Lucky Supreme

by Jeff Johnson

  “Fine. Today was solid. Your cats miss you, but I’m on the couch and they’re both laying on me. Little piggies.” She yawned again. “You need to get a TV.”

  “Not really.”

  “Nighty then. Don’t be stupid.”

  Back in the hotel I crashed on to the bed with my clothes on, properly spent. Carina’s perfume was all over me and my mouth tasted like I’d eaten a hairy boxing glove, so I stripped down, had a shot of gin from the minibar, and took a shower.

  With a towel wrapped around my waist I went out on to the balcony and looked over the sleeping city, my mind drifting randomly over the blurry events of the day. Delia was right. I couldn’t really afford to be stupid. I was pretty far out on a limb, walking the wire with no safety net. I could feel it, even through the booze and the fucking and the exhaustion. “Don’t be stupid” was solid advice.

  But I was on a roll.

  My cell phone rang at nine a.m. sharp. Gold light flooded the hotel room, bright on my eyelids. I groaned and scooped the phone off the nightstand and looked at the number, rubbing my face. It was Obi.

  “Hey boss! Hangover?”

  “Oh shit,” I muttered. The sound of his impossibly happy voice was like an ice pick scraping across the inside of my dried-out skull. I fished around in the back of my mouth and pulled out a curly black pubic hair.

  “Good!” he continued. “I’m glad you’re having a good time, dude. I bet you even smiled once or twice. You probably even got laid. You get your stuff?”

  “No,” I replied. “I … there was, see, I … shit.” I sat up and shook a cigarette out of my pack, then staggered out the sliding door onto the balcony and lit it. The sharp breeze woke me up a little. “Obi, I need a little favor.”

  “Alka-Seltzer?” he asked. “The woman asleep in your bathtub needs a ride home?” That was one good thing about an old apprentice: they always felt like they owed you. Forever.

  “I need you to tap your client base. Get someone with connections to find out who owns the Smiling Dragon Tattoo Emporium. The actual building.” Most working tattoo artists had a list of customers with specialized backgrounds. I had a massive one, and I’d trained Obi well, so I knew he’d been picking up Monterey names as he went.

  “No prob. Actually my broker can do that. Or this law librarian I tattooed that works in real estate. She’d be good. It’ll take about an hour after I get to the shop. Is one o’clock okay?”

  “’S fine.” I padded over to the miniature coffee maker in the alcove outside the bathroom and stared at it. The little machine was bleak. Mournful. Oppressive.

  “So, what, you going to look up Bling’s boss?”

  I decided against attempting the coffee machine and turned away. “Yeah. Bling said something that made me think, right after I’d kicked his stomach out. He was still working off some kind of debt. Every day, he said. Like a slave, or a prisoner. I need to know who runs that place and who owns the building. Everything.”

  I had room service bring up a twelve-by-sixteen cardboard shipping box and a pot of coffee, and an hour later I was showered, dressed, caffeinated, and standing in line at the Marina post office with the bulk of Bling’s cash. I taped and labeled it at the weight desk by the priority envelopes and passport forms. The money actually smelled bad, like old milk, fish oil, and rotting tarps. The box was addressed to me at the Lucky Supreme. On the way over I’d stopped by a scenic pond with some swans gliding over the surface and underhanded Bling’s gun into the still green water.

  Once the package was sent, I drove back to the airport and returned the rental, then took a cab back to the Portola. I was still shaking the hangover and needed a walk, so I wandered out to the pier, pausing now and then at the vendor stalls to look over the displays of saltwater taffies and seashell sculptures. Finally, I got a second cup of coffee and the local newspaper and sat down on a bench in the sun.

  I had Bling’s money, but it was a fraction of what people were paying for Roland Norton, Panama 1955. It wouldn’t hurt to press it a little further. I still felt bad about yesterday, but it was hard to feel truly moribund sitting in the sun and staring out over the ocean. Maybe I just didn’t want to go home, I realized. Obi had found a fantastic little piece of America. I chipped away at the newspaper and drank coffee. After a while I took out my sketchbook and half-heartedly scribbled and sketched at the edges of a few of the sailboats.

  Sketchbooks came in all shapes and sizes. I favored the black ones with the hard, durable covers, the size of a hardback book. On impulse I flipped back to the first page and traced the dark trail of the last six months. It was like a diary written in hieroglyphics.

  The first pages were always tense in a sketchbook. It was bad juju to have something crappy or thematically off too early, so they almost didn’t count. In this one I’d drawn skulls, the first one with heavy shadows, a few cracks, no real time invested, and then on the next page another one. It was apparently skull number one’s girlfriend. Floppy hat with a flower in it, clown makeup made out of playing card hearts and spades, diamonds and clubs. Scattered around the base of it were coins set on their edges, with comic book motion lines to make them spin. Hard to remember, but probably girl problems.

  Two pages of coiled snakes. Then four pages of guns, smoke curling from the barrels, smeared Gotham skylines behind them. Crows with no trees to land on. An owl head on a stick. A ten-page study of antlers, mostly deer. A mummy, no background. Necklace of eyeteeth, three pages of toads, some realistic eyes, a red wine finger painting of something, I couldn’t tell, maybe gears, a second run of toads, a five-page spread of poisonous fantasy mushrooms, crows again, and a duckling with a distended fish mouth underneath it. Then … a sailboat. I looked up.

  It was in no way the reflections of a positive mind, not until the boat. The water was sun dappled, tips of eraser white on the graphite water. Slow, easy clouds gave the sky some character. It hadn’t occurred to me to draw the boat on fire in a hurricane, a tornado bearing down on it, shooting out a medusa halo of lightning as it came, tsunami waves on all sides.

  Maybe it was evidence that I had skipped out of a rut I’d been in without knowing it. Strange times can do that. I looked around at the place I was sitting. It was beautiful. Perfect light, the smell of the ocean. Obi was right to live in this place. I probably couldn’t. If I tried, it would only be a matter of time before I got used to it all, and every day, the feeling that I was somehow too conspicuous, that all the strangers could tell that I was the strangest stranger of them all, would wear me down and start to piss me off. I couldn’t fit into Obi’s paradise. I was just a visitor to places like this. Point of fact, I’d already beaten the shit out of someone, perved out with a waitress, mailed drug money to myself, and carried around someone’s gun all morning until I threw it into a pond. And I’d been there for twenty-four hours. Plus, I was sitting on a bench plotting mayhem, dark imagery in hand.

  I sighed. Big Mike’s sketchbook was unusual in some ways. He used Sharpies instead of pencils. Nigel didn’t sketch in his so much as write. Lists, phone numbers, drafts of insulting letters he was going to send, with a few pictures here and there. He tore most of the pages out as he went, so when he was done with one, it left a trail so secretive that any psychiatrist or future historian would give up instantly.

  Delia liked sketchbooks that were slightly larger than mine, which made sense as she was smaller than me. Almost all of the pages were drawings of birds, but there were also pages of what looked like textile patterns. I sometimes painted, but I almost always gave them away when I was done. Big Mike did the same thing. Nigel never painted or did any kind of art outside of tattooing. He was a collector. But Delia was a serious painter, and a sculptor as well. She kept that part of her life to herself, and I wondered about that, not for the first time.

  Obi called a little after one o’clock.

  “Done,” he said. “You got a pen?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The Smiling Dragon Slau
ghterhouse is owned by Nicholas Dong-ju of Dong-ju Trust in San Francisco. He owns the entire mini mall, including the hair place and the video game store.” Obi reeled off the San Francisco address and I jotted it down in my sketchbook.

  “Thanks,” I said. I snapped the book closed. “I’m going to drive over there now. Call you tonight when I get back.”

  “Right on,” Obi replied. “You know Beth would love to see you. Wanna come over for dinner?”

  “I’ll pick up something on the way back. No telling how long this might take. But thanks, brother.”

  “Cool.” I could hear the disappointment in his voice. Obi wanted to share his pain.

  I got my car out, gassed up, and hit the freeway. Within twenty minutes I was back under heavy clouds. San Francisco cloud cover was different than the rain ceiling in Portland, or anywhere else for that matter. It had a cursed feel to it, old and heavy and tired, the kind of sky that was likely to produce wrecking fogs and scummy sleet, maybe even a frog storm. The sky didn’t seem as much like a ceiling as a sad helmet with advertising on the far side. It started to rain ten minutes later and the traffic slowed. I flicked my lights on and surfed through the local radio stations, smoking and thinking.

  It was entirely possible that Dong-ju was the same Asian resident of San Francisco who had purchased the Roland Norton piece from Wes Ron in England. Totally possible. Whoever he was, he had money, real estate, and at least three businesses. Only a powerfully eccentric weirdo could take an interest in Roland Norton’s bug-eyed, semi-retarded garbage, but San Francisco was notoriously full of them, so it could also easily be a dead end. I mentally shrugged.

  There was more to consider, of course. The business entrepreneur owner of a tattoo shop factor. It was like a vegan owning a steak house, or a Republican owning a bookstore. They just didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, and they always tended to zero in on the profit margin, at the exclusion of more important things, like art and its progress as a thing without a giant dollar sign on it. Dong-ju could represent a higher octave of this problem. This time I shrugged with my face.

  It was all extended speculation, but if he was in fact the guy I was looking for, then the opening card I had to play was a pretty good one. Dong-ju had more to lose than I did, plus he had Bling on a financial leash, so he’d get paid in the end one way or another, no matter what. He could either pay me the balance and take it out of Bling’s ass, give me my flash back and take it out of Bling’s ass, or have me and the cops in his hair for as long as it took, and then he could take his frustrations out on Bling. It was worth a shot to talk to him, no matter how I looked at it.

  Traffic finally let up at the suburban outskirts of San Francisco proper. I exited I-80 and headed over a mossy old concrete bridge down into Harriet Street. The gloomy energy of the place was getting hard to fight off. From there, I entered an increasingly shitty neighborhood that grew a little worse with every block. The rain thickened and slowed, smacking the hood of the car in slow, fat drops. Streetlights flickered to life, hours early, and shed a lonesome, crappy glow on everything as I slowly drove, making a cautious approach. It surprised me that San Francisco still possessed run-down industrial areas. Gentrification had erased or upgraded most of it on the West Coast, especially in high-priced regions like the Bay Area. Run-down industrial was hard to find in Portland, and when you did find it, it was filled with artists and their strange support ecologies. Cheese makers and tiny print shops hid in the warehouses, cafés and snotty restaurants down the alleys. Nothing like that was going on here.

  Dong-ju Trust proved to be the most uninviting bunker in a stretch of them when I finally found it. The building was an enormous, squat thing with rust-streaked gray paint and patches of exposed concrete. There was a parking lot with a sagging chain link fence on the east side with a new black Lincoln Town Car, a white pickup, and a newer tin shed. There was space in the lot for a dozen or so cars and a truck or two, but the rest of it was empty and it looked like it had been that way for a long time. The roll gate was locked and chained. The caged windows of the building were caked with years of soot and set too high to see through. Above the dented steel door was an address in nail-on numbers, but no company name.

  I sat in my car across the street, having second thoughts. There were a few yellow lights on inside, their urine glare completing the welcome. It was too bad I’d tossed Bling’s gun into that pond, I thought. I could easily picture bodies inside the place, or a horrible Dickensian factory with emaciated child workers. Towering boxes full of bullets. Crates of unstable landmines. A deluxe meth lab. Mannequins. The ball bearing in my pocket was the exact variety of dumbass Delia had warned me about. I took it out of my pocket and pushed it down in between the seat and the seat back.

  A produce truck slowly rumbled past a block down, riding extra low on the springs. I got out and locked the car. The rain wasn’t especially cold and the air smelled like rust and wet fruit trash. I flicked my cigarette away as I went up to the door and then just stood there staring at it for a minute, getting wet. Bad shit was behind that door. I could feel it. There was a battered plastic pad with a speaker grate and a black button on the wall next to it. I pressed the button and heard a distant buzz inside.

  “—es?” came a static-lashed woman’s voice.

  “I have something to discuss with Mr. Dong-ju,” I shouted into the speaker grate. “Roland Norton. Panama. 1955. Like, proto art.”

  “—pointment?” I could barely hear her, but I picked up bored.

  “No, I don’t. I’m sure Mr. Dong-ju would like to talk to me. I’ll only be in town for another few hours.”

  “—oment please.”

  I stood in the rain and a lonely minute passed. Then another minute. I pulled up the collar of my bomber jacket. Two minutes after that I blew rain off my face and pressed the button again.

  The door opened immediately. A short blonde woman in jeans and a T-shirt scowled out at me. She was maybe a hard thirty, with a used-up coke nose and a Russian whore’s makeup. Her washed-out blue eyes looked tired and glazed with Prozac. I looked down from her bad stare. Flip-flops. Pink toenail polish.

  “Come on,” she snapped.

  I followed her into a small space cordoned off by chewed-up corkboard office dividers. It was ten degrees colder inside and the air smelled like mildew and bad coffee and menthol cigarettes. She sat down at a small desk with an office computer and an untidy pile of papers, sucked some coffee from a paper cup, and tapped the keyboard.

  I was about to say something irritating when the steel door opened behind me and a big wet guy in a long black leather jacket rolled in on a cloud of cologne, wiping rain from his flat boxer’s face with both of his huge, scarred hands. He didn’t look Korean when he focused his small, piggy eyes on me.

  “What do you want.” There was a crescent-shaped scar under his left eye and the eye itself was a little drifting and scummy. His teeth were small and uniformly gray. Dentures.

  “I’m looking for Nicholas Dong-ju,” I replied.

  “We know already,” the blonde said in a nasal twang. I flicked my eyes at her. She scratched the side of her mouth with one long fingernail, stretching her lips into an ‘O’ the way women do when they apply lipstick. She glanced under her fingernail.

  “What for,” she asked. It didn’t come out with a question mark. The big guy stepped closer. I nodded and held my hands up in surrender. His hard face settled lower down into deep ugly.

  “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said calmly. My pulse was ramping up. “I have reason to believe that Mr. Dong-ju might be in possession of some property that for a variety of reasons he might not want.”

  The big man squinted.

  “Wrong answer,” the blond droned, still bored. The big guy rolled his neck and flexed his hands.

  “Look,” I said, hands still raised, taking a step back toward the blonde, thinking human shield, “some shithead who used to work for me might, and I mean might, have sold
Mr. Dong-ju some stolen property. Artwork. Stolen from me. I could easily be wrong. I just wanted to ask Mr. Dong-ju a few questions, that’s all. I seriously don’t want any trouble of any kind.”

  I could throw the blonde and then maybe the computer next, then use the desk as a vaulting point to get over top of the divider behind it.

  The big guy snorted and shook his head. I found my center of gravity and bent my knees ever so slightly. He picked up the change in my posture and his good eye widened. He smirked. Barely.

  “Get out.”

  I walked carefully around him, just out of reach of his gorilla arms. Behind me the blonde tapped away at her computer, the entire episode already forgotten. I backed up to the door and opened it, stepped out into the rain, and turned.

  There were two cop cars on the street, one in front of my BMW and the other one behind it. Four cops in rain gear were right outside the metal door waiting for me. They looked pissed.

  “Hands up, asshole,” one of them said, raising his flashlight like a baton.

  Someone hit me hard from my left and flattened me against the wall. I was cuffed, fast and tight. I didn’t resist as I was escorted to the lead cop car across the street. The cop who nailed and shackled me was kind enough to duck my head so I didn’t bang it on the way into the chicken coop.

  I sat there, heart pounding, my face iron with cold fury, while the four cops stood around and talked things over, sweating me. A couple minutes later they broke up and two of them went back to the second car. The other two got in up in front of me.

  “Name,” asked the cop in the driver’s seat, hard eyes in the rearview. His partner twisted around and gave me the opening glare of the ‘We already don’t believe you’ routine.

  “Darby Holland.”

  “We need some ID,” the same cop said. “That BMW yours?”

  “Yep. Wallet’s in my back pocket.”

  The cop in the passenger seat got out and came around, opened the back door.