A Better Goodbye (30 page)

“Last motherfucker called me that, I put out a cigarette in his eye.”

Blanco growled and Scott looked like he'd gone into shock. It was all he could do to say, “Not in here, guys. Guys?”

But Nick wasn't paying attention to him. It didn't look like DuPree was, either.

“You want to try your cigarette trick with me, you don't have far to go,” Nick said. “Otherwise, get your dog out of here.”

“Just on account of you said so?” DuPree said.

“I knew you'd figure it out sooner or later.”

“I don't think you askin' nice enough.”

“Okay. If you don't do what I told you to, I'm going to throw you out the window. Then I'll take your dog someplace to grow old peacefully instead of making you think people are supposed to shit cupcakes when they see you with it. Is that nice enough?”

DuPree put on a phony grin.

“I get it,” he said. “You afraid of the dog. That's what it is, ain't it? You about to mess your drawers worryin' my man Blanco gonna chomp down on your ankle, make you scream like a bitch.”

“If that's what happens, you won't see it,” Nick said. “You'll be somewhere between the third and fourth floor.”

“Sheeee-it,” DuPree said.

“Quit stalling. Make up your mind.”

DuPree started toward Nick as Blanco barked and lunged ahead of him.

Nick held his ground, thinking he would try to kick the dog away first, maybe bring down the divider on its head, before he went after DuPree.

“Goddammit, no!” Scott shouted, sounding like he'd finally found his balls. “You're gonna have the cops all over this fucking place.”

DuPree looked like he couldn't believe his ears. “So this punch-drunk faggot can just stand there and disrespect me like he wearing motherfucking Kevlar? I hope that is not what you are telling me.”

“All I'm saying is I'll get my ass thrown in jail,” Scott said. “That would pretty much fuck up what we talked about, wouldn't you say?”

“Plus my next client will be here in, like, ten minutes,” Coco said. “You want him to walk in and see your dog going crazy? We'll get great reviews on the Internet for that.”

“She's not bullshitting, dude,” Scott said.

Sierra nodded robotically, stunned that one of her sisters in the sex trade had dared to speak up.

Nick watched it all, not caring about anyone's worries, not even Coco's. He knew he was going to fight DuPree someday—it was practically written in stone—and he figured they might as well get it over with now.

But there was DuPree pulling the dog toward the door, and Scott padding after him, saying, “I'm sorry about this, bro, really I am.”

DuPree looked past Scott and fixed his prison-yard stare on Nick. “I'll see you again, motherfucker.”

“I wouldn't miss it,” Nick said.

On the way down in the elevator, all DuPree thought about was kicking that security cocksucker's head in, leaving his brains all over the goddamn floor, and then tearing that rice-paddy cunt up with his cock. “Motherfucker,” DuPree said, punching the wall and getting a growl out of Blanco. DuPree was for sure going to fuck the pussy out of her when he ripped off Scottie's lame-assed operation. Next week, he told himself; he'd do it then, and maybe fuck Scottie up too, fucking doughboy pussy. Right now, though, with the elevator door opening, he just hoped he had some hash back at his crib.

When he and Blanco stepped off the elevator, there was a middle-aged white dude waiting to get on: trim, handsome, lots of gray in his hair, going for a casual look in a teal-and-cream-colored sweater that DuPree figured must have cost him four bills easy.

“Evening,” the white dude said, staying mellow at the sight of Blanco, maybe not even recognizing a pit bull when he saw one.

“What up?” DuPree said, still in ghetto mode.

It was only when the elevator door had closed that DuPree thought about the briefcase the white dude had been carrying, wondering what was in it and where he was taking it. DuPree yanked Blanco to a standstill and watched to see where the elevator stopped.

Eighth floor.

How about that shit?
DuPree thought. The dude was for sure going to see the Oriental bitch. Now DuPree understood why she was worried about scaring off a trick, if he looked like that much money. It would be nice, DuPree thought as he walked Blanco out into the night, if the dude was around when he took down Scottie's apartment. Might turn a nice score into a big-assed score. And then DuPree saw a Rolls-Royce convertible parked out front. Had to be the trick's. Just like that, it was more than a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car; it was an inspiration.

Barry started to say hello as Jenny closed the door behind him, then stopped when he saw her press a finger to her lips. He looked puzzled, but she didn't explain, just guided him toward the master bedroom, away from wherever Nick was, away from Scott and Sierra listening on the other side of the dividers. She knew she was forgetting Barry's donation, but she didn't care.

As soon as she closed the door behind them, he wrapped his arms around her and moved in for a passionate kiss that died on her lips. He pulled back and gave her a puzzled look. “Not glad to see me?”

“Sorry,” Jenny said.

And she was, really and truly. He looked so good and smelled so nice that any other time she would have been on him before he could jump her bones. She knew he was already hard—she could feel his thing when he hugged her. But even that wasn't enough to ignite her now.

“It's been really weird around here today,” she said. “Like you wouldn't believe.”

“You're all right, aren't you?” he said.

That was what she liked about older guys. They always wanted to protect you while young guys, if you told them the exact same thing, would say that giving them head would take your mind off your problems.

It felt like the most natural thing in the world for Jenny to lean into Barry and let him hold her. “I'm all right,” she said, “but I feel about as sexy as, I don't know, a bowl of oatmeal or something.”

“If you were oatmeal, I'd eat you.”

Not cool
, Jenny thought,
not now
. But sometimes even older guys made tactical errors, so she forced a small laugh and hoped Barry hadn't felt her recoil. She didn't want to chase him away. She just wanted to take the conversation in a different direction.

“What do you think?” he said. “We could talk a little about what's got you so upset, and then I'll give you some kisses on your sweet place, the way you like them, and we can see what happens.”

There wasn't enough time left in the day for Jenny to tell him everything, mainly because she'd never told him anything. Barry didn't know about the robbery or the rapes or the translucent man or DuPree or Scott or the business of getting naked for strangers whose cocks you would soon hold in your hands. All Barry knew was that she was a cute little Asian girl he wanted to fuck, and that she wanted to fuck him, too. At least she had until today. And maybe she would tomorrow. But not now, when it was Nick who dominated her thoughts. She hadn't told Barry about him either, and she wasn't sure how she would, mainly because she was still figuring out what Nick meant to her.

“Would you mind if we were just quiet for a while?” Jenny said.

The fear slowly ebbed from the place where Nick kept it stored deep inside him. It had grabbed his heart and his gut the instant he had seen DuPree's dog, but he had known he couldn't run no matter how much he wanted to. He had to stand firm and put on the same executioner's face he had worn in the ring, all the while remembering what Cecil had told him the first time he fought a genuine badass: “Never show fear—make fear work for you. Make the motherfucker across from you feel it.” It was advice easily comprehended by an uncluttered mind, but Nick's mind now was a warehouse of bad memories.

They came wrapped in gauze, and were filled with vague figures moving in slow motion and speaking in voices he had to strain to recognize. He thought he heard his mother shouting—yeah, it was her for sure, shouting at a dog to get away from them. There was barking too, and growling. And a little girl's screams. And her blood. She was Nick's playmate, three years old, maybe four, from the two-flat next door, and her blood stained the last snow that fell in Chicago that year.

He could still see it, even though he couldn't remember the girl's name, or her face, or what became of her. He thought she had moved, she and her family, to get away from their memories of the dog and the blood. But there's no escaping what is carved in your memory. There is only enduring it. Why Nick had been able to succeed this time, he knew he would never say aloud. It was Coco. She gave him a reason to care and a purpose beyond chasing away unwanted suitors and cleaning up after two-hundred-dollar assignations. She gave him a reason to hold his ground. The hell of it was, no matter how tenderly she treated him, he still wasn't sure she saw him as anything more than a slab of meat.

How do you spell his last name?
she kept asking herself. It wasn't like they wore name tags—where would she pin one when she was wearing something low cut, except on one of her boobs? The only time she'd heard Scott say Nick's last name, he'd been mumbling. So everything she was doing now at her kitchen table was pure guesswork. B-A-V-K-O or B-A-V-K-A, or did it start with a P?

Jenny's fingers flew over the computer keyboard as she fed the possibilities to Google. She hadn't bothered at first because she'd decided that a man with such sad eyes couldn't possibly be a danger to her. Of course he might have turned out to be a disaster at providing security even if he had been a boxer, but he reminded her of a bird with a broken wing, and she didn't believe in abandoning wounded birds.

The Nick she'd seen call DuPree an asshole—an asshole! How great was that?—couldn't have surprised her more if he'd come to work in a fishnet dress. He'd kept it together the whole time, his voice real low, every move cool and economical, and when DuPree started toward him with that dog, it looked like that was what Nick had been hoping for. He was, like, totally fucking dangerous.