Jack Wakes Up (21 page)

What you’re trying to find out involves someone else.”

“Who?”

Junius looks at Freeman with pronounced disdain. “What’d I just say to this motherfucker?”

“You said enough about the Russians.”

“Right.”

Jack shakes his head. “Did I miss something?” When neither man answers, he starts at the beginning. “What was your relationship with Ralph?”

“Easy, man. He rolled a bit at the clubs for me, moved some product. Mostly small time.”

“I was a friend of his. That’s why I want to know. I’m trying to find out why he got rubbed.”

Junius nods. “That’s real cute, you saying ‘rubbed’ like that. You learn that from TV?”

“So who popped him?”

“Yo, popping Ralphie was almost a community service out here, man. I mean I did business with the fat fuck, but he was not what you’d call the most above-deck motherfucker, if you get me.”

“Then just tell me why he stopped doing business with you?”

Junius looks upset at this, as if Jack’s brought up a bad memory, or made him think of something he didn’t know. He shakes his head. “That motherfucker stop? Shit. He couldn’t stop buying if he had to.”

“OK,” Jack says. “So you don’t know anything about the deal he was working with a Colombian named Castroneves?”

Junius shakes his head. “I fucking hate Colombians, man.”

Behind him, Jack hears Freeman say, “Scarface.”

Junius points at the big Samoan. He laughs. “No,” he says to Jack. “In seriousness. I don’t know anything about that.”

“Or who hired the guys to drop by his house and leave a hole in his head?”

“Here’s what I can tell you, Jack Palms. And I tell you this out of a friendly gesture, not anything more.” He holds up his hand with his pointer finger extended. “The Russians you talk about? I know them, and have worked with them. But if they’re the ones who put a hole in Ralph’s head, and I’m not saying they are, it was not me who sent them. I just did some business, made a few trades to see what their supply line was worth and then I backed off it. Truth is, they’re more headache than they worth.”

Then, from inside his jacket, Junius’s cell phone starts ringing. He takes it out and looks at it, and then holds up one finger to Jack. He pushes a button, holds it up to his ear. “Yeah.” Junius nods, listening to the other end. “Really,” he says, nodding again. “No shit?” Then he looks at Jack. “I’ve got Jack Palms right here in front of me now.” He listens. “No, for real.” More listening. “No, just big Free and myself. Sure. Sure.” Then he listens and looks at Jack, laughs, and hangs up the phone.

“That’s the man Vitelli,” Junius says. “He say he got Alex Castroneves with him right now. That Colombian motherfucker you just spoke of? Tony tells me that you two just did size business for Ralphie-boy’s visiting friends. Is that true?”

Jack holds up his hands, palms up, beside his knees. “This is why I’m trying to talk with you, Junius. I just want you to know what’s going on, so I can find out what’s what in this town. I want to know how I’m involved.”

“Oh, you involved now, Jack,” Junius says, nodding. “You involved here in this motherfucker.” He stands up and goes over to the table, turns and kicks the chair across the room. “Ralph got you doing business with the Colombian?” He has his hands in fists, his forehead furrowed. “What the fuck that fat fucker thinking?”

Jack gets up and prepares himself for anything. Caught between a giant and an angry man is not where he wants to be. “So I take it that you didn’t know that was coming?”

“Motherfucker.” Junius takes a deep breath, trying to settle himself. He holds up one finger and starts breathing like he’s in a Lamaze class. “The thing you don’t understand,” he says. “Is that I made that little bitch.”

“But then you knocked him down, too.”

“Right. That’d be how you want to see this, wouldn’t it.” He shakes his head.

Jack looks at Freeman to see what to expect: the Samoan has his arms folded, a serious look on his face, from what you can tell from his non-tattooed side. The side with the tattoo looks serious or angry all the time. Suddenly Jack wants to ask him if he had the tattoo when he was in the NFL.

“What you looking at?” Freeman says to Jack.

Jack turns and sees Junius pick up the chair he kicked over and set it back upright. It made a mark on the wall that he smoothes his hand over, then knocks just above it. “This place ain’t all that sturdy, Free. Just a bullshit partition here, really.” He stands up straight and looks at his friend. “We ought to check out for ourselves whether we want to keep coming here. Bullshit like this can walk right in.” He tilts his head toward Jack. “And who knows who’s listening on the other side of this wall?” He knocks on it again.

Freeman nods, his arms still folded. “I’ll look into that, J.”

“Thank you.” Junius slides the chair in front of Jack’s, but doesn’t sit down. He brushes off his hands. “Now, Mr. Palms, my friend. We got the car outside, and my people are waiting. So this conversation is over.” He takes a card out of the inside of his jacket and drops it on the floor.

“You call me when you’re ready to start rolling,” he says. Then he nods at Freeman and leaves the room.

Freeman bumps Jack from behind as he heads toward the door, knocking over Jack’s chair.

“Later, bro.”

Alone in the small room, Jack bends to pick up the card as one of the waitresses comes in to start clearing the table. The card is Junius’, with just his name and a cell phone number, nothing else except one word: product.

After a fast exit from the restaurant, just a wave to the maitre d’ and his two friends in suits, Jack stands outside in the cold air, breathing hard, trying to calm his nerves. He walks around the corner, paces back and forth, then crosses the street to the park to sit on one of the concrete benches. He looks up at the Peace Tower, its concrete platforms looming above him, and at the night, gray and full of light reflecting back down onto the city. There’s enough fog in this town to keep any night stars away for most of the year; the city lights shine up against the clouds and make a bubble of reflected fluorescence.

He gets up and decides it’s time he saw Maxine. The last thing he needs is another encounter with people who have bad tempers or want to do him harm, especially if those people have extra-large body guards. Though he’ll have to talk with Junius again and probably Tony before the night is through, it’s been a long, crazy day, and he wants to relax, at least for a little while.

About a half-hour later, Jack shows up at Maxine’s with Japanese take-out—noodles and sushi—as a peace offering. He didn’t call ahead, but he can see she’s home because her lights are on, so he knows she can’t ignore him when he rings the bell. “Delivery,” he says into the speaker box when she comes on. The door buzzes—was she expecting food?—and Jack goes inside, walks up the stairs and to her door.

When he knocks, she calls out, “It’s open.”

Jack opens the door, and she’s standing in front of him, hands on hips, wearing jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt cut open part-way down the front to show her chest and a little cleavage.

“Jack Palms,” she says.

Jack smiles. “That’s me.”

He goes over to the table to set the food down and then wraps Maxine up in his arms. “You were expecting a pizza?”

She laughs, puts her hand on his chin and turns his face to the side. “You know you got new cuts today?” she says. “I might not be able to let you leave here again, if this keeps up.”

“Baby,” Jack says. “Don’t make the offer if you won’t keep it.”

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“Someone shot the Mustang.”

She pulls back to see Jack’s face and as soon as she does her face gets doubly serious. For all Jack knows, there might be tears in his eyes. “Oh, Jack,” she says. “The Mustang?”

He nods and she comes closer, holds him tight.

“I’d be glad to stay here and stop getting bruised,” Jack says. “I’ll stay inside with you forever once this thing is done.”

She pulls back. “But?” she says.

“But tonight I’ve got to go out, fix a few things, collect some money from the Czechs, and point a cop in the right direction. Then everything will be OK.”

She leans forward and stands on her toes, kisses Jack on the lips. “That’s not so bad,” she says.

“Good. Keep reminding me of that.”

“I will.” She takes him by the hand and brings him back through the living room to her bedroom. She dims the lights, but Jack can see she has more bookshelves in here, some lamps with scarves draped over them, a tapestry on the wall, a couple of pictures on the shelves. She 182

takes off his jacket and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “So how was your day, darling? Tell me what happened.”

“Not bad. Just a few meetings, a conference call, some Russian fucks shot at us and then I chased them down, crashed their car, and made sure they were dead.”

“That was you?” Maxine says. “I saw that on the news tonight. It looked awful.”

“Then I drove a few friends to the wharf, got the Czechs the coke they wanted. The Colombian came through. You know: just your average day in the city.”

“Standard,” she says.

“Tell me about it.”

“Now will your friends take off?”

“Monday, I think.” He kisses the top of her head, runs his fingers along her bare shoulders.

She pushes him backward and down onto the bed, and then climbs on top of him, straddling his chest, and finishes unbuttoning his shirt, peeling it open like a present. She slides her fingers across his pecs and then down along his sides toward his back. He winces a little as she goes near his ribs, and she moves closer to take a look. “You have a nasty bruise here,” she says. She gives it a light kiss. Then she leans back to take her top off, and Jack starts touching around her navel, below it and around the rim of her jeans. When she comes back down to him, he kisses her neck, then her lips, and then raises her up and kisses her chest. He takes one of her nipples in his mouth and teases at it with his tongue.

It hurts when she touches his face, kisses his ears, but he can hear the music come on soft and gentle when she reaches to the dresser and puts on a CD. He’s glad for the sound, glad to know his ears and some other parts of his body are still working, that he can still feel pleasure after the considerable pains of the day. She takes his pants off slowly, kissing along his legs as she does, finding a few more bruises, and for a few minutes Jack lets himself lie back and enjoy it. Then he takes her in his arms and pulls her up onto the bed and moves over her. He touches her skin with 183

his fingers, opens her pants, and eventually takes them off. Seeing her firm body in the dim light, he feels better than he has in a long while.

When they’ve finished, they lie still for a time, hearing the soft music and feeling the slow, small movements of one another’s breathing. Finally, she gets up and disappears, comes back with the food, brings it to the bed, and they eat with chopsticks out of the white Styrofoam containers, taking turns feeding one another.

“So you know about how my marriage broke up?” Jack says.

Maxine shakes her head. “No. And don’t tell me.”

Jack takes another maki. “OK by me.”

“I’ve got some cigarettes in the night table next to you,” she says. “You ever eat sushi while smoking?”

Jack laughs. “I’ll wait for later.”

She stops with her chopsticks near her face, a clump of noodles hanging from them. “Do you really have to go back out tonight? Why not just call the Czechs tomorrow and go get your money.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t. They made that mess downtown today, and now I’ve got to give the police something by tomorrow or else they come after me looking to clean it up. That and I still have to find out who killed Ralph.”

Jack remembers Junius getting the call from Tony at the restaurant earlier. He wonders why Tony would call Junius, especially if he was with Castroneves. What was happening there?

“Remember when you first called me?” he asks. “And you said you wanted me to come down to The Coast so you could tell me something about Ralph.”

She nods, taking a piece of salmon nigiri and putting the whole thing in her mouth.

“So what’d you want to tell me? I never got the full story because Tony showed up.”

“Yeah,” she says. “That bastard made me go turn up the music, only you can’t turn it up from behind the bar. You have to go upstairs to the office. And the office was locked. So I had to get 184

one of Tony’s boys to let me in. Then the thing’s already programmed to go up at eight o’clock, and it was like five minutes to eight.”

“So Tony wanted to get rid of you.”

She shrugs. “Who knows what that bastard ever wants. He wanted to get rid of you in a minute. Maybe he was trying to get rid of you then.”

“So what’d you want to say?”

Jack can feel Maxine’s body next to his under the blankets: their sides pressed together and her smooth skin against his leg. She nods, puts her hand under the blanket and runs her fingers along Jack’s thigh. “You’re all right, you know that Palms?” She kisses him on the cheek. “The thing is,” she says, “Tony wouldn’t let Ralph come around The Coast anymore because he found out Ralphie was dealing to a couple of the girls.”

“And Tony didn’t want Ralph around the girls.”

“No,” Maxine says. “That wasn’t it. Ralph dealt to his girls for a long time and Tony was OK

with it. He said he liked how it made them dance, that it made the new ones dance better and not worry. When my friend Michelle started dancing there, he even gave her coke to get over her nerves the first few times.”

“So what happened?”

“Tony told Ralph to stop. Then he started dealing to the girls himself.”

“Tony?”

“Yeah. He got himself a new supply line and then he started dealing to the girls. He cut Ralph out. Then he found out Ralph still sold to a few of them and he wouldn’t let Ralph around the club anymore. After that he started dealing to the customers too.”

“And that stuff about Ralph touching the girls?”

She shakes her head, hair falling onto her face that she brushes away with the back of her hand. “Not really.”