I plaster on what I hope is a convincing smile. My rapidly escalating body temperature feels like it might ignite the two pounds of marijuana in my jacket, whose unmistakable aroma, I’m certain, is wafting up through my collar. I am definitely going to jail.
I’m not really conscious of walking down the hallway, but suddenly I’m in front of Rick’s desk. I haven’t evaded the storm but sailed right into its epicenter: Danny’s office is awash with blue uniforms.
In contrast to my own internal horror show, Rick looks relaxed, maybe even wide-eyed, like we’re watching actors film an episode of a TV cop show.
He’s about to say something else when Danny gets escorted from his office, a sober man in a gray suit attached to each arm.
Danny looks through me as if I’m not there, a gesture I quickly find myself grateful for. “Mark my words, Ricky,” he says to his assistant. “I’m going to fuck you.”
“You might want to save some of the romance for your cellmate,” Rick replies.
Danny cackles. “What cellmate? You think I’m going to wind up in prison? Worstcase scenario is a country club vacation, you dumb, ignorant fuckface.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” says another sober-suited man, defined by his posture and attitude as the Man in Charge. He holds Danny’s vaporizer in his hand. “I’ve already identified at least three Class A narcotics in that cabinet of yours back there. Your white collar’s gonna look a lot dirtier to the judge. Hope you got a good lawyer, Danny.” The Man in Charge turns to one of the uniforms. “Clear off one of these desks, willya? Lay out the drugs and the paraphernalia. The Post will want a picture.” Then he turns to me. “Who the hell are you?”
There are a lot of ways to answer the question, and none of them seem good. “You know this guy?”
he asks Danny.
“I don’t know anything,” Danny says defiantly.
“From here on out you’re talking to lawyers.” He mimes the act of zipping his mouth and throwing away the key.
“Get him out of here,” says the Man in Charge, sniffing the air. “Mother Mary and Joseph. The whole floor smells like grass.” He returns to Danny’s office, leaving me face-to-face with Rick.
“I don’t think Danny’s going to be able to take your meeting,” Rick says. “Let me walk you to the elevator.”
Rick is bursting to share. “Those Germans he kept meeting?” he says as soon as we’re out of earshot of the police. “Fronting money from Iran.
Fucking communists.”
I resist the urge to tell him Iran’s a theocracy.
“Crazy,” I say instead.
“Whatever. Hey, I know you were his drug dealer, but as far as I’m concerned, the drugs were incidental. Live and let live, right? Fucking weed.
Who smokes fucking weed anymore? Now if you could score me some blow….”
I glance at the various law enforcers still milling about the office, mercifully oblivious to our conversation. “I don’t …”
“Don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.
Whatever. Play it your way. Happy New Year.”
“See you around, Rick,” I say, managing to wedge myself into the elevator.
“He got what was coming to him!”
“Nobody gets what’s coming to them,” I say as the doors slide shut. “And what they do get they probably didn’t deserve,” I add, aloud, to no one.
I fast-walk for maybe a dozen blocks, looking nervously over my shoulder, but I don’t think I’m being followed. I hail a cab.
“Kennedy,” I say, climbing in. It’s already almost six o’clock, two hours until my meeting with Mr. Yi.
“How long do you think it will take?”
The cabbie, a burly guy with an unpronounceable name, examines me with glazed eyes. “Depends on traffic,” he says, nearly slamming into a parked car. He spits a series of what must be profanities in a foreign language, something Eastern European.
Are you okay?” I ask.
He grunts. “Double shift.”
“Just get us there in one piece.”
“You don’t like, you find other cab,” he says, turning around to face me.
“Can you keep your eyes on the—” Too late. I hear a sickening screech as the cab scrapes against a parked car. The cabbie throws the wheel in the other direction, overcompensating enough to slam into a town car in the next lane. I’m thrown forward, then sideways as the cabbie pulls the wheel the other way, sending the car into a spin.
We bounce off two more cars before coming to a stop, facing oncoming traffic. Several more cars collide around us.
We sit for a minute in silence. “I’m going to find that other cab now,” I tell him, hopping out of the backseat and sprinting to the safety of the sidewalk. Traffic on First Avenue has come to a complete halt.
“The fare!” he screams after me, climbing out of the cab with what looks like a police baton. I flip him the bird and scramble over the hood of the dented town car. I sprint two long blocks to the next uptown avenue and stop another cab.
“Kennedy,” repeats my new driver, a turbaned Pakistani who at least doesn’t seem dangerously fatigued. “Do you want we take the tunnel or the bridge?”
“Which is faster?”
He shrugs. “That is not for me to decide.”
“Which is usually faster?”
“Sometimes the bridge, sometimes the tunnel.”
“Okay, the tunnel.”
“I think maybe the bridge is faster.”
“Fine,” I say. “The bridge.”
The taxi pulls up to JFK’s International Terminal ten minutes past my appointed meeting time with Mr. Yi. “We should have taken the tunnel,” says the cabbie. “You never know, you know what I’m saying, man?”
“How much?”
“Forty-two dollars.” I toss three twenty-dollar bills at the cabbie. “You don’t have change?” When I shake my head no, he sighs. He makes a show of fumbling through his pockets. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”
“Well played,” I tell him. I leap out of the cab, leaving him a nearly 50 percent tip.
“God bless you!” he yells.
As promised, the punctual Mr. Yi is nowhere to be found. “Fuuuuuck!” I scream at no one in particular.
“Watch the language,” warns a passing transit cop.
By the time I’ve paged Mr. Yi over the publicaddress system and called the courier agencyboth misses — the flight is less than an hour away. I slump to the floor near the ticket counter. You’ll see her again in a couple of weeks, I say to myself. I rest my head in my hands.
“Are you okay?” asks a woman from behind the ticket counter. She’s Korean, approaching middle age, dressed in the uniform of the airline I’m supposed to be flying.
“My mother is dying,” I say, surprising myself.
Suddenly, we’re both crying. “And you missed your flight?” she asks, holding out a tissue box.
“I was supposed to meet the guy with my tickets here, but my cab got into an accident and I was late.” I accept a tissue and dab my eyes. My conscious brain is no longer in control of my speech. “She’s in the hospital in Seoul …,” I hear myself saying. I’ll spare you the rest of the performance; suffice to say that it’s desperate, shameless, and in the end, effective.
“There is one thing I can do for you,” she says.
“The flight is not full. I could sell you a seat.”
“I don’t have much money.”
