A little after noon the next day, Friday, I met up with Angela at the Clarion.
“And why should I do this for you?” Pete said.
“Because you owe me,” I said.
“For telling your father you were about to get yourself tossed into jail?”
“You set me up with Detective Barrone in the first place.”
“For educational purposes. I figured you were looking to do a school report about detective work. How was I supposed to know you were involving yourself in an open police case, not to mention falling in love with the target of an acid thrower.”
“I’m not falling in love with-”
“Right. Somebody mentions the girl’s name, and you get this look in your eyes. Watch: Nicole. See? You’re toast.” He turned to Angela. “Am I right?”
Angela cracked her gum. “Bread crumbs.”
“Pete, I need this favor. Think of my mother.”
“Don’t do that, kid. Don’t try to make me feel sorry for you.”
“I’m not. I don’t mean it like that, and I don’t want your pity. I mean that she would have done what I’m trying to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Sticking up for somebody who’s having a hard time sticking up for herself.”
Pete shook his head and picked up the phone.
Angela, Cherry and I met at Cherry’s Starbucks a little before three p.m., when Cherry relieved the person behind the counter. I was back there too, setting up Angela’s phone camera inside the pastry case. Angela was sipping a latte and surfing on what appeared to be a brand-new, just-released special-edition MacBook Pro with a seventeen-inch screen that would have retailed for $3900 if its guts weren’t absolute garbage I had pieced together for around $40. The nice shiny case itself was from BJ’s. The forklift king actually showed up for work the previous weekend and had sailed the blades through a stack of Apple boxes. They were tested, found to be broken beyond repair, written up as damaged freight and tossed, and then I went Dumpster diving.
Starbucks was, per usual at this hour, empty, until Puglisi showed up around 3:45, just as Pete’s friend in the Clarion’s feature department, aka the gossip room, suggested he should. By now I was hiding out in the parking lot, in Cherry’s yellow Honda. I watched Puglisi hurry into the shop. He’d gotten a tip Nicole Castro was meeting her new beau there at about four p.m. If Puglisi got there a little early and put himself near the front door, Nicole and her man would be sitting ducks. Puglisi could get a perfectly clear shot, front-page worthy.
Puglisi barked a coffee order at Cherry and situated himself in the corner, setting up his lens. Four o’clock came and went, and neither Nicole nor the beau or whoever he was showed up. Ten after four came and went. At about twenty after four Puglisi’s phone rang. He answered angrily and then hung up even more angrily, having been told that the tip turned out to be bad information. Just as he was about to pack up his stuff, Angela, seated two stools down the window counter from Puglisi, yawned and stretched and said, “Can you watch my laptop for a couple of minutes while I go to the bathroom? Thanks.” And off she went.
Puglisi sized up the situation. The bathroom door was closing behind Angela. Behind the counter Cherry was cleaning the espresso machine, her back to Puglisi. He shrugged, tucked the laptop under his arm and headed out to his car. He stopped when he noticed a thick glass Coke bottle on the hood of his Honda. It had been placed there as a paperweight to keep the smiley face Angela had drawn from flying away in the considerable wind. The smiley face also had hands, and both of them were flipping off Puglisi. He turned around to find me walking toward him. I was holding out Angela’s phone, playing the video of Puglisi’s robbery. He took a swing at the phone, but I saw it coming and held it high over his head. Being much taller than the dude, I had no problem keeping the phone away from him. “Besides,” I said, “she got you too.”
Cherry was out with us now, looking at her phone camera screen. “So weird. From this angle, it looks like you’re stealing a four-thousand-dollar computer.”
“I believe that’s grand larceny,” I said.
“It’s entrapment,” Puglisi said.
“Wanna gamble on a six-year minimum sentence?” I said.
Puglisi smirked and looked around the parking lot. “I’m guessing Nicole isn’t coming?”
“I’m happy to relay any message you have for her. Maybe a final good-bye?”
“Okay, champ, I’m off her tail. Be about a day before the Enquirer has a new team on her.” He got into his car. “Happy now?”
I reached through the window and casually took back the laptop. “I need you to do one more thing for me.”
Twenty minutes later, the picture I got of the black Civic swerving out of the parking lot in front of my building the previous night was up on the tabloid sites with the headline BREAK IN BURNED BEAUTY CASE IMMINENT, RECLUSE ON THE RUN.
I’d tried to leak the picture myself, but no media organization would take my anonymous submission seriously. Only the likes of Shane Puglisi and his Scorpion Imageworks had the credibility to get such a shot picked up. He actually sold the picture for five grand, over the phone, from right there in the Starbucks parking lot.
Basically I was trying to buy us some time. The Recluse would see the story. She wouldn’t be able move around so easily, not with that picture in hot circulation. She would have no choice but to lie low. At the same time, I knew that if she’d been crazy enough to follow Nicole and me to my building, she wouldn’t be backing off for good. We’d get an extra couple of days to do some digging before the Recluse on the Run storyline faded from the front page and the psycho couldn’t fight the itch to burn again. Maybe that would be enough time to hack the breakthrough piece of information that would help us find her before she found another chance to hit Nicole. I’d given up on the idea that Detective Barrone was capable of stopping the Recluse. If she was stoppable, then Angela, Cherry, and I were going to have to stop her.
Angela and I took the bus west. She fell asleep, her face on the window. Her left hand was closed tightly but her right was open. Her fingernails were chewed bloody. A razor wire tattoo circled her wrist. She caught me looking at it. “Cool, right?” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
We got to the Route 22 stop, and from there I walked her home. We stopped at this bodega a block from her house. “I heard you have rock-solid fake ID. Any chance I can get you to man up and buy me some beer?”
“How about a Snapple Green Tea?”
“I believe you’ve already had the pleasure of seeing me hurl all over the street?”
I was suspended, but she’d cut that day. “Thanks for taking off from school for this,” I said.
“Oh, it was a sacrifice. If you were really thankful, you’d get me the Budweiser.”
“I feel bad saying this, but as your friend, I have to.”
“We’re not friends, but go ahead.”
“Can I help you get yourself to a rehab program?”
“Many have tried, all have failed, but I’ll tell you what. Help me get that fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and I’ll check myself into a luxury spa to dry out. Maybe in South America. Maybe I’ll never come back. Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, I’m wondering what it would be like to suck your tongue really, really hard.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Saving yourself for Nicole?”
Nicole or not, it wasn’t going down, not with all that lip metal. “Thought you weren’t into me like that anyway.”
“Spaceman, that was like two days ago. The way I feel today, anybody’s fair game. When you’re hungry, meat’s meat.”
“I’m truly flattered.”
She headed into the bodega and I went home.