The Nightworkers

by Brian Selfon

  Afternoons are for clients. Handshakes, PINs, and stored-value cards. Hard drives get swapped. Lefty Franklin talks politics, Jacob Burnside goes on about his ex-wives, and Shecky has a lot to say about the Mets. Business is fine, no new account closures, but hunting his watcher disrupts his day. He’s late to several meetings, including the most important one. But at last he’s at Maria Hernandez Park, where the client is still waiting on the bench.

  Vasya—actual name unknown—is a small, flaky-skinned man who wears neat suits. Gorgeous shoes. A jaunty pin in his lapel, a little white cat face—what’s it called?—Hello Kitty. Seeing Shecky, Vasya flicks his cigarette, stands, and extends a hand.

  “You need a drink,” Vasya says as they begin their walk-and-talk.

  “Thank you for taking my call last night,” Shecky says.

  “How could I not? Your problems are ours.” Vasya is Shecky’s liaison at the Paradise Club, an early and very important client. Shecky has explained this clearly to the kids: everything done by the Paradise Club is none of our business, but everything done for the Paradise Club must be done right away. Like get off your ass and go fucking help them right now. Last night, though, it was Shecky asking them for help. “And you did the right thing,” Vasya says, as if reading Shecky’s embarrassment, “calling me. Thank you for your trust.”

  Shecky shakes his head. “What a mess.” The call was miserable and shameful, a new low in an already wretched month—all those banks turning against him, freezing his accounts. But the call was also necessary, and he made it just moments after he worked it all up in his ledger. Scheduled out the whole family disaster, transaction by transaction, calculated to the last penny.

  “Don’t worry, we’ve all known messes.” Vasya speaks with casual conviction. “We’ll get it cleaned up together.” Slow walking, now, they share a look. We’re old-timers, we’ve seen and done plenty, we’ll get through this. Then a hint of mischief comes into Vasya’s eyes. “Tell me, though. If it’s not too personal. These problems with the accounts, how did they start?” Now the mischief is in his mouth. “Was it your son?”

  A punch of mixed emotions. My son. If only! But Vasya’s insinuation about Henry—it’s painful precisely because it echoes Shecky’s own thoughts. Henry did nothing wrong on purpose, and he’s never lazy, but sometimes his judgment … And now Shecky feels the heat in his face, hears the thud of his heart. “My nephew,” he says pointedly, “is absolutely responsible.” Pause. “No, wait, I didn’t mean…” Shecky feels worse, now, tricked by his own tongue. An angry ache moves down his shoulders to his fists. Vasya should never have brought up Henry. “All due respect, but we will not discuss him.”

  “Of course, forgive me.” Vasya stops the walk-and-talk. Puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll come out from this, you understand?” His smell: cigarette smoke, cologne. His eyes: cold. “In the end, every problem is just an expense.”

  * * *

  More errands, and Shecky comes home late to dinner.

  Late to dinner—him! Jesus fuck, he thinks. These kids are your responsibility. What good are your schemes and your scrambling if, come dinnertime, you’re not here for them?

  Take it down a few, Dannie scolds him. “You don’t have to actually rip your heart out,” she said once to an actor. Overacting was a kind of apostasy for her. “This is a five-buck show. No one’s expecting warm blood.”

  He imagines Dannie in his kitchen now, rolling her eyes at him. Telling him not to beat himself up. But she’d be amused, too, because—and this amazes him more and more as the years pass—she actually enjoyed his little quirks. Just liked being around him. And now she’d remind him that he’s only a half hour late. She’d indicate Kerasha, whose presence means he hadn’t missed the family dinner after all.

  Down a few, Shecky. Keep your blood off the floor.

  Kerasha is in her usual seat. In her usual pose, too: leg over the arm of the chair, foot on the windowsill, book open on her lap.

  “Sorry I’m late, kid,” he says. “You must be starving to death.”

  “I’m not going to let myself die, Uncle Shecky,” she says. “Not before dinner.”

  How does she do it? Decades younger and fresh out of the cage, but she always comes off like she’s holding the family wisdom. And who knows, she probably is. She spotted that watcher, after all, credit where due. And speaking of, she must know now—even from the armchair—whether that watcher is close.

  But shouldn’t she come to him for help? He is, by some twists of luck and law, her sponsor. Maybe just once in a while?

  Earlier in the week he spoke about this with Fat Boris, the family ID doctor. A dad with a daughter.

  “Shouldn’t she look up to me?”

  “How could she? You’re, what, five foot four?” Fat Boris smiled as he handed over the passports he’d printed for Shecky. “She tolerates you. Be grateful for that. Start from there.”

  Tolerant is a good word for Kerasha. Tranquil. Self-contained. Whereas he, her de jure guardian, lives from terror to terror.

  “Sorry,” Shecky says again, a good word for him. “We’ll get something in your belly right quick.” He slices up a dry salami, a garlic pickle, and a cheese wedge, and puts them on a serving plate heaped with crackers. “Get started,” he says, hurrying back to the kitchen. He wants to ask Kerasha about the green Mustang. Wants to call Henry to see why he’s not here. Ask about the heavies. See whether he’s still sore about last night’s tiff. But so much of being an uncle-guardian-employer is doing nothing, saying nothing, just abiding. It’s not enough for questions to hang unanswered; often they mustn’t be asked at all.

  “It’s bluefish tonight,” he tells Kerasha, peeking in on her from the kitchen. She turns a page, which is all his announcement deserves. No doubt she’s expected nothing else. Bluefish is all they have, and even with her eyes in her books, she seems to know every inch of the house. Inside, outside, the surrounding streets. The contents of the refrigerator. The presence or absence of a green Mustang.

  Down a few, Shecky. Give the girl a proper meal, and she’ll talk when she has something she wants you to hear.

  He sets the oven to broil. He stretches foil on the pan and lays the bluefish—gutted, but with the head, tail, and fins still on—at the dead center. Salt, pepper, olive oil: it needs nothing else. Wild rice and broccoli rabe, both cooked earlier this week, will do fine for sides. One in the microwave, the other simmering in a pan, he checks the clock. Seven more minutes, then the fish can go in under the flame. The meal has basically made itself. He opens a Guinness.

  Fuck the green Mustang. I have a niece and beer.

  Life has played me fair.

  He brings three loaded plates to the kitchen table. He also has his Guinness and one for each of the kids, including the absent one. Jesus forbid Henry should come home and see there’s nothing left out for him. Henry feeling given up on, feeling forgotten—never. He can slam all the doors he wants, but Shecky won’t let him down like that.

  Plates down. Shecky himself down. There’s an empty chair, but fuck it. Grace: “Thank you for being here. Thank you for being my family.” Eyes open. A sparkle, a bit of leather, a length of steel, a flash of gold. His bottle hits the table, a clatter, a mess.

  “Jesus fuck,” Shecky says. “Where did you get that?”

  On his kitchen table is a large black pistol. A Glock, he’s pretty sure, a 9mm demon—on his kitchen table, not twelve inches from his niece.

  Next to the pistol is a police badge.

  “The plate is K8134M,” she says, righting Shecky’s bottle. Leaving the table, coming back with a dishrag. Putting it to work. “Not sure we still need to run it.”

  Shecky’s eyes go from gun to badge, and stay there. NYPD, Detective 7229. “This is real?”

  “They were in his nightstand,” she says. “The lock was pretty good, but the hinges popped right off.”

  And so ends the non-mystery of the blue Impala and the green Mustang: the watcher is
police—the obvious answer was the right one. Now before him is the actual mystery: What the fuck are they going to do about it?

  “We have to get rid of those,” he says, indicating the gun and the badge.

  “Do you want me to put them back?”

  A pause. The offer, like Kerasha herself, is wild. Audacious.

  But also tempting.

  The watchers don’t have to know they’re being watched. They can be misdirected. But if this means putting Kerasha back in danger—

  “He doesn’t even have to know,” she says.

  He catches the glint in her eye, and all at once he gets it, why she brought the badge and the gun here. She’s having fun. Of course she is, she was born to this—the silence, the darkness, the score. Even the danger, he supposes, her power to slip through it. But to steal a badge and gun from a cop, to hit him in his own house, and then to go back—how could he allow it? But how could he say no when it’s so obviously the right move, when it would allow them to stay a step ahead, for once? For a moment he shares in her thrill at what she’s done, at what she’s proposing to do again.

  But then in her eyes he sees the little girl as she was when he visited Paulette’s apartment. Just one visit, maybe fifteen years ago, but he still remembers the stank of those rooms. Remembers, with shame, how he’d turned away from his cousin—wretched, practically decomposing. Shecky was disgusted, but he was also powerless, with no custody rights—and he’d run from her scabs and scratching.

  And left the girl behind.

  Not this time, Shecky thinks. Today I’m the uncle I should have been from the start. And I’m not sending her back to a cop house.

  Shecky picks up the badge: 7229, NYPD Detective. “Fuck him,” Shecky says. “We give it back and he’ll go on with his meddling. We lose it, and they’ll put him in the rubber room.” He sets the badge back on the table and pushes it next to the gun. “Out of the house, off a cliff. Both of them.”

  “Gowanus Canal,” Kerasha says after another forkful of fish. “Won’t be the first time something’s disappeared there.”

  chapter 14

  Hours earlier, Emil Scott is on the run. Breathless. He leans against a brick wall, gasping as he counts his options. One, hail a stranger. Maybe this dog lady across the street will do. Rat terrier on one leash, Great Dane on the other, a study in contrasts. Everyone an artist in Brooklyn, even in dog selection. Excuse me, ma’am, he’d say. I’m carrying what I’m pretty sure is drug money, and someone—a man, I think—is chasing me. Do you mind if I use your phone to call … What’s that? My phone? Funny story …

  But it’s not funny at all, and it’s not even a story. His phones—both burner and personal—have vanished.

  He at first chalks this up to absentmindedness, a fault he has made no apology for since he sold his first painting. But a shadow has followed him from one end of Bushwick to the other—despite the three fallback hideouts, chosen, Henry said, expressly for him—and as he leans against this brick wall, his heart racing, he cannot turn away from the fact that his phones were plucked from his pockets. He’s being hunted, that’s certain now. The only question is whether he’s already caught.

  A parked truck, two men in the bed unloading lumber. Filthy clothes, bright orange hard hats—possible details for an oil painting.

  An oil painting? Fucking plant your feet, Emil. (He’s hearing Henry in his head.) You’re holding a bag and you’ve got a tail. What do you do?

  The answer takes a moment, but it comes.

  I look for options.

  This is no small miracle. In his hour of need, the training is coming back to him.

  Okay, options. How about this road crew? May I use your phone? he’ll ask. May I borrow your truck, may I wear your clothes? Can you please hold this garbage bag for me—can we swap lives, just for today?

  Okay, so you get a phone, he says to himself. Talking himself down, turning the panic into an actionable plan. Who do you call?

  A moment passes.

  His talk-down has backfired.

  Who would he call? Not his mother in Woodstock. Not his dead stepdad, obviously. Not Imani, and definitely not Henry—Emil would have to talk circles around his aborted stopover. He’d also have to remember the number. And he can’t call the people he was supposed to meet at the stopover—another forgotten number—and you’re not calling 911 when you’re holding the devil’s bag.

  Here he is, Emil Scott—the “hipster prince of Bushwick,” as Imani sometimes calls him. Never without an opening to attend, always some Facebook friend waving him over, everywhere a girl or boy waiting out Imani. Here he is, the man who always has someone—alone.

  No, not quite alone. His hunter will be his final companion.

  His creative genius is usually playful, but at this moment every vision is a horror. A long coat, a blade visible just beneath it. A child transfixed by a red ball, a dark shadow approaching. A couple sleeps peacefully, while, through the doorframe, tendrils of black smoke …

  In a dusty bodega he catches his breath. Visible out the windows are the towers of the Moses Houses. The AC in this bodega, mounted just above the front door, rattles while blowing in warm air, yet Emil is chilled and shaking. They must think him a trust-funded addict, he considers, another bohemian visiting the Moses Houses for a hit. And why not. The way he’s feeling now, he’d try anything.

  He walks along an aisle of detergents. Industrial-strength cleaning sprays fill the top shelves. Then scouring powders, then drain de-cloggers. The colors on these bottles would have lit him up this morning. Now they make him dizzy.

  Toss the bag here, he thinks. Just stuff it behind the Windex.

  But then he’d answer to Henry, to that uncle he answers to. This isn’t his money to lose. Emil hurries out of the bodega, afraid of his own impulses. Emil, who’s always trusted himself, now doubting; always one with himself, now divided.

  Across the street are teenagers: cigarettes, red bandannas, bare arms. Restless. The mostly white hipster set from Emil’s corner of Bushwick—men with mustaches, women with sleeve tattoos—they’d probably avoid these kids. Cross a street to get away from them. For Emil, they are a godsend. Safety in numbers, safety among witnesses—seeing them Emil remembers both the general tactics Henry taught him, and the specific reference to a room in the Moses Houses that could serve as an emergency hiding spot. And so Emil goes to the kids, asks for weed. They blaze together, no one asking for money. No one even looking at the garbage bag packed with cash, which, per training, he’s got slung over his shoulder. (“Forget it,” Henry said, “don’t fucking look at it. People follow eyes.”) The bag is still over Emil’s shoulder when the kids get bored with him, forget him, and one of them says something about seeing a girl. The bag is still over Emil’s shoulder when he follows them into the tower.

  Just inside is a busted fire alarm. The kids slap it as they pass, maybe for luck. Emil slaps it, too, after the kids have disappeared around the corner. Why not? And who knows, maybe the luck’s already here. He’s inside a large complex where it will be easy to get lost. He knows about a hiding spot. For the first time since that odd train transfer at Myrtle Avenue, his whole body relaxes.

  Heartened, Emil walks the halls, thinks about Imani, and does not immediately hear the approach of the man who has been following him.

  chapter 15

  Another scream.

  They’re killing her. Henry races out of the stairwell, down the hall. Fight time is now, his body knows what to do.

  Medic, coroner, avenger—whatever you need, Lipz, I’m here.

  Corridor of doors, only one half-open. Only one that’s screaming. He barrels toward it, previewing the horror show in his head. Lipz on the floor, Tiger and his boys over her, beating her flat with bats. Or they have knives, they’re carving her up. Or it’s a chain, a wire—it doesn’t matter, he’ll go at them, just him and his hands. Whatever she’s getting, he wants for himself: she made the mess, but they’re in it together.
>
  And so he’s unprepared to see Tiger on the floor, Lipz above. Tiger a human X, his limbs tied open with coaxial cables. Lipz’s hands wet, her shirt crimson, a glob of something fatty hanging near her mouth. She’s hacking at Tiger’s head with keys, Henry sees, sawing off his beloved hair—his buzz lines, his dye dots—cutting into the scalp. Tiger screams like an animal, and Henry’s eyes keep going to the coaxial cables. Tiger’s wrists and ankles are tied to a radiator, a bedpost—what Lipz has accomplished is admirable, in a way, but she’s a little too psychotic to take advantage of the situation.

  “Where’s my stash, bitch?” Key cut, scream. “I need my shit!”

  Henry grabs her hands. “Let him answer.”

  Minutes later, Tiger is left whimpering, and Henry and Lipz descend the unlit stairwell. “This country’s so fucked,” she says. Her stash is long gone, but she has the four hundred dollars Tiger made from it. She also has Tiger’s prized wallet, the leather marked as if by claws. “I sell for ten, and everyone says ten is the ask. But now I fucking find out that fucking Tiger gets fucking fifteen? Fucking fifteen to my ten? Fucking disrespect, that’s what it is.” They step over a wino, and three steps later Lipz’s outrage has become in-rage. “Fuck me. No name in the motherfucking street. I ask for twenty, but then they look at me like I’m nothing. Then I feel like I’m nothing. And I cave.” They come to a flickering floor light. Henry can see her now, slouch-walking with her eyes on her feet. Her tatted arms crossed over her chest.