Czechmate

by Seth Harwood

  53

  Baby

  They release Jack from the hospital later that week, just after giving him another tasteless meal—this one a “lunch.” Gannon’s back at her condo, having left him on his own to get there. Sure, she said she’d look after him, but Jack’s not sure yet if he can trust her or if he should go back to Sausalito to take care of himself, go back to the old solitude. After all, it’s his shoulder that’s wrong, right? He should still be able to walk, jog, take care of himself.

  The nurse says the same thing: that he can walk, that he might as well not spend another night. It’s fine with him, is the truth of it. Any place is better than another night in the hospital with the lights on, funny sounds, and people coughing up and down the hall. For the first time all week, he slides out of the bed and puts his feet onto the cold linoleum floor. They’ve put the little hospital bootie-socks on his feet, the kind with nonslip rubber treads on the bottom. The kind of thing you wear when it’s going to be nothing more than socks on your feet for a while.

  But now it’s time for him to get dressed, to take off the gown and put pants on, get his shirt on and get out. He sits on the edge of the bed, wondering whether it’s really just his shoulder that’s the problem. The nurse’s left him alone, everyone else is gone; he’s by himself. Just him, the bed, the window, and his clothes. Out the window it’s grey fog, the usual San Francisco situation. Maybe it’s raining, but from the bed Jack can’t tell. From where he’s sitting, he can’t see any other buildings, just the fog. Somewhere out there beyond it is his house in Sausalito, the one with the broken back door, Victoria’s shelves in the kitchen, his Action Movie Guild award for Best New Actor, the burned bed, a nice, big, warm shower, his clothes, and a Ducati—his Ducati—in the garage. Other than grabbing his clothes and the bike, he can do without the rest. Probably time to sell the old place and move on. But to where?

  In the other direction, out there across the Bay, is Ralph Anderino’s empty house in El Cerrito, probably gone to one of his relatives and sold by now. There’s Officer Shaw’s house in Walnut Creek, his family, his life, Mills Hopkins’s house, wherever that is. Jack doesn’t even want to know what the people there are feeling today, what they’ve been going through.

  His hands on his knees, Jack coughs and feels a scratching in his lungs, something not right. Part of him wants a cigarette, something he hasn’t had since he was checked in, and part of him knows he’s just going to feel bad for a while after that much H—that there’s nothing he can do. He shakes his head, coughs again. In his chest he feels weak, like some kind of cold is building, and his bones hurt. He really just wants to sleep, to stay in bed for a long time. But not this bed. Whether he can do this at Gannon’s condo is unlikely. Maybe a hotel room downtown would make more sense—a hotel room anywhere.

  His bed at home is a charred, burned mess.

  He’s got about two hundred dollars in his wallet, money in the bank from the deal with Castroneves, and no money coming in from Mills Hopkins or the police for all his troubles. Nothing unless someone else on the force knows about their arrangement, which is unlikely.

  Somewhere else out there is Freeman Jones, fucked, not walking because Jack shot his knees up. He shakes his head, coughs again, hocking up some phlegm that he considers spitting onto the clean tiles of the hospital floor, then thinks better of it, swallows the mess.

  Freeman wouldn’t leave town, blow out of San Francisco and forget about all of this. Freeman would stay here.

  Jack closes his eyes, sees Mills Hopkins in front of him: the cop strapped to the bed, his shoulder all but gone, the look in his eyes resigned and like he’s just ready to go, to leave this world. Jack also sees his own hand on the gun, hears the sound of the shot. It’s not a sound he’ll forget. He still sees the face of the man he shot outside of Tedeschi’s cafe on Bartol, the man between the two cars. He had no choice about it, he tells himself—either shoot him or he’d have shot Shaw—but that doesn’t make the sight of his face go away.

  He rubs his eyes with his good hand, the one attached to the arm he can still move, the arm with the burn marks wrapped in gauze. His veins still feel like someone cleaned them with Drano, scraped them with a screwdriver, then poured hot coffee through. Something like that, something he knows is just the fact of his little taste of the old drug, the dip he took into the good that wasn’t good, what Akakievich did to him with the H.

  Fucking Akakievich.

  Jack shakes his head, thinking about the girls Akakievich had killed to get his message across to his big swinging dick customers. Guys like the mayor who probably won’t feel a damn bit of pinch for this, or like Franklin Clarence who took off but will get caught eventually, who fucked himself out of a job and a pension and whatever life he had that would lead him to a young Russian sex slave.

  Fuck all of them and their whole fucking mess.

  Jack puts his good hand on his knee and pushes himself up to stand. His back hurts. He coughs and then sighs. On the chair in front of him are his pants. The gown’s already off his left shoulder, folded inside the sling, and he pulls the rest of it off him, lets it drop off his right arm and to the floor. Naked, he looks down at his body, sees bruises, a cut on his left thigh, and the fact that he’s getting older. He’s even developed a bit of a paunch, an extra fold of skin around his middle. Probably the drinking has given him that.

  He reaches for his jeans and grabs them, sits back onto the bed and steps into them just like he’s done every other day of his life. His sneakers are under the chair and he puts them on over the hospital socks. Then he rings for the nurse to come help him get into his shirt.

  Downstairs and outside of the hospital, in the cold of the fog, he pulls his jacket around himself and steps into the cold wind. A strong breeze hits him and rushes up against his chest, and he wishes he could zip his jacket, but he can’t. It won’t fit, is just draped over his left arm and the sling. He holds it closed with his right hand.

  Shaw said that he left the Fastback in a garage, gave Jack directions on where to find it. He looks up the block, doesn’t see a garage, but starts to head up Hyde in the direction Shaw told him, up a steep hill toward Geary.

  He walks slow, coughing every ten feet or less. Maybe he won’t go to Jane Gannon’s, he decides. She has enough to deal with already. He doesn’t know where he’ll go beyond the car yet, knows only he’ll soon be back inside the Fastback that he hasn’t seen in too long. And when he’s there, then he’ll decide what to do next.

  He keeps on up the hill. It will take him a while to find the Mustang, though once he does he’ll know immediately it’s his, regardless of the new color. He’ll recognize it right away, then he’ll be part-way home, on his way back to a better version of himself, one ready to get through the days and weeks. Some part of him will be happy, because red or black, to his eyes, the 1966 Mustang Fastback k-code will have never, ever looked better.

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  ALSO BY SETH HARWOOD

  Have you read them all?

  JACK PALMS CRIME

  Jack
Wakes Up

  Washed-up movie star Jack Palms left Hollywood, kicked his drug habit, and played it as straight as anyone could ask for three years. Now the residual checks are drying up and the monastic lifestyle's starting to wear thin. When Jack tries to cash in on his former celebrity by showing some out-of-town high rollers around San Francisco's club scene, he finds himself knee-deep in a Bay Area drug war.

  And the thing that scares Jack the most? He's starting to enjoy himself.

  It'll take the performance of a lifetime to get him through it alive.

  Buy it: US UK

  This Is Life

  Jack finds himself in the middle of a whodunit in the seedy red-light district of San Francisco. Young girls, shipped as merchandise from Balkan countries and sold to city heavyweights, are turning up dead and no one knows why. Closer to home, a crooked cop steps out of Jack’s past and into his backyard, taking potshots from the bushes at midnight.

  Buy it: US UK

  Or, if you’re curious about JUNIUS PONDS and want to read his origin story, you’ll enjoy:

  Young Junius

  In 1987, Junius Posey sets out on the cold Cambridge (MA) streets to find his brother’s killer in a cluster of low-income housing towers—prime drug-dealing territory. After committing a murder to protect himself and his friend, he finds himself without protection from retribution. Shocked by the violence he’s created and determined to see its consequences through to their end, he returns to the towers to complete his original mission.

  Buy it: US UK

  JESS HARDING, FBI

  In Broad Daylight

  During the endless days of an Alaskan summer, a fiend slashes his way through the rural community, where everyone knows your name and always distrusts the outsider. FBI agent Jess Harding treks back to Anchorage to hunt down this sadistic killer who's reemerged from a five-year hiatus—a killer who has already slipped from her grasp once before.

  As Jess attempts to immerse herself in the area's culture, she finds a strange rural village inhabited by Russian Old Believers hell-bent on protecting their way of life. Soon Jess needs a safehaven from the glare of daylight—a blood-stained message left at the scene of a murder says she’s no longer the hunter, but the hunted.

  Buy it: US UK

  CLARA DONNER, SFPD HOMICIDE

  Everyone Pays

  Detective Clara Donner worked vice in San Francisco for years alongside the runaways and vulnerable women who walk the night. She thinks she’s seen the worst people can do—until she’s assigned to investigate a particularly ruthless serial killer.

  As the body count rises and a pattern emerges—each victim is known for his brutal abuse of women—Donner follows the killer’s trail across the city. In spite of a nagging sense that the world may be better off without these men, that maybe this killer is doing good, she pursues every lead… until she finds a damaged girl with links to both the killer and his prey. Is this new witness the key to unraveling these murders or another victim left in the killer’s wake?

  Buy it: US UK

  About the Author

  Photograph by Eric Fernandez

  Seth Harwood is the author of the bestsellers Everyone Pays, In Broad Daylight, and Jack Wakes Up, as well as Young Junius and This Is Life. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing for Harvard and Stanford. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and daughter. Find more online at sethharwood.com and patreon.com/sethharwood

  Copyright © 2018 CRIMEWAV BOOKS

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  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 9781729465660

  ISBN-13: