as he needed to be. Let Beaumond think he was squishy. This was the way he lulled you to sleep when he was pitching. Blockheads muscled up to the plate to dive into pitches, all macho and shit, trying to pull everything, the way they saw major leaguers do it on TV. Leo stayed outside, outside, tossed one in the dirt, then — how ya doing? — buried his fastball in your ear. That was the danger of underestimating Leo.
Beaumond hadn’t blinked since he handed up his warning, the muscles in his neck tense, his jugular blue and pulsing. Leo looked at him, at the place where he had touched his forehead, and pictured a smooth round bullet hole squirting blood, Beaumond tipping over backwards in his chair, his Wal-Mart sneakers and his graying socks dangling in the air. It was going to be his pleasure.
There was a way out of this, Leo told himself, definitely a way out, if he just kept his cool, if he didn’t panic and let the situation get the best of him.
The situation. All baseball was situations. All of life was situations, too. He was on to something here. He’d have to think it through when he had some time. When he had some time and his head cleared and he wasn’t worried about whether Negrito was going to take him for a ride to the Glades and feed him to the fucking alligators.
At the corner of 17th and Washington, Leo coughed and gagged and lowered his head between the bumpers of two cars. He heaved a few times, but nothing came up. When his eyes stopped watering, he peered out from behind his shades, hoping he wouldn’t see anybody he knew. Because there were tons of people heading back from the ocean in the dying afternoon light, the streets buzzing with girls in bikinis and beach wraps.
