Milos returned her smile. “Of the many items I import and export.”
“What kind of items?”
“Whatever is in demand,” he said.
“And the bathing beauties,” she said, jutting her chin at the pool. “Are they part of your distribution network too?”
“Hardly. They’re items in demand, which I imported from the city especially for the occasion.”
He’d hired the best-looking girls from a number of strip clubs and vanned them out for the night. Their job was an easy one: party, have a good time, wear very little, and be very friendly.
“Ah,” Cino said. “Window dressing.”
“More like party favors.”
Cino seemed to think this was very funny, and Milos enjoyed the ringing sound of her laughter as he watched the girls. Nature and silicone had provided them with fabulous bodies. They were on display now, but their real work would begin after they dried off. They had been instructed as to the pecking order of the guests and, keeping that in mind, were to pair off with anyone who was interested.
Tonight was supposedly a little bonus for the key people in the network of drugs and guns and currency that fed Milos’s operations. Many races down there on the patio: Italians, Greeks, Africans, Koreans, Mexicans, all soon to be part of his growing empire. His was now an international business, and thus had to be an international man and deal with everyone. Of course for his personal operations and security he used only full-blooded Serbs, hard, loyal men, blooded in battle.
But this gathering was more than just a party. It was a testimonial, an affirmation of sorts. They were here as Milos’s guests. Some of them might harbor an inkling in the backs of their minds that they could be his equal, but tonight should lay that to rest. This wasn’t neutral territory where equals meet. They had come to his place, where he called the shots; they were enjoying themselves on his tab, and getting a good look at his impressive new digs. They were in a position where the fact that Milos Dragovic was the man was being pounded home every minute of their stay.
They were down there with the bimbos, he was up here with the supermodel. Didn’t that say it all.
Forty-eight hours from now things would be very different. No business associates, no bodies in the pool. Sunday would be purely social, to establish and enhance his status among the big names out here.
“What’s that noise?” Cino said.
Milos recognized the rapid wup-wup-wup that seemed to come from everywhere. “Sounds like a helicopter.”
And then he saw it, maybe a hundred feet up, gliding in from over the ocean. A bulging net of some sort dangled beneath it. Milos couldn’t see what was in the net, but it looked full of whatever it was. Some new way of fishing, maybe? But no water was dripping from the net.
Whatever he was up to, Milos thought, the pilot shouldn’t be flying that sort of cargo over homes. If that net should tear…
“Oh, look,” Cino said. “He’s stopped right overhead.”
That was when the first suspicion that something might be wrong flitted through Milos’s mind. It became stronger when he noticed that the helicopter didn’t have any numbers on it. He didn’t know the exact rules, but every damn aircraft he’d ever seen had a string of numbers on the fuselage. This one either didn’t have any or someone had masked them.
Milos looked around and saw that the party had stopped dead. All his guests were standing still, looking up. Even the babes in the pool had stopped their splashing and were pointing at the sky.
“What do you think he’s up to with all those tires?” Cino said.
Tires? Milos looked up again. Damned if she wasn’t right. That net was full of tires. Must have been fifty of them at least.
What’s that asshole doing dangling all those tires right over my house?
And then the net opened…
And the tires tumbled free…
And fell directly toward him and the house.
Cino let out a high-pitched scream.
“Get inside!” Milos shouted as he turned to do just that, but she was already on her way, moving remarkably fast on her sky-high high heels.
Milos dove through the door just as the first tires hit the roof with the staccato thudding of a giant doing drum rolls with telephone poles, accenting with the cymbal crash of shattering skylights. An instant later other tires landed directly on the deck-patio area, smashing railings, overturning tables, wrecking the green house.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been it. But the tires on the ground didn’t stop on impact, they kept moving, bouncing ten, fifteen feet in the air in all directions; the ones on the roof were even worse, caroming off the pitched tiles and sailing toward the pool.
Milos ducked as a tire slammed into a sliding glass door just a few feet to his left, cracking it but not breaking all the way through. Screams and panicked shouts rose from outside. Milos clung to the door frame, watching in horror as his party dissolved into chaos.
The girls in the pool were lucky – they ducked underwater as tires splashed around them. But the men on the decks and patio didn’t have that option. They scrambled around, fleeing in all directions, bumping into each other, occasionally knocking each other down as the tires rained on them, flattening them, knocking them into the pool, upending tables and sending food and flaming chafing dishes flying. The randomness of the assault, the unpredictable, helter-skelter nature of the trajectories added terror to the chaos.
Where was his security? He scanned the tumult and found a couple of them still upright. Splattered with an assortment of desserts, they crouched by one of the raised decks with their guns out and raised, eyes searching the sky. But the helicopter was nowhere in sight.
With the tires bouncing from the direction of the main house, and the wings hemming them in on both sides, those guests still upright had nowhere to run except toward the beach. The tires bounced in pursuit, catching up to some and knocking them face first into the sand.
It seemed as if the tires would never stop bouncing, but eventually, after what seemed like eons, the last one wobbled to a halt. Milos stepped outside and gazed in horror at the shambles that had once been the pride of his grounds. Every square foot had suffered some damage. The girls were wailing as they crawled shivering and dripping from the pool. The cracked decks and patio were littered with debris and battered men struggling to their feet, some groaning, some cradling broken limbs, a few out cold and lying where they had landed. It looked like a war zone, as if a bomb had exploded.
But worse than any physical destruction was the deep, hemorrhaging wound to Milos’s pride. Guests in his home, proud men here at his invitation, had been injured or – worse – caused to run like panicked children. Their humiliation while under his aegis was a double disgrace for Milos.
Who would want to do this to him? Why?
He searched above for the helicopter, but it was gone, as if it had never been.
Never had Milos felt so impotent, so mortified. He fought the urge to scream his rage at the moonless sky. He had to remain poised, appear to be in control – as much as one could be amid such havoc… and then his gaze came to rest on the tire that had almost smashed through into his living room. It was mud-stained and bald, so worn that its steel belts showed through in spots.
Junk! Bad enough that he’d been attacked in his home, but he’d been assaulted with garbage!
With a cry that was half roar, half scream, he picked up the tire and hurled it the rest of the way through the window.
As he watched it roll across his living room carpet, Milos Dragovic swore to find out who had done this and to have his revenge.
3
Sal’s body was bucking so hard from repressed laughter he had to turn off the camera. If only he could scream it out, lie on his back and guffaw at the sky! Of course that might attract the kind of attention that would stop all laughs for good. He wiped his eyes on his sleeves and, still giggling, hurried off the dune toward his car.
O
h, God, that was wonderful. Those tires bouncing all over the place, tough guys running around like a bunch of cockroaches when the light goes on, screeching like little old ladies. The Slippery Serb’s gotta be shitting a brick! And I got it all on tape!
When he reached his car he sat in the front seat and caught his breath. He stared out the window at the empty dunes.
Bad night for Dragovic, yeah, but was it enough for what he’d done to Artie? No. Not nearly enough.
But it was a start.
Check out the other fix-its in… All the Rage
June
Hosts
With Hosts I began sneaking Jack’s family back into his life.
The novel has an SF plot with a thematic purpose. I’m not much into themes in my fiction – at least not consciously – but I couldn’t resist pitting this ultimate individualist against the ultimate collective. As I wrote it I came to love Jack’s sister and I let that love carry over into the Teen Trilogy where she’s his go-to person in the family.
There’s a blatant Bugs Bunny reference in the novel that no one except one of my sons-in-law has caught.
I introduced the Lady here. I didn’t know what I was going to do with her but I like to toss things at Jack (and myself) and see how he deals with them. I wasn’t sure what she was at this point, but I wanted a Chorus character to help explain what was going on and chose her. I hadn’t written the Teen Trilogy yet but made her an integral part when I did.
I occasionally let real life intrude on my fiction. Jack’s opening scene is my response to the Colin Ferguson shootings on the LIRR in 1993 – 25 shot, 6 killed. All those people were hurt or killed because of New York’s victim disarmament laws. If only one – one – other passenger had been armed, many of those victims would have been spared. But all they could do was watch him methodically walk down the aisle shooting everyone he saw.
If Jack had been there, things would have been different, as you will see…
HOSTS
(sample)
Riding the Niner.
Sandy Palmer wondered what percentage of his twenty-five years he’d spent bumping and swaying along this particular set of subway tracks back and forth to Morningside Heights. And always in the last car, since that left him a few steps closer to his apartment.
Got to save those steps. He figured everyone was allotted only so many, and if you use them up too fast you’re looking at early death or a wheelchair. Obviously marathoners and the hordes of joggers crowding the city parks either were unaware of or gave little credence to the Sandy Palmer theory of step preservation and reclamation. They’d regret it later on.
Sandy glanced around the car at his fellow passengers. Seven years now riding either the Nine or the One, starting with his first semester at Columbia Journalism and the frequent trips down to the Village or SoHo, now every damn day getting jammed in on the way down to midtown and back for his job with The Light. And in all that time his fellow riders still looked pretty much the same as they always had. Maybe a few more whites in the mix these days, but not many.
Take this car, for instance: Relatively crowded for a post rush-hour run, but not SRO. Still a couple of empty seats. Working people – nurse’s aides, bus drivers, jackhammer operators, store clerks, short order cooks, garment workers. Their skin tones ran a bell curve, starting with very black, peaking in the mid-browns, and tapering off into lily-white land. After growing up in Caucasian Connecticut, Sandy had had to get used to being a member of a minority on the subway. He’d been a little uneasy at first, thinking that people were staring at him; it took months before he felt comfortable again in his white skin.
The white guy dozing diagonally across from him on the L-shaped plastic bench they shared mid-car looked pretty comfortable. Talk about generic pale male – if Sandy hadn’t been thinking about white people he probably wouldn’t have noticed him. Clean shaven, brown hair sticking out from under the dark blue knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, an oversized white Jets shirt with a big green 80, jeans, and scuffed work boots. The color of his eyes was up for grabs because they were closed.
Sandy wondered what he did for a living. The clothes gave no clue other than the fact that he wasn’t white collar. Clean hands, not overly callused, though his thumbnails seemed unusually long.
The train slowed then and about a third of the passengers rose as signs announcing the FORTY-SECOND STREET / TIMES SQUARE station started slipping past the windows. The generic pale male opened his eyes to check the stop, then closed them again. Mild brown eyes. Definitely a GPM – an infinitely interchangeable example of the species.
Not like me, he thought. With my blond hair, hazel eyes, thick glasses, this big nose, and acne scars left over from my pre-Accutane teenage years, anyone could pick me out of a line-up in a minute.
New riders replaced those debarking almost one for one, spreading through the car in search of seats. He saw a slim young woman move toward a double seat at the very front of the car, but the man in it, a scraggly-bearded Asian guy in a stained fatigue jacket, with wild hair and wilder eyes, had his gym bag and a boom box on the empty half and he brusquely waved her away.
Wisely, she didn’t argue – he looked like the sort who was heavy into soliloquies – and went elsewhere in search of a seat. Sandy figured that was a potential blessing in disguise because she was moving toward the middle of the car, toward him.
Keep coming, he thought, wishing he were telepathic. I’ve got your seat – right here next to me.
She looked about twenty or so, all in black – sweater, tights, shoes, even the wire rims on her tiny funky glasses. She’d done one of those shoe-black dye jobs on her short, Winona Ryder-style hair, which made her pale face – not Winona Ryder’s face, unfortunately, but still pretty – look all the paler.
Sandy slid to his left, leaving half of his butt off the edge of the seat to give her plenty of room. She took the bait and slipped in next to him. She didn’t look at him, simply opened her book and began to read.
Instead of rejoicing, Sandy felt his insides tighten. What now? What to say?
Relax, he told himself. Just take a deep breath, figure out what you can about her, and see if you can find some common ground.
Easy to say, but so hard to do. At least for Sandy. He’d never done too well with women. He’d been to a couple of the campus counselors when he was a student and they’d both said the same thing: fear of rejection.
As if someone needed a Ph.D. to tell him that. Of course he feared rejection. Nobody in the whole damn world liked rejection, but that didn’t seem to stop people from courting it by coming on to each other with the lamest, sappiest lines. So why did the mere possibility of rejection paralyze him? The counselors liked to tell him the why of the fear didn’t matter so much as overcoming it.
Okay, he thought. Let’s overcome this. What have we got here? We’ve got a book-reading Goth chick heading uptown on the 9 express. Got to be a student. Probably Barnard.
As the train lurched into motion again, he checked out her book: Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut.
Bingo. Film student.
Okay. Here goes.
He wet his lips, swallowed, took that deep breath…
“Going for your film MFA, right?” he said.
And waited.
Nothing. She didn’t turn her head, didn’t even blink. She did move, but just to turn the page of her book. He might as well have used sign language on a blind person.
But he knew he hadn’t imagined speaking, knew he must have been audible because the GPM opened one of his eyes for a two-second look his way, then closed it again. Reminded Sandy of Duffy, their family cat: a one-eyed glance – two would require too much energy – was the only acknowledgment that chunky old tom granted when someone new entered his presence.
So now what? He felt like he was back in high school after asking some girl if she wanted to dance and she’d just said no. That had happened only once but that once had been enough to stop him from ever
asking anyone again. Should he retreat now? Slink away and hide his head? Or push it?
Push it.
He raised his voice. “I said, are you going for your film MFA?”
She looked up, glanced at him with dark brown eyes for maybe a whole millisecond, then went back to her book.
“Yes,” she said, but she spoke to the book.
“I like Hitchcock,” he told her.
Again to the book: “Most people do.”
This was going nowhere fast. Maybe she’d warm up if she knew he’d gone to Columbia too.
“I graduated from the School of Journalism a couple of years ago.”
“Congratulations.”
That did it, Sandy, he thought. That broke the ice. She’s really hot for you now. Shit, why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut?
He racked his brain for another line. He’d already been given the cold shoulder; nothing left to lose now. He’d swum beyond his point of no return, so he had to keep going. She was either going to let him drown in a sea of rejection or send him a lifeboat.
He smiled. Just the kind of crappy imagery his journalism professors had tried to scour from his brain. One had even told him he wrote the most cliché-ridden prose he’d ever read. But what was the big deal about clichés? They served a purpose in journalism, especially tabloid journalism. Readers understood them, expected them, and probably felt something was missing if they didn’t run across a couple.
The sudden blast of music from the front of the car cut off the thought. Sandy looked around and saw that the wild-haired guy in the fatigue jacket had turned on his boom box and cranked it up to full volume. It was pumping out a sixties tune Sandy half knew–”Time Has Come Today” by the Something-or-other Brothers.
Back to the film student: Maybe he should dazzle her by mentioning his great job at the city’s most infamous weekly tabloid, The Light, where his degree from one of the country’s great journalism programs landed him an entry-level position one step above the janitorial staff – except in pay. Or how he’s been doing interviews at every other paper around the city trying to move up from The Light and no one’s calling back. That’ll impress her.