by Seth Harwood
“Sponge bath,” Jack says. “Any chance you got some ladies in this place to help me out?”
Niki shakes his head. He laughs through his nose and turns to leave.
In the bathroom mirror, Jack looks himself over to assess the damage: his face is pale, ashen, and the night’s pills and alcohol have left dark rings under his eyes. He remembers too many of his dreams, thoughts from the night about being naked in the streets of San Francisco, walking through downtown with his sling on and not a thing else, walking past Freeman, his hand covered in blood, his face frozen in pain, the cop from the Prescott Court basement, Matsumoto, with the hooks in his shoulders, and the man Jack shot outside Tedeschi’s cafe.
He drops a washcloth into the sink and starts running hot water. His hair’s matted to his head and he needs another shave. The sling comes off easily, but removing his shirt is a bit harder. Carefully, Jack gets both arms out and looks at his chest. There’s a dark purple bruise around the outside edges of the bandage. Other than that, it’s all white tape and gauze. In one part of the gauze, he sees a red spot of dried blood the size of a quarter. He’ll have pain, but not time to deal with it today. The bottle of Vicodin stands at the ready next to his bed on the table. But Jack can’t afford to slow down that much.
He wrings out the cloth, squeezing out the hot water, and smooths it out over his face.
He’s going to have to choose one or the other: pain or a little slowing down. And if he’s going out, if there’s a chance people out there might have guns, he can’t afford to slow down.
Cigarettes. Cigarettes might be the best he can get.
10. The Lock and the Load
When Jack gets out of the bathroom, Shaw’s already in the living room with the others, eating bread with jelly, sitting on the couch and watching TV. He stands when he sees Jack, shakes his head.
“My motherfucker,” Shaw says, coming toward Jack. Shaw wears a tight black sweater, its form true to his muscled shoulders and arms, and black cargo pants. He’s dressed not to fuck around. Around his shoulders he wears a leather harness that holds his gun. The skull cap’s gone and his head looks clean, like he shaved it that morning. They exchange a three-phased handshake, and Shaw puts Jack’s keys into his hand.
“Fuck is this?” Jack looks at the keys like they’re something he lost and didn’t know he’d had.
“Brought the Fastback into the city for you. Probably not a good idea, but we can’t let that baby sit out in Walnut Creek. Someone’s bound to impound it.”
“Yeah,” Jack says. “I feel better already.”
“It’s in the garage downstairs.”
“Thanks, baby.” Jack goes to give Shaw a one-armed hug, but Shaw holds back, weary of bumping Jack’s shoulder, the sling, or the arm.
“How do you feel?” Shaw says, hitting Jack on the good shoulder.
“She shot me. What the fuck can I do?”
Shaw shrugs. “Nothing to do about it now.”
“Except try and fuck her.”
They both laugh. Shaw tells Jack to keep working on it. Jack asks Shaw how it feels to be a fugitive.
“I’m guessing for you it’s same old. For me it feels fucked up, like it’s something I got to fix in a hurry. I got a family, a name to protect.”
Jack smirks. “I haven’t been in the tabloids in three years.”
Shaw cups his hand to his ear. “Is that The Star I hear printing out a special edition?”
Jack laughs, starts toward the breakfast spread and asks Shaw if he has a plan. Shaw points in Vlade’s direction. “Your friend has one. Says he knows where we can find Akakievich.”
Vlade, Al, and Niki all come over, the five men standing in a small circle in the living room of the suite.
“I need a coffee,” Jack says. Vlade points toward a room service tray with a plastic coffee pitcher on it, but Niki holds Jack’s arm before he can move.
“Let us decide some things first.”
“After.” Jack gets the coffee—milk, one sugar—and stirs his cup, conscious of the others looking at him, waiting. “OK,” he says. He tastes the coffee, it’s not bad, but not hot enough. “I can hear you.” Vlade stays quiet until Jack rejoins the group.
The four of them stand around him: Shaw looks pissed, his forehead creased like he’s not sure he can trust Vlade; maybe he can’t; Vlade’s face is calm, like he’s done this kind of thing before, as if he’s getting ready to lead them out on a mission; Niki’s stone-faced as always; and Al looks like he couldn’t be happier, like he’ll do whatever Vlade asks of him if he gets to fire a gun and see action. Jack gulps his coffee.
Vlade says, “Alexi is taking on more than he can handle. This is bluff. His operation?” He waves his hand in front of him. “A house of cards. The mayor? Your chief? These men will not help him. And he will not turn them in. Without them, he has nothing.”
Shaw starts to talk over Vlade. “He’s blackmailing them. Dude has enough shit on them to bury these cocks. They won’t want him going down because they don’t know what he takes down with him. What if he’s got a file set up to go to the press if he’s out of commission?”
“Then we take care of that,” Vlade says. “But this heat?” He points at Jack and Shaw, shakes his head. “What you two did will not stay dirty for long.”
“Or fuck these guys,” Jack adds. “They get some shit on them. Not like they can stay clean forever when they’re buying underage girls.”
Shaw angles his chin toward Jack, conceding the point. “Still doesn’t help us.”
“We get them the killer, come out with how Akakievich ran this whole thing, supplied these civic leaders with young trim—” He gestures toward Vlade with his mug. “—excuse me to the young women of your country—and in the process we clear ourselves.”
Shaw shakes his head before Jack can even finish. “No. They’d never believe this. And who do we bring all of this to? The press? My chief in Walnut Creek?” His head-shaking gets quicker and more localized to his face. “No fucking way.”
Vlade slams a fist down into the palm of his other hand. “Listen! We stop Alexi. That is first we do. Stop him and free the girls. Then we make him pay. We do this, the rest—” He waves his hand. “—once Alexi does not pressure these people, our problems will work out.”
Niki and Al nod, regard Vlade as if he’s just spoken the gospel truth.
“It is us he wants,” Vlade says. “Old debts. This is about that. We give him this, we settle it.”
Shaw’s brow goes all to wrinkles over Vlade’s last statement, and Jack remembers he doesn’t know anything about the old KGB rift between the two of them. He looks at Shaw, shrugs; the cop will find out about it sooner or later.
“I’m in,” Jack says.
Shaw asks where they can find Akakievich, to which Vlade nods. “He will find us. If we go to—”
“We do this like it is high noon,” Al says. “Shoot-out. The lock and the load, motherfuckers.”
Shaw stares at Al with his mouth half-open for a moment. Then he shakes his head and closes it. “Where’d you get this guy?” he asks.
Vlade puts his hand over Al’s. “He does not get a gun. Al, you do not get gun today.”
Al frowns on one side of his mouth. Out of the other side, he says, “No the lock and the load?”
“How about the drive and the park, big guy?” Jack offers.
Vlade gives Al a quick glance, but Al looks away.
“We go to Alexi’s club. We wait for him there. Once he knows that we are in San Francisco, he will come to find us.”
“You’re talking about the Top Notch? Jack, what the fuck is he talking about?” Shaw shakes his head. “Cops on the Top Notch like Prescott Court was their station.”
“No,” Vlade says. “He does not have other club? Mirage? Something else?”
“Mirage’s been closed down. Where you been, man?”
Vlade tips his head toward Shaw. There’s a few breaths of silence among the five of the
m, an awkward tension as they wonder between them if they have any ideas.
“Gannon said there was another place,” Jack says. “Smaller action. Just your usual girls.”
“This is what we find,” Vlade says. “And this is where we wait.”
11. Revived
Jack waits on the couch, sitting with Shaw and Niki while he finishes his coffee and eats a bagel. Vlade and Al are getting dressed.
“You’ll want to see what Al comes out wearing,” Jack says, raising his eyebrows. He gestures with his bagel toward the room Al’s in.
Shaw takes his feet off the coffee table, sits forward. He rubs his hands over the knees of his jeans and looks toward Al’s room, then back to Jack. “Oh yeah?”
“Guy’s a piece of work.”
Niki shakes his head. He’s wearing dark jeans and a tight, short-sleeve sweater. His thick leather jacket lies next to him on the couch. “He is original.”
Shaw draws his gun, the Beretta M9, from its shoulder holster. He checks the slide and the firing mechanism, then the clip. “Old habit,” he says. “But nothing else relaxes me anymore.”
Niki nods, takes out his own weapon and shows it to Shaw. “Cleaned this morning.”
“Makarov,” Shaw says. He takes the gun and sights down its barrel, pulls back the slide and smells the chamber. Then he hands it back to Niki. “That’s a nice weapon.”
They both look at Jack. “What you carrying?” Shaw asks.
Jack holds up his good hand and shows the palm of the hand sticking out of his sling. “No weapons, Officer. I’m just a clean-living civilian.”
“You really want to have to talk Alexi out of what he’ll try and do to you?”
Jack shakes his head. “Other night I had the Beretta. The .38.” He shrugs. “But now I don’t.”
“No,” Shaw says. “That didn’t come to the hospital with you. Probably ended up in Gannon’s garage somewhere.”
“What about the BMW?”
“Impounded. FBI took it and the Barrett as evidence. They weren’t fucking around, towed what was left of the M6 on out of there, shit carved up with holes like cheese. Matter of fact, that’s probably where your gun went.”
“So what do you do now?” Niki asks. “For protection.”
“I’ve never carried a gun before yesterday, and I’m not eager to start.” Jack thinks back to what happened with Freeman, how having a gun forced him to use it. He’s still not over what happened. As the picture of Freeman holding his bloody hand and wincing in pain flashes across Jack’s mind, he cringes again, knows he doesn’t want to rack up even more people he’s shot. On the other hand, Freeman might’ve killed him if he didn’t have the gun.
He sees the Russian he shot outside of the cafe again, the look on the girl’s face when Shaw shot the guy with the AK in the house on Prescott, the guy’s dead face staring up at the ceiling.
“Not like it did you any good when you had it before,” Shaw says. He looks at Niki. “This guy froze up.”
Jack looks at them both and doesn’t say anything. He knows that in Shaw’s military-trained, hard-ass world, he’s not a shooter, not a guy who’ll take charge with a weapon and maybe save the day or take out all the bad guys. And, in fact, he’s all right with that. If he can keep guys like Shaw, Niki, and Vlade around, he won’t have to be the one who does the shooting, fills people up with slugs. And that’s better for him—for his conscience, his karma, and, in the long run, for his mental state on the whole.
“He’s right. I probably wouldn’t use it. You know me—” Jack makes a too-serious face, one he used more than a few times to look tough in Shake ’Em Down, and jokes, “I’m the guy from the movies, remember? Just an actor.”
Niki nods, gravely.
Shaw winks at Jack. “Let’s not go too far with that. I’ll admit you held your own a few times the other evening. You didn’t shy away from Mr. Agent Gannon.”
Jack thinks back to the way it felt knowing he’d either have to jump Tom or he’d be looking down the barrel of a gun, the moment of choice between acting and losing control of the situation. Given those options, it wasn’t a hard decision.
“I’m just saying—” Shaw gestures toward Jack’s sling. “You’re not going to able to fight with that thing. How you going to protect your ass?”
Niki tilts his head at Jack. “He has point, Jack.”
Jack nods. “I’ll do what I need to. We’ll see when it comes.”
“You let me know when you need this,” Shaw says, raising his pant leg to reveal an ankle holster with a smaller weapon, a silver .38 revolver like the one Jack got off the Russian in the North Beach alley.
“Good to know,” he says.
Vlade comes in from the next room and heads toward the suite’s door. Niki’s already on his feet, helping Jack up before he can rise.
“You sure you do not want wait here?” Niki asks.
“No. I’m coming. You guys are my protection, remember?”
Shaw laughs. “You think it’ll be safer out there?” Then he looks past Jack and squints like he’s not sure what he’s seeing. Jack turns to look, sees Al wearing a tight beige turtleneck, tucked in, with brown polyester pants on beneath it. The sweater’s tighter than Al’s body calls for; in comparison to Shaw and Niki, Al’s a little out of shape: his gut sticks out over his pants. Through the sweater, Jack can see Al’s white wifebeater. He’s wearing new, glowing-white Nikes.
Jack can’t help but say it: “Are you kidding?”
“That’s a look,” Shaw says. He gets up fast. “How you doing, my man?” He offers his hand out to Al, and Al slaps it, offers his hand back to Shaw. Shaw drops his hand onto it without enthusiasm.
“I am good to go,” Al says. He walks past them and toward the door where Vlade waits.
Shaw looks at Jack, forehead furrowed. Jack raises his good shoulder in a half-shrug. “Stealth mode,” he says. “Sneakers for sneaking.”
“Right.” Shaw puts his Beretta back into its shoulder holster. “That’s us especially. No one sees you and me.”
“You mean I can’t use this for my career? Come on, man, I haven’t had publicity like this in years. It’s the break I need to get my life back on track. Just think of how many people saw my picture on TV this morning.”
Vlade opens the door and looks out into the hall.
Shaw shakes his head. “You’re fucked, Palms.”
“That’s Hollywood, my man. I’m back in the saddle here. Revived from the dead.”
Vlade waves to the rest of them that the hallway’s clear, and they follow him out.
12. Smoke
Jack and Shaw sit in the back seat of the Czechs’ rented Escalade, tinted windows shielding them from view. Al sits on the hump, squeezed between them. The Escalade has a big back seat, but even with its size, the three of them can’t sit without rubbing shoulders. Jack’s on the driver’s side, behind Niki, his bad shoulder to the glass.
Outside of the garage and back above ground, the day is a foggy San Francisco morning, the kind of day that might be a good one if the fog finally burns off and allows the sun to show its rays. Sometimes you can just tell in the morning, like the fog has a way of showing its lack of permanence, tipping you off that the sun will come, but not today. Today’s one of the days where the fog could stick around all afternoon, keep the streets cold and full of wind. Jack wishes he had more on than a T-shirt under a button-down, but there’s no changing that now.
They ride with all the windows closed, and Jack thinks about asking Niki to open a window so he can smoke, but he pushes the thought away. His throat still hurts from last night, a feeling he hopes some orange juice can wash away, if he can manage to get some. He still feels somewhat out of it from the Vicodin, the alcohol, and the deep sleep. He fingers the bottle of pills in his pocket, the bottle he thought about leaving behind but didn’t; with the pain in the shoulder seeping back as he drank his coffee, he brought it along. Now the pain speaks its own language, a familiar fo
reign tongue that is hard to ignore. He considers his options: handle the pain and the distraction that comes with it, or take the Vicodin and handle the drowsiness.
“You guys mind if I smoke?”
“Not if you open that window,” Shaw answers.
Vlade looks back at Jack from the passenger’s seat. “It is not good to open the windows, Jack.”
“Just a little. Not enough for anyone to see inside.”
“You serious? You’re willing to take a chance at someone seeing us for a fucking cigarette?”
“It’s better than stopping to smoke on the street.”
Shaw laughs, but like he’s heard something ridiculous, not like he’s heard a joke.
Jack wraps his hand around the bottle of pills. It’d be easy enough to open it with one hand, shake out a pill or two, pop them into his mouth. It would ease the pain. He fingers the childproof cap, presses it down, then thinks about his morning runs, the lack of control he had in his life with Victoria, the way his jobs and the fame, even the money, all slipped away: it was like everything got too good for a while and he took so much that he had to pay back for it later. Then, before he knew what was happening, things started to go, to up and disappear on him. Collection time. Maybe he’s still paying everything back. Maybe things with the Czechs and the motorcycles were too good. Maybe he shouldn’t have started drinking again, let himself have that indulgence. He knows it was a fuck up, that he’s been exposed as one who cannot accept excess, even tamper with drugs or alcohol. He’s an addict.
Life is work, he reminds himself. He grinds his teeth, clenching his molars together, thinks about the character in a book he read once who ground aspirin between his teeth habitually, got addicted to the taste of them. He’s heard this happened to a lot of people, back in the day.
He lets go of the bottle and takes his hand out of his pocket. Vicodin, any drugs: they’re addiction.