Which was when she told him the whole long story, how she got mixed up with Max Fisher before she went to Ireland, had even been engaged to him for a while, and now he’d been connected to some drug dealers.
“You sure it’s him?” Slide asked.
“I was engaged to the fooker,” Angela said. “You think I can’t recognize a snap of him in the paper?”
Slide said, “So he was arrested. What’s that gonna do for us?”
“If you actually read the article you’d see that he was released, along with his partner, this guy, Kyle Jordan. God only knows how he got mixed up with that crowd. Max dealing crack-Jaysus, I can’t even imagine that.”
Slide went, “So what do you want to do? Kidnap him?”
“Not him-somebody close to him, and then make Max pay,” Angela said. “See, I know how Max is. He talks the talk but deep down, when it counts, he’s what we in America call a wuss. You should’ve seen him when he found out he had herpes. He was crying like a baby.”
“Herpes?” Slide asked.
“Oh, no, he didn’t catch it from me,” Angela said quickly, obviously busted, trying to cover. “He got it from, um, a previous relationship. And he didn’t give it to me either. Honest.”
Slide suddenly felt the urge to scratch. He also had the urge to wallop her again, but the lure of money was stronger. He said, “So he’s a wuss. What does that do for us?”
“He’s in a very vulnerable position, cops breathing down his neck, and if he’s dealing drugs these days, he must be seriously loaded. It’s the perfect time to kidnap somebody close to him and the panicked bastard will pay.”
“I like it,” Slide said, “but who do we grab? He got a wife?”
Angela got a strange look on her face, said, “I sincerely doubt that any woman in her right mind would be with that man. But there’s this partner-Kyle from Alabama.”
“You know him?”
“Never heard of him before, and honestly I can’t imagine what Max is doing with somebody from Alabama. I mean, the article says he met the guy down there. When I was with Max he bitched about going to the West Side.”
Slide was playing with the idea, tossing it around in his mind. He wanted to get the kidnapping gig down and he knew it would pay serious wedge if only he could stop killing the victims so fast.
“The only problem,” Angela said, “is how we do the abduction. After all, Manhattan isn’t Backwoods, Ireland. You can’t just nab somebody off the street.”
“True enough,” Slide said, grinning. “But you can.”
Twenty-One
Denial is the outstanding characteristic of the addict.
Max took twenty minutes to fill out the Cocaine Anonymous addiction test, twenty-three questions asking him things like whether his cocaine use was interfering with his work (Nope. Moolah rolling in), whether he’d experienced sinus problems or nosebleeds (Occasionally), and whether he felt obsessed with getting coke when he didn’t have any (Si, señor). He tallied up the yeses-only eight out of twenty-three, nine if you counted the nosebleeds one. Hell, he wasn’t an addict, not even close. What the fuck had he been stressing about? And, to think, he’d been seriously considering the idea of cleaning up, going into rehab. Whew, dodged a bullet there.
Max ripped up the addiction test and did three quick lines. Whoops, what was that blood coming out of his nostrils? Nine yeses. Eh, what the fuck ever.
The only downside of not being an addict was he couldn’t do one of those rehab gigs. People magazine had done a piece saying you were, like, nobody unless you’d done at least one stint. That bony Brit chick, Kate Moss-yeah, she’d fucked up big time by being photographed shoving mountains of coke up her dainty little nose. It looked like she was gonna lose all those lucrative contracts-so what’d she do? Yup, that’s right, headed right to rehab in Arizona, and voila-not only did the dumb-ass public admire her for her courage but shit, get this, she scored more gazillion-dollar contracts. Now that was class. Them Brits, they had some sneaky moves-no wonder they’d once owned India.
So, Max thought, when he had his movie career up and humming, he might do a stretch in one of those places anyway, just for the PR bump. Not long-come on, how long could The M.A.X. be out of the game? — but yeah, some time to deal with “personal issues” would do him good. He could see the cover of Entertainment Weekly, The M.A.X. looking contrite and yes, suffering, in real, physical pain, but was he denying it? Fuck no, here he was fessing up, admitting-and this would make a killer headline-I’m human, too. A tear would be rolling down his cheek, of course, though they’d probably have to Photoshop that in. God, it would be beautiful and word was, in those clinics, you made the best dope connections so he could, you know, combine business and healing in the one package. And, chances were, he’d meet one of those babes like Paris Hilton, have her hanging on his recuperating arm. Nah, not Paris; he liked the way she’d talked into the mike in that sex video, but she was way too flat-chested and way too bitchy, a bad perfecta if there ever was one. He’d rather have that other one with the implants, Tara Reid? Yeah, that Tara babe would be all over him, oozing love for The M.A.X., and when the press asked he’d simply say coolly, “We’re just good friends.”
Yeah, he’d be all set if only the blood would just, like, freaking STOP. That stuff, it totally ruined your shirts. He was wearing a white Van Heusen number-it was fucking Goodwill for that baby. How many fucking shirts had he bled on and had to donate? A hundred bucks each for those shirts and they went right down the shitter. Maybe he’d have to start buying black ones, go the Johnny Cash route.
Max was totally gone on this whole vision when his thirst kicked in, an overwhelming, all-consuming passion for gallons of water. Ah, screw that, make it a brew, lots of vitamins in those hops and lots of yeast too, right? Yeah, just a cold one-hell, maybe a few cold ones-and didn’t that prove he wasn’t a cokehead? You never see a junkie gasping for a Bud, right?
“Kyle, The M.A.X. needs a brewski!”
Kyle was back at the apartment, but the sushi chef was gone. Maybe he ran back to Japan, or at least back to Nobu. Max had given Kyle Katsu’s room but, man, Max hoped the kid had changed those sheets.
Max shouted for him again, then pounded down the hall to his room. The kid was watching Meg Ryan movies, a stack of ’em back to back-said he was having himself “a Megathon”-and he actually asked Max, “You think she’d be hard to find in Seattle?”
The schmuck really believed she lived there and, fucking with him, Max went, “I’ll ask Hanks if you can have her address.”
The kid’s eyes got huge and he stuttered, “You know T-T-Tom Hanks?”
Times like this Max wondered-was he fucking with Kyle or was it the other way around? Could someone be alive and functioning and yet be so brain dead?
But Max said, “Me and the Hankster go way back. Yeah, he was unsure about doing this movie with a fucking mermaid, and I told him, go for it Tommy, it’ll make a splash.”
The kid was stunned and Max had to jar him out of it, going, “The brewski. You know before, like, Tuesday?”
Rooming with Kyle, having to dumb it down on a daily basis, was stretching Max’s patience mighty thin, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. The cops had released Kyle along with Max, with instructions that they couldn’t leave town. Max didn’t want Kyle living alone someplace where he could fuck up and do something stupid. Max figured he knew the cops’ big game plan. They’d searched the apartment while Max and Kyle were being questioned but, guess what, they hadn’t taken anything. They could’ve nailed The M.A.X., but for what? It was his first offense and they could get possession but could they have gotten intent to sell? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe Max would’ve gotten six months or, if he had a good lawyer, community service. No, Miscali and those assholes didn’t want to send Max up on bullshit charges. They wanted the Big Kahunas, the Colombian suppliers, the behind-the-scenes players. So they figured they’d leave Max and Kyle on the loose for a while-see where that led them. Little did they know that The M.A.X. was one step ahead of the game.