A Girl Like That(61)

The Tall One licked his dry lips and pulled out a ski mask. “Here. Wear this.” His tone was clipped, held no room for excuses. I put it on, wrinkling my nose against the slightly musty smell of the cloth.

“You have to go with them,” Bilal had told me soothingly. “To identify the target. You don’t have to do anything else.”

He must have thought I was as high as he was if he ever expected me to believe that theory. I knew I was there as insurance. In case the police showed up and we got caught. It would be easier for them to hand me in to the cops—“He was involved as well”—instead of taking the entire rap themselves.

But luckily for them, it didn’t matter. I wanted to go. I wanted to look at the deli boy when they beat him to a pulp. I brushed a finger over my nose, which would never be straight again. I wanted my revenge.

It had been easier with Zarin. A few rumors, a bunch of anonymous tips to that girlie gossip blog and her whole reputation, not that much to begin with, had been in shreds. From what I’d heard Asma telling her friends—telling anyone who would listen, really—Zarin had turned into a wreck and had once been heard crying in a bathroom.

There were times when I wondered if it was true—if she really was crying—when something that felt a lot like guilt twisted inside me. Does revenge matter anymore? The voice in my head sounded a lot like Abdullah’s. It wasn’t like my reputation was affected. The deli boy hadn’t even said anything. I opened my mouth, ready to call the whole thing off. But then the car jerked to a stop and I realized we were already a block away from the Lahm b’Ajin shop in Aziziyah.

“Are you ready?” the Tall One asked us before slipping brass knuckles onto his left hand.

“These guys, they’re good at what they do,” I remembered Bilal telling me. “You don’t want to make them angry.”

I swallowed hard. It was too late to back out now.

A man wearing the white deli hat and uniform and a stained apron emerged from the front with a large package, which he delivered to a waiting car.

“That one?” A hard nudge to my side from the Short One, who was sitting next to me in the back. He nodded toward the employee who was now heading back inside.

I shook my head. No. The boy who had beat me up was taller, broader. I examined the Short One’s much smaller frame and wondered if he or the Tall One would really be able to take on Zarin’s new boyfriend. But then, as if sensing my doubts, the Short One’s eyes squinted as if he was grinning behind his ski mask, and he pulled out something from his bag. The cricket bat looked old, but sturdy. Enough to turn spinners into sixers and bash in hard Parsi-boy heads.

Adrenaline coursed through me and I didn’t even care that I was wearing the stuffy ski mask. The cashier looked up at us when we entered—three masked men, the Short One with his cricket bat, the Tall One with a hockey stick. I had been annoyed when Bilal had warned me not to take any weapons for myself. “Safer that way,” Bilal had said. “You be their lookout and stay away from the actual fighting. If you get any more bruises, your daddy-ji will begin to ask questions, and we don’t want that, do we?”

But now, faced with the sole employee at the deli at that time in the afternoon, I was a little relieved that I didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t even look at me, his eyes trained on the hockey stick the Tall One casually waved in his face. He raised his hands in the air. “I will give you the—”

“Porus,” the Tall One interrupted. “Indian boy. We are looking for him.”

The man, who was also an Indian, frowned slightly. His mouth tightened before he replied, “No one of that name works here.”

The Tall One glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. A mistake? I shook my head.

He turned back to the cashier. “Look here. Tell us where Porus is and no one else gets hurt. You understand me?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” The man refused to budge, refused to tell us where Porus was.

“Ali, huh?” The Tall One traced a finger over the man’s name stitched on the apron. His hand arched up, making contact with the man’s chin and then his nose. Two quick jabs that had the latter clutching his face, eyes watering. “Or maybe your name is Porus and you are lying to me.”

Behind me, the Short One casually picked up the company’s funny little figurine near the display case—a grinning cow holding the green-and-yellow Lahm b’Ajin flag—and threw it against the window, cracking the pane.

“No!” the cashier shouted. “Help!”

But there would be no help forthcoming. The deli was housed at the bottom of an old apartment building that had once belonged to the owner’s grandfather. There were no other shops in the vicinity, and at this time in the afternoon, the roads were silent.

Bilal had been careful to wait until the deli’s owner had a day off. “You never know with that old man,” Bilal had said. “He used to be in the military at some point.”

But today, apart from the cashier and our target, there were no other employees inside.

It was ridiculous how easily the cashier crumpled under the Tall One’s blows, how he began babbling details he’d tried so hard to keep from us before: “Loading dock … back entrance … next to the toilet.”

Maybe it was easier that Porus’s back was turned when we crept out and that his arms were loaded with a large crate of salami.