by Jeff Johnson
“Lean,” he instructed. I leaned over so he could get to my wallet.
“Anything sharp in here?”
“No.”
“No needles, pocketknife, anything like that?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” The suspect junkie burglar speech.
He pulled my wallet out and returned to the front seat. Both of them were bored as they ran my license. I watched through the window as one of the cops from the car behind us went to the steel door of Dong-ju Trust with a note pad and pressed the buzzer. The blonde opened it and let him in, smiling and bobbing her head, a grateful and concerned citizen.
“Lot of cash,” the second cop observed, holding my wallet open for his partner to look into. He turned and gave me a flat stare. “What are you doing here?”
It was time to think fast. It wasn’t the first time I’d been shuffled into that particular seat, so I was ready. That’s what the sweat time was for when used wisely.
“I’m on vacation,” I snapped, irritated. “Someone told me there was an art gallery around here. I was trying to find it.”
“An art gallery?” They exchanged a look. “This is an industrial area. Most of these places are storage.”
“I’m from Portland,” I replied, “as you can see from my driver’s license. Tons of our galleries are in the industrial areas. Use your fancy computer and google it. It’s sort of the thing these days.”
The cops sighed together. They’d evidently heard all about it already. Passenger seat gave me an appraising look. “We got a few calls that someone meeting your description was prowling around looking at gate locks and testing doors. Looking through windows. That you? Trolling for art galleries?”
“This was my first stop.”
A third cop car pulled up. No one got out.
“Mind if we search your car?”
“Go right ahead,” I replied. I relaxed and stared out at the rain.
He put my wallet on the dash and came back and got my keys, going through the whole sharp thing again. The cop from the second car joined him in the search and they rooted around in the BMW for a few minutes. Eventually they slammed the doors and locked it again. The cop that had gone into the building came out and they all held a short conference across the street.
“No luggage,” passenger cop said when he got back in. “Where you staying?”
“The Portola Plaza in Monterey,” I replied. “The pass key is in my jacket.”
They looked at each other again. The results from my driver’s license on their computer could not have been in any way helpful to my cause, but there were no outstanding warrants, just a long list of bad shit I’d done and much more that I might have.
“Get him out,” the driver said.
The passenger cop pulled me out of the back and took the cuffs off, then handed me my wallet and keys.
“You want to find an art gallery? Google it, genius. We better not find you around here again.” He gave me a tight smile. “Hope you enjoyed your stay, and drive safely back to Portland.”
My knuckles were white on the steering wheel as I drove. No one followed me, and for some reason that made me even angrier. I’d walked right into a sweet little burn. It had everything. Tidy, efficient, clever, and free. Bling had obviously had some coke-fueled episode after I’d left him, reviewing everything he’d said on rewind and fast forward until the paranoia bit down on something hard. Then he’d called to let them know I might be coming. I should have known when the burned-up blonde had kept me waiting so long, and then the big guy was dripping wet when he showed up. I’d been played, and now I couldn’t even go back without a major hassle. The cops had my license number, description, history, and every reason to fuck with me. Sweet indeed. And smart. It also sent a very clear message. I’d found the right guy.
Telling my version of the truth to a bunch of wet beat cops had obviously been out of the question, for many reasons other than purely aesthetic ones. Something about me never inspires confidence in law enforcement types, and I felt the same way about them. It showed. My record made me an unreliable witness to anything, an unbelievable giver of statements, and a reliable source of bad news. In this case, all true once again. I’d just lost a hand without ever getting to the poker table, like I’d been mugged at the casino door, a casino where I would be gambling against big money and was sure to be robbed anyway.
I considered going back and pounding on the door of Dong-ju Trust like an idiot maniac, then just winging it. It was such a powerfully reckless, stupid idea that it would catch them by surprise. I wanted to burn the fucking place to the ground right after I stomped that crusty bitch’s computer into a million pieces. Setting me up with a pile of cops was not only infuriating, it was dangerous. People got shot that way all the time, especially people like me. And cops didn’t shoot anyone just once anymore, either. They kept firing until their guns were empty, probably because of something to do with paperwork, and there had been six of them. That was a lot of bullets. I swallowed and tried to let the fire settle into coals. It was time to regroup.
Some brilliant, next-level, RAND Corporation reasoning was called for, with a considerable amount of Israeli tactical know-how and probably some high-end, otherworldly spy gear. What I had instead was a package of skills designed to survive at the lower end of things and honed by being there for so fucking long. So basically none of that. I considered the situation from various angles. Brilliant reasoning did not honestly describe my thought process, I knew. Tactical know-how just sounded perfectly awful, so no again. All I had in the way of next-generation spy gear was my metal ball. Lame.
Amazingly, the biggest mistake so far had not been mine after all. Nicholas Dong-ju had shown his level of game and given me time to think, and I was going to make sure his ego’s error cost him. I had days to plan and a staff of my own that made the floozy and Eye Goo Dude look like sissies. I knew who had my stuff, and that was enough for the moment. And Bling was going to get another visit from me.
I lit another cigarette, somehow cheered by the train of thought. I was getting back into my element, mostly because there was nowhere else to go, true, but I had a destination. I had a feel for the situation. It was a sketchy one, but it was enough to work with. I knew who had my flash, and they knew I knew it. The fuse was burning and that was fine by me. I’d been assessed as some kind of scumbag who could be stalled by the cops and turned aside. People were always so incredibly surprised to discover that they were in fact right about the scumbag label, and that the brand had not only been painstakingly earned but came with an entire package of hard to deal with, completely unexpected bullshit.
My life had been a snake nest of burning fuses for as long as I could remember. People in general planned and planned their entire lives, creating structures to live inside of, the bigger and more complicated the better. They were waiting to retire to start living. A much smaller percentage of people never made a single big plan at all and cruised the ineffable instant, with a loose idea of a possible future. I was a different and almost completely foreign kind of mechanic in that respect. The perfect plan was the kind that had every chance of success, but if it fell apart it had the potential to explode and create a beautiful chaos to navigate at speed, and that was generally the secret goal all along. Every politician knew the same thing, which was maybe why I couldn’t trust a single one of them. Most every working artist of any kind did, too. It could be a bad thing to rub up against. The future had no substance. It didn’t smell like anything, it didn’t make noise, and it had no color at all. Not until it happened. And I was usually right there waiting when it did, with my collapsing plan.
I punched scan on the radio and let it ride until I hit a doo-wop station. Nolan Strong, the Five Keys, the Penguin. I liked how people could really sing instead of scream in those days, not that the screaming was entirely out of step with the times. My hands felt good on the steering wheel as I gripped it. I felt strong. In the
aftermath of all the adrenaline, my face felt mobile and clean. My breath came with a long, even lightness. Even my dick was a little hard.
A song was like an idea. It came and then it was gone, leaving an echo inside of you. My plans in the nest of fuses always resembled layers of those echoes, a thing Delia glimpsed from time to time and understood on some level. And you could replay a single song and add it to the symphony, but it was never exactly the same because you changed a little in between listenings, and the world always changed around you as well. A sketch was like that also, an assemblage of rough lines, the bridge between something part dream and something final, but still viewed differently every time. I found myself smiling at the quantity of the madness I carried around inside me.
I knew what I wanted. The ghost of something was already lifting from the ground. My opponent had emerged from a place of potential hiding with an attitude. Fine. He’d manufactured a crafty little trap on the fly using the cops, some kind of Slavic monster, and a retired whore. I had far more dangerous things up my sleeve. I had the Lucky Supreme. And I had Old Town, in all its glory.
I pulled into the parking garage at the Portola Plaza just after seven. My last night in Monterey looked like it was going to be a foggy one and it was only getting worse. My cell phone beeped a few times on the drive back, but I’d ignored it, lost in thought. On the short walk to the hotel I stopped and sat down on a bench and checked my missed calls. Obi, Delia, and Big Mike. I somehow didn’t want to hear any of their voices.
I thought about calling Carina, the tall waitress I’d met the night before and ridden like a fancy bicycle, but I was still in a strange, contemplative mood that was in mid-transition to something else. Instead I lit a cigarette and stared out into the dark. I thought about how occasionally I was sick of Portland, and how I’d never left for good because I suspected that wherever I went would eventually wind up feeling the same, just with different weather. I would always wind up in Old Town, no matter where I was. I also ruminated for a period of time on tattooing itself, and how I landed in it flat on my back, too tired and featherless to fly anymore.
Once upon a time it had seemed like the only option, the only way to scrape together enough money to get a safety margin. Poverty had left a canyon of a scar in me, I knew, and there would never be enough of the right kind of dirt to fill it in. I smoked and watched the night.
When I was fifteen, I’d gone almost two weeks without food at one point. I’d fallen all the way down into the deep end of the gutter and all the things in it had come alive around me. Down that low a kid can still taste pretty good to some people, even a real skinny one. A bag of bones, thick hair and big eyes, with more than a little of that special, desperate kind of tired is highly marketable meat. And the butchers and the counter girls were just as hungry as the fat man with the bib. I shot my cigarette far out over the water and lit another one. I don’t know why I was remembering it, but there had to be a reason.
After my mother and sister left to go live with some distant relative with room for two, my older brother and I had wandered around before we each decided that the other one was too much of a burden. Work for him had revolved around his taking as much as he could of whatever I could scratch together from odd jobs and petty crime, the kinds of things I was capable of without an ID or a wallet to put it in. He wasn’t lazy or greedy. He was damaged. When I hit the first really hard stretch he lit out for a legit paycheck, but he didn’t need me tagging along. The saddest I’d ever been was the day he finally split, madness in his eyes. He might have been a lot of things, some good, some bad, but he’d loved me.
The city was Denver. It was there that I first caught the tail of the animal inside of me, the wild thing that sometimes came out of the brittle and contrived shell of a proper human, and there was never any getting the fucker back in. Society can be much more exclusive than most people will hopefully ever realize. A night came when I was standing in the snow in broken shoes and a stolen coat with no pockets, staring past a neon CLEAN sign through the window of a Laundromat at an ashtray full of juicy, lipstick-ringed menthol butts jutting from a cat litter pan. My eyes had refocused on the alien, awful reflection of my face, all eyes and cheekbones. I was a cartoon parody of a thousand things that would never be. Me. I’d failed the admissions test and would not be joining the cast of society’s comedic fantasmadrama. Blink. Still there.
The night that happened to me, I boldly went after the ashtray anyway; huge revelations aside, I needed those cigarettes. It was warm in the place and the chime above the door sent a painful shock through me, but I didn’t want to stay for long because I knew it would make my feet hurt if I warmed up. Some biker chick had been sweeping up and busted me halfway through my scavenger hunt. Her smile had been the smile of a horny serpent, full of lust and something I was later to recognize as dollar signs.
A foghorn called in the distance, pulling me out of my reverie. I smoked and looked at the unlit boats, remembering, knowing it was a bad idea but letting myself do it anyway. We’d chatted, the green-haired biker lady and I. She invited me back to her place. I knew she was thinking sexy street boy. It was the first and last time I fucked for food, and I got ripped off. What I got instead was a chance to live for another week when she introduced me to an amateur magician named Riley the next morning. I chuckled, then stopped.
Riley had been an affable sort of killer who was part of the local specialty food chain, one rung above the woman I’d desperately torn apart with the last of my strength the night before. She’d been the feeder. Riley was the warden pimp, the gardener, the salesman with everyone’s shoe size. Later that night I met Riley’s patron, a wealthy restaurateur with an enthusiastic taste for boys just like the boy they thought I was.
The whole thing was unbelievably corny. I’d known as soon as Riley whipped out his first magic trick, after my meal ticket had vanished like the cigarette in Riley’s hand, exactly what was in store for me. What they could never have known was that the bait in the trap was all I had left, and the rules that had put me in that situation in the first place were the rules I’d just abandoned because of my random reflection in a Laundromat window. Reeking of skanky biker chick pussy and shivering all the way into my spleen, I was delighted to snort their cranky coke, which had been a terrible mistake for them. It had been like giving fast-acting rabies to a dingo.
The night had not played out well for Riley and the big rape guy. I’d escaped with all the coke, a big bag of weed, ten bottles of assorted pills, a pair of gold-plated fingernail clippers, sixty-two dollars, a bleeding scalp, and a crazy plan. Over the next few weeks I’d lived off the spoils of my first operation as a nonhuman. I tracked Riley and the biker woman, whose name I never knew, and I’d found it delightfully easy. When I’d found an even dozen of the kids who went before me, I rounded them up and proposed my plan, in the cinder block living room of Travis Kentucky, the dime bag champion of Macadam Park. Blackmail. And when it was done, I’d kill Riley and the woman and rape dude.
I got up from the bench to head back to the Portola. There was a bar off to my left, down a walkway. I started walking, taking my time, unable to stop remembering.
I’d risen that week to the status of king. Those poor, starving, tapped and rolled boys had trusted me, too. With the last of my money I’d gotten us all cinnamon rolls and we’d smoked seedy weed, and for a night an astonished hope had come back for all of them. A little of it even seeped into me, and I’d marveled at it, a gummy foreign thing struggling out of a fiberglass cocoon inside of me. We’d talked about escape, where we were going to run to and how fast. The memory of those faces, lit from within, mobile and hot, the flashing broken teeth and bright glassy eyes and dirty hair, all of it haunts me.
The next morning we went to work like a team of hardened juvenile street commandos. Jacob was a fourteen-year-old kid whose parents died in a car crash outside of Boston, and this was his second escape. He’d hit the streets in a permanent semi-psychotic flight t
o get away from his pervert uncle. It was clever Jacob who found Riley. My troops were fanned out in a giant grid, with me in the center, ready for the word, and it was Jacob who brought it. He went to round up everyone else while I went to give Riley our terms.
Riley was still in the phone booth where he’d been spotted minutes earlier, laughing with lunatic hysteria and pounding the wall, wearing a bright yellow jacket. For some reason I can remember the jacket very clearly. It was a ski jacket, with zippered pockets, a shiny canary color, with a bright red collar. He dropped the phone when he saw me and ran, but he went straight down the wrong alley right off the bat. When he realized he was cornered, Riley dropped into some kind of martial crouch and then I was on him. The fight was over in less than three seconds and ended with my knife at his neck. I gave him our terms, even though I’d wanted to see his spine worse than I’d ever wanted anything. Ten grand or I blew the whistle. A measly ten fucking grand. I stupidly listed off the names of everyone who was ready to testify to impress the gravity of the situation on him, how truly fucked he was, how my research had been so complete and so perfectly damning. Riley agreed to pass the information along and meet me with the money at one a.m, in the Dunkin’ Donuts by the college. He’d said he was sure it would work, that it was great we were stopping the guy, that if it hadn’t been him acting as the lasso man it would have been someone else, that he was truly sorry, that I should gut the biker whore. He’d said a lot of things, white foam at the edges of his mouth. He even wanted in on it. On the special nights, when he failed to find the right kind of urchin, he got a whipping and a really savage buttfucking. In the beginning he’d been fine with it, but he limped a little sometimes anymore, so he was game for an escape plan and some payback.
Jacob’s body was found in a dumpster three hours later.
An hour after that, three more went all the way down. An insane biker and a brass knuckle Mexican were sweeping up. I tried to find any of the others, but the night had turned into a nightmare of sirens and freezing wind and garbled rumors of the body count. They knew my name and it was everywhere. Even bill, Darby Holland. Three bills, Darby Holland. One grand, Darby Holland.