Kyle said, “The Lord is my weapon.”
Max, sick of the whole conversation, went, “The Lord better be packing, then.”
Kyle stuck his hand out and Max, puzzled, asked, “You want to shake my hand?”
Sly little redneck grin from ol’ Kyle who said, “I’d like my Glock. That piece cost me a whole bunch of bucks.”
Max, flying off into another one of his accents, said, “Don’t you be giving me none of yer lip, boy, hear? You ain’t too tall to take a whupping.”
The whupping set off a drug hard-on and if Felicia had been there, he’d have given her a real whupping right now. “Now git yer ass in gear, boy, we is set to rock ’n’ roll, you hear what I’m saying? You down, bro, you ready to chill with The M.A.X., you ready to ice these spics?”
He liked this rap so much he was sorely tempted to write it down, use it in his HBO series.
Kyle, an edge in his voice said, “Don’t call them spics.”
Max said, “Long as they don’t call my play, hombre.” He started hunting around for the shit he needed to make a martini. There was enough time, as long as while he was making it Kyle went and got the car. Like, right now.
Kyle stared at Max as he found a pitcher but fuck, no olives. Who the fuck was supposed to be doing, like, the housekeeping?
Oliveless, he turned to Kyle, and in his most sarcastic tone went, “Hello, the car, the ve-hi-cle…like, duh?”
Kyle had the vacant-eye look back and Max reckoned, no two ways about it, down there they were definitely giving one to family members or sheep. Hell, maybe down there the sheep were family members.
He said, “Our means of transportation, son. Or are you thinking we should call a cab, say, Take us to our drug deal, Mohammed?”
He had to get these lines down on paper. Maybe write ’em up as a book one of these days, like those Hard Case books with those women on the covers. Max had never picked one up but, man, those guys knew how to use a pair of tits to sell a book.
Kyle said, “Oh, right,” and he was gone, with his bible.
Max downed the martini. Wasn’t bad, maybe he could do a second, wash his mouth out, take the acrid dope taste out of his gums. Naw, better not. Say what you like about The M.A.X., he knew his limits-oh yeah, he knew when enough was enough.
He put the Glock down the waistband of his trousers, in the small of his back, and went, “Ouch.” Jesus, it was cold. Did he have time to warm it up? Could you microwave a gun? And it pressed against his bum sacroiliac, shit. He took the piece out, got his black suede jacket. It had that expensive cut, you saw it, you whistled, it said taste and platinum card. Yeah, after today, it was platinum or bust baby.
The jacket had a large inside pocket and he put the gun in there. Was the bulge too big? Ah, fuck it, he was good to go.
He had a last sip of the martini, said, “Bring it on, muchachos.”
Max and Kyle headed out to Queens in a Ford SUV. Max wanted to go in a Porsche, show the hombres what a hip, happening guy he was, but he figured they’d be in a limo and he wanted to be above them, looking down. Yeah, you need that height advantage in any business transaction. How do you think The Donald did it? And how many millionaire midgets were there in the world?
He had Kyle do the driving. What, you think The M.A.X. had time for trivial shit? Get real, buddy.
Crossing the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Max did a line on the dashboard, just to stay nice and juiced.
Kyle said, “Um, you think you should be doing that?”
Max inhaled, felt the rush, went, “Doing what?”
“That coke in the car, out there in the open an’ all… you know what I mean?”
Man, that slow, muttering cornpoke drawl could start to get on a person’s fucking nerves. Max caressed the Glock, thinking maybe he’d shoot Kyle in the foot, see how he liked that. For fucking Christ’s sake, the kid was, what, becoming moral now? Thought he had a bible so that made him what, God? Max wanted to remind Kyle that he was the one who’d turned him on to this shit-the kid looked innocent but he was a goddamn enabler. But he didn’t want to get into it now, when he was so focused, so in the zone.
About ten minutes later, they approached the meeting spot-the lot behind the abandoned warehouse, right along the East River.
Max didn’t see any other cars in the lot. He wondered what the fuck was going on, said, “What the fuck’s going on? Weren’t the hombres supposed to be here before us?”
“There they are,” Kyle said.
“Where?” Max said impatiently. He didn’t see shit and was that line wearing off already? Goddamn bullshit coke. What happened to the Real Thing?
“Right over there,” Kyle said.
Now Max saw two kids, teenagers, approaching the car, squinting at the headlights. One of the kids was wearing a Madonna concert T.
“Who the fuck are they?” Max said.
“The big one’s Xavier and the shorter one’s Carlos,” Kyle said. “They’re the Colombians.”
Max would’ve thought Kyle was joking if the kid wasn’t dumber than Forrest Gump. These were the cartel, the Noriegas of the zeitgeist? And, yeah, as soon as he found out exactly what zeitgeist meant, he’d use it more often. Meanwhile, he was seriously agitated.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” Max said.
There was no limo in sight; how’d they get here, on their fucking bicycles? They had goddamn piercings. And how old were they, sixteen?
“Hey, bro,” Xavier said, still squinting badly. “How ’bout cutting the lights? You blindin’ my ass.”
The fuck sounded like he was from the goddamn Bronx-how much American TV did they get down in South America? He didn’t even have a Spanish accent. Max had been wasting his time with all that Señor Lopez shit for this?
Kyle turned off the headlights and Xavier and Carlos came up to the SUV’s driver-side window. The three of them started talking, laughing it up, like they were in a fucking high school parking lot. Fuck, maybe they could all go out for pizza.
Max, needing a pick-me-up big time, was getting set to do another line, about to snort it through a rolled-up hundred, when another car pulled into the lot, headlights blazing.
“The fuck is this?” Max asked.
“Darned if I know,” Kyle said.
There was something about Kyle’s tone. He sounded very un-Kyle-a little too quick, too prepared. It crossed Max’s mind, Was this some kind of set-up?
Max felt a drip of white cold sweat roll down his back and he knew that was gonna fuck up the line of the shirt. He was thinking, Uh-oh, good this is not.
Two black guys got out of the car. One was skinny, one was huge, looked like Fat Albert. They were both in oversized basketball jerseys and were wearing backwards baseball caps.
Max went, “What the fuck is this? A goddamn nightclub?”
Then Max spotted the automatic weapons the guys were holding. He was too shocked to react. He just sat there, looking as dumb as Kyle, as the two black fuckers started running toward the SUV, firing. Glass was shattering, Xavier’s head exploded. The top of it just like took off, went through the air like some weird Frisbee and Max was thinking, Oh, holy fuck.
Covered in blood, Max shouted, “Drive, you asshole! Drive!”
A bullet went into Carlos’s neck, made almost a whistling sound-whoosh, and kept right on going, to Colombia maybe. Then Carlos crumpled like a sex doll Max had once had and crushed in his excitement. More glass shattered, and finally Kyle turned on the ignition and the SUV started.
Ducking, Max shouted, “Go!” and Kyle sped away.
Max didn’t know if he’d been hit. He didn’t feel any pain but maybe his terror had blocked it out.