Free Kill Me by Stephen White Page B

Jimmy Lee’s contact, his “guy.” The meeting took place in the interval between my tumble in the Bugaboos and that board meeting in Santa Barbara. Late spring, early summer, 2004. My left wrist was still adorned in a cast. The rest of me had healed nicely, thank you.

    Even though I’d been given a hint at what to expect that first time, the reality was disconcerting. In a quick phone call from a taciturn man two days earlier, I’d been instructed to walk slowly down the west side of Park Avenue in Midtown between 53rd and 54th over the lunch hour and to be prepared to be greeted by someone pretending to be an old friend. I should be agreeable, I was told. Jimmy must have warned somebody that I was capable of being less than agreeable.
    The “old friend” who approached me on Park Avenue turned out to be a lovely, sophisticated woman a half-dozen or so years younger than me who called my name and pranced up to me on impossibly high heels. She gave me an embrace of the kind of profound exuberance that is usually reserved for airport terminals or wayward grandchildren being reacquainted with bubbes and zadies.
    But the woman mashed her chest into mine the way few bubbes ever do and ran her hands up and down my back and tenderly down my sides before her long fingers ended up on my cheeks. All my cheeks. First the southern cheeks, then the northern cheeks. She finally planted a not-quite chaste kiss on my lips. As she pulled away she smelled of spices and flowers and something that made me think of crisp sheets that had been dried in the sun.
    I was quite aware that I had just been frisked for the second time in my life, and that I hadn’t really minded it. The first time had been by a razor-burned Oklahoma state trooper on the desolate shoulder of Interstate 35 due east of Enid on a miserably hot July afternoon when I was nineteen years old. My memory’s reflection was that it hadn’t been anywhere nearly as enjoyable an experience as this time had been.
    A black Town Car like ten thousand others in New York pulled to the curb next to us. This woman who was my newest, best, old friend opened the back door, smiled, and said, “In.”
    I obeyed. She followed me.
    “Where are we —”
    “Shhhh,” she said, while she used a compact to check her lipstick and, it appeared to me, to look down the street to see if any other vehicles had pulled over to the Park Avenue curb anywhere behind us. When she was comfortable that we weren’t being shadowed and that her perfectly swollen lips were perfectly edged and perfectly glossed, she scooted her perfectly shaped ass next to me on the backseat, and undid the shoulder belt that I’d reflexively fastened across my chest. In a practiced, sultry, last-call voice, she murmured, “My advice? Close your eyes and enjoy this.”
    If I thought that I’d been frisked on the sidewalk on Park Avenue, then what I got in the backseat of the Town Car that was carrying us downtown was something much closer to a full-body massage. Was there a part of my anatomy that she didn’t trace or palpate with her probing fingers?
    Let me think.
    No, there wasn’t.
    Not a one.
    I took only part of her advice, though. I certainly did enjoy it, but I didn’t close my eyes. She was much too lovely for that.
    When she was done with her examination, I said, “Thank you very much. Is it my turn now?”
    She laughed a laugh that not only clearly told me the answer to my question was no, but also told me that if I ever got to know her I’d probably like her a lot. The laugh told me, too, that I would never get to know her.
    I don’t know why, but I’d already come to the conclusion that she wasn’t my Death Angel. She had a role in all this, but she wouldn’t be pulling any literal triggers. Call it intuition.

    Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time doing business in New York, and I knew the local landscape and mores pretty well, but I wasn’t an honorary native by any means. Without a