by Tom Pitts
“Where the fuck did you get that?” Juliet asked.
Bomber shrugged, then took a long, slow pull off the warm beer.
Upset with the lack of food, Russell pulled a partially crushed pack of Camels from his jacket and emptied its contents on the green carpet. There were at least a dozen cigarette butts in the pack. They spread across the floor with strands of loose tobacco sprinkled among them. The kid poked through his stash with his index finger.
Bomber spoke for the first time since they’d been in the house. “Hey, kid, can I get one of them?”
Calper Dennings deplaned at eleven that morning. SFO being just what he’d expected: a madhouse, the chaotic clamoring of thousands of insects all pressing in opposite directions. Business professionals stepped in front of him from the airplane’s aisle to the baggage claim. Bewildered tourists slowed his pace as they paused to read signs or wipe snot off their toddlers’ noses. He hurried and stalled and sidestepped his way through the terminal, feeling his blood pressure rise and his patience deplete.
He didn’t have to be in San Francisco at any particular time, so he decided he’d stop at one of the airport lounges for a quick drink to sew together his fraying nerves.
He was looking forward to this new job, a simple find-and-finger. He intended to take his time doing it too. San Francisco was one of his favorite cities and he fully intended to squeeze in a little R-and-R. Scotch before noon was out of character for him, but it’d been a hell of a flight. Between getting to the airport and delays, he’d been up since five that morning. He figured he’d earned it.
He’d just ordered the top shelf over ice—what would have been well anywhere else—and was getting ready to lift his glass when his phone rang. He pulled the cell from his pocket, looked at the caller ID, and answered.
A voice asked, “You there yet?”
It was Ashton Taber, the barking dog on the leash of the man who’d picked up his plane fare. Taber was the contact, the buffer between him and Stephan DeWildt, a self-described captain of industry and Hollywood movie mogul. Calper had worked with DeWildt’s type before. Grandiose nouveau riche who thought money bought them a separate set of rules for behavior. They liked the cloak-and-dagger feel of in-betweens and cryptic calls. He’d never met DeWildt. Taber was the only one he’d met in person, and that was just to pick up his fee. In cash—no checks. This was his second job for DeWildt and Taber. The first one didn’t turn out too well and Calper was surprised they called him for more work.
“Barely. I’m still at the airport. What’s up?”
“Looks like our friends are in Sacramento.”
“You gotta be kidding me. I just got here.”
“She called the lawyer, the one up there, Paulson. You know the guy I’m talking about. Tried to squeeze him for a few bucks.”
Calper sighed, looking at the drink in front of him.
Taber said, “Hey, you’re not on vacation. I know you were looking forward to racking up our expense account in San Francisco, but we need you to get up there and get a bead on these kids.”
“What I was looking forward to is not being in a car or a plane for a few hours.”
“Call us when you get to the valley. You got the lawyer’s address, right?”
“Yeah. I got it.”
Calper ended the call and spun around on his bar stool to see the signs illuminated above the terminal walkway. Rent-a-car/Baggage claim: Level one. He knew a hit of scotch wasn’t the best idea before setting out on a—what was it? It had to be at least a two-hour trip—but, what the hell. He spun back around on the stool, picked up his glass, and threw back the scotch.
It wasn’t until late morning Linda realized she’d forgotten her paycheck at home. She’d been sitting on the check for two days and intended on depositing it during her lunch break. Now she was going to have to drive home at noon then race to the bank and, hopefully, make it back to work by one. She rolled her eyes and snuck out of the office at quarter to twelve to save time.
The check sat right on the kitchen table where she’d left it. The display on the microwave read 12:15. If she hurried, she’d be able to grab a quick bite before her break was over. If Gary hadn’t spent the morning gazing at the neighbor’s house, he probably would have seen the check and reminded her to take it. Credit card payments had already been made online and, if the money wasn’t in the bank by five, the payments would bounce and they’d be charged late fees. With all the discussions they’d recently had regarding their finances and how they needed to start acting like grown-ups, she didn’t want to be the one to blamed for spacing out on the most rudimentary financial responsibilities. Keeping up with a mortgage was new to them and it’d begun to dawn on the couple how fragile their credit was. Gary called it their house of cards, and she knew he was only half-kidding.
After letting Barney out for a quick romp in the backyard, she tucked the check into her purse and headed out the front door. Across the street sat a faded green Impala. The car was backed into the Perkins’ driveway, its cracked grill facing the street. Rust hugged the bottom of its fenders and the paint had been bleached near white by the California sun. The car was empty, but the trunk was open.
The sight was so odd that she stopped a moment to look. The Perkins usually kept their Ford Escape inside the garage. Their neighbor’s driveway was almost always empty. The sight of a car, especially a beat-up car like this one, was an affront to Linda’s eyes.
The garage door behind the old Impala started to roll up. Not with the loud automatic garage door opener she’d grown used to hearing, but forced manually. She squinted into the darkness of the Perkins’ garage and saw a man. By the time she’d focused on him, she realized he was staring right back at her.
Jason stood, hands on his hips, and smiled at the pretty lady across the street. She didn’t move, didn’t flinch. He leaned into the Impala’s trunk and pulled out a battered-looking PC tower. He set the computer on the garage floor then went back to the trunk for the monitor. With the electronics out, he slammed the trunk lid and moved into the sunlight at the front of the car. He smiled again at the woman across the street who appeared to be frozen. Then he nodded a silent hello and—just in case she was eyeing him with lust and not suspicion—he threw her a wink.
Chapter Three
Jason clapped his hands together as a way of opening the meeting. “Okay, here’s the deal. I gotta wait here for the electric guys, but we still need money to cop today. So this is how it’s gonna go: Juliet, you’re gonna drive Bomber up to Walmart and let him do his thing in there for a while. Bomber, only shit we can sell or return. I don’t want you coming back with a bunch of crap that’s gonna lay around here. And don’t fucking steal a bunch of beer. CDs, DVDs, electronic shit, that’s best. Fly under the wire too. We’re gonna have to boost a ton of shit from this place and we don’t need ’em recognizing your face every time you come through the door.”
Russell said, “What about me?”
“Did it sound like I was finished? I’m gettin’ to you.” Jason frowned at the kid, the interruption now making everyone uncomfortable. “After she drops Bomber, Juliet is going to take you to Safeway. You get in there and grab something to eat for us. Try to get some unperishable shit. Cans of meat and beans, you know. Oh, while you’re there, steal a can opener too.”
Juliet sat against a wall twirling a jade broach between her fingers.
“Juliet, we need you to get down to the food stamp joint and apply.”
“Fuck that. It’s a waste of time. They’re not going to do it if I don’t have proof of residency. I told you that already.”
“You want to stay and wait for the electric company?”
“But you already made the call. It’s gonna be in your name, what’s the point?”
“All right, fine. I’ll wait here—like I said—and you just hang outside Walmart and make sure Bomber comes out of there without a stream of s
ecurity guards behind him.”
It’d happened before. One time Bomber slowed a security team by screaming that they were profiling him. He wasn’t sure what that really meant but it worked. Enough heads turned and the guards slowed enough for him to escape. Another time he led four young security guards outside of a Walmart in Fresno and battled them bare-fisted till he walked away with them on the asphalt and him with his swag under his arm.
Juliet shrugged and turned her attention back to the broach.
“What?” Jason said.
Juliet remained silent but raised her eyebrows and looked at Jason without moving her head.
“Fuck.” Jason reached into his jeans pocket and extracted a small pink balloon. He lobbed it at her and, with deft precision, Juliet snatched the tiny object from the air before it hit the carpet.
“There,” Jason said. “That’s the last one. After you get all comfy and well, why don’t you get a hold of Ready Eddie and see if we can’t trade some of those pills we got for some real shit. You think you can handle that?”
Juliet offered a mock salute.
After Jason retreated to the bathroom, the kid, Russell, asked, “Juliet?”
She ignored him as she bit at the balloon, opening it up to expose a tiny lump of brown wrapped in cellophane.
“Juliet?” he asked again, more timid than the first time.
“What?”
“Will there be a little left for me?”
Calper checked into the Super 8 off the Madison exit. A Motel 6 sat across the way, but in his experience, it was better to spend a couple of extra bucks and save the inevitable headache of being woken up by locals using the motel as a safe spot to party. Of course, he’d learned this the hard way: getting into a beef with some meth heads in Riverside County and nearly having his head blown off. Besides, there was a Denny’s adjacent to the Motel 6 and the restaurant attached to the Super 8 was at least a half rung up the ladder from the tired fare of Denny’s. Super 8 wasn’t a big step up, but it was a step up.
He got to his room, logged onto the motel’s Wi-Fi, and settled in. He’d just received the latest information the client sent for this job, an email with some vague descriptions of Jason’s companions and some intel on the home where they were thought to be hiding. He knew it was only part of what he needed. DeWildt was trying to control the information, letting it trickle in. If he counted only on what clients gave him, he’d be in prison right now. He learned that the hard way too.
He sat at the bureau and searched the internet. It never ceased to amaze him that if you were patient and searched anyone hard enough, the amount of damning information out there was staggering. He used a couple of sites he paid for—Felonsearch, Peoplefinder, and good old LexisNexis, but mostly he searched and scrolled through the endless annals of the internet. You really didn’t need access to police databases or banking websites, most people’s dirt was hiding in plain sight.
First he pumped in the names Abigail and Donald Perkins. Then, after he’d gleaned what he could, he typed the name Jason DeWildt.
When Gary walked through the front door that evening, the smell of Linda’s spaghetti sauce filled the house. Barney barked with delight and circled Gary, his tail wagging and his butt wiggling. An open bottle of red wine stood on the kitchen table. Linda sat at one end with a glass in her hand and a magazine spread out in front of her.
“Smells delicious,” Gary said.
“It’s the same sauce we had last week. I froze the leftovers.”
“It was good then and I’m sure it’ll be good now.” Gary tossed his jacket onto the couch, retrieved a second wine glass from the cupboard, and joined his wife at the table.
“I can’t tell you,” he said as he poured, “how much that job is pissing me off. Just when I was getting used to the program they use, they upgrade to a new system and I’m completely lost again. I feel like an idiot down there. I have to ask Rooster how the damn thing works every five minutes. They think someone’s stealing parts and I have to inventory everything every time a van goes in or out. I swear, if shit goes missing now, they’re going to think I’m the one stealing it.”
Linda wasn’t paying attention. Not to Gary, not to the magazine. She looked up from the article she pretended to read. “You know, I think you were right.”
“About what?”
“About the Perkins’ house. The light you saw. This morning I saw a guy moving stuff in. I guess they sold it after all.”
Gary took a moment to take a sip from his glass. “They seem nice?”
“No. It was just the one guy and he looked like a scumbag.”
“Scumbag? What’d you mean?”
“He looked like a bum, all dirty. Like a homeless person or something. Not someone who just bought a house.”
“Really?” Gary got up from the table and went to the kitchen window. The Perkins’ seemed quiet now. No signs of life. “Did they have a moving truck or what?”
“Nope. Just some beater car. Looked like it barely ran. It’s probably in the garage now.”
“Maybe after dinner I’ll go say hello. Meet our new neighbors.”
They’d finished dinner and put the dishes away by the time Gary was ready to walk across the street to the Perkins’. The evening light was failing and the streetlights began to pop on one at a time. There was no car in the driveway now, the junker Linda described probably tucked away in the garage. No sounds or lights inside the house, none that could be detected from the outside anyway. Gary pushed the doorbell. He heard no chime. He knocked. Three hard raps with his knuckles. Nothing.
As he turned to walk away, the door creaked open. In the threshold stood a young lady with long brown hair highlighted with faded colored streaks. In this light, Gary couldn’t tell if the streaks had been pink or purple or red, their present effect somewhat bruise-like. The girl didn’t say anything, she only looked at Gary with a gentle curve of a smile. Thin to the point of frailty, the woman seemed delicate, and to Gary, strangely attractive. She reminded him of the girls he used to run with in the old days, back in San Francisco, before Linda. The kind of girls he was too timid to date, the ones that seemed dangerous, damaged. It wasn’t till he said hello that he noticed she wasn’t wearing anything under her jean jacket. There may have been a bra, he guessed, but definitely no shirt. The sight of the exposed flesh threw him off and his eyes involuntarily slipped down to search for cleavage.
The woman seemed to notice where his gaze wandered and she forced her grin into a moist smile exposing a row of straight teeth. “Hi.”
“Hi, how’re you doing? I live across the street,” Gary said. He hooked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his home. “I just thought I’d stop in and say hello and meet our new neighbors.”
“Well, hello,” she said. There was coyness in her tone, a flirtatious note that Gary didn’t notice but was affected by anyway.
“Hi,” he repeated. “My name is Gary, and like I said, we’re neighbors now, I guess.”
The woman didn’t offer her name. She smiled and waited for Gary to say something else.
“So, did you buy the place, or are you renting?”
“We have an arrangement with the previous tenant.”
“Owner.”
“Pardon me?”
“Owner. The Perkins weren’t tenants, they were owners.”
“Could be, I don’t know. I’m not the one who made the arrangement.”
“Oh, your husband knew the Perkins?” Gary didn’t know why he said it like that. He knew it’d sound like he was fishing for information, like he wanted to find out if she was married or attached.
She smiled again, playing right along. “No. My roommate. He made the arrangements.”
He almost repeated it. Roommate. Gary stood there a moment longer, trying to think of what else to say. There was nothing and the young lady in front of him wasn’t talking either.
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“Okay, I’ll let you get back to it. I’m sure you have some unpacking to do. If there’s anything you need, we’re right there.” This time he turned and pointed directly at his house. He saw Linda’s silhouette framed in the kitchen window. “It’s a nice neighborhood. Quiet. We actually haven’t been here that long, but we like it.”
“We?”
“Yeah, me and my wife, Linda. We’ve been here for almost a year.”
Again the girl said nothing.
“All right then,” Gary said.
“All right then,” said the girl.
“I didn’t, ah, catch your name.”
“Juliet. My name is Juliet. Nice to meet you, neighbor Gary.”
By the time Gary reached the front door of their house, Linda was already seated at the kitchen table. She’d refilled her wine glass and was waiting patiently for his report.
“They said they made an arrangement with the Perkins.”
“Who?” Linda said doubtfully.
“That girl, Juliet. She said they’ve made some sort of deal with Perkins so they can stay there.”
“Juliet, huh? Nice name. You guys have a nice talk?”
“What do you mean?” He sat down across from Linda at the table.
“I mean she was playing you. Are you kidding, Gary? You didn’t see it. She had no shirt on, for Christ’s sake. And now she’s telling you she knows the Perkins?”
Gary wondered how she could see if the girl was wearing a shirt or not. “No, she didn’t say she knew them.”
“Oh, she said her husband knew them?”
“It’s not her husband, it’s her roommate.”
Linda rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Gary, you really fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”
Gary wrinkled his nose and scrunched his face. “I didn’t fall for anything. It’s what she told me. Don’t get weird on me just because some skank moved in across the street. Fuck, she looks like she’s two steps away from being homeless.”