the gym.
I was doing lat pulls, front and back. Ten front, ten back. Over and over, until I lost count. I don’t even know what I set the weight for. I wasn’t tired. And nothing was coming to me.
Except Rena. She came into the gym and stood in front of me. She had on that same blue outfit, but now she was holding a pistol. She handled it like she knew what it was for.
“What happened?” she said.
I let the bar go back up. Slow, the way you’re supposed to.
“I’m stupid,” I said.
“Meaning …?”
“I tell you, go sit on the desk. Only, I don’t know where that damn desk is, okay?”
She made a pretty sound in her throat. It made every part of her wiggle a little. Except the hand holding that pistol.
“Go that way,” she said, pointing with her other hand.
I walked. She was behind me. When she said to turn, I turned. Finally, we were in a little room. The desk was just old dark wood with a couple of drawers, little glass knobs. The only weird thing was that it was facing the wall.
“Stand still,” she said.
I saw her walk around from behind me. She went right up against the wall, then she turned around and faced me. She sat down so her elbows and wrists made a triangle, with the pistol centered on my chest.
“You get it now?”
“A partners desk. So one partner sits facing the other one, right?”
“Yes. This is Albie’s den. For his special, private stuff. Not his work stuff, understand?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been in here plenty of times,” she said.
I remembered hearing a girl say something like that, a long time ago, when I was still in school. The other girls were really stabbing her. With words, I mean. Not like playing the dozens—really vicious stuff. Like, her mother must be a real whore,’ cause the girl didn’t even know who her own father was. “I do too,” the girl kept saying, like she was a little kid.
That’s how Rena sounded now.
Back then, I’d waited around after school until the worst one came out. I didn’t know her name, but I could see she was with her special friends.
When they saw me coming, they didn’t know what to do. A guy like me, I wasn’t supposed to be around people like them. I stepped close to the leader girl. Before she could say anything, I slapped her, hard enough to make her fall down and start crying.
“Tell your boyfriend I did that,” I said. “He’s not gonna do nothing. You know why? Because he don’t give a fuck about you. He’s only with you because everyone knows you give the best blowjobs in school.”
I never did find out what happened at school. I never went back, and they never came looking for me. But I was on the same corner every night, and people knew it. Her boyfriend, that pussy could have found me anytime he wanted.
Only he never showed. So I never found out what happened in school. I wanted to call the girl they’d been torturing, but I guess I was afraid that I’d only made things worse.
I wasn’t going to do that this time. So all I said to Rena was “Sure, you have. But I know something about that desk you don’t.… At least, I think I do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The desk. The proof you need is in the desk. Only, Albie had it fixed so’s it takes three people to get at it.”
“There’s only two of us.”
“I know. But I can do what two of the people are supposed to. You do the other part.”
“Like two partners?”
“I … I guess so. Maybe that’s right. All I know is, that desk has to be lifted up. Way up. All four legs have to be off the ground. High off the ground. That’s the two-man job.
“Then the third one stands underneath. There’s like this water stain. On the underside, I mean. You have to look real close to even see it. Then you have to tap right on it. Not hard, just, like, with your knuckle.”
She got out from behind the desk. “Give me that phone,” she said.
I handed it over. She tossed it onto this old couch. It was some dark leather, and it didn’t look comfortable. But it had a bunch of rugs and stuff on it, so the phone didn’t make a sound when it landed. Neither did the pistol.
“Let’s do it, Sugar.”
I crawled under the desk. It