Page 43 of Brick

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Brick

Brick didn’t see Tre on the job Friday night, and he didn’t ask where he was. Sucre would’ve told him if the kid was dead, which meant right now, Tre only wished he was dead. Brick wanted no part of it.

The first half of the night, he did simple collections. No one was too far in the hole, so it wasn’t rough work. No doubt Sucre had planned it to work out that way because Brick had a fight at midnight.

Talking to Olivia had been a welcome diversion from slapping Fat Kenny around for the hundred bucks he owed. He considered their call as he stripped down for the match. For the life of him, he had no idea what possessed him to spill his guts over his pathetic history. But no one had ever actually wanted to know him before. He didn’t count the people who thought they could leverage a friendship for drugs or protection.

Olivia was genuinely interested.

And he wanted her to know he wasn’t a bad man by choice. Maybe he could have been someone better if his life had gone a different way.

He breathed in the miasma of sweat, cigar smoke, and beer as he approached the ring.

It was a moot point, anyway. This was his life.

Blood.

Brutality.

Climbing between the ropes, he pushed down thoughts of Olivia, locking them away. He reached for the cold stillness inside himself and faced the poor bastard he was about to destroy. His challenger, Paolo, appeared to be of Puerto Rican descent. A big motherfucker, maybe an inch or two taller than him and at least seventy-five pounds heavier. The man had a lazy eye and a mouth full of crooked, grey teeth.

Sucre wanted Paolo to go down in three and a half minutes. A challenge, but not an impossible one. The man swung wide as the bell rang, and as he expected, Paolo’s size slowed him down. On fast feet, Brick danced out of the way.

The next time the man’s meaty hand flew out, he ducked low and jabbed him in the side. It happened twice. Three times.

Sucre gave him the nod.

He had to speed things up. He faked another jab with his left, luring his opponent to step away, directly into the path of a viscous right hook. Before the guy could shake it off, he cracked into his temple again and again, driving him down to his knees, then slamming his head flat onto the floor.

Paolo didn’t get up.

Sucre would make big bank tonight.

Brick walked out without so much as a scratch on him and a few hundred more dollars to add to his Grandma Fund.

***

Magnolia Green wasn’t the swankiest nursing home around, but the staff kept it clean, and they had become a surrogate family to Brick’s grandma during the years she’d lived there. The nurses waved in greeting as he walked the familiar pale blue halls on Saturday afternoon. He’d brought with him a bouquet of gardenias and his grandma’s favorite sugar-free chocolate muffins from the bakery around the corner, the same place he got the tiramisu he liked so much.

This time, every week, Grandma usually hung out in the music room. She’d never learned to play any instruments, but she loved listening when volunteers came from a local church group to sing and play the piano.

He waited quietly, leaning against the wall at the back of the room as the ladies went through their set-list. He wouldn’t interrupt, not when Grandma had looked forward to the music all week long. The piano player had more skill than the singer, who warbled through “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and a couple other songs he didn’t know, but Grandma never stopped smiling the entire time.

This was why he endured working for Sucre.

He had never been especially close to his grandmother. She didn’t coddle him as a child or protect him when her son got high. She was never cruel, though, and for most of his life, she was the only person who cared if he lived or died.

He waited until the church ladies let themselves out before approaching Grandma’s wheelchair.

“Brick?” She spoke before he even reached her side. “Do I smell gardenias?”

Placing the bouquet in her lap, he tucked the box of muffins under his arm and took the handles of the chair. “Yes, ma’am. Picked them up fresh this morning.”

Her hands shook as she lifted the flowers to her face. “Mighty fine. Smells mighty fine.”

He looked for the bruise on her arm he’d seen in the photograph. He found it, though it had faded to a pale purple now. It wrapped around her slender arm like someone had squeezed her too hard. He thought about asking her how she had gotten it, but he didn’t want to upset her.

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