Slide (14 page)

Twenty

I like to beat up a guy every now and then. It keeps me hand in.

M
ONK
E
ASTMAN,
N
EW
Y
ORK CRIME BOSS

When Slide got back to the apartment, some Indian woman grabbed him and started screeching about an explosion in the basement and how she wouldn’t tolerate this type of behavior. Slide was tired, wanted to get inside, get a cold one, many cold ones, and here was this mad Indian cow yelling in his face. He was sorely tempted to off her right there, but he sighed, said, “Yeah yeah, I’ll take care of it.”

She was still hollering, pointing her finger in his face, saying, “I will not stand for this” and “This cannot happen under my restaurant” and a lot of other shite talk. Finally he got away from her, went down to see what the bejaysus was happening in the apartment.

First thing he smelled was cordite. He was confused—had Angela been in a shootout? Then he saw the empty pitchers of margaritas and, worse, his list, his whole game plan, was out on the table. The bitch had been going through his stuff.

She was in the bathroom, the door locked. Slide busted open the door—wait till the Indian cow saw that—and grabbed Angela, pulled her out into the kitchen area. He whacked her good and was about to lay on a whole lot more when she shouted, “Get your fucking hands off me,” and whipped out one of his handguns.

Stupid bitch couldn’t tell the safety was still on? He grabbed the gun by the barrel, wrenched it this way and that while she fought to pull the trigger. Eventually he tore it from her hand.

Angela shrank back against the wall, went, “Oh, Jaysus, please don’t kill me!”

Kill her? Slide wanted to ram her head into the wall a few hundred times, watch her bleed out. But he’d had a long, hard day—he’d killed a rollerblader in Riverside Park earlier—and he wasn’t in the mood to kill again, not right now, anyway.

“You didn’t call the police, did you?” he said, tossing the gun on the table.

“No,” Angela said. “I swear on me mother’s grave, no. Nor Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security?” he said.

Angela, trembling, went, “You’re in...Al-Qaeda, aren’t you?”

“Al-Qaeda?” Slide said. “Are you fookin’ mad?”

“ ’Cause what I’ve been through, with IRA guys...I can’t take another terrorist boyfriend.”

“Is that why you blew the place up? Cause you think I’m in with fookin’ Osama? Jesus wept, are you stone mad?”

“Well, you’re growing the beard...and you’re always talking about airplanes and—”

Slide went to the fridge, opened a bottle of Bud, sucked it down in one sloppy gulp.

Then Angela, who’d regained some of her composure and her earlier anger with it, went, “In that case, Mister Not-Al-Qaeda, what’s this list, then? You planning to dump me?”

Actually, especially after this, Slide was planning to do more than just dump her. But, because he loved to fuck with people’s heads—it’s what he lived for—he said, “Never, baby. We’re a team for life.”

Angela said, “Then why did you write those things?”

“It’s for me screenplay,” he said. “I have to have some way to get money for us, right?”

“A screenplay, my arse. Try again.”

“All right,” Slide said, smiling because a brainstorm had come to him just in time. “What can I say. You got me. I been havin’ an affair—but I’d already decided to break it off.” He picked up the list from the table, neatly tore it in two, put the pieces in his pocket. “It’s her I’d decided to dump. Not you.”

“You asshole,” Angela said, but there was a hopeful glimmer in her eye.

“I love you, baby,” Slide said. “You and me.”

“You mean it?”

“Cross me heart.”

“Who was she, Slide? Was she someone I know?”

“Who?” For a moment, he seemed completely baffled.

“The other woman, Slide. The one you’re dumping.”

Oh. “Nah,” he said. “No one you know.”

“Was she...younger than me?”

“Ah, fook, see why I didn’t want to tell you? Enough with the questions already. T’would only hurt you to know.”

She went over to him, wrapped her arms around him tightly, and said, “I just want things to work out for us so badly, and I don’t want any more trouble. I was thinking—maybe we should leave New York.”

“What do you mean? We just got here.”

“Yeah, but I’m tired of living this way, in this fookin’ coffin, with curry dripping from the ceiling. And I’m tired of the whole city grind. I want to move to the suburbs. I want to be a soccer mom. I want to have a big kitchen that I can cook in. I want to live in a big house in New Jersey, like the one the Sopranos have.”

He had to admit, the idea appealed to him. Operate in the suburbs, be Mr. Low Key Guy, hold down a job during the day, kill at night—yep, that worked. And the Sopranos’ house with that swimming pool! Angela, she could be like Mrs. Soprano. He could go around killing his arse off and she’d be there at the door at night to kiss him and say,
How was your day, hon?

“I’d like that too, babe,” he said. “But we need a stake to make that happen. I’ve been trying to get it, but it’s just not coming together.”

“Well, then,” Angela said. “Take a look at this.”

She showed him a photo in the newspaper, some business fuck looking smug.

“And that is of interest fookin how?”

Which was when she told him the whole long story, how she got mixed up with Max Fisher before she went to Ireland, had even been engaged to him for a while, and now he’d been connected to some drug dealers.

“You sure it’s him?” Slide asked.

“I was engaged to the fooker,” Angela said. “You think I can’t recognize a snap of him in the paper?”

Slide said, “So he was arrested. What’s that gonna do for us?”

“If you actually read the article you’d see that he was released, along with his partner, this guy, Kyle Jordan. God only knows how he got mixed up with that crowd. Max dealing crack—Jaysus, I can’t even imagine that.”

Slide went, “So what do you want to do? Kidnap him?”

“Not him—somebody close to him, and then make Max pay,” Angela said. “See, I know how Max is. He talks the talk but deep down, when it counts, he’s what we in America call a wuss. You should’ve seen him when he found out he had herpes. He was crying like a baby.”

“Herpes?” Slide asked.

“Oh, no, he didn’t catch it from me,” Angela said quickly, obviously busted, trying to cover. “He got it from, um, a previous relationship. And he didn’t give it to me either. Honest.”

Slide suddenly felt the urge to scratch. He also had the urge to wallop her again, but the lure of money was stronger. He said, “So he’s a wuss. What does that do for us?”

“He’s in a very vulnerable position, cops breathing down his neck, and if he’s dealing drugs these days, he must be seriously loaded. It’s the perfect time to kidnap somebody close to him and the panicked bastard will pay.”

“I like it,” Slide said, “but who do we grab? He got a wife?”

Angela got a strange look on her face, said, “I sincerely doubt that any woman in her right mind would be with that man. But there’s this partner—Kyle from Alabama.”

“You know him?”

“Never heard of him before, and honestly I can’t imagine what Max is doing with somebody from Alabama. I mean, the article says he met the guy down there. When I was with Max he bitched about going to the West Side.”

Slide was playing with the idea, tossing it around in his mind. He wanted to get the kidnapping gig down and he knew it would pay serious wedge if only he could stop killing the victims so fast.

“The only problem,” Angela said, “is how we do the abduction. After all, Manhattan isn’t Backwoods, Ireland. You can’t just nab somebody off the street.”

“True enough,” Slide said, grinning. “But
you
can.”

Twenty-One

Denial is the outstanding characteristic of the addict.

A
DDICTS
A
NONYMOUS

Max took twenty minutes to fill out the Cocaine Anonymous addiction test, twenty-three questions asking him things like whether his cocaine use was interfering with his work (
Nope. Moolah rolling in
), whether he’d experienced sinus problems or nosebleeds (
Occasionally
), and whether he felt obsessed with getting coke when he didn’t have any (
Si, señor
). He tallied up the yeses—only eight out of twenty-three, nine if you counted the nosebleeds one. Hell, he wasn’t an addict, not even close. What the fuck had he been stressing about? And, to think, he’d been seriously considering the idea of cleaning up, going into rehab. Whew, dodged a bullet there.

Max ripped up the addiction test and did three quick lines. Whoops, what was that blood coming out of his nostrils? Nine yeses. Eh, what the fuck ever.

The only downside of not being an addict was he couldn’t do one of those rehab gigs.
People
magazine had done a piece saying you were, like,
nobody
unless you’d done at least one stint. That bony Brit chick, Kate Moss—yeah, she’d fucked up big time by being photographed shoving mountains of coke up her dainty little nose. It looked like she was gonna lose all those lucrative contracts—so what’d she do? Yup, that’s right, headed right to rehab in Arizona, and
voila
—not only did the dumb-ass public admire her for her courage but shit, get this, she scored more gazillion-dollar contracts. Now that was class. Them Brits, they had some sneaky moves—no wonder they’d once owned India.

So, Max thought, when he had his movie career up and humming, he might do a stretch in one of those places anyway, just for the PR bump. Not long—come on, how long could The M.A.X. be out of the game?—but yeah, some time to deal with “personal issues” would do him good. He could see the cover of
Entertainment Weekly
, The M.A.X. looking contrite and yes, suffering, in real, physical pain, but was he denying it? Fuck no, here he was fessing up, admitting—and this would make a killer headline—
I’m human, too
. A tear would be rolling down his cheek, of course, though they’d probably have to Photoshop that in. God, it would be beautiful and word was, in those clinics, you made the best dope connections so he could, you know, combine business and healing in the one package. And, chances were, he’d meet one of those babes like Paris Hilton, have her hanging on his recuperating arm. Nah, not Paris; he liked the way she’d talked into the mike in that sex video, but she was way too flat-chested and way too bitchy, a bad perfecta if there ever was one. He’d rather have that other one with the implants, Tara Reid? Yeah, that Tara babe would be all over him, oozing love for The M.A.X., and when the press asked he’d simply say coolly, “We’re just good friends.”

Yeah, he’d be all set if only the blood would just, like, freaking STOP. That stuff, it totally ruined your shirts. He was wearing a white Van Heusen number—it was fucking Goodwill for that baby. How many fucking shirts had he bled on and had to donate? A hundred bucks each for those shirts and they went right down the shitter. Maybe he’d have to start buying black ones, go the Johnny Cash route.

Max was totally gone on this whole vision when his thirst kicked in, an overwhelming, all-consuming passion for gallons of water. Ah, screw that, make it a brew, lots of vitamins in those hops and lots of yeast too, right? Yeah, just a cold one—hell, maybe a few cold ones—and didn’t that prove he wasn’t a cokehead? You never see a junkie gasping for a Bud, right?

“Kyle, The M.A.X. needs a brewski!”

Kyle was back at the apartment, but the sushi chef was gone. Maybe he ran back to Japan, or at least back to Nobu. Max had given Kyle Katsu’s room but, man, Max hoped the kid had changed those sheets.

Max shouted for him again, then pounded down the hall to his room. The kid was watching Meg Ryan movies, a stack of ’em back to back—said he was having himself “a Megathon”—and he actually asked Max, “You think she’d be hard to find in Seattle?”

The schmuck really believed she lived there and, fucking with him, Max went, “I’ll ask Hanks if you can have her address.”

The kid’s eyes got huge and he stuttered, “You know T-T-Tom Hanks?”

Times like this Max wondered—was he fucking with Kyle or was it the other way around? Could someone be alive and functioning and yet be so brain dead?

But Max said, “Me and the Hankster go way back. Yeah, he was unsure about doing this movie with a fucking mermaid, and I told him, go for it Tommy, it’ll make a
splash
.”

The kid was stunned and Max had to jar him out of it, going, “The brewski. You know before, like, Tuesday?”

Rooming with Kyle, having to dumb it down on a daily basis, was stretching Max’s patience mighty thin, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. The cops had released Kyle along with Max, with instructions that they couldn’t leave town. Max didn’t want Kyle living alone someplace where he could fuck up and do something stupid. Max figured he knew the cops’ big game plan. They’d searched the apartment while Max and Kyle were being questioned but, guess what, they hadn’t taken anything. They could’ve nailed The M.A.X., but for what? It was his first offense and they could get possession but could they have gotten intent to sell? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe Max would’ve gotten six months or, if he had a good lawyer, community service. No, Miscali and those assholes didn’t want to send Max up on bullshit charges. They wanted the Big Kahunas, the Colombian suppliers, the behind-the-scenes players. So they figured they’d leave Max and Kyle on the loose for a while—see where that led them. Little did they know that The M.A.X. was one step ahead of the game.

When Max had been released from the precinct, he’d spotted the tail on him right away.
Spotted the tail
—man, he had this shit down cold. He’d also seen cops around outside when he went out for chores—i.e., to buy cigars and load up on booze. The cops weren’t uniforms and they weren’t holding up NYPD signs, but they might as well have been. Max, especially when he was coked up, knew everything that was going on around him and he had amazing instincts. Put one cop in Yankee Stadium with fifty thousand screaming fans and Max would pick the cop out, no problem. It was like Max was born with sonar for this shit.

One afternoon, when Max left his apartment, he did his usual cop search, immediately spotting the son of a bitch—the black guy sitting at the table in the sidewalk café across the street and up the block. Then, as Max headed up the block, he spotted something else. Blonde hair, big knockers—could that possibly be...?

Max’s hand was up, hailing a cab, and a cab pulled up, nearly running over his goddamn foot. When Max looked over again she was gone.

“Come on, buddy, get in my cab,” the driver said. “I don’t have all day.”

Max got in, trying to look back to confirm,
Was it her?

It couldn’t’ve been, Max decided later. What the hell would she be doing in America, after all this time? Nah, it wasn’t her—it had to have been a hallucination. Or maybe it was just paranoia. Okay, okay, so now he was up to 10 out of 23 on that coke addiction test. Maybe he shouldn’t’ve ripped the thing up so quickly.

The hallucination, or whatever it had been, reminded Max of how lonely he was. Yeah, he had Kyle around, but Max was physically lonely. Since Felicia had been killed there had been a big gap in Max’s life—well, two gaps, about the size of a pair of 44-double-E’s. The thing was, Max was a relationship guy. Without a loving, caring, big-titted woman at his side he felt incomplete. Yeah he was a metropolitan dude, but at heart he was a romantic, a one-woman man. Sure he played around, but no biggie, that was just for show, to impress the troops. But deep down he was a Paul Newman type really—one woman, one love. Damn straight and, hey, maybe he’d invent a salad dressing too. Fuck, the possibilities were, like, endless.

Funny thing was, Max had been thinking about Angela for a couple of weeks now, wondering where she was, who she was with, if she was happy. Maybe that’s why he’d thought he’d seen her, because she was prominent in his thoughts. So much had happened since the last time they’d spoken that it was hard for him even to remember what had gone wrong between them. He couldn’t remember any fights they’d had or any real conflict. Okay, she’d given him herpes, but aside from that Max could only remember the good times—the blowjobs, the quickies on his desk at his old office. You know, the Hallmark moments.

The next morning Max couldn’t get out of bed, depression kicking in big time. Even the thought of getting up for a little nose candy and some
Scarface
didn’t have any appeal. Kyle, God bless the kid, noticed Max’s state and tried to help, but The M.A.X. just couldn’t be reached. Max was even thinking about retiring the The in The M.A.X. He just didn’t feel worthy.

Man, this being depressed shit sucked big time.

Then, the next morning, Max noticed Kyle was gone. He thought maybe the kid had gone out shopping or to Blockbuster to get another Meg Ryan movie, but then it got to be afternoon and there was no sign of him. It was very unlike Kyle to disappear for even a couple of hours without leaving a note, or saying where he was going and when he’d be back. Sometimes Max felt like he was the stupid kid’s father. And there was another virtue right there, his fathering side, his nurturing streak. No wonder people flocked to him—he had enough love to go around.

Max wondered if the cops had picked Kyle up and Kyle was busy confessing, implicating Max in the shootings, but the sad thing was that Max didn’t really care. Having to spend the rest of his life as some queer’s fuck hole seemed like a better option to Max than lying around in bed all day, feeling so, so...so worthless.

Sometime in the afternoon, the doorman called up, said there was a package for Max at the front desk marked
URGENT AND PERSONAL.
Max didn’t have the energy to go down to get it so he had one of the porters bring it up. Max was so not himself that he gave the porter a five-buck tip. The porter, shocked, went, “You feeling okay today, Mr. Fisher?”

Max couldn’t even muster the energy to fire back with one of his usual zingers. He just smiled meekly and muttered, “Have a good day.”

The package was about shoebox size—actually, it seemed to be a shoebox. But there weren’t shoes in it—it was way too light for that. An envelope was attached to the box and there was a note inside the envelope. Max took out the note. It read:

N
OW WHO’S A DICK
?

Even more confused, Max opened the package. It was wrapped up with lots of tape, and then inside there was crumpled-up newspaper. Max was starting to think it was some prank, maybe that cop Miscali playing head games with him, and then he got to the plastic bag, looked like one of those Ziplock things. There was something inside the bag, something long and pink.

Max held up the bag, studying the contents, and then it hit him. If he hadn’t been so depressed he would’ve screamed—fuck, he probably would’ve run for his life—but in his current state his only reaction was to drop the bag on the floor and back away very slowly.