Page 6 of A Friend in the Glass

“Excuse me?” that same excited, almost aggressive, voice said into the quiet.

Rufus stopped, looked behind him, and saw a middle-aged woman approaching. She was holding a broom and dustbin and was what they called big boned. She had short black hair and wore some t-shirt with a logo Rufus assumed was for a video game. “Just looking for a friend,” he said quickly.

“You gotta pay if you come into this area—hang on. Did you just call?”

“Just?”

“A few minutes ago?”

“Like ten or fifteen,” Rufus answered.

“I am not running a sex line!” Kim shouted, startling a few patrons, but otherwise they didn’t get up from their chairs. “This is an upstanding business! Get out, you skinny little shit.”

Rufus backed up the remaining steps before bumping into Sam, still in the doorway. While hastily pulling Sam with him, Rufus shouted back, “It was an honest mistake!”

“And you wonder why,” Sam murmured as they tumbled outside. He raised his eyebrows. “No Shareed, huh?”

Kim opened the door and continued their conversation, “Honest mistake my fat ass, boy. I have to fight tooth and nail for every fucking customer I got, and you casually toss out there my time would be better spent as a purveyor of pornography.”

“Good Lord, woman,” Sam said. He caught Rufus’s arm. “We’re going.”

Rufus shoved his sunglasses back on while countering, “The porn industry brings in like, 100 billion a year, so yeah, maybe you could afford a feather duster if you switched over.”

Kim dropped the dustbin and launched after Rufus with the broom.

“Holy shit, lady!” Rufus ran toward the end of the block. “Give me a break, I’m just looking for a friend,” he insisted a second time. “She made a phone call from your café this morning. Sam, tell her, before she tries to break my legs!”

“I feel like I should let this play out,” Sam said, leaning against the window. “It’s like Animal Planet. Fuckheads of New York. See them in their natural habitat.”

“Sam,” Rufus cried, dodging when Kim got close.

She was huffing and puffing something about feather dusters in the general vicinity of Rufus’s asshole before managing to knock the broom between his legs and Rufus crashed to the frozen sidewalk. Standing over him triumphantly, Kim said,“When you see God at those pearly gates, you tell him Kim Kawabe sent you.”

“Sam!”

“Christ Almighty.” Sam ripped the broom from Kim’s hand and pointed the handle at her. “Lady, chill the fuck out. Rufus, get your ass up. Back to your corners, or whatever you say after a fucking Manhattan meet-and-greet.”

Rufus took the chance to skuttle backward like a crab.

Kim, seeming unfazed by the cold, put her hands on her big hips and gave Sam a long, lingering once-over. “Sam, huh? You’re not from around here, I take it.”

“The basic human decency probably gave it away.”

“The phone call—” Rufus tried as he got to his feet.

“Shut up, I hate you,” Kim snapped at Rufus. She said to Sam, “You can ask me about a phone call, though.”

Sam’s eyebrows went up again, but all he said was “A woman who called herself Shareed. It would have been early this morning. Sometime after eight.”

Kim pursed her lips together like she was reluctant to speak, but went ahead with “I don’t know about the name, but yeah, I had a lady pay to use the phone this morning.”

“What did she look like?”

Kim narrowed her eyes as she watched Rufus join Sam’s side, still rubbing his ass. “Black. Pretty. About my age. Kept her hair real short—shorter than mine. She kinda gave me the look, you know? But she didn’t hang around long enough for me to offer some coffee.”

“Local?”

“No way. I give ten percent discounts to the hotels around here. She had one of my coupons. Not that it mattered—it was a phone call. I charged her a quarter.”

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