I laughed out loud. “She said that?”
He raised his glass and I lifted mine in response. “You know our Tammy. At least she keeps it quiet when Vic is around.”
“At least.”
I poured myself another shot. The booze was washing out the fear, or at least my awareness of it, and my hands were steady again, steady as they’d been since the luck had touched them twenty-five years ago.
“So, what’s the number, Walter?”
“Six, two, and seven. Tammy said the cards were solid, but I should exercise caution in love. Recommendation to play.”
“Sounds good. We could always bet with Lucky Luciano’s bank.” I said it just for the reaction; Red Man’s lip curled at the name of Vic’s biggest competitor in the Harlem numbers racket, now that white men had busted up the black banks of my youth.
“You could.”
A shiver twisted up my spine. “You have a job for me,” I said.
“Victor has a job,” he corrected, amicably. “But you weren’t surprised to see me, were you?”
“I had a special delivery early this morning. You didn’t…”
Do it? I wanted to ask, but stopped because a shadow crossed his face and his lips drew back, ever so slightly, from his teeth.
“No,” he said, shortly. “Tell me.”
“Maryann West. That’s what the note called her. She was beat bloody and I let her get away. Why the devil didn’t he just kill her and leave me out of it?”
“Victor likes to play.”
He did, I knew that well enough, but it surprised me every time when Victor dared play Red Man. The tie between them was decades old and thick with debt. It seemed that they scared everyone but each other. Red Man reached into his leather satchel and pulled out a thin manila folder. The picture clipped to the front of the file was of a white woman in her late forties, gray hair unflatteringly cropped, with squinting eyes that might have been hard, or sad.
“She looked a bit different this morning,” I said.
“But you let her go.”
“I don’t kill anyone on just Victor’s say-so. And not in my own damn home. Which Victor knows.”
“Oh, he knows. He could get a dozen of his men to bump this lady off, but you, you need reasons.”
“He wouldn’t want me if I didn’t.”
Red Man hesitated. “You’re very sure of that, Phyllis?”
My pulse jumped. “The whole point of making me an angel was to mete out justice. Which means I get to choose.”
“It’s a nice place you’ve made here, Pea. Nice furniture. Nice neighborhood. You have a good life, and Russian Vic made it for you.”
“We have an arrangement. That doesn’t mean he owns me.”
His smile, his kind moon eyes, they stopped me cold. “Doesn’t it? Victor wants this done, and he wants his knife to do it.”
I crunched the ice between my teeth and sucked in a sharp, bourbon-scented breath. “What if she says no?”
Red Man considered this; at least, he set down his glass and turned his gaze from me to the lacquered Chinese screen separating the parlor from the dining room. He steepled his fingers over the gentle curve of his belly and took a deep, soulful breath. I wanted to agree so badly I could have vomited acceptance on my shoes. I would kill that woman, crime unknown, just to avoid learning who I was without judgment in my hands. But I wanted the other path more.
“You know my name,” he said.
I frowned. “For a while now, Walter. What’s your point?”
“Point is,” he said, “no one uses it.” He addressed this to the screen’s jade dragons, breathing gold fire. I couldn’t read his face. “Even you call me Red Man same as everyone else down in the Pelican. I’m past minding, these days. But my name is Walter Finch, and for a long time, you and Dev were the only ones who had bothered to know it. Now Tamara does, of course.” He shook his head with a faint smile. “You ever wonder why I took my time finding you two all those years back? I waited as long as I dared. Because I thought, maybe they can get out. I thought knowing my name meant something. I thought we might be the same that way, for all you like pretending you’ve never been north of 110th Street. But you!” He laughed, and looked at me. His face was tired and angry and hopeful, a spring of emotion conflicted and deep, a sensibility with which I had never credited him.
“I could have killed you myself for wasting that chance—I hadn’t realized that you liked it.”
I took a startled, hiccuping breath. He looked like Red Man, lounging with casual menace on my dead man’s chaise, but he was right, that was just a name other people called him. I had believed what I wanted, because it was easier, because calling him “Red Man” with white folks helped them dismiss my thick lips and stiff hair.
“And you don’t like it?” I asked. “Good bourbon, money, power? You’ve fooled a passel of people if you don’t, Walter.”
I watched him make a decision; he swung his legs around to the floor and faced me. “I liked it for a time. The same as you. Victor saved my life—no, I won’t tell you the story—but it was at the very beginning, when he was just a jumped-up runner. We built this empire together. And then I fell in love and I had children and one day I realized I was still only what I had always been: the muscle, the dirty right hand. But it’s too late, now. And I want my children as far away from this business as I can keep them, which means I stay right here. I have to be Red Man so they can be something better.” He paused, and bitterness veined his next words: “Victor
