He reaches up to touch me, but I slap his hand away. “Don’t touch me,” I order. I don’t stop riding. I’m close to coming, to screaming, to exploding. Distantly, I hear my phone vibrating again.
Then the orgasm shatters inside of me, and then Angelo is coming.
When it’s over, I don’t wait. I climb off of him and go to the bathroom. I stay there until I hear him leave. Only then do I re-emerge, grab a blanket, and burrow into a cocoon on the couch. Part of me hopes I never wake up.
When I do inevitably wake up, I feel groggy and my phone is vibrating again. It’s a bright winter day, and the sunlight is blaring against my face, making me feel even more disoriented. I stand and stumble to the bar. I have no idea where Angelo is. I tell myself I don’t care.
I check my cell phone. The missed calls are from Ricky: twenty-one of them. Several texts, too, all of which are variations of fucking call me!
I call. There’s a nauseous feeling growing in my belly. He answers right away, not even a ring. A half ring, if that.
“Dani, where are you?”
“What is it?” I croak. “Is Wyatt okay?”
Ricky sighs. “No, Dani. He’s in really bad shape. You need to get down here.”
“Tell me what happened,” I say. I feel like there’s an ocean roaring in my ears.
“It’ll be easier if you come down. I can call you a taxi—”
“Tell me!” I yell, slapping my hand down on the bar.
“He’s in a coma,” Ricky says gravely. “He might wake up. Shit, he might not.”
I swallow hard and nod like that will make all this make sense. “What was it?” I ask dumbly. “What the fuck did he take?”
“Drugs, Dani,” Ricky says quietly.
“What drugs?”
“Kong,” Ricky says. “It was that King Kong shit.”
I turn as a reflex, as though Angelo might be standing there. It’s lucky he isn’t, because if he was I’m not sure what I’d do. I might throw a glass, rake my fingernails down his face. I think about the box I found under the bar, how evasive Angelo was.
Then the truth hits me like a tsunami:
The drug that Angelo is peddling has put my brother in a coma.
I slide down the bar, dropping to the floor.
“Shit,” I whisper. “Oh shit.”
25
Angelo
I’m pacing around the office of Sole Nero. The phone keeps ringing in my ear. Again, there’s no answer. I don’t know what game Giraldo is playing, but it’s gone past far past pissing me off now. My blood is boiling and there’s this tension in my head like my forehead might just crack down the middle.
Giuseppe gave me the news when I got into the club. Apparently, one of the King Kong shipments we received was cut with a bad strain of heroin, really bad stuff, and now several college kids are in the hospital. I immediately sent the soldiers out to retrieve as much of the shipment as they could. But that’s a fool’s errand, and we all know it. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
So I need answers.
And Giraldo still isn’t picking up the phone.
I kick my desk—the one I bought to replace the one that suffered death by letter opener—and wince when the phone stops ringing again. No voice mail, just like that, an abrupt stop.
I sit down and try to take a deep breath to calm myself. Then I call again, putting the phone on loudspeaker. While it rings, I think of Dani slumbering on the couch this morning when I left, just a sliver of her face visible above the blanket. I’ve tried calling her several times today, too, but she hasn’t responded.
Everything is fucking crumbling at once.
I play five-finger fillet to distract myself as the phone rings. Once, Father told me that when a man is overly emotional, the best thing to do is something completely unrelated to the problem for a little while. So I focus on the stabbing blade. For a little while, it even works.
By the time Giraldo answers, I am something approaching calm.
“Angelo, amico, what is it? Is something wrong? You’ve been calling me more than my wife, man.”
“Are we friends, Giraldo?” I say. “Amico, you call me. And yet this morning I get word that you’ve sent me fucking heroin. Heroin, Giraldo, some fucking rat poison. My product’s filling every hospital ward in the goddamn city. What’re you thinking?”
“Whoa!” Giraldo yells. “Angelo, I assure you, we send only the purest. You know that. We’re doing good business together. Why would I sneak in some poison? What sort of business sense does that make?”
“Maybe one of your old-timers wants to make a play on New York,” I say. “Maybe they convinced you to poison the shipment, and maybe right now they’re gearing up to use the chaos to their advantage. It’s not hard to think of a reason, Giraldo.”
I finger the letter opener as I imagine slitting the man’s throat. Just before Giraldo replies, my phone starts ringing with a call on the other line. I glance at it. Dani. “I’m putting you on hold,” I tell the man. “If you’re not here when I get back, it’s war. I mean that.”
“I’ll wait, Angelo,” he says. “I want to straighten this out as much as you.”
When I switch the call to Dani, I can hear something is wrong right away. It’s in the way she’s breathing. It sounds hollow, like she’s been crying.
She doesn’t talk for a few seconds. Then she says, “Guess where I am, Angelo.”
I swallow, because I already know. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Her brother is a junkie college student. And this shipment of King Kong hospitalized dozens of people just like him.
“I’m staring at my comatose brother,” she continues. “Your King Kong put my brother in the hospital. And I actually thought I had feelings for you. Can you believe that? What a fucking idiot I am. Our deal is off. I’m not your fake wife. I’m not your anything. You’re nothing to me.”
“Dani, wait—”
“No!” she cries. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
“It’s heroin,” I tell her. That bit of information might help save her brother. It is the only thing I can do right now. “It was cut with heroin.”
A pause, and then, “I’ll let the doctor know. Goodbye, Angelo.”
She hangs up; the call automatically switches back to Giraldo. I pick up the letter opener. I feel like I’ve been punched in the chest. Only now, when I’m going to lose her, do I realize just how much I’ve begun to care.
“You need to fix this, Giraldo,” I snarl.
“Angelo, of course,” he says. “But I swear to you, I am not behind this. I swear on my life.”
“Let’s say I believe you,” I muse. “Is it possible that somebody tampered with it on your end?”
“No, Angelo—”
“Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear,” I say coldly. “Tell me the truth.”
He sighs. “It is possible, but very unlikely. I run a tight operation.”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Investigate things on your end. Pay special attention to any old-timers who might not like us young men making a play of our own. I’ll look into things here. But Giraldo, you know what happens if I discover you’re lying to me, don’t you?”