Chapter 36 Scary Fucking Friend
Scary Fucking Friend
Manny Llorente was terrified. And profoundly sore.
His tendons hurt and his cartilage hurt and his fucking fascia hurt.
His skin was marbled with purple blotches from popped blood vessels, which was evidently what happened when you got yourself vacuum-sealed like a chicken breast. The handcuffs hadn’t helped either, or the hard plastic backseat of the fed car, or the harder bench he’d slept on in holding.
Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was as bad as his worst nightmares, but the booking officer told him he was lucky the even-worse MCC had closed, said it had been nicknamed the Guantánamo of New York.
Petrified, Manny watched a cockroach scuttle across the concrete seam where floor met wall.
After he’d been processed, he’d been deloused, given prison blues in which to await arraignment, and handed a tidy square of belongings—sheet, pillow, slip-on shoes, toothbrush, bar of soap.
His disposable thin-as-paper underwear chafed the insides of his thighs.
He could not believe this was real. He could not believe any of this was actually happening to him.
A scrawny meth-head roommate and an overflowing toilet welcomed him to his jail cell. The power was out, the cell like a walk-in freezer, and the sheet on the stained mattress was threadbare and scratchy.
“What’re you in for?” the cellmate asked.
“I’m not,” Manny said. Even to his own ears, his voice was high-pitched, warbling with denial. “I’ll be out any second. My lawyer’s coming to get me. I’m not supposed to be here.”
The air was thick and stifling, reeked of sewage, and—and—
He was hyperventilating, choking on his own breath.
A correctional officer was banging on the bars. Manny hadn’t passed out, not exactly, but he felt distant from himself, segregated from the terror crawling through his veins.
“You asked for a call,” the CO said, unlocking the door.
Manny’s legs shook as he marched down the corridor. Arms stuck through bars, whistles, the repetitious grunts of someone jacking off.
The phone bank was crowded, the narrow room reeking of BO.
Manny was given a phone card with limited minutes. He called his brother again.
“Did you talk to a lawyer?”
“Yeah, man. Told you. He’s on it.”
“When can he get here?”
“It’s Sunday, man.”
“You don’t get it, Richie. I can’t be here. Do you hear me? I cannot be here. This is a place for animals. I’m not gonna make it. I’m not cut out for this. I can’t be in here. Not a second longer. I have money, so much fucking money, you have to make this happen for me. You have to—”
“Manny, I told you. I did what you asked. I got an expensive lawyer. I handled it for you.”
Behind Manny, a big Mexican dude with a goatee circled his finger: Hurry it up. His slicked-back hair and robust mustache glistened with sweat. A sumo-wide beer gut stretched his inmate shirt low, sagging down past his crotch. His pants, bizarrely, had neat creases from an iron.
Manny came back to the call, gripping the old-fashioned black receiver, whisper-shouting into the phone. “This isn’t fucking handled, Richie.”
“I gotta go. Maddie has softball practice.”
“I can’t be in here, man. I cannot be in here.”
A long pause. In the background, Manny could hear voices, a door shutting, his niece laughing. Sounds of life, of ordinary life in an ordinary house. His heart ached for it, for anything like it. To be out of here.
“I told you, Manny. Your job”—Richie said the word the way he felt about it—“it’s not a good job. I told you it was bad fucking news, Manny. That it would come to this.”
“What are you saying, Richie? You saying I deserve this? You saying I got what was coming?”
Scratching noises, then a muffled shout, “Be there in a second, sweet girl.” Richie came back to the line. “Know what, Manny? Maybe you do.”
He cut the line.
Manny stood there until the dial tone bleated in his ear. Outside, he had so much power. But in here?
Bile welled up in him, scouring his throat, resentment and rage and marrow-deep terror. He didn’t know what to do, where to vent everything boiling inside him.
He had a number.
They did use burners, the White On Posse, but that scrawny douche ringleader—what’d he call himself? Taz?—sometimes texted from his real phone. Manny got on him about that, couldn’t take the risk, and every time the dumb little shit pinged him, the digits scorched his memory.
He punched them now.
One ring. Two. Three.
“Yuh?”
The kid could barely talk. His brain, rotting inside the skull.
“You stupid motherfucker,” Manny hissed. “You fucked me.”
“Wha? Wud happened?” Taz didn’t sound particularly concerned. In fact, he sounded stoned.
“I’m in fucking MDC is what you did. ’Cuz of that dumb bitch you grabbed off the subway. She has a scary fucking friend.”
Bobbling sounds as the phone was handed over.
A different voice. Harder. “Dude, relax, relax.”
“It’ll blow over,” a third voice said.
He was on speaker.
Someone else: “Like when we dealt with that one crazy pastor.”
“This is no fucking pastor,” Manny said. “Far from it. And you guys are next.”
“No way he finds us. We’re fine.”
“You’re not fine. My whole operation is burned.”
Stuttering laughter, slow and medicated. “We’re fine. We can do this ourselves. We got the cameras. We got the dicks.”
More stoned sniggering.
The connection broke. A lobster-claw hand had hooked over the cradle switch.
Meat swayed beneath the forearm, thick as a thigh.
From behind, a yielding wall of flesh shoved into Manny, a stink like mildew wafting over his shoulder.
A wash of cold shuddered through him, his sphincter tightening. He was afraid to turn around.
“I tol’ you to hang up, ese.”
Manny stepped away, eyes lowered. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”
The fat man faced him, head cocked back, looking down his nose, breathing noisily through his nostrils. Manny felt the breeze of the exhalation. On the side of the man’s neck, 13 was inked in a Roman font. Three dots at the corner of his eye. Ms on his chin, both cheeks.
Mexican Mafia.
“Word is you a chomo.”
“Chomo?”
“A skinner, bitch. Diaper sniper. Kiddie fiddler.”
“No.” Manny backed away, glancing around for a correctional officer. “No, no, no. I was just a middleman. The money guy—an editor, bro. Like: film editing. Coding. A producer. That’s it. That’s all. Just a middleman.”
“So you make kiddie porn?”
“No, no, no. I didn’t. I don’t. None of the girls were underage, man.”
The fat man wet his lips. “Girls,” he said.
Manny was crying. He couldn’t help it. He’d shriveled up right there against the wall. “No, not like that.”
The fat man grabbed the saggy hem of his shirt and tugged it high, leaning back and wheezing with the effort.
Across his heart was an elaborate tat of a Mexican girl in what looked like a confirmation dress, a lace veil pulled back from her face. In flowing script beneath: Celeste Garcia and two dates showing a twelve-year lifespan.
He let go of his shirt but it stayed high, riding the bulge of his gut.
“My angel,” the man said. “She was my angel.”
I’m just the middleman, Manny thought, but he couldn’t push the words out of his head.
“See ya on the unit,” the fat man said. “Chomo.”