In the Nick of Time (28 page)

Nick shrugged and unwrapped his salad; the limp green lettuce looked as if it had seen better days. He balled the plastic up into a tight ball and tossed it over to the side of the table in disgust.

“I thought we were friends. I thought we were better than this!” Tomas continued, not letting up.

“Don’t make this about you, okay? It wasn’t about you.” He kept his head down as he shoved a mouthful of Romaine between his lips, worked it over good and hard while a small cherry tomato burst inside of his mouth, leaking its seedy guts all over the place.

“You coulda called and told me…”

“And said what? ‘A Tomas, pull over. Guess what, man? My blood type isn’t O negative; it’s one hundred proof! I’m a raging alcoholic, a ruthless drunk, now let’s go arrest some other drunks today. Hello hypocrisy, how the hell are ya?!’”

“You know damn well what I mean, Nick. I had to learn about it after Captain called us all in the meeting room talking about Nick’s gone, he has some personal issues to address, get back to work. You think that was fair? You think that was the right way for me to find out?!”

“A lot of things in life aren’t fair, Tomas.”

“Yo, really?! Really, Nick? This is all I get, huh? After all of these damn years? Fuck you, Nick.” The man angrily tossed his damn napkin onto the table. His left eye twitched a little just as Nick recalled it would when his temper flared. “This shit isn’t right and you know it!”

Nick slowly looked away, then lazily glared at the guy.

“Fine. You want to know what the deal was? I was trying to protect you. The less you knew, the better. I did it because I care about you.”

“So you suffered in silence? You got high in silence? You were drinking… in silence. Did you drink when you were with me? I never smelled it… not once! I gotta nose like a blood hound.”

Nick sat back in his seat, and briefly closed his eyes.

Fuck. I knew this was going to happen…

“Yeah, Tomas, I drank sometimes when we were together. I drank first thing in the morning. I drank in the afternoon sometimes, too. When we had to help with the graveyard shift every now and again, I’d do it then, too. I took charcoal pills to cover the smell. That shit tastes awful, but it masked the odor and I also gargled mouthwash.”

“Charcoal pills?” The guy rolled his eyes. “You had it down to a science, huh?”

“Pretty much.” Nick dabbed at the corner of his mouth and leaned forward, both hands on the table. “Look, Tomas. You’re my friend, more like a brother. You have to understand, I have a lot of guilt that I’m still working through. You think I have an attitude with you? It’s became I’m embarrassed and didn’t want to have to do this with you right now. But you’re here, just like you said. I’m sorry, okay?” He shrugged, raised his hands in exasperation, and placed them back down. “I just don’t have any answer for you that is going to make it okay, so you can understand it, you know? It’s a sickness. I’m sick, brother… I did what I needed to do to protect the sickness, instead of trying to get well.” He leaned back in his seat, looked briefly over to his right at two guys playing a game of cards. “Now, I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to get better, to get my life back. I fucked up, man… I fucked up big time.”

Tomas sat there for a while, rolling his tongue around in his mouth, then crossed his arms over his heaving chest.

“I’m just tryin’ to understand.” He nodded, a sad smile on his face. “I uh, I came down here to see how you were, see how you were doing.”

“I know. And now that you’re here, I’m glad.”

They grinned at one another as Paul Simon crooned, ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.’

“Once I looked at you, I guess I got a little angry, wanted some answers. I miss you, man. I fucking miss the
hell
out of you. It’s not the same without you there.”

“I miss all of you, too… I think about you every day, Tomas.”

“I should kidnap ya,” Tomas joked. “I should put you over my shoulder and haul your ass outta here.”

Nick tilted his head to the side and chuckled a bit.

“That’s funny… Hey, you know, I remember sitting on my stoop one time when I was about eight years old and watching all the cars and travel buses going up and down the street.” He moved his finger back and forth, as if a long line of vehicles were parading by right at that second for the two to see. “I wanted to be in one of those cars, and never come back. I wanted someone to jump out of his or her big, shiny automobile, kidnap me, and take me to a land of milk and honey. I used to have crazy ideas like that as a child,” he hooted grimly. “I used to see news stories about kids being abducted, too. Shit, I even knew a kid that had been grabbed right up the street from me and never heard from again. I envied her for a day or two…”

“Maaaan.” Tomas swayed back and forth in his seat. “I can’t even imagine you being like that, you know? You just seem so different now.”

“Well, we change, we grow. Sometimes we grow down into the ground instead of up towards the clouds. I think I grew crooked.” He smiled wide, showing all of his teeth.

“Me too.”

“Nah.” Nick scratched between his brows with his index finger. “Tomas, you’re one of the good guys, true blue. People would call it stages or phases, you know, when I would be running around as a kid, getting into trouble. It wasn’t a phase; something was going on with me, something wrong. Anyway, I would ask God to have some lady stop at a red light, see me sitting there, come grab me and take me to her nice, big penthouse uptown.”

Tomas burst out laughing, causing Nick to offer an awkward grin.

“You wanted the big time, huh?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “In my mind she was always a blond lady with long, wavy hair, a silky red scarf tied around her neck and white gloves, that would go all the way up to her elbows, you know, like in the old movies. She’d smell like lilacs and have a mouth covered in China red lipstick…looking like a damn 1950’s movie star. She’d have a lot of money too and would be crazy about little ol’ me. Tell me she always wanted a son just like me… And then we’d live happily ever after.”

“Were you drinkin’ too then, man?!” Tomas joked, slapping his knee.

“Nope, just had a crazy imagination is all. None of that ever happened, obviously. I was so bad, I couldn’t even get kidnapped.” He rubbed his hands together like a homeless guy about to put them before a trashcan lit for heat.

Tomas burst out laughing, “You’re a real character, Vitale. Hey, let me ask you something.” He took another sip of his Sprite.

“Yeah… did you get enough to eat, hog?”

“Yeah. The pizza was a little greasy, but it was good.”

Nick nodded.

“So, you had a question. What is it?”

“You’re in here, but to me, you were really headed in the right direction. Shows looks can be deceiving.”

Nick nodded.

“Honestly, I think you were born to do this, Nick. I loved working with you, man, because you are just as dedicated as I am. I know you didn’t have it easy as a kid, we’ve talked a lot, you know? But how could you go from wanting to be kidnapped to wanting to help? I find you confusing, but… I’m asking the questions now, and I hope you humor me, and tell the truth.”

“Of course I will; it’s time. I need to—”

“You’re coming back, right?”

“What? To work? If you all will have me.” He clicked his teeth and winked.

“It’s not in my hands.” Tomas threw up his arms. “But you best believe I’m rooting for you. I need my old partner back; I need you like, yesterday. Anyway though, tell me about it.” He scooted his chair in closer and waited.

“Well, you already know a bit about my history, but after a while, some things get played out, or you get bored, or shit catches up with you.”

“What did you do?”

I did what all kids do when left with no other options. I grew up.” He took another deep breath. “I stayed in B-Ville and drank, stole, and ran the streets until after many years of facing few to no consequences for my actions, I was finally busted. The day of reckoning had arrived!” He threw his hands in the air and shook them, laughing at his own misfortune.

“Who shot ya!” Tomas bobbed his head as he did his imitation of Biggie Smalls.

Nick burst out laughing.

“Man… you brought back some memories with that. Let me tell you though, the day things changed—at least my perception, I should say—is a day I’ll never forget. One autumn afternoon, two police officers nabbed my ass as a suspect for stealing inside a department store. They apparently had new cameras installed, and I hadn’t staked out the place again to find out. So anyway, I walked in there, cocky and bold, getting ready to do my usual monthly purge, not knowing guys like me had been set up for the kill. Anyway, there I was in the middle of the net for capture, so to speak. I didn’t even have a chance to get anything this time around. My luck had run out.

“One of the cops, an older short black guy with salt and pepper hair crossed his arms over his chest and said to me, ‘How old are you?’ I didn’t answer. He asked me again, and I told him, ‘Fourteen.’ That was a lie. I was sixteen, but I knew the younger I came across as, the safer I’d be.”

Tomas nodded as he listened to the story of yesteryear pour out from between his lips.

“He told me I was the same kid who’d hit the place a while back with a bunch of other hoodlums, that we had pantyhose over our faces and had gotten back in the stock room, stole a bunch of shit. That wasn’t true, it wasn’t me. I never wore any pantyhose over my head in all my life, but—”

“You wore Gina’s that one time at the Christmas party.”

“Oh shut up, man!” Nick burst out laughing. “Anyway, I was scared shittless because he was talking big time stuff, like jail time, getting me real amped up. Then, just like that, I didn’t even care anymore. It was so strange… One second, my heart was pounding, then the next, I could have almost fallen asleep from boredom. I just didn’t care about my life, Tomas… didn’t care at all. So anyway, he grabbed me up and put cuffs on me.”

“You got your own bracelets, felt like a big shot, right?”

“Hell, yeah!” Nick smirked. “I felt big about it now, glad in a way that I’d finally been arrested. I’d get my street cred and I’d never been to juvie before. But then he flipped the script on me and ruined everything. He told the other cop he’d handle this, so that just left him and me. When he got me to the police car, right, he pointed in my face and told me he wasn’t taking me to juvie or the police station or letting me go. My heart sank. He said he was taking me home to my mother and he was going to show her the tape of me robbing the back of the store all those weeks ago.”

“Ohhhh, no!” Tomas laughed lightly as he got good and into the story.

“Ohhhh, yeah! You can tell a Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn that he’ll have a record, that you’re takin’ him to juvie, but don’t tell him you’re taking him home to Ma!”

They both cracked up loud and hard, so much so, Nick’s eyes welled with tears.

Damn… I miss you Ma…

“He wasn’t bullshitting. Home to your mother…must’ve been worse than Hell.”

“Oh yeah, home to Ma, man! I cannot even explain to you the fear I had of her seeing me in action like that. Something about it tore me up inside, especially since I knew it wasn’t me and he’d give my mother a heart attack, tell ’er some stuff like that, a bunch of lies. Then I relaxed and realized, ‘Hell, she’d know her own son! I’m being silly, right?! She’ll tell the man.’ So I sat back, real proud of myself, got over it real quick. I wouldn’t give him my address though, but somehow he found out anyway and drove right up.

“We got there and Mom wasn’t home, right? Some of my friends were standing around, pointing and saluting me as I sat in the back of the police car, acting like I was chilling in the back of a limousine. I figured he’d surely have to take me to juvie then, since she wasn’t home, and everything would be just fine.”

“She still would have killed you in juvie. The one time I got in trouble in school, man, my mother promised to stomp me to death!” He laughed.

“No see, this is how I was going to play it. I would be on different turf, not home. She’d feel sorry for me, locked up like that. I’d tell Mom it was some misunderstanding, right? That they had the wrong guy, give her the rundown about how the police think all Hispanic kids look alike.”

“The race card! Classic!”

“Right! And a being FOTB,” he said with a shrug, “and having a rough time, she would believe me, I thought. I had it memorized in advance. I got my lies all worked out in my head. I’d even picked out my alibi. I had it all taken care of; the plan was hatched and running free. But my bubble was busted pretty damn fast. That stumpy fucker kept me with him for two hours, man, driving around and doubling back over and over! I couldn’t believe that shit.” He burst out laughing.

“He was determined… Sounds like you, man…sounds like something you’d do to a kid, Nick.”

Nick’s lips kinked in a smirk.

Yeah, I guess it does…

“Yeah… So, Mom got home, looking real tired. Her long, curly black hair was all flat, like she’d been caught in the rain. Her lipstick wasn’t bright red anymore—like she’d eaten something and worn it off, and her facial complexion seemed oily instead of freshly powdered. She always looked real pretty in the mornings but exhausted when she’d get back home from work. I took no accountability for being one of the reasons why.” He took a deep breath.

“So we get in the house and the guy asks if she’s got a VCR, right? We had one at that time—someone had gave her the old thing. He put the tape in, pushed play. I sat back on the couch with a smug smile on my face figuring this asshole is going to look real stupid in a minute or two. I figured, you know, like so many other guys, it was a case of mistaken identity.

“Well, the tape started to play and I recognized my friend Jonathan that I’ve told you about. I got kinda worried at that point, ’cause we all hung together. And then I saw some of my other friends, Judge, Liam and Kool, too. And there I was… with the pantyhose over my fucking head…”

“Ohhhh, man.” Tomas shook his head. “Busted!”