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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 ru
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 go
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.
Little Monica from Guest Relations, living large.
“She sure as hell knew what she was doin’ when she had her relations with this guest,” Billy bitched all the time. “ ‘Specially when she forgot to take that damn pill she swore she was on and just didn’t work that one time.”
Gary had met Billy in New York one night when the Magic were in to play the Knicks. Billy’d gone clubbing with some of his teammates, a lot of the ones who’d move on later, and they’d picked up some girls who wanted to go to Elaine’s and see if there was any movie stars up there eating fried calamari. They got there about one in the morning. Gary was drinking with some other cops at the bar, because for all the shit you read in the papers about Woody Allen and movie stars and other celebrity dinks going to Elaine’s, it was a cop bar, too, especially late at night. Elaine liked her celebrity crowd because it was good for business, but liked drinking and hanging around with cops just as much, from the commissioner on down.
Gary saw Billy Cash’s crowd come in the Second Avenue door, watched the fuss everybody made, saw the stroke the room gave him once he got his big table, the one Woody liked in those days, back there where you made the men’s-room turn. Then Gary went back to his drink and the two waitresses from Hanratty’s up the block he was talking up didn’t pay Billy Cash any more mind until the fat drunk actor decided to call Billy out.
The actor, some guy who used to be in the movies but was working on some ABC soap-all this time later, Gary couldn’t remember whether or not it was All My Children or One Life to Live-had some drunk friends with him. So it made him whiskey-brave enough to tell Billy that they should take whatever it was had started between them outside. And Billy, who Gary would find out later usually laughed assholes like this off, didn’t think it was so fu
Plus, the girls he was with wanted a show.
Gary, leaned on the bar near the front window, thought it was all bullshit, that it was a playground face-down and nothing more, and once the air hit them they’d settle it before anybody threw a punch. But then he watched through the window as the actor set his hands as if he’d boxed some in his life. Or maybe played a boxer in the movies. And before Billy Cash knew it, he’d been hooked solid on Second Avenue above his ear and was down on one knee.
The fat actor was lighter on his feet than Gary thought he could be, as much gut he was showing against his white shirt, and as Billy started to get up the actor clipped him again, another left, same place above the ear. Gary couldn’t hear what was happening, just saw the guy’s friends laughing and cheering him on and probably telling him to finish Billy off.
It was then that Gary excused himself from the Hanratty’s girls, came through the door as Billy was getting to his feet, finally having enough sense to get his hands up.
One of the friends said, “Oh, look, the faggot brought a playmate.”
Gary took a fistful of the friend’s long stringy hair with his left hand, pulled out his badge with his right, then pulled the guy close to him and said, “Give us a kiss.”
The fat actor said, “This is between me and him.”
“Unless I say it’s not,” Gary said. “That would be another way of looking at things.”
The actor took a step at Gary now, like he was going to do something about it, badge or not, and as soon as the left hand came forward Gary caught it the way you would a softball in a mitt and said, “The next move anybody makes here will be me breaking that pretty nose of yours.”
It ended right there. The actor and his buddies got into a cab. Billy told the girls to get back inside with his teammates, who somehow managed never to leave the table. Billy started to introduce himself to Gary that night and Gary said, “I know who you are.” Billy told him to come in, join the party, and about a half hour later he said, “How much you make? With the cops, I mean.” Gary couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him, so he did, right down to the thirty-seven cents at the end of it after everything got taken out. And right there, straight out that night, Billy said, “How’d you like to come work for me?”
Gary asked him what that meant, and Billy pretty much laid out what the job would be. Leaving out the parts about the girls. And Gary Hall said yes, just like that, the answer coming out of how tired he was of counting off the days and months and years to his pension, setting up his cameras across the way from some club where the mob boys had watched too many movies, life with Billy Cash sounding like more high life than Gary had ever known, all the way back to growing up under the el on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona.
After that, nobody fucked with Billy Cash and got away with it.