by Rob Hart
“Thanks,” I told him. “No one’s ever pointed that out.”
Paul continued walking toward the door. “A tough guy with a heart of gold and a fast mouth. Could you be any more of a cliché...”
I laughed.
Then he laughed.
And like that, we were friends.
Samson pulls the car to the curb on Broome Street and sits silently, the engine running, the only sound the aggressive whoosh of the heater from the front of the car. I think this is my sign to exit, but maybe this is the first step toward building a gentler, more thoughtful life for myself.
See if the two of us can bury the hatchet.
“So, how’ve you been?” I ask.
Silence from the front.
Maybe this was not a good place to start. The only hatchet Samson wants to bury is a real one, in my face. Which bothers me more than it should, probably.
“Can you at least tell me why you dislike me so much? Was it something I said?”
“The fuck do you care?”
“I’ve been gone for a bit. Figured we could take it as a chance to start over.”
He twists in the car to look at me. All I can see is his face in profile. “I do not like you because you’re a dumb motherfucker thinks he’s a smart motherfucker. That’s the worst kind of motherfucker there is.”
“People change.”
He shows me the back of his head. “No they don’t.”
“Fine. I tried. But one day, Samson. I’m gonna crack you.” I stop as I’m climbing out of the car. “I don’t mean crack you like hit you. I mean crack you like one day we’re going to be pals. Just wait and see.”
I think it’s pretty funny, but he doesn’t say anything. I step into the gripping cold and as I’m closing the door Samson says something. I open the door wider. “Come again?”
“Penthouse.”
“Great.” I slam the door shut, a little harder than I need to. Since the windows are tinted I can’t see his reaction but I doubt it’s favorable. Turn to face the building. It’s big and ornate. Beige stone with green accents. I don’t know the name for this style of building, except that it’s the kind of building that doesn’t get built anymore.
There’s a set of double metal doors. A buzzer sounds as I get close. Must be cameras. I step into a small lobby that’s all marble and mirrors. There’s an elevator across the way and, standing to the side, an old Latino couple, leaning into each other, sobbing.
I can’t see much about them, the way they’re pressed into each other. They’re wearing coats and the man has the woman’s face nestled in the crook of his shoulder. He glances at me with sad, tired eyes. The naked display of emotion makes me want to turn around and leave, but the door clicks behind me, which presses me forward. I feel like I’m intruding so I hurry into the elevator and the doors slide shut, cutting off the muffled sounds of their crying. That much is a relief, though the feeling of sadness lingers like a smell.
There are four floors and a P. Before I can press anything, the P lights up and the elevator ascends. It stops and opens into a vast, darkened room. Everything is white—the walls and the floor and the domed ceiling, featuring three large skylights. The apex of the dome has to be thirty feet high, maybe more. The room is broken up by pieces of art and stylish but comfortable-looking furniture—couches and easy chairs and wingbacks grouped in patterns that feel both haphazard and deliberate.
Toward the back of the room there’s a staircase leading to a loft, and underneath is a passageway. I step into the room and the sound of my footsteps echo off the walls. The floor is a stone tile, and the whole place feels like the owner wants to recreate the feel of being in a museum.
“Darling.”
It comes from everywhere and nowhere.
The word she hangs on like a portrait.
Ginny Tonic materializes out of the darkness under the stairs. Her hair is held in a tight bun, and she’s wearing a surprisingly drab outfit—charcoal slacks and jacket, light purple blouse, light purple pumps. Like she just left a business meeting attended by people she didn’t feel the need to impress. As she steps into the light, I can see a whisper of her five-o’clock shadow showing through her foundation.
“Please, have a seat,” she says, sweeping a sharp-nailed hand toward a couch facing two wingbacks.
She doesn’t attempt to shake my hand or lean in for a kiss on the cheek, and I don’t move in to make the attempt either. There’s something about the intimacy of it that would be inappropriate given how we left things.
She sits on the couch and I sit on a chair. Between us there’s an oval coffee table, holding a sea-glass green ashtray and a black leather cigarette case. She picks up the case, clicks a button on the side. The white butt of a smoke pops out and she places it between dark red lips, then presses another button. A flame leaps from the corner and she inhales, the cigarette crackling to life.
She holds the contraption toward me.
“No, thank you,” I tell her.
“If you prefer your own...”
“Not smoking these days.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Can I have my girl get you a drink? Jameson rocks still your poison of choice?”
I thought we were alone. Guess not. “Not drinking much, either.”
The cigarette nearly falls out of her mouth. “You. Ashley McKenna. Not drinking or smoking. Were you in rehab? Or is this an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type scenario?”
“Like I tried to explain to Samson, people change.”
Ginny nods, takes a deep drag, exhales, places the cigarette in the ashtray. Leans back and puts her hands on her knee. We sit there for a moment, occupying our space. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. I don’t think she does either. The anticipation is toxic. Like fumes you’re afraid to breathe in.
There’s a clicking sound from the other side of the room. Heels. A woman appears from the darkness. Redhead, severe makeup, blue-sequined dress. Her Adam’s apple casts a shadow across her pale throat. She reaches the table and places down a rocks glass in front of Ginny, containing fizzing liquid, ice, and a lime.
Ginny clears her throat, not taking her eyes off me.
The queen presses her hands to her mouth and reaches toward a cedar box, pulls out a coaster, and places it under the drink.
“I am so sorry…” she starts, in a husky, put-upon voice.
“It’s okay,” Ginny says, in a tone that makes it clear this is very much not okay.
The queen throws a frightened glance at me, like somehow I might be able to fix this, but I don’t know where to start.
“That’s all, darling,” Ginny says, still not looking at her.
The queen nods like she’s accepted her fate and disappears into the gloom. Ginny takes a sip and places the glass on the table, not on coaster.
Finally she says, “It’s good to see you.”
“Is it really?”
She puts her hand on her chest and her mouth forms an O. Like I’ve insulted her. “Why would you ever think otherwise?”
I laugh. Ribs ache. “You tried to kill me last time I saw you.”
Ginny rolls her eyes. “Still on that, are you? I wasn’t trying to kill you. I was trying to teach you a lesson. One you obviously learned. You are much more at peace than the last time I saw you.” She squints. “Though I can see you’re still up to your old tricks. What happened to your face?”
“Stopped an assassin. Foiled a terrorist plot.”
“Tell me the real story.”
“Just did.”
Ginny taps ash off her cigarette. “At least your sense of humor is intact.”
“What do you want, Ginny? How did you even know I was in town?”
She extends her hand, palm out, and fans her fingers so she can inspect her nails. “I know everything.”
“Stop that.”
She takes out her phone, cradled in a glittery purple-pink case. She regards something on the screen, taps a reply, the subtle movement of
the phone catching the light and making it sparkle.
“Even if you knew I was coming home, how did you know I was at Mamoun’s?” I ask.
“One of the employees there is on my payroll. He texted me soon as you walked in. As it happens I’ve been looking for you.”
“That’s not creepy,” I tell her. “So, I’m here.”
Ginny leans forward, stamps out the cigarette. Picks up the case like she’s going to extract another, thinks better of it, and places it back down. “I regret how we left things.”
“You want something.”
“We’ve been friends a very long time,” Ginny says. “Truth is, I probably owe you my life. I know things got a little out of hand the last time we saw each other. I was in a tough spot. Everything that makes me me was under threat. This machine I had spent years building was on the verge of being smashed. It made me… cruel.”
“Not the word I would use,” I tell her, unable to offer another suggestion.
Truthfully, I wasn’t blameless. The memory of Chell gets caught in my throat. I loved her so much it hurt. She loved me too, just not the same way. After she got killed, after I tore through New York City like a wrecking ball trying to find the person who did it, I ran afoul of Ginny and she handed me my ass.
Ginny is a district leader. There are at least a dozen scattered around the city. The job description is as vague as the title, but it generally means anything that’s fun and illegal, she gets a cut. At least, anything fun happening in her district, which used to be: 14th Street to the north, Delancey to the south, the Bowery to the west, and the FDR to the east. I expect, given the location and opulence of her new digs, her territory has expanded.
Point is, I was making a lot of trouble at a time when she was fighting for her business. I made the mistake of taking a swing at her in a blind rage, and that’s when things went south. The next morning, when I came to, I apologized. Figured I owed her that much.
Because I sort of used to work for Ginny, too.
When I was playing the amateur PI thing, people would hear about me and hire me, but that’s no way to make a living. I supplemented my income by working for Ginny. Mostly carrying things. Sometimes I found stuff and occasionally I hit people—though I always made sure they had it coming.
That was a life I was happy to leave behind.
It’s why I left.
I was running from the giant clusterfuck of a mess I had made.
And it was time to grow up and I needed a little time away to do that.
But mostly, the clusterfuck, at the center of which, dictating the choreography, was Ginny.
I wave my hand around the apartment. “It seems things worked out.”
“Do you like it?” she asks. “It’s a little more befitting of my status. This building used to be an NYPD training facility before it got broken up into apartments. This here was the gymnasium.”
“I’m happy you’re happy.”
“And I you,” she says. “Your travels in the Orient have been fruitful.”
“I wouldn’t call it that. You didn’t invite me over to reminisce.”
She smiles. Gets up. Walks across the room to a table in the corner. Picks something up and carries it back, her heels clicking against the floor, the sound echoing in the cold void of the room. She puts down a folder.
“I need your help,” she says.
I pick up the folder. Inside are some pictures. A young, skinny boy with mocha skin and a mop of dark hair. His eyes are red, a flare from the flash of the camera. Taken at a party by a cheap disposable. He’s sweaty, smiling, wearing a tank top. There’s another photo too, this one a glamour shot. It’s the same boy, wearing a brown wig, dress, heavy makeup.
“Jacqueline Coke,” Ginny says. “Her straight name is Spencer Chavez.”
“One of your girls.”
Ginny nods gravely. “She’s missing.”
“And?”
“I want you to find her.”
I close the folder, toss it on the table. “You have people for stuff like this.”
“You’re good at finding people.”
“I don’t work for you.”
Her face falls a little bit, but rather than respond, she leaves me space to explain.
“I’m trying to walk a straighter path,” I tell her. “I can’t do that if I’m working for you.”
Ginny sighs. “Did you happen to see them in the lobby? The Chavez family?”
The sobbing couple. “Yes.”
“Spencer’s parents. He’s been missing for weeks. They’re bereft. I’ve had one of my people looking for him and he hasn’t been able to shake anything out. Last anyone saw him was on Staten Island. To be honest, I was going to tell them it was a lost cause, but you being home, it strikes me as fortuitous. You know I don’t hand out compliments like lollipops. You are very good at this. And it’s your home turf. If anyone’s going to find her, Ash, it’s you.”
“Staten Island has a heroin scene?”
“Clearly you haven’t kept up with the news,” Ginny says, standing, pacing around the room, raising her voice so it’ll carry. “Heroin is experiencing a renaissance across the city, but on Staten Island it’s reaching epidemic proportions. More than eighty overdoses this year. The police can barely keep up.”
That, I did not know. And frankly it’s surprising to hear. Staten Island is the Smalltown, U.S.A. of New York. Lots of picket fences and modest suburban homes. Little leagues and church functions. But there are bad neighborhoods too, and it’s not like crime and addiction discriminate. Those things tend to latch on any place they can get a fingerhold.
I feel for the family. Really, I do. But it’s Ginny. There’s got to be a catch.
“I don’t think I’m the right person for this,” I tell her.
I think she’s about to turn to face me, but she keeps walking, back to the table. Returns to the coffee table and places down a small leather toiletries case and a thick stack of bills. The bill on top is a hundred. It’s held together by a yellow paper band that reads $10,000. My eyes go so wide they ache.
“Twenty thousand. There’s ten to start, you get the rest at the end. Even if at the end you don’t find her. I trust you to be thorough. If you can’t find her, she can’t be found. You get paid either way.”
“She must be important to you.”
“She’s my friend.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Naloxone. It’s a nasal spray. Stops an overdose dead in its tracks. Figure where you’re going, you might need it.”
Ginny smiles. She sees it. Stubbornness giving way to curiosity.
That’s a lot of money.
First, last, and security for sure.
But the money isn’t the thing that’s got the gears in my head turning.
I can’t shake that image of the Chavezes, standing in the foyer, like they were the only thing in the world holding each other up. Crippled by grief over their missing kid. It makes me think of my dad. I know how and where he died, but we never got his body. Lost when the towers fell. No final resting place. Which means I’ll never have a full sense of closure.
It’s different, but it’s not.
That little piece never feels like it’s not missing.
My conscience is telling me this is a compromise—that for all my bluster about walking a straighter path, I’m full of shit because I’m back to old habits.
But it’s for a good cause.
It makes me wonder if Ginny timed the Chavezes exit with my entrance.
Probably.
Not that it matters.
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll do it.”
She claps her hands and smiles. “Marvelous.”
The dim shoreline of Staten Island squats in the bay before us. The rest of the city radiates light and energy the way the island doesn’t, like an empty patch in a star-filled sky. I can barely make out the curve of the eastern shore, the lights on the boardwalk at South Beach lit up despite the weath
er.
To the right, the waterfront neighborhoods of Rosebank, Stapleton, Tompkinsville, St. George. Closer to Brooklyn in feel and density. As you travel south on the island, it fades to a New Jersey aesthetic—strip malls and cookie-cutter houses—until you get to the southern tip, which feels like 1950s Middle America.
It’s too cold for the air to hold any humidity so the view is crisp. A ferry pulls out of the terminal in the distance, bringing people into Manhattan for the evening.
New York City is home but Staten Island is home home. Where I was born.
I once read that if you took a pie graph that broke up the country by ethnicity, and laid it over the same graph for Staten Island, the numbers would be nearly identical. America in microcosm. With all the bullshit that brings.
A place I’m not always excited to visit.
The car drifts through the toll plaza to a cash lane, where the driver—not Samson, mercifully—forks over the $15 tab. It almost makes me feel bad, but not bad enough to dig into the stack Ginny gave me. I figure the toll is included in the trip.
When I got in the car I told the driver the address and he didn’t ask questions, or plug it into his phone, or acknowledge me. I figure he knows where he’s going.
We pull onto Bay Street. The island doesn’t look much different than I remember it, though I haven’t been here in long enough that I’d be able to point out things that have changed. Nothing looks new. Not the way it does in Brooklyn, in the gentrified neighborhoods, Williamsburg and Bushwick, where a block might be blown to shit but then suddenly there’s a fancy bistro with modern design sensibility, stuck in between a run-down bodega and an abandoned building.
The infection of gentrification hasn’t reached this far.
But then the driver cuts down Front Street. A good shortcut, saving you five minutes or so because there are no traffic lights.
Except, now there are lights. Three of them, plus a mammoth apartment complex on the water, where the old Navy base used to be. The building is modern and boring with wood accents and a big courtyard in the middle. Bright orange loungers. I guess the infection has metastasized. Staten Island may be the least-cool borough, but as the rest of the city fills up to bursting, it was only a matter of time.
