Chapter 2
“All right, all right, all right, I’m coming!” I tumbled out of bed with a thump, muttering something about Sundays and landlords and stupid men who bought you drinks and didn’t have the decency to come home with you afterwards. My hair was a mess; it went into one of the worst buns I’ve ever made in my life and I splashed some water over my face, trying to wash away mascara and eyeliner.
These people really wanted to piss everyone in the building off, though. They didn’t stop pounding on the door until I wrapped my bathrobe around me and wrenched the door open.
“What? It’s eight in the morning, you—”
They knew exactly what time it was. More to the point, I got the sense they didn’t care at all. They practically knocked me over to get into my apartment. All three of them were tall, at least 6’2”, and they walked into my apartment like they owned the place, looking all around themselves like they were going to try to catch me selling drugs. My eyes went to their waists to see if they were carrying guns. Were they undercover cops? Were they going to accuse me of something?
No to the first one, but as it turned out, yes to the second.
“Where the hell is he?” one of them demanded. “Where’s he staying?”
“Wrong apartment.” I was scared out of my mind, but they didn’t need to know that. I crossed my arms, threw one hip out, and did my best New Yorker impression. “So get the hell out before I call the cops.”
“Listen, lady.” This guy seemed to be their ringleader. He pushed me up against the wall and I squeaked before I could stop myself. “Where the hell is he? We know you saw him last night. You think you can hide him?”
“I don’t…” His forearm was pressing against my windpipe, and spots were appearing in front of my eyes.
I was genuinely terrified. Everything my mother had warned me about came rushing back: home intruders, robbers, murderers, rapists. They’d nearly beaten down my door and here I was with three of them in the apartment, and I couldn’t even fight one of them off.
If there was any comfort, it was that the other two didn’t seem to be piling on. No one wanted to rip my pajamas off. In fact, neither of them were even checking me out at all. I gave them all a once over. They had the same look as Dominick, frankly, like maybe they boxed with bears in their spare time or something. Like someone had plucked a cowboy right out of Montana, put him in J Crew and sent him strutting around New York City. It was hot, but not particularly comforting when one of them was trying to choke me and the other two seemed interested neither in me nor in stopping him.
I managed another squeak.
“What was that?” The ringleader cocked his head to the side, and I got lost in his eyes. Black again, black on black—and that gave me the clue I needed.
“You mean…Dominick?” The words came out of me before I could stop them, and I regretted it pretty much immediately—you know, when his arm pressed even harder.
“That’s it. Where’s Dominick?”
“I don’t—know—” I choked and thrashed.
“You had a fight with him last night.” His arm loosened slightly over my windpipe.
“How the hell do you know that?” At this point, maybe I should have been scared. I mean, they were spying on me, right? But the truth was, I was furious. Someone had watched me get shot down, and now they had the nerve to come into my apartment in the morning and ask me about where my not-actually-one-night-stand was. I was pissed.
“We know a lot of what goes on in this city,” one of the other men said. He had shut the door neatly, so that no one in the hallway would watch me get choked to death. I was beginning to really hate that guy. He kept watching me like it was mildly interesting to see someone get beat up, but he didn’t really care, and maybe he’d rather go out for a hot dog instead. Screw him.
“That’s nice,” I said savagely, and the first one slapped me.
I made the mistake of spitting in his face. Like I said, I was pissed. The problem was, now so was he. He pushed me down on the ground and my arm was up behind my back before I could say a word. Worse? He’d done some weird thing that seemed to be squeezing all of the air out of my body. There went my plan of screaming loud enough to get someone to call the cops.
“Search the apartment.” His voice was cold, and the two other guys trouped past me obediently, disappearing like wraiths into the shadows of my itty bitty two bedroom. I couldn’t decide whether to be happy my roommate wasn’t here to get caught up in this, or feel sorry that she wasn’t here to call the cops. Mostly sorry. As they went, the first man bent down to my ear, his voice cold as anything I’d ever heard. “You lied to me. You said you didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m not going to forget that, you know.”
“I didn’t say that,” I had shivered convulsively at his voice. Now, I thrashed ineffectually. It didn’t accomplish anything, but it helped to feel like I was trying to get away. “I said you had the wrong apartment.”
He was just shaking me to warm me up for his next witticism when the call came back from one of the other rooms.
“He isn’t here.”
“Told you,” I muttered, and he flipped me over onto my back. To this day, I don’t know what told me to be so afraid of him, but I lay there petrified. He didn’t have a knife, or a gun, or anything. I mean, true, he was ripped, but it was clear that he hadn’t actually tried to kill me so far. Still, I lay there in a total terror. It was like my brain knew, down somewhere deep, what my conscious mind was never, ever going to come up with: this guy looked like a human, but he had claws and teeth I couldn’t see, and he was going to maul me if I didn’t cooperate.
“Then where is he?” he asked, crouching down over me, and I lost it.
“I don’t know! Goddammit, what is your problem? I met him last night, he shot me down—I don’t know where the hell he is!”
They looked at one another, as if assessing whether or not they thought I was telling the truth, and what’s-his-face considered me for a moment.
“Well, then, here you go, sweetheart.” He grinned as though the endearment was very clever. “Tell you what. All we need you to do is give Dominick a message.”
I stared at him, breathing hard, wondering what the hell he meant.
“Are you going to do it?” one of the others asked me. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“I don’t know if I can find him again,” I said honestly. Apparently, I was still naive enough to think that if they understood the situation, they’d stop trying to involve me.
“Well, you’d better find him again,” the ringleader told me. “See, we’ll know if he doesn’t get the message. Understand?”
“I don’t know where he is any better than you,” I told him a bit desperately. “If you saw us fight, you saw all there was to see.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I think you might want to track him down. I think he might let you.” His smile was truly frightening. His teeth looked human, but with the strong suspicion of also all being pointed. I don’t know how to describe it, but my dumb animal brain knew what was up. I tried to scrabble away out of instinct and came up against another one of them, standing there to block my escape. He smiled down at me, and it was one of the most terrifying things I had ever seen.
“You have it all wrong,” I said. I swallowed. I was genuinely frightened: what if they came back? What if I couldn’t find Dominick and they thought it was my fault and came back and…what was it, exactly, that they were threatening? The fact that it didn’t seem to be violent rape wasn’t exactly comforting.
“I don’t think we do,” said the first one. “I think you’ll find him. And you’ll tell him that we stopped by.”
“Who the hell are you?” I choked out.
“You know,” said the third guy. He hadn’t spoken up yet, but his voice was just as gravelly and growly as the first two. “I think she might actually be telling the truth. I don’t think she knows where he is.”
“Well, she’s going to find him for us, isn’t she? And she doesn’t need to do anything special, just give him a message.”
“What message?” I just wanted them to get out. “Just tell me the damned message.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said encouragingly, like he had just managed to convince me not to do something incredibly stupid. “Here’s what you tell him: that James stopped by.”
“That’s it?”
“That we’re going to find him soon, and that he might as well bring himself in.” He smiled again. “You can remember that, right?”
I nodded furiously, and then from their expectant silence, I realized they were actually waiting for me to repeat it back. Were they in some kind of gang? Was this The Godfather or something? Did the Mob only employ people with black eyes?
Oh god, was Dominick in the mob? What had I gotten mixed up in?
I tried not to sigh.
“I’ll tell him James stopped by, and that you’re going to find him soon, so he might as well bring himself in,” I repeated tonelessly. My throat really hurt, and I could only hope it wasn’t going to bruise. Being a cocktail waitress isn’t exactly a skill-based profession so much as a looks-based one, and my rent wouldn’t take kindly to it if I was sent home without a paycheck until the bruises faded.
“There you go.” They had the nerve to step over me to get out of my apartment. They didn’t offer to help me up or anything; not the Mob, then. The Mob had manners, I was given to understand. At the door, their ringleader turned back to look at me.
“Remember now,” he said, almost pleasantly, “if he doesn’t get the message in three days, we’ll come find you.”