Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

  ALSO BY MATT BURGESS

  Dogfight, A Love Story

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Burgess

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © James Worrell; styling by Megan Caponetto

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Burgess, Matt.

  Uncle Janice : a novel / Matt Burgess. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-53680-6 (hardcover)—

  ISBN 978-0-385-53681-3 (eBook)

  1. Policewomen—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction. 3. Drug dealers—Fiction. 4. Drug traffic—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.U746U63 2014

  813′.6—dc23 2014003337

  v3.1

  For the real-life J.I.,

  whose courageous dishonesty made this book possible

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Five Months Later

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  Only the knife knows what’s in a pumpkin’s belly.

  —GUYANESE PROVERB

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two dirt-gray pigeons perched close together for warmth. They were fifty-some feet above Roosevelt Avenue, in a tangle of steel girders beneath the elevated train tracks. The night before, a late-season storm, the worst so far of 2008, had whitened the sidewalks and packed the el’s eaves tight with snow. For the birds it was still too cold to coo. They hugged their wings tight to their bodies, their chests swollen with a stubborn civic pride, because unlike the upstate robins, wrens, hawks, and white-throated sparrows, the city’s pigeons felt far too urban to even consider migrating south for the winter. Where would they go? Myrtle Beach? West Virginia? Yeah right. Good luck finding a decent discarded bagel on the sidewalks of Morgantown.

  Fifty-some feet below them on Roosevelt’s slushy street, an overweight Korean leaned against an el pillar. Zippers crisscrossed his white leather jacket along the shoulders, at the elbows and cuffs, and across his wide chest. Greasy strands of hair, in a bowl cut so terrible it could only have been ironic, hung down to his eyebrows. He played some sort of game on his cell phone. Or maybe was just typing an extra-long text message. In the midwinter, late-day, rush-hour light, the phone’s blue screen cast his face in a ghoulish glow.

  The pigeons felt a tingle beneath their splayed feet. Time to go. They took off toward the nearest rooftop, where the stubby arms of satellite dishes thrust their round fists into the air. Time to go for the Korean as well. Seeing the pigeons fly away, he heaved himself off the pillar and retreated a few steps onto the sidewalk. A minute later, maybe less: the rumble. A little black kid bouncing a freshly purchased handball paused to plug up his ears. In the nearby, too-close apartment buildings, old women set teacups back onto saucers and young women recapped their eyeliners. The avenue’s flyer-hander-outters rested their vocal cords. All the cell phone walkers/talkers put their callers on hold and at last a Flushing-bound 7 local train went screaming overhead. Knocked loose, a heavy clump of snow—a real nasty neck-shiverer—fell from the eaves and landed plop in the spot where the Korean had been standing only moments earlier. Once the train safely passed, both he and the pigeons returned to their posts.

  Janice Itwaru went up to him and said, “Hey, yo.”

  He did not bother to look up from his phone.

  Did she feel extra hopeful he’d have drugs on him for sale because he was a person of color? And if she did, did that make her a racist? Well, yes, sorta, and yes, sorta, although probably less racist than most, plus she herself was a person of color, Guyanese, with a mother from the capital, Georgetown, and her fuckface father born and bred in a much smaller place literally called Paradise, but whatever, listen, racism aside, the real reason she approached the guy hopefully was because when an ordinary citizen gets tired he goes home or sits on a bus bench, but an on-the-clock drug dealer with no other place to go leans his expensive white jacket against a dirty-ass pillar. Unfortunately this alleged on-the-clock dealer seemed more interested in his phone than the twenty-dollar bill crumpled up in her back pocket. Hey: no judging. Maybe his mother told him to never talk to strangers. Maybe the last person he’d trusted was a barber at Supercuts, and lookit how that had turned out. Maybe—and this was perhaps most likely—maybe, not recognizing her, he worried she might be an undercover cop. Fine. Understood. Trapdoors abounded for these dealers. On today’s walk down Roosevelt, starting in the Queens neighborhood of Woodside, then Jackson Heights, and now into Corona, the guys who had recognized her suggested she go fuck herself, go rape herself. Compared to those creepazoids, this Korean came off like a prince. Skittishness she could handle. When she needed to make a buy, she liked to step up to every potential dealer, close enough to smell the fast food on their breath, but she also knew how to take half a step back and let the particularly paranoid shuffle over to her.

  “Has the guy come through yet?” she asked. She tilted her chin toward a red-and-yellow bodega across the street. “The guy who’s always out there?”

  His eyes flicked up at her before returning to his phone. “No hablo inglés.”

  A Spanish-speaking Korean? Sure, why not? On this stretch of sidewalk, one of the most ethnically diverse in the world, with sari shops smushed up against momo carts smushed up against stores that sold both Communion dresses and Mexican wrestling masks, Janice was willing to believe any sort of miscegenation mash-up was possible. Again: understood. Addicted, along with the rest of her work colleagues, to the cheesecake telenovela Rubí, which was running in chronological syndication on channel 47, Janice said, “You know. The guy. El hombre siempre de la tienda.” The man who’s always out there.

  “No speaky a Spanish,” the Korean said.

  Disgusted, or rather pretending to be disgusted, she hiked her purse strap over her shoulder and dashed into the street without looking. Somebody nearby screamed. A dark blue gypsy cab skidded through the slush to a stop, inches from Janice’s hip. She meant to cut it close, but not this close. Her fingertips brushed the warm hood, as if petting a giant, purring, predatory cat. Inside the car, a dashboard Virgin Mary trembled with whiplash. The cabbie seemed too stunned to honk, but on his behalf all the other drivers behind him leaned into their horns. Surely the Korean had to be looking at her now.

  She kept moving through stalled traffic toward the bodega’s bright lights. Out in front, flanking the front, was a pair of relics from an earlier New York, when people walked around with loose change instead of cell phones: a coin-operated, music-making, up-and-down, carousel-for-one machine that kept kids quiet and off their feet for about half a minute, not a fantasy unicorn in this case or a flying elephant
but a grounded-in-reality yellow taxi, albeit one missing a backseat; and next to that, a pay phone, still functional, its receiver slickened with germs. Both waited to be used. The bodega’s window signs advertised—as they had ten, twenty, thirty years earlier—LOTTO TICKETS and COLD BEER, with a more recent handwritten placard promising HAVE CURE FOR BEDBUGS.

  Inside, the store’s closed-circuit television footage—assuming the security camera was even on—showed a grainy, black-and-white Janice wandering up and down the aisles. She scanned the newspaper headlines. “High Noon,” said the Post. “Hill & Obama in Shootout,” beneath a picture of the presidential candidates wearing Photoshopped cowboy hats. Janice thought they both looked like assholes. She read the nutritional information on a box of Hamburger Helper. (Poor.) She compared Red Bull to Sugar-Free Red Bull. Because her feet hurt, because she was cold and thirsty and needed at least fifty cents in change anyway, because technically she was allowed two alcoholic beverages while working, she bought a tallboy of Modelo Especial, paying not with the twenty-dollar bill in her back pocket but with her own money instead, and drank the whole thing standing up at the counter while the nervous Pakistani bodega man made shoo-shoo gestures with his hands.

  Out on the sidewalk she burped. Excuse her! Across the street the Korean was still leaning against the pillar, but now it was she who wouldn’t look at him, not directly at least. The musical taxi, meanwhile, had found a driver: a little boy who drove with both hands on the wheel, as if afraid he might crash. His father, or at least the man Janice assumed was his father—a twentysomething Latino with the gray polyester suit and cheap pleather shoes of a doorman or security guard—stood nearby and jabbered into a cell phone. He was not the guy Janice had been talking about, el hombre de la tienda, because the guy Janice had been talking about did not actually exist.

  “Hey, where’s Corona?” she asked the doorman.

  “What?” he said. He cupped a hand over his cell phone to muffle an angry woman’s voice wah-wahing out of the receiver. He said, “You’re in Corona.”

  “No kidding?” Janice said. “Hey, you know where Manhattan is?”

  When he pointed east, she stepped off to the side to give the Korean across the street a better view. He saw, she hoped, a fiending addict asking some random dude where her dealer was at. You know. The guy.

  The Korean watched her—she assumed—pick up the pay phone’s receiver with only her fingertips. After depositing her quarters, she called what she imagined he imagined was her dealer, or maybe somebody who could get ahold of her dealer. Or maybe some other dealer she knew in front of some other bodega. Her mother answered on the second ring.

  “It’s me,” Janice said.

  “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but I think I might be getting some overtime tonight.” Intensely superstitious, but without any wood to rap her knuckles against, she used her forehead, knock knock. “I probably won’t be home until pretty late,” she said. “Okay? Will you write that down on the whiteboard?”

  “What is that noise I’m hearing?”

  “A musical taxicab,” Janice said. “Will you write down on the whiteboard that I won’t be home until late, please?”

  Janice had recently commandeered a label maker at work to post little reminders for her mother. LOCK ME UP, GOOD LOOKIN’ for the back door’s dead bolt. HEY HOT STUFF, TURN ME OFF above the stovetop’s burner knobs. The whiteboard, hammered to the kitchen wall, was for the more temporary items, like buy flaxseed, make dr appt, don’t panic: jan called and is working late. Savita Itwaru—Vita for short, objectively speaking the world’s most beautiful woman, whose hands always smelled like the lavender lotion Janice’s sister gave her every Christmas—had been diagnosed sixteen months ago with early-onset dementia.

  “I don’t need to write it down,” she said.

  “Okay, but it’d be a lot easier if—”

  “What?” Vita said. “I can hardly hear you!”

  “I’m saying if you just wrote it—”

  “What?!”

  Janice rested her forehead against the pay phone shell, its icy metal biting clean through her wool dockworker cap. Her eyes ached. Her feet throbbed. A sticker inside the phone shell offered nontraditional psychic services at what it promised were reasonable rates. DON’T GIVE UP HOPE, it said. SEE MADAM SANDRA. Some previous caller, possibly Janice without even realizing it, had picked away at the sticker’s four corners. “Listen, Ma,” she said. “I gotta get going, okay?”

  “Be good,” Vita said, her standard good-bye.

  Janice waited until her mother hung up before slamming the phone into its cradle. She stuck her finger into the coin-return slot, just in case, but the metal flapper thingy wouldn’t go all the way up, its chute probably jammed full of cotton balls, an old hustle her father had taught her many, many years ago. You come back later with a wire hanger to empty out a week’s worth of free laundry. Her father’s lesson, as always: there is a world beyond this one, a world made more glamorous by its cigar-scented sleaziness, with ports of entry as diverse as an usher’s open palm or a pay phone’s dark chute. She picked up the germy receiver and slammed it again. With a last glance at the boy in his taxicab, she headed toward the other side of the avenue, more carefully this time, looking both ways before crossing the street.

  As she walked past the Korean, he said, “Hey, mama, what you need?”

  He banged on the apartment door with the side of his fist. Weirdly chatty on the walk over here, he’d told her to call him Marty and had promised his boy would hook her up with two top-of-the-line crack vials for only ten dollars apiece. Family discount, he’d said. She had the money in her palm, ready to go, hopeful that she could get out of the apartment in under a minute with both Marty and the drugs. She needed him outside so the Narcotics investigators could grab him for intentionally aiding the criminal sale of a controlled substance, a felony. He knocked on the door again, for some reason softer this time, as if communicating a secret message. Two tiny golden screws affixed a mezuzah to the frame. Before Marty could knock again, a fair-skinned white guy opened the door. Short and squat, as wide as Marty but a good six inches shorter, he was much older than she’d expected, in his early to mid forties. Skin tags hung off his eyelids. He dressed young, though, in baggy shorts that went past his knees and an Anchor Steam bicycle jersey too tight for his body. Some semblance of a blond mustache grew only at the corners of his mouth. With a glance he seemed to register her presence in the hallway, but after that he looked only at Marty, without apparent recognition or interest, his face emptied of expression, as if he were posing for a passport photo. She thought maybe they’d knocked on the wrong door, but no: a sudden head jerk waved them into the apartment, which felt feverishly hot. All the radiators were clanking. Dirty cast-iron frying pans crowded the kitchen’s stove range, and when she saw them she knew for sure she was in a crack dealer’s apartment. WELCOME, said a welcome mat. It was kept inside the apartment, not out in the hall, probably to prevent it from getting stolen. PLEASE WIPE OFF YOUR PAWS. Behind her, Marty turned over the door’s dead bolt, her least favorite sound.

  No one had spoken yet. The dealer did not offer to take her coat or even bother to introduce himself, nor did he say anything to Marty, who wandered off alone toward the back of the apartment. A little bowlegged, as if the bicycle jersey were not merely an affectation, the dealer led her into the living room, where an enraged pit bull rose up in its little doggie bed and started barking at her. All the muscles along its sleek back were tensed. The roof of its snapping mouth appeared ridged like a dried creek. And yet, instead of blitzing across the hardwood toward Janice’s throat, the dog stayed, for now, in its fuzzy bed, as if unwilling to leave it. A massively pregnant belly with distended pink nipples hung low to the ground. The room reeked of cigarettes. The windows were all closed, the dusty blinds all pulled down. There was some other shit, too—a futon, a wicker chair, amateur paintings of city skylines hanging on the wa
lls—but she struggled to focus on anything beyond the dog’s barking. Her fist still clutched the twenty-dollar bill. Concerned primarily with keeping that dog in its doggie bed, she acquiesced to its owner and allowed him to lead her farther into the room. She didn’t know what else to do. She hoped the less she resisted, the faster she’d be allowed to leave. Told to sit down—the first words he’d spoken to her—she fell backward into the huge round Papasan wicker chair. A baby Glock 9mm pistol lay at the bottom of her purse. A small strip of body adhesive kept a nonfunctioning kel-mic taped between her breasts. Every time she went out onto the streets as an undercover she thought she might die, but—despite the investigators in a Chevy Impala a couple of blocks away, despite her partner and ghost, Chester Tevis, probably right across the street under the Peruvian restaurant awning—never before had she felt so alone. In this flytrap of a chair, her feet couldn’t reach the floor.

  “Geronimo!” said the dealer, and the pit bull stopped barking. Exhausted, breathless, it dropped down on its side in the doggie bed. A dark tongue unspooled from its mouth.

  “Good girl,” said the dealer, looking at Janice.

  He left the room, but the tiny men in all the radiator pipes kept swinging their tiny hammers. She wondered if she could outrun a pregnant dog to the door, get out before the dealer came back, but here he was now, with his bowlegged walk and a tall can of air freshener. Pure Citrus Lemon. He pointed it at the ceiling and kept his finger too long on the nozzle, as if to drain the entire can. She started coughing into her armpit. A cloying lemony wetness misted her face.

  “Sorry,” he said, sounding delighted. He sat down on the end of the futon nearest his dog. “It’s a lot, I know, but it’s better than the cigarette smoke, yeah?”

  “I guess.”

  “No, it is,” he said. “For sure.”

  Her hands clutched the purse in her lap. “So Marty told me you could maybe like hook me up with some vials or whatever?”