A Better Goodbye Page 21

  Dawg? Scott couldn’t believe it. DuPree had gone such a long time without calling him dawg, the ultimate in street affection, that Scott had thought it would never happen again. Now that it had, though, he couldn’t sound giddy about it.

  “What,” he said, “you call me up so I can listen to you talking to that pit bull of yours?”

  “No, he’s my white motherfucker,” DuPree said. “You’re my dawg.”

  It was then that Scott knew the tectonic plates in his life had shifted. Exactly how, he wasn’t sure. But something was changing. DuPree would get around to it in his own time, on his own terms, cool as shit. Scott was ready for whatever it was, criminal or civil. It was like he’d always told himself: You want to survive in L.A., you got to be ready to reinvent yourself.

  23

  Typical Friday. Brianna bailed before her shift was over and Jenny was booked as soon as she got there. She barely had time to throw on her sheer red mini dress before her four o’clock buzzed from downstairs, five minutes early. He turned out to be a barrel-shaped guy who talked nonstop about a writer’s need to find “the emotional center of dramatic situations.” It sounded like he’d read some of the same books she had, and a lot more she intended to read now that she had some time away from school. When he was on the futon in the second bedroom, he shifted to a rambling monologue about his struggle to maintain his “artistic palette in the face of the corporate vultures.” She wondered which studio he was talking about, but he didn’t say and she didn’t ask.

  She knew he’d unwind after she jacked him off, but she wasn’t sure he was ever going to give her the chance. When he rolled onto his back, he started telling her about the chemist who figured out the structure of the benzene ring. She had no idea what the benzene ring was, but there wasn’t any stopping her gasbag client to ask for an explanation. “This chemist had a dream in which a snake swallowed its tail,” he said, “and they told him, ‘That’s kind of easy, you just fall asleep and figure something out.’ And he replied, ‘Visions come to prepared spirits.’” Then it was time for the gasbag’s hand job.

  He gave Jenny a hundred-dollar tip and called her “a very bright young woman.” She accepted the tip and the compliment while she was trying to determine whether his story fit into her life somehow. She would have asked him for guidance—he didn’t seem like someone who denied many requests—but he was more interested in meeting the other girls. So it was that Cookie, finished with her shift and headed to an outcall, and Sierra, who had shown up late, both received fifty-dollar bills, big hugs, and sloppy kisses on the cheek from their manic benefactor.

  “He ever stop talking?” Nick asked when it was safe for him to step out of the master bedroom.

  “I don’t think so,” Jenny said.

  “Even when he came?” Sierra asked.

  “I didn’t notice,” Jenny said.

  Sierra laughed. “Concentrating on his dick?”

  “No, thinking about something he said.”

  The ringing phones saved Jenny from having to explain about visions and prepared spirits. L.A. seemed to have an endless supply of horny guys with money to spend. One of them was Barry, who asked Jenny if he could have her last appointment. She would have preferred a real date, but she still had a lawyer to pay. She’d see him at eight.

  Scott showed up half an hour before Barry was supposed to. Jenny didn’t think much of it. He was probably just starting his weekend early. If he had something else on his mind, Sierra was there. She’d seen her last client of the day, and she was the only one of the girls who could tolerate Scott on a regular basis. Jenny couldn’t remember the last time he’d said anything to her except hello. That was fine with her.

  Ten minutes later, DuPree walked in, nodding his head, eyes like ice, talking in the monotone that Jenny had learned to find so terrifying. He had a dog with him, straining to get out of its leash and explore its new surroundings. At least that was all Jenny hoped it wanted to do.

  “Hey,” Scott said. “You brought White Fang.”

  “Name’s Blanco,” DuPree said.

  Jenny tried to think of what kind of dog it was. She’d always preferred cats, would have had one, in fact, if her landlord allowed them, and this dog—squat, thick chest, pink eyes, undershot jaw—was butt ugly. Even with its tongue dangling happily from the corner of its mouth, she couldn’t help thinking it must have been a candidate to be drowned at birth.

  “Does he bite?” Sierra asked.

  “Pet him and find out,” DuPree said.

  “Oooh, I don’t think so,” Sierra said, forcing a giggle.

  That was when something in Jenny’s head clicked. “It’s a pit bull, right?” she said.

  “You one smart little China girl, ain’t you?” DuPree said, turning his eyes on her for the first time, his face devoid of emotion.

  Jenny thought he was making himself sound ghetto to frighten her, to remind her of their time alone. But she still found it in her to say, in a voice she hoped was loud enough for him to hear, “I’m Korean.”

  “That mean you ain’t smart?” DuPree was smiling now.

  “I recognize what kind of dog Blanco is, that’s all.”

  “Then maybe you want to pet him. You know, since you’re the dog expert.”

  Silence smothered the apartment.

  It was the smirk on DuPree’s face that pissed Nick off more than anything, that haughty I’ve-done-time-and-you-haven’t look that thugs always seemed to fall back on at moments like this. The dog just added to DuPree’s sense of menace, scarred by the cruelty that warps too many pit bulls. He could hurt you bad, even kill you, and DuPree was using the pit’s reputation the way he would have a gun in a robbery.

  Nick took a deep breath and said, “Knock it off. She’s not interested in the dog.”

  “That so?” DuPree looked at Coco. “The man speaking for your true heart, Miss Saigon?”

  “I’m a cat person,” she said.

  No one laughed but her.

  “Sorry, I just am.”

  DuPree kept his eyes on Nick standing by the room divider. “How about you? You a cat lover too? Or you just like pussy?”

  “You’re missing the point,” Nick said.

  “Yeah? What point is that?”

  “I don’t like assholes.”

  DuPree’s eyes narrowed. “Say what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Last motherfucker called me that, I put out a cigarette in his eye.”

  Blanco growled and Scott looked like he’d gone into shock. It was all he could do to say, “Not in here, guys. Guys?”

  But Nick wasn’t paying attention to him. It didn’t look like DuPree was, either.

  “You want to try your cigarette trick with me, you don’t have far to go,” Nick said. “Otherwise, get your dog out of here.”

  “Just on account of you said so?” DuPree said.

  “I knew you’d figure it out sooner or later.”

  “I don’t think you askin’ nice enough.”

  “Okay. If you don’t do what I told you to, I’m going to throw you out the window. Then I’ll take your dog someplace to grow old peacefully instead of making you think people are supposed to shit cupcakes when they see you with it. Is that nice enough?”

  DuPree put on a phony grin.

  “I get it,” he said. “You afraid of the dog. That’s what it is, ain’t it? You about to mess your drawers worryin’ my man Blanco gonna chomp down on your ankle, make you scream like a bitch.”

  “If that’s what happens, you won’t see it,” Nick said. “You’ll be somewhere between the third and fourth floor.”

  “Sheeee-it,” DuPree said.

  “Quit stalling. Make up your mind.”

  DuPree started toward Nick as Blanco barked and lunged ahead of him.

  Nick held his ground, thinking he would try to kick the dog away first, maybe bring down the divider on its head, before he went after DuPree.

  “Goddammit, no!” Scott shouted
, sounding like he’d finally found his balls. “You’re gonna have the cops all over this fucking place.”

  DuPree looked like he couldn’t believe his ears. “So this punch-drunk faggot can just stand there and disrespect me like he wearing motherfucking Kevlar? I hope that is not what you are telling me.”

  “All I’m saying is I’ll get my ass thrown in jail,” Scott said. “That would pretty much fuck up what we talked about, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Plus my next client will be here in, like, ten minutes,” Coco said. “You want him to walk in and see your dog going crazy? We’ll get great reviews on the Internet for that.”

  “She’s not bullshitting, dude,” Scott said.

  Sierra nodded robotically, stunned that one of her sisters in the sex trade had dared to speak up.

  Nick watched it all, not caring about anyone’s worries, not even Coco’s. He knew he was going to fight DuPree someday—it was practically written in stone—and he figured they might as well get it over with now.

  But there was DuPree pulling the dog toward the door, and Scott padding after him, saying, “I’m sorry about this, bro, really I am.”

  DuPree looked past Scott and fixed his prison-yard stare on Nick. “I’ll see you again, motherfucker.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Nick said.

  On the way down in the elevator, all DuPree thought about was kicking that security cocksucker’s head in, leaving his brains all over the goddamn floor, and then tearing that rice-paddy cunt up with his cock. “Motherfucker,” DuPree said, punching the wall and getting a growl out of Blanco. DuPree was for sure going to fuck the pussy out of her when he ripped off Scottie’s lame-assed operation. Next week, he told himself; he’d do it then, and maybe fuck Scottie up too, fucking doughboy pussy. Right now, though, with the elevator door opening, he just hoped he had some hash back at his crib.

  When he and Blanco stepped off the elevator, there was a middle-aged white dude waiting to get on: trim, handsome, lots of gray in his hair, going for a casual look in a teal-and-cream-colored sweater that DuPree figured must have cost him four bills easy.

  “Evening,” the white dude said, staying mellow at the sight of Blanco, maybe not even recognizing a pit bull when he saw one.

  “What up?” DuPree said, still in ghetto mode.

  It was only when the elevator door had closed that DuPree thought about the briefcase the white dude had been carrying, wondering what was in it and where he was taking it. DuPree yanked Blanco to a standstill and watched to see where the elevator stopped.

  Eighth floor.

  How about that shit? DuPree thought. The dude was for sure going to see the Oriental bitch. Now DuPree understood why she was worried about scaring off a trick, if he looked like that much money. It would be nice, DuPree thought as he walked Blanco out into the night, if the dude was around when he took down Scottie’s apartment. Might turn a nice score into a big-assed score. And then DuPree saw a Rolls-Royce convertible parked out front. Had to be the trick’s. Just like that, it was more than a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car; it was an inspiration.

  Barry started to say hello as Jenny closed the door behind him, then stopped when he saw her press a finger to her lips. He looked puzzled, but she didn’t explain, just guided him toward the master bedroom, away from wherever Nick was, away from Scott and Sierra listening on the other side of the dividers. She knew she was forgetting Barry’s donation, but she didn’t care.

  As soon as she closed the door behind them, he wrapped his arms around her and moved in for a passionate kiss that died on her lips. He pulled back and gave her a puzzled look. “Not glad to see me?”

  “Sorry,” Jenny said.

  And she was, really and truly. He looked so good and smelled so nice that any other time she would have been on him before he could jump her bones. She knew he was already hard—she could feel his thing when he hugged her. But even that wasn’t enough to ignite her now.

  “It’s been really weird around here today,” she said. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “You’re all right, aren’t you?” he said.

  That was what she liked about older guys. They always wanted to protect you while young guys, if you told them the exact same thing, would say that giving them head would take your mind off your problems.

  It felt like the most natural thing in the world for Jenny to lean into Barry and let him hold her. “I’m all right,” she said, “but I feel about as sexy as, I don’t know, a bowl of oatmeal or something.”

  “If you were oatmeal, I’d eat you.”

  Not cool, Jenny thought, not now. But sometimes even older guys made tactical errors, so she forced a small laugh and hoped Barry hadn’t felt her recoil. She didn’t want to chase him away. She just wanted to take the conversation in a different direction.

  “What do you think?” he said. “We could talk a little about what’s got you so upset, and then I’ll give you some kisses on your sweet place, the way you like them, and we can see what happens.”

  There wasn’t enough time left in the day for Jenny to tell him everything, mainly because she’d never told him anything. Barry didn’t know about the robbery or the rapes or the translucent man or DuPree or Scott or the business of getting naked for strangers whose cocks you would soon hold in your hands. All Barry knew was that she was a cute little Asian girl he wanted to fuck, and that she wanted to fuck him, too. At least she had until today. And maybe she would tomorrow. But not now, when it was Nick who dominated her thoughts. She hadn’t told Barry about him either, and she wasn’t sure how she would, mainly because she was still figuring out what Nick meant to her.

  “Would you mind if we were just quiet for a while?” Jenny said.

  The fear slowly ebbed from the place where Nick kept it stored deep inside him. It had grabbed his heart and his gut the instant he had seen DuPree’s dog, but he had known he couldn’t run no matter how much he wanted to. He had to stand firm and put on the same executioner’s face he had worn in the ring, all the while remembering what Cecil had told him the first time he fought a genuine badass: “Never show fear—make fear work for you. Make the motherfucker across from you feel it.” It was advice easily comprehended by an uncluttered mind, but Nick’s mind now was a warehouse of bad memories.

  They came wrapped in gauze, and were filled with vague figures moving in slow motion and speaking in voices he had to strain to recognize. He thought he heard his mother shouting—yeah, it was her for sure, shouting at a dog to get away from them. There was barking too, and growling. And a little girl’s screams. And her blood. She was Nick’s playmate, three years old, maybe four, from the two-flat next door, and her blood stained the last snow that fell in Chicago that year.

  He could still see it, even though he couldn’t remember the girl’s name, or her face, or what became of her. He thought she had moved, she and her family, to get away from their memories of the dog and the blood. But there’s no escaping what is carved in your memory. There is only enduring it. Why Nick had been able to succeed this time, he knew he would never say aloud. It was Coco. She gave him a reason to care and a purpose beyond chasing away unwanted suitors and cleaning up after two-hundred-dollar assignations. She gave him a reason to hold his ground. The hell of it was, no matter how tenderly she treated him, he still wasn’t sure she saw him as anything more than a slab of meat.

  How do you spell his last name? she kept asking herself. It wasn’t like they wore name tags—where would she pin one when she was wearing something low cut, except on one of her boobs? The only time she’d heard Scott say Nick’s last name, he’d been mumbling. So everything she was doing now at her kitchen table was pure guesswork. B-A-V-K-O or B-A-V-K-A, or did it start with a P?

  Jenny’s fingers flew over the computer keyboard as she fed the possibilities to Google. She hadn’t bothered at first because she’d decided that a man with such sad eyes couldn’t possibly be a danger to her. Of course he might have turned out to be a disaste
r at providing security even if he had been a boxer, but he reminded her of a bird with a broken wing, and she didn’t believe in abandoning wounded birds.

  The Nick she’d seen call DuPree an asshole—an asshole! How great was that?—couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d come to work in a fishnet dress. He’d kept it together the whole time, his voice real low, every move cool and economical, and when DuPree started toward him with that dog, it looked like that was what Nick had been hoping for. He was, like, totally fucking dangerous.

  Jenny had never slept with someone who was dangerous or anything close to it. She hadn’t slept with Nick either, but it was a possibility if she could just learn something about him. But she still couldn’t figure out if his last name started with a B or a P. What about that V? Should it be an F?

  A few keystrokes later her computer screen glowed with the tortured life of Nick Pafko, the street kid from the northwest side of Chicago who chased his dream as a boxer all the way to the ring, where it died when Alonzo Burgess did. It was an accident, a hazard of the trade, the kind of terrible mistake that other fighters had found a way to get past. But Nick was stuck in the quicksand of tragedy. And here was Jenny trying to decide if she should totter into it with him on four-inch heels.

  24

  It rained on and off for three days, which didn’t do anything to improve DuPree’s mood. Fuck the rain when he’d just had his Beemer detailed and it was almost June and he had work to put in. It was hard enough driving in the goddamn city when it was dry and motherfuckers weren’t sliding all over like the streets were covered with ice. Maybe if it rained more, they wouldn’t be reacting like they pissed sitting down. Things the way they were, though, the best DuPree could do was to tell himself the dude would be so busy keeping his Rolls in one piece that he’d never notice a brother on his ass.