Suntan shook his head.
“It’ll be okay when I decide,” he said. “My old lady’s no house show, blue boy.”
Ricci looked at him. Blue Boy. Now they all had smart little nicknames for each other, though he supposed the guy’s darling had coined that one. Blond, a tight figure, she’d slid up next to Ricci while he’d been on his stool waiting for a refill, given him a practiced eyebrow flash, hair swish, and flirty smile. Then she momentarily leaned close, held her arm out next to his, and remarked how his navy-blue shirt matched the shade of her blouse… except the word she’d used for the articles of clothing in question was “tops.”
This was Northside, though. Nowhere to come in search of true romance.
The blonde was good-looking in her overdone way, and it had been a long while for Ricci, and he’d felt an itch to take what she was offering. But he’d remembered seeing her hanging all over Suntan in a booth at the other end of the place, figured her for the type who would thrill on playing guys against each other, and reconsidered. So he just kind of smiled at her, said something neutral — yeah, sure, nice — and went back to leaning over his glass at the counter, assuming that would be the end of it.
Except it wasn’t. She had gone out of her way to make eye contact with Ricci later on from over in her booth. More than once. And if he’d been able notice her from across the room, Suntan would have noticed from right alongside her, where he’d had his hand grafted to her breast.
Ricci guessed she’d been better at the game than either of them.
“You don’t want to make this mistake,” he said now. His tongue had a problem with the s’s, stretching them out and running them together. “Don’t want to get into it with me.”
Suntan’s response was to inch closer. Behind Ricci on the pavement, Hairy Arms had done the same to block his retreat, corner him between the side of the car and its partially open door. What was next according to the tired script?
As Suntan bulled forward at the car door, meaning to shove it against him with both outthrust hands, body- slam him with the door, Ricci caught hold of its inner handle, beating him to it by an instant, pushing the door outward with all his strength. Suntan staggered back, hands going to his middle, the wind knocked out of him. Ricci started to slip out of the space where he was wedged between the car and door, wanting to follow through immediately, get on top of Suntan before he could recover. But then he felt a blow on the side of his face under the cheekbone, saw an explosive flash of brightness, and knew through the thunder and lightning that he’d been sucker punched from behind. Hairy Arms, son of a bitch. He’d landed a solid one.
Ricci’s mouth filled with the salty taste of blood. Careless, sloppy. Why hadn’t he been ready? Goddamned son of a bitch.
Hairy Arms stepped in for another swing, but this time Ricci could see it coming. He dropped his head, turned on him, grabbed his wrist with both hands. Then he jerked it down hard, snapped it up again with an equally sharp twist, moving around behind him, holding on to his wrist with one hand, sliding the other down to his elbow, wrenching his arm high up against his back. Hairy Arms grunted in pain but didn’t unclench his fingers. Keeping the guy’s body between himself and Suntan, his arm still twisted high, Ricci bent his wrist back as far as he could and, as the fist finally sprang open, pushed him against the mailbox and banged his forehead down twice on its metal hood. Hairy Arms hung half-limp over the mailbox a moment and Ricci drove his head down a third time with the heel of his hand so his whole face smashed into it. The bridge of his nose twisted and gashed, blood streaming from his nostrils, he let out another grunt of pain and then fell forward onto the pavement and didn’t move.
With his friend collapsed there in a heap, Suntan came charging around him, chin tucked low behind his club fists. Ricci knew he had room to pivot and kick on several different planes, deliver a snap under his upraised arms to his abdomen, a roundhouse over them to his neck, but there was no steadiness in his legs, no balance, nothing to trust at all, and he realized he’d have to count on the likelihood that Suntan would have similar problems for similar reasons. They’d both spent the last few hours doing the same thing in the same squalid dump.
Ricci stood facing Suntan until his lunge had almost brought them into collision, and then sidestepped at the final instant, grabbing his shirt behind the collar with his right hand, and also somewhere lower down between the shoulders with his left, yanking the material in opposite directions as he got his hip out in front of Suntan’s waist, using his own momentum to throw him off his feet. As Suntan bellied down on the pavement, Ricci drove his shoe into his spine right around the small of the back, crouched, flipped him over, and straddled his chest, pounding him on the jaw with a right cross, a left, then bringing up his fist and punching him straight-on in the mouth.
Suntan’s head rolled backward on the concrete, his eyes half shut, his upper lip split and bloodied.
Ricci bunched his shirt collar in both hands, hauled his shoulders off the ground.
“Look at me,” he said, and shook him hard.
Suntan groaned through lips spattered with red foam, his eyelids still drooping.
Ricci shook him.
“I told you to look at me,” he said.
Suntan managed to open his eyes a little wider, bring their pupils into bleary focus.
“I could break you apart right here,” Ricci said. “Do anything I want to you.”
Suntan looked at him without making a sound.
Ricci pulled him up higher, closer. Pulled him up off the sidewalk until their faces almost touched.
“I’m nobody you ever want to see again,” he said. “Nobody.”
Suntan’s mouth worked, produced an unintelligible sound, blood and saliva spilling down over his chin. At last he quit on trying to form the word and simply nodded.
Ricci stared down at his battered face another moment, his eyes steady. Then he released the front of his shirt to let him drop back onto the pavement, rose, got into his car, and keyed the ignition.
His fingers closed around the steering wheel, jittered around the wheel. A breath, Ricci thought. He just needed to take a breath. He felt dull, nauseous, light-headed. The inside of his cheek was torn where he’d caught the hit from Hairy Arms. He probed the area with his tongue and an upper molar wobbled against its tip.
Ricci sat pulling air into his chest, swallowing it in deep gulps. That didn’t make things better. Maybe it was his adrenaline level falling, he didn’t know. But it had never happened to him before, not like this. His trembling hands. The weakness. The fog in his head.
Ricci reached for the clutch. He didn’t care whether somebody found him sitting where he was and called the cops. Didn’t care what they’d make of it at UpLink, especially Rollie Thibodeau and Megan Breen the Ice Queen. Nor did he care whether the two big boppers scraped themselves off the sidewalk and came at him again. But he felt that if he stayed there in the car and didn’t move, he would just kind of fade out until he wasn’t there anymore. That he would start sinking inward, collapse in on himself without being able to stop.
He had to move, right now, or he wouldn’t.
His hands still trembling, Ricci backed up, put the car in drive, and without checking traffic, stepped heavily on the accelerator and pulled away.
FOUR
Megan Breen shot off a crisp combination of blows. Left jab, right cross, left hook.
“So how’m I doing, Pete?” she said, and took a deep breath.
Nimec looked at her from behind one of the 150-pound heavy bags in his boxing gym, spotting her, holding the bag close to his chest with both hands.
“Sounds like you’ve got this New York deal on your mind,” he said.
Megan pounded the bag with another combo.
“I don’t get you,” she said.
“The ex-mayor’s slogan,” Nimec said. “ ‘How’m I doing?’ He was famous for it over there.”
“I thought his claim to fame was dancing on stage with the Rockettes.”
Nimec grunted, unsure. Wasn’t that a longstanding tradition in the Big Apple, something like the Hasty Puddings, with those Harvard students putting on skits for each other in drag? But who knew. Showtime politicians
