28. Mike
MIKE
Iopen the door for Nico, and he steps in with his jacket still half zipped, like he was halfway to somewhere else and changed his mind.
He doesn't take it off.
We sit at the table. I have sales reports and invoices stacked beside me.
"Do you want something to drink?"
"Frank Liu's dead," he says.
I look at him.
"Shot. Flushing, near his house. Two nights ago."
I look at him.
"How do you know?"
"I was doing some research on your brother since the bathroom incident. It came up."
"You've been running his name."
"It's what you pay me for." Nico watches me. "They're calling it a robbery gone wrong."
I push back from the table.
"You think Ryan did this."
"I think a lot of things line up that shouldn't." Nico's voice stays flat, the way it does when he's already decided and is waiting for me to catch up. "Frank Liu, shot outside his own house in a robbery."
"You know how many people want a DA dead?"
"I'm sure thousands," he says. "You have a bigger problem than you realize."
I stand.
The chair legs scrape the floor.
I walk to the bar, pick up a glass, and set it down again. My hands don't know what to do, so I give them nothing.
"He's the reason I went into the Marines; I was like him when I was eighteen. And he said if you stay on the streets, you get killed or end up in prison. You're smarter than me, you got to get out of here. The next day I joined the Marines."
Nico leans back. “Because of that he gets to ruin everything you've ever done with your life?"
I turn from the bar. "I didn't say that.”
“That is what you said. Where's the logic in throwing your life away for your brother?”
I look at the floor. At the scuff marks under the stools. At anything except him.
I reach for my keys.
"I'll go see him tonight."
"Mike."
I slide the keys into my pocket.
"I need to hear it from him."
"You already know."
Neither of us moves.
Finally, Nico exhales through his nose and sits forward.
We move to the computer. I pull up last quarter's sales figures and stare at them until the numbers stop being numbers. Nico points to payroll, liquor cost, a dip in Thursday revenue, and I nod at the right places. I even write something down.
But all I can see is Frank Liu on a sidewalk in Flushing.
All I can hear is Ryan laughing through prison glass.
Nico keeps talking.
I keep pretending I'm listening.
When I pull up, Ryan is on the front steps with three guys I’ve never seen before.
One is skinny, shaved head, cigarette burned almost to the filter. One stands near the railing, eyes moving up and down the block. The third is big. Thick neck, wide shoulders, Knicks hoodie stretched across his chest.
Whatever they’re talking about dies the second I walk up.
Ryan sees me and smiles.
“Hey, this is my brother, Mike.”
The skinny one squints at me through the smoke.
“Oh yeah, I remember you.”
I look at him, but I can’t place him.
“Alright we’re going inside,” Ryan says.
The big guy shifts on the step.
“What about the kilo?”
Ryan turns to him.
Slow.
“What did I say?”
The big guy looks down at Ryan, at the other two.
“I know, but we didn’t decide to do -”
Ryan steps in and hits him open-handed across the face so hard the sound cracks off the brick.
The big guy staggers sideways, grabs the railing, misses it, and drops to one knee on the concrete.
“I said, shut the fuck up.”
The skinny one looks away. The guy by the railing goes still.
Ryan steps down and kicks the big guy in the gut. All that size folds in half. The breath comes out of him in one ugly burst.
I grab Ryan by the arm and pull him back.
“Hey, take it easy.”
Ryan looks at my hand on him first.
His face is calm. That’s the ugly part.
“I told him to shut the fuck up and he’s still talking like we’re on The View.”
Ryan and I go inside.
The big guy is still on the sidewalk, curled around his ribs, his legs kicking weakly against the concrete while he tries to breathe.
Behind us, the skinny one and the guy from the railing move in fast, get him under the arms, and drag him down the block.
Ryan drops onto the couch and picks up the remote.
The television comes off pause in the middle of The Bold and the Beautiful. Beautiful people, expensive rooms, somebody crying like the world ended over a marriage that probably won’t last a week.
“What was that about?” I ask.
Ryan watches the screen.
“That was bullshit. Nothing.”
“Nothing?” I ask. “Are you selling again?”
“Let it go, okay.”
He turns up the volume.
“You watch this stuff?” I ask.
"Yeah, got into it in prison." He points to the screen. "This woman's supposed to marry this guy she grew up with, but her true love who everyone thought was dead shows up, and now she's upstairs crying in her wedding dress while everyone is waiting downstairs for her to come down."
"Heard about Frank Liu?" I say.
He pauses the television. "Heard about that from Elliot. Terrible."
"Shot outside his own house."
"That's what they're saying."
Carla comes in from upstairs with a laundry basket.
"Mike, I thought I heard your voice."
The silence stretches. I have my answer before he opens his mouth.
"He heard about Frank Liu."
"Terrible," my mother says.
"You don't know anything about it?" I say.
"He walked free for five years after what he and Janet Graham did to me." He sets the coffee down. "He's not walking free anymore; that's what I know."
"I'm not saying he didn't deserve it."
"Then what are you saying?"
I don't have an answer for that.
"I evened a score." Ryan's voice doesn't rise. That's the part that scares me — how calm he is, like he's talking about a debt he settled at the bar.
Carla sits on the couch next to him.
"He got what was coming," she says. "That's all."
"You're backing this."
"I'm backing my boy," she says it like it's obvious, like there's no version of the world where she wouldn't.
I put my hands on the back of the chair instead of sitting in it.
"You don't think you're going to be a suspect," I say to Ryan. "Recently released, motive on record, and Frank Liu turns up dead two weeks after your hearing."
"I've got an alibi."
"What alibi?"
"He was with me," Carla says. "All night. Watching a movie. I made him dinner."
"That's not an alibi; that's you lying for him."
"It's what I'll say if anybody asks." Carla's face doesn't move. "And nobody's going to ask twice. Not without proof."
Ryan leans back in the chair, arms crossed.
"And if they do ask — I'm suing him. I'm suing the whole Queens DA's office.
Why would I kill a man I'm suing? That's the question I ask right back.
A lawsuit's worth more to me than a body.
Not to mention, according to Janet Graham, Frank Liu is innocent, so why would I kill him? "
It's clean. Too clean. He's already thought this through, already built the story before he did the thing the story's supposed to cover.
"What about Janet?" I ask.
"She's got hers coming too," Ryan says.
The room goes quiet in a different way.
"Why? She got suspended."
"A fucking year! A year off her license, and then she walks right back into her life like nothing happened. Five years, Mike! I did five years for what she did, and she gets a slap on the wrist."
"He's right." Carla picks up Ryan's empty mug, moves to the sink like she's talking about grocery lists. "She has to pay too."
Ryan looks at me for a long moment. Something in his face shifts — not anger, something closer to reading.
"She's going to get hers," he says. "Like Frank."
Ryan puts the soap opera back on. He and Carla watch.
I feel it before I even decide to say it.
"Let me do it."
Ryan pauses the television again. Carla sits up.
"You want to do it?" Ryan asks.
"Yeah."
"You," Ryan says it slowly, turning it over. "You think you're up to that?"
"You think I didn't kill people in Afghanistan?"
Ryan looks me up and down. "You were in bed with this chick…"
"Frank Liu is killed, okay, lots of people want a DA dead."
"That's right," Ryan says.
"But not Janet Graham, prosecutor in Manhattan too, whose only connection to Frank right now is you. That's a hell of a coincidence."
"You really want to do this?"
"You need an alibi better than Ma. You go near her yourself; you're the obvious name. Motive, opportunity, a hearing two weeks ago where everybody in that room watched you stare her down. Cops will have you in an interrogation room in an hour."
Carla nods.
"I know her routine. I know when she's alone. I know things about her that nobody else does." I keep my voice even, the way I used to keep it steady on a range when everything in me wanted to shake.
Ryan's quiet, working it.
"You'll need an alibi," I say. "Somewhere public. Somewhere with cameras and a dozen witnesses."
Carla sets the mug down without a sound. She's watching me the way she used to watch Ryan when we were kids — like she's trying to decide if I mean it or if I'm about to disappoint her.
Ryan stands up. Crosses the kitchen slowly, stops. I can smell the coffee on his breath.
"You think you can do that?"
I don't blink.
"Yeah," I say. "I can do it."