Headstone City Part 9

An intensifying ache expanded within him, trying to free itself with such influence that Dane had to hug his guts in while he shrugged back a grunt of despair. Abruptly, Angelina was sitting beside him.

"You should visit me," she said. "It'll make you feel better. You don't have anything better to do most days anyway."

Chewing his tongue and tasting blood, he tried to say her name but couldn't do it. There were a great many words of power in life-common ones, familiar ones somehow too hard for him to speak. He wondered how you did it, died with style, drinking coffee and a sucking wound in your chest.

"You need to go, Angie," he said, urging her on, trying to shove her through the veil. "You're not doing either of us any good. I don't want you here anymore."

"Of course you do."

"No, really."

"What do you think, I'm gonna play the harp, Johnny? You think that's what it's like over here? You want me to tell you how it is?"

"No."

"I didn't think so."

Angelina enjoyed taunting him the way the last person to leave a party cherishes the power of staying too long. She slid up against him, put her head on his shoulder, her hair covering him the way he dreamed of Maria's hair draping over him, even though he couldn't feel it. They sat there watching Glory Bishop distract the terrorists with her t.i.ts, the government a.s.sa.s.sin in the back of the room s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around with his high-tech laser scopes and s.h.i.t.

"It's okay," she told him. "I can make it all right, if you'd only let me help. We're gonna get through this."

"I'm not so sure most of the time," Dane said, quietly, hoping his grandmother didn't have her ear against the wall.

His regrets seemed to have sinuous limbs that reached into places where the living couldn't fit. The girl here, always around him. "They're going to come for you soon."

"Your brothers and the Monti crew?"

"Berto thinks you've been out long enough now. They've been spreading the word around the neighborhood. People are waiting to see what happens."

"I still don't know why they haven't made their move yet."

"They're weak," Angie said with a cute giggle. "And JoJo single-handedly killing three hitters who ambushed him has sort of set them back. They're scared of you. They think you might've learned all kinds of a.s.sa.s.sin stuff in the army."

"They watch too many movies," he said, with the government a.s.sa.s.sin movie playing out on the television, Glory working her way to her one big action hero line. "What's he got planned for my spectacular exit?"

"I don't know."

"Vinny isn't saying?"

"Vinny doesn't say anything."

That didn't sound right. "What do you mean?" Dane asked, but Angie just stared affectionately at him, like she was watching a dog trying to perform a difficult trick.

Berto didn't have much of an imagination, so he'd leave it to Joey Fresco or Big Tommy Bartone. Those guys knew how to whack somebody and make the rest of the town grimace.

"Your mother," Angie said. "She wants me to tell you something."

Stopping there, staring at him with sad but loving eyes, waiting to see how it affected him. How important it might be to speak to his mom again.

What the h.e.l.l did it say about you when the dead looked at you like they wanted to cry?

He knew some guys who walked out the door at sixteen and never looked back. Others, in the joint, who'd whacked their parents for insurance or in a lunatic rage. One huge n.a.z.i Lowrider by the name of Buford, telling his story in the cafeteria one afternoon. Explaining how he'd never gotten over the fact that his mother had thrown all his comic books away. He's thirty-five and firing machine guns with all the other white supremacists up in Michigan. They have a bonfire afterward, where they bring their children out and everybody dances around to kill-the-Jew songs with German lyrics. One of the kids is about eight, wearing a swastika on his sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the Batman symbol on it.

Buford left the rally, drove back down to Indiana, walked into his mom's place, and put nine rounds into her face.

There were insignificant microtraumas that could eventually turn your conscience to dust.

Dane still couldn't get beyond his mother's death and never would, he realized. There was an unmined anguish there that he needed for some reason. Maybe it made him more human when he needed to be that, and more inhuman when he had to become something else.

"What does she want?" Dane whispered. "Why doesn't she visit?"

"She can't. Because you need her too much."

He watched Angie, wondering if he really could keep her sane in h.e.l.l, or if she'd gone over the edge. Or if it was just him. "Of course I need her."

"Too much. If she came back, it would ruin you. Who you are and what you've got left to do. You're always this close to death."

"Hey, Angie, you think you're telling me something new?"

He could see his ma, languishing day by day, for years. Withering in darkness, tormented by her own body. It made him want to drive a fist inside her and squeeze out whatever was doing this to her. His mother, torn in half, peeling away from the inside out. Dad unable to bear witness, working longer and longer hours.

You can give yourself blood poison by tearing open your scabs. You dig into a scar long enough, it'll crawl forward on its own, cover you up until your mouth, nose, and even your eyes are sealed.

"You should go," he told the dead girl he'd sort of killed.

"She wants you to know-"

"I don't want to hear."

"But you do, Johnny, you really do."

He glared at her, a girl who'd spoken her last words to him, and kept right on speaking them.

"I don't give a s.h.i.t, Angie. That's enough."

Glory blowing the guy off the bridge with the rocket. "I'm gonna rock your world, baby!"

"You ever gonna go back to Bed-Stuy and settle the score for me?" Angelina asked.

"Yeah."

"When? When are you gonna do it, Johnny? Please tell me. Tell me!"

The current of the past took him again and rolled him along. Drawing him one way and then hurling him another. It brought him back to the last time he'd seen her alive. A red awning over the door. Flower boxes filled with petunias. The cop with his hand up.

ELEVEN.

He hadn't been a very good cab driver either, because he didn't gun it up and down the streets driving like a maniac, rushing all day long trying to make a buck. You'd think it would've played into his strengths, his instincts, being a driver and always digging the speed, but it just didn't work like that.

Fatigued most of the time for no reason but his own inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. It was either a Newtonian law or somebody in a mortuary talking about the plastic-faced cadavers laid out on gurneys.

The Olympic Cab & Limousine Company would've fired him after the first week, except the guy in charge at the time knew Dane had a tenuous connection to the Monticelli clan and didn't want to kick him free. Not until he had a clearer idea of how much trouble he could expect from it later on.

If a fare brought Dane back over the bridge to Brooklyn, he'd take his time returning to Manhattan. He'd cruise around Headstone City for a while, take a long lunch break, and wander the neighborhood. Head over to the Grand Outlook Hall, walk the galleries, and consider his options.

There weren't many left. He thought he might join the force. Or maybe take up Vinny's offer to become a Monti lieutenant. It was mostly for show anyway, he wouldn't even need to wear a piece if he didn't want to. Just carry Vinny's coat for him, hold the doors open.

Neither choice appealed to him much, but then nothing really did.

His own apathy weighed on him like a sack tied to his back. He could sometimes see the shadow of the bitter old man he was going to be someday. The old p.r.i.c.k wishing he could go back and kick his younger self in the a.s.s. Get him moving in the right direction and avert more tragedy.

Dane had just gotten back into his cab and started to pull away from the Hall when Angelina Monticelli threw open the door and got in back.

"You need one of those pine-fresh deodorizers in here," she told him. "Doesn't this atrocious smell give you a headache?"

"I kind of like it."

"That's because it gets you high. So little oxygen getting to your brain. Death by sinus attack."

Fifteen years old and seething with hip att.i.tude. She hardly ever smiled but there was always a glint of superiority in her gray eyes. He knew she could verbally outmaneuver him with ease. It scared him a touch but also made him admire her.

She'd dressed down today, wearing an oversized black sweater and midnight-blue jeans, no makeup, her dark hair falling straight back over her ears, showing the slightest curl of bangs up front.

He heaved a sigh out like throwing a rock. "Angie, what're you doing?"

"What do you think I'm doing? I need a cab. You're a cab driver. You know simple economics, yes? The law of supply and demand?"

"Shouldn't you be in school?"

"Just drive."

"I'm on break."

"You're always on break, Johnny, you sit around here for hours. How do you make a buck?"

"I don't need much," he admitted.

"That means you're gonna live with your grandmother forever? Don't you know what they say about you, a grown man living with his grandma? Even if she does make the best ziti. She brought some to the St. Mary's book sale last month. Bishop Dilorenzo couldn't tear himself away, the cheese hanging off his face. He was a pig, it was disgusting to see, but kinda fun too. Why don't you get married?"

It was the kind of conversation he was easily led into and had to consciously avoid. "Don't you have school?" he repeated. "How do you learn things like the law of supply and demand if you don't go to cla.s.s?"

"It's almost four. Don't you own a watch?"

"Yeah. It's at home in a box with my tie clips and cuff links. Where are you headed?"

"I'll tell you when we get there, soldier boy."

"I need to call it in to the dispatcher."

"This one is off the books. Come on, what do you care? I can see how much you fret about following the rules and bringing in as much money to Olympic as you can. Besides, you don't need to worry, it's not like they'll fire you." Saying it with an edge, like she had something to do with the boss not firing him, by way of her being part of the family. He checked the rearview and she fluttered her eyes at him.

One of those girls that, when she's little, she's cute, bright, and funny, and makes you wish she's your own younger sister. But then, when she hit thirteen or so, you grew acutely aware of her s.e.x appeal. The angle of the jaw, the shape of those legs, and suddenly your whole cerebral cortex got rewired.

You found yourself vying for her time, grinning a lot, then smacking yourself in the forehead going, What the f.u.c.k are you thinking?

"Come on," she said. "It's important and I'm running late. Cut through the plaza, make a left."

"You don't want to give me the address?"

"I don't know it, but I've been there before." Taking out a compact and checking herself in it, making kissy faces until she was sure her lipstick was okay.

He'd known her all her life but just started seeing her in that new light two years ago. As her transformation into adulthood continued he knew he had to watch himself, stop sweating so much around her. It wasn't totally his fault. It was chemical. She was becoming what he desired, just as her sister Maria had before her.

The shape of her nose, the pouty lips, and the brash knowledge in her gaze that made him want to ask her, Hey, what are you thinking? Angie had the right curves, and they were getting better every month.

Ignoring him just enough to get him irritated. He supposed that made it worse because he liked to be cut down. His own streak of masochism going pretty deep. The army psychiatrist used to ask him if Mom or Dad used to smack him around as a kid. If his mother would hit him upside the head and then yank him to her bosom. If she used to take bubble baths while he was sitting on the toilet. All kinds of s.h.i.t, that shrink had a G.o.dd.a.m.n dirty mind. No matter how many times Dane told him no, the doc would just nod and ask the question again in a different way.

Knowing his flaws didn't help him most of the time. The indifference could lead him to do stupid things.

He wanted to ask Angie about her sister, see how Maria was doing. If she was still going out to the clubs every weekend, if she had anybody serious in her life.

Angelina reached forward and touched the back of his neck, fingering his scars. "These the ones you got when you and my brother went through the windshield?"

"Yeah."

"Jesus Christ, there's metal!" She knocked twice on the plate. "I didn't know you could actually feel it, with it sticking right out like that. Man, that's freaky! I thought safety gla.s.s was supposed to keep people from getting cut this bad."

"It wasn't so much that as rolling thirty feet down the street."

It made her smile for a second, seeing the humor of two guys bouncing down the road after doing something as foolish as trying to ram a roadblock. But then the image must've cleared up for her, seeing the blood and their bodies skittering into the gutter, and she looked away.

"How'd it happen?" she asked. "I mean, I know some of it, but I never heard the whole thing."

"Why would you want to hear about any of that? It happened while you were still in the crib."

"I'm curious."

Dane told her almost everything, leaving out the part about the girls in the sand, but without really knowing why. Like she'd think less of him because of that? And did he really care?

Sometimes it seemed like nothing mattered at all, then a minute later it was like everything did. Every moment of your past, every inch of your body.