The Mentor (8 page)

I took a
sip.  "Nah, it's fine."

Pavan
exhaled a huge breath.  "Okay.  Just forget I said that."

Couldn't
help it, I just laughed.

"Oh
fuck-oh-fuck, I'm a dick.  Sorry, dude, seriously, I didn't mean, you know
that you
would
because, or, anything just--"

"It's
okay.  Funniest damn thing I've heard in weeks."

One of the
women I’d seen earlier by the fountain laughed, too, engrossed in her own
conversation.  When she did, she tossed her head back like some movie star in a
shampoo commercial.  

Yep.
 This was a group effort thing.  

Me, I’ve
never had group sex.  I’m lucky for those rare times Laura has a lapse of
judgment and spends the night.  My version of a three-way, unfortunately,
is when I’m by myself but I get tired and switch hands.

“We just
can’t sit out here and drink warm beer all night staring at your apartment, man.”

“Fine,
fine.  I just wanna make sure he’s not up there waiting.”

“What do
you think he’s got against you?”

I said, “I
dunno.  Don’t have the first clue.”  I stood and stretched my legs,
took the first tentative steps toward my apartment.  
Lester
’s was
pretty quiet, a weeknight, so my plan was to put an ear up to my door at the
top of the steps and listen for a while.  Just to be sure.

Pavan
trailed right behind me as we crossed the street to the door that led to my
stairs.  I yanked on the dirty brass knob and we were inside.

No thumping
through the walls this time but, to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded it
because at least it would have drowned out the sound of my own heartbeat.
 I could feel it too, up in my throat, and I tried hard to swallow it back
down.

The
afternoon had been hot and that always cooks up a fetid beer smell in the
stairwell.  My gut was already doing flip-flops trying to digest my own
fear.  The warm, gut-rot of week-old Old Milwaukee wasn’t helping.

The top
three steps always creek, so I took a big step over them and sided up to my
door.  I wondered for a second if they’d made noise the previous night but
with the bar downstairs hopping as it was, I never heard a thing.  

Pavan
stopped a couple stairs down, and I glared at him.

I
whispered, “Man, I thought you were in on this with me.”

“Yeah,” he
whispered back.  “But I got little legs, man.  I can’t do that
Plasticman stretch you just did over your squeaky stairs.”

He had a
point.  I thought for a second and decided this might actually work out
for the best.

“Okay, I’ll
point at you, and you start running for the door, then I’ll fling it open,” I
whispered, mouthing each word slowly.  “Be in a half step behind you.”

Pavan’s
hair wagged, his face less convinced than his coif.  I turned back to the
door and put my hand on the knob.  Raising my arm, I held up three
fingers, and then counted down.

When I got
to one, I gave him the point and twisted the knob.  It twisted easily and
I gave it a push, but it didn’t open.

“Abort!”

Pavan’s
hair flopped at the door as he stopped one step back, his hands clawing at the
walls, desperately trying not to go ass over teakettle down my rickety stairs.

“What the
fuck, man?” he hoarse whispered at me.  

“Locked.”

Once we got
the door open, I flipped on the light next to the entryway and the kitchen
glowed dingy yellow.  

The corners
of my apartment were dark as black holes as the two of us stood at the
threshold, surveying the lay of the land.  With my left hand I reached out
and grabbed two empty beer cans from the top of my stove and felt only slightly
more confident now I was armed.

I took the
first step forward and Pavan was elbow to shoulder with me.  From the door to
the living area, where my couch is, there’s a short wall there and it makes for
a truncated hallway.  We both headed toward the couch, keeping an eye on the
swirls in the shadows.

No one was
sitting on the orange crates this time.  I looked at the couch and saw no
one there, too.

“Okay.” I
let out the breath I’d been holding and lowered my beer cans.

"What
the hell are you doing?”

Like
Drunken
Master
Bruce Lee, I spun down to one knee, launching my beer cans in the
direction of the voice as if they were throwing stars.  Both of them
sailed harmlessly over Laura’s shoulder, and she just stared.

“Dexter?
 What’re doing?”

“Nothing,
sweetie,” I said and faked a smile.  “I didn’t know you’d be over
tonight.”

Dressed in
her nightshirt with the stain that suddenly reminded me of the structure of
some metal carbonyl cluster I'd had to memorize for a midterm years ago, she
crossed her arms over her chest and plopped on the couch.  

Pavan was
looking a little
too
hard at her.  I’d never known the guy to have
a girlfriend.  I got the feeling he was recording the image for later use and
that earned him a flick on the ear.

“Ow,
asshole,” he said but didn’t look at me.

Then, for a
brief moment, something struck me.  The stain on Laura’s shirt, I’d seen a
dozen times but
this
time it reminded me of something I’d studied in
college.

Those
years, those
memories
, I’d lost them after the accident. 

I was told
it was "retrograde amnesia."  And I'd said at the time
that
sounded like something Meredith Baxter-Birney would have on any number of
various Lifetime network made-for-TV movies.

After the
crash, my head was bashed up pretty good.  Those memories, I was told, were
probably lost for good.  Yet, here was an image bubbling up from the void.
 Strange.

I sat on
the orange crates, looked down at Laura.  This is how the guy had been
looking at me.  She glared back at me, eyes burning a hole in my head.

“You going
to tell me why you’re sneaking in your own apartment?”

“I had an
intruder the other night,” I said, leaning to the right and peeking out the
living room window.  “Just making sure—“

“Hell, you
could have told
me
.”

“I didn’t
want to worry you, babe,” I said.

“Yeah, but
you let me walk right into your place after somebody breaks in?  What if
he came back?”

“Oh,” I
said, crossing my arms.  “I’m sure he’s long gone.”

“Yeah?  So,
why did you two piss yourselves when I came in the room?"

Pavan went
to the fridge and nabbed a cold Bud.  He held one up, and I shook him off.
 I wanted one but I was going to see if he started getting groggy in the
next couple minutes before I indulged.

Sue me. 

Hell, he'd
probably
enjoy
the light show.

As Laura
looked around the room, her short bleached hair looked like a meringue pie on a
spinner at a bakery.  “Who would break in here?  You don’t have
anything to steal.”

“Maybe he
didn’t know that.”

“I still
wish you would have said something.”

“You
worried about me?  I can handle myself.”  

Pavan
looked okay, so I got up and crossed into the kitchen.  I grabbed a beer from
the back of the fridge, on the right.

“No, I
wouldn’t have been so casual about opening the door for your landlord to dig
around under the sink if I'd known somebody had broken in here.”

My kitchen sink
leaks and always has.  The landlord is too cheap to get a plumber so he
knocks ten bucks off my rent if I don’t use the kitchen sink.  I have a
tube sock on the faucet held fast with a rubber band so I don’t forget.

“Why was he
here?  You didn’t turn the sink on, did you?”  I said and looked in
the basin.  

There’s a
breach in one of the pipes, and the water drips behind the wall between my
place and the bar.  The water attracts roaches, some of which eventually die.
 That attracts rats, which eat the dead roaches and then stray cats that
go after the rats.  

The
landlord hates cats.

“What’d
Angelo say?  Was he pissed?”

“No, the other
guy.  He seemed okay about it,” she said, sitting up, and then settling
her rump onto her feet, arms draped over the back of the couch.  From
where I was, I could peek straight down her nightshirt, and it was the nicest
thing that had happened to me all day.  Women have no idea the true power
they have over us men.

After
flicking Pavan’s ear (
“Ow, asshole”
), I started to walk toward the
couch, tired.  Then it finally registered.

“What other
guy?”

Yeah, I
know.  Friggin’ Kojak, that’s me.

She lifted
her shoulders.  “Nice guy, must have apologized a hundred times for
barging in.”  Spreading her arms and stretching like a cat, she scooted to
the edge of the couch and said, “Still, I had my mace in my hand, in my pocket.
 Can’t be too trusting.”

I looked at
Pavan, and he quickly covered his ear.  Then, I raised my eyebrows and
looked toward the orange crates.  He looked at the orange crates and then he
raised his eyebrows.  He had no idea what I was trying to tell him.

“This new
guy, how’d you know it was the landlord?”

“How'd I
know?  You mean other than he had a key for your apartment, a tool belt around
his waist and wanted to fix the sink?  He told me.”

“Oh yeah,
that guy.”  I nodded.  “Looks like a black ninja, right?”

Laura
laughed, hopped up from the couch and shuffled toward my bedroom.  “I
don’t know about the ninja part,” she said and stopped at the door, leaning on
the thick paint of the molding.  Whoa, I loved her calves.  When she
shaved her legs, I really loved her calves.  When she didn't, I still did.

She added: “He
had really great teeth.”

Yeah, I
knew those teeth.

Pavan
looked at me and shook his head slowly.  “You coming?”

“Where?”

“
Not
here,” he said, padding toward the door.  “You said you didn’t want to
stay here tonight.”  I turned and watched Laura walk into the bedroom, her
body slipping into the velvet darkness.  He said in the hoarse whisper:
 “Man, that guy was here
again
, right?”

“Yeah, I
gotta check under the sink.  Wonder what he was doing under there?
 Maybe he put some sort of…” I said and popped open the cabinet.  A
moment later, the room was suddenly split with the sound of buzzing and I
lifted my head out from under the sink. “Yep, looks fine under there.”

“How can
you see?  You need a flashlight,” he said and started rummaging through my
junk drawers.

“Nah, I’m
cool,” I said, my eyes flashing toward the bedroom.  “You head home.  I’ll
call you in the morning.”

“Dude, he
might have put something—“

“Listen
Pavan,” I said pushing him toward the door. “If I don’t get in there within the
minute, she’ll be done before I can get undressed.”  Opening the door to
my apartment, I pushed him out.  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”  He craned
his neck, trying to look around me as I closed the door and locked it.

I caught
sight of the sink and stopped.  What had he been up to down there? 

Then, I
heard the first loud sigh from my bedroom and realized it could wait.

THE NEXT
MORNING, I tried to roll over but my body was sore and that thought made me
smile a little.  

I craned my
neck up and looked out the window, upside down— it was barely dawn.  The
sky was slashed along its edge, and a hazy orange glow bled through the wound.
 

Next to me
in the dark, Laura lay motionless, deep in sleep.  I closed my eyes again and
tried to join her.

“What a
waste of the day.”

My eyes
popped back open.  

Had I
fallen asleep so fast?  Dreaming? 

Sure, possible.

“I mean,
Dex, you’re already awake.  You should go for a run, maybe.”

But not
likely.

Lifting my
head, I saw the black man sitting on my dresser across the room.  The light was
very dim, but I could see that his feet hovered a few inches above the floor.

“You could
stand to lose about twenty-five, thirty pounds.”

Looking
over at Laura, I was surprised when she hadn't woken up.  Maybe it was
just a dream?  

I squinted,
trying to draw his features out of the darkness.

“Don’t
worry about your girl there, Dex,” he said and slid off of the dresser to the
hardwood floor.  He made no sound.

The way he
walked, like a predator or a big jungle cat, was smooth and precise.  That
slow, aggressive motion instantly put me in a full-boil panic.