This is Agent Bite-Me’s floor, the pain in the butt reminds me as we topple off the couch.
Shut up! snaps Marco Polo. By this time, he’s really running the show.
Even I’m starting to wonder how far all this might go when the guys from Secure-O-Matic decide to test the new burglar alarm.
To say we hit the ceiling is to understate the matter. When we come back to earth, she’s on one side of the basement, and I’m on the other. If I look as shocked as she does, we are one stunned pair. It’s completely illogical, but the two of us are thinking the same thing—that we generated enough steam to set off the smoke detector.
Then the buzzer stops and a voice from upstairs calls, “Just a test. Sorry.”
This is accompanied by strangled laughter.
I’m enraged, but I’ve got to hand it to those guys. They knew what we were heading downstairs to do before we did. I wouldn’t hire them to alarm my house, but if I ever need a mind reader, I won’t go to the lady with the tarot cards.
I can’t remember a moment ever feeling so weighty with significance. The incident at the frat party could have been a fluke, but this is no fluke. The world is not the same place that it was when we woke up that morning.
She just says, “Wow,” and I nod. But neither of us knows what comes next.
Kendra calls up the stairs to the Secure-O-Matic crew, “You guys are almost done, right?”
Prayer, the short-term kind at least, does me no good, because the reply comes back, “A few more hours to go, miss.” More laughing.
I’m ready to hang out all day waiting for them to leave, but Kendra has a story to write for the Jefferson Journal—an exposé on which teachers give out the most A’s.
“They’ll never let you print it,” I predict.
She sighs. “Probably not. But I have to try. Teachers ramble on and on about freedom of the press, but God help you if you actually try to use it. Which reminds me—you never answered my question about why you quit the Jaguars.”
Yikes. “Uh—you had it right the first time. Coach Bronski—the guy’s a fascist.” A silent apology to the coach, who’s probably really nice.
“That took guts,” she says admiringly. “I should do a follow-up piece—you know, about how hard it is to leave football for the courage of your convictions.”
“It’s okay. I’m using the extra time to concentrate on—other things.” But at this moment, the only other thing I can think of is Kendra, and what just happened in her basement.
Leaving is awkward, and the presence of the two Secure-O-Matic technicians doesn’t make it any more comfortable. Mostly, we talk lice business. I take my nit comb and my half of the tea-tree-oil shampoo. I get the spray too because my bedclothes haven’t been done yet. And the way things seem to be going, the cooties could continue to commute back and forth between our heads. Believe it or not, the thought isn’t entirely repulsive.
I take down her phone number but freeze when she asks for mine. Our lines are all bugged—by her own father, no less. How great would that be: Agent Bite-Me, hearing his sweet little daughter on the Luca tapes.
“We’re getting a new number,” I lie.
The investigative reporter in her looks suspicious.
“Crank calls,” I explain quickly. “My mother’s panicked.”
Yeah. Mom’s pretty helpless when she doesn’t have a chicken potpie handy.
There’s a kiss good-bye involved. It would be longer, but Secure-O-Matic sets off the alarm again. This time I know they did it on purpose.
From Kendra’s house, I head straight for Ray Francione. When he’s not with Tommy, Ray can usually be found at the Silver Slipper, a bar in Long Beach.
The guy at the door tells me to get lost. But then someone recognizes me, and I get the royal treatment.
“Vince!” Ray appears out of the back room, where I’m pretty sure a lot of vending-machine business goes on. “What’s the problem? Why aren’t you in school?”
I laugh. “You’re Tommy’s baby-sitter, not mine.”
He turns pale. “Not so loud! People got big ears. If that gets back to your brother, there’s going to be pain to go around.” He pulls up a bar stool. “Why are you ditching class?”
I say stuff to Ray that I wouldn’t even tell my own mother. “Head lice. It’s a twenty-four-hour pass. Listen, Ray, I need a big favor. Can you get me a cell phone that’s untraceable to me?”
“Untraceable?” He’s instantly alert. “If you’re dealing drugs—”
“You know me better than that,” I retort. “There’s this girl, Ray—at least I think there is. I want to be able to talk to her without the FBI listening in.”
Notice how I don’t bore him with the details of who she is, and more important, who her father is. That’s on a need-to-know basis, and nobody needs to know. I wish I didn’t.
Ray nods understandingly. “I can probably come up with something.”
“Today?”
“Relax, Romeo.” He grins. “I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into. This is a cloned phone. It’s illegal, right?”
“I’ll pay for it,” I insist. “I just don’t want it to be bugged. If I went to the store and set up a real account, the FBI would be listening in by the end of the week.”
Ray laughs. “You can’t pay for it, dummy. What, you’re going to send AT&T thirty bucks a month anonymously for a phone they don’t even know exists?”
Good point. But I’m not really sweating the small stuff. Kendra has assumed a place in my brain where logic has no sway. “I still need it,” I insist.
“It’s yours,” he assures me. “So long as you know what you’re doing. You’re the one who’s always moaning and groaning about staying out of your father’s business. This is part of it. This girl must really be something special.”
I shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. I’ve got nothing to compare it to. Maybe it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Does she know who you are?”
I shudder. “God, no!”
He reaches out and ruffles my deloused hair. “You’ve got the right to be seventeen. Listen, your mind must be working a mile a minute right now. Just try to relax and enjoy it. It’s never going to be this new again.”
Ray’s the best. He promises to drop by with the phone tonight.
As I leave the Silver Slipper, it occurs to me that seventeen years living under Anthony Luca’s roof couldn’t make a criminal out of me. That took half an hour in Kendra Bightly’s basement.
On the way home, I swing by the grocery store and buy thirty dollars’ worth of canned goods and cereals, which I take over to the food bank at St. Bartholomew. Call it a donation of my monthly cell phone fee from the Good Samaritans at AT&T.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KENDRA AND I continue to see each other—if see is the right word. I take her to dark movie theaters; we spend our afternoons in the gloom of her basement, and evenings crammed into my parked Mazda. If Jimmy Rat thinks the trunk is too small, he should try to maneuver in the backseat.
We see each other in daylight too, but that’s mostly at school, with Alex hanging around. Which is becoming a bit of a problem because he really, truly hates her.
It’s nothing against Kendra. He would hate anyone in her position right now. I’m coming to see that all that blather about living his love life through me is exactly that, blather. He’s just plain jealous, and I’d tell him so if it wasn’t for the fact that I genuinely feel bad for the guy. He’s languishing on the bench of that stupid football team, with not so much as a single date to show for countless hours of brutalizing practice. His shoulder pads are doing him about as much good as his virtual Ferraris. The one thing he had going for him was a best friend in exactly the same boat. We could while away our evenings and weekends plotting an end to our dweeb-hood. And now I’m with Kendra all the time, and he’s high and dry.
He doesn’t admit this, of course. He pretends to be Kendra’s be
st friend. To me he uses terms like “our girlfriend” and “our relationship.”
It bugs me. “She’s not ‘our girlfriend.’ She’s not even my girlfriend, really. We just hang out.”
“No,” he says sternly. “You and I hang out. You and Kendra take care of business.”
I’m heating up. “We don’t ‘take care of business.’ Come to think of it, what the hell is taking care of business? Speak English!”
“You can call it whatever you like,” he says smugly. “Just so long as I get all the details.”
It’s a sticky situation. Although no specific contract was ever signed, it was always assumed between Alex and me that each would tell the other anything that was going on vis-à-vis the fairer sex. Now that I’ve got something to share, I’m not sure I can do it. And instead of acting on a great surge of loyalty to Kendra, I basically feel like a welcher.
As usual, an experience that is pure bliss for most people ends up being just plain complicated for me. I’m juggling Alex with one hand while trying to navigate so that I never end up in the same room with Agent Bite-Me. Then there are the Lucas, who can’t find out about this relationship either. It’s nerve-racking!
The time with Kendra is great—almost too great. I’ve never been addicted to anything, thank God. So I couldn’t imagine how you fall into a trap like that until I started dating Kendra. When I have to see her, I just have to, and I’m willing to jump through any number of hoops to get to her. I’d feel like a complete idiot except for the fact that she’s the same way about me.
And it doesn’t help that she’s so busy. Kendra is one of those people whose schedule always has to be jam-packed. She works at the day-care center; she writes for the Journal; she takes advanced lifesaving at the Y; and she gives piano lessons to little kids on the side. There are CEOs with more leisure time!
Not wanting to seem like a loser, I pretend to have just as hectic a calendar. I invent a bunch of part-time jobs to explain why I always have money, in case Kendra’s reporter’s instincts or inherited FBI-agent DNA starts to question that. It sure beats telling her the truth, that underworld kingpins pay good allowance.
It’s not a very good sham, but it works for now. In reality, you need motivation to be as busy as Kendra, and it’s already been established by just about everybody that I don’t have any. The one thing I’m motivated to do is hang out with Kendra. Sometimes the only way to do that is to drive her places. We use the transit time wisely, making out during red lights and while stuck in traffic. I take only the most congested routes. Soon I’ve memorized every construction zone in Nassau County.
When the Mazda’s in motion, and I have to watch the road, we speculate on the secret lives of pedestrians and our fellow drivers. I’m not that creative, but Kendra’s awesome at it. Maybe that’s why she struggles to write for the school paper. The truth is never quite as interesting as something made up.
“See that guy in the Jeep Cherokee? He’s got the spare tire stuffed with his ex-wives’ heads.”
I point to an innocent young woman pushing a newborn in a carriage. “And she’s with the KGB.”
“No, the baby’s KGB,” she corrects me. “The mother’s a sophisticated robot. See? Her eyeballs are rotating camera lenses.”
How am I supposed to keep up with that?
One time we pass a mild-mannered guy carrying a violin case, and she says, “Oh, please. There’s no violin in there. That’s a machine gun. I can spot a gangster a mile away.”
God, I hope not.
I doubt she could ID my father or any of his associates. The fact is, we’ve all grown up with so many TV mobsters that when you see the real thing, it’s always a letdown. Dad could be the Pricewaterhouse representative who guards the ballots at the Academy Awards. Ray is a dead ringer for one of the priests at St. Bart’s. Uncle Exit looks like exactly what he is, an aging hippie, complete with beads and tie-dye. He got arrested once for a homicide because the police found the impression of a peace sign in the strangulation marks on the victim’s throat. He turned out to be innocent, but I can appreciate the cops’ thinking process. The only difference between now and Uncle Exit’s Woodstock days is that his shoulder-length hair is streaked with gray.
Uncle Puke is American Gothic without the pitchfork. Primo, this guy from his crew, is so into fishing that he walks around with a hatful of lures. And Uncle Carmine, who is a volunteer fireman in his other life, is just as likely to show up in a bright red fire-chief’s car as in his Mercedes Kompressorwagen.
I pull over in front of the Y, and Kendra gets out.
“Need me to wait for you?” I ask. “I mean, this is a pretty tough neighborhood with all these wiseguys around.” I indicate violin man, who, incidentally, is wearing a tux.
The truth is, dating someone who’s busy is just as exhausting as being busy yourself. I may be just a moth to a flame, but every time the flame moves, I end up following it. And at least the flame has a purpose; I’m just flapping around.
Schoolwork gets done at midnight or not at all. But then, midnight has always been a busy time at the Luca house. Uncle Uncle has been underfoot lately, which usually means that a huge shipment of TVs or VCRs is about to fall off a truck at Kennedy Airport. It’s almost like a plague of locusts when this happens. For a few days afterward, every drawer, every closet is packed with stolen goods. Swag, they call it. Around the time of the big Japan Airlines heist last year, I opened up my locker at school, and sixty brand-new Palm Pilots fell out. That’s the last time I trusted Tommy with my combination.
Speak of the devil, Tommy’s home too, peering over my shoulder and bugging me while I try to work on iluvmycat.usa.
“How do you know all these cat owners?”
“I don’t,” I reply, keyboarding steadily. “But anybody with Internet access can get on my site.”
“Anybody?”
“All you need is a computer and an Internet service provider. AOL. AT&T. My hookup is with the cable company. You just log on to my site and read what people have to say about their cats. You can post a message on my Cat Tales bulletin board and even e-mail a picture to go with it. Or if you’re buying or selling a pet, you can place a free ad in Meow Marketplace.”
I steel myself for his eruption of ridicule. Tommy isn’t the most diplomatic guy in the world. But he’s fascinated. “What’s this ZIP-code thing? Why would you care where a bunch of strangers live?”
“That’s for this other function,” I explain. “Feline Friends Network. If you give me your ZIP code, I can match you with other cat lovers in your area who are interested in getting together to discuss their pets.”
“Jeez, Vince,” he says in genuine admiration. “I always knew you were smart, but I never thought you could do anything like this.”
“It’s not really as hard as it looks,” I assure him. “You just have to work out the links. The program takes care of the rest.”
He harrumphs. “In my world, a link is a sausage, and a program comes on TV.”
I look at my brother, a guy who dropped out of eleventh grade, and who, to my knowledge, has never read a book from cover to cover. “Hey, Tommy, did you ever think of doing something with your life other than working with Dad and the uncles?”
He shrugs. “What else could a guy like me do?”
“Well, that’s the whole thing,” I persist. “You have no idea what you might be good at. You got on board with Dad before you could take a look at your options.”
“There’s nothing wrong with what Dad does!” he says hotly. “You drove a Porsche, and you’d be driving one today if you weren’t such a Boy Scout!”
“You could go back to school—”
“Do you have any idea how much I hated school the first time around? Didn’t you ever walk into a place, and you just know in your gut that it isn’t for you? When you try, you fall flat on your face. And every rule they have seems like it was put there just to torture you.”
I don’t say anything, but Tommy h
as described exactly how I feel around the vending-machine business.
“What can I tell you, Vince? I’m not smart. But at least I’m smart enough to know it.” He throws me a crooked grin. “You think I don’t see how Dad brought in Ray to keep me out of trouble? He says Ray belongs to me, gives me points on his earnings. But you know what he really is? Screwup insurance. And the screwup is me.”
“You could do worse than to listen to Ray,” I say honestly. “He’s a real friend. How he got mixed up in this crummy business is a mystery to me.”
He’s melancholy. “It’s not just Ray. When Dad put me in charge of that thing with the cement-truck drivers, suddenly there’s Uncle Fin watching my back. Or that Florida job, when Gus the Greek just happened to be on vacation down there. I look at those guys, and I know Dad tells them more about what’s really going on than he tells me. He trusts strangers better than his own son. Dad’s paranoid that the feds have an inside man in—” He catches himself; we’re not in the basement. “Inside Brothers.”
That’s a jarring thought. We look at the FBI investigators as an amusing nuisance. You know, “Turn down the stereo, Tommy. Agent Numb-Nuts can’t hear himself think.” But an inside man posing as a wiseguy might be able to gather a lot of evidence. I mean, I don’t think much of Dad’s way of making a living, but I sure don’t want to see him go to jail. God, if they pin the Calabrese hit on Dad, that’s a murder rap, guaranteed life sentence. And who knows what they could get Tommy on? And Ray and the uncles. They’re all dirty. It would be like everybody I know suddenly disappearing.
“You’re sure about that?” I ask nervously.
He shakes his head. “That’s the whole point. I’ll never know what Dad really thinks, because he doesn’t believe I can keep my mouth shut. Even Mel knows more than me, and he’s just some lawyer who happened to marry our sister. How can Dad be so sure Mel isn’t the rat? He’s not afraid of him.”
“Because he’s too busy being afraid of Mira,” I quip, but add seriously, “I guess that’s the whole thing about an inside man. It’s always someone you don’t suspect. Someone you trust.”