Free Head Case by Jennifer Oko

into his ear. “Da?” 
    He nodded emphatically. Then he said something in Russian, angrily. And then he pulled the cord out of his ear and chucked it and the phone onto the floor in front of the passenger seat.
    The car swerved into the right lane and pulled a quick right off the drive. We were a third of the way down the east side of Manhattan, not far from the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel. 
    He pulled up to a curb and reached into the glove compartment.
    My heart stopped for a moment, but then I saw that it was not a gun or bullets that he had taken out. It was a map of Brooklyn. 
    It occurred to me, having now ascertained that this odd man was most likely unarmed, that this might be a good time for me to try to unlock the door and bust out.
    I was about to start slamming the heel of my boot against the door frame when Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn’s phone rang again. He leaned forward to pick it up off the floor and said something that stopped me in my mental tracks.
    “Okay,” he said. “Da, da, Mitya. The dockyard. We meet her there.”
    Her?
    He peeked at me through the rear-view mirror. “New plan,” he said, pointing at the part of the map just opposite the southern tip of Manhattan.
    “Was that Mitya?” I asked, and unleashed a litany of my confused concerns. “What’s at the dockyard? You mean Red Hook? Is Polly meeting us? Is that who you meant? I thought she was at home, on the Upper West Side? Why are we meeting her in Red Hook?”
    He turned around. “You know this place?”
    I nodded. Red Hook, Brooklyn, once a seedy dockyard, was now a thriving gentrified neighborhood, complete with an Ikea, art galleries, an MTV “Real Life” set. And yes, a whole bunch of trendy nightclubs.
    “I know it,” I said. “The other side of the Battery Tunnel.”
    “You know how to get there?” he asked.
    God, looking back now, about a half-hour later, he was unwittingly asking me to help him drive me to my doom. Unfortunately, I knew the way.

14

    June 8 and 9 (B.D.)
    Five Months Ago.

    The hottest nightclub in Red Hook was housed in a former fish-packing warehouse located next to a pier that had been transformed from an old commercial shipping dock to a highly gentrified strip-mall, complete with shops like the Gap, Barnes and Noble, and not one but two Starbucks. The club was called Charity, a name probably more interesting for its incongruity than for any good deed performed on the club’s behalf, though the owners did claim to donate a portion of each evening’s proceeds to some indeterminate organizations. Truthfully though, if anything, the charity came in the form of beverages too expensive to actually get drunk on. What I mean is that unless you were super rich or super beautiful, you could count on not having to suffer from a super hangover the following morning, because it just cost too much. Unless, of course, you smuggled in your own inebriants. Or your friends bought your drinks.
    Or unless you (or Polly, as was the case here) fortuitously (or inauspiciously, if you ask me) wound up, en route to the bathroom, walking inadvertently into the path of Mitya Stoopsky, the luminary downtown DJ and recent subject of adulation on the gossip sites. Famous mostly for the fact that he’d been spotted canoodling with just about every ingénue, from Mary-Kate and Ashley to a recently divorced Ashlee, and who, not seeing where he was going, thanks in part to the stuttering strobes and sight-altering black lights, accidentally turned and splashed his beer all over the diaphanous blue silk tank top Polly had just borrowed from me. The one I had bitterly fought over and won the right to purchase at a designer sample sale the weekend before, and that was now so cunningly yet tastefully displaying her lithe figure underneath. Polly, oblivious to the DJ’s celebrity (and benefiting from a chemically enhanced ego boost), acted appropriately pissed off. The DJ, not used to be spoken to in such a voice in such an