by Jeff Johnson
It took five long minutes to get the chain and the cord off of him and I wasn’t gentle about it. When I was finished, Bling lolled onto his side like a beached tuna and then flopped over on his back. His puke was getting all over him. Obi was right about the gut he’d grown. I lit a cigarette for him and stoked the cherry before I tossed it into his lap from five feet away.
“Fuck,” Bling whined, plucking it up and smacking his jeans where it had come to a smoldering rest. He took a long drag and coughed, then eyed me.
“You better not have sold my stuff,” I cautioned.
“Sure as fuck did.” Bling took another drag. “Had to.” He blew the smoke in my direction and stared at me through slit eyes. There was a white gob of whatever he’d retched up earlier stuck in the corner of his mouth. “Do what you’re gonna do, Darby. Just get it over with. We had a few laughs, me and you. I know what you tried to do for me. But all this shit? You don’t understand, man. Walk away. If you walk away, it’ll be like I paid you back a hundred times over.” His hand was trembling as he hit the cigarette again.
“I know you were running pills out of Canada,” I said. “I know you burned a bunch of scumbags and split town. I don’t need to understand anything about you, kid. It would make me dirty somehow if I did. But predicting you, now that’s a different story. I knew, I just fucking knew your place would look like this. Just like I can predict that everything you say will have some kind of wrinkle in it.”
Bling didn’t say anything. Amazingly, his smug expression returned, this time with watery, world-weary, sad eyes. It was strange and surprising to see something so complicated on his face. Reveling in his fate, the kind of magical tragedy that only happened in movies and to him, and there was actually something real about it. He held up the cigarette and studied it like it was a pet insect.
“I knew right when I saw you that this shit was finally over,” he began. “I don’t even fuckin’ care at this point.” He tried for a sigh and coughed instead.
A messy, distorted truth was about to come out of him. I could feel it. I watched and listened, motionless, transfixed in spite of myself.
“Got all fucked up with the wrong people,” he continued. “I always do. But this time there’s no way out. I’m still working this shit off every day, like a … like a slave or a prisoner, I guess. Indentured servitude, like the Irish guys in the old days. They wanted your Norton flash, don’t ask me why. They wanted it all. I always thought it was some ugly shit, especially compared to some of the other old stuff at the Lucky.” He shrugged and coughed again. “Who the fuck knows.”
“Who’d you sell it to, Jason? Tell me who has it and I might mail this money back when I’m done with them.” I said it calmly.
Bling’s laugh was a mean bark of disgust aimed at both of us. “Not a fucking chance, Darby. You, that slick fucking soulless bastard Nigel, Big Dummy Mike, little psycho fuckin’ Delia … You may be a pack of badasses, dude, but these people would eat your livers with fava beans. No fuckin’ way. Just let it go.” He took a breath. “I’m really trying to help you out right now.”
“Jason,” I said. I could hear the tiredness in my voice. I leaned out and whipped him over the top of the head with his gun. He screamed and shrank back into a ball, as far back into the trash around him as he could get.
“I said no fucking way,” he said firmly. He glared at me, all angry dog in a hot car. “They have pictures of my parents! Pictures they took of them sitting in their backyard, dude. They were eating. Laughing. Pictures of my sister and her three kids at a park. No way, Darby. That’s the one bridge I can’t burn. You maybe can’t understand that, but try, dude. Just fuckin’ try.”
Bling’s jaw quivered. I knew from that look that I could beat on him all night and he wouldn’t talk until the very end, but Jason knew I wasn’t a killer, that I wouldn’t, couldn’t go all the way to monster, that he would never see his death in my eyes as I beat him to the edge of oblivion with no intention of stopping. That true, unfakable x-ray stare was the only thing that would get him to spill his guts. And from the look on his face I knew that whoever had the Roland Norton flash definitely could go there and keep going, all the way back to his mommy and daddy and points beyond. It didn’t mean that it was true, just that he was sure of it. I was suddenly sick of that room, sick of looking at him, sick of the smell of his vomit and the rotting trash. The aura of desperate scumminess was getting inside of me and fingering things.
“Jason Bling,” I said slowly. “You might have a soul in there after all. You can’t fucking imagine my surprise.”
He stared at me with those dog’s eyes.
“Just sit there,” I continued. “Sit there for an hour. A week. Don’t ever get up again. Don’t pick up that broken phone and monkey around with it. Don’t do anything at all, because I will know. I will, and then I’ll have to come back, and if that happens we both change forever.” I paused. “I’m gonna leave now, but I want you to think about something, fool. You know why I don’t blow your worthless fucking brains all over that pile of shit behind you?”
“No,” he replied sullenly. I leaned a little closer and stared as far as I could into his empty head. It was so empty I flash-hallucinated that I could see right out his ass to the seat of his pants. My glimpse of his soul had come and gone. His face went so blank that for a moment I could see what he must have looked like when he was a little boy, before he took all the wrong detours and lost his map and became Jason Bling.
“Me neither.” I got up and backed up to the door, the money under my arm, the gun pointed at his face. Bling raised his hands and then slowly reached down and withdrew the small bag of coke from the breast pocket of his T-shirt, his glassy eyes never leaving mine. I backed out, lowering the gun to my side, leaving him in his personal darkness as I closed the door on what he considered a life.
On the drive back to Monterey I checked the rearview every thirty seconds. There was no way Bling would try to follow me, especially since I had his only gun and I’d been convincingly sincere about what would happen if he did, but there was a chance that he had the spine to look out the window at my rental and get the license plate. The hard calm had left me on the walk to the car and I was shaking a little and my stomach felt like it was full of flat beer. The rings of moisture under my arms were getting cold and sweat was trickling freely down my ribs. I lit a cigarette and rolled the window down, letting the freeway-speed ocean breeze scour away some of the stink of the last hour.
The sun had set while I was busy. I tried to call Obi on my cell phone, but I couldn’t scroll with my thumb. I cursed and tossed the phone on the seat, then tried the radio, but I couldn’t hear anything with the windows down. So I smoked and tried to keep the cigarette from being blown apart.
That hadn’t worked out too well, I thought. I glanced at the fluttering, greasy pillowcase on the passenger seat. The gun was underneath it. I cursed again and smacked the wheel with the flat of my hand. A mixture of shame and self-loathing rippled in itchy waves through the meat of my body. I felt fevered. Infected.
Jason Bling was no better than an animal from a drainage canal. No smarter, no more noble. His life was a malarial rampage of pussy, drugs, and the constant scams that linked it all together. And he’d dragged me down into his Darwinian sewer with no effort at all, and for at least one evening I was just another sorry creature in Bling’s shit-eating food chain, one clever rung higher than he was. That was why I walked out with the money and the gun and enough information to work with. Because I’d played his game, and I was better at it.
Deep down, I wanted to believe in some kind of world where no one beat the hell out of anyone else for stealing something crappy. Where no one got tied up in a puddle of puke. Where I didn’t sit in front of someone and ruin a part of both of us while I openly wondered about murder. The evolving mystery of the crap in question just made it all a slightly different shade of wrong. I was under no illusion that I would ever hold incense and hug turtle
s and contemplate the dawn with the Dalai Lama. It was way too late for anything like that. But for years I’d been feeling like the level of deranged corruption around me was at the maximum level I could tolerate without lasting damage, and my personal threshold was exceptionally high. When it spiked beyond a certain point, I couldn’t swallow it anymore. On some psychic level I was puking as I drove, a hard retching purge, but I couldn’t get it out. It never came out. It always stayed in me somewhere, every single time.
I tossed my cigarette out the window and lit another one. The lights of Monterey flickered through the groves of eucalyptus trees and I got a sudden wash of Saturday Night Howl. Neon. A clean hotel room. Bars with clean people, doing their drinking in clean clothes out of clean glasses. Music. Women with nice shoes and day jobs. No scabs in their lipstick. No chance they had ever met Bling. It didn’t matter that I’d be the worst person in the room.
When I got back to the hotel, I parked the rental in the garage down the street next to my BMW and locked it. It would have been nice to put the money in my car, but it didn’t have a trunk and there were security cameras everywhere, so the spare tire compartment was out too. I walked up the sidewalk to the Portola with Bling’s gun in my bomber jacket and the pillowcase full of money tucked in a roll under my arm. Delia would call it one of the weak parts of a plan that had already devolved into improvisation. I was glad she wasn’t next to me, scowling in that way she had when I risked making something already bad worse.
None of the perfectly crisp employees or sunburned vacationers looked at me as I went through the wide lobby to the elevators, every one of them amazingly unaware that I’d just beaten and hog-tied a worthless scumbag and stolen his drug money. I rode in the elevator with a German tourist and her short-shorts teenage daughter. When I looked down to avoid their eyes, I noticed flecks of Bling’s puke on my pants. I didn’t raise my head until the doors opened.
Back in my room, I took a thousand dollars out of Bling’s stash and locked the rest of it in the hotel room’s closet safe with the gun. Then I took a long, boiling shower, scrubbing my hair and my hands over and over again. The top two knuckles on my right hand hurt a little where the ball bearing had been when I pounded Bling’s soggy beer gut, and my hip was stiff, probably from the drive down from Portland, but the hot, sulfurous water soaked into my joints and I gradually relaxed.
When I turned the water off I could hear music in the distance as a dance club fired up their sound system a few blocks away. I got the aspirin out of my bag and popped three, then walked naked over to the window. The night looked peaceful, restively devoid of angry prostitutes and scheming thieves. No obvious drug dealers or pimps. Not a junkie in sight. Not even any desperate old people. A couple holding hands strolled past below me, maybe going to dinner.
I dressed in the best clothes I’d brought with me. The black Armani jeans were getting faded, but it was dark. The black V-neck sweater from the Myer and Franks after-Christmas sale still looked good. I needed to get out and get into a higher class of trouble. If nothing else, I could get drunk enough to forget why I was getting drunk, and that had spiritually medicinal value all by itself.
In the elevator I checked my face for bruises, because you never know. You can bruise your face after a fight of any kind just by rubbing it too hard. There weren’t any, but the bulging wad of twenties in my pocket was throwing off the cut of my pants. When the doors opened I headed across the huge tile lobby to the bar, still decompressing.
The bar turned out to be a little too upscale for my taste, which wasn’t really much of a surprise, but the designer had also gone for a blend of cozy with a dash of sports bar in a misguided attempt to please everyone. A bar needs character, but not a schizophrenic one. It confuses people prematurely. There was a gas fireplace in one corner, surrounded by low driftwood drink stands and glass coffee tables and plush chairs. Across the expanse of wine-colored carpet from the fireplace, an immensely vulgar plasma-screen TV was silently broadcasting a sports channel. No one was playing the polished grand piano to the right of the entrance. They were piping in an almost subliminal level of Casioed Billy Joel.
The place was only half full, even at nine thirty on a Saturday night. I ordered a smoky martini at the mahogany and brass bar and turned on my bar stool, surveying the room. It was depressing, but in a hygienic way.
Some kind of convention was evidently going on, at least in the hotel. Most of the other drinkers were wearing nametags, a dead giveaway. The bar crowd was predominantly male, guys in their mid-to-late forties, with big mushy office bodies tortured by red meat and 24 Hour Fitness. Collared shirts, huddled in tight groups and drinking expensive white wine or Midwestern bar standards. The scattering of women were all hyper and shiny, with TV hair. I’ll never know why, but women with too much glittery jewelry always struck me as birdlike, but in a chicken rather than a sparrow kind of way. An intense, peyote-level scrutiny of my formative memories on the subject might have dredged up my introduction to the concept of gizzard stones or something equally ghastly, so I never thought about it.
There were a few people at the bar itself, mostly obvious locals chatting quietly with the bartender. One of them was a woman in her early thirties wearing most of a uniform, possibly a waitress from one of the numerous local bistros. She was pretty, with shoulder length straight black hair and a long, lanky figure. I smiled at her and she looked away. She was talking, so I slipped into eavesdropping mode.
“—Mary and I was like, good God, girl.” The bartender was an older woman with gray in the wings of her hair. She nodded sympathetically as the woman continued. “I mean, the terminals are updated every six months. I can’t screw around with her tickets every fuckin’ order.”
“You should take a shift at this place,” the bartender said, looking over her shoulder. A ticket chattered out of the black plastic module on the bar top by the drink condiments as if on command. She plucked it out and showed it to her. “Check that out. No abbreviations, but all the stuff at the bottom? Everyone hits the rush button. And when they tip me out, you think this constant drink crisis ever comes up? Why would I even bother to mention it?”
A couple of bar drinkers peeled off for a table. The bartender started filling the emergency order that had just come in, either from room service or the restaurant next door. The waitress looked at me again.
“I can’t stand computers,” I offered as an opening. She smiled and stirred her drink with a straw. It looked like a rum and coke, a drink I’d only consider if the world was ending in thirty seconds.
“Can’t do a damn thing without them,” she replied. “So you aren’t with the software convention?”
I picked up my drink and moved to the stool next to her. She gave me a grin that said I was being an idiot. I ignored it and looked innocent, even perplexed.
“No way,” I said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “Who are they?”
She laughed softly.
“Computarians.” She turned and looked at the other drinkers. “We have conventions around here every week, sometimes two.” She looked me over, the laugh still dancing around her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Art,” I said expansively. I tried to look thoughtful and then I thought about Bling.
“Hmm,” she said, watching my face.
“It’s a rude environment sometimes. Very competitive.”
“Do you like it?” she asked, sipping through her straw. Her lips were thin and painted a dark, flaking red. I shrugged.
“It’s probably better than, I dunno … what did you say these people are up to?”
She shrugged back. “Premier Telecom Applications. That’s what the geek sign in the lobby says, anyway. Probably routers or satellite code crap.”
“Ah,” I said, brightening. “You understand that kind of thing?”
“I’m working on my business degree. So no. But I’ve been serving them all night at the bistro up the street.” She lowered her eyes over her drink.
“Maybe,” she replied, smiling in earnest.
My cell phone rang a few times that night, but I didn’t answer it. It turned out that Carina and her boyfriend of several years had broken up a few months before. Around two a.m. I left her little beachside apartment and checked my missed calls. There was one from Obi, two from Nigel, and eleven from Delia.
I called Obi first and got his voice mail, a happy, family kind of message with the kid squeaking in the background. Nigel’s number went straight to voice mail. Then I called Delia. She answered on the first ring.
“Gettin’ some poon?” she asked in a slurred voice.
“Just finished,” I said. “What are you up to?”
She yawned. “Went out for drinks. Played old Atari games at that arcade place downtown. Lame. When you didn’t call, I actually figured you were fine. You would have called right away if you got shot or something. Or the cops would have. Or the morgue. A veterinarian you were holding hostage.”
“I’m walking through Monterey trying to find my hotel,” I said. It was a nice night, not too cool, with a salty breeze touched with rosemary and cotton candy. I told her about it.
“Did you find Bling?” she asked when I was done.
“Oh yeah.”
“You kicked his ass, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Goody,” she said sleepily.
“It really wasn’t that bad,” I said. “He did puke.”
“Right on. So do I need to worry about the cops showing up at the Lucky in the morning?”
“I doubt it,” I replied. “I didn’t get the flash back, but I have an idea who might have it.” I saw the Marriott sign off in the distance. The Portola was right next to it. “I guess I’ll be down here for another day or so. How’s the shop?”