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That, and the steam-cleaning bill.

“That’s All” is followed by “Workin’ For a Living” by Huey Lewis and the News. Vanessa holds something in her lap that I mistake for a balled-up Kleenex until it yips and I realize, with dawning sadness, it’s a dog: papery, vein-shot ears and black marble eyes that seem on the verge of popping from its skull. My gaze locks with its through the rearview mirror and, in an unprecedented canine-human mindmeld, we simultaneously acknowledge the utter frivolity of its existence. It yips again—token protest?—and Vanessa soothes, “Shhh, Tootsie, shhh.” I pity the thing: it’s the latest
pet-du-jour
that, like the chinchillas and chows and Shar Peis and Abyssinian cats before it, will be tossed aside in favor of the next treat-of-the-week. I once picked up a lady outside Bloomingdale’s who’d slung a live ferret around her shoulders and the sight triggered the memory of…

…Alex “Slash” Trimball, twenty-three years old, walking away from the blazing village of Bu Von Kon with the flayed corpse of a Viet girl draped around his shoulders. The village was in flames, the air rich with burning bamboo and burning palm leaves and burning…other things. The girl’s skinless body shimmered, blood-glazed tissue reflecting firelight the way moon rays reflect off a placid pond’s surface. “What do you think?” Trimball asked. He shrugged; the tiny body flapped bonelessly. “Keen… fashion sense,” I said. Trimball was a sharecropper from Iowa. Devout Methodist. Father of four. He shaved a ribbon of muscle off the girl’s thigh with the detached air of a man whittling wood. The jungle’s like that: it gets inside you, under your skin and into your bloodstream, plants roots in your heart and mind and soul. You surrender to its madness as a matter of basic survival…

…I drop the Vanessas
off at a brownstone on the corner of Riverside and Eighty-first. One of them pokes a ten-spot through the window to cover a nine-eighty fare. The two of them perform an intricate farewell ceremony: they clasp hands, bend at the knees, air-kiss, then produce identical daytimers to plan their next excursion. Feels like I’m watching a wildlife documentary:
Inane Rituals of the Manhattan Socialite.

The CB squelches: “
Need an answer…need an answer man…
”

I switch to a safe band. “Go.”

“
Got a hardcase. Real John Dillinger-type
.”

“Sunchasers. Thirty minutes.”

I cut up Fifty-Seventh and hang a left on Fifth. Sunchasers is the newest high-society phenomenon: the tanning salon. Some poor yuppie had to cancel a trip to Cancun? No problem. Fifteen minutes on a tanning bed, bombarded with 2,500-watts of ultraviolet light, he’s a dead ringer for George Hamilton. Sunchasers is owned by Marco Sorbetti, an old-school Moustache Pete and current Capo of the Westside Outfit. It’s a front: drugs, guns, and stolen merchandise are hustled out the back. Half the beds aren’t even plugged in. It’s the most obvious front I’ve ever seen—it’s in
Harlem
.

Who the fuck needs a tan in Harlem?

How many yups are trekking to the ghetto for a tan?

I park two blocks away and retrieve my black bag from the spare tire well. Stopping at a bodega to buy some heavy-duty trash bags, I spot a bottle of Coppertone oil beside the magazine rack. Eying my purchases, the clerk jerks his head towards the snow-covered sidewalk.

“Bad time of the year to be seeking coloration.”

“Taking a trip,” I lie. “Milan.”

Sunchasers is deserted. A dead Boston fern rests in the window, bookended by two dead cacti. Joe Fresco sits behind the reception desk. Joe is the antithesis of a tanning salon customer: fat and fortyish, pale as mozzarella and hairier than a silverback gorilla.

“Hey, Answer.”

“Afternoon, Joe. Phil here?”

“Last door on the left.”

I head down the hallway as Joe slouches to the door and, to the utter dismay of the sun-worshipping bag-ladies and winos shuffling around outside, turns the sign from “COME IN, WE’RE OPEN” to “SORRY, CLOSED”.

Information and knowledge are two currencies that never go out of style. Those with knowledge excel. But one must know what to look for, how to get it, and its value in a free market economy. Most importantly, one must know the correct questions to ask. And the most effective ways of asking them.

I am in the information business. Information extraction, to put a fine point to it.

The tanning room walls, ceiling, and floor are draped in transparent plastic. The tanning bed is white with the dimensions of a coffin. A decal on the lid reads
TURBOTAN 2000
, and the tagline says: “From Bleached to Bronzed in 10 Minutes Flat!” A man is shackled to a chair in the middle of the room. Behind him stands Phillip Menna. Phil’s a bottom-tier Outfit guy, your basic pavement-pounder. He tracks deadbeats and stoolies and anyone else who winds up on the Outfit blacklist—an unhealthy list to be on.

“Afternoon, Phil.”

“How they hanging, Answer?”

“Low and lazy.”

I set my toolbag next to the captive: early twenties, wearing black-pegged jeans and a torn Judas Priest t-shirt. He’s working on some patchy facial hair, it’s blooming in dark thatches at his chin and cheek hollows. I’ve seen him in the line-up at CBGB’s, wolf-whistling at chicks outside pool halls and all-nite diners…I haven’t seen him
exactly
, you understand, but he looks like a thousand other guys in this city—a
type
.

“Mister Punk Rock here, he and some friends boosted a van last week,” Phil tells me. “A cube van full of bathroom fixtures. Now
under
that load, in a false bottom, are the fifty kees of uncut blow that was to be trucked into South Jersey.” Phil cuffs the kid upside the head. “Now Mister Punk Rock
knows
where the truck is stashed—isn’t that right, shit-for-brains?—but Mister Punk Rock ain’t spilling.”

I throw a switch on the tanning bed. A faint hum as a slit of purplish light slants between the top and bottom halves. Mister Punk Rock’s eyes are a cloudy green. His face is a mask of defiance but around the edges, like a thin lip of light silhouetting a doorframe, I see fear.

“Got a name, kid?”

“Joey.”

“Joey who?”

“Joey Ramone.”

“Fucking wiseass,” says Phil.

“Alright Joey,” I say. “Why don’t you tell us where the truck is? Then you can go back to shooting stick and chasing underage tail.”

“Fuck you, old man.”

I’d hoped he might be different. I keep hoping one of them will possess a sense of self-preservation. But no, he’s like the rest. Probably been scrapping since childhood, punched and kicked, sliced a few times. Maybe his father used him as a punching bag and he’s thinking
I know pain, tasted it, not afraid to taste it again
.

He doesn’t know pain. None of them do; not really. But I teach them.

I take a straight razor from my toolbag and cut the kid’s shirt off. A rockstar body: underfed and sparrow-chested, arms so thin and skin nearly translucent. He wouldn’t look out of place at a Nazi internment camp. Some animal, a wolf or fox, is tattooed over his heart. I hook my fingers inside his waistband to get some separation between denim and flesh, carefully slicing through his jeans and boxers.

“You gonna blow me, old man? This give you a thrill, you fucking flamer?”

I say, “Joey look pasty to you, Phil?”

“Fucker looks like he spent the night spooning with Dracula.”

“So he could do with some color?”

“I’d say so.”

The first Outfit job I pulled was on a sawbones named Dr. Joseph Weinstock. Doc Joe was selling prescription blanks to the Outfit: tablets of one-hundred blanks that runners would forge signatures on and offload at twenty, thirty bucks a pop. The speed freaks and nodders loved it and the scam netted Doc Joe a couple thou a month. But he got greedy and jacked the price. The Outfit balked. Doc Joe threatened to take his business to the Eastside. Bad move. They called me in.

A doctor’s hands are his dinner ticket; something happens to his digits and he might as well burn his shingle because his practice is toast. By the time I walked into the soundproofed room, Doc Joe’s fingers had been spread and u-clamped to a table. His mouth was duct-taped, nose smeared across half his face; would’ve looked just like strawberry jam if not for the white humps of cartilage.

“Put him out of business,” Marco Sorbetti said.

Using a DeWalt variable-speed drill, I bored pinprick holes through Doc Joe’s fingernails, tracing the milky rim of each cuticle. Then I filled an insulin needle with carbolic acid and injected it into the tender flesh under the enamel. There was this violent
fizzling
, like when baking soda and vinegar react, followed by the rank smell of emulsified flesh. Doc Joe’s fingers withered, then blackened. It was like watching matchsticks burn down. He broke most of them spasming against the u-clamps. The Outfit was duly impressed. Now I’m their Answer.

I uncap the bottle of Coppertone and slather coconut-scented oil over Joey’s chest and arms until his body gleams like a shellacked egg.

“This what you like, you fucking old faggot? Greasing dudes up?”

“Yes,” I say softly. “This is how old faggots like me get off.”

I crack the tanning bed open. Eight rows of ultraviolet bulbs reflect their heat on my skin. Phil uncuffs Joey and leads him over. The kid’s smiling.

“Hey, I could use a tan. Bronze me up and I’ll be off to Fantasy Island.
Hey, boss—de plane, de plane!
”

Phil sits Joey on the lip of the tanning bed. I kneel and look into his eyes. I need to make him realize who he is dealing with. I’m not a monster, not exactly, but I do not care about him and he needs to understand this. He needs to know I will hurt him mercilessly until he tells me what I need to know. If he does not, I’ll watch him die.

“One more time: where’s the truck?”

The kid yawns. “Let me catch some rays, old man.”

Sometimes I think that if everyone did what’s best for them, my occupation would become redundant. But it is my experience that people rarely act in their own best interests.

I lay Joey down, then close the lid and lock it with a pair of Swedge padlocks. The kid’s singing “California Dreaming” by the Mama’s & the Papas. Nice voice.

Phil produces a deck of Bikes and we play a few rounds of nickel poker. I’m left holding aces and queens when he trumps me with a full house; then he matches fives on the last card to beat my ace-high. Cards are a great way to kill time; Crosshairs and I used to play in the jungles of Vietnam until he lost his poker face.

Got his poker face
torn off
is more accurate, I suppose.

Ten minutes pass. I check on the kid. He’s lobster-red but the pain hasn’t registered on his nervous system yet. “Close the lid,” he says. “Getting comfy.”

I press my finger to his flesh. It leaves a dime-sized spot of whiteness. “Listen to me,” I say. “Phil and I are going to lunch. When we get back, I guarantee you’ll tell us where the truck is. So why don’t you spill now, before I have to scrape you out of this thing with a spatula.”

“Bring me back a meatball sub, why don’t ya?”

I close and lock the lid.

We choose Honey’s, a chicken-and-pizza joint three blocks east. We sit at a bar strung with winking Christmas lights underneath a banner that reads
HAVE A MERRY HO-HO-HONEY’S CHRISTMAS
and order a jug of Schlitz.

Phil says, “So what’s this wiseass gonna look like when we get back?”

I sip my beer, considering. “Well, once I put a hotdog into one of those turbo-model tanning beds. One hour cooked it. Two hours and it looked like beefy jerky. Three, shoe leather. After four it was pretty much ashes.”