Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  “I’m not sure I understand—”

  “You know, what has it done? What’s the biggest, you know—”

  “Oh, I get it. What’s the biggest change the Internet has had on us, that’s easy. Porn, for free, accessible anywhere.”

  He blushed to the roots of his hair. “Okay okay okay. Right. Yeah, so what’s the second, you know—”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Information,” he said. “Free.”

  “What information?”

  He waved his arms. “Any of it. All of it. Wanna know where the missile bases are in Kamchatka? Who writes code for the NSA? The questions on next year’s bar exam? How to say ‘go fuck yourself’ in Urdu? What would happen if Michael Jordan tried to post up Bill Russell? How many Ping-Pong balls—”

  “Okay,” Al said. “I get it.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t get it yet. Nobody does. Listen to this. Here’s a piece of skull candy for you. There are . . .” He paused for effect. “No . . . secrets . . . anywhere.” He looked at her. “Anywhere. None.”

  She stared at him, her mouth half open.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Now you’re starting to . . . We ain’t just talking account numbers and credit scores, either. Just, you know, play with that. Bounce that around for a while. Privacy is dead. In fifty years nobody will even remember what it was. Nothing is safe, nothing is the same.” He laughed. “Everyone walks around, like, hey okay, whatever, because they don’t get it. We’re naked. Totally. All of us.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Naked. You want me to prove it? You want . . . Watch.”

  “No!” she said, unable to keep the urgency out of her voice. And then quieter, and a bit afraid. “No. I believe you.”

  “Oh,” he said, alarmed, “I didn’t mean . . . I mean I wouldn’t . . .” He rapped the side of his head with his knuckles and addressed his monitor as though it were a third person. “You see? This is why we never get the girl.”

  “That’s not why,” she said, half to herself.

  “What?” He seemed stunned. “What? Why, then?”

  “Well, hey, if you knew a witch,” she asked him, “and she asked you out, would you go?” She watched the light of caution dawn in his eyes. “If you knew she could turn you into a newt.”

  “Or an Apple,” he said. “No wonder most of them were virgins.” His half-smile was quickly replaced by a look of chagrin. “Well, that sucks,” he said, louder.

  “Robbie, you give up so easy,” she said, stunning him again. “Are you going to post my pictures?”

  “I did already,” he said, still sounding awed.

  “Don’t lose my phone number,” she told him.

  “Never,” he said. “Will you come back to check or should I—”

  “Watch for me,” she told him. “What would happen if Michael Jordan tried to post up Bill Russell?”

  “Russell,” he told her, “would make himself a nice Michael sammich.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Okay.”

  Alessandra paused just inside the office door. “Sarah, when you came in, were those two tall skinny white guys standing around outside the Starbucks across the street?”

  “What?” Sarah had, apparently, been miles away. “Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

  “Two guys,” Al said. “White, both of them six foot six or so, dressed out of the ‘business casual polyester’ page of some catalog. They were standing around the Starbucks across the street when I got here. Paying a lot of attention to everybody coming in or out of this building.”

  It seemed an effort for Sarah to drag herself back to the present. She glanced at the office window, but there was no view, it faced a row of empty gray windows across an airshaft. “I, um, I didn’t notice.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I don’t like how this feels.”

  “Well, okay,” Sarah said, rousing herself. “But I should probably catch up on billing for a while this morning—”

  “No way,” Al told her. “Come on, grab your jacket, you and me are gonna find a back way out of this building. I need to watch these characters from a safe distance. We can deal with all that other shit later.”

  “You really think—”

  “Yeah, I do,” Al told her. “Come on, we got to go, right now.”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah held a pair of Marty Stiles’s heavy binoculars up to her face, squinting through the dirty glass window of a men’s clothing store down the block. “I mean, if this was Brooklyn, okay, I could guarantee you for sure those two ain’t neighborhood guys. But, you know, Manhattan, who could tell?”

  “Yeah,” Al said. “I hear you.”

  “I was wondering,” Sarah said. “How bad do we really need a Manhattan address?”

  “Marty always thought it was a big deal.”

  “Marty doesn’t think we got any good pushcart food over in Brooklyn,” Sarah said. “He’s just afraid he won’t be able to get any nice BBQ horsemeat on a stick if he moves across the river.”

  Al wondered which of them was right. Another business issue, she thought, another question for which I have no answer, and not a lot of interest, either. Fine businessperson I’m gonna make . . .

  A guy who looked like a salesman in the men’s store wandered up to the two of them, eyeing Sarah’s binos. “Birdwatching today, ladies?”

  Sarah didn’t look at him. “Do I come to your office while you’re working and bother you?” she said.

  The salesman shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “Long as you’re not scaring away the customers.”

  Sarah still didn’t look at him. “What customers?”

  The guy looked at Al.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes,” she told him. “And we won’t bother anyone.”

  He craned his neck to look out the window to see what they were watching, shrugged again, then turned and walked away.

  “You want my opinion,” Sarah said, “these two look like they’re from one of those rectangle states out in the middle.”

  “Hard to figure,” Al said. “They don’t look like cops, but they don’t look like bad guys, either.”

  “Either way,” Sarah said, “I think they know we’re in here.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “The one with the blue jacket keeps glancing over here at the front door,” Sarah said. “Like, once every ten or fifteen seconds. Like he’s watching to see if we come out.”

  “Damn,” Al said. “What’s the other one doing?”

  “Talking on his phone.” She looked back at Al. “That mean they know we’re in here?”

  “Keep watching,” Al told her. “Yeah, it probably does. Also means there’s more than just those two. They must have had someone inside the building to follow us out.”

  “Who do you think they are?” There was a trace of fear in Sarah’s voice.

  “That’s the first question,” Al said. “Second question, what the hell do they want? They could be working for Uncle Paolo, although I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Not his type. I’m thinking he’d use someone from the old country. These guys are too All-American. My best guess, they got hired on by one of Paolo’s customers. Whatever Uncle Paolo is really importing, he’s not into the retail end of things, he can’t be. So he’s basically a supplier. The real heavies would be whoever is buying his product, cutting it up, and selling it to the street-level guys. Those guys might not want to hit us, be too easy to follow us back to Uncle Paolo through you being Frank’s ex. They might hire it out.”

  “One other possibility,” Sarah said.

  “I’m listening . . .”

  “Jake. Jacob West.”

  “I thought you checked him out last night.”

  “Very funny,” Sarah said. “The other guy just hung up his phone, that can’t be good. Listen, I just thought, you know, when Aggie West came along, here was my chance to show I could do something. Maybe I got in over my head. Maybe
. . .”

  “Maybe,” Al told her. “We are gonna have to figure it out later. Right now we gotta get out of here.”

  “How about a cab?” Sarah said.

  “That could work, but those two bozos see us trying to hail a cab, they might decide to take measures. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Here,” Sarah said, handing Al the glasses. “Take these.” She fished out her cell phone.

  “Who you calling?”

  “Dial Seven,” Sarah said. “That limo company that runs ads on the radio all the time.” She punched buttons on her phone, and when the call went through, she changed completely. “Aah, hello? Um, can you, um, can you help me?” Her voice quivered with uncertainty and fear. And it wasn’t just fear in her voice, it was the barely contained squeak of someone on the verge of panic. “Um, thank you, um, I’m in this store near West Houston, okay, and I think my husband is out there waiting for me. My ex-husband, I mean. No, no, if the police come, he’ll, oh God, I just wanna get back to my dad’s house, and if you have like a driver who could get me back to Queens in sort of a hurry, my ex couldn’t get me there, my dad would . . .”

  Alessandra watched in amazement. Sarah wasn’t imitating a character, she had embodied one. She’d gone pale, her hands shook, she looked like a frightened bird. Al wondered, again, how bad things had gotten between her and Frank. Maybe this was a character Sarah knew all too well . . .

  “Could you? Oh, that would be so sweet, if I have someone to talk to until he gets here. Thank you so much . . .” She glanced at Al and the frightened bird disappeared. She held out a hand, fingers spread, mouthed the words “five minutes” to Al. Then she turned back to the dispatcher and was at once terrified again as she gave the name and location of the store.

  Pitch-perfect, Al thought. A woman, all alone, afraid of her ex-husband, thinks he’s gonna kill her, or at least beat the fuck out of her, but no, she doesn’t want to call the cops, doesn’t want to get the pathetic loser in trouble . . . Fucking women. And then she shook her head, realizing that Sarah’s act was so good that she, Al, was getting pissed off at a nonexistent fictional husband. She looked back through the glasses at the two men down the block, watched the guys who were watching her. A few minutes later she heard the snap of Sarah’s phone as she ended the call, felt Sarah’s fingers soft on her arm. “Come on,” Sarah said, once again herself. “He’s here.”

  They headed for the door. “Where’d you learn how to do that?” Al said.

  “Do what?”

  Al took all the money out of the front pocket of her jeans and handed it across to the driver. “Go,” she said. “Please, just go.”

  “Where the boah at?” The driver, a heavy black guy, had a broad Southern twang in his voice. He tromped his gas pedal and the car screeched away.

  Perhaps sensing the driver’s suspicion, Sarah reached across the front seat with an unsteady hand and gripped the man’s shoulder. Who woulda known, Al thought. Seemingly ordinary person, turns out to have an extraordinary ability. What else could she be capable of? “Thank you,” Sarah said, a tear rolling down her cheek. “Thank you so much . . . I don’t see him now, he was standing right there on the corner. Do you think he could follow us?”

  “Don’ worry, sugah, we gon’ leave him scratchin’ his butt and wonderin’ where the hell evahbody went.”

  Al sat back in the seat as the driver bulled his way through Midtown traffic, heading for the Triboro Bridge. He was right, no one would catch them: there couldn’t be two men in Manhattan this crazy . . .

  She held Sarah close in the back of the car and whispered in her ear as the aged Town Car roared over the ruts and potholes of Flushing Avenue, down on the border between Brooklyn and Queens. Sarah’s face was a study in concentration as she listened to Al’s instructions. It’s not supposed to be this way, Al told herself, you’re supposed to be calm, detached, ready to do what you need to do but wishing no harm or evil on your opponents, you are not supposed to feel this insane rush of fear and elation . . . She was a skier teetering on the precipice, gone just past the point of balance, committed to jumping in, and you better nail that first turn, honey, because if you blow it you got a long way to fall before you land on those rocks down there . . .

  There was a Korean version of a Home Depot right on Flushing, just inside the edge of Bushwick. The neighborhood was a warren of ancient low-rise industrial buildings. The Brooklyn renaissance had stalled a good half-mile away and it was hard to see how it would make it this far, or why. There wasn’t much here to work with, the buildings would never be turned into lofts, they were too small, too old, and too far gone, had been so for perhaps the past century. Nice to know, Al thought, that there are things you can still depend on, Bushwick was always gonna be Bushwick . . . She pointed, the cab lurched to the curb, she and Sarah jumped out of the backseat and ran into the truck-sized warehouse entrance.

  There was a chopper in the sky somewhere over Brooklyn, but Al paid it no mind, it was far away, only a sound, like the distant echo of a train somewhere. She hurried Sarah past pale rectangular stacks of fragrant pine boards. “You know where you’re going?” Sarah asked her, breathless.

  “More or less,” Al told her. “I grew up around here. Kinda. This way.” They ran down a long aisle, drawing odd looks from the Oriental guys who staffed the place and from the various members of the genus Contractorus newyorkus, who came in all sizes and colors. At the far end of the place she slowed them to a walk. Al held up empty hands to the security guard and the lady working the counter, universal sign language for “hey, we didn’t take anything.” The guard and the counter lady looked at each other, then blankly at Al and Sarah, but neither made a move to stop them.

  The alleyway out back was paved with cobblestones rounded over by two hundred years of abuse and the cracks and ruts between bricks were filled with ice, making the entire surface slippery as hell. “This way,” Al said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, great,” Sarah said. “I knew I shouldn’ta ate that second bagel this morning.” They half-walked, half-ran down the alley, keeping close to the row of ancient brick factory buildings. The buildings had been built to fit the needs of another time, they were too small now, and too short to accommodate a modern truck’s height. Some of them did seem to be occupied, but all of them were shuttered up tight against the cold. And against the sidewalk entrepreneurs, Al thought. No shelter here, no place to hide. They got to the end of the row, where the alley would dump them back out onto a main street, but just as they got to the corner one of the two men who’d been watching them from the coffee shop in Manhattan barreled around the corner straight at them. He seemed as surprised at they were, he showed the naturally uncoordinated gawkiness of a tall man, all flapping elbows and knees as he groped frantically in an inside pocket and tried to stop.

  Al had no time to wonder where the hell he’d come from or how he’d managed to track them here, but she also had none of his loose-limbed gracelessness, either. She lowered a shoulder and charged into him, hitting him in the chest. His feet went up in the air and he went down awkwardly, cold-cocked himself on the frozen cobblestones.

  The sound of the chopper was no longer just an echo.

  You gotta be kidding me, Al thought. A helicopter? In Brooklyn? It would have to be a traffic copter.

  Or cops.

  “Holy shit!” Sarah said. “How did he—”

  “Listen to me,” Al told her. “When I say go, I want you to run for that bodega across the way over there, you got it?” She peered around the corner of the end of the alleyway. “This asshole’s partner ought to be behind us somewhere, they probably wanted to catch us between the two of them. I’m going back for the guy. You got money? Good. Whoever’s in the bodega, wave a couple of twenties at them and get them to find you a ride. Make up a story, but don’t wait for a gypsy cab, they got to have someone who’ll drive you out of here. Got it?”

  Sarah nodded. “Okay. Are you sure . . .”

  You
should run away with her, Al thought, if that chopper has anything to do with these guys, you are about to blow this, big time. “Yeah. Go now. GO!”

  Sarah ran. Al watched her until she hit the bodega’s front door, then she turned and ran back down the alley. She’d thought it would lead them to safety, but it was a trap now so she ran hard for the back door to the Korean lumber store, staying close to the buildings, as she had before. She skidded to a stop just inside the place, breathing hard.

  The security guard jabbered at the counter lady, then took a step in Al’s direction. Al turned in his direction and pointed a finger at him, “do not fuck with me” in any language. He looked at her face and froze. “Smart man,” she said, and she headed into the store.

  She walked cautiously down the long aisle that ran across the back of the place, peering down each of the intersecting aisles as she went. All the wood in this place, she thought, and not one good stick, all of it too long and too heavy . . . The same guys who’d eyed her suspiciously before did so again, but she ignored them all, she was looking for a tall white guy looked like he just got off the bus from Des Moines. She began to second-guess herself. What if you’re wrong, she thought, and what makes you think you can understand how some strange man thinks, particularly some guy dresses like a mannequin out of an old Sears and fucking Roebuck catalog . . .

  He didn’t seem to be anywhere inside the place, and Al knew she was running out of time. She hunkered down behind a big pile of five-gallon cans of roofing cement up near the Flushing Avenue entrance.

  She heard some commotion outside the entrance and it was too late for second guesses. She peered over the top of the pile of buckets and there the guy was not fifteen feet away, he must have caught her movement out of the corner of his eye, he had his gun out, pointed up at the ceiling, he opened his mouth to shout as he began to bring the gun down to bear on her, she held a can of asphalt with both hands and she swung in a half-circle, pitched it at the guy with all the force she could muster. It took his knees out from under him and he began bellowing before he even hit the floor, he bounced once, lost his gun in the process, screamed, and grabbed his knee. Behind him the can fetched up against the register stand and the top burst open, splattering black goop. Lumber patrons danced out of the way as Al ignored the shouting voices and ran for the door.