by Jeff Johnson
I drained the little cup and poured another in the same motion. By the third, my spirits had lifted somewhat and I was warm, though black specks flitted around the edges of my vision. I put the bottle back in the drawer and prowled the dark shop, my thoughts sufficiently lubricated. I took a ball bearing out of the top drawer of my desk and rolled it around in my palm and paced some more.
I had four options, as I understood things. One: go back to San Francisco and really get out of control in a bad way. Take the whole gang and some really hard-hitting scumbags with me. Things could resolve fast in fast-moving situations. I didn’t like the idea of hitting the gas like that and I’d disregarded the idea once already, but I had to reconsider it. Two: come clean to the feds and actually work with them. If I did that I would definitely get into trouble of some kind. I didn’t know for what, but there was every certainty of it. I’d already done too many bad things, and I was definitely going to do more. Three: somehow communicate with Dong-ju and back off of the Roland Norton flash, then just wash my hands of the entire thing. That was clearly the most sensible idea, but the one I dismissed first. It was too late, and it meant I was playing along with the system and letting myself get crushed by the hammer of the dollar. There was no way I was walking down that dead-end dirt road. I never had and I never would. And four: stall for time until I found a sweet spot, an opening of some kind to maneuver through. Take my time and look for a window. Keep beating down whoever Dong-ju sent. Maybe see what Delia turned up. Keep the street on fire and pour more gas on it. Score some dope and have Nigel run it as a reward system. That idea had some merit, but it was likely that whoever Dong-ju sent next would have a gun, and there might be more than one of them. I’d lose eventually, and possibly soon if Agent Pressman was right. Those were house odds. The biker-without-a-motorcycle knife-guy had been curiously amateur, either a solo operator who knew someone on Dong-ju’s payroll, or a playful, sacrificial warning from one of Dong-ju’s enemies. In either scenario, it confirmed the feds’ theory that Dong-ju had me under a microscope.
Whatever I eventually decided, I was exhausted and one of my cats had been out all night. I locked up the shop and drove home, keeping an eye on the rearview. The gray streets were empty.
When I got home I called Buttons as I walked up the steps, but he didn’t come. When he finally did get home he was going to be pissed, I thought. Out all day and all night. An angry cat could really hurt your feelings. I checked the porch for signs of little wet paw prints, but there were none. No massive boot prints either.
On opening the door I knew immediately that someone was in my apartment. I silently closed the door again and took the steel ball out of my pocket. It was warm and slippery in my suddenly sweaty hand. The hammering of my heart swept my exhaustion aside, at least for the moment, and I felt my face twist into a mask of violated rage. That was it. I took a deep breath and felt my chest crackle with life. I could taste blood in my mouth.
I gently pushed the door back open and went in low, my right hand cocked to deliver a speedball to someone’s face as a prelude to barehanded strangulation. The apartment was dark, but my eyes adjusted in three rapid blinks. I closed the door and quietly locked everyone inside with me. Then I stood.
Cordelia Evelyn Ashmore was asleep on the couch, breathing softly. There were six Sierra Nevada Pale Ale bottles on the coffee table next to her. Her sketchbook and a pencil lay in the mix. Both cats were sprawled out over her legs, regarding me suspiciously. Buttons yawned and lowered his head. Chops snorted like a baby hog and rooted into the warmth at Delia’s side. She stirred slightly and quieted.
Her mouth was slightly open. I stood over her and studied her face. Asleep, she looked like a forest pixie from a fantasy movie, Lord of the Rings without the pointy ears. She seemed almost frail without her personality blazing from her compact body. I pulled the blanket she had stolen from my bed over her leg and her bony shoulder and studied her peaceful face again. Amazing, I thought, the things that came out of that mouth when she was awake. Cordelia Evelyn Ashmore. Another mystery. I walked through the dining room and found a note she’d left on the table.
“Let myself in to check on Pinky and Dillson since you were in jail. Again. You’re really racking up some debt. I have better things to do. You better give good head, loser. —D. PS if I’m asleep don’t wake me up or I’ll barf. I drank all your beer.”
I took a shower, checked on Delia again, and finally climbed into bed. The house was quiet. I turned out the light, and as tired as I was sleep didn’t come. Eventually I lit up a cigarette and smoked in the dark, then finally sat up and turned on the light.
I got up and opened the bottom drawer of my dresser, moved the clothes out of the way. In the back was an old cigar box. I carefully lifted it out and set it on top of the dresser. It was layered with old tape and bad memories. It was one of the very first things I’d bought when I first got to Portland, for two bucks at a junk store that had vanished from Old Town two decades ago. I opened it.
Inside was a skull ring. Tin, the kind of thing that cost five dollars at a head shop in Denver in 1989. There was a deck of playing cards from a Vegas casino, all the aces missing. And a small framed picture. The three oldest things I had, that I’d somehow kept with me against all odds. I took the picture out and held it under the lamplight.
The glass was cracked. The frame was bent and old, but nowhere near as old as the photo. It was a picture of me and my brother. He was sitting on the floor, maybe all of four years old, a worried kid with big eyes. He had his arm around me. I was standing in a trash bag, smiling, curly hair. Some kind of juice had stained my mouth. My eyes were going to look just like his in a few more years, but I was too young right then to know. I often wondered what I’d been thinking, what he’d been thinking, who had taken the picture, where we were. That kind of thing. I always felt a singular variety of sad’s emotional cousin when I looked at it, something I never felt at any other time, but knowing I still had it made me feel something, too. Maybe I’d tell Delia about it someday.
I put it back in the cigar box and put the box away, rearranged the clothes to hide it, and closed the drawer. Then I got back in bed and turned out the light again. Maybe someday, I thought, I should try to find that dude, if he was still alive. Find him before I died or he did. Some kind of clock had started ticking around the time that picture was taken, and the ticking sound was louder now. Dmitri had talked about destiny like it was something proud he could cling to, which only meant that he had no idea what he was talking about. Chaos was his destiny, same as mine, same as everyone’s. I closed my eyes and I was asleep in seconds, holding my ball bearing like a talisman.
When I woke up at noon I felt like a pile of shit squeezed into a human-shaped cheesecloth. Sweaty and loose. My back hurt in a stinging way, like I’d scraped my spine on something rather than the digging-with-shovel ache. I’d slept for five hours.
The smell of coffee hit me, and close behind it the sound of humming. It was a Stooges tune, “No Fun.” I sat up and rubbed my face. My eyeballs made squeaking sounds. I groaned.
“Oh goody goody wakey wakey,” Delia called, singsong.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I called back in a hoarse voice. She padded into my bedroom with a steaming cup of coffee and set it on the nightstand. She was barefoot, wearing one of my black T-shirts and a pair of skintight, ripped-up jeans with white yarn Frankenstein stitching. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without makeup, in broad daylight no less, and her skin looked like milk, the skin around her eyes very tight, almost pulling at the lids of her large green eyes. Curiously healthy for a woman who had blacked out on my sofa, every bit the forest pixie I’d studied the night before. She patted my cheek and wrinkled her pug nose.
“You stink,” she said sweetly. She turned and padded back into the kitchen.
I took a sip of the coffee. It was pure rocket fuel, thick and black. I took another sip and fired up a smoke. From the kitchen came
the sound of running water.
I got up, stretched, and put some pants on. The water stopped and Delia’s humming came through again, a bebop version of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
“Brekkie,” she called.
I followed her into the dining room, where she set down two plates of cantaloupe, oranges, and buttered slices of baguette. I settled in front of a plate and she sat down across from me. Her sketchbook was by the ashtray, and it made me wonder how long she’d been awake, if she’d peeked in on me and seen my sleeping face. I watched as she picked up a piece of orange and popped it into her mouth. She watched me back.
“You didn’t molest me in my sleep, did you?” I asked. She shook her head and wiggled in her chair, obviously pleased.
“Good.” I sipped my coffee and picked up a piece of cantaloupe. “So what happened after the cops carted me off?”
“They asked us a bunch of questions. Standard stuff.” She took a big bite of bread and then talked around it with bulging cheeks. “Nigel and Big Mike were happy you took them out of the scene. And thanks for not telling them I threw that chair.”
I shrugged.
“We all told them the same thing. Scumbag comes in, says something to you and whips out a knife, you kick his ass, blah blah blah. They asked if you were some kind of psycho. They pulled your record, I guess. We said no, just slow and sort of unstable.”
“Huh. Good. They can add slow and unstable to the rest of the shit. I wonder what that will cancel out.” I ate some orange and then launched into a detailed account of what had happened with the feds. By the time I was done Delia had a serious look on her face.
“Holy fucking shit,” she summarized.
“Yep.”
“Strange about the scumbag. I almost wonder … It sounds plausible that it was a warning from one of Dong-ju’s competitors, but what if it really was Dong-ju? Even the feds said it wasn’t his style, but what if that was deliberate? What if Dong-ju is trying to confuse the feds? Make them ease up on him so he can move around while they look for another player? Darby, what if Dong-ju drove you out of town just to see where you would go? Just to follow you all the way to where you hide all your shit? Which you might want to check on at this point?”
“Interesting …”
“It would be just like a guy like that, to kill so many birds with one stone.” She looked worried. “So many possibilities.”
We thought about that for a moment.
“It figures that they assume this Nicholas Dong-ju is going to butcher you,” she said eventually. “I lamped the shit out of his ass on my lap top. My whore posse helped out too. Cashed in some favors and now we owe some.”
“What’d you guys find?”
“Mostly the kind of bad shit that backs up the feds’ butchering theory. He has a pretty low Internet profile—suspiciously low, considering—but no one can entirely escape the web. First, he’s some kind of Kung Fu dork, tournament level. Kendo too, same deal. Fought and won in China, Japan, Korea, you name it. Kendo is where these dudes dress up in bamboo and hit each other with sticks, in case you were wondering. Rich as hell, as in on the board of directors for someplace called the June Yacht Club, so he might have bought the trophies, but I somehow doubt it.”
“Great.”
“That is great, when you think about it. The man isn’t a scrapper, but he sure as fuck wants to be.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he’d probably be surprised if you pulled one of your classic Darby Holland moves. The fake stumble followed by the eye poke. The surprising face bite. The good old-fashioned dick punch. Even your totally original ball bearing speedball to the sternum is uniquely effective against any kind of fighter who actually knows what he’s doing. There’s no defense against that kind of flat-out chicanery.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You just threw a chair into some dude’s head. Yesterday.”
She wiggled around, pleased again. “I’m tiny. You’re … you. Kind of like Batman, but uneducated and broke. And your costume is perfect, because it looks just like street clothes.”
“Are you flirting with me? Batman? And is this all we’re eating? I’m fucking starving.”
Delia snorted in disgust and sashayed into the kitchen, returning with the coffee pot.
“Don’t even flatter yourself, you messy-haired weirdo. My kind does not flirt with yours except out of habit. I know the kind of wretched yuppie poon you slobber yourself to sleep dreaming about and no way am I putting on a power suit and carrying lube in a briefcase so you can blow your load in my ass in a fancy boardroom, plus you don’t even—”
“Change of subject. Back to Dong-ju and breakfast.” I finished the bread and the fruit and pushed the plate back. “That made me hungry.”
“Mexican?” She cocked her hip, standing in the kitchen doorway. I shrugged.
“Okay then. And quit looking at my ass.” She went back into the kitchen and got eggs out of the refrigerator. I watched as she started cracking them and lit another smoke.
“So to continue,” she said as she worked, “this rich martial artist, art collecting, temperamental boss of Bling also seems to have pissed off the feds, but you already knew that. He was also mentioned in a Chronicle article a few years ago, and it might have started there. Bigi found that by the way, says you owe her a bare-bottom spanking, but in the article he was in some hot water over shady investment activity. It was never mentioned again, so he probably got off.”
“Did it say what?” I didn’t really care.
“You don’t really care,” Delia said. She finished cracking eggs and started whisking. “I read the entire article and even I had a hard time figuring it out, but it seems like he had provenance issues based on undated materials sold at a Sotheby’s auction.”
“What a total fucker,” I said.
“I know. Douchbag, right?” She disappeared from view and I heard one of the burners fire, followed by the clang of a sauté pan. “So not much else. His house was mentioned in an architecture magazine, but only in passing. No photos of him, which was weird. But he really does seem to be an art collector. He has a few pieces out for show from time to time. Mostly industrial crap. Big. He likes glass and metal and red.”
“Huh. So no pictures of him? Not even a blurry one? Harvard yearbook?”
“Nope, but I was thinking Obi could get one of his loopier clients to go after him with a camera. You have a little money to spread around after robbing Bling.”
“True.” I smoked and thought about it while Delia chopped a yellow onion and opened a can of green chilies. “I guess I’d rather keep Obi out of it. He’d just do it himself and refuse to charge me. He has that kid now.”
“Your call, but you’re right.” She disappeared again and I heard the sizzle of chilies and onions hitting a hot buttery pan. “I bet we won’t need a picture though. I already know what he looks like.”
“Really.”
She popped her head around the corner. “Yep. A rich bad-ass. Korean, but probably only half, hence the Nicholas. Lives in that mansion of course, but wears Kung Fu pants around the house, athletic suits when he’s out. Except when he’s doing business, and then our boy is this year’s tailored Italian, always black. Real white teeth. Ponytail. Interesting eyes. Strong hands. Abs like yours, but without the scars.” She disappeared again.
“Draw a picture of that for Nige and Mikey,” I suggested. “I’ll give Monique a complete description to drop into the gutter, too. Be on the lookout for white-tooth karate-pants guy with a stick and boat shoes, possible gym clothes. Rob to death on sight, caution advised. Just in case he wants to make friends.”
“Use your imagination, Darby,” she scolded. “You wouldn’t even see him coming.”
I stubbed my cigarette out. She appeared in the kitchen doorway, a giant knife in one hand. She gestured with it.
“But I see everything,” she purred. She stood like that, staring at me with an unreadable smile, knife poised. I fe
lt a sudden, powerful pulse of love for her, and I realized how different the look on her face was from Pressman’s or Dessel’s, or anyone else’s. Delia really would use the knife in her hand. She’d use her fingernails. But most importantly, she would use her mind. For me. Some of the lead shifted around inside of me, old metal that had all but rusted into a fixed wad in a different age.
“I love you, Cordelia,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever used her full name. Maybe that was why she blinked.
“And I of course love you,” she replied. She gestured again with the knife, pointing at the bathroom. “Now go take a shower while I finish the migas. You have four minutes, so just hose off the big chunks.”
I went into my bedroom and stripped. I peeked out the door and scampered past into the bathroom when her back was turned.
“I saw that,” she called. “I wasn’t kidding about seeing everything, dude. Naked savage, early morning, super bad hangover with eggs in my face. I’m getting the pukes.”
I cranked the water and waited until steam started to roll. Four minutes later I emerged red and vibrant, ready to be butchered after a suitably vicious display of the combat techniques Delia was so fond of making fun of. She didn’t look up as I walked past with the towel around my waist. I though about snapping her one, but she still had the knife. When I got back to the dining room table she was already sitting, a steaming plate of migas, basically a green chili omelet with fried strips of corn tortilla, waiting for me. She’d given herself a tiny portion in comparison. I dug in.
“So what’s next?” She watched me closely, enjoying my poor manners. “You learn anything when you talked to Wally? You never told me.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. I had to be pretty vague about what I was looking for so he wouldn’t smell money.”
“Darby, he owes you.” Delia put her fork down. “I mean, money? Really? Again? You helped that old bastard get his mommy’s inheritance back after he spent it all on pussy and trips to Hawaii. You helped him pay off his house as part of the price tag for the Lucky, which wound up being way too fucking much and we all know it. He lied to you and cheated you for years, and now that all this is happening, you’re afraid to tell that shitty old man the truth? Even when it might save your life?”