Wtf

by Peter Lerangis

  “I never heard that expression before,” the old man said with a laugh, as he put on his silk baseball jacket and wrapped a scarf carefully around his neck. “Like the jacket? I’m thinking of ordering for the entire staff. You’d pay, but I’ll keep it close to cost.”

  “You’re cheap, too. I like that in a man.” Gino linked arms with Ted and threw a wink toward Reina. “See you after midnight? I’ll be there just as soon as I escort Ted to his Senior Singles meeting.”

  “Eat me,” Ted said.

  Reina shrugged. “I’ll think about it. I may use the time to study for my SATs. Who knows how involved I’ll get?”

  “Dang, you are one twisted beeyotch,” Gino said cheerfully. “See you later!”

  As the two walked out, Reina read the back of Ted’s jacket:

  I lattes:

  They take a latte time

  And cost a latte money

  But they’re worth it!

  * Smitty’s Brooklyn *

  Theodore Smith, Founder

  She began cleaning out the espresso machine, vowing she would never, ever wear a jacket like that in her life.

  11

  BRUNO (AN INTERLUDE)

  October 17, 10:57 P.M.

  He took at the last drag from a Marlboro and flicked it into the street.

  “That is ecologically very destructive to the environment,” said Scrotum.

  Bruno sat on the steps of the brownstone and held out his pack to the craggy old guy. “Fuck the environment and fuck you. You didn’t get so ugly by eating alfalfa sprouts. Want one?”

  “I stopped, you little punk,” Scrotum said, puffing out his scrawny chest. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I feel like a million bucks.”

  “You look like forty-nine cents.” Bruno put the pack back into his pocket. Suddenly the cigarettes didn’t seem like such a pleasurable idea. Being around this guy was a singularly unpleasurable experience. Looking at his face alone, with its saggy jowls, deep lines, bloodshot eyes, and dark thatches of nose and ear hair, was enough to kill anyone’s appetite. It was hard to believe he’d passed the exams for the department. Bruno glanced up into the third-floor front apartment across the street. Nothing. No movement.

  He knew their mark was there. They’d followed the kid home from Prospect Park, where he’d gotten the shit kicked out of him. Then they’d almost lost him, but Scrotum had gotten the exact address by poking around in the garbage, fishing out a discarded envelope from among the orange peels and sandwich rinds. He was scarily good at that.

  The little punk had to come down sooner or later, and until then, he and Scrotum would have to wait. As long as it took. It was a good thing the rain had let up. “So how’d you get the name Scrotum, anyway?”

  “It’s Scranton.”

  “Come on … how’d you get it?”

  The old man looked away. “Guy in the station house. Part-time actor. Was in The Godfather or some shit. Did Shakespeare, whatever. One time I come in to the lunchroom, I’m carrying a tray full of sammitches for the guys, he looks up at me and says in this big voice, ‘Enter Scrotum, a wrinkled retainer!’” He shrugged. “So … it stuck.”

  Bruno tried to keep from bursting out laughing. “Stuck?”

  “Anyways, he told me he didn’t make it up. He got it from some Broadway guy.”

  “The scrotum?”

  “The nickname, asshole!” He began rolling up his sleeve, revealing a ropy arm and a tattoo, faded and mottled with stretch marks, that said either DOLORES or DORIS.

  Bruno jumped off the stoop, cackling, as Scrotum threw an old-school-boxing left jab, which made him laugh even more.

  Thunk.

  Across the street, the tenement building’s iron front door slammed shut. A guy in a black leather jacket and light brown hair, maybe nineteen or twenty—not much younger than Bruno—lifted up his collar as he hurried into the street. He was carrying a hefty shoulder bag and wearing sunglasses.

  “That the guy?” Scrotum whispered.

  “Get your eyesight checked, Methuselah,” Bruno said, leaping to his feet. “Yeah, it is. Let’s get moving.”

  “Whoa … whoa … don’t get too excited,” Scrotum said. “We wait a block and keep him in our periphial vision. We gotta let him make the drop—then we take in the big guy. Ianuzzi, the prick. We fuck this up, the chief nails us to the wall.”

  “Peripheral.”

  “The fuck?”

  “Peripheral. Not periphial.” Bruno edged forward, beginning to follow the mark. “There’s no such word as ‘periphial.’”

  “Suck my balls,” said Scrotum.

  Bruno fought back the image that was edging into his brain.

  He never thought police work would be this hard.

  12

  REINA (RESUMED)

  October 17, 11:38 P.M.

  Insouciance.

  She hated how words popped into her head like that. This had been happening way too much since she’d started taking an SAT prep class, her head crammed with ridiculous words understood by maybe 5.7 percent of the English-speaking world, i.e., a few thousand professors, journalists, and OCD high school kids desperate to get into college. And so it went, all day long: A crying little girl—lachrymose. Kids rushing to be on time for class—celerity. A door opening into a dark cellar—tenebrous. Erasing Cam’s text messages—cathartic.

  And Waits, right there in Smitty’s, sitting in a chair where she couldn’t help but see him not looking at her, with his leather collar turned up, his sunglasses hiding his eyes, and his face betraying nothing—insouciance.

  It was the not looking at her that bugged Reina most of all. That and the fact that he’d come in at 11:34, exactly twenty-six minutes before Ted had given her permission to close. She had been looking forward to going to Blowback.

  Normally, Smitty’s “late crowd” was a bookish, Park Slope-ish bunch who tended to apologize a lot, laugh at odd things, and preface descriptions with “sort of” like a nervous verbal tic. Because they nursed their mocha lattes for hours, she could ignore them and do massive amounts of homework.

  With Waits it was a different story. Looking out the window, his black leather shoulder bag tucked under his legs, he angled his cup in her direction. The gesture said Another double espresso in an offensively demanding way.

  Ted would have jumped at a signal like that from Waits—pour him refills for free, slip him pastries for free. Whenever she’d protest this, he gave her a look that said Don’t fuck with this guy. Which meant that Ted was just as brainwashed as anyone else. He believed all the legends: Waits had murdered his own parents, he had been kicked out of school for putting cocaine in the water tank, he slept with girls in alphabetical order by their first names, or last names.

  All bullshit. Reina didn’t buy any of it. Waits was a low-life drifter, an Olmsted head case. Every class had one: The Genius with So Much Promise Who Just Snapped. He didn’t deserve all the groveling.

  She buried her face in her book, purposefully ignoring him.

  Desultory.

  “Excuse me?” he said in a voice much sweeter than you would expect—a singer’s voice.

  Mellifluous.

  She looked up, as if just noticing him for the first time. “Hm?”

  “Could I have a refill, please?” he asked, glancing at her and then out the window. “If you don’t mind.”

  Deferential.

  STOP STOP STOP!

  Holding up a finger, she read to the end of the paragraph. It was useless. She couldn’t understand a word. With a sigh, she stood and began making the double espresso.

  But when she turned to serve him, he had left his seat. His shoulder bag was gone too. She looked around curiously. Behind her, she heard the sound of running water from the shop’s bathroom.

  As she placed the steaming cup on the table, the front door opened and two men walked in.

  Figured. Just when she needed to pack up, whoopee, happy hour.

  The younger guy wa
s almost good-looking, save for a head of slick black hair and an Ayyyy-babe-if-you’re-lucky-I-may-let-you-sleep-with-me expression. The older guy had basset-hound jowls, canyonlike wrinkles, and arms that looked like deflated balloons. He was flat-out salivating with his eyes, which traveled up and down Reina’s body as if he were at a yo-yo tournament. She looked conspicuously at the clock, which read 11:41. “We’re about to close.”

  “It says ‘Open till 1:00 A.M.,’” the younger guy protested.

  “It’s been slow tonight—”

  “It’s okay,” came Waits’s voice from behind her.

  She turned. Waits was emerging from the bathroom, still buckling his belt. “I think these guys are here to see me,” he said insouciantly.

  “You?” the older guy said with exaggerated fake surprise. “Never saw you in my life.”

  Waits gestured for them to sit at his table. “What do you gentlemen want?”

  “A venti macchiato half-caf half-decaf with one percent and Equal, no froth?” said the younger guy.

  “Small regular coffee, three sugars,” mumbled the older guy, who was staring at his partner as if he’d just spoken Norwegian.

  “Three sugars?” the younger guy said.

  “For my sweet deposition.” The older guy shrugged defensively. “What, you don’t like that? At least I order in English.”

  “You fuckin’ moron, you have diabetes,” the younger one said. “And it’s disposition.”

  Reina turned away and tried to block them out. This wasn’t her night.

  The two guys seemed somehow thrown by Waits, who, in contrast, was looking very calm. As she focused on her reading, she only picked up occasional snatches of conversation, and more than once the use of the word “scrotum.” Nice crowd.

  Hoi polloi.

  Waits was the first to leave. “Keep the change,” he said, slapping a bill on the counter, then bowing slightly to the other two, who did not seem happy. “Gentlemen …”

  He strolled out the door. The two men stared at the table, not looking up.

  Reina pretended to concentrate. Don’t order anything more. Please, don’t order anything more….

  Suddenly the older guy pounded the table so hard his cup went flying. “Shit!”

  He stormed out the door with the younger man in pursuit, leaving the broken cup on the floor and a crumpled five-dollar bill on the table—on a $5.69 check.

  With a disgusted sigh, Reina took the money. The clock read 11:59. Right on schedule.

  As she grabbed a broom from behind the counter, she noticed a rumpled black shape under the pastry shelf—Waits’s shoulder bag. She grabbed it and ran out the door, looking up and down the sidewalk. The street was empty.

  Ducking back inside, she flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and locked the door from the inside. Time to cash out. Finally. She dropped the shoulder bag behind the counter. It was heavier than she expected, as if it were full of textbooks (yeah, right). Well, he would just have to pick it up tomorrow.

  She swept up the broken china, dumped it, bound up the garbage, took the plastic bags outside, and left them on the curb. Ducking back in, she opened the cash register, took the five out her pocket and tucked it into the proper slot, then grabbed the bill Waits had left on the counter.

  It was a hundred dollars.

  She had to look at it twice. Then she noticed a rumpled napkin next to it, with a message:

  What the—?

  Reina checked the clock. 12:04. How long did he expect her to stick around? Why the hell couldn’t he take his own shoulder bag?

  She drummed her fingers on the counter. She could try to track him down, but she really wanted to get to Blowback. She needed the break.

  Could he have meant to leave a hundred?

  He couldn’t have.

  She stared at the bag a moment, then lifted it to her shoulder. It smelled of stale cologne. As it plopped back to the floor, the metal zipper slid open a bit and the two halves separated by a fraction of an inch.

  Hmm.

  She flicked off the outside floodlight and the over-head light, leaving only a dim, pulsing fluorescent behind the counter.

  Bending over, she pulled the zipper. The folds of a sweatshirt puffed out of the opening. She slid the zipper the full length and reached inside, pushing away a sweatshirt and a pair of corduroy pants.

  Under the pants was a canvas drawstring bag. She glanced to the window again and opened the string.

  Hands shaking, she removed a tightly bound stack of bills. Holding them under the light, she riffled through. Hundreds, all of them. In the bag, underneath it, there were at least a dozen more stacks.

  Idiot! There would be fingerprints.

  Shoving the stack into her pants pocket, she zipped up the shoulder bag. That would have her prints too.

  Complicit.

  Panicked, she reached into her pocket for her cell phone. She could call information. Maybe Waits had a listed number.

  As her fingers closed around the phone, it rang.

  She fumbled to open it. The screen showed a number she didn’t recognize. Probably a pay phone. Guys like Waits still used pay phones. “Hello!” She was shouting now, her voice nearly a screech. “Look, I—I can’t—why did you—?”

  But the voice at the other end was not Waits. It was vaguely familiar but patching in and out, screaming something about her cousin.

  Incomprehensible.

  “Who is this?” she shouted.

  “Stuck … party …” the voice crackled. “Help … deer … Gino … Blowback—can we … tonight …?”

  “Hi! Blowback? You want to meet me there?”

  “Yes! … Chhhhh …”

  “Wait, is this—?”

  The call sputtered and finally dropped. She was pretty sure the voice belonged to Byron Durgin.

  13

  BYRON

  October 17, 8:59 P.M.

  Ouch.

  Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

  All the major indexes, down the toilet. Again. Hang Seng, NASDAQ, Nikkei bleak-ay.

  Byron was not happy. He glanced away from his BlackBerry. Looking at the screen while the car was moving made him feel nauseated. Which made the sucky news even suckier.

  He tried not to think about it. How could all his market guesses have been so dead wrong? When you lost this big, it was embarrassing. When you lost this big with other people’s money, you made headlines. Financial Whiz Kid Takes Investors to Cleaners. You kissed college good-bye. You looked forward to the kind of life laid out in countless cautionary movies. Exile to Las Vegas. Addiction. Abandonment. Homicide. If you were lucky, Philip Seymour Hoffman played you and died in a pool of vomit.

  Worse, he would be just another fucked-up Durgin, following in the footsteps of five brothers and a sister in various stages of genetically predetermined failure. His dad was going to kill him. The kid is perfect, Sergeant Durgin loved to say. Either a genetic mutant or we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Ha-ha.

  Thump.

  Byron tried to focus on the trees outside, blurred by the rain and speed. It just made him feel worse.

  The whole world should be connected by subway, he thought. On the subway, he never got nauseated. He wasn’t suited for car travel. Or the suburbs. Or losing.

  Especially losing.

  “AWWWW, NO WAAAAAYYY!” In the front seat, Cam was spazzing out over a baseball game on the radio, at the same time that he was texting on his cell phone.

  And Byron once again couldn’t believe that he was here—getting involved in this stupid kind of scheme—with a guy who could get so worked up over a team of nine steroidal total strangers. “It’s only a game,” Byron said. “These guys don’t give a shit about you.”

  “Oh, and you don’t get all mental over the market, do you?” Cam shot back. “At least when the game is over, nobody goes broke.”

  Byron sighed. For the twentieth time since getting into the car, he felt in his pocket for the envelope. The hef
t of it, the shifting of the merchandise inside it as he moved around, was reassuring and scary as hell.

  Easiest cash we’ll ever make, Cam had said.

  Which alone was enough to run the other way. But when the other way was a corner, when your portfolio was underwater and you owed five hundred to pay a margin call, you took a chance. You did your own version of what the queen was purported to do when getting laid. Lie back, close your eyes, and think of England.

  “Friggin’ Mets!” Cam pounded the dashboard. “Can you believe that shit? Can you believe it? Hit-and-run with one out at the top of the ninth—I mean, what were they thinking?”

  “Unbelievable,” Jimmy agreed, gripping the steering wheel tightly, leaning forward. It was pouring and the road must have been slippery, but he drove like an old lady.

  Jimmy could be annoying.

  Byron looked at the back of his head in disbelief. “Tell us, James, what’s so fucking unbelievable about it? Did you even understand what happened?”

  “I could crash this car so easily if you don’t stop distracting me,” Jimmy murmured.

  “Sorry,” Byron replied.

  Jimmy glanced over his shoulder. “What are you so pissy about all of a sudden?”

  The radio announcer was blathering on, his staccato voice competing with the static: The management is insisting that trade rumors for a third basemen are untrue, as Delgado steps up to bat …

  Cam, done with his texting, was now talking to someone on his phone.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m pissy,” Byron said, slipping his BlackBerry into his pocket. “Sports announcers. The butchers of the English language. ‘As’? Did you ever notice the way they use ‘as’? I mean, they’re talking about one thing and then it’s like, oh, whoops, I forgot I’m supposed to be calling the game, so I’ll just stick an ‘as’ in there, for that sophisticated and silky-smooth transition. ‘Today Osama bin Laden was captured while humping his favorite goat, as Martinez throws a fastball for a strike …’”

  Jimmy’s head was arranged like a question mark. Cam shifted around, his massive shoulders crowding the space between the seat and the dashboard. “That time of the month, Shirley?”