Airbag Scars

by Jim Heskett

  Micah jumped at the bottom rung of the fire escape and missed with his first attempt. He glanced back at the collection of people, and a few more had turned their heads toward him. On his second attempt, he smacked his hand against the bottom rung, making it clang. He jumped again, barely managing to grasp it with one hand, then he wrenched the other up. He got a stark reminder that his injuries from the car crash weren’t healed yet as his stomach muscles seized and his shoulders rebelled.

  “Sorry, shoulders,” he said, grunting, “but I need you right now.”

  Placing his feet on the side of the building, he muscled through the pain to raise himself up to the next rung. Then he could pull himself high enough to get his feet under him, and had no trouble after that.

  He paused at the second-floor landing, a steel grate bolted to the outside of someone’s dirty and paint-flecked window. He squinted through the window into a kitchen. The lights were off, no sound and no reflected lights of a television anywhere to be seen.

  Breaking and entering was the kind of thing the old Micah would do, back when he was Michael. “Living a program of rigorous honesty,” he muttered as he raised the window. No lock, and the thing made plenty of noise as it rattled up the track until he could fit through. If people were home, they would have heard him.

  He landed in the tiny kitchen, brushing some paint flecks off his arms as his feet found linoleum underneath. The apartment still returned nothing but silence. Just the rumble of dance music from the strip club below coming up through the floor, like the ground disturbance in a house near an airport.

  Must have been awful to sleep in a place like this.

  Holding his breath, he padded into the living room. Rathole of an apartment, the kind of place you see in movies about slumlords, where residents in stained wife-beaters sweat under the oppression of no air conditioning and fluorescent lighting.

  He pressed his ear against the front door, letting the vibrations of the building normalize so he could hear anything distinct in the hallway. Felt in his back pocket for Frank’s handcuffs.

  He slipped out into the main hallway, immediately noticing the collection of stains on the gaudy brown carpet underfoot. Counted five other apartments on this floor, all of them shut. Three of them had no soliciting signs taped or thumbtacked to their doors.

  He started at the door closest to the near end, listening to each. The first two were empty, or at least quiet, and outside the third, he listened to a few seconds of a man and a woman arguing about him wasting too much money on lotto scratch cards from the convenience store. The fight quickly evolved from scratch cards to finances in general, and how they would pay the rent next month.

  Past the apartment doors was an opening that he assumed led to the staircase up, and Micah approached it foot over foot, not wanting to show his head until he could get a good listen. He paused at the edge with his center of gravity low, ready to bolt.

  “I gotta take a leak,” said a voice. Some east coast accent, like New York or Philly.

  “Hurry up,” said another voice, this one further away. “I got places to be, m’man.”

  Then the sound of footsteps went shuffling up the stairs and away. Someone had been camped out on the stairs, maybe guarding it against anyone from the second floor exploring up there. And that was a dead giveaway that the third floor was the place to be.

  Micah peered around the edge and his eyes traced a slim wooden staircase with a sharp bend after eight steps. Testing each step for creaks before he put his full weight down, he crept up to the bend. Inched his head around until he could see it was clear.

  The third floor was identical to the second, except the doors to all six of the apartments on this floor were wide open. Micah could hear music and voices waft from a doorway at the end. At least three or four of the men were speaking, occasionally broken by the sound of something clinking, like glass or porcelain.

  He stepped onto the floor as a blur of fabric appeared at the end. He could clearly see a shoe stepping out from a door, so he reacted. Dashed into the nearest available apartment.

  Inside, Micah found nothing but a rug in the middle of an empty room. “Did you guys order the pizza?” said a voice, and the last word seemed closer than the first.

  Micah’s eyes darted around the space, seeking a closet. When he found one, he rushed for it and hid around the corner to collect himself and his thoughts. The closet smelled of shoe polish, that same chemical-and-licorice smell he had always associated with a relative’s house back in Oklahoma. Wood panel walls and shag carpet. An aging tractor marooned in an un-mowed island of grass near the barn.

  Micah snapped back to reality as the voices down the hall resumed.

  The impulsiveness of this mission to locate Roland Templeton settled over him. He’d come in here with only handcuffs, thinking he was going to slam Roland to the ground and carry him off to justice to make it up to Frank. So, so stupid. Of course, Roland would have other people with him, protecting him, if he were some important guy to this strip club owner’s business.

  If he was even here, which wasn’t for sure yet.

  Micah knew he needed to get out. If these people were as thuggish as he suspected, they’d have guns.

  For some odd reason, Micah was struck by the sudden urge to fire one. To feel that sense of power and protection that came with squeezing the trigger. He thought of the gun range across the street from the strip club.

  But that would have to wait. First, he needed to leave here alive, as soon as he knew for sure Roland was here.

  Footsteps came down the hall, growing louder. Micah slipped the handcuffs from his back pocket. If anything, they were heavy, and he could maybe smack the explorer in the face and make a getaway.

  The footsteps stopped, right outside the door. The doorframe of this apartment creaked back and forth a few times. Micah stilled his breathing and closed his eyes.

  “Hey,” called a voice from down the hall. “After I play, it’s your turn. That’s how this works.”

  “Just a second, Roland,” said the man peering into this apartment.

  That at least confirmed it, so Micah felt a little less stupid for busting in here.

  “I’m losing my patience,” Roland said.

  “It’s just dominoes, man, jeez,” the nearby man said.

  Micah held his breath. Something was going to happen soon.

  A few endless seconds later, the doorframe creaked again and the footsteps faded back down the hall.

  Micah let all the air out of his lungs and returned the handcuffs to his back pocket. Now, to leave, or try to apprehend Roland? Leaving seemed the non-suicidal choice. Micah knew where the bail jumper was now, and the logical move was to involve Frank, because he would know what to do next.

  Still, he felt that tug. If Micah slapped the cuffs on Roland, he could drag him back to Frank and be the hero. Except for that pesky problem of the multiple thugs down the hall, in the same apartment as Roland. They might not be so willing to let Micah drag him off.

  Do the smart thing, the little Boba Fett in his pocket whispered to him. Walk away and let Frank handle it.

  He rubbed his hands over his face and drummed his fingertips against his temples. Why was this impulsive urge to snatch this bastard so hard to resist?

  Because, Boba Fett interrupted, you’re not quite two weeks sober and you’re still thinking like a crazy person. You can’t trust your intuition right now.

  He took the Boba Fett action figure out of his pocket and pinched it between his fingertips.

  “Okay, you scandalous bounty hunter Boba,” Micah whispered, “looks like you win this round.”

  He creeped back in the living room, then peered out into the hallway. The clinking and chatter had resumed. The best way out would be the same way he’d come in.

  He slipped back down the stairs, listening to the couple on the second floor arguing, still about money. He kept an active eye on each of those apartment doors, ready to sprint if one of
them should open.

  He walked to the end of the hall and put a hand on the doorknob, but it wouldn’t twist. Locked. The inhabitant of this apartment had come home in the last few minutes, or the door had locked on its own when Micah had shut it.

  A bolt of panic unsettled him until he realized he could simply walk down the main stairs and leave by the front door, because it would be unlocked from this side. Then it would appear that he was visiting a friend, instead of skulking around on the fire escape like some home-invasion artist.

  He descended the stairs with his head high and opened the front door. And that’s when he caught one of the bouncers out of his peripheral vision, standing to his left, smoking a cigarette.

  Chapter Twelve

  HAYDEN MEANDERED down a pastel-pink hall in her office building, past the open doors of other case managers’ cramped offices. A lingering limp made her feet shuffle along the carpet, but the sound was barely noticeable against the din of her coworkers counseling their clients. In an office with twelve case managers, only one was male, which Hayden always found odd.

  Her limp had become a shadow, barely giving her any pain anymore. She should be back to running within a couple weeks, with only two or three weekend races missed. Running next to the mountains of her adopted home gave her the most serene feeling of any activity, and she missed it too much to let it go for long. Lack of exercise had made her irritable.

  One of several irritations in recent memory.

  Cheating boyfriend William had sent a couple of texts, which were half-hearted apologies and Hayden hadn’t felt the need to reply. Same with Sherry’s emails, which Hayden had deleted, then later dug out of her trash folder and read the other day. Sherry’s apologies were sincere, but they hadn’t made Hayden want to reopen their communication. Fuck the both of them. They deserved each other, as far as she was concerned.

  She felt worse about losing Sherry than William, actually, because they’d been friends for going-on five years.

  William had come by that morning to get his things, which she’d left out in the hall. No way would she let him in to blubber excuses and half-truths.

  Behind Hayden trailed Glen, her newest client, which brought her total number to sixty-seven. She used to receive new clients at approximately the same rate she lost/graduated old ones. Things had changed. Budget cutbacks meant less staff, and, therefore, no more reasonable caseloads. She’d had blowups with her boss at milestones forty, fifty, and sixty. Another one would likely come at seventy. If the tally ever stretched to eighty, she would quit, because eighty would be crazy-town.

  Hayden ushered Glen into her little office to complete his intake procedure and formally add his case file to her count. She had finally taken down the framed pictures of William the day before, but the non-dusty blank spots on her bookshelf still reminded her where they used to sit. The absence of presence of a thing still being presence of the thing.

  Most of her coworkers’ offices featured sloppy crayon drawings by their kids. And roses on Valentine’s day. And chocolates at Easter. And candy canes at Christmas. Hayden preferred to decorate with only a few pictures of mountains, lakes, and other favorite running and hiking spots. Plus one print of downtown Denver’s tall buildings against the backdrop of the mountains to the west. Her favorite thing to stare at between sessions.

  Glen sat opposite her desk, and Hayden opened his chart. She peeked at him then scribbled Glen Mould, Age 42. Prior MH tx in Dallas for schizoaffective. Dx later changed to bipolar. Hayden noted his leg bouncing rapidly against the floor and his eyes darting around the room. He was wearing a trucker baseball cap, with mangy chunks of brown hair jutting from underneath. His face was tan and creased, his fingernails dirty and his knuckles stained brown from nicotine. Drooping eyelids nearly covered his pupils, and he jerked his head erratically every few seconds.

  Client presented with labile affect. Possibly under the influence of ETOH or other substance.

  They sat in silence for a few moments, and Glen stared at her. Hayden’s thoughts drifted to Donovan, her new next-door neighbor, and that night they’d met. For a few days afterward, the whole thing had seemed like a dream. Her doc had said she’d suffered no concussion, but she sure felt like something had rung her bell that night. And she kept thinking about how weird it was that Donovan had shown up at that exact moment and helped her get back into her apartment. But, given the way he’d been looking at her, the logical conclusion was that he wanted to help her get into her bed that night, too.

  Then the thought struck that maybe she should go out with him. Would help her get her mind off her asshole ex-boyfriend.

  She cleared her throat and commanded herself to focus. She clicked her pen a few times to break the silence. “I’m going to jump right in so we can get all of the required intake questions out of the way. I see here that you’re new to our state. What brought you to Denver last year?”

  He pursed his lips. “You first. What brings you to Denver?”

  “I moved here for this job, but we’re not talking about me. So how did you end up in Denver?”

  “To get away from those crazy fuckers. Got a friend, she was married to one of them. She moved here after they put her husband away, and she told me it was safe. They woulda killed me, so I left.”

  Hayden scrawled a note along the margin of the chart: possible paranoid schiz. “Do you feel depressed?”

  “No.”

  “Have trouble sleeping?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you ever hear voices or see things that aren’t there?”

  “Well, that's a matter of how you look at it, ain't it?”

  She was starting to get the feeling that Glen knew how to game the system. “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  “You mentioned something about how they were going to kill you. Do you often feel like people are out to get you?”

  Glen sneered. “You mean aside from El Lobo and his whole crew? Just my bitch wife and her whole fucking family. Did they tell you what that slut did?”

  Beside the note about paranoid schizophrenia, she wrote El Lobo. “No, they didn't tell me anything.”

  “Well, shit. We was in Midland, that's out in West Texas. I was working an oil rig there, and had been going on ten years. Kids in school, wife in a goddamned book club, hunting buddies at the Elks Lodge… the whole damn setup. You ever hear of the Sinaloa cartel?”

  Hayden sneaked a glance at Glen’s thumb, which was red and covered with the scars of burst blisters. Common sign of crack or meth abuse. “I can't say I’ve heard of that particular organization.”

  Each time Glen wiped his nose with the back of his hand, Hayden made a mark. “Organization? Hell, that ain’t no organization. Them spawn of Satan is at the root of this whole thing. The lot of them, all the way up to that fucker they called El Lobo, who ran North Texas and Oklahoma. Most evil sons of bitches you ever saw.”

  Hayden pondered the name Sinaloa cartel, and it did sound familiar. She remembered something about a series of trials a few years ago, mostly related to drug trafficking and a string of murders. High profile stuff, lead story on the news for a few weeks.

  “My wife, she took our two kids, and one day up and left. Come to find out, she’d been meeting one of Lobo’s bodyguards at the Motel 6 after I went to work most days. He fed her some bullshit about being a better provider and a better man. Like he could come up in my house and take away everything that was mine. I tried talking to her, but she done bought a whole truckload of his bullshit, so I told her to go on and get out of my house, and they could have each other. I don’t need none of that.”

  “She left but then you told her to get out? I don’t understand.”

  Glen bared his teeth. “Why are you trying to twist my words around?”

  “I’m not,” Hayden said. “I must have heard you wrong. So you were by yourself for a while in Texas.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “And
you came out here to get a fresh start?”

  He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at her. “I don’t like the way you’re asking me that. If I’d stayed anywhere close to El Lobo, I’d be deader than a motherfucker, like everyone else who ever crossed him.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  MICAH AND the Pink Door’s bouncer met each other’s eyes. Time slowed like a Wild West movie, and Micah pictured tumbleweeds blowing across the sidewalk between them.

  The bouncer had taken a deep drag on his cigarette, and tossed the butt onto the ground as he exhaled. “What the hell were you doing up there? How did you get in?”

  “I, uh,” Micah said, then he spun on his heels and backhanded the bouncer across the face. The last tendril of smoke left the guy’s mouth along with a healthy amount of spit as his head twisted to the side.

  But he recovered quickly and lunged at Micah, who sidestepped. As Micah wheeled around to face the bouncer, he caught sight of the collection of homeless people across the street. They were watching the fight with rapt anticipation. Maybe the most exciting thing they’d seen all day.

  The bouncer collected himself and reared back with his left, then jabbed Micah with his right. The tricky punch caught Micah completely off-guard and landed on his nose, immediately filling his eyes with tears. A burst of pain shot through Micah’s face like spreading cracks on a frozen lake surface.

  He flashed to a few years ago, stepping into the ring with his best friend to box. They were both green and inexperienced wearing those gloves, both learning how to take a punch and counter correctly.

  Through the teary blur, he only had a second to evade the next punch, which was a standard uppercut. He moved back far enough to avoid most of it, only catching a shade of the guy’s knuckle underneath his chin.

  “I’m going to beat you into the ground, you little shit,” the bouncer roared, and while he was busy grumbling, Micah took that time to reach back for the handcuffs in his pocket. But as he pulled them out, his sweaty hands were too slippery and they clattered to the ground.