“Yeah,” Gary said, “he coulda. So could the room service waiter. Or the woman from housekeeping they keep on call twenty-four hours a day when you’re in town, in case you decide your pillow feels as hard as your dick or some such. Or the bellman brings your brushed suedes back looking all new after you smudged them someplace and they’ve been botherin’ you ever since.”
Only Gary could talk to him that way. Not even the Magic coach, Tommy Clayton, could. There’d never been a coach Billy Cash had in his life, all the way back to Wake Forest, who had any real juice with him. Or any coach Billy trusted. But he trusted Gary Hall, his bodyguard, the man in charge of what Billy liked to call his all-around situation, the ex-undercover cop from New York City he’d hired to permanently have his back, in season and out, work his surveillance, watching out for Billy Cash the way he had when he was chasing bad guys, going over every single hotel room Billy stayed in like it was in one of those crime scene shows on television.
Only the job was more than that now, Gary knew. All of a sudden, these last months, the full-time job was listening to this nonstop shit about Monica and how he was sure she was having him followed so it would be no problem when she divorced him to get half.
That and taking care of the girls.
Billy Cash said, “That your way of tellin’ me you checked him out? The guy in the lobby?”
“I talked to security. They said he was just a driver, wanting to be right there when his man, some Saudi asshole, came off the elevator, probably coming down from doing the same bad things in his suite you were about to go up and do in yours.”
“Speaking of,” Billy said. “We good for later?”
“With the MTV girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
Billy Cash leaned back, smiled. “MTV,” he said. “Maybe we’ll make our own damn video.” Then he closed his eyes and with them still closed said to Gary, “You see that driver guy in the lobby again, the one with the towel-head, you act like you’re with hotel security, check him out your own damn self.”
“After I get Miss MTV squared away,” Gary said. “As part of my ever-expanding duties.”
Billy wasn’t even listening, Gary saw that he’d put his headphones on, was probably listening to some of that thump-thump-thump rap he said got him going.
So this was another time when Gary stopped short of telling him that he didn’t sign on to be a pimp, that he didn’t know when he signed on with Billy Cash that his job would turn into getting the girls into the hotel and then out, after Billy had finished his business.
That and watch out for all the private eye shit Billy was sure Monica was putting on him, looking to have him by the balls when she filed, something Billy was sure was going to happen soon.
Billy took the headphones off and said, “You ought to get yourself a girl of your own, you wouldn’t act so fucking pissed off all the time.”
“So I can be as happy as you and Monica?” Gary said.
“I’m talkin’ about one who’ll love you for yourself, not for the cold cash,” Billy said. Always looking for another play on words when it came to Monica.
The Academy ran into some traffic, turned right on Forty-fifth, on its way over to Broadway.
“My life’s complicated enough,” Gary said, “watching out on your life.”
“I sound paranoid about her sometimes, don’t I?”
It made Gary smile, he couldn’t help himself “Ya think?” he said. Trying to remember a time when there wasn’t this kind of standoff between Billy and Monica, her holding on to the title of Mrs. Cash, the celebrity it gave her, the way he held on to his money.
“You know what they say, dog,” Billy Cash said. “Just ’cause you’re paranoid don’t mean the motherfuckers ain’t out to get you.”
Billy Cash was Jordan after Jordan. Not the Michael who couldn’t stay unretired and came back and retired wearing the funny Wizards uniform. The Chicago Michael, the one who won everything and made all the money. Billy said he’d gone to Wake, not North Carolina, where Michael’d gone, or Duke, because those schools didn’t need him, they’d already won all their national championships. So he went to Wake, in the same neighborhood down there, and won his Deacons two NCAAs, his sophomore and junior years, came out before his senior year to play for the Magic, even though everybody’d known he was ready for the pros after high school. Only he said he’d win more titles in college than Michael, so that’s what he went and did. Now it was Billy Cash on the Wheaties box, Billy selling his cell phones and his Gap clothes and those high-def TVs and Suburbans. It was Billy in the Disney commercials, more visible for Disney than the fucking mouse.
It took him a while to win in the pros, six years, but then the Magic had finally broken through and he had won two titles in a row there. Then some of the guys he played with got tired of being his “supporting cast,” which he’d accidentally called them one time same as Michael had with the Bulls, started leaving for free agency, moving on for cash of their own. So the people running the Magic had brought in a younger supporting cast and Billy kept scoring and finally, the year before, they’d won again. And were on their way to another, all the TV experts agreed, as long as that sore foot of Billy’s made it to the end of June. It should have been enough, Gary Hall knew, to have Billy Cash feeling as if he had his skinny-assed self sitting on top of the world, keeping his eye on the prize.
Problem was, he kept looking over his fucking shoulder for Monica.
He’d met her at the Guest Relations desk at Disney, some appearance he made right after the Magic had drafted him and the mouse-ear people had signed him up to be their smiling pitchman, shooting the first commercial the day the Magic had picked him first in the draft. Where you goin’, Billy Cash? I’m goin’ to Disney World! One of those deals. Gary wasn’t with him yet, having just made detective, assigned to a surveillance detail with the Seventeenth Precinct, Manhattan. But he’d heard the story about how Billy and Monica had met so many times he could recite it by now like he could the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I’m Cash,” he said to Monica that day, a snappy little dish in her Disney colors and Disney clothes, giving him a look.
“Fast Cash?” she said.
“Hard Cash.”
Then Monica had said, “Your next question should be where I’m gonna be after you get done waving from the back of your convertible in the afternoon Disney parade.”
They went out that night and every night that week and when she told him she’d missed her period two months into his rookie season, they eloped to Las Vegas on an off-day between playing the Clips in L.A. and the Kings in Sacramento, like they were just a couple of crazy kids. “Just so’s the math would be close enough for all them at Disney corporate later on,” Billy said.
They had a boy and then a girl the year after that and became the happy People-magazine-cover couple-sitcom Negroes, Billy liked to say to Gary-even though the whole time, from the day they got married in the tacky Vegas chapel just for laughs, Billy Cash was still fucking everybody who’d stay still long enough. If Monica knew, at least in the first years Gary ’d gone to work for Billy, she never let on to him. She was into the full swing of being Mrs. Cash by then, working the charity circuit hard, fighting for Afghan women and land-mine victims with that pretty blonde that Paul McCartney’d married, the one with one leg; somehow putting herself in the middle of all the 9/11 shit even though she’d been having her picture taken with the kids at Splash Mountain when the planes hit; going up to the White House what felt like every couple of months to Gary for another luncheon or photo op with the First Lady.