stretched his long arms. “Near there, yeah.”
“It’s just one bus. Let’s go.”
He dropped his head. “My parents would creep you out.”
“I bet you can handle them.” His near hand was on the table. She covered it with hers.
“It’s hard.”
“You handle me. That’s hard.” Her hand moved to his thigh. “We’ve been together for almost a month, and I still don’t know where you live. That’s kind of weird.”
He brushed his fingertips along the back of her hand. “Listen, Morg, my mom’s kind of messed up. She can get really angry for no reason. It’s like she just turns on you. I don’t like to bring friends around or even to talk about it. It makes me, I dunno…it freaks me out.”
“I’m sorry, baby.” She kissed him again then whispered, “at least you turned out pretty cool.” Morgan looked away, pensive. When she turned back, he recognized her purposeful expression. “Let’s get high before the party,” she announced, plainly pleased with her new agenda. “I bet we can use someone’s car.”
Relieved, Billy lightly kissed the back of her neck, a thing she liked. He was still tense, though. He would have to figure out a better story. Something that was at least part true. He didn’t like to lie about his mom.
Corey hit redial on her cell phone, trying Billy again. She was sitting at her worn plank table, facing the fire. Her diary lay open in front of her. She had been writing about Billy, wondering where he was. She wanted to tell him their good news, how Dr. Stein was going to help. She left another message, her third of the day. Okay, she had to put him out of her mind. Corey began writing again, whatever came to mind:
I think I like Dr. Stein. He’s not like anyone I ever met. He doesn’t care how he looks or seems to be to other people. It’s as though all he cares about is getting things right in his mind. When he’s distracted, I think it’s because he’s working on some idea. But sometimes he just fades out, as if he’s been alone too long, lost in the woods or something. I wonder why he doesn’t put that big mind of his to work on that? I wish I could tell him what really happened. I’d like to see the look on his face then.
I have to be careful. Nick Season is out there, stalking. He’s looking to strike again. I know we’re in danger, though I don’t know why. When I see Billy this week, we have to face this thing. I don’t think I can wait until Wednesday. Why doesn’t he answer the phone?
Billy and Morgan sat in Mary’s car, smoking a joint. Mary was in the tenth grade, a total outcast. She and another outcast friend were regulars at the Blue City Café. They had wooden plugs in their noses, wore black clothes, liked punk music, and kept to themselves. Mary didn’t hang out with the younger kids, but, for a joint, she would let them get stoned in her car. On Fridays she parked it at the Olympic Academy, in the empty lot behind the new gym, where no one would bother them.
When they’d finished the joint, Morgan kissed him again, a long leisurely kind-of-stoned kiss. He liked how, even after smoking a joint, her mouth still tasted fresh and minty, like candy. He put his hand on her breast, tentative, and she leaned into him. He put his other hand between her legs, his thumb just touching her panties. Billy wasn’t sure what to do next; this was about as far as they had gone. He thought a lot about doing more. He had even stopped at Toys in Babeland, a hip sex shop on Pike Street, looking for ideas. Most of their ideas weirded him out.
So he wasn’t ready at all when Morgan unzipped his pants then took his very hard penis in her hand. “Nice,” she whispered. And just like that, she had it in her mouth. All of it. It felt unbelievably good. So good, Billy wondered if it was really happening to him. He opened his eyes. Uh-huh, yeah, it was.
Six
Corey Logan. The woman was like some kind of obscure offshore virus, an incorrigible, possibly lethal infection. And now she was moving freely, zigzagging dangerously close to a sensitive, sterilized zone. Nick ran his thumb down the back of his lustrous black hair. It hung a quarter inch over his collar, a nod to another time. He touched it when he worried.
As a child, Nikos Sisinis was bold as a lion. On the streets of Athens he was a champion, a king. His father, an audacious con man, said his son had the “gift.” That is to say, at the farmers market or in the lobby of the Royal Olympic Hotel, Nikos didn’t miss a thing. In the alleyways the touts whispered that the kid was even smarter than his dad, who could multiply six numbers by six numbers in his head. For this boy, all things seemed possible.
Nikos’ mother, a gypsy, died when he was seven. Four years later his father was killed, and eleven year old Nikos was sent to live with his father’s uncle, the Sisinis family patriarch, in Seattle. Uncle Antoniou owned a Greek restaurant on a seedy stretch of Second Avenue. Antoniou “Tony” Sisinis was a scrawny guy with fish breath. And Uncle Tony hated gypsies, especially half-breeds. He had no use for wide-eyed young Nikos except for base unpaid labor and for sex. The youngster slept on a cot in the basement dreading his great uncle’s footfalls on the stairs. The young lion understood that his vile great uncle was what he had, his prospective adoptive parent, his sole connection to this new place. And he had to learn English, become a U.S. citizen. He would put Uncle “Tony” out of his mind, bide his time. He could do that.
Before he turned thirteen, Nikos Sisinis was having feelings he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. At thirteen, he put a lug wrench through the windshield of his great uncle’s prized possession, a ’59 Mustang—three times—before admitting to himself that he had developed a weakness, an embarrassing, emasculating flaw. His weakness—his Achilles heel, as he saw it—took the form of unexpected, crippling anxiety attacks. And they were happening more often. Blindsiding him—a worrisome problem suddenly escalating to paralyzing anxiety. And when the anxiety came on, he was useless. Undone. Nikos, the ferocious Greek bull, morphed—in a heartbeat—to pissant pantywaist, raging lion to plaintive pussy, worrying obsessively about what could go wrong, playing and replaying endless bad outcomes in his mind. The thing was, to get where he was going—and he had his eye on real money, the big con—there would always be things to worry about. He had to take risks, he knew that much. So worrying about it was a curse. Here he was, Ares, the fucking God of war, unmanned.
Surveying his uncle’s mangled Mustang, Nikos knew he had to fix this right away, or one day soon he would do something weird. That night, he waited for Uncle Antoniou to close the restaurant. Even then he knew to be discreet and assiduous. No one ever found Antoniou Sisinis. Nikos’ times of unrelenting anxiety came less often, but they still came.
For the next three years he lived with his second cousins, marking time. He went to school and worked at the restaurant at night, waiting for his unmanly episodes to finally end. It was the end of the sixties, a con artist’s candy store, and, for Nikos, proof positive that this was the land of opportunity. At seventeen, he was tired of waiting. Nikos ran away to L.A. where he changed his name to Nick Season. He finished high school then community college. For money, he went with older women. During these years he began to carefully manage one worry at a time. For the popular young gigolo, it was a revelation—if he removed a worrisome problem, took it off the table, one of his episodes was that much less likely.
At twenty-three, Nick passed the LAPD tests and became a Los Angeles police officer. In time he was working undercover. He liked this work, and he was good at it. The way he put it to himself, he was a bad guy pretending to be a good guy pretending to be a bad guy. As he charted a course through the LAPD, he perfected his worry-managing skills. The key, he was learning, was to rend the worry from his life. Cut it out root and branch.
As
