Kiss of Evil (17 page)

There. A shadow to his left. Next to the chip stand.

There are two people standing there. A boy and a girl.

How had they gotten in? Tony B wonders, his heart racing a little. Why hadn’t he heard them? Had they come in the
back
?

They are young—the girl is in her late teens, the boy even younger, maybe sixteen—and they are staring at him. The girl is one hot-looking little bitch, that’s for sure. Trim, brunette, athletic. She isn’t dressed sloppy like a lot of the other girls who come in the store and tease him; the black girls with their baggy jeans unbuttoned and their tube tops wrapped tightly around their budding breasts. This one is white, slender, seductive, wearing a short denim skirt and flowered blouse, the kind of girl who always went for a man like Tony B. Sure he was into his fifties now, but he was a
young
fifties. Still had most of his hair, all of his front teeth. And he still had all the charm in the world when he needed it.

“We know each other?” he asks, bending the top of his
Racing Form
to make eye contact with the girl. He reaches over and drags a Newport from his pack, lights it. “We been introduced?”

“No,” the girl says. “You just look like someone we know.”

The girl’s voice is deep, like a woman’s. Her blouse is sheer and Tony B can just about make out the shape of her right breast. “Oh yeah?” he answers, trying to float a smile. “Harrison Ford, maybe?”

“No,” the boy says. “Like an uncle or something.”

The boy’s age is less determinable after he speaks. The kid is on the tall side, dark hair, dark eyes. He now seems younger than sixteen. Like a big thirteen-year-old with a man’s hands. His voice hadn’t fully broken yet. Smart-ass punk, for sure.

“Well, I ain’t your uncle,” Tony B says, realizing he isn’t going to make any time with the girl if this little shit is hanging around. “So now that we’ve established that piece of business, you buyin’ something?”

“We’re just looking,” the girl says. “We’re allowed to look, aren’t we?”

Cocky little cunt, Tony B thinks. Reminds him of the first ex, the one he did the stretch for. Looks a little like her, too. He’d gone up for an eight-to-ten ride on an attempted murder charge for beating the shit out of Lydia that day, but less than a year into his sentence they found a mistake somewhere and had to spring him. “Who said this is America, girly-girl? This ain’t America in here. This is Tony B’s. Capeesh? Now, either you buy something, or you take it on the arches. Those are the rules.”

She turns to the side and Tony B can see her nipples poking up against the inside of her blouse. God
damn
she’s a sexy little thing. Tony doesn’t know whether to yell or get hard. She grabs a pack of Gillette single-edge razor blades off the rack.

“We’ll take these,” she says, gliding over, placing them on the counter.

As she walks, Tony B is mesmerized by the shift of her breasts beneath her blouse. Up close he can see that her eyes are almost black.

He rings up the razor blades, an item he keeps stocked for the cokeheads. Cokeheads prefer the single-edge blades to cut up their lines. It used to be
his
ax of choice, back in the day. “That’s three-sixty-two, miss,” Tony says, not taking his eyes from hers. “Including tax.”

The girl reaches into her pocket, produces a five-dollar bill. As she hands it to him, Tony B would swear that she intentionally lets her hand linger on his for a moment. When he hands her the change, he repays the flirtation in kind.

“Need a bag?” he asks.

“No,” she replies.

“Now, you be careful with those razor blades, miss,” he adds, shutting the cash drawer, sounding far more paternal than he wants to. “Wouldn’t want you to cut that pretty skin of yours.”

The girl turns to face him fully. She smiles a smile that sends shock waves through Tony B. But the sensation cannot compare with what he feels as she unbuttons her blouse and reveals most of her left breast to him. There, right above her pink nipple, is a small tattoo of a flower. “I can take the pain,” she says. “Can
you
?”

“I . . .” is all that Tony B can muster as she buttons her blouse, turns on her sandals, and sashays to the door, where the boy awaits her. Somehow, Tony B manages to tear his eyes from the girl. He looks at the boy, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The boy is smiling at him.

And he suddenly looks a lot more like a man.

Tony B is drunk. It is two in the morning, and he is leaning against the wall outside his store, in the alley, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, searching the same pants pocket for the tenth time, hoping that a full pack of matches might have spontaneously generated there since his last visit. Nothing.

Fuck it, he thinks. I’ll wait until I get inside.

He slowly continues up the alley, toward the back parking lot.

He’d had an unbelievable night at Big Ray Amato’s poker game. Walked in with two hundred, walked out with six. Drank Ray’s booze all night, ate his food. It’s a good thing Ray’s house was only two blocks away, within walking distance of the store, which is precisely where Tony B has decided to sleep it off. No
way
is he going to drive all the way up to Collinwood. He steps into the small pitted gravel parking lot behind his store. There are two cars, including his own, along with a beat-up van. The lot is dark, empty, still; the day’s wet heat seems to radiate from the ground like a colossal steam iron buried in the earth, just inches beneath his feet.

Tony B begins the ritual of searching for his keys.

And, for the second time that day, finds that someone is standing right in front of him. Someone who does not make noise. Tony B looks up, takes a wobbly step backward, and sees that it is a woman. A beautiful young woman with pale skin and shiny hair.

Where had he seen her before?

Man
the short-term memory is shot, he thinks, laughing to himself. Guess thirty-some years of drug and alcohol abuse will do that to you. It’s the brunette bitch from the
store
, of course. The cocky one. The little girl with the tattooed tit. But now she is made up like a woman. Tight leather pants, spike heels, hair piled high on her head.

“Hey, baby,” Tony B says.

“Hey yourself,” she answers.

Tony B thinks: She dumped her little turd friend and she came back for Tony Fuckin’ B. Before he can take a step in her direction, he hears a sniffle from nearby and sees the boy sitting on a packing crate next to the Dumpster in a dark corner of the lot. The pungent smell in the air tells Tony B that the kid is smoking a joint. Right out in the open.

Right behind
his store
.

Ah, who gives a shit? Tony thinks. He is loaded, there’s a foxy little bitch nearby, and he hadn’t smoked a joint in five years. “You’re gonna get in trouble smoking that shit,” Tony B says, smiling, staggering over to the Dumpster. “Got a hit for your Uncle Tony?”

The boy looks at the girl. She nods. The boy hands the giant joint to Tony B.

“
Man
,” Tony B says, drunkenly examining the double-long spliff. “Where the fuck you from, Jamaica?”

The boy and the girl both break into stoned laughter. Tony B takes a huge, lung-rattling drag on the joint. He holds it for a few moments, his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie.

More laughter. It causes Tony B to lose the hit. “Hey . . . quit makin’ me laugh,” he says, already feeling some of the effects of the pot. “Damn,” he adds. “This is good shit.”

“Only the best,” the boy says. “Take another hit. Help yourself.”

What the fuck, Tony B thinks, and complies. This time, after holding it only a few seconds, the pot begins to excavate the top of his brain. Street sounds from Euclid Avenue, a half-mile away, are suddenly crystal clear. Somehow, he can smell the trash from behind China Garden, all the way up on East 105th! His mind is unclouded but, suddenly, his limbs weigh a
ton
. “I don’t . . .” Tony B says. “How come I—”

The kid laughs. “You’ve been dusted, man.”

“What?”

“You’ve been dusted. Angel dust.”

Before he can react, Tony B remembers the girl. He wants to get a good look at her with this new, scary buzz on. He turns on his heels and can suddenly smell her perfume—rich and flowery and sexy. He starts to get hard even before she steps out of the shadows and opens her blouse to reveal two of the most perfectly shaped breasts Tony B has ever seen. Ever. “God almighty,” he exclaims. “God. All.
Mighty
.”

The girl covers up, giggles.

“How much?” Tony B asks.

“How
much
?” the girl answers.

“Don’t play with me. How much? You say it, it’s yours.”

“How much do you have?”

Tony B rummages his pockets. He has cash everywhere. “Six hundred,” he says.

“Six hundred will get you everything you want,” she says, stepping very close. She begins to unbutton his shirt.

“What about
him
?” Tony B answers, nodding at the boy, who is now back next to the Dumpster, in the shadows, his eyes staring out like lucent black stones.

The girl removes Tony B’s shirt, letting it fall to the ground. “He doesn’t care,” she replies, unzipping his pants, backing him over to the pile of flattened cardboard boxes against the building. “He likes to watch.”

Tony B knows this is a huge mistake, just as he knows that he isn’t going to stop. Within a minute or so he is completely naked—save for his short black socks and soiled Reeboks—and half-sitting, half-leaning against the waist-high stack of boxes, the sultry night air pouring over his body, the angel dust and the alcohol in full control of his reflexes.

The girl backs up a few paces. She removes her white blouse and begins to dance, topless, in front of him, gently swaying her hips to one side, then the other.

Jesus jumped up Christ on an Easter palomino
, Tony B thinks. I’ve died and gone to fuckin’ heaven. He glances over at the Dumpster.

The boy is gone.

Then, for Tony B, everything begins to happen at once; all of it shrouded in a pasty gray light, all of it lurching to a maddeningly unsyncopated beat.

Movement to his left. The crunch of gravel. A young man’s rhythm.

A shadow from Da Nang? Tony B wonders. Am I back
in country
?

The beautiful girl in front of him begins to exaggerate her slow, liquid movements. A pale arm lashes out in the moonlight; the curve of a young breast flashes before him.

Now—hot breath on his neck. Sounds from behind him.
Sliding
sounds.

Now—the girl’s leg rises toward him.
Fast
. A cobra strike from the darkness.

The kick to his exposed testicles is so swift, so
precise
, that at first Tony B thinks it is part of her dance routine. He knows he should feel it, but, for the moment he does not. For the moment, he cannot feel
anything
.

Then, a loop of wire is cast over his head. “Razor wire,” the boy whispers in his ear. “Concertina.” The boy is behind him now, kneeling on the boxes. “You move an inch you puncture your jugular vein. Don’t fucking move.” Wearing thick leather gloves, the boy continues to wrap Tony B’s head in the razor wire, slicing tiny cuts and nicks in the man’s head, neck, shoulders.

Tony B’s mind is a mire of confusion, indecision, anger.

“She’s dead,” the girl says.

Dead?
Who’s
dead? Tony B wonders.
And why can’t I move my hands, my feet? Why does everything weigh . . . a fucking . . . ton
?

“She’s finally dead,” the girl repeats. “You’ve finally killed her.”

And, in an instant, Tony B knows.

Jesus Christ.

He begins to cry as his daughter takes his now-flaccid penis in her right hand.

The sobs become a deep, soughing wail as his son produces a single-edge razor blade and examines it in the heat-shimmered moonlight.

Tony B tries to scream, but the pain now generated by his crushed right testicle, the fear generated by the razor wire at his throat, prevents him from making any coherent human sounds.

Instead, Anthony del Blanco opens his mouth, and all that pours forth is a series of small, wet whimpers, sounds of fear and defeat and failure and humiliation, sounds that return to his ears with full dynamic range and echo like a young woman’s footsteps across a long, dark gallery of remembrance.

For five minutes, they do not stop. The baseball bats they had fitted with the single-edge blades first demolish the man’s head, pounding the razor wire deep into his flesh, caving in his forehead, occipitals, cheekbones, jaw, clubbing his upper torso into a crimson mess, snapping his collarbone into dozens of pieces.

In spite of the girl’s wishes, in spite of her decade of prayers, her father is dead by the time the two begin work on his ribs, stomach, hips, legs.

When they are finished, heavily lathered after such a workout in such heat, the boy reaches into the Dumpster and retrieves the gallon plastic bottle he had placed there earlier in the day. He completes his task by pouring the contents—the full measure of two thirty-ounce cans of beef broth—over the length of his father’s corpse.

The boy and girl agree that they have done the world a favor. Of course, the law enforcement agencies will not see it that way. And thus they must split up. She will return to her foster home, where she is, at that very minute, on the third floor, asleep. He will take the Greyhound to San Diego. From there, a cousin will bring him into Mexico, a place where he will be safe.

They hold each other in a long, silent embrace, just as they had held each other in that doorway nearly a decade earlier. Then, for her own safety, the girl gets in her car, a car belonging to her foster mother, a late-model Toyota for which the girl had made a duplicate key months earlier. She meets her brother’s eyes one last time as he readies the key at the back of the van. He had stolen the van earlier in the day and will leave it a dozen or so blocks from the Greyhound bus station at East Thirteenth Street and Chester Avenue.