Page 91 of Antihero

Mikey tossed another handful into his mouth. “Ranch. Ranch is solid, too. Sometimes you gotta stick to the classics.”

“Mexican Street Corn,” Finn-Finn said. “Duh.”

Now a Kings of Karnage commercial was rolling on Taz’s phone and it was weird seeing it here while B-Roll played it out there, like worlds colliding and shit, which is how it felt inside Taz’s chest with the Blancas.

“Mexican Street Corn’s outta bounds,” Mikey said. “We’re going with the classic suite. You can have Chile Picante con Limón”—he brought a shitty accent hard, which cracked them up—“but Mexican Street Corn’s, like, a specialty flavor.”

“Yeah, fag,” B-Roll said. “No specialty flavors.”

Taz needed to get outta his head, away from Blanca. He needed to get numb. He toked deep, held the smoke in his lungs. His vision was getting wobbly at the edges and he couldn’t remember if he’d not taken Adderall or taken it twice but he figured the former so he blew out the smoke, popped another, washed it down with triple sec syrup.

“Wha’oud we do anyhow?” His words were slurry. “’Bout th’ Manny thing.”

B-Roll fired and fired, fingers jamming on the remote, grenades flying, jaw clenched, eyes all don’t-fuck-with-me intense like they got. “Hunt the hunter.”

“How would we find him?” Finn-Finn said. “How?”

“Through the bitch.”

“How’da we track her down? We don’t even know who she is. We don’t even know.”

“I got her DNA sample right here,” Mikey said, and everyone cracked up at his gesture.

“Gross. Gross. You’re fucking gross.”

“I am Dirty Pete’s cousin,” Mikey said, smiling big, and Taz could see the pride beneath because Taz always noticed shit like that. He got it, though. Dirty Pete was next level.

Taz was higher than the Empire State. His stomach was boiling with acid, weird, so he did another shot to settle it down, took another hit since pot helped with nausea and shit. His phone was up again in front of his face and he was swiping through TikTok—flick flick flick—trying to distract himself from—from what? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t working.

“Original flavor, man. It’s where it’s at. I keep coming back to it.” Mikey emptied a bag into his mouth, Corn Nuts spilling everywhere. B-Roll passed Taz a pre-roll over his shoulder called Green-Eyed Wombat—sativa? hybrid?—and he took a long-ass hit and everything got swimmy.

“Wait! Wait! I got it! I got it!” Finn-Finn stood up and fell over but no one even laughed, they were too far gone except for B-Roll, who kept smoking NPCs in Karnage like it was nuthin’, and Finn-Finn stumbled off somewhere, lost in his own high.

Taz’s phone slipped through his fingers, bounced on the dirty-ass carpet. It took a lotta focus to lean forward on the couch and pick it back up.

Then Finn-Finn was standing there, swaying, holding something, something blurry.

Taz said, “Huh?”

“Her wallet, man. We have her wallet.”

And Taz squinted and saw it was a girl’s wallet, one of the longer ones to hold all their tampons or whatever. And Finn-Finn turned it inside out and a bunch of shit rained down on the Corn Nuts and the pre-rolls and the torn-out yearbook pages.

Taz picked something up outta the mess. A state ID.

He squinted at it. It was the chick from the subway.

Anca Dumitrescu.

There was an address, too.

He had another weird impulse—that he should hide the license, make it go away. Make it all go away.

But before he could do anything B-Roll grabbed the ID outta his hands and looked at it and then passed it around.

“The fuck kinda name’s Dumatreshka?” Big Mikey said.

Finn-Finn grabbed it next, pecked in the last name on his phone. “Romanian, man. It’s Romanian.”