Black Leather Required

by David J. Schow

  There followed that single beat of dead silence that comes between the time you smash your thumb with a hammer and the time you howl. Then, the whole building responded. The salsa music chugging forth from the floor below was cranked up a good twenty decibels. Babies screamed. The scaly anti-Semite laid into the topic of young, disrespectful, snot-nosed, loudmouthed shitheels. The musclebound black badass next door yelled for me to come on over and make him.

  Then my body surprised me by yanking my head back into the bathroom, posthaste. The stench in the shaft was jesus-christ-putrid tonight; it had been like sticking my face into the chimney of a crematorium. Something had died down there, for sure. Something big, and from the smell, rotting merrily away. I know how dead stuff stinks. I found a dead mouse trapped in the works underneath my fridge once in Miami. Here, the upward-drafting febrile odor was similar, but fifty degrees riper. My face closed up all ports in a tight pucker. Even my shocked pores snapped shut. I started whacking the window down to choke off the smell, and it skewed in its track and jammed. This was just frustrating enough to kick my brain over into panic-button cocaine overdrive, and I bashed that fucker solid with my fist, pretending it was the anthropoid skull of the lip-moving asshole next door. Bash, bash, paint slivers jumped away and bash! the window banged shut, tight as an airlock, with a bloody handprint on top of it.

  I was sweating and panting now. The individual pepperonis off my dinner pizza were fighting to grease their way up for an encore. But the moaning had stopped. I could deal with my headache, with that slug Bauhaus, with all the other shit minutiae of my life.

  Rats, I thought. Sure, rats. Maybe they crawled into the sump to eat, and drowned down there.

  But what about the ghost?

  The phone was still upside-down in a tangle of blankets on the bed. It had a rotary dial; Bauhaus had been too cheap to spring for a touch-tone. With a pointed sigh instead of formalities, I said, "When and where?" I was disgusted now; I ached. Let Emilio pummel the snot out of me. It'd be worth it just to flip Chicago the goodbye birdie. As Bauhaus began to encode his ETA and coordinates, I overrode him. "Wait a sec–you run any girls, Bauhaus?"

  He groaned a prissy bitch of a groan. "Jeeezus, Cruz! Don't talk shit like that on the phone, man, I might be bugged!"

  Or a cat. Maybe a cat fell in and the rats bit him to death. A big cat. . .

  I knew full well no one was listening to our conversation except the good and bad demons of Bauhaus' impoverished conscience. "Don't dick away my time," I snapped, itchy now. "You're throwing me a bonus tonight, and don't feed me any smoke, because you can afford a party girl. And she'd better not have any diseases whose names are, like, acronyms, you hear what I'm saying? Otherwise, you can pound your stash up your loading dock with a mallet." I hung up.

  My ears strained. No ghost. There was nothing now but the drumming of my headache.

  Awhile later, Bauhaus made my walking weight heavier by half a kilo of the white stuff–a guaranteed felony bust for dealing, should anyone wearing a badge pat me down. Before I could work up a good invective about his mother, he tossed me the keys to an '83 Camaro with snow tires and 35,000 miles on the odometer. No hard feelings, huh kid? My rented date waited for me in the suicide seat, next to a jug of Chivas that Bauhaus had popped for, gratis. Rosie must have told him. Thank god for Rosie.

  Downtown Chicago wasn't worth the drive between blizzards. Cruising Oakdale would be like checking out the bondage action at a Bible study meet. I didn't particularly want to get drunk. Tomorrow was a school day for me.

  The girl bit me, giggled, and gave her name as Drea. She had a purple streakjob, Isis eye paint, a Madonna album's worth of tramped out rock 'n' roll lace, and fantastic legs. I made her keep her spikes on while we did it. After she had freebased herself up into the ionosphere, she wrapped those legs around yours truly and made vigorous use of an extremely motile pelvis. She was better than any of Emilio's aerobicized bimbos, and she talked about oddball stuff like auras, and tarot cards, and Buddhist chanting in-between times. While she went to the john, I checked out her bag. Mixed amid a nightmarish jumble of cosmetics, I found a pinky vial barely dusted with lees of coke, a plastic case of good old Ortho Novum, and an Illinois state ID that assured me I had not made the same error in judgment as my predecessor, Nugget Astaire. Her name was really Loretta, and she had turned 22 three weeks ago. The ID mugshot made her look green, like one of the living dead. I refilled her amber cocaine vial from my fresh stock and tucked it back into her bag, to be discovered later as a belated birthday gift. Like I said, I try not to be a bad guy.

  Later, as she was dozing on top of me with what was left of my last erection easing out of her, slowly, slowly, I said, "Did you hear that?"

  "Mm." She slitted her eyes open. "Hear what?"

  "That sound. Kind of a moan." It teased the limits of my perception, and I tried to approximate it for her.

  "I don't hear anything except that fucking samba music." She rolled over and lost me. "Oops–sorry."

  My slight fix on the ghost noise was erased by the lunatic calliope rhythm and abrasive Latino singing penetrating the floorboards. Drea pushed her ass into my lap, spoon-style, and gave me a place to warm my hands. Outside, past the thick condensation fogging my windows, snowflakes as big as my palm began to meander down from the sky to bury the city.

  My first taste of bonafide snow was pretty comical. After four straight weeks of what the imbeciles on the news here called "medium to light flurries," my neighborhood had become a Dantean vision of the Arctic Circle. Lumbering automobiles skidded ass-sideways into each other, providing a lot of employment for Chicago's fender, body and paint people. Dead black slush, like concentrated air pollution mix, obliterated the curbing while the sidewalks simply vanished beneath a four-foot snow-pack that settled into solid ice. Pedestrians pretended it was nothing abnormal. Cursing, they tea-kettled about and broke their bones. No big deal. Everybody slouched along, muffled into anonymity, necks bowed by the forces of nature, defeated and pissed off, avoiding eye contact and snarling at all corners–the Chicagoan in full wintertime flower. It was positively medieval.

  I got the use of Drea three times a week, once for each cash drop. Bauhaus seemed to think this little perk compensated for sticking me with far more dope than I was comfortable holding. There was more snow inside my rathole than out.

  Gradually, I became convinced that the moaning noise was actually coming from the airshaft, as though the shaft itself was haunted. When I finally got convinced enough to batter open the bathroom window again, to check, it stopped for good.

  For reasons I do not totally understand, I didn't flash on this fact until I was making it with Drea. I actually stopped in mid-stroke to say, "It's gone." The silence in the building flooded full-blast into my skull.

  She sucked in a breathy gasp. "What?" Her eyes went wide and started scanning around for the police.

  "Our ghost. He's gone. Guess he decided to vacate."

  Her expression fired up, to hover midway between short-fused anger and utter disbelief. "Jesus christ, Cruz!" She rearranged herself and began a direct assault–the fed-up leading the retarded. "Look–the only thing I want going bump in the night is you."

  I pondered the fate of my ghost until Drea started squirming around. Then I forgot it, and did some moaning of my own.

  As was her habit by now, Drea recharged her coke vial from the open kilo bag in the second drawer of my dresser. It was part of her preparing-to-leave ritual. But this time she hesitated at the door, and turned back to kiss me. I think I gaped.

  "I kinda like you, Cruz," she said in nearly complete innocence. "You're nothing like some of those pigs Bauhaus has made me fuck. I like listening to you talk; you never talk about normal shit. You talk about ghosts in the building and how all the geezers tramping around in the snow look like their bulldogs. It's. . .I dunno. Kinda poetical."

  This really whacked me. It sounded too much like a roundabout farewell. It's been fun
, hon, but. . . I grabbed her by the forearms. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

  Without even a pause for dramatic effect, she said, "Bauhaus is setting you up." Her matter-of-factness scared up gooseflesh all over my back. "I heard him on the phone. He said, 'Tell him I'm gonna take care of Cruz, tonight."

  "Who was he talking to?"

  She shrugged. "Somebody in Miami."

  I thought of the Lady and the Tiger. If he'd been talking to Rosie, then his remark was innocuous enough, even benevolent. But if that wimp prick had said the same thing to Emilio. . .

  "Listen, Drea, I need you to find out for me–"

  She shied instantly, eyes glazing with fear. "Too late. I gotta go now, Cruz. I'm sorry." And she pulled away.

  "Why? What's gonna go down?"

  "I dunno–I just gotta go, now, that's all!" She was definitely scared. Now.

  Now. I checked the window, scoping out the street below. My Camaro was parked half-under a snowbank thoughtfully provided by some plow pilot with piss-poor aim.

  "Sorry, Cruz," I heard her repeat, feebly, before the door closed. Whatever was coming up, she'd pushed herself over the borderline by warning me, and needed to insure her own safety in the approaching shitstorm. I understood that. She didn't want to inhale none. I stayed posted at the window until I saw her crunch hurriedly out into the 2 a.m. snowfall.

  Thirty seconds after she rounded the corner, a pair of Metro cop cars crept from opposite ends of the street like stalking wolves, and rendezvoused beside the Camaro. A dark, burly police shape wiped off my license plate and then looked up toward Freddy's building. His line of sight was targeted two windows north of my position.

  Thirty-two thousand dollars worth of refined cocaine, more or less, was sitting in a drawer five feet away from me. Screw "street value"; that bullshit is just to make drug busts sound more impressive on the evening news. It all rushed together to make a picture in my head, and my heart fell down and went boom. As I watched three uniformed cops head for the downstairs door, I knew the one place I did not want to be was on television.

  If I tried to flush the whole kilo, my ass might really be out to the wind. What about the plastic bag? Could a whole kilo clog the pipes? I couldn't take the chance, and didn't trust Freddy's Cro-Magnon plumbing. If could successfully ditch the stash, I could make my normal morning rounds and use the cash to buy my way out of town. I could also make a pit-stop at a pawnshop, and buy a piece of large enough caliber to blow Bauhaus' fucking brains all over his cherry-red pussywagon before I went on an extended leave.

  There was no time for a passionate review of my options. They were already clumping up the stairs. I scooped the heavy baggie out of the drawer and dumped it into a plastic trashcan liner. I yanked the adhesive strip, sealed it and dumped it inside another, then sealed the whole package into a third. If water gets on coke, you might as well try to peddle cooking fat. I swabbed out Drea's sloppings in the drawer with a handful of moist paper towels. Those I flushed down the toilet along with two fingers of Panama Red from my smokebox. I took the plastic package (which was now watertight, I hoped) and dropped it (gently, I hoped) down the air shaft. It splashed when it hit bottom, far away, and I prayed there had been nothing sharp waiting down there to jab a hole in it. I heaved the window down and blew away the paint and wood flakes. I made sure the shower curtain was drawn.

  The cops outside heard my toilet tank refilling. Sometimes the plunger handle sticks and the damned thing runs and runs until you jiggle it. "Good morning," I said with a smile. My manner told them I'd run around this track plenty of times and knew the drill. But the sound of my toilet tank told them they'd missed instead of hit. I could read the expressions they traded. That's why I was smiling.

  The only way to get to the bottom of the air shaft at 2:30 in the morning was through the bathroom window.

  There was no time to wait until sunrise and visit a hardware store in search of do-it-yourself fire escape ladder. By morning, Bauhaus would know I was still loose, and by lunchtime he'd set a better trap into motion.

  Likewise, I couldn't go downstairs and start rapping on doors to see if I could crawl through on a lower floor. As far as I knew, the building had no vacancies, and even knocking on an empty apartment door might rouse the curious.

  I thought instantly of Freddy the super.

  He was not in residence here; I think it was too clean for him. But he maintained a seedy office in the basement near the laundry room. I'd signed a bullshit lease down there. Nobody used the laundry room now; it was like the inside of a glacier, locked solid with ice at the terminus of a frozen tunnel. I recalled a circular power saw that had been sitting on Freddy's desk. If there were power tools among the junk and salvage ferreted away down there, maybe there was something I could use as a rope. Or maybe Freddy had a secret hatch leading into the shaft.

  I shrugged into my fatigue jacket, patting the side pocket to make sure my roll of duct tape was still there (Trust me: Nobody in the dope trade lacks duct tape; it has a million uses). The only building noises at this time of night on a weekday were half-hearted–the after-bar-hours domestic punch-outs, TV noise from behind triple-locked doors, the occasional burglary in progress.

  I made a crosshatch pattern of tape on the window of Freddy's office door, then planted my elbow sharply into the X, dead center. The tape web sagged quietly into my grasp, laden with fractured glass. In seconds I was in.

  Three minutes later, I was out, carrying two figure-eight coils of heavy-duty electrical extension cord, one 25-foot length, and a 50-footer with plugmold outlets every ten feet. Both were sheathed in that groove-textured, bright orange insulation that made the wire more durable and bulked it out to a diameter of about half an inch. It was the strongest, most practical stuff I could find for my needs down in Freddy's fetid garbage dump lair.

  After ditching the fifty-footer in my room, I tied one end of the shorter cord to the banister and unreeled it down into the rectangular void separating the stairwells. It uncoiled in snaky twists and turns. I went down two flights, light-footedly so as to keep my business to myself, wound the cord double around my right forearm, and performed a slow pull-up. The anchor banister creaked like the front door of a haunted house (I thought of my missing ghost), the cord went taut and arrow-straight, and my feet met the risers again. I grabbed above the slack and repeated, counting-off slowly to thirty while I dangled there. The cord did not stretch under my 155 pounds. I wiggled around and the only length I gained was due to the insulation taking a firmer bite on the rail, tightening. I stopped before the goddamned banister could come crashing down on me in splinters and chaos. I felt I could trust this stuff to a two-way climb. As if I had a choice.

  Back in my room, I knotted the cords together and tied large, pretzel-shaped climbing loops every five feet. I traded my track shoes for a pair of steel-toed, gum-soled boots Drea had advised me to get for hoofing around in the snow. Before pounding my bedroom window open again, I slipped on a pair of yellow leather trucker's gloves (I'd finally learned my lesson after bruising the heel of my hand). It took a bit more violence than usual to chock the window up all the way, and when I'd forced the cramped access full open, I snugged the glove-pulls around my wrists, for climbing.

  I peered down into the black nothingness; it was the first time I'd been able to fit my head and shoulders all the way out. Darkness swallowed my breath vapor two feet beyond my nose. I wanted a backup light, in case I did something stupid, like drop my nightstick flashlight into the water I knew was waiting below. I settled on stuffing one of the Army coat's big tub pockets with candles and wooden matches. I secured the baton light to one of my belt loops by threading a shoelace through the ring on its butt. Just call me Tenseng Norkhay.

  The eagle-claw feet of the bathtub were permanently bolted to the decaying floor tiles, and the tub was heavy and immovable enough to provide a solid, reliable tie-off. I choke-knotted the cord around the closest foot and fed my line out the window a few feet a
t a time. A cockroach, irate at my intrusion on his under-the-tub domain, decided to make a run for it and I pulped him into the treads of my boot as soon as he skittered into the light.

  It was five minutes to three in the morning. With luck, my presence in this dump would be history by four. And now it was time to find out just how far down the cord reached.

  I cinched the waist drawstring of the fatigue coat tight, zipping and buttoning the front flap. It was going to be chilly as well as damp in the shaft. I turned up the collar and sealed it with the Velcro straps.

  Then I stepped up onto the far lip of the tub, put my right leg out the window, and backed out into the air shaft.

  Heights don't scare me. The dark doesn't scare me. The close press of the shaft is no threat, because I know it's an illusion, and I'm not a claustrophobe. This was going to be rather like urban caving, and part of me thrilled to the fact I was capable of such extreme lengths.

  Going down would be the easy part. My biceps and the extensor muscles of my forearms were up to the work. I tipped outward, braced my toes against the waffled metal, eased my weight backward on the line. And slipped.

  Five feet of cord skinned through my hands before I fisted leather around rubber and lurched to a lung-compressing halt. Momentum banged my face against the corrugated steel, scattering shock lightning across my inner eyelids. My heart totally freaked, punching blood furiously through my brain along with an assortment of nasty thoughts on my own abrupt termination, like defective cars smashing together in a freeway pile-up. I hung. I pendulumed. The orange insulation squeaked against the windowsill, dropping paint flakes into my hair like chaff. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and tried to orient by feel.