Chapter 31 No, Please #2
Lowball glasses clinked drunkenly at the neighboring table, the sound of smacked glass redolent of a sniper round piercing a window.
One of the men tilted back abruptly in his chair—pressed into the bare mattress, stomach down—nearing Joey and—unconscious form flipped like a living doll—Evan almost kicked out the wooden rear legs and brought him tumbling onto his back where—hands clutching and grasping, red grip marks across pale flesh—he could drop a kneecap onto the throat to shatter the trachea.
The pack of drunken men was within touching distance of Joey. One of the guys pawed at the woman he’d been dancing with and she let his fat hand slide across her belly.
Evan’s heartbeat had quickened, the pulse tangible at the side of his neck.
If he didn’t want to draw in a close-quarters space crowded with no-shoots, he had his Strider, the table knife, fork, the jagged peg of a torn-off chair leg.
A clean strike at the bread plate could break it into shards, a double-wrap of the cloth napkin protecting his palm on the grip.
Joey’s coupe glass could be ground into an eye socket, extra points for the blinding sting of alcohol.
If he eliminated them all now there would no longer be a threat to Joey.
But there wasn’t.
There wasn’t a threat to Joey.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m not safe to be around right now.”
Joey wilted.
He threw cash on the table and sliced through the throng, adhering strictly to the third of his five pre-charted routes to the front exit.
Driving through Midtown toward the Bronx, Evan was completely locked in. High visual alertness, a mental map of surrounding blocks continuously unfolding around him as he forged north, heart rate resting around 60 bpm.
And yet.
He could not let go of the way Joey had wilted when he left, hidden beneath her hair and an oversize coat.
Guilt wrestled with righteous annoyance.
The delta between the training he’d undergone and the operations he’d conducted and Joey’s abbreviated time in the Orphan Program was substantial.
It was also worrisome. He didn’t know if she’d been stress-tested sufficiently to be field-operational.
He couldn’t even be sure if she could handle a basic waterboarding.
He avoided the FDR, driving through interior city streets to maximize alternative routes. A light rain fell, making the asphalt shimmer. Coasting up First Avenue, he found himself dialing Aragón.
“Hola, amigo.”
Evan said, “I think I screwed up.”
“Screwed up how?”
Three greens in a row, street signs for Sixty-Third, Sixty-Fourth, Sixty-Fifth whipping by overhead. Evan cleared his throat. “Handling a situation with Joey.”
“Explain to me.”
Evan did.
Aragón said, “Zoom me.”
“Why?”
“So I can see you.”
“Why?”
“To understand better, yes? To see.”
“I don’t Zoom.”
“So call with whatever pinche encrypted shit you use.”
The median strip hemmed Evan in on the left, giving him two decently flowing northbound lanes to work with. Parked cars clogged the third. Skyscrapers towered on either side. Even in the fancy Mercedes, it felt claustrophobic, like burrowing through a maze.
“I’m driving.”
“Then pull over.”
“I’m in Manhattan. I can’t find a space.”
Aragón laughed at him. Not a kind laugh.
“Cabrón de Ningún Lado, world-class assassin, can wipe out an entire cartel with a fountain pen. But he cannot find parking. This is so sad, no?” He’d infused more Mexican street into his already robust accent, so Evan knew he had to trust what was coming at him.
He said, “Fine.”
Cutting the line, he revved the gas and then punched the brake, wrenching the steering wheel.
All four tires flew across the slick pavement, the car arcing into a controlled 270-degree skid.
Still rotating, he floated across the neighboring lane behind a garbage truck and skipped between two parked cars and up across a curb ramp to tuck neatly into the side of a loading bay, nose pointed out, passenger door inches from the concrete embankment, bumper a foot and a half from the rolled-down dock door.
He cut the engine, lights muting, disappearing as surely as a hawk swooping into a hidden roost. The entire maneuver had taken less than two seconds.
Beyond the windshield, the city kept on in all its gyroscopic wonder without him.
Cloaked in darkness, he redialed through his pinche encrypted shit.
Aragón’s face loomed large. He was ensconced in his patrón armchair in the living room, that row of antique books behind him like he was a lawyer on a TV commercial. “You’re all shadowy. How do you say? The noir.”
“Yes. The noir.”
“I am glad you are done whining like a maricón about parking,” Aragón said. “And you know I support maricones so don’t be sensitive. You know what I am saying. Now as for Josephine, she showed up looking, what? Visible?”
“Ostentatious.”
“I don’t know that word. But whatever. She is a woman. Women are amazing. They are so deep and twisty and, eh, intuitiva. How they think? It is so different. And the feelings! It’s hard to believe they are the same species let alone that we are supposed to mate with them.”
“Joey’s not a woman. Not entirely. And no one’s mating with her anytime soon.”
“Fine. Females, then. Who knows what they have to negotiate in any setting? So you thought she was— What’s your word?”
“Ostentatious.”
“Too visible. Have you ever been to a club as a woman?”
Rhetorical questions annoyed Evan. He refused to answer.
Aragón was undeterred. “Then how do you know what she must do to figure her way and—cómo se dice?—ah, read the room? And this mission, it has you not so steady, eh? It has brought up fear in you. So you are seeing only Josephine’s blind spots, not the possibilities or advantages of her approach.
Maybe what she sees covers your blind spots. ”
“I don’t have blind spots. Not operationally.”
“Okay. So is that what you want for her? To be just like you?”
Evan started to answer, stopped, bit down on the inside of his lower lip. Aragón waited knowingly. A woman walked by with a little yappy dog. The light cycled from yellow to red to green. Across the street, a guy in a pickup tried to parallel park, missed the angle, got in on the second try.
Evan said, “No.”
“If you demand perfection, you will break her. Or create someone who is perfect in one way and one way only. Allow her more leeway.”
Evan said, “Fine.”
“But on the other hand?” Aragón shrugged. “Screw her feelings. She wants to operate? She has to learn.”
“Helpful,” Evan said.
Someone shouted, “A la mesa!”
“Coming!” Aragón rose from his armchair with a groan. “Keep open,” he told Evan. “Get rid of this black-and-white Nowhere Man thinking. And you will see what to do with Josephine. It is like with this woman you are helping. Sometimes we learn the most from people we most disagree with.”
“Five minutes ago, you wanted me to execute Luke Devine.”
“That hijo de su chingada madre isn’t ‘people,’” he said, and hung up.