Peril

She grabbed the suitcase, raced downstairs, called a cab, and waited by the door, watching the morning light build over her neighbors’ houses. Again, the irrevocable nature of what she was doing settled over her. She would never see this street again, never wave to her friend Della across the cul-de-sac or shop with her in the local supermarket. Della, like everything else on Long Island, was already disappearing from her life, growing translucent in her memory. She would call her when she got to the city, let her know that she’d made it, but all the rest—whatever job she got, where she lived—all of that she would have to keep secret for fear of being found.

The phone rang but she didn’t answer it. She was terrified it might be Tony and she didn’t want to hear his voice. Or it might be his father, whose voice would freeze her in place. No, she decided, the only voice she would listen to now was her own.

“All right,” she whispered vehemently, “go.”

And suddenly everything grew oddly weightless and insubstantial, the past years of her life, the long hope she’d nurtured for that big happy ending, all of it suddenly rising from her like the final bubbles of a dead champagne.

CARUSO

“How did this fucking happen?” Labriola demanded. His eyes glowed hotly in the murky darkness of the living room.

Caruso gripped the arms of the worn Naugahyde chair and shifted nervously. “He’s always been good for it before.”

“And so you let him get in this deep? Fifteen fucking grand?”

“Like I say, he was good for it before, and so . . .”

“Before?” The Old Man’s mouth jerked violently, spitting words like stones. “You mean before he suddenly wasn’t good for it no more?”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso confessed weakly.

Labriola’s eyes narrowed. “Well, here’s my question, Vinnie. Why the fuck do I care what he was before if he ain’t good for it now?” His massive frame blocked Caruso’s view of the street outside, the gabled row houses of Sheepshead Bay. “Can I spend the money this guy ain’t good for?”

“No, sir,” Caruso answered meekly.

Beyond the window, children played on the sidewalk and women stopped to chat, their arms filled with grocery bags or the latest baby. Caruso wondered what it would be like to live on such a street, have a house, a wife, kids, be complete and on his own. His cramped apartment surfaced in his mind, the rumpled sheets of his bed. He called it his bachelor pad, but it was no such thing. A bachelor pad was a place a guy fixed up nice and kept clean because he might meet a girl and bring her home. The room he rented in Bay Ridge was just the place where he slept and ate pizza from the box and waited for the phone to ring, summoning him here, to face the smoldering figure of Leo Labriola.

“You listening to me, Vinnie?”

“What?”

“Are you fucking listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Labriola ticked off all the things he couldn’t buy with money he didn’t have—fancy cars and whores and diamonds for Belle, his longtime mistress. And if “some broad” wanted a sawbuck for a blow job, he’d have to pass on that too, because Caruso had let this deadbeat fuck get in over his head, which wasn’t going to stand, because nobody came up empty on Leo Labriola. No. Fucking. Body. Ever.

“So what I’m saying is, make him good for it,” Labriola fumed. “You don’t make him good for it, Vinnie, then I’ll make you good for it.”

“Yes, sir,” Caruso said. His fingers rose to the knot of his tie. “Don’t worry, Mr. Labriola. I’ll get the money.”

“You fucking better. Because I don’t make threats, right? I make promises.”