It takes trust.
And like his father with his own first clients, Laurent would never-not ever-forget that fact, not even years later when he was asked to stay late on a cold, rainy card night, when every store on the block was closed and every second waiting here decreased the chances of him seeing a pierogi or-
Diiiing, the bell rang at the front of the barbershop.
Laurent turned as the door slammed hard into the wall, nearly shattering the plate glass. It wasn’t his client. It was a crush of young men in their twenties rushing in from the rain, stumbling at the threshold. They were soaked… slipping… dripping puddles across the black-and-white tile floor.
For those first seconds, Laurent was pissed. He hated dealing with drunks, especially drunk college kids who suddenly see a barbershop and think they want a Mr. T mohawk. But it wasn’t until they tumbled inside that Laurent finally saw the true cause of their lack of balance: The young man in the middle sagged facedown to the ground. His friends weren’t walking with him. They were carrying him.
As he lay there, not moving, his right arm was bent awkwardly in a way that arms don’t bend. Sliding down from his soaked hair, drips of blood tumbled into the new puddle of rainwater, seeping outward as they turned the floor a strangely beautiful light pink. But even in the midst of the chaos, even with the blood still coming, the young barber, who would forever regret staying late that night, immediately recognized the tattoo on the bleeding man’s forearm.
An eight-ball.
He’d cut the hair of one other person with the same mark. He knew what it meant-and what gang it came from.
“Get inside! Shut the door!” one of the boys said, screaming at the overweight boy-no, that was a girl-who was still standing out in the rain, looking like a chubby phantom and not saying a word.
“They’re gonna kill us!” the other boy called out, his haunting gray eyes locking on the barber with an almost spiritual clarity. Laurent knew him too-he’d known him for years-back from when the boy was little and his father would bring all sorts of trouble to the shop. Even back then, even when it got bad, Laurent never saw the boy get riled. Until now.
“I mean it, Laurent. Please…” the young twenty-year-old who would one day be the President of the United States pleaded as his gray eyes went wet with tears. “Please can you help us?”
90
"Beecher…” Dallas warns through the phone.
“I’m already gone,” I say, shoving open the lobby’s glass door and darting out into the cold. My body bakes in the weird sensation from the heat in my winter coat mixing with the brutal wind from outside. But as I weave past the concrete benches in front of the brick building…
“Make sure Nico’s not following,” Dallas says, reading my mind.
I check. And check. And recheck again.
The glass door is shut. From what I can tell, there’s no movement inside.
“Get out of there!” Dallas adds as I run for the narrow black path that snakes through the snow and leads back up to the parking lot. I recheck one more time, but as I turn around, my legs feel like toothpicks, ready to snap and unable to hold my weight. But this time-all the times-I’m not looking for Nico. I’m looking for her.
For Clementine.
My mind swirls into rewind, replaying every moment, every interaction, every conversation we’ve had since she “magically” returned to my life. I thought I was lucky. I thought I was blessed. How many guys get to reconnect with the girl they used to dream of? The answer’s easy. None.
I replay our night on the bridge… and the homemade photo she made of us… and how she understood me in a way that Iris never did. I try to tell myself how stupid and cliche and dumb every precious moment was-but the toughest truth, as the bitter pain in my belly tells me, is how bad I still want every damn second of it to be real.
Still running on toothpicks, I tear as hard as I can, putting as much space between myself and the building as possible. My stomach nearly bursts, feeling like a rolled-over carcass. How could she do this to me?
“Beecher, are you-?”
“I–I saw him,” I tell Dallas.
“Nico?”
“No. I saw him. He’s here. I saw Eightball!”
“What’re you talking about?”
“He’s alive. We assumed he was dead-that Wallace killed him all those years ago-but he’s-” At the top of the hill, the path dumps me back in the parking lot that sits right across from Nico’s home building. Within seconds, I beeline for Dallas’s old Toyota and fish the keys from my pocket. “Don’t you see, Dallas? We were right-about Eightball… and the blackmail… That’s what they were doing. That’s how they found out what happened all those years ago,” I add as I whip open the car door and slide into the front seat. “Maybe they found Eightball… or Eightball whispered it-either way, they used that to blackmail-”
“I think it’d be best if you put down the phone now,” a soft gentlemanly voice suggests from the backseat.
“Whatthef-!” I jump so high, my head slams into the roof.
“I also highly recommend not turning around,” the man warns. “I see what you’re doing,” he adds as we lock eyes in the mirror. He’s an older black man with silver hair and a matching silver mustache. “I’m begging you, Beecher-this is the time when you want to use that big brain of yours. Now please… put the phone down, and put your hands on the steering wheel.”
His voice is kind, almost soothing. But there’s no mistaking the threat, especially as I spot his shiny silver weapon just above the back of my headrest.
At first, I assume it’s a gun. It’s not.
It’s a straight-edge razor.
91
Twenty-six years ago
Journey, Ohio
"Up here… left up here!” the kid with the tight curly hair-the one called Palmiotti-insisted, sitting in the passenger seat and pointing out the front windshield of the young barber’s white van.
“The hospital’s to the right!” Laurent shouted, refusing to turn the wheel.
“No… go to the other hospital-Memorial. Stay left!” Palmiotti yelled.
“Memorial’s twenty minutes from here!” Laurent shot back. “You see how he’s bleeding?”
Behind them, in the back of the van, Orson Wallace was down on his knees, cradling the head of the unconscious kid with the eight-ball tattoo, trying to stop the bleeding by tightly holding towels from the barbershop against his head.
An hour ago, Wallace threw the first punch. And the second. He would’ve thrown the third too, but Eightball got lucky, knocking the wind out of Wallace’s stomach. That’s when Palmiotti jumped in, gripping Eightball in a tight headlock and holding him still as Wallace showed him the real damage you can do when, in a moment of vengeful anger, you stuff your car keys between your knuckles and stab someone in the face.
Years later, Wallace would tell himself he used the keys because of what Eightball did to Minnie.
It wasn’t true.
Wallace was just pissed that Eightball hit him back.
“He’s not moving anymore,” Wallace’s sister whispered from the back corner of the van. She was down on her knees too, but just like in the barbershop, she wouldn’t get close to the body. “He was moving before and now he’s not.”
“He’s breathing! I see him breathing!” Wallace shouted. “Stewie, get us to Memorial!”
Palmiotti turned to the barber. His voice was slow and measured, giving each syllable its own punch. “My father. Works. At Memorial,” he growled. “Go. Left. Now.”
With a screech, the van hooked left, all five of them swayed to the right, and they followed Spinnaker Road, the longest and most poorly lit stretch of asphalt that ran out of town.