Hard Luck

by Pascal Scott

  “Where are you from?” Elizabeth asked, making small talk.

  “Bern. You’re from LA, right? Mickie said you were in a foster home together.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was LA like?”

  Elizabeth took a sip of beer. She would never learn to like beer, but sometimes, you had to drink it to be sociable. And it was good to be able to drink again, even if she was violating Omega’s rules.

  “It wasn’t like anything. It wasn’t like the movies, if that’s what you mean. Hollywood and all that.”

  Denise was drinking, too. The difference was that she seemed to like beer. A lot. “Is that where you lived? In Hollywood?” Denise asked.

  “Yeah. West Hollywood. Where is Bern?”

  “It’s east of San Diego County. Way the fuck up in the Cuyamaca Mountains.”

  “What was that like, growing up in Bern?”

  “You know what they say about Fresno? That it’s the armpit of California? Well, if Fresno is the armpit, Bern is the asshole.”

  Elizabeth laughed.

  “For real,” Denise continued. “Nothin’ ever happens in Bern. It’s just hunters in the fall and campers in the summer and a population of like fifteen thousand year-round. The only good thing about Bern is that I-8 runs right through it. That’s how I broke loose. I put my thumb out, and fuck me if the nicest gang of bikers didn’t stop to give me a ride.”

  “Seriously? Bikers?”

  “Angels, yeah. They were on a drug run from Tijuana to Oakland. There’s a biker bar on I-8 they stop at sometimes on their way back.”

  “You were wild, girl.”

  “I was,” Denise said and tilted her head. “I still am.”

  “So, Mickie’s not your first biker,” Elizabeth said, ignoring that head tilt.

  “Mickie’s not a biker. She rides a bike. There’s a difference.”

  “You’re right. There is,” Elizabeth said. “How’d you two meet?”

  Denise studied her for a moment. Elizabeth did the same. Denise was maybe nineteen, twenty, with that storm of bottle-blond curls and a dangerously angelic face, a good little bod inside a man’s white T-shirt—probably Mickie’s—that hung loose, nearly to the knees of her ripped jeans. Bare feet. Elizabeth could see the appeal.

  “In a bar. I was horny, and so was she.”

  “Hmm,” Elizabeth mumbled.

  Denise was still studying her. If Elizabeth hadn’t known better, and maybe she didn’t, she would have guessed that Denise was sizing her up for sex. After a moment, Denise reached over and set her bottle on the glass tabletop.

  “Why don’t you come over here? Closer to me,” she said.

  Why? Why? Because you’re sleeping with my foster sister, for one thing. Because you’re too young, for another. Elizabeth stood.

  “That’s the thing about beer. It goes right through you. Where’s the, ah—?”

  Denise’s pink lips formed an exaggerated pout. “Oh, boo. You’re dissing me. Maybe another time. It’s down the hall, on the left.”

  “Thanks.”

  In the bathroom, Elizabeth opened the wall cabinet fronted by a black-splotched mirror. Inside she saw a bottle of mouthwash, a stick of deodorant, rubbing alcohol, and an amber vial of meds. That was what she was looking for. Pulling it off the shelf, she read the label—Depakote, 125 mg.—before opening the top and tipping a capsule into her palm. It was white and blue, marked RDY 532. She pulled a piece of toilet paper from the roll, wrapped the capsule, and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. Then she recapped the bottle and returned it to the shelf, used the toilet—beer really did go right through her—washed her hands, and walked back to the living room.

  Mickie was there now, still in the blue shirt and black pants of her Brink’s uniform. A semiautomatic pistol hung in a leather holster from the thick belt on her waist. Denise had gotten up from the couch and had wrapped herself around Mickie’s tall, lanky frame in a sloppy kiss. They didn’t break when Elizabeth entered the room.

  “Don’t mind me,” Elizabeth said.

  They didn’t.

  Back in her bedroom at the Point after lights out at 11:00 p.m., Elizabeth tried to ignore the incessant soundtrack of barely audible propaganda that droned over The Wire around the clock. She needed to think about how to drug Mickie. If Mickie paid attention to her meds, she’d notice the change right away. But how many people actually looked at their pills before popping them? Elizabeth could dump the contents of the capsules down Mickie’s bathroom drain and substitute something innocuous, like corn starch or flour. Taking the dummy placebo, it wouldn’t be long before Mickie had a seizure; that was guaranteed, once she was off her meds. Hopefully, the episode wouldn’t happen while she was on the job. If it hit while she was off duty, it might frighten her enough to agree to the heist.

  Assuming that it went down like that—that an off-duty attack scared Mickie into agreeing to steal the money—then Elizabeth would need to get Mickie back on her meds before she realized that Elizabeth’s meddling had caused the seizure in the first place. If Elizabeth had dumped the real Depakote down the drain, that wouldn’t be possible. What would be better would be if she could replace Mickie’s pills with a substitute and then, after she’d had an episode, Elizabeth could return the original capsules to the bottle. That would work.

  She could do it on one of her beer-necessitated trips to Mickie’s bathroom. The only question now was, where would she get empty blue and white capsules that could pass for Depakote? She had to think.

  There was another problem. Billy was going off the rails. Clearly, he was losing his mind. San Francisco had seen this kind of religious delusion before, in Jim Jones and his People’s Temple in the 1970s, and Charles Manson and his hippies when he lived in the Haight during the 1967 Summer of Love. There was Synanon and Scientology, the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas. It always took a while for the media and authorities to catch up. By the time they did, it was often too late, as in Jim Jones’s massacre in Guyana of more than nine hundred adults and children, including four journalists and Congressman Leo Ryan, who had been sent to investigate the cult.

  Elizabeth wasn’t going to wait for outsiders to figure out what was going on inside Omega. And if the authorities did find out what was happening, what would that do to the transitioning inmates? What would become of them if Omega lost its license and closed? The Omegans who were there voluntarily could leave and fend for themselves. But what would happen to the convicts working their way toward release? Would they go back to prison?

  She was so close to finishing her sentence. Just forty-six more days. “God helps those who help themselves,” a soothing female voice whispered over The Wire. Only now Billy claimed to be god, and Billy wasn’t going to help Elizabeth. No, that was something she was going to have to do for herself.

  Chapter Seven

  Thomas Chambers didn’t mind being bald; in fact, he thought it gave him a certain bad-ass quality. Since his head shaving at Omega, he was getting more sideways glances on the street from both women and men than he had in the past, even in the distant past when he was a cocky young dude from southeast San Diego. Cocky and stupid, he thought now. He remembered one night with a date—a white girl, he was sleeping with girls back then—when he and his date, whatever her name was, and another brother and his date, also a white girl, drove to downtown San Diego, to the parking lot of the police headquarters on Broadway. Cruising past the row of black and white Crown Vics, Thomas had slowed his ride to point out the line of unmarked vehicles.

  “See those?” he had asked his date. She was one of those wide-eyed sun-blondes he found all over the San Diego State campus, where he was a sophomore. She was a freshman, undecided, going to school on Daddy’s dime. Not like Thomas.

  “That’s what the narcs drive.”

  He was showing off in front of everybody, even Gerry, the other brother in the backseat. Thomas thought he so was smart. He was smart, and he had a good future ahead of him until he got
busted. Couldn’t quite figure out how that happened until the day of his trial, when he sat in the courtroom and Gerry walked in to testify against him. Turned out, Gerry was a snitch, a former pusher who had been busted once himself and worked out a plea. Posing as an SDSU student, Gerry had been sent on campus to scope out dealers selling to white kids. Gotta protect the children of the white folk.

  Prison was hard for anybody, but for a closeted gay black man, well, prison was something Thomas didn’t ever want to do again. All that was behind him. The past was the past. This was now. And now presented troubles of its own. Like Billy. Billy had lost his mind. This Church of the Omega strategy was brilliant, on the one hand, and pathological, on the other. It was Billy desperately trying to conceal his crimes. Thomas knew that Billy was embezzling from Omega, had probably been stealing from the start. And not just taking a little off the top; no, Billy was doing some serious theft. Like tens of thousands of dollars serious.

  The board didn’t know yet. The accountant had been falsifying records for years, no doubt at Billy’s insistence. Billy had just fired him, probably to cover his tracks. Like nearly everyone associated with the Omega Foundation in an official capacity, the accountant was an ex-con. Four of the five board members were former Omega residents. The only board member with a completely clean record was Sally Whitman, a well-meaning seventy-something notary who rubber-stamped board decisions.

  And then there was the IRS. The IRS was saying Omega owed back taxes. Rock and hard place, yeah. What were the choices? If Thomas told the board about Billy’s embezzling, it would set in motion a chain of events as predictable as dominoes falling. Billy would do prison time. Omega would lose its government contracts. Private donors would be gone quicker than a politician’s handshake. Thomas would be unemployed. The media would have a field day. Oh, yeah, the media. The press built you up and then they tore you down.

  Honesty wasn’t looking all that good. Cover it up? That was an option if Billy could just keep his dumb cracker mouth shut. But knowing Billy, that wasn’t going to happen. Thomas didn’t know what to do. But he was going to need to do something, and soon.

  Chapter Eight

  Mr. Wing, owner of Wing’s Herbs, argued that he didn’t sell the capsule Elizabeth held in her hand. No, no, she tried to explain; it looks like this one, but it’s not this one. She was looking for a medicine that looked like this. He nodded vigorously beneath a gray newsboy cap.

  From a glass display case, he pulled two white boxes imprinted with black Chinese letters. The first, he said, was for xìngyù gàn. On the box, Elizabeth saw a line drawing of an amorous couple in an erotic embrace. Uh, no. Mickie was getting all the help she needed with her xìngyù gàn from Denise already, thank you very much.

  The second was for energy. For qi. It sounded like it was some kind of traditional ginseng formula. That was the one, Elizabeth told him. She opened the contents to make sure and looked inside. The capsules were blue and white, and except for the markings—they had none—they were perfect. And a little ginseng never hurt anybody.

  She would buy that one and replace the Depakote capsules in Mickie’s bathroom cabinet with the blue and white ginseng. Then, as soon as Mickie had a seizure—or two if she was still reluctant to agree to the heist—Elizabeth would return Mickie’s original capsules, with the actual Depakote in them, to the prescription bottle. That was the plan.

  “No,” Denise said.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “Let me work Mickie. She’ll do it for me.”

  How was it that Elizabeth had just confessed her plan to Denise, this girl who was much too young for her, not to mention the fact that she was sleeping with her foster sister? Elizabeth needed to get ahold of herself. It was her third day of the freedom that came from WAP, and how had she used it? To buy capsules that morning in Chinatown and to end up now—what time was it anyway? A little after 3:00 p.m.—to end up lying here now on damp sheets with Denise in Mickie’s bed. And how dumb was that? And how had that even happened?

  Elizabeth had to blame it on the joint they had shared, which had made it easier to say yes to the tequila shots, which had made it easier to say yes to the beer chasers, which had made it easier to say yes to Denise. Mickie wouldn’t arrive home from her shift until after 4:00 p.m., and they both knew that. And yet Elizabeth had agreed to have lunch with Denise at noon, and had she really believed that it would be lunch? Like, a sandwich and chips lunch?

  No, lunch was dope and Cuervo and Coors and feeling the hunger of going too long without a woman’s touch. It was the Indigo Girls on the boombox in Mickie’s living room and a trail of tossed-off clothes that led to the bedroom. Fuck. How dumb could she be? And worse, she had just confided to Denise the plan, her perfect plan.

  “No,” Denise said. “Mickie’s already pissed at the company. She can barely pay for her meds. They’re like three hundred dollars a month, and she can’t use her insurance because the insurance company would tell Brink’s and then she’d get fired. Did she tell you what they pay her?”

  “No. I assumed she made a good salary.”

  “No, she doesn’t. It’s bullshit. Long hours, low pay, no breaks. That’s why I think she’ll do it. She’s already scared shitless they’re gonna find out she’s spastic and fire her.”

  “She’s not spastic. She’s epileptic.”

  “Whatever. She said she got really bad after that robbery. Before that, I guess it was kinda under control. She killed a guy, did you know that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, that really did a number on her. Mickie isn’t a killer. Now my ex Dirty Dan, the Hells Angel, he’s a killer. Like a natural born killer. But not Mickie. No, you don’t need to make Mickie have a fit. Let me work her.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, I can do it. I can turn her. Especially if you’ve got a good plan.”

  “Oh, the plan is good. The plan is perfect.”

  Denise rolled over on her side and pushed a pillow under her head. On the smooth skin of her right bicep, a skull tattoo stared out of hollowed-out eyes. Denise blinked her long lashes at Elizabeth, flashing those big impish eyes the color of strong tea. A silver barbell sparkled in her right eyebrow. Her wild, bleached-blond hair fell forward like the forelock on a palomino.

  “So, tell me about this perfect plan,” Denise said.

  Elizabeth found herself wanting to trust Denise, even though she knew better. Maybe it was because it was a little like looking in a mirror. When she looked at Denise, she saw a younger version of herself.

  “Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Once Mickie agrees, it’s simple. The next time she’s got a pickup at the airport, she’ll drive there with her partner like it’s just another routine job. While she’s there, she’ll have her partner wait in the truck while Mickie goes inside to sign for the shipment. After she comes back and has unloaded the bags, she’ll tell her partner that airport security needs to see him. If he asks why, Mickie will say she doesn’t know. Her partner will leave the truck and go inside.

  “As soon as that happens, Mickie will drive away. She’ll go to the parking lot of the Airport Hilton, where I’ll be waiting in a getaway car. The Mexican border is about eight hours driving distance from the Bay Area if I take I-5. I’ll drop her off at the bridge in San Diego that crosses over into Tijuana. I’ll give her enough cash to see her through a few weeks. The Tijuana Airport isn’t far from there.

  “Customs doesn’t check foot traffic, so she can walk right over like she’s just another gringo tourist. At the TJ Airport, she’ll buy a one-way ticket to Belize. Belize doesn’t extradite criminals to the U.S.”

  “Doesn’t what?” Denise asked.

  “Extradite. Belize doesn’t send Americans back to the U.S. We don’t have a treaty with them.”

  “Cool.”

  “Belize is one of the best places in the world to hide money. Their bankers don’t ask questions, and they don’t report large sums of cash deposits the way Ameri
can banks do.”

  Denise was listening carefully. “How do you know all this? About Mexico and Belize and robberies. Is that what you learned in prison?”

  “How do you know I was in prison?”

  “Mickie told me.”

  “Yeah, I suppose she would. No, when I was at Diablo, I didn’t tell anybody about my plan. You’ve got to be careful who you trust. I’ve used the library here in San Francisco on my WAP days.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Yeah, I’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “What do you do then? After you leave Mickie at the bridge.”

  “Then I find a storage unit in San Diego, near the border. I’ll get a unit and unload the bags there. I don’t think the feds will be coming after me, but in case they do, I want the cash safely out of the Bay Area.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “When the heat is off, I’ll start taking trips to Belize from Tijuana, delivering the cash to Mickie for deposit into an offshore account. At the same time, I’ll open up several bank accounts in San Diego to launder the money. You can deposit up to ten thousand dollars without alerting the feds.”

  “The library again?” Denise asked.

  “Uh-huh. I looked it up in a law book. It was part of the Money Laundering Control Act from a couple of years ago. Before that, there wasn’t any problem. You could just dump as much cash as you wanted into a bank account, but the feds changed that because of drug money.

  “Anyway, eventually, all the money will be transferred, one way or another, into that offshore account. Then I’ll move to Belize. My first choice would be to go to the French Riviera, but that’s not as practical.”

  “Because of extra, uh, extra—?”

  “Dition. Extradition. Yeah, France extradites U.S. citizens, although there are ways around that. Or Spain. Spain is good, too. Barcelona is supposed to be beautiful. But Belize is better.”