Gina Takes Bangkok (The Femme Vendettas) (41 page)
Read Gina Takes Bangkok (The Femme Vendettas) Online
Authors: S. M. Stelmack
Jack’s address turned out to be a dilapidated grocery store, its barred windows smashed and brick facade layered in crude graffiti. Pulling over to the curb, she double-checked the address. Had Monroe played some kind of cruel trick on her? Surely to God, Jack couldn’t be living in a place barely fit for a rodent.
She locked her car and wondered if she would ever see it again. Oh well, that was why she paid the outrageous insurance premiums. You shouldn’t have what you can’t afford to lose. It’s what her father had always said, and she’d made it her personal motto. She walked across the street and was about to step onto the curb when the heel on her right Blahnik got wedged in a pavement crack. She tugged with her foot, and nothing happened. The heel was sensible, a full inch across, and still this.
“Fine,” she muttered. She unzipped the boot, slipped out her nyloned foot and hopped on the other as she began prying out the heel. From down the street, she heard the men snort in laughter.
Yes, she could afford to lose her six hundred dollar boots. Her pride was an entirely different matter. She was not going to meet an old high school friend with one shoe. Besides, it was freezing. She went at it again with renewed vigor.
The heel popped loose which sent her hopping madly about in all directions to keep her balance. The crowd laughed raucously, and Lindsay jammed her foot back into her boot, closed it with a most satisfying zip, and straightened. Then gasped.
She was looking up at the biggest black man she’d ever seen in all her New York life. He was a tree, a building, a mountain. He wore a knit hat, a parka that could’ve covered her car, and tundra boots that had to have been custom-made to fit him. A brown paper bag full of groceries hung from his bear paw of a hand with no more effort than she’d hold an empty envelope. Down the two-lane bridge of his nose, he looked at her with the mild disdain normally reserved for pigeons.
He took in her boots, her coat, her car, and no doubt, her skin color. “You lost?”
Lindsay tried for a friendly, brisk tone. “Not at all. I’m meeting a friend. He lives right here.” She attempted to skirt around him. “I mustn’t keep him waiting.”
The giant pulled a face and narrowed his eyes. “Here? What’s his name?”
She dropped the friendly and kept the brisk. “Why would I tell a stranger my friend’s name?”
His eyes widened and apparently conceding the point, he stepped aside to let her pass.
“Thank you,” she said. “Have a nice day.”
She got past him and headed up to the rusted metal door of the shop. She tapped on it, then banged on it. Nothing. Aware that her every move was being watched, she tried the handle. It was unlocked—didn’t, she realized, even have a lock. She glanced back to where the winterized wall of humanity stood watching her. He smiled, flashing a set of gold teeth, clearly not intending to walk on.
“Uh, looks like he left it open for me. Must be home, then.”
His smile glittered. “Must be.”
“I’ll have to remind him not to leave his door open.” She paused deliberately. “Who knows who might wander in?”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
Lindsay didn’t know what to do, so she pushed open the door and tried to close it quickly behind her. It took a couple of goes as the door didn’t sit square with the frame. She waited, listening for the Yeti of Bedford to follow. Nothing happened, and she turned back to the shop’s interior. Or what there was of it.
Crumbling white plaster exposed wires, and the floor was stripped straight to the plywood underlay. A patchwork of old linoleum tiles, mud-stained carpet rolls and cardboard trailed from the front door to a reinforced metal one at the rear.
“What the hell happened, Jack?” she said under her breath. She crossed the gutted store and knocked on the metal door.
No answer. Lindsay went straight to the door knob. It was locked. She knocked again, harder this time. Behind her, the shop door crashed open and in came the giant.
“You ain’t getting past that one,” he said, nodding.
“Wha—?”
He strolled towards her, shifting his bag to one arm, while his hand dug around in the pocket of his parka. “Locked it on my way out.” He pulled out a set of keys so full that they formed a stiff three-quarters arc and selected one.
He stepped forward and she stepped aside.
“You live here? Not Jack Cole, then?”
“That the name of the friend who’s waiting for you?”
The game was up. She sighed. “Yeah, it is.”
Again the man’s mouth broke into an amused smile. “He’ll be back soon. You want to, you can come down and wait.” He moved sideways to hold the door open for her.
Lindsay tried not to look as scared as she was. What the hell had Monroe gotten her into? The cop had warned her to talk to Jack herself, but hadn’t mentioned anything about his living in the basement of some abandoned building with Bigfoot. Perhaps it was a kind of test. After all, if she didn’t have the guts to go down there, how could she expect others to face New York’s real underground?
“Sure. Sounds good.” Carefully she walked down the stairwell, him clumping behind her, filling the one escape route. They emerged into a clean, spartan apartment. No, not spartan. Spartan was its own kind of style. This was absence, the kind of deprivation found in a prison cell. There were no bookshelves, no television, no phone—not even a single picture on the cracked plaster walls. The only illumination was the weak beams of sunlight that fell through a pair of small street-level windows high on the back wall. Lindsay had no sense of Jack in the bleak apartment, nothing to make it seem as if this was where he belonged.
The black man kicked off his boots, carpeted the floor with his coat. “Sit down. He’ll be back soon.”
Her seating choices were two chairs, an uncomfortable-looking plastic one by a small formica kitchen table, and a worn mud-brown leather armchair pushed into the far corner. Lindsay crossed the room to take up the latter.
“So…my name’s Lindsay.”
The man took two cartons of eggs from the paper bag, placed one on the counter and the other in the rusted fridge. “That right?”
Lindsay was tired of being played with. “Yeah, that’s right. Now could you stop with your I-know-something-you-don’t-know game and act like a normal human being?”
His eyes positively gleamed. “Man, I can’t wait for Jack to come back and see what I brought home.”
“You make it sound as if I were a bargain at a garage sale.”
He gave a soft hoot. “More than what Jack bargained for, I’ll bet.” He turned to the sink and began washing his hands under a sputtering tap. “Reggie,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I’m Reggie.”
“I take it you’re a friend of Jack’s
Reggie dried his hands on a towel that Lindsay wouldn’t have washed her floor with and took a large frying pan from one of the small cupboards. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Lindsay took in his familiarity with the place, and had to ask, “You and Jack are…roommates?”
“Yeah.” Reggie scrunched his forehead in sudden thought. “You asking if I’m gay?”
The directness of his question threw her, and she reacted with her own bluntness. “I don’t care if
you
are. I’m just wondering about Jack, is all.”
Reggie let out a whoop of laughter, and he fell back against the ancient yellow fridge, rocking it and holding his gut. He chugged out a succession of long motor-like guffaws. “Oh, man, I can’t wait. I can’t wait.” Gradually he subsided and began cracking eggs into the pan.
He was on his seventh when he theorized, “Might explain why he’s so off women, but I doubt it.”
Lindsay watched as Reggie broke all twelve eggs into the pan and proceeded to scramble them on a two-burner hot plate, his back to her.
“How do you know him?” Lindsay said, shedding her jacket and folding it over the back of the chair. The place wasn’t as cold as it looked.
“How come you say you’re a friend of Jack when you’ve never come around before?” he asked right back.
He had a point. “We were friends in high school, then he and his dad moved away, and I haven’t seen him since. I didn’t know until today that he was back in New York.”
“You’re here to say hello?”
Lindsay wasn’t about to go into it with Reggie. “Yeah. Something like that.”
He snorted at having his line thrown back at him. “I like you, girl.” He shook his head. “I can’t wait.”
When the pan had heated to a steady hissing, he tipped half of the yellow globby contents onto a plate, and ate the rest out of the pan, staring off into space as if he were by himself.
“You live alone?” he suddenly asked.
This time Lindsay was prepared for Reggie’s abruptness, maybe because he was a straight-shooter like her. “No. I have a niece.”
He stopped chewing. He looked ready to ask another question when the door at the top of the stairs opened. The light from the store above briefly cast a man’s shadow down to the dim apartment. Gold teeth appeared in anticipation. “Must be him now.”
Lindsay stood automatically. Her hand fluttered to her pale hair and she wished she’d thought to check herself in the mirror instead of watching Reggie shovel egg into his face.
Not that she was here to rekindle a high school crush, her ears tracking the descent of the booted footsteps. Still, there was no denying it. She was looking forward to seeing Jack Cole again.
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S. M. STELMACK
IS OUR pen name, short for Serge & Moira Stelmack.
We aim to give what we like in a story—gutsy men and women, high stakes and LOL lines. Serge is the storymaster who blasts out the beginning, middle and end. Moira comes behind, clucking and hemming, as the story undergoes countless rewrites till it meets our vision. She’s also the media relations manager, senior editor, marketing VP, director of operations (domestic and foreign), comptroller and the one who makes sure that Serge has a steady supply of cola while he works.
We live with our two kids, and several other strange pets, in a land of wintertime sunshine and snow and summertime mud and mosquitoes. Actually, it’s not that bad. The snakes in the local lake aren’t venomous.
We really need to move.
Authors, Serge & Moira Stelmack
http://www.smstelmackauthor.com/
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