Chapter 4
FOUR days later, Griff realized that Dante was actualy, consciously, trying to avoid him, and he had no idea why.
Actualy, Griff didn’t realize it until breakfast the third day after that Gowanus wreck while eating oatmeal in his father’s kitchen and staring at that $500 rol sitting on the table next to the maple syrup.
Hell. Half the week had gone by with him holding a wad of cash. Dante had vanished off the face of the earth with no explanation.
Griff felt like an asshole carrying around that much money, but he didn’t want to redeposit it. He knew that Dante needed it and stil didn’t know how to get it to him. He drove to Dante’s brownstone, but it was dark. Freaky. He caled the Anastagios, but they were worried too because they hadn’t heard from their son.
Dante wasn’t at any of the bars and he didn’t answer his cel.
There was no one to cal. Griff tried to be logical. Maybe Dante was on a long date? What if he was overreacting? Was he just being jealous or possessive?
Last thing he wanted to do was involve anyone else in his own ridiculous feelings. Panic blossomed and drove long roots into his chest.
Eleven hours later, Griff was out of his skul with worry and violent scenarios: Dante was sick and couldn’t get to a phone; Dante was unconscious in a ditch; Dante had fled the country; Dante had been shot by a jealous husband; Dante had gotten caught in an explosion in a borrowed jacket and couldn’t be identified.
Fucking horrible.
For once, Griff understood in his bones how the wives felt when firemen didn’t cal to check in regular. By ten that morning, Griff started caling other firehouses around Brooklyn. Everyone thought they’d seen Anastagio, but no-I-guess-not-sorry. Not since the game last Monday. Have you tried his house?
Griff made more cals and traced the gossip. Using his dad’s name and rank, he made a cal to headquarters and got a piece of the puzzle from a supervising dispatcher. He rang up Bed-Stuy and got a lead from a probie on Ladder 111 who didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to talk about where Dante had been. Ladder 111/Engine 214’s nickname was “the Nuthouse” for a reason. Their neighborhood was batshit: crackhouse fires and huge arson scams. These men walked into crazy, video-game-level destruction on a daily basis.
The probie pointed Griff to a commander on Staten Island who’d just gotten back from a casino weekend in Jersey. And there was a site boss at a new office building going up on the waterfront. He tried Ferdinando’s in case Dante had stopped for lunch at some point. Finaly Griff caled his own firehouse and had one of the lieutenants check the duty roster.
Ding-ding-ding.
Two nights ago, Dante had come in a half-hour late but done someone else’s tour. He’d delivered a baby in the subway and worked a pizzeria fire on King Street before taking off. Oh, and Tommy remembered seeing his car up the block.
The fuck? Why didn’t he answer his phone?
Bit by bit, he put Dante’s last few days together. From what Griff could tel, his best friend had spent half the week in Atlantic City, missing al his tours. He’d got back late and picked up an unscheduled long shift, then six hours of construction over on Columbia Street, and then snuck to cover a helish action-movie tour for some crazy asshole on the 111 on what should have been his twenty-four off. And now, with about three hours of sleep under his belt, he was dragging his ass back to their house for more punishment.
He’d been working straight for more than 48 hours and only Griff had any idea.
Fuck his death wish. I’m gonna kill him.
In his truck, Griff white-knuckled his steering wheel as he drove. The rol of bils burned against his leg. He knew something was seriously screwed up, but Dante was holding out on him. He had to know that Griff would do anything to help. What was so bad he couldn’t say?
Dante was too proud to ask for help, but this was crazy. They weren’t supposed to work that many tours in a row. It was completely and clearly suicidal.
Dante was breaking al kinds of regs and had just figured no one would notice?
Back after the World Trade, everybody had worked a twenty-four in four tours. Off duty, the men just puled a tour with another group on another engine.
Nobody went home and their families understood. Hel, the families were volunteering at the Pit or the hospitals. Each man did a tour at his station, then headed into Manhattan to pitch in with a crew on the ground, hit a tour at the Pit, and then spend his day off going to funerals. Day four he started back at his station again.
Rinse, repeat. But that had been a national emergency.
Here, Dante was putting himself and everyone around him in danger for some stupid-ass reason. Griff thought about what could have happened to his best friend and thought he was going to puke.
ATMing, the guys caled it. When you started scrambling for money to cover bils and just kept jumping into half-legal work to scrape together cash in a hurry. You treated the emergencies like an automated teler with no limit—you punched in a code and punched in a code until eventualy it punched back and you ended up fucking barbecue in a zippered bag down the city morgue.
Griff swerved the truck, distracted. A yelow cab honked at him as he turned onto Court Street. He was speeding, but he had to get there before Dante went out on a cal.
Why Atlantic City? What about the cash?
Griff wracked his brain as he threaded through traffic toward the firehouse. What were the possibilities? Gambling, drugs, hookers, blackmail. None of them seemed like Dante. He partied, but most of his money went where it was supposed to: food and mortgage and beer and cable. Could someone have gotten him hooked up in some swindle?
Griff’s heart pounded with a toxic blend of anxiety and anger as he raced the clock through the narrow blocks, trying not to hit anything alive.
When he turned onto the right block, he didn’t even bother looking for a parking space. He yanked his truck into a space in front of a hydrant, knocking the tires against the curb at a stupid angle. He kiled the engine and puled the emergency brake. He climbed out and slammed the door so fast it caught his seat belt.
They could just give him the fucking ticket.
Halfway to the station, he realized he’d locked his keys inside. He didn’t turn or even break his stride.
INSIDE the station, Griff jogged past the turnout gear and the rig, headed for the stairs. Up in the bunk room, he found the arrogant son of a bitch making his goddamn bed.
“I know. I know. I fucked—” Dante walked between the narrow beds toward him with his hands up like a white flag… guilty, exhausted surrender al over his unshaven face. His clothes were stil smoky from the Nuthouse tour. Idiot.
Griff crossed the room in four strides. “After working a double?! And the Nuthouse? Are you fucking crazy?!” He swung and his fist connected solidly with Dante’s square jaw.
- Bam! -
Dante crumpled to the floor like a pile of sooty laundry. He stayed down there, one arm raised defensively. “Jesus.”
“Are you stupid? You coulda got kiled, Anastagio.” Griff shook his hand, feeling guilty and righteous in equal measures. “Some kinda hero. Or you just love bagpipes so much you want a funeral? Did you think about that? Your fucking family? People….” He tried to take a breath. “People care about you, jackass!” The noise had brought an audience clomping up the stairs. Three younger guys shuffled in the doorway, not sure if they should interfere and not realy wanting to try and rush the giant, crazy redhead. They eyed his shoulders and massive fists warily.
Next to his half-made bed, Dante raised a hand to them to let them know to stay outside.
Good choice.
Griff hissed at him through gritted teeth. “For money. Money! The FDNY ain’t a fucking piggy bank you can keep cracking open when you need, D.” A wiry probie took a brave step into the bunkroom, “You okay, Anastagio?” His eyes flicked to Griff; his hands came up, trying to keep the peace.
On the floor, Dante spat and nodded. He waved everyone back to their bunks. The crewmembers shuffled away from the door, muttering, and then they were alone again.
Dante’s mouth was bleeding, and immediately Griff felt like an asshole. Wel, he was an asshole apparently.
“Are you on drugs? Gambling? What the hel did you do? I had to lie to your parents.” Griff lowered his voice by force of wil. He kept his fists at his sides.
“Please. Whatever it is, I can fix it. I can help. But you gotta tel me. C’mon . ” Down there on the floor, Dante shrugged, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry.” Griff wanted to offer a hand but knew he was too scary stil. He was afraid he might pul his friend into a relieved embrace, so he stood like a hypnotist with his hands hovering: you’re getting sleeeeepy.
Griff felt like an ass dragging family bulshit into the station. Shit. Everyone hated it when the wives “dropped in” to surprise one of the guys with melodrama.
It was crazy enough here without the rest of the world intruding. And besides, the firemen gossiped worse than nuns on holiday.
“I was trying to make some money at the casinos. Atlantic City. It was stupid and I lost.” Dante rubbed his jaw and licked his bloody lip. “I needed a miracle and it didn’t show.”
“So ask me! Whatever it is. Ask me, man. I’l get you a miracle. But you gotta say what… Just say.” Griff searched his best friend’s exhausted face, begging for an explanation. “I freaked out. Didn’t know what to think.” True.
“Sorry.” Dante nodded. The circles under his eyes were almost purple. “I know. Please… I’m sorry, Griffin.” Jesus, he looks like hell in a bucket.
Griffin lowered his hands to his pockets, jingling change. “We thought you’d gotten hurt. Your family is frantic.” That was a lie, pretty much.
“That’s why I didn’t tel anyone. I….” Dante fel silent. He dragged a knee under himself and tried to stand up. He stayed down. “Ow.”
“Talk to me, D.” Griff breathed slowly in the room of little beds, waiting for Dante to find the words for whatever it was.
“They’re gonna take my house. The bank.”
Dante’s house was a ramshackle four-story brownstone in the rougher part of Cobble Hil, right on the edge of Red Hook. He’d bought it out of foreclosure and it showed. When he’d closed on it, there were wals and floors and even ceilings missing in some rooms. The stairs hadn’t reached the top two floors. The garden in back was an ash-heap, and the damp basement was stil stacked with about two decades of catalogs and car magazines. Working on his days off, Dante had done three years of renovation before he could even move into the ground floor. Al the guys had helped him chisel away at the projects; his brother Paulie gave him surplus materials, but the list was big enough to walpaper the parlor. Once he got it fixed up, he planned to rent out a couple floors as swank apartments, but that was a stil a couple years away. Stil, since 9/11, Dante had lived for that house, and Griff would’ve done anything to help him keep it.
Down on the floor, Dante puled onto one knee, gazing up like a bedraggled knight trying to propose marriage. “Second notice, man. I can’t keep paying late.”
“Since when?” Griff shook his head and reached down to him, feeling like a bag of dirt.
Dante reached up and took Griff’s hand, puling himself to his feet. He winced and wobbled, shaking his arm out. “Couple months. Wel, five. I know it’s a shithole, but it’s my shithole. I’m just not ready to be a fucking failure, G. You know?” Griff knew. He thought about the musty basement room he slept in at his father’s house. He thought about al the guys who had crashed at Dante’s and never put cash in for dinner or beer even, al the humpty-dumpty marriages Dante had helped put together again in his stupid, amazing, generous way. “I’m sorry.”
“You fucking should be. I’m not stupid. Wel, I may be, but I’m not being stupid at this particular moment, al right? Fuck! You’re too strong to be hitting me.”
“I worry about you.” Griff looked at the rows of narrow beds, the posters taped to the wals, then back.
Dante grinned a little. “I worry about me too! I’m the looker. What are you bastards gonna do for sloppy seconds if you fuck up this face?” He rubbed his jaw, opening his mouth to test the soreness. The circles under his eyes made him look like he hadn’t slept in a week. Maybe he hadn’t. “I don’t want to let those assholes take my house. I won’t let them.”
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“Didn’t you ever… haven’t you cared about something that much, enough to wreck yourself for it?” Dante’s eyes bored into his like a judgment, even though he didn’t realize what he’d said.
Haven’t I?
They were eye to eye and Griff almost couldn’t take it.
“You gotta bigger heart than anyone, Griff.” Dante’s rough hand reached around and held the back of his neck so he couldn’t look away.
Griff didn’t try. He swalowed and shifted his weight uncomfortably, but he just held that searching stare without blinking and knew he’d do anything, literaly anything, to help Dante. He knew al about wrecking himself for something that mattered. “So what, you’re gonna sel a kidney? Rob a bank?”
“No. I figured out something. A guy offered me a kinda job.” A smile bloomed on his split lip, and suddenly Dante was happy as a kid at Christmas. “The other night at the Bone. You met him: the bald guy in the suit.”
Griff tried to find the man’s face in his memories of the 9/11 party. He remembered a shaved head, a suit. Oh yeah, the fight with the Puerto Rican.
“The Russian?”
“Yeah. Alek something. I got his card. Apparently he runs some kinda website.”
“Alek does.” Griff felt a cold pebble of anxiety harden in his gut. “What kind of website?”
“You know… dirty.” Dante waggled his eyebrows.
Keep it together, Griffin. “You mean like porno?”
“Uhhh, duh?” Dante sat down on a bed and stared at Griff. “It ain’t a cooking class.”
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Anastagio.” Griff sat on the bunk opposite. He scrabbled in his brain, trying to think of an argument that would keep his buddy’s pants on and his ass off the Internet. “Actualy that may be the worst idea you’ve ever had in your life. Which is saying something given your checkered history.”
“Har har. I mean, it’s not gross or anything. Like animals or pudding or whatever. And it’s way more money than we make eating smoke.” Dante nodded at the obvious reason and logic of the idea, his face calm. “Totaly professional. He shoots in a studio out on Avenue X. Sheepshead Bay.” The ice in the pit of Griff’s stomach grew spikes, and the angry blush crept up his throat onto his face. “You, uh… wait. It’s like a naked dudes site? Alek runs a website with guys flashing their junk and he wants you on it?”
“Wel, I didn’t have a vagina last time I checked, G.” Dante roled his eyes and his face creased into an exasperated frown. “So, yeah, it’s guys.” Griff pressed. “Have you gone to this site? Checked it out or whatever?”
“I’m gonna. I mean, I don’t have Internet at my place yet and I can’t exactly”—his voice dropped to a cop-show murmur and his eyes flicked to the door
—“surf to Donkey Dongs ‘R’ Us while I’m working.”
“You’re kidding. That’s what it’s caled?” As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Griff wished he hadn’t asked.
“Nah. It’s Hotrod something. No, wait. That’s not it.” He dug a card out of his walet. “HotHead-dot-com. Hot head. Get it?” Shit.
“I get it.” HotHead. Now he’d never be able to forget it, and knowing would make him nuts .
Dante put the evil little card back in his walet. “He’l pay me almost a grand to get undressed on camera. It’l take a couple hours. No sweat.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, ya know, jerk off too… I guess.” Dante’s eyes flicked to the door again as if he expected the rest of the crew to stomp in here looking for chili. “Just polish the pole. For cash! Like I don’t do that four fucking times a day already.”
Another thing I should never know.
This was not how Griff had imagined this day, or even this conversation, going. For once, he wished his best friend had an ounce of shame. The idea of Dante jerking off was bad enough, but for an audience? A male audience? A male audience of milions? The ice in his stomach melted into cold sweat.
Jesus H. Christmas.
Right then, Griff realized what the two men had been fighting about that night at the bar, why the kid had taken a swing, why Alek had been so cagey. Duh.
He had found some dude with a six-pack and bils he couldn’t pay. Bingo. He had shot a skin flick with that little Latino, and then his girl had found out . Fuckety-fuck. Most likely he’d come to that 9/11 party to scout talent: buff blue-colar dudes down on their luck. In this economy, there was a surplus.
Now Griff felt like a complete asshole; he’d defended this pervy Russian scumbag against some poor dope he’d taken advantage of. He hadn’t known; he hadn’t known! He wished he could go back in time and help the little Puerto Rican beat the living shit out of Alek before he had a chance to make this slimy offer to other desperate guys.
Like my best friend.
Last thing he damn wel needed: access to Dante naked and aroused at the click of a mouse.
Griff stood and sat down on the little bed next to Dante. “Y’know, it’s not free money. It’s not fucking fun or whatever you expect or else that prick wouldn’t pay people to do it.”
“He’s offered me close to a grand. Wel, six hundred plus bonuses. I don’t have any hang-ups. If I did it a couple times I’d be able to get out of the hole.” Dante counted off the porno benefits on his perfect fingers. “Pay off bils. Make my note. Plus it’l be great for my ego.”
“Just what you fucking need.” Griff roled his eyes and snorted.
“You know, you could come with—”
“No.” Griff shot that down fast, nostrils flaring as he dragged air into his lungs.
“Alek was asking if you’d be—”
“Fuck no! And I don’t think you’re going near that pimp once you think it through. Are you brain-damaged?! What if your folks found out? Or the fucking department? The neighborhood? People who love you. Imagine if your mom saw you greasing your dork. C’mon.”
“Bulshit. Ma doesn’t even know how to get online. Plus, there are like thousands of these jizz-biz websites, so it’l be my needle in the haystack.” Dante shook his head and ran a hand through his wavy hair. “Who’s to know? I don’t get why you’re so mad.” Griff turned toward Dante, talking directly to him as if he were a head injury patient in a pediatric psych ward. “Porn is forever, Dante. When you realize that you’ve made a huge fucking mistake and want to undo it, your cumshot is going to be everywhere, and that jam is not gonna get back in your jar.”
“So?” Dante pursed his lips and pretended not to hear what Griff was saying. “I might open up a whole new dating pool.”
“Yeah, yeah. You joke about it, but you’re not gonna want your junk floating around where every perv in the world can get at it. Nothing is worth that.”
“Oh.” Gears turned in Dante’s head. Porn was something they al joked about, and he didn’t want to be a joke.
Think. Think, asshole. Griff mentaly crossed his fingers and offered a little prayer, watching Dante mul the possibilities. He tried to think of worse things he could predict to scare sense into his best friend, but he kept quiet for fear of giving him any dumber ideas.
Dante’s face fel. “I see what you mean.”
“Tel him no.”
“It’s a lot of money though. Seriously.”
“I’l get you the money.” Griff pinned him with cool gray eyes. “Look at me; I promise you. I swear to God and the angels on my mother’s grave. Whatever it takes, Anastagio. I wil make sure you don’t lose your house. I wil take care of you no matter what. Okay?” Dante smiled and gave a little nod of sad gratitude. “I know, G. I know you wil. I was just trying to take care of myself.”