Danny couldn’t taste the beer. He tried to keep his face a mask, to stay above it. The ticking clock made him think of time bombs, explosions straining to escape.
Evan leaned forward, corded forearms bunching. He smelled of beer and cigarettes. “Then Lupé touches Chico’s face real soft. Smiles at him, turns, and walks out.
“Chico senses what’s coming, starts struggling. You can tell he wants to kill these guys, but he’s just a prison queer. What he wants isn’t important. After all, these three are gladiators. One gets him in a chokehold, and another lifts his foot up on the bunk, stretches the leg out straight. The bangers are laughing, two of them arguing who gets to do it, like Chico isn’t even there. He’s turning white and shit, but they don’t pay him any attention. Finally the one on the bed holds Chico’s leg taut, the joint locked. The third winds up, then stomps down, just bam, down, like snapping firewood, right on the knee. Chico howls, I mean, you can hear it through the gag. And no fucking wonder, because bone is sticking out the back of his prison blues. The bangers hoot, and slap each other on the back while Chico shrieks. Whole thing took maybe a minute. Guards find the pruno, the blade, Boyfriend’s body, they choose to write it off as a lover’s quarrel between the cellmates. Easier than actually looking into it. That’s the mentality on the inside.”
Danny’s mouth was dry, and the tension in his stomach had curdled into something sour. There wasn’t a hint of emotion on Evan’s face, none. Just the intense stare between them that he didn’t dare break. He swallowed slowly.
“After that,” Evan spoke softly now, “Chico didn’t walk so good. But I’ll tell you what.” He paused, and then the mask of his face cracked into a smile, thin-lipped and cruel. “He never again forgot what he was. Or who he belonged to.”
Danny leaned the chair back, feet on the ground. His palms swamped up with sweat. He struggled for the remnants of his cool, and took a swallow of beer. It flowed warm and flat down his throat. “Bad luck for Chico.”
Evan smiled broadly at that, but with none of the comradely warmth Danny remembered from their childhood. “I thought about your offer.”
Here it comes.
“Fold it sideways and shove it up your ass.”
Danny shrugged, finished his beer.
“You owe me, Danny. But I’ve thought of a way to square us. And you’re going to help, like it or not.”
11
The cigarette tasted sweet as a stolen kiss.
A funny expression, Evan thought, Ma’s. She used to say it on good days, the ones when she’d sing, the ones when the bruises weren’t too bad. He hadn’t thought of her in a while, but now, strolling through Lincoln Park, watching families indulge in happy domestic bullshit, she came to mind. He couldn’t say for sure, but he’d bet she’d not had too many kisses stolen.
After he’d jimmied the lock on Danny’s window and let himself in, Evan had wandered from room to room. He wasn’t searching for anything in particular. Just looking. He lingered over a photo of Karen smiling in a bikini, shielding her eyes from the sun of a lost afternoon. Took a shit in the master bathroom, thought about leaving it floating there, a little gift, but decided against it. Then he’d sat and waited with a smile growing inside. It felt good to be playing again.
And the game had gotten better once Danny arrived.
He took another drag, smoking the cigarette to the filter, feeling the melting resistance as the heat fused it. His favorite part, the cigarette yielding. He knocked off the cherry and flicked the butt into the grass. One of the Lincoln Park mothers, about his age, figure still tight and her hair expensive, glared at him. He winked, then laughed as she gathered her boy off the swing set and hustled him away.
Look out for the bad man, kid. Your mommy, she’s still a nice piece of ass, and she’s got instincts strong enough to tell her to move away. Funny how it worked. The more you had – a job, a house, a lover, a kid – the more you had to lose. Soccer Mom may not have spelled it out that way, might have chosen to push a truth like that out of her well-decorated world, but some elemental part of her understood.
Evan pulled the smokes from his shirt pocket and tapped out another one. The sun fell warm on his back and the top of his head, though the wind was cool. A perfect afternoon.
Danny had said no. Or tried to, anyway. In the end, he’d agreed to think about it. With the old Danny, the one he’d known, it would have been different. But now he was just an angle to be played, and he cowed the same as a prison queer or a soccer mom.
But then, he had so much. So very much to lose.
12
“Jesus.” Patrick turned, one hand still on the railing, to look Danny in the face. “Are you serious?”
Karen had whipped up pasta for dinner, with spicy sauce and a bottle of red. She hated the criminal in Patrick, feared his impact on Danny, but Patrick the person, him she loved. So the three of them had sat at dinner, laughing and having a good time, all the while Danny raging behind a calm mask, desperately needing to talk to Patrick alone. “Nevermore.”
“I can’t believe he asked you to do that.”
“It wasn’t so much asking,” Danny said, “as telling.”
“Motherfu-”
“Keep your voice down.”
Patrick turned back to the sprawling night sky. After dinner Danny had led him out to their fire escape, ostensibly so that Patrick could smoke, but really for the privacy of it. The game had just let out, and Wrigley Field still blazed with light. The streets swarmed with fans shouting drunkenly for cabs.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” Danny shook his head. “I really don’t.” Was it only yesterday afternoon he’d sat at the kitchen table, knuckles clenched on the beer bottle, listening to Evan propose a plan to shatter his life? Hard to believe so little time had passed. He’d thought of nothing else since. Hardly slept, his mind spinning and grasping for a way out.
Your boss, Evan had said. He’s got a kid, yeah?
Right then Danny had known what was coming, and fear climbed his spine one vertebra at a time.
To hear Evan talk, it was a simple thing, no big deal. Together they snatch Tommy, put him somewhere safe. Dick-twist Richard into paying as much as he could afford – not too much, Evan said, no point making it impossible – in trade for his son’s life. Split the score and consider themselves finished, all accounts balanced.
“Jesus.” Patrick’s face glowed as he dragged on his cigarette, eyes wide and dodgy. “What did you tell him?”
“What do you think? Hell no. You know what his response was? ‘Think about it.’ He’s sitting in my kitchen, boots on the table, telling me to think about it. He rocks back a little, so his shirt pulls up? And he’s got a gun tucked in his belt.”
“He pulled a piece on you?”
“Just let me see it, like it was an accident. Then he asked when Karen would be home.”
Patrick blew a breath through his lips. “So he’s set on it.”
“The way he sees it, either we’re partners or I’m disrespecting what I owe him.”
“You don’t owe him shit.”
Danny shrugged. “Not the way he sees it.” Which left Danny in a bad spot. The first times they’d met, there had been awkwardness and even a little fear, but also a faint and reserved fondness. They’d grown up together, suffered Sunday school together. Shared swiped menthols to impress fifth-grade girls in leather jackets and too much hair spray. Watched the sunrise from the top of a parking deck, twelve-year-old Evan afraid to go home, his eye blackened from stepping between his parents. They had history.