Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [54]
“Car broke down?”
“I wouldn’t call you for that.”
“Your shit was in the paper today. They say you’re importing niggers from Cuba. I guess the personal training didn’t work out too good. It was a nice picture of you, though.”
“It’s more complicated than that. You remember Vivian?”
“The Chinese chick?”
“Vietnamese. Yeah. It involves her. You see what I’m saying?”
“I should have guessed that. She was a bitch and a half from the get-go. Shit. Where you at, homeboy? I’m coming like John Wayne and shit to get your monkey ass.”
I told him where I was. He mumbled something to someone else. I thought I heard the sound of traffic in the background muffled by static.
“Back of the parking lot. Twenty minutes,” he said. “Doors that go out by Cozzoli’s Pizza. Don’t make me wait, motherfucker.”
Twenty-five minutes later, the car was outside. It was a stretch limousine as white as Moby-Dick and nearly as long, with tinted windows as dark as a pirate’s eye patch. I would have preferred something a bit more inconspicuous—maybe an anonymous black sedan capable of dissolving in traffic, but here was the limo coming toward me. The driver coasted over a speed bump doing twenty, and even from thirty yards away I could hear the tremolo of the bass throbbing through the speakers like thunder inside a drum.
I stepped through the sliding glass doors and walked briskly toward my ride. The limousine eased to a stop just as I reached it. The door opened, and a sweet white plume of marijuana smoke rushed out to meet me like a genie lifting out of a magic lamp. A few shoppers stopped and stared as I got in. It must have looked to them as though a derelict had suddenly had a change in luck. I ducked into the darkened interior and out of range of their glances and shut the door behind me, sealing myself into the noisy confines of an alien world that was part nightclub, part traveling bong.
Besides the driver, whom I couldn’t see, there were three men in the car, not counting me. All three were black, all three wore Ray-Bans, and I could tell at first glance that none of them were particularly glad to see me. I could also see that my appearance worried them. They studied me with the unabashed intensity of anthropologists who have found something strange in the mists of Borneo. The music hammered at my brain like a team of trolls armed with rubber mallets, but it didn’t matter, since no one was doing any talking. I sat on the long seat across from the three men and shot them a smile that bought me nothing in return. So I tucked it away behind my teeth like a wad of gum and sat there watching them, wondering if they were debating the thought of kicking me out.
The man in the middle was Space Man, Hank Watts. He had gained back all the weight he’d lost while I was training him, right before his second CD went double platinum, but this wasn’t the time to bring it up. He wore a red shirt, red pants, and red shoes, and on his head sat a small, round, red hat. Around his neck he wore a gold chain I could have melted down for retirement income, and in his right hand he held a joint that looked like an albino cigar.
Hank, a.k.a. the Space Man, took a long toke. His cheeks puffed out like a trumpet player’s, and then he blew the smoke from the side of his mouth.
“Chronic,” he said, smiling like a connoisseur. “A hundred dollars a quarter Z, but this shit is choice.”
The other two men in the limo were hard cases. They had theirs acts down pat. One wore a black nylon stocking cap tied behind his forehead. He looked as though he weighed two-seventy, was thick-boned and massive. He wore a black sleeveless leather vest with nothing but muscle-plated skin underneath. He was wearing a silver crucifix, which made me feel a lot better, as I prefer to travel, whenever I can, with Christians.
The other man was tall and lean and wore white silk pajamas and a pair of black sandals. His hair was done up in cornrows that looked like carefully plowed fields as seen from a plane over the farmlands of Kansas. He had