Panic Attack (9 page)

The voice came from behind Johnny as he was entering the Astoria Boulevard subway station. He was surprised to hear his name spoken at three in the morning in Astoria, where he didn’t think he knew anyone.

For a moment he worried it was a cop. Just in case, he started reaching into the pocket of his jacket where he had a Kel- Tec .380.
But then he looked over his shoulder and actually had to blink, doing a double take.
“Carlos?” he asked.
He hadn’t seen Carlos Sanchez, his old friend from St. John’s, in how long? Eight, nine years? Nine years, but Carlos looked like he’d aged twenty. He was only four or five years older than Johnny, but he looked fifty with all of that gray in his hair, and his face looked old and drawn, too. Johnny had heard through Rayo, another guy from St. John’s, that Carlos had been away for dealing.
Carlos came over and gave Johnny a big hug. He reeked of booze and pot smoke, and Johnny couldn’t wait for the hug to end.
“It’s been a long time, bro,” Carlos said, finally letting go. “Been a long, long time. The hell you doin’ ’round here?”
“I should be asking you that question,” Johnny said. “I thought you were away.”
“Naw, man, that’s ancient history,” Carlos said. “Got out six months ago, and I’m livin’ here now, bro. Well, not here, here, I mean Queens, Bayside. I’m just here in Astoria on some business, know what I’m sayin’?”
Johnny wasn’t surprised Carlos was dealing again; the guy had been dealing since he was thirteen. Johnny had never touched drugs, not even pot, which was the main reason why he’d only been away one time. When you weren’t whacked out on drugs and could think clearly, it was easy to stay one step ahead of the cops.
“Where you living now?” Carlos asked.
“Still in Brooklyn,” Johnny said. “Got a little place out in Red Hook.”
“Yeah, how you gettin’ by?”
“I’m doing okay.”
“Yeah, you still a pretty boy. I bet you gettin’ all the ladies, right?”
“I can’t complain.”
“Can’t complain? Yeah, I remember the times, we’d point to any girl in the schoolyard or wherever, pay you twenty bucks or whatever and bet you couldn’t go pick her up, and you’d take our money every time.”
“Not every time,” Johnny said.
“Not every time,” Carlos said. “Check this guy out. You still got that sense of humor goin’ on. You still make me laugh.”
Johnny heard a subway pulling into the station above them. “Well, that’s my ride,” he said. “It was really great seeing you again, man.”
“Come on, hang out,” Carlos said. “Where you rushin’ to at three in the morning?”
“Long day,” Johnny said. “Gotta crash.”
“Come on, man. You ain’t seen your ol’ bro in how many years and you can’t sit down and have a drink?”
Johnny really wanted to get home and away from Astoria. It was unlikely that Theresa would call the cops, but after he hustled a woman he didn’t like to stay in her neighborhood.
“I don’t drink,” Johnny said.
“Johnny Clean, that’s right,” Carlos said. “Remember everybody used to call you that shit? Never drank, never did nothin’. That’s how you stayed a pretty boy, right?”
The train was pulling into the station, the brakes screeching.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Johnny said. “Why don’t you give me your cell? We’ll hang out some time.”
“Nah, come on, sit down with me right now,” Carlos said. “We can get some coffee and cake. I got something I gotta talk to you about anyway, somethin’ where you can make some serious cash, know what I mean?”
Johnny wasn’t interested in hearing Carlos’s idea, but he knew he couldn’t just blow him off. You didn’t do that to a guy from St. John’s. Growing up, those guys had been Johnny’s whole family. He’d spent every Christmas with them, every Thanksgiving.
“Okay, let’s go,” Johnny said, “but I can’t stay out long.”
They went to the corner, to the Neptune Diner, and sat in a booth by a window with a view of the Grand Central Parkway, still a lot of traffic this time of night. Johnny was starving— a night of hustling and sex had built up quite an appetite— and he ordered a bacon cheeseburger with everything on it. After a couple of bites, he realized it wouldn’t fill him up, so he ordered another one.
Carlos caught Johnny up on guys from the old neighborhood. Everybody, it seemed, had gotten into some kind of trouble. Pedro was doing fifteen for manslaughter. Delano was at Attica for dealing. DeShawn had been stabbed to death in a fight outside a bar in Philly. Eddie had OD’d on smack.
“Sounds like me and you are the big winners, huh?” Johnny said, smiling.
“Yeah, I’m doing okay,” Carlos said. “Not in jail anyway, and I got my HIV under control.”
“Oh, shit,” Johnny said. “Sorry to hear that, man.”
“Eh, it’s okay,” Carlos asked. “The fuck you gonna do, right? And with the medicines they got, I’m gonna live longer than you.”
Carlos was sobering up, and Johnny started to have a good time bullshitting with him about the old days at St. John’s. Johnny had forgotten how much he’d needed Carlos back then. The courts had sent Johnny to St. John’s when he was nine years old after his mother was killed. They’d told Johnny she went in a car accident, which hadn’t made sense to him because she didn’t own a car, and then he found out a few years later that her mother wasn’t really a secretary, she was a hooker, and she’d been stabbed to death by one of her clients. Johnny felt like an outcast at St. John’s because all the other kids were a lot tougher than him and had known each other all their lives. He got picked on a lot— it seemed like every day somebody wanted to kick his ass— and Carlos had been the only one who always had his back.
So when Carlos looked at Johnny seriously and said, “So the thing I got goin’ on...” Johnny knew he couldn’t say no right away even though he also knew this wasn’t going to lead to anything good. He had to at least listen to his old buddy, see what he had to say, give him a little respect.
Surprisingly, Carlos’s plan didn’t seem so bad— rob some fancy house in Forest Hills while the family was away in Florida. Carlos’s ex- girlfriend, the maid, had the keys and knew the code to the alarm system.
“Shit’s gonna be so easy,” Carlos said. “The house is gonna be empty and we gonna go in and out. Gabriela, my girl, she said the lady in the house got a diamond ring. It’s so expensive she doesn’t wear it, but she keeps it right out in her bedroom. My girl’s gonna tell us where everything’s at so we can go in, out, and then we got fifty thousand dollars, twenty- five each.”
“What about your girl?”
“That’s the funny shit.” Carlos was laughing.“She was on my ass the other day, sayin’ she wanted the money split three ways, going it gotta be equal and shit or she won’t give me the keys. So I was telling her, yeah, don’t worry, baby, it’ll be three ways, anything to shut her fat ass up, right? But when we get the money, that’s it, we gone. She never gonna see our asses again.”
Carlos was still laughing, wiping tears out of the corners of his eyes with his index finger.
Johnny had to admit the plan sounded good, but that’s what worried him. In his experience, when something sounded too good it usually meant it was bad.
“How do you know the family’ll be in Florida?” he asked.
“Because my girl works there,” Carlos said. “She knows everything.”
“And when we don’t give her a cut, how do you know she won’t rat us out?”
“Why’d she rat us out and get her own ass sent to jail? The cops, they’re gonna know she got us the key and the code. Naw, trust me, the bitch is gonna keep her mouth shut.”
Johnny had some more questions, but he couldn’t find any obvious holes in the plan, and he didn’t see how he could say no. Twenty- five G’s was some serious cash— beat the hell out of the kind of pocket change he’d been making lately, a few hundred bucks here and there on the good days. The summer was coming, and he could use a break. It would be nice to take a couple of months off, go to the beach down the shore, work on his tan. How hot would he look with a tan? How many women would want to screw him then? He’d pass that thousand mark in four years, no problem.
“So,” Carlos said, “you in or out?”
Johnny looked across the table at his old buddy and smiled. The night of the robbery, Johnny and Carlos, wearing backpacks, met where Carlos had parked his car, outside a pizza place on Austin Street in Forest Hills. Johnny had come by subway, but Carlos had taken his car, a beat- up Impala. Not the best getaway ride, but if things went right they wouldn’t be in any rush. They’d just casually get in the car and drive away.
“Ready to do it?” Carlos asked.
“Hold up,” Johnny said, looking around. He didn’t like this at all. Yeah, it was better meeting here than in front of the house they were gonna rob, but it still felt too out in the open. It was 1:30 a.m., and almost all the stores were closed, but there were still cars passing by, and right across the street and down the block a little, there was a homeless- looking guy hanging out.
“What’s wrong?” Carlos asked.
“Maybe we should’ve met at the house,” Johnny said.
“You told me to park here.”
“The car’s okay. I’m talking about us. It’s not good if somebody sees us together.”
“So what if somebody sees us?” Carlos said. “We’re just two people. What did we do?”
“I mean if somebody remembers,” Johnny said. “After.”
“After what? The people’re in Florida. It’s gonna be like a week before they find out the joint got robbed.”
Johnny didn’t care, he still felt uncomfortable. The homeless guy seemed to be looking right at them. Johnny still had a bad feeling about the whole thing. He’d been on a roll lately— picking pockets, picking up women, hustling a little pool. It wasn’t big money, but it was steady, and it was safe. Why was he getting in on a robbery with a drug addict?
He was ready to back out. He was going to say to Carlos,
Sorry, man, I don’t like it,
and go back to Brooklyn, but he knew he’d be letting Carlos, his brother, down, and was there really a reason to? Maybe he was just overthinking it, making it more complicated than it really was. Maybe it was like Carlos said, an easy twenty- five K. He’d go along with it, see how it went. If it didn’t feel right at the house, he could bail then.
They went past Austin Street under the Long Island Rail Road tracks and through the big gates into Forest Hills Gardens. Johnny had only been to this neighborhood once or twice, driving by, and he’d forgotten how fancy all the houses were. They were like mini mansions, with front lawns and backyards and driveways, and they had to go for, what, three, four million dollars, maybe even more nowadays. It reminded him of the houses in Rockaway in Brooklyn. One summer, when Johnny was eleven or twelve years old, he stole a bicycle, and every day he biked all the way to the beach. He’d pass all the fancy houses out there, watch all the families— the dads playing catch with their kids in the street, or the kids playing on their front yards and shooting hoops in their backyards. He’d wonder what it would feel like to be one of those kids, just for one day, to have everything instead of nothing.
As they walked, they didn’t talk at all. This had been Johnny’s rule— no talking. They went about three blocks, made a left, and there was the house. Jesus, it was one of the nicest ones on the block— three stories, brick, front lawn. When Johnny was a kid he would’ve killed to live in a place like this. He hoped the people appreciated what they had, that it wasn’t just all normal to them and they didn’t give a shit.
Johnny and Carlos looked around to make sure the coast was clear, then nodded to each other and walked up the driveway to the backyard. One thing struck Johnny as wrong, and he’d kick himself about it later: A shiny black Mercedes was in the driveway. There was a garage in the back, so if the people were away, out of town, wouldn’t they put the car in the garage? Or why not drive it to the airport and leave it there? Johnny was going to say something to Carlos, even suggest they go back to their car, but then he thought maybe there was nothing so strange about it at all. Lot of rich people have two or even three cars. Maybe the other cars were in the garage and the people had left the Merc in the driveway. Maybe they’d taken a limo to the airport. There were a lot of reasons why the Merc could be there.
At the end of the driveway, it was dark, just like Carlos had said it would be. They opened their backpacks and put on their ski masks and gloves and took out their flashlights. Then they went around to the back door. Carlos turned on his flashlight and opened the back door with the keys. So far so good, but now they had to disarm the alarm. Carlos went right to the keypad and punched in the numbers, but the red light was still blinking. Fuck, in maybe a minute or less the alarm would start blaring, and they’d have to run as fast as they could back to the car and get the hell out of Forest Hills.
“Come on,” Johnny stage- whispered. He was holding the door open, ready to take off.
“Wait,” Carlos said, and he started punching the numbers in again.
Jesus, Johnny knew he should’ve made Carlos write the code down, but he swore he had it memorized. Carlos typed in several numbers, then hesitated, as if thinking, using all his concentration, then punched in the last two.
The red light turned green.
Carlos smiled widely, and Johnny wondered,
Had the guy been fucking with me all along?
It was the type of prank Carlos would’ve pulled at St. John’s, trying to scare the shit out of somebody and getting a big kick out of it.
But they were in the house, that was the important thing. Now they had to get what they needed and get the hell out.
Shining their flashlights ahead of them, they went through the kitchen— it was huge, with brand new- looking stainless steel appliances— and into some kind of big pantry. Then they went into the living room— man, these people were loaded; they had a plasma TV on the wall, looked like a sixty- incher—and entered the dining room, where Carlos started coughing. He bent over for a few seconds, like he was trying to prevent a full- blown coughing fit. Then he straightened up and said in a loud whisper that was almost like his normal speaking voice, “Gotta stop smoking, man.”
“Shhhh,” Johnny said, shining his flashlight at his own face to show Carlos how serious he was.
Carlos smiled, and Johnny wondered if the cough was just for show, too, to get a reaction.
Carlos’s attitude was starting to piss Johnny off. He’d been cool on the way to the house, but now that they were inside he was acting like this was all a big game or something.
They continued to the foyer, to the staircase. The plan was Carlos would go up and get the jewelry and whatever cash there was, and Johnny would be the lookout. Johnny knew he was putting a lot of trust in Carlos. Carlos could come down and say he couldn’t find the jewelry, and meanwhile pocket all of it, but Johnny didn’t want to believe Carlos would ever do that to him. They were brothers for life, and they’d never rip each other off. They had a bond that nothing could break.