Fifty-Boy
17
3am Rendezvous
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| Thinking About Molly |
I took in my breath and lay real still. I'd witnessed 3am rendezvous before. But this one was different. Jake Finn was scared to move. I lay very still and closed my eyes. The air was frigid.
I recognized her voice. This was it. When she called me at the phone booth on the Boardwalk asked me to be here, I said yes.
The ocean crackled like brittle on the beach.
I was scared out of my mind, but I didn't want to let her down.
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| In A Rose Pink Suit |
The short guy with her, in the overcoast, set a beat-up brown briefcase on the deck between his feet and pulled Vivian close to him. The clasp on her thick sable coat came undone. Her short pink skirt stretched tight against her hips, her fine long legs bent to kiss this toad.
I knew his slumlord ass, the bed bug emperor, Paul Meanos. I didn't like him, nobody did. He leaned back on the railing and tasted his lips like he was appraising her kiss.
And Molly thought I was an asshole...
"Bonnie kiss like that?" He said.
Vivian studied his face: standard-issue handsome, Mediterranean brown eyes, no reflection, the usual I'm an important guy uniform, power-tie, tasseled loafers, nylon see-through socks, the pin-stripe suit... How this asshole let himself get away with the robins-egg button-down blue oxford shirt was a piece she couldn't figure.
She thought, the way he looks, he could be a pit-boss or a banker, a man who didn't take chances. She didn't answer him. She adjusted her shoulder-bag. What did she care? He agreed to meet her. He agreed to make the switch, to replace her new, sequential bills with old, used money.
He was a toupeed dupe who suited her purposes, for now... The man who didn't take chances, taking the half million in new bills off her hands, he just better have her four hundred thousand in his briefcase... How Bonnie kissed was none of his business.
I heard footsteps on the ramp up to the Boardwalk. It made me sit up on my elbow. I peered between the Boards. Her angry green eyes flashed down and I dropped onto my side again.
"Oh, shit." She slid the bag off her shoulders and slipped it over the rail.He looked back and said, "What are the cops doing here?"
I latched her bag, eased it toward me through the sand and waited for the briefcase.
She jerked the sable tight around her body and said, "We met for a drink and a news story about the homeless who live in your dumps, that's all. Now shut up and kiss me... And by the way, Pauly," she breathed into his face, "She's a lousy kisser."
She tipped his briefcase over the edge in my direction with the toe of her pointed black heels. He had her in his arms and in an instant I was gone.
Jakey-boy was three blocks away from Roosevelt Place, on his knees in the moonlight. The muffled thud of the briefcase as it landed in the sand repeated itself over and over again in my chest 'til I thought my heart was going to pound right out of my raggy clothes. My lungs pumped out my breath in short bursts of steam. My hands shook. My fingers wouldn't work, like stiff useless sticks on the tarnished golden latches.
I looked up and down the beach, but couldn't see a soul. Overhead the Boards were empty. Then I heard the slow, even murmur of a warm steady motor against the syncopated tide and the wind that curled the whitecaps.
Jake Finn clutched the case and the shoulder-bag and burrowed like a sand flea back under the Boards as the headlights of a cruiser pulled to a stop and a man got out.
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