Free Last Safe Place, The by Ninie Hammon

out a fedora to go with it. He hadn’t never worn a hat, told her it made him look like one of the Blues Brothers in blackface, but he knew it was part of the plan.
    After that, they went directly to Mama Rosina’s in Little Italy for dinner before the show, dressed in their new duds with their old clothes in Macy’s sacks. Mama’s was a family-run Italian restaurant with lots of atmosphere, which meant it was dark as an old maid’s underwear drawer, lit only by candles on the tables that had dripped mountains of wax down the sidesof their wine-bottle holders. The place instantly made Theo uncomfortable because it looked just like the restaurant in the first Godfather movie where Mikey Corleone shot the crooked cop and the drug dealer Sollozzo. Which maybe was what had given Gabriella the idea.
    Halfway through the salad, Theo got up and excused himself and went to the restroom—just like in the movie, only not to pick up a gun hidden behind the toilet tank. The restrooms were in a small hallway off the kitchen with a back door at the end leading to the alley. A red sign on the door warned: “Emergency exit. Do not open. Alarm will sound.”
    He came back to the table a short time later, his gimpy limp a little more pronounced than usual, as the pasta was being served. They all ate, talked, didn’t laugh though. They couldn’t pull that off. Right after the main course, Ty started to get sick. Within minutes Gabriella had to rush him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t puke on the table, with P.D. only a step behind, of course. They stayed there a long time, didn’t return for the rest of dinner or the tiramisu dessert.
    Theo figured if you’d been hired to keep track of the folks who’d gone to the bathroom, you’d have to be a special kind of stupid not to notice they never came back out. There was likely a lot of yelling going on somewhere on the subject. But by that time, Gabriella, Theo, Ty and P.D. were driving through the Holland tunnel into New Jersey in a bunged-up, five-year-old Honda Accord with so much mud on the license plate you couldn’t read the number.
    After the meal, the old black man seated at their table used his napkin to discretely wipe off his silverware, glass and the two, crisp $100-bills he used to pay for the meal—told the waiter to keep the change. He gathered up all the Macy’s bags, pulled his red sweater close around him against the chill in the air and took a cab to the Warwick Hotel. He got in the elevator, punched every button so it stopped on every floor all the way up. When the doors finally opened on the 38th floor, the only thing inside the elevator was a pile of Macy’s bags.
    Three hours later, the afternoon shift maintenance crew supervisor, an old fellow who’d been called Drumstick back in the day, punched out on the time clock in the hotel basement like he’d done just about every day for the past thirty-seven years. Dressed in his blue jumpsuit uniform, the old, bald black man with coke-bottle-thick glasses made his way down the hall pastthe garbage chute that was the final resting place for the tiny, snipped-up pieces of a fedora and a red sweater and went out through the Sixth Avenue staff entrance. He walked the two blocks to the subway entrance on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street and took the D train home to Harlem—with $5,000 in crisp, hundred-dollar bills tucked snug in his hip pocket.
    Least that’s the way he and Theo had planned it and Theo assumed that’s the way it’d worked, prayed that it had.
    The man who’d played drums in Theo’s band forty years ago had exchanged the keys to the Honda for Theo’s red sweater, his hat and a 30-second demonstration of Theo’s limp in the bathroom of Mama Rosina’s. Folks had joked back in the day that they was twins separated at birth and even after all these years they were still the spittin’ image of each other. Except Drumstick didn’t have a hair on his head anymore. And he could barely see.