The Shake
curious to see if he would try something heroic. He didn’t budge.“You going to college?” I asked.
Danny puffed disdainfully through his nose. I wondered if that was something he’d learned from his dog.
“Man, what do you want from me? Why are you in my house?”
Danny was a fashionable little rodent. It looked like he spent most of his spare time shining his very expensive Italian shoes, and the rest of his time experimenting with his hair and glasses, trying to look less like a hamster.
“Don’t be so touchy,” I said, pointing to the girl. “I see you’re a connoisseur of the arts of seduction. I was just wondering if you’re a scholar, as well.”
Danny remembered the girl’s knees flanking his shoulders. “Shit!” he said, as if he thought I had been paying him a compliment, “This bitch is too stupid to seduce.”
I couldn’t deny the possibility that Danny was right. “She’s what, about sixteen, seventeen?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, dismissing the question. “She’s old enough.”
“Old enough to be drugged and raped?”
“Hey! I didn’t drug her. She did that herself.”
“You just sold her the drugs and then decided to take advantage of the situation?”
“What are you, like, her dad, or something?”
Danny didn’t appear to be suffering from any moral dilemmas. If I wanted to do a service to humanity, drinking this little prick’s blood would probably qualify.
“Nothing like that. I’m just trying to get a sense of who I’m dealing with.”
“Anyway, who says I sold her anything?”
“I know who you work for, Danny.” I said, casually examining the paraphernalia on the coffee table.
“You here to score?” he asked.
“Just information, Danny. Tonight I want to get high on information.”
I heard the faint hiss and smelled it before Danny realized what was happening. Finally, with a funny, inquisitive expression on his face, he cranked his head around, staring between the girl’s legs. “You little bitch!” he screeched, then jumped up, grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her off the sofa. She hit the carpet with a thud but didn’t wake up. “The cunt pissed on my new sofa!”
Gawking at the wet stain, Danny started to shift his weight like he was going to kick the girl.
“Don’t,” I said, with enough force to stop him.
He looked at me, trying to decide if he had to obey. “Whatever, man!” he said, stepping back. “This little bitch just ruined my new sofa.”
“Danny!” I said, “Forget the sofa.”
His eyes jumped back and forth several times between me and the girl before it sank in that maybe his sofa cushion wasn’t his most pressing concern.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” I said, pausing for a little dramatic effect. “I want you to sit in her pee.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Sit down in her pee.”
“No fucking way, man. What the fuck?”
“I’m not asking, Danny. And I’m not going to say it again.”
We looked at each other while the seconds ticked by. In the end, Danny shrugged his shoulders as if to imply that there was nothing he’d enjoy more than to relax in her urine. He tried to be sneaky at first and sit on the edge of the wet spot. I motioned him over with a wag of my finger, and Danny scooted obediently into the dark stain. A sick expression clouded his face as the dampness soaked through his pants.
“Now that we’re comfortable,” I said, “about a year ago you sold some cocaine to a cop named Dean Arnaud, who subsequently got himself killed. Do you remember that?”
“How do you know about that?” Danny asked, genuinely surprised.
“Let’s not get sidetracked. Who was Arnaud going to sell the dope to?”
Forgetting about the pee, Danny put his hand on the cushion, then jerked it off again like he’d been burned. “Fuck!” he said, wiping his hand on his pants. “I don’t know shit like that. He pays for the product, it’s his. I don’t give a shit what he does with it.”
“How long were you dealing to Arnaud, before he was killed?”
“I don’t know. A couple years.”
“So you knew each other pretty well?”
“No, we didn’t fucking know each other. He was a customer. That’s all.”
“He never talked to you about what he was doing? Who he sold to? Nothing like that?”
“Hey! The guy was a cop. Dirty or not, I didn’t trust him and I didn’t like him. I wouldn’t have gotten near him if Richardson hadn’t sent him to me in the first place.”
“Richardson sent him to you?”
“The first time, yeah.”
“And the last time?”
“Yeah, maybe. Now that I think about it, I guess he did say Richardson had set him up with a buyer. But he didn’t say who exactly. Just some Russian guys in town for a Kings game, or some shit like that. Fuck, man! I can’t remember all the shit I hear.”
Richardson had lied about how much he knew, and Danny may have been making a lot of it up as he went along.
“Let me see if I’m following you, Danny. At first you didn’t know anything, and now that you think about it, you just happen to remember that Arnaud mentioned some Russians?”
Danny performed a brief routine of innocent exasperation, as if to show me how little it all had to do with him. “Man, you know I can’t just throw names around, even if I knew who they were. And I don’t. Arnaud was always running his mouth about some shit or other. I got the impression he was selling the powder to these two Russian guys that used to come to town once in a while, that’s all.”
“How do you know them?”
“They used to by from me sometimes, back before Arnaud started playing middleman.”
“What did they look like?”
“Like Russians, I guess. Big Russian dudes. One of them had a number tattooed on the back of his hand.” Danny held up his right hand as he said this. “404. Except the second four was backwards, like a mirror image.”
It was possible Danny was following orders from Richardson about what to