Uptown Thief (6 page)

Chapter 6

M
arisol jumped up and ran down the stairs to the front door. Her hand reached involuntarily for her locket.

Eva stood frozen in the middle of the lobby. The receptionist and several women stood huddled behind the front desk. They watched the street through the two-way mirrored glass of the street door.

“Dulce, I know you're in there! Bitch, I'm a kill you if you don't come out right now,” a thugged-out Latino yelled from the sidewalk. He wore oversized shades and a cap pulled low over his face, a large-caliber gun dangling from his right hand.

Jerry. Marisol had a feeling of déjà vu. As if Dulce had not only described Jerry, but also shown her a picture.

Marisol texted Jody for backup, but she might be anywhere in the city.

The thirty or so girls who had come down behind Marisol stayed hunched in a knot by the stairwell at the back of the room.

Eva rushed to the reception desk. “I'm calling NYPD.”

“No cops!” Marisol said. “We got girls in here with warrants or no immigration papers.”

“He has a goddamn cannon in his hand, Marisol,” Eva said. “I don't like police, either, but it's better than getting shot.”

“Only a psychopath would shoot us in broad daylight with witnesses,” Marisol said.

“What about that guy doesn't say psychopath to you?” Eva asked.

Jerry hulked back and forth like a caged jungle cat.

At the corner, he had parked his tricked-out Hummer across two lanes of Avenue C traffic. Cars honked, and clusters of passersby rubbernecked.

“Shut the fuck up!” Jerry yelled, turning to the motorists.

Marisol peered down the street and counted five heads in the Hummer: three female, two male.

“He's not gonna kill us,” Marisol said. “This is for show. I'm going out.”

“Are you nuts?” Eva asked.

“It's just like that dad at the Chelsea clinic,” Marisol said.

“That guy only had a hatchet,” Eva said.

“Motherfuckers don't just get to intimidate women in our clinic.” Marisol put a hand on the door. “I'm going with or without you.” She pushed the door open a crack. A gust of wind blew in, and Jerry swiveled in her direction.

She stepped out in the street without a backward glance.

Eva grabbed her cane and stepped out the door, her limp more pronounced than usual. Although she wasn't a brawler like Jody, Eva had a fierceness on which Marisol had come to rely. Not only had Eva survived polio, but her parents had survived the Holocaust as children. Eva wasn't looking for a fight, but she was prepared to survive one.

Marisol felt the adrenaline surging through her. Where her shoulder touched Eva's she could feel the other woman trembling slightly.

She and Eva advanced. Underneath Eva's plus-size suit, she was solid. Still, the pimp's tall, broad-shouldered, and heavy frame dwarfed them both. Marisol was a head shorter than him and probably half his weight.

They walked into the middle of the street. “Can we help you?” Marisol asked.

“You bitches better send Dulce out right now.” His scowling expression had etched deep, taut lines into his face. His rugged skin contrasted strangely with the oversized cartoon characters on his designer jeans outfit.

This was how Marisol had always imagined her uncle showing up. If she had ever called the cops or social services and had gotten away from him. Somehow he'd find her. Come after her. All the more outraged for her defiance. She had to bite back the memory.

“Dulce came in several days ago with two black eyes, a dislocated elbow, three broken ribs, and a fractured femur,” Marisol said with a steely calm she didn't feel. She bluffed about the ribs—they were only bruised. “She can barely walk.”

“So fucking what? Bitch deserved it.”

Marisol remembered the garden of bruises on Dulce's body in the tub. She narrowed her eyes. “She was practically unconscious when we brought her in. For medical reasons, we can't send her out. When she's healed up, she can decide for herself whether or not she wants to return to working with you.”

“Bullshit. I tell Dulce what she wants.” The gun rested at his thigh. He stepped closer to Marisol and looked as if he might hit her with his other hand. Marisol's body clenched.

Eva stepped forward as if to break it up, when they all heard a police siren coming up the block in the opposite direction. The pimp stepped back and slid the gun into the waistband of his jeans, pulling his baggy shirt down over it.

The cruiser pulled up and two cops got out. One stepped up to the Hummer, and the other approached the altercation on the sidewalk.

“What's going on?” the cop asked.

“My friend just came to say hello,” Marisol said. “But he didn't park very well.”

“If he doesn't leave, we'll tow his oversized vehicle.”

“I'll be back,” Jerry said, stalking to his car.

As she watched him walk away, there was something familiar in his voice, his walk, but she couldn't place it. He was unforgettably imposing. She would have remembered meeting him.

“You know that's Jerry Rios, right?” the cop asked when Jerry was out of earshot. “Was he looking for a girl in the clinic? Do you want to lodge a complaint? We can get him for disturbing the peace.”

“No thanks,” Marisol said. “We've got this under control.”

The cop rolled his eyes. “Just don't go complaining when he beats the girl to death.”

“Let's say I did cooperate,” Marisol said. “You couldn't lock him up for long. Where would you be when he comes back even more pissed off at us for getting him arrested?”

He didn't have an answer to that.

She sucked her teeth and went to catch up with Eva in the clinic.

“Has he ever come by before?” Marisol asked after closing the door behind her.

Eva shook her head. “Who could forget a guy like that?” she asked. “I thought I was gonna piss my pants.”

“I fucking hate pimps,” Marisol said.

“You're shaking,” Eva said.

“We need extra security,” Marisol said. “For tomorrow while the staff is at the fund-raiser.”

“Can we afford it?” Eva asked.

“I'll make the money happen somehow.”

* * *

That evening, on the subway, Marisol held her dry cleaning in front of her body, like a shield. A pair of women with fashionably torn clothes pressed against her in the uptown train. The seats had been filled since the first Manhattan stop near Wall Street. Two men in expensive suits sat to the right of her. Across from them was a browner cluster of passengers who had been on the train since Queens and Brooklyn.

Throughout midtown, passengers embarked and disembarked, an inhalation and exhalation of humanity. Somewhere around Harlem, the crowd thinned, and Marisol hung her dry cleaning on the upper handrail. She got off at Washington Heights, and walked several blocks to a quiet watering hole.

Marisol didn't have a significant other. She was married to her work. But she couldn't fuck her work. At least, not anymore.

She sat at the end of the bar and ordered a shot of tequila. While she waited for her drink, she slipped the locket with the picture of her sister into the change purse of her wallet. Someone was playing a tortured bolero on the jukebox. The tenor's voice crooned heartbreak, as Marisol savored the taste of lime and salt on her lips and the cool touch of ice on her tongue.

A man walked in and looked her up and down. He was a little shorter than her, but with gorgeous tawny skin, hazel eyes, long, hard limbs, and a devious smile.

She smiled back, but with no teeth, feeling a tingle of excitement. She offered him only the briefest of glances, and a shadow of a shrug.

He nodded to the bartender, and then walked to the other side of the room to watch a large flat-screen TV. The Knicks were down by fifteen, but he turned away just as they scored a three-pointer.

He hitched up his jeans and slid onto the bar stool next to her.

“Quieres otra?”
he asked.

“No thanks,” she said in Spanish. “But I'll buy you one.”

He raised his eyebrows, but then leaned back and smiled.
“Como no?”

She told the bartender in Spanish, “A rum and Coke.”

“How do you know what I want?” he asked.

“I know exactly what you want,” she said, leaning back on her own stool, tossing her head, and arching her back. “Does the drink really matter?”

“Maybe not,” he said, downing half the drink.

“Boricua?”
he asked.

“Sí.”
She was Puerto Rican. From his accent, she could tell that he was Dominican.

“De aquí o de allá?”
he asked.

“Los dos,”
she said, having grown up both in Puerto Rico and in the United States.

“I don't know about you Puerto Rican girls,” he said, swirling the dark liquid in his glass. “My brother married a Puerto Rican. Beautiful but too independent.”

Marisol put a hand on his arm. “No need to worry about that with me.”

“You're not independent?” he asked, skeptically.

She laughed. “I'm never getting married.”

“Don't say that.” He took another sip of his drink. “Maybe later you will. Maybe now you just want to have a good time.”

He used his index finger to move a stray lock of her hair off her shoulder. He didn't touch her skin, just moved the hair in a slow arc, so that it teased along her collarbone. “Maybe now you want company after a long day at your job.” He spoke in a murmur, as the lock of hair slipped off the edge of her arm. “Maybe you just want somebody to make you feel really good.” He traced his hand down her arm and onto her knee.

“I like to feel really good,” she said. “But there's a problem.”

“Really?” he asked. “What's the problem?”

“Los hombres,”
she said.

He laughed, tracing circles on the tip of her quadriceps. “Men are the problem?”

“Not exactly,” Marisol said. “But condoms. Sometimes men have a problem with condoms.”

“Condones?”
he asked, sliding his hand farther up her thigh.

“Do you have that problem?” she asked.

“No,” he said, walking his fingers gently up to the meeting of her thighs. “I think I have one.”

She pulled his hand from between her legs and held it. “No need for that,” she said. “I bring my own.”

“You live nearby?” he asked. “I'm staying with family. I can't really—”

“I know a place,” Marisol said, dropping a twenty on the bar and leading him out the door.

At a nearby hotel in Harlem, she paid cash. She grabbed him in the elevator, and they tangled. Her tongue in his mouth, his hands groping her breasts through her blouse, pressing her hand to his hardness.

“Any other
problemas
I might need to know about?” he asked, hot rum breath on her neck.

“Me being on the bottom would be a problem,” she said. “I like it like this. I like it standing.”

“I bet you like it on top, too,” he said, his hips grinding against hers.

“And I like it from behind,” she said, twisting quickly so his hips pressed against her ass.

The hotel room was a small but clean mass of pale corners with a blond wooden desk and crisp white linens.

They tossed their dark clothes on the white woven rug. She rolled the condom onto him, and he knelt on the pile of clothes. She had him enter her while she sat, open-thighed, on the blond wooden chair.

She could see that he was well-endowed, but she couldn't really feel him inside her, even with him pounding so hard that the chair thudded against the desk. She thrust her hips forward and toppled him back onto the floor, riding him atop the pile of clothes. She tossed aside a stiletto heel as it dug into her knee.

She swiveled around so that she had her back to him, and he moaned with the deeper angle. She still couldn't quite feel him, so she stepped abruptly off of him.

“Que pasó?”
he asked, startled.

“Aquí
.
”
She led him to the dresser, grabbing a pillow off the bed. She guided him to enter her from behind, sliding the pillow between her hips and the edge of the dresser.

“Te gusta?”
he asked.

He gripped the dresser with one hand and lifted the other one to caress her shoulder.

She brushed his hand off. “Don't touch. Just fuck me.”

“Okei
,
”
he said, putting the other hand on the dresser to get better leverage.

“Da me más!”
she said.

He pumped furiously, and she focused all her attention on the spot between her legs. She blocked out the rest of his body, the room, the sound of his breath in her ear. She tried to inhabit only a center of pleasure, ride him like a horse to the finish line. She was almost there.

Suddenly, she heard him gasp and spasm.
“Coño!”
he said
.

She slid her fingers between her lips and masturbated herself to a climax, and the two of them slumped forward onto the dresser.

After the last wave of the orgasm subsided, he was too sweaty, too hot, too much on top of her. She slid out from under him, holding the top of the condom so it wouldn't slip.

“You should go,” she said in Spanish.

He nodded, a bit taken aback, and he disentangled his clothes from the pile on the rug.