Business is slow, and Jimmy Rat is sitting with one bare foot up on the bar, clipping his toenails into a cracked cup marked TIPS. When he sees me, he pitches a fit. “Jeez, Vince, get the hell out of here!”
“I need two minutes, Jimmy. That’s all.” But when I take a step toward him, he bolts. It’s a funny hopping gait since he’s only got one shoe on, and there’s glass on the floor in here, too.
“Hear me out!” I cry.
He scrambles headlong into the bathroom. I try to follow, but he’s holding the door against me.
“One minute!” I plead.
“You got something to say that’s worth my life?” he snaps back. “’Cause that’s what it’s gonna cost!”
Suddenly, the door flies open, and I burst inside, just in time to see him disappear into a stall.
“Fine!” I exclaim. “We’ll do it this way. You don’t have to see me.”
“I’m not listening!” he shouts, his hands covering his ears. Then, when I start talking, he sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of his lungs.
It’s a Cirque du Soleil experience. I’m in the toilet of a club that’s a toilet to begin with, so it’s actually more like toilet squared. I’m yelling at a stall door that’s singing the national anthem back at me while the storm of the century approaches from the west.
I climb up on the sink and stare down at this cowering singing idiot. He won’t look at me, and he won’t shut up, so I just say my piece at top volume right through the rockets’ red glare.
“THE PLATINUM COAST IS NEVER GOING TO TURN A PROFIT BECAUSE IT’S NOT A REAL CLUB! THE WHOLE THING’S A CON, JIMMY! YOU AND ED HAVE TO STOP PAYING BOAZ! I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN STRAIGHTEN IT OUT WITH MY DAD, BUT I’LL TRY!”
“‘O, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave…’”
Outside, a deafening crash of thunder. I can hear heavy rain pounding at the single window.
I’m screaming with frustration. “JUST NOD YOUR HEAD OR WAVE YOUR HAND IF YOU HEARD WHAT I SAID! I’VE GOT TO GET HOME! THERE’S A BIG THUNDERSTORM ON THE WAY!”
A sudden silence. Jimmy looks up at me. “With lightning?”
I have no patience left. “No, with ketchup! Of course with lightning! It’s a bad storm! The whole city’s talking about it! If you’d climb out of the sewer once in a while, you’d know that!”
He looks up at me, his face intense with excitement. “Gotcha, Vince! Thanks a million! I’ll pass the word to Ed!”
I just naturally assume he means my business advice, and not my weather report.
How the hell was I supposed to know?
By the time I get home, I might as well have been riding in a convertible. I’m drenched, and there must be three inches of water on the floor of my Mazda.
Mom sends Dad into the hurricane to move one of the Mercedes out of our quadruple garage to make room for my car. Two seconds on the driveway and he’s every bit as wet as I am.
Wet or dry, I’m revolted by the sight of my own father. The word is out before I can bite my tongue: “Bastard!”
He freezes, and we stand glaring at each other in the downpour.
“Honest Abe Luca!” I growl in disgust. “What a crock!”
His response is measured. “As a parent, I never thought I’d say this, but I sure hope you’re drunk.”
“You know who’s ripping off Jimmy and Ed so they’ve never got the money to pay you? You are!”
His eyes shoot sparks. “You’ve got some set of balls!”
“I saw it with my own eyes! One of the partners is Rafael! Uncle Uncle’s Rafael! Which means some of that money trickles upstream to you!”
He’s in a fury that the rain is doing nothing to cool. “Do you know how many guys I’ve got under me? Maybe you expect me to make notes every time somebody takes a whiz, but that’s not how it works! These people have to make a living. And how they do it is their problem, not mine!”
I can get just as mad as he can. “Don’t tell me you didn’t sign off on this!”
“If it’s Rafael and his guys, then Uncle signed off on it. Or maybe Carmine. You think they call the Pope every time there’s algae growing in the holy water at St. Bart’s?”
“Fine,” I growl, flipping my wet hair out of my eyes. “You didn’t know. But you know now. What are you going to do about it?”
A flash of lightning illuminates his face, and I can see what everybody else is so afraid of. Anthony Luca, mad, makes the storm of the century look like light rain.
“What I do or don’t do is none of your business!” he roars. “Why should I have to take my cues from an overprivileged puke who looks down his nose at me and how I put bread on the table? Oh, Vince doesn’t approve of The Life. Alert the media.”
“I accept what you do,” I throw back at him. “But what’s happening to Jimmy and Ed—illegal isn’t the half of it! You don’t rob a guy and then break his legs because he’s got no money. Surely there’s some kind of honor code out there, even for people like you!”
He goes ballistic. “For someone who doesn’t want any part of my business, your little nose is in pretty deep! I’ve got captains who put in less time than you!”
“I thought you wanted motivation,” I say bitterly.
He seems genuinely anguished now. “What am I going to do with you, Vince? You’re like crabgrass! Every time I turn around, you’re in another part of the lawn!”
The next shot is mine, but I don’t take it. All of a sudden, I’m completely spent, soaked to the skin and exhausted by a day that started in front of Kendra’s locker, long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Twenty minutes later, we’re both in dry clothes, and my mother is stuffing us full of lamb chops, warning, “A good dose of double pneumonia will put you totally out of commission.” Agent Bite-Me, wherever he’s listening from, will never guess that Dad and I were just at each other’s throats. He can’t see that Mom has placed us at opposite ends of the table, and is patrolling the demilitarized zone with a meat fork.
It’s only now, when I can’t say it because the walls have ears, that I realize what I should have told Dad out there. That this isn’t same fight, new day. This is different. A line has been crossed, and I can never look at my father in quite the same way again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I’M AT SCHOOL BRIGHT and early again the next day, waiting on the doorstep for a custodian to let me in.
It’s the same guy from yesterday. “Don’t you got no home?” he quips.
Not much of a joke, but it’s eerily close to the truth. I have a home, but there’s a cold war going on there. I don’t relish the idea of hanging around so Dad and I can glare at each other.
When Alex arrives an hour later, he finds me perched on a chair, putting up a large homemade poster. I jump down so he can read the message:
VOTE VINCE & KENDRA
FOR A ROYAL HOMECOMING
He’s confused. “I don’t get it.”
“I don’t, either,” I sigh. “But she’s the only thing in my life that makes any sense right now. I’ve got to get her back.”
Alex makes a face, but it isn’t his usual toxic look of distaste for all things Kendra-esque. There’s something else in the mix. Maybe a little guilt?
“Don’t even start,” I groan. “I know you don’t like her.”
“I like her—” he protests.
“Then you don’t like me and her,” I persist. “Listen, I understand. Really, I do. But I have to try this, get her attention, put myself close enough to her that one day, maybe, she’ll realize I’m not my father.” I shrug miserably. “I’m going to go make some posters.”
Wordlessly, Alex opens his locker, which is right next to mine. There, under his backup gym sneakers, sits a stack of continuous form paper. I recognize it immediately. It’s a whole pile of those computer-generated Vince and Kendra signs, the ones I spent half the semester ripping down!
I stare at my friend since elementary school. “That was you???
?
A shamefaced shrug; a tiny nod.
“Why?” But I already know. He figured I’d blame the posters on Kendra, which I did. And any disharmony between Kendra and me is beautiful music to Alex.
“I’m toe-jam,” he admits, his face flushed. “You think I like it that I can’t feel good for my own best friend? But I’m dying here! I think about sex twenty-five hours a day, and I can’t even get a lunch date. Okay, I joke about it, but when the laughing stops, it really hurts! Especially when Tony Soprano’s son, who doesn’t even care, is so irresistible that even the FBI’s daughter can’t keep her hands off him!”
I glare at him. “You didn’t place an anonymous phone call to Agent Bite-Me, did you? You know, to talk about the weather, and who his daughter’s boyfriend happens to be?”
He’s genuinely distressed. “God, Vince, never!”
The weird part is I instantly believe him. Alex is a termite, not a saboteur. He wouldn’t dynamite my relationship; he’d just chew away at it, hoping that the whole thing would fall apart on its own.
“I’d punch you,” I growl, “but I’d probably break my hand on that obelisk you call a nose.”
He looks mournful. “I’m not saying what I did was right.”
“Well, what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything!” he snaps. “Except that I’m sorry and life sucks.”
“I found that out yesterday,” I agree sourly.
“And, hey,” he adds, “free posters.”
I can’t stay mad at him. I never could. We haul out the computer-generated signs. There are twenty-one of them.
“Enough to get us elected president and first lady.”
“Are you kidding?” scoffs Alex. “You guys are going to come dead last.”
“I’m counting on it,” I tell him. “Anyway, there’s only one voter I’m trying to reach.”
There’s no way Kendra can miss all those posters, but she’s ignoring me just the same. I catch glimpses of her as the day goes on—in crowded hallways, across the cafeteria—but every time she sees me, she quickly looks away.
I don’t push my luck by trying to talk to her. Time heals all wounds.
“Figure two thousand years, and all is forgotten,” Alex offers by way of comfort.
“You’re way too cheery for a guy with a dead Chia Pet,” I say, glowering.
The big news that day happens in cyberspace. Sometime last night, in the middle of the thunderstorm, that giant among Web sites, iluvmycat.usa, nudges cyberpharaoh.com out of first place to become the most hit project in New Media class. I get a round of applause when Alex and I enter the computer lab. Even Mr. Mullinicks gives me a congratulatory slap on the shoulder.
“There must have been a big toga party down at the cat pound,” I mutter, booting up a machine.
Sure enough, my site now boasts over a thousand hits, and there are 276 ads on Meow Marketplace. If iluvmycat.usa holds its lead, I’m going to get an automatic A++ in New Media. And the irony is that I understand what’s happening here less than anything in my entire school career, except maybe Beowulf.
I check the postings that put me over the top. “Aw, come on!” I blurt out. “Who calls a cat Compassionate Conservative?”
Fiona speaks up. “Maybe he’s named after the horse.”
I’m instantly alert. “There’s a horse named Compassionate Conservative?”
“It was on the news last night,” she replies. “The poor thing broke its leg in the middle of a race, and they had to shoot it. It was really sad.”
Could this cat really be named after a racehorse? I read the ad again:
Cat for sale: Compassionate Conservative. You’ll have a sixth sense about this cat. A real winner at parties, toga included. $350—TC.
Right after class, I head for the library and grab a copy of the New York Post. I flip through the sports pages, and there it is—a small article next to the race results: “Tragedy struck in the home stretch of the sixth race at Saratoga yesterday.”
I look up, frowning. I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve read this before. But that’s impossible. I haven’t seen a newspaper today. And even if I had, I sure wouldn’t have looked up the racing results—“…the sixth race at Saratoga…”
You’ll have a sixth sense about this cat. A real winner at parties, toga included…
An “oof!” escapes from me as if I’ve just landed hard. I get some strange looks, but I can’t worry about that. I feel like the scientist who figured out the Rosetta stone and decoded hieroglyphics once and for all.
“Toga”: Saratoga Raceway.
“Sixth sense”: the sixth race.
This isn’t an ad to sell a cat! This is a bet on a horse! It’s $350 on Compassionate Conservative, running in the sixth at Saratoga, placed by someone named TC. A real winner must mean the bet is for the horse to win.
My mind runs through an inventory of those other messages. The words win, place, and show are everywhere. This is a real show-cat, or place this cat at the top of your to-do list, even a cat I found at Winn-Dixie. Then there’s the daily double: this is a double sale of two cats. Or the exacta: I’m selling exactly two of my cats. And Kendra was dead right about the numbers being important. They give the amount of the bet and which race it’s on.
The names! Compassionate Conservative, Cuppa Joe, Color Me Purple, Thank-You Mary, Lip Gloss: they are all there in the race listings.
I go over every inch of that racing page with a fine-tooth comb. I’m not that easily amazed. Once you’ve popped your trunk and found Jimmy Rat bleeding into a blanket, everything else counts as relatively predictable. But the harder I look, the more I realize there’s a whole secret language in Meow Marketplace, one that you practically need the Enigma decoder to figure out.
By matching the horses in the paper against a printout of the Web site ads, I painstakingly begin to identify the racetracks. Toga means Saratoga; that’s the easy one. A movie star refers to Hollywood Park. Pure gold is Golden Gate Racetrack; a gem of a cat is Emerald Downs. And ringing endorsement seems to be Belmont Raceway, as in ringing and bell. It gets cute like that. All those “inky” cats turn out to be running at Penn National Racetrack. And get this: the cats that can “quack” are at Aqueduct—like Aqueduck. It might be a joke, but I have a sneaking suspicion that your average track rat doesn’t know any better.
But I might be selling them short, because some of these code names are kind of clever. Sharpshooter denotes Remington Park. Arlington International Raceway explains all those cats that enjoy long walks through the “cemetery.” And my personal favorite: Churchill Downs is responsible for all those feline “prime ministers.” Thank God that’s straightened out. Now I can die.
That FBI heredity turns out to be worth something after all. The ads are exactly what Kendra said they’d be: coded messages. She didn’t know that the code was for betting on horses, but she had the rest of it right. Sharp as a tack, my Kendra. Too bad she isn’t my Kendra anymore.
There’s only one loose end: who is the recipient of these messages? Who’s taking the action from all these cyberspace horseplayers? I know the answer before I finish asking myself the question.
Who developed a sudden interest in the Internet in general and iluvmycat.usa in particular?
Tommy Luca.
Here I am, so happy that my brother has found a hobby, and he’s using it to turn my New Media project into an Internet betting operation.
Same old story. The vending-machine business has once again taken over who I am and what I do. I’m a prisoner in my own life.
The kicker, the real frustrating part in all this, is that there’s nothing I can do about it. Mr. Mullinicks would just tell me it’s my problem. The principal would probably call the cops. That leaves Dad, and he’s Tommy’s boss. Some of the profits from the operation end up in his pocket. Sure, I could get on my computer and delete the site entirely. But then I’d flunk New Media and miss starting college next fall. I’m trap
ped.
It occurs to me that my prospects for winning Kendra back are getting grimmer by the second. Remember, I’m not just a loan shark anymore. Now I’m a bookie.
I stand up to refold the Post. The front-page headline catches my eye: STORM WREAKS HAVOC ON AREA BUSINESSES.
I don’t know what makes me read it. I had to bail out a Mazda Protegé last night, so maybe I feel a brotherhood with other victims of the weather.
Fires caused by lightning strikes destroyed three Manhattan businesses as a line of violent thunderstorms passed over the tristate area last night. Return to Sender on Norfolk Street, Java Grotto on West Broadway, and the Platinum Coast on West Thirty-Ninth Street were all gutted by flames….
I come dangerously close to putting a secondhand burrito on the library carpet.
Jimmy’s place! Ed’s place! The Platinum Coast!
I feel like I’m reeling around the room, bouncing off the walls. I don’t know what this is, but I know what it isn’t: a coincidence! Lightning crackles over the city, and the only businesses that get hit are Jimmy’s and Ed’s? Impossible!
I run for the pay phone in the student common area. It takes me a full minute to cram in forty-five cents, the cost of a call to New York. That’s how badly my hands are shaking. The line rings and rings. Then it dawns on me: I only have their work numbers. If Return to Sender has been destroyed by fire, there’s no phone left to answer.
In despair, I realize that I can’t reach Jimmy or Ed. Going to the city won’t help either. Their places of business are burned-out shells. Nobody’s going to be there. And I don’t know where else to look for them.
I rack my brain. Who would know how to reach Jimmy Rat? Certainly not the Avon Lady. Dad. Yeah, right. He’s my favorite person, and I’m his. Uncle Shank—but he’ll just tell Dad. Ray—that’s the one.
I dial the Silver Slipper, and the bartender puts Ray on the line.
“I need a favor. Have you got Jimmy Rat’s cell phone number?”
“Vince, are you nuts?” he exclaims. “There isn’t a bagman in Hoboken who doesn’t know that guy is off-limits to you!”