Slide (5 page)

“No,” he snapped as if she’d asked a stupid question. “How do you feel about joining up with me in the kidnapping biz?”

So, what, now she was going to be the Irish version of Patty Hearst? Least she’d remember to wash her hair. What was that girl thinking, letting CCTV pick her up on a bad hair day. Christ, you rob a bank, at least make the effort, put a little blusher on, a hint of eyeliner.

She went, “Kidnapping biz?”

He slowed a tad, said, “You’ll have noticed the chains and shite around the house, right?”

Like you could miss them?

Before she could say, You mean it wasn’t a kink? he went, “I’m in the kidnapping biz, a pro, been doing it for a while.”

And fuck, he looked so proud, like he was really doing something important, his bit for the new prosperity. Meanwhile, she was thinking,
And how successful have you been? You live in a shithole, can barely buy the drinks, drive a freaking banger, and have to roll some poor schmuck in a car park.

Here he was again, now looking like he was about to bestow some great honor, going, “I’ve decided to let you be my partner.”

She loved
decided
. Like he’d been deliberating over it and wasn’t she lucky she’d been
picked
.

Then she thought, A kidnapper, an Irish well-groomed version of Patty Hearst. She had to admit, there was something glamorous about it. And if you did it right, shite, there could be a real payoff. Christ, wouldn’t she just kill to be rich?

She asked, “But nobody gets hurt, right?”

He gave her a bashful smile, said, “See, that’s my motto right there, no pain, lotsa gain.”

This from a guy who put broken bottles in strangers’ faces.

She went, “You’re a caring man.”

He literally hung his head, whispered, “I put the C in care. Sometimes, I think I care too much.”

She nodded, thinking the C applied if you meant cunt, then asked, “Have you someone in mind?”

He sang, “
You can always get what you want
.”

Real pleased he was using
can
, not
can’t.

Then, scaring the shite out of her, he did a hip swivel that was supposedly Jagger, but came off like Jim Carrey in
The Mask.

“Go on,” she said. “Who?”

“Who?” he said. “Jagger or Richards, one of those fookers. The Stones are in town, and someone’d pay plenty to get those lads back alive.”

“The Rolling Stones,” she said.

He looked at her, nodded.

She said, “You want to kidnap the Rolling Stones? That’s your plan?”

“The fook’s wrong with it?” he said.

The idea started to grow on her. The Stones weren’t so young anymore, probably couldn’t run like they’d’ve been able to back when.

But would there be room here for the lads? And of course she’d need a whole new wardrobe. Mick liked his women in the newest gear. God, she was already seeing Mick’s lips on her neck. So, okay, he had a few wrinkles but fuck, he still had those buns and, come on, if you haven’t sucked a Stone, have you really lived? Have you?

She could see herself on
Oprah
, Oprah’s fattish face, full of curiosity, asking,
And when did Mick give you the diamond ring?
Then Angela would modestly flash the huge stone on her engagement finger. She’d make a joke about it, go, “I’ve got my Stone all right.” She pictured her and Mick spending winters in the south of France, and lots of little Stones with Angela’s eyes.

“So what do you say?” Slide said. “You in or out?”

Imagining herself and Mick getting married on an exclusive island off the coast of Who The Fook Cares, Angela sang in a voice much worse than Slide’s:
“Wild horses...won’t keep me away...”

Seven

“OK,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.” “Really?”

“Order are orders,” I said. “The alternative is anarchy and chaos.”

L
EE
C
HILD,
The Enemy

Max Fisher was the shit all right. He was living it up—the kingpin of New York, another goddamn Scarface. His crib—he called it FisherLand—was a penthouse sublet on East Sixty-sixth Street and Second Avenue. He’d always liked the building because it was made of dark black glass, like the windows of a limo, and to Max, it oozed class, was a place The Donald would’ve loved before he started naming buildings after himself.

Yeah, everything was going Max’s way, all right. He was making five grand a week in profit as what he liked to call himself, “a high-end crack dealer.” He had the freshest clothes, a live-in sushi chef named Katsu, and best of all he was getting some of the finest poontang in the city from his steady ho, Felicia, a former stripper he’d known from Legz Diamond.

Yeah, it was hard to believe how far Max’s life had come since that weekend from hell in Alabama.

How many other slick brothers like himself could’ve got out of that hole? No cash, a chink in your ass, literally, and not only had he kissed that shithole goodbye, but he’d set up a mini-empire in Manhattan. And we’re not talking years here, buddy. He’d put this shit together in—what was it that Irish cunt used to say?—oh, yeah,
jig time.

Where was that Irish bitch now? he wondered. If the curse he’d paid to have put on her worked, she was probably in an Irish prison, sucking some prison guard’s meat in the hope of a free lunch. Yeah, Angela had fucked Max over but good, but who was laughing now, bitch? Who was the player in the toughest game in town and who was on her knees, taking it large in some skank Irish prison? Huh? Huh?

Man, if Max had known the crack business would be such a gold mine, he wouldn’t have wasted years of his life selling goddamn computer networks.

The thing was, unlike a lot of businesses, it was so easy to get the ball rolling as a crack dealer. The startup costs were miniscule, and the obstacles to entry were virtually non-existent. All he needed was product and steady customers. And the great thing about the business was you didn’t have to worry about shit like “competing technology.” Once you hooked a customer, he was yours for life.

The way Max got the action started: a week after he’d hightailed it out of Alabama, Kyle had sent a mule, some high school kid, up to the city with Max’s first supply of rock. He had the merchandise; all he needed was the customers. In his days as head honcho, Max had had to do with whatever was necessary to close sales, including, for many important clients, scoring coke. Max figured that all had to do was “transition” the fucks from coke to crack and he’d make a mint. Easy, right? And of course Kyle had been all for the idea, even though the putz was only getting twenty percent, and it was twenty percent of the
profits
, and Max had no intention of paying it to him anyway. Poor fuckin’ Kyle. The kid was so in love with the idea of having a foursome with the blond bimbos that if Max had told him to go up to Harlem and stand in front of the Magic Johnson movie theater wearing a
FUCK YOU, NIGGERS
T-shirt, the stupid moron would’ve done it.

But, yeah, Max’s drug dealing business was a huge hit. He started small, with addicts he knew. Like one of his oldest steadies, Jack Haywood. Jack was the VP of Information Technology at a major midtown investment banking firm. He was a closet cokehead and Max had been taking advantage of this for years, plying the asshole with coke and table dances in exchange for inking six- and seven-figure IT deals.

So when Max had received his first shipment of rock, he’d called Jack at work and gone, “Don’t hang up on me. I’ve got something good for you—”

“I can’t do business with you any more,” Jack said nervously.

“It’s not about business,” Max said. “It’s—”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “It’s not you. I think you’re a decent guy, but my bosses—they don’t want me, well, associating with you anymore.”

Max had expected this attitude from Jack. When NetWorld had gone under, Max had gotten into a little trouble with the police. Something about a bunch of murders he didn’t commit. None if it had been any fault of his—blame it on booze and that ditzy bitch, Angela. Call it “the dark period” in his life. But that was all in the past. He was a new Max Fisher now, a Max Fisher who had discovered the wonderful world of crack cocaine.

“It’s not what you think,” Max said. “I just want to get together, for old time’s sake.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“I have some new candy for you,” Max said.

Candy
was the old code word that Max and Jack used to have for coke.

There was silence on the line, then Jack said, “I don’t like candy any more,” but Max could tell the idea was very appealing to him.

“This is really sweet, really delicious candy,” Max said. “I tried some myself the other day.”

A longer silence, then Jack asked, “How sweet and how delicious?”

Max punched the air, thinking,
Gotcha, sucker.
What was that line from
House of Games
, and two to take ’em? No, that wasn’t it. What-the-fuck-ever.

Max took Jack out, got him hooked. Before long, Jack was spending a thou a week on Max’s shit, and that was only one customer. Soon Max had twelve other Jack Haywoods and his profits started to explode. Hell, Jack had even hooked his wife on crack. That was the beauty of the business—you could gain new customers so effortlessly. It was all word of mouth. You didn’t need to advertise, you didn’t need to invest a lot of money in having a pretty office. There was no one to impress. All you had to do was get people addicted and you were golden. They would get others hooked, and so on and so on. This was better than TiVo and the George Foreman Grill.

Max had been smoking crack himself—but he was taking it easy, kept it to two pipes a day. Well, maybe more than that sometimes, but he didn’t go crazy or anything. He found that crack actually kept him balanced. If he was having too much booze, he would smoke a crack pipe to pull himself back up, and vice versa. It kept him levelheaded, in control. And, just like he was avoiding mixing alcohol, he stuck to crack and crack only. The stupid fuckers who got addicted to the rock—like Jack Haywood and his wife—were the ones who cut it with brown. Yeah, that was right, Max called heroin
brown
. He was up on all the current, hip drug lingo all right. He listened to Naz, Ja Rule, Busta Rhymes, and 50 Cent. He even knew how many times 50 had been shot—nine. See how hip he was?

To keep the hip vibes flowing, he had gangsta movies playing on his massive Sony 64-inch LCD TV, twenty-four-seven. Classics like
Boyz n the Hood
,
Menace II Society
,
Gang Related
, and, of course, the granddaddy of ’em all,
Scarface
. One of Max’s favorite ways to pass the time was to smoke some good rock while watching
Scarface
and trying to keep track of how many
putas
Pacino blows away. When he got into the twenties he always lost count.

Max learned lots of hip lingo, but
chill
—ah, chill was by far his favorite new word. Man, he loved saying chill. And it was such a useful word; it had so many meanings. Chill could mean to relax, as in, “Chill out, my man” or “I’m just sitting in here in FisherLand, chillin’ with my bee-atch.” But it also meant to be cool, like, “I’m chill, baby, I’m chill.” And it meant, “Hang out,” like when you say to somebody, “Wanna chill?” But the best way to use chill was in place of fuck. Like sometimes Max would go to Felicia, “Yo wassup, my bee-atch? You wanna get in bed and chill, baby?” Or sometimes, while she was going down on him, Max, high on crack, would go, “Yeah, chill on my rod for a while, baby. Yeah, like that, my bee-atch.”

Was hiring Felicia as his round-the-clock ho the best move he’d ever made or what?

When the money started rolling in, one of the first things Max had done was go to Legz Diamond in midtown, where he used to entertain his networking clients back in the day. He bought a lap dance from Felicia, and as she was squatting over him, those great fake tits—had to be quadruple Ds—inches away from his face, he whispered to her, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“They ain’t real,” she said.

“I know that,” Max said. “I was curious about something else. How much’re you making?”

She thought about it, went, “You mean dancin’?”

“No, I mean the whole enchilada. Dancing plus whatever else you do on weekends. How much you make in a week?”

After a long pause, she went, “On a good week? Two thousand.”

Max went, “Say hello to your new boss—I’m paying you four.”

And that was it, done deal. Talk about closing a sale.

Felicia moved into the penthouse with him and Max only had one rule: she had to walk around topless at all times. He didn’t care what she wore on the bottom, but he needed to see those tits constantly. Her knockers were like his goddamn
inspiration
. He could be feeling down about something, self-doubt creeping in, and he’d go, “Yo, Felicia, come here bee-atch and chill on my lap,” and life would have meaning again.

The most chill thing about Felicia was how she knew her place in the world, and how she accepted it. She knew she was a ho, a bee-atch, and she didn’t give Max “no talkin’ back to.” Most of the other women in his life had been a lot more sensitive. Angela, forget about it. If he called her a bee-atch, she’d would’ve bashed his face in. And his ex-wife Deirdre, God rest her soul, hadn’t exactly rolled with the punches either. If Max had let one slip, called her a cunt or something, she would’ve had a big fit, going on about how he was “verbally abusive” and “a misogynist” and a “womanizer.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Thank God he was through with all of that shit, right?

But, yeah, Max was in heaven with Felicia. If there was such a thing as an ideal woman she was it. At home, it was like she was his beck-and-call girl, his Pretty Black Woman, but nothing had ever made him feel more like a player than the times he took her out on the town. He’d be in one of his new mustard-colored suits, and she’d be wearing something really skimpy, showing as much of her boobs as was legally allowed, and just to see the looks on people’s faces was priceless. Everybody was so fucking jealous, especially the guys. They’d look at him, their mouths sagging open, and he could read their minds. All the jealous fucks were wishing that they could be Max Fisher, just for one day, just to see what it was like.

Sometimes Max took Felicia out clubbing to all the hip spots. Max felt like he was back in the good ol’ days at Studio 54. So what if he was the oldest guy on the dance floor and the kids called him “Gran’pa”? Max Fisher still knew how to get jiggy wid it and he and Felicia had a fucking blast.

But Max’s favorite place to take her to, to be seen, was the QT hotel on Forty-fifth Street. There was a hip swimming pool bar on ground level in the lobby and it was where all the current happening players hung out with their beautiful young ho’s.

Businessmen on their lunch breaks would stop by, not to swim, but just to leer in through the glass at the spectacular women in bikinis, wishing that some day their wildest dreams would come true and that they could score some of that fine poontang for themselves.

Max knew what it was like because he used to be one of those losers himself. But now he’d turned the tables. Now he was the one in the water with his beautiful smoking hot bee-atch, and the guys in suits were looking in at him. Man, it felt good to be a winner, on the other side of the glass.

The only little issue Max had had with Felicia was one day when he went into his safe in his office to put away some cashish, and noticed the wedge of green was looking a little low. He did a count and sure enough a thousand bucks was missing.

He said, “That fuckin’
puta
’s stealing from me?”

Sounding like Pacino without even trying.

He went under his bed, took out his rod. You wanna be a drug lord, you better talk the talk. Max knew shit about guns, had never even fired one, but man, just holding a piece in his hand made him feel like his dick was six inches longer. Which would make it, what, a solid nine-and-a-half inches?

He started toward the bathroom where Felicia was showering, then he decided he needed to get pumped for this. He hadn’t smoked any crack in about an hour—Jesus, it was like he was going cold turkey. He didn’t have time to cook up some shit, so he took out the little silver wrapper, did some fast lines. This was nothing like the rock, barely a notch above a double espresso, but, man, it hit him like a train, fast and hard. He did a little dance, rapping a little of the gangsta stuff he’d been listening to, doing a little 50 Cent. He sounded great and thought he could release a rap album and it would go fuckin’ platinum. But he’d need a cool name, have to use numbers or initials or something. What about M.A.X.? Yeah, that had a ring to it and man, he could rap. He’d go on stage in a suit—didn’t P. Daddy, or whatever the hell his name was today, do that?

But Max knew if he wanted to go gangsta he’d have to take it all the way. He’d get all the right threads. Shit, when he was The Man, the designers would be giving him clothes for free—they’d want their clothes to
be seen
on The M.A.X. He liked that, put
The
in front of his name, to highlight that he was the one and only M.A.X., the
official
M.A.X., that there was no other. Yeah, and he’d have buy a Jeep, get some customized
The M.A.X.
plates for it. Man, would that look bitchin’ or what? He laughed,
bitchin’
. He was getting’ down with the homies all right. The coke loosening him, he was flying, ideas hitting him, like a zillion a second. When he was a big-time rap star he knew all the brothers, all the bee-atches, would look up to him, like he was a mother who’d been around the block a few times and they best be showin him some respect. Yeah, he’d seen that respect, no,
fear
, from his bee-atch, Felicia. Her eyes fucking dazzled at his genius. They’d be in the hood, hanging with his homies, and he’d be her Mr. Wall Street. Like how many guys could pull off corporate America and be down with the gangstas? Yeah, it was time to pull some attitude on that sista.