Chapter 16: Chapter 16 - Ricky Knows
Chapter 16 - Ricky Knows
One of Ricky's men found him at seven-fifty, before the Thursday set. Teo was working the main floor on the early perimeter sweep, clocking who was at the bar and who was near the corridor and where the weight was distributed in the room. The man was thick-necked and in his forties, longer at La Reina Roja than Teo had been alive. The soldiers were a different category. He put a hand on Teo's arm, which was not a thing this man did.
"Jefe quiere verte," he said. "Ahorita."
Teo nodded and followed him down the back corridor.
The Thursday set would start in twelve minutes. The dembow was already running at three-quarter volume, the bass seating itself in the floor and the chest. Past the dressing room Yari's laugh came through the closed door with something lower under it that might have been Cami. His eyes stayed on the door at the end of the corridor.
The man knocked twice and stepped back.
"Entra," Ricky said from inside.
The office was the same as it always was. The metal desk held its two chairs in the positions the two chairs were always in, and the framed Punta Cana print sat above it on the wall. The desk lamp threw a circle of light that did not reach the corners. The safe sat behind the print. Teo kept his eyes off it and sat in the chair opposite the desk without being asked. Ricky's eyes registered the sitting and moved on.
Ricky was behind the desk in a white dress shirt with no tie and the sleeves unrolled, his jacket on the hook behind the door, his phone face-down on the surface between them. His face was specific and short of warm.
"Mateo." Ricky picked up a pen and set it down again. "Good week."
Teo kept his hands flat in his lap. "Yeah."
"I mean it. I want you to hear that." Ricky leaned back in his chair, the leather giving slightly under his weight. "The Tuesday run. Vaca had a problem at the corner on Willis, you know the situation with the Albanian pressure, everybody's a little tighter right now, and you handled it without me hearing about it until two days after. That is handling I can use."
"It moved when it needed to move."
Ricky tapped the desk once with two fingers, a single clean beat. "The way the news reaches me matters as much as the news. Too many people bring me problems before they know whether the problem is actually a problem. You don't do that. I noticed."
Teo's eyes were on Ricky's hands, on the pen, on the phone where it sat face-down between them.
"Going forward," Ricky said. "The Saturdays specifically. I'm going to need you on the floor during the full set, not just the second half. Starting next week. Personal request." He paused. "Not through Machete. Direct to me."
"Same hours or longer."
"The position's different. It's closer. Which means I need to know I can rely on what I'm putting close."
"You can."
Ricky leaned forward, picked up the pen again, held it without writing anything. He had a measuring look on him, the same one from the first night in this office.
"You've been keeping your head, Mateo. I see it. The Briella situation, the Albanian noise, the pressure from above. Guys fold under that, or they get more useful. You're the second kind." Ricky set the pen down. "That's not common."
"It's just work."
"A man who says that means it. A man who has to convince me is performing." Ricky picked up his phone, glanced at the screen, set it down again. "I have enough people performing."
Teo kept the words minimum and the composure flat. He was aware of his hands in his lap.
"The job is what tells me everything about a man." Ricky reached for his phone, turned it over, looked at the screen briefly, then set it face-down. "Let me be specific with you, Mateo. Specific is the thing I can offer you right now."
Teo waited.
"The collection stop on Tinton. Wednesday before last. You were in and out of that building in four minutes and I heard nothing from the tenants. That's four-minute work on a building that used to take eleven under the previous assignment." Ricky laced his fingers together on the desk. "The conversation with Nestor at the service door, Thursday before this one. He thought he had a situation with the parking and you told him what to tell the city inspector. Settled a thing that could have brought eyes we didn't need." A pause. "And the hallway near the back dressing room, about two weeks ago. You were talking to one of my girls. You were off-shift. Brief, quiet, you moved on."
The room cooled around the inside of Teo's ribs.
His hands were already flat in his lap. His breathing kept the rate it had been keeping. The pen on the desk was where his eyes had been and where his eyes stayed.
"That's the attention I need in my people, Mateo. Everything you do in this building, I want you to know that I see it. That's not a threat. That's a compliment. You understand the difference?"
"Yeah." The word came out at the level the word had to come out at, brief and flat, the soldier's version of yes.
"Good." Ricky sat back. He was not finished. "The girl thing. I'm not telling you what to do with your time. Men are men, girls are girls, that's business going back to whenever business started. But in my house, what happens in my house is my business."
"In your house."
"I know you do, Mateo. I know what I got in you, mijo."
The word landed in the chair Teo was sitting in.
Machete said mijo with the meaning the word had on a stoop in Puerto Rico thirty years ago. In Ricky's mouth the meaning was identical and the use was not. Ricky had said Mateo in this office a dozen times over two months and had never said the other word until now.
Teo's hands stayed flat in his lap and his back stayed against the chair and his eyes stayed at the level of attention they were supposed to stay at.
"Appreciate it." The word came out correctly.
"Saturday set. Full set. Starting next week."
"I'll be there."
Ricky picked up his phone and turned it over. The conversation was complete.
Teo stood up, said the right thing, and left.
The corridor was still warm. The dembow had reached full volume and the bass moved through the floor in its steady pulse. Past the dressing room, Yari was saying something he did not process. Nothing in the voice was Cami's. He kept walking.
The main floor opened around him: the Thursday crowd coming in, the bar running, the stage empty. Two of Ricky's men were near the door. The thick-necked one was back at his post. The room was the same room it had been twenty minutes ago.
He walked straight through and out, and the front door took him into the cold.
The parking lot was half-full. His Honda sat where he had left it, middle row, backed in by habit. The door closed on the noise of the expressway and the insulation's edge held a thin version of it: trucks on the Bruckner, the overpass forty yards east, the low continuous machinery of the road.
His hands went onto the steering wheel and stayed there. The engine stayed off.
Three specifics, three places at three times, and on two of them Ricky had not been in the building. The Tinton stop was a Wednesday and Ricky was not on that block. The Nestor conversation was at the service entrance on a Thursday evening with Ricky inside the club. The corridor two weeks ago had been a corridor Teo checked both directions before he spoke to Cami, with Ricky on the other side of the building.
Ricky knew anyway.
Someone had been watching, or Ricky had been watching through someone, or both. The arithmetic ran on the Tinton timing and on the Nestor parking situation and on a corridor with a girl in it. The numbers landed with the clean weight of a thing that had been true the whole time and had taken this long to become visible.
Two months of rising had been two months of building a wall between Ricky and the parts of his life he kept off-shift. The first time Ricky had called him into this office and praised him with this same specificity, Teo had walked out reading the praise as standing. The higher a man rose, the more protected he was, and what stood near him was more protected too. The arithmetic had gone with him to the rooftop and the abandoned building and the motel room. Not yet had been the answer because the standing was not yet high enough.
The arithmetic had been correct in every line and wrong in the premise. Rising inside the house did not put him above its accounting. Rising put him further inside it. The closer he got to Ricky, the closer everything near him got.
His hands came off the steering wheel and rested on his thighs.
Ricky had said one of my girls, off-shift and brief and quiet, and had said it without a name on her. Naming would have been a different transaction. The sentence Ricky had said instead was that he could see the corridor and could see who was in it and for how long and with whom.
Cami's name had not been spoken because the naming was for later.
The corridor had been enough. Two weeks ago had been enough. Kept it brief and kept it quiet and moved on was a description of Teo at a service door with one of Ricky's girls in November, which meant Ricky had been watching Teo, which meant every job that had put Teo closer to Ricky's attention had put her closer too.
Machete sat at the edge of the thought without coming into it. The southbound truck two months ago carried with it the doctrine: rules exist because without them nobody is safe; the question is only who pays. The logic ran frictionless from inside the house, and now the why of it was visible. It had been built to run from inside. Machete loved him and the loving was how the running worked.
Every conversation after closing belonged in the same column now. The Honda in this parking lot with the R and the R in the windshield and one letter dimmer than the other belonged in it. The abandoned building belonged in it. Room 9 belonged in it. He had thought he was keeping her in spaces of his own. The spaces had not been his. She had been there for the same reason any of it was still standing: no order had been given yet about what had already been seen.
Yet did all the work.
The weight of yet settled in his chest as a thing separate from the cold of the seat and the cold of the air on the back of his neck.
He breathed in and out. The thinking went short and the short went tactical and the tactical settled on what could be worked with.
The safe behind the Punta Cana print held six digits and two turns each direction. Ricky had opened it twice in front of him over eight weeks, and both times Teo had counted the turns from the visitor's chair without appearing to count. The first time the counting had been habit. The second time the counting had been preparation he had not yet admitted to himself.
The kitchen exit behind the bar was forty feet from the bar to the door. The door was alarmed and the alarm had not worked in eight months. On a slow Tuesday in October he had tested it with a light push, the door opened two inches, nothing sounded, and he had let it close and gone back to his post.
The train schedule westbound was already in his phone. Two weeks ago from the third floor of the abandoned building, sitting on concrete with the city below, the arithmetic of Pittsburgh had run without commitment yet on the table. Philadelphia via New Jersey was one route. The 5:08 out of Penn Station direct to Pittsburgh via Philadelphia was the other. Track 7. The phone had gone face-down and Cami had said Pittsburgh one more time and the Reina Roja neon had sat over her shoulder through the south window, red on the low clouds, and nothing had been said about any of it.
The not-saying had been then. Then was over.
Beyond the windshield the parking lot held its cold. Trucks ran south toward the city and did not stop. The Bruckner overpass sound carried.
He picked up his phone.
It rang twice. She picked up on the second ring. She answered calls at the pace she chose, the same pace she moved through the dressing room at.
"Hey." Her voice was level.
"Hey. You okay?"
"I'm okay." Two seconds of pause. "Teo."
"Yeah."
She had heard something in the single word. The half-second before her own word said so. She did not ask what.
"Tomorrow night. Not the club. I'll call you in the afternoon, we'll figure out where."
"Okay." A beat. "Teo."
His name came across the line on its own, neither question nor answer. He held the silence and let her keep it.
"Yeah."
She breathed once on the other end of the line. Four seconds of highway sound on both ends, the city running its evening machinery around the two of them.
"Mañana," she said.
"Mañana."
She ended the call.
Another fifteen minutes went by with the engine off. The cold came in at the edges of the windows, dry, the smell of the expressway in it. By the end of the sitting his own breath was visible in front of him.
The thing he noticed was that fear was not what was sitting in his chest. The stash house had been a rolling nausea and the collection runs had been a split-second charge and Ricky's office an hour ago had been something different from both. This was simpler than any of it. The problem was the correct problem and the dimensions of the problem were known.
Safe and kitchen exit and broken alarm were known. The 5:08 westbound out of Penn Station ran from Track 7 in the dark before dawn. Cami's prepaid number lived in his memory and not on his phone past the call he had just made and the ones before it. Behind the Punta Cana print, the combination had matched itself both times he had counted it.
A man who trusted his locks did not change them.
The key turned. The heater came on and he let it run a minute before he touched the wheel, the interior warming by degrees from the vents up. The La Reina Roja sign sat in the windshield, cursive R and R with one letter dimmer than the other, the neon going through its pulse. Eleven years that sign had run under the same voltage. The voltage was the part Teo kept his eyes on now.
He drove out of the parking lot. The sign went behind him, and the road in front of him was where his eyes stayed until the road in the mirror was the only road in the mirror too.