“No, really.”
“What do you think, I'm gonna play the harp, Johnny? You think that's what it's like over here? You want me to tell you how it is?”
“No.”
“I didn't think so.”
Angelina enjoyed taunting him the way the last person to leave a party cherishes the power of staying too long. She slid up against him, put her head on his shoulder, her hair covering him the way he dreamed of Maria's hair draping over him, even though he couldn't feel it. They sat there watching Glory Bishop distract the terrorists with her tits, the government assassin in the back of the room screwing around with his high-tech laser scopes and shit.
“It's okay,” she told him. “I can make it all right, if you'd only let me help. We're gonna get through this.”
“I'm not so sure most of the time,” Dane said, quietly, hoping his grandmother didn't have her ear against the wall.
His regrets seemed to have sinuous limbs that reached into places where the living couldn't fit. The girl here, always around him. “They're going to come for you soon.”
“Your brothers and the Monti crew?”
“Berto thinks you've been out long enough now. They've been spreading the word around the neighborhood. People are waiting to see what happens.”
“I still don't know why they haven't made their move yet.”
“They're weak,” Angie said with a cute giggle. “And JoJo single-handedly killing three hitters who ambushed him has sort of set them back. They're scared of you. They think you might've learned all kinds of assassin stuff in the army.”
“They watch too many movies,” he said, with the government assassin movie playing out on the television, Glory working her way to her one big action hero line. “What's he got planned for my spectacular exit?”
“I don't know.”
“Vinny isn't saying?”
“Vinny doesn't say anything.”
That didn't sound right. “What do you mean?” Dane asked, but Angie just stared affectionately at him, like she was watching a dog trying to perform a difficult trick.
Berto didn't have much of an imagination, so he'd leave it to Joey Fresco or Big Tommy Bartone. Those guys knew how to whack somebody and make the rest of the town grimace.
“Your mother,” Angie said. “She wants me to tell you something.”
Stopping there, staring at him with sad but loving eyes, waiting to see how it affected him. How important it might be to speak to his mom again.
What the hell did it say about you when the dead looked at you like they wanted to cry?
He knew some guys who walked out the door at sixteen and never looked back. Others, in the joint, who'd whacked their parents for insurance or in a lunatic rage. One huge Nazi Lowrider by the name of Buford, telling his story in the cafeteria one afternoon. Explaining how he'd never gotten over the fact that his mother had thrown all his comic books away. He's thirty-five and firing machine guns with all the other white supremacists up in Michigan. They have a bonfire afterward, where they bring their children out and everybody dances around to kill- the-Jew songs with German lyrics. One of the kids is about eight, wearing a swastika on his sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the Batman symbol on it.
Buford left the rally, drove back down to Indiana, walked into his mom's place, and put nine rounds into her face.
There were insignificant microtraumas that could eventually turn your conscience to dust.
Dane still couldn't get beyond his mother's death and never would, he realized. There was an unmined anguish there that he needed for some reason. Maybe it made him more human when he needed to be that, and more inhuman when he had to become something else.
“What does she want?” Dane whispered. “Why doesn't she visit?”
“She can't. Because you need her too much.”
He watched Angie, wondering if he really could keep her sane in hell, or if she'd gone over the edge. Or if it was just him. “Of course I need her.”
“Too much. If she came back, it would ruin you. Who you are and what you've got left to do. You're always this close to death.”
“Hey, Angie, you think you're telling me something new?”
He could see his ma, languishing day by day, for years. Withering in darkness, tormented by her own body. It made him want to drive a fist inside her and squeeze out whatever was doing this to her. His mother, torn in half, peeling away from the inside out. Dad unable to bear witness, working longer and longer hours.
You can give yourself blood poison by tearing open your scabs. You dig into a scar long enough, it'll crawl forward on its own, cover you up until your mouth, nose, and even your eyes are sealed.
“You should go,” he told the dead girl he'd sort of killed.
“She wants you to know-”
“I don't want to hear.”
“But you do, Johnny, you really do.”
He glared at her, a girl who'd spoken her last words to him, and kept right on speaking them.
“I don't give a shit, Angie. That's enough.”
Glory blowing the guy off the bridge with the rocket.
“You ever gonna go back to Bed-Stuy and settle the score for me?” Angelina asked.
“Yeah.”
“When? When are you gonna do it, Johnny? Please tell me. Tell me!”
The current of the past took him again and rolled him along. Drawing him one way and then hurling him another. It brought him back to the last time he'd seen her alive. A red awning over the door. Flower boxes filled with petunias. The cop with his hand up.
ELEVEN
He hadn't been a very good cab driver either, because he didn't gun it up and down the streets driving like a maniac, rushing all day long trying to make a buck. You'd think it would've played into his strengths, his instincts, being a driver and always digging the speed, but it just didn't work like that.
Fatigued most of the time for no reason but his own inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. It was either a Newtonian law or somebody in a mortuary talking about the plastic-faced cadavers laid out on gurneys.
The Olympic Cab & Limousine Company would've fired him after the first week, except the guy in charge at the time knew Dane had a tenuous connection to the Monticelli clan and didn't want to kick him free. Not until he had a clearer idea of how much trouble he could expect from it later on.
If a fare brought Dane back over the bridge to Brooklyn, he'd take his time returning to Manhattan. He'd cruise around Headstone City for a while, take a long lunch break, and wander the neighborhood. Head over to the Grand Outlook Hall, walk the galleries, and consider his options.
There weren't many left. He thought he might join the force. Or maybe take up Vinny's offer to become a Monti lieutenant. It was mostly for show anyway, he wouldn't even need to wear a piece if he didn't want to. Just carry Vinny's coat for him, hold the doors open.
Neither choice appealed to him much, but then nothing really did.
His own apathy weighed on him like a sack tied to his back. He could sometimes see the shadow of the bitter old man he was going to be someday. The old prick wishing he could go back and kick his younger self in the ass. Get him moving in the right direction and avert more tragedy.
Dane had just gotten back into his cab and started to pull away from the Hall when Angelina Monticelli threw open the door and got in back.
