Necessary Deeds by Mark Wish

Author:Mark Wish [Wish, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Blaine Davis owns a swanky four-bedroom penthouse in Long Island City, Queens, where, now, high rises are replacing warehouses and crumbling pre-war apartment buildings, some of the high rises already blocking the views of Manhattan others of them boasted only months ago. Years ago, Blaine invested his proceeds from Night of the Solstice in numerous abandoned warehouses and often-empty parking lots in Long Island City on a tip he’d gotten from a guy named Marty, held onto the deeds for longer than most investors would, then sold half to a developer who promptly built a seventy-six-floor, mirror-windowed finger to Manhattan, the largest penthouse suite in which Blaine owns now free and clear—and lives in with none other than the woman known to me as my ex.

This evening, the six chairs at that penthouse’s fashionably narrow dining room table are occupied, the three facing lower Manhattan by Em and me and Hendee, who I’ve just signed as my client in perpetuity. Blaine and Lauren and Doreen sit across from us, backdropped by glare from the setting sun.

Much as Em’s natural beauty continues to have a solid hold on me, Lauren still has looks that could kill. She’s had work done since my conviction but still strikes me as exquisite, her hair piled high in that seemingly careless way only women with features stunning as hers can pull off, her teal eyes as mesmerizing as they were the night we met.

Doreen’s charms are a different matter. To put it mildly, Doreen is well-endowed. (Or as Em put it in a whisper to me just before we sat, “Damn, are those huge.”) Unlike Lauren and Em both, Doreen has a quick smile and a generous, infectious laugh. Her diction confirms her MA in Lit from Harvard, yet she appears enamored of Hendee’s plainspoken work, if not his prison haircut and newly acquired tendency to grin. Indeed, Hendee appears happier than he has since the day I met him.

For his part, Blaine has been laying it on thick with Em. He plied her with extra champagne just after we arrived, then with his “imfamous”—his word—martinis, and now, as we eat, he’s refilling her glass with pinot. The main course is shrimp something or other delivered by a “copter” to the helipad twenty-six feet above us. If his ego was soaring when he left me for ITM, he’s twice as full of himself now.

And Em, to my frustration, is doubtless charmed by him. She’s also drunk, so I’m giving her a break on the flirtation escalating between her and him, trying to convince myself it’s more his doing than hers.

“Ethan,” Lauren now says after her own sip of pinot. “We hear you’ve been made some offers.”

Hendee swallows a mouthful of salad. “This is the word.”

“Got yourself a pretty sweet deal, huh,” Blaine says, assessing Hendee with what strikes me as a half-hearted attempt to appear impressed.

“It’s only two books,” Hendee says. “And one of them is poetry, so, well, I’m not sure we’re talking about two bestsellers here.

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