Jack Wakes Up (26 page)

“Fuck, Jack. Fuck. You. Jack,” she’s saying.

“Maxine,” he says. Their faces are close but there’s no intimacy now that she’s trying to break away from him and has just held him at gunpoint. “Did you just want the money?”

She doesn’t say anything; her lips are pale with how tight she’s holding them closed; her face is furious.

“Max,” he says. “Why couldn’t we just relax together when this was over?”

“Because fuck you, Jack. You think I just like dragging guys I don’t know home and taking care of them? You think that’s my idea of fun?”

Jack wants to let her go, but she’s still fighting. It seems so crazy that they’re on the floor of her kitchen, their bodies pressed against one another, his legs around hers and both of their arms over their heads, and yet she’s trying to kill him. “I actually liked you,” he says, feeling like an idiot.

“Yeah, well that was dumb, wasn’t it, Jack?”

He kisses her on the cheek. “You’re the one who was dumb, Max. What’s Tony giving you?”

“Fuck! Why don’t you just let me go and leave?”

“OK,” Jack says. He holds her arms with one hand so that he can take the gun off the floor, and then he pushes her back and sits up, pointing the gun at her. “Don’t get up just yet,” he says.

“Let’s us talk for a minute.”

She pulls her shirt down around her thighs and sits up, legs crossed, with her hands in her lap. Jack moves back slowly, reaching behind him. He finds the chair and sets it right, sits down.

“Now,” he says.

“What do you want Jack?” Her eyes are cool, without any of the emotion he thought he’d seen in them in the past few days.

“I guess I just want to know why.”

“You really going to shoot me?”

Jack looks at the gun. She’s been staring at it, and now he has a look at it himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “Would you have shot me?”

She turns her head to look away, then down at her hands. She shakes her head. “Tony wanted me to follow you and see what went down.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. He found out about The Mirage from Castroneves. So why’d he need you too?”

She looks up, and Jack can see tears in her eyes. “He just wanted me to stay with you in case anything happened. He didn’t know that you guys’d be dumb enough to meet in his club. ” She laughs, looks down at her hands, plays with the silver ring on one of her fingers. “I told him no for as long as I could. I swear it, Jack.”

He puts the gun down on the table. “Didn’t you feel anything this whole time?”

“I don’t know.” She nods. “Yes.” She stands up and looks at the gun, but Jack’s got his hand over it. There’s a moment where he can see her considering another run at him, but then it passes.

“Good decision,” he says.

She moves back to the stove. “You want some tea?”

“Why don’t you just sit down with me at the table.” He points to the chair across from him: a good distance from the kettle, any knives, any heavy objects. She moves across the kitchen and sits down.

“So,” he says. “What was in that for you?”

She sits down, fixes her shirt around her shoulders and tightens it to her body. She shrugs. “I did this for Tony,” she says. “He asked me to and so I did it.”

Jack feels like he just realized half-way through his marriage that he’s been spending his time with someone he doesn’t really know. It’s not unlike what happened with Victoria. It took him a lot longer to see what was really happening there, but this isn’t so different. It really all just 222

comes back to trust: Jack trusting the wrong person—the wrong woman—yet again. He tries not to wince.

Maxine laughs once, covers her face. “Oh, Jack,” she says.

“Tony Vitelli. You did all this for him?”

She nods. “He’s the boss.”

“What’s he giving you?”

“Money, dumbass. Bartending I’m making like a hundred a night, if I hustle; then you walk in, Tony offers me five grand to watch you and keep him up to date on the Czechs. That seem like a hard decision?”

Jack looks down at the gun on the table, frowns. “It’s a hard decision if you don’t consider yourself a prostitute.”

She hits the table hard, with both hands. “You motherfucker!” Maxine starts to stand, but Jack takes the handle of the gun, grips it properly again. He holds it on her until she sits back down.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

“I’ll leave.” Jack stays where he’s sitting, looks around the small kitchen. He’s not sure of what to say next yet, can’t believe that she’s actually rolled him over. “For fucking Tony?” he says. “That sleaze ball?”

She shakes her head. “Green money, Jack.”

“You fucking him, too?”

Then, before he can lift the gun, she’s standing; she swings and connects with his face as he lifts the gun. He takes the hard slap and nods. “OK,” he says, though it hurts. “I guess I deserved that.” He touches his cheek. “If you are I don’t want to know, I guess. Matter of fact, I don’t care.”

“Think whatever you want, Jack. You’re an asshole.” She sits back down.

“Tell me why Tony’s so hot after the Czechs.”

She shrugs. “He’s got something going with a guy who knows them. That’s what I think.

Some guy from over there.” She waves her hand toward the living room, beyond. “This guy is a whole new line for white products: pills and powder. He’s Tony’s new guy. Now he has a problem with your friends. Turns out he wants to know where they are, what they do, what they’re involved with. It becomes Tony’s concern.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He’s bald. Ugly bald. Bad beard. That’s all I know.”

Jack shakes his head, still unable to believe that she’s been working for Tony the whole time.

“Didn’t you know I’d get the money, that it’d be worth more to you to be with me?”

She laughs. “Yeah. I see all that money rolling in from the DVD sales of ‘Shake Me Down’

just falling off of you. No offense, Jack. Your house is nice, but if you plan on entertaining, you should lose some of the ‘third notice—unpaid’ envelopes off your dining room table.”

Jack nods, stands up from the table. “That’s cool, Max. I see how it is. You couldn’t wait. I have the bag of money outside, actually, and all you want is to relieve me of the whole amount.

Right? Take it at gunpoint?” He walks close to her, holding the gun down by his side. “That’s good, Maxine. Nice way to be.” He reaches to touch her face and she slaps his hand away.

“OK,” he says, walking out of the kitchen. “Then thanks for the bandage job. You did a good job of patching me up.”

He lets the door close softly behind him, doesn’t give her the pleasure of hearing it slam.

In the car he goes straight for his pack, doesn’t even bother to try and hold back from smoking. He’s got about ten cigarettes left, half the pack, and if he goes through that tonight, it’s fine with him.

Then he’s driving and for a while he’s not even sure where he’s headed. It occurs to him that he’s got to go to The Coast, but he needs Niki with him, at least, so he heads for the hotel.

Jack can’t quite wrap his mind around what happened with Maxine: that she was playing him the whole time. There was that part of him that never trusted her, and then she made that part seem so wrong. So much for the idea that he has to trust somebody, or maybe he just has to be more careful about who that person is. Jack knows he’s done it wrong now twice at least with women, fucked up and let them take him down, mess him up. He can only be glad this didn’t cost him as much as his time with Victoria. Maybe he should just give up on trust for a while.

Maxine did him successfully, made him play her game, but he still doesn’t understand why. It’s just another question for Tony Vitelli.

He just wants a drink more than anything else now, thinks of himself at a bar with the smokes and a scotch in his hand. Then he lets himself think about going up to the Czechs and joining them in the powder, and it’s the first time that he’s thought like that in a long while. He shakes his head and puts out his cigarette, curses into the empty car. He knows she hurt him bad if his mind goes that far, if he’s that far out of where he’d worked himself back to being. But the 225

temptation’s been there for the past few days, the whole time this thing’s been going on. What he needs now is to just finish it up, go back to Sausalito, get back into his routine, or maybe even leave town for a while, head up to Seattle or the San Juan Islands, even Vancouver. He can get away and let it all blow over, which it hopefully will, and then worry about getting healthy again.

But what he needs now is to get through this; he takes a new cigarette out of the pack and lights it up.

At the Regis, he leaves the car outside and goes right to the bank of elevators for the penthouse. When the operator sees Jack, he recognizes him and takes him right up. In the car he looks himself over again, checks his reflection in the doors and actually decides that he looks better now that he’s had it out with Maxine and he’s determined to get this thing over with.

There’s a new look of determination on his face that’s stronger than coffee, overcomes even the exhaustion he’d seen before.

“You guys are having some night, it looks like,” the operator says to Jack.

Jack looks at him, a kid not more than twenty, working his way through the night at a fancy hotel. He nods. “It’s all good times with us.”

“You were in a movie, right?”

Jack shakes his head. “You must be thinking of somebody else.”

The doors open, and Jack sees David and Al sitting on the couches, watching TV. Al’s got his hand in a bucket of ice. “You’re back,” David says. He doesn’t get up, just raises his glass: another scotch.

“Boys,” Jack says. “I need a drink.” They point him to the bar, and Jack walks over. Al gets up off the couch and comes with him carrying the bucket of ice. He starts to question Jack about what’s happening next. Jack has his hand on the decanter of scotch, whatever they’re drinking, and he’s going to tell Al to sit back down when he hears Vlade.

“Jack’s back!” Vlade comes out of one of the rooms, holding a small travel bag. “What is up, Jack?”

Jack laughs. “You want the good news, or the bad?”

“Good news, of course.” Vlade comes around the outside of the room and over to the bar. He claps Al on the back and takes a lowball glass off the shelf, pours it half-full from the decanter that’s still in Jack’s hand.

“Where’s Niki?”

“Niki is sleeping. But we will get him up.”

“You call my name?” Niki stands on the far side of the room in a pair of pajama bottoms. His chest bare, Jack can see he’s wider in the shoulders than he expected, and big through the chest.

Vlade takes the bottle out of Jack’s hand, pours another lowball and adds a few chunks of ice from the refrigerator. He puts the glass into Jack’s hand, where the bottle had been. “The good news, Jack.”

“Shit,” Jack says. Even now, this close, he thinks of what he’s seen drinking do to Victoria, what he remembers it did to his father, and he puts down the scotch. “I need a coffee.”

Vlade laughs and claps Jack on the shoulder. He gives him a light slap on the face, just enough to touch and not hurt—it gets the point across.

“OK. The good news is that Junius is getting sprung from prison as we speak. How’s that for good?”

Vlade raises his lower lip and tilts his head at the same time, as if he’s considering this and isn’t entirely sold on its merit. He takes a drink, shakes his head. “And the bad news?” he says.

“Maxine sold me out. She was working for Tony this whole time.”

“Oh!” they all make the sound at once, a communal groan.

“Ouch,” Vlade says. “Shit, Jack.”

This even gets David to turn around on the couch and look at Jack with a long face. Al just shakes his head. He puts down the bucket of ice and pours himself another scotch.

Niki comes into the room. “What is next?” he asks.

“The Coast, baby. It’s definitely time to take Tony Vitelli down.”

“Shake him down!” Al says.

Vlade puts his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You sure you are up to that tonight?”

Jack shakes his head. “Fuck. This is the time and I see plenty of reasons. I came to recruit guns and drink scotch. And I’m not drinking scotch, so who’s coming?”

Niki raises his hand, disappears back into his room to get changed. Vlade says, “Your friend on the police. Why can’t you just tell him to arrest Tony? Why do you have to go there?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “He wants names and faces, who’s doing what in this town. It’s not just about Tony, it’s about finding his supply, finding out what he has going with Maxine. It might be about finding his connection to the K.G.B. I want to find out for myself what happened to Ralph, who sent the guys that shot up my car, who killed Ralph’s dog. I want no guesses, so I can rest when this is all over. I’m not going home until I find out for sure.”

“What guesses?”

Jack takes a step back and counts them out on his fingers. “Maxine working for Tony? That’s not a guess. She told me she was. Junius getting put in the lock-up as part of Tony’s design to help get him off the streets, I still don’t know for sure, but Tony didn’t go in. That’s one. Tony killing Ralph and sending the Russians who shot Michal, that I still don’t know. That’s two big ones. Why would someone kill Ralph?” He looks at his hand, and then puts it on Vlade’s shoulder. “This guy with the beard being Tony’s new supply? I’m getting close on that one but I want to know it for sure. I still don’t know what’re my guesses and what I’ve actually figured out. That’s what’s killing me.”

“Why not go home, Jack? Wait it out and let the police sort through this?” Vlade puts his opposite arm on Jack’s shoulder so now they’re in a kind of odd yin-yang embrace. “Take the money and relax, as they say.”

Now Jack gives Vlade a light slap on the face and he takes his hand off Vlade’s shoulder. He steps away. “I can’t do that, V. The money will be there. I can go home to rest tomorrow.” Part of Jack wonders if maybe Vlade’s right, but the greater part of him knows he won’t sleep for weeks thinking of the Russians or Freeman knocking at his windows, wants to ride this thing out so he can personally put all the pieces in place. “Tonight I got to get to the bottom of this. Tomorrow I go home and know that the people who killed Ralph and put Maxine up to this are taken care of, that they’re not going to come looking to find me. That,” he says. “That, Vlade, is for me.”