by Jeff Johnson
My hand wrapped around the steel ball in my pocket. I watched him closely.
“Sorry about your brother,” I said.
He stared at me and then nodded, once.
“You think Dong-ju’s going to keep fucking with me? He seemed pretty pissed when I wouldn’t snort his coke or play live porno with his … whatever she was.”
He shrugged. “Nicky does what he does. He didn’t buy that house with food stamps, dumbass. He’s the best there is at whatever he feels like doing.” He squinted at me through a curl of smoke. “You play chess, little man?”
“Don’t even play checkers, dude.”
“Nicky plays eight games at a time. In his head. He doesn’t even have a board. Just calls people and tells them his next move. He never loses.”
“Gnarly.”
Milo shook his head. “You’re too stupid to understand what I’m saying.”
“I’m sure that’s true.” I smiled. “So exactly what does he do? Other than manipulate art, I mean.”
The driver peeled off the car. “I don’t like you. But I will give you one free piece of fact.” He looked up at the mad tangle of light and glass that was Dong-ju’s house. “Once you walk through that door, Nicky owns you. You do what he says and maybe you come out again. But he always keeps one finger on you. He’s somewhere in your head right now, and to him, you aren’t anything but a little tiny piece in a game your eyes are too small to see. That’s what he does.”
We stared at each other appraisingly. Eventually, I cleared my throat.
“Sucky,” I observed. “To be you, I mean.” I heard his hands crunch into old hammers.
“I better never see you again, kid,” he said evenly. I returned his flat gaze.
“It’s good to have hope.”
Whenever something is too easy, it makes me paranoid, and on a scale of one to ten I was hovering somewhere high up in the heartburn region around eight point five, especially after the conversation with Milo the driver. Every alarm bell was ringing and smoke and flashes of lightning filled me. My nostrils burned with ozone and phantom coke. My dick felt ichy. The scotch had left a bad cave-dirt taste in my mouth.
I had a white-knuckle grip on the wheel as I wound the Camry out of the foggy hills. It didn’t look like I was being followed, but I drove fast anyway. When I hit the freeway, I headed back toward the city, still eyeing the rearview mirror. The paranoia was going up instead of down as I got further away, so Milo the driver was right; Nicky was in my head. Nicky Dong-ju was clearly crazy. Not groovy crazy, but ticking time bomb, way fucked up nuts. I was totally certain that I hadn’t seen the last of him. It was like some part of him was sticking to me, and I wondered if Dong-ju had told Milo to tell people that story as a parting fear tool, if the creepy lecture had been scripted. If it was, then Milo needed a raise, because I was freaking out. Either way, the big question was when Dong-ju would surface again, and if I’d be lucky enough to catch it in time.
It was a bad time to be dealing with a situation like that, but then again there never seemed to be a good one. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by Dmitri and his brewing feud with the city, or the increasing pace of the demise of Old Town and the new, harder edge of the nightscape. I had to focus on Dong-ju for the present, as much as I could, without letting everything else go down the drain while I did. Eight games of chess in his head. Jesus. I hadn’t been kidding about the checkers.
The part about Dong-ju owning people after he interacted with them, in particular, had left me cold. It was almost like he was describing a one-man credit card company. There was something medieval in the vision of Dong-ju as some kind of wizardly investment guru that somehow fit together with everything else, like the snug pieces of a children’s puzzle depicting a flat plain of featureless brown. Billions of people were converted into cash every day, but in this case there weren’t even any shareholders to spread the blame around. That made Nicky Dong-ju sort of like the devil.
I blew out a long sigh and cracked the windows, then lit up a smoke, rental policy be damned. Maybe I was just worn out, I thought. Tired and stretched thin and hung over, harried by bullshit from every side into a state of general nervousness. He had given me the Roland Norton flash back and offered to purchase it legitimately, after all. He’d even apologized. The feds had evidently been to visit him, and nobody really wanted to screw around with them, no matter how many games of chess they played in their head at one time. Every criminal relied on heavy case loads and quickly diminishing interest, but they all knew that once the federal badge man got a good bite out of you, he wasn’t going to stop eating until dinner was finished, the silverware was licked clean and ready for auction, and the table was stolen from impound.
I shook my head. After twenty years of tattooing, I’d learned to read people well enough, I reminded myself again. Pressman and his morgue face, Dessel and his cheery death wish. Delia and her deep worry. Mikey’s coward side. Nigel’s inner sociopath. Gomez and the lost flowers. Dong-ju hadn’t liked that I’d found him, but he somehow hadn’t seemed too surprised, so complex fakery was conceivable. There was something too playful about him, a menacing variety of smoldering interest in the way he watched my every action, mapping my face with his eyes, like a hyper version of Agent Pressman, but with a new and troubling dimension. Dong-ju had the aura of a killer, the type of man who had poured boiling water on small animals as a boy. And the sudden snap between moods, the freakish whores. That was more than enough for me.
I took an off-ramp at random and checked the rearview again for any signs of a tail. No one exited after me and I soon realized why. I’d found my way into some awful California suburb that reminded me of a miniature Orange County, one of the nation’s most expensive urban blights and a place so close to hell that I’d never visit it again unless I stumbled upon a stray nuke. It did nothing to improve my mood, which was finally moving past panic into the edge of fury. I forced myself to relax my shoulders and something popped in my lower back.
I surveyed the darkening streets and what I saw somehow enabled me to take a rare detour on the road to anger. The exit to depression. No wonder people were decorating what was under their clothes. One look at where they had to live spelled it out. It was all of it the same, and the sameness had touched the dark side of the moon in the sleepers inside of it.
I wondered what this area had looked like back in Roland Norton’s day. The densely packed, middle-class ghetto of fast food chains and cheesy plastic restaurants, of barn-like houses plopped down on tiny wedges of lifeless Martian soil, had probably been low hills back then, with a few groves of fruit trees, maybe some grapes. Clean wind had played through long grass. Families might have had picnics there, driving out from the city in their DeSotos and good-time Sunday Chevys. Picnic baskets. Lemonade.
I shouldn’t have smacked that woman’s ass, I thought. If I’d been half a man, I would have crushed Dong-ju’s forehead right then, just buried a metal ball in his brain, frisbeed the coke slab into the driver’s ruined knees, burned the whole entire shithole of a mansion to the ground, and then peed on the smoking foundation. Taken those women straight to an airport and given them enough Bling dough to make a go of it somewhere, anywhere. Maybe robbed Dong-ju’s palace before the arson and given them that, too. I swore and smacked my forehead. At the next stoplight I took the ball bearing out of my pocket and looked at it, then held it as I drove.
The ridiculous metal ball was a symbol of something I believed in, perhaps one of the only things I knew to be true. That metal ball was what Delia had tried to remind me of, even though as a symbol she found it lacking. I’d resolved a long time ago to make my own rules, and it was a more complicated resolution than was easily realized. I would not carry a gun just because everyone else did. I hated the things and viewed them as one of America’s most flagrant pusswad atrocities. I wasn’t going to shoot someone just because they shot at me. I might, but it wasn’t part of any kind of “plan” I had. In many other ways as
well, I tried to never let the world around me tell me what I was going to do next, to force me to mirror behavior good or bad, confusing or terrible. Maybe that made me a dick sometimes.
All my adult life I’d tried to live that way, first because I had no choice and then later because of pure cussedness mixed with other, darker, more lonesome things. I decided what it was to be a boss, a friend, a neighbor. Other people could believe what they wanted and do what they would, but there was some kind of priceless freedom in being alone enough to decide every time to do what you, the individual, should do. I often failed in that regard, but I was generally going to do what I felt like I could live with, and a lot of the time it barely made any sense at all.
So many things were changing, as poor Dmitri had said, and I was in the middle of a situation where I didn’t know any of the rules I was supposed to break, least of all my own. I glanced at the ball in my hand and felt a ripple of doubt. It was entirely possible that my philosophy was a little too fortune cookie. Maybe Milo had been right. Maybe my eyes were too small to see the big picture.
Fuck it, I thought. It was absolutely the wrong time to reexamine my life and have deep and harmonious choir practice with the universe. I clicked on the radio and settled on a Mexican pop music station. I’d always been able to convince myself that they were going on about something cheery, since I couldn’t understand the lyrics. After a few more turns, I found my way out of the hellish suburb and into something different and oddly soothing, an older area with slices of ocean occasionally visible in the distance through patches of wind-gathered fog. I followed the streets down to the coast and eventually onto a wide boulevard that ran into a tourist strip. There was a Best Western right on the beach, so I pulled in and checked it out. A room with a balcony overlooking the beach: two hundred and seventy bucks, once again courtesy of Bling and the pharmaceutical industry. I paid in cash.
I needed to unwind, so after I tossed my bag and the portfolio into the room I walked down to the strip and stretched, then went in search of a bar. I found a promising one a block down, in the front half of an old, weathered steak house called Jimmie’s. It was dark inside, a solid wood and brass type of place, and the atmosphere settled around me like a comfortable old coat. It smelled like steak, oyster shells, old beer, and Lysol—my kind of place. I thought about calling Obi or Carina, but I decided not to. They were both more than an hour away and there was a chance some asshole would attack me that night, plus I was in too weird a mood to bother anyone without feeling guilty about it later. I nursed a beer and a Jameson’s on the rocks and ordered the prime rib plate with salad.
“Where you from?” the bartender asked, after I’d ordered dinner and it looked like I was going to be there for a while. I squinted at his nametag. Mike.
“Up the coast a little,” I replied. “Just in town for the night.”
“Fog, huh?”
I nodded. He accepted the chatter pass and wandered down the bar, doing bartender things.
Some rowdy surfer guys and gals came in and sat down. I turned on my stool a little and watched them. I’d always had a thing for surfer chicks—they qualified as a cousin to my athletic librarian dream bride. The evening was firming up, so to speak. It was soothing to listen to them talk about waves and secret breaks. After a while they segued into a lengthy discourse about some kind of new rack one of them was thinking of getting for a van. I knew there were people out there in the world, especially in America, who led carefree lives like theirs. I hadn’t been designed to be one of them, but it was nice to eavesdrop on them now and again.
My food came and I tore into it. I hadn’t eaten since the oysters that morning and I’d been driving around fueled by nothing more than a stomach full of Dong-ju’s cave water and the steam power of mean. I finished the prime rib and the salad and pushed the empty plate back, sated but still light. I could and maybe should have eaten another entire round, because sometimes I felt the hunger behind the hunger, when I’d been burning for too long, but I needed the room for booze. The cheery group of surfers evidently knew Mike the bartender and maintained a friendly banter with him. They gave him standing instructions to bring a pitcher of margaritas every five minutes until one of them fell out of a chair, which he obliged.
“I made it,” one of them said. Adorable, with a sunburned face, wide set eyes, and long, clean limbs. She looked healthy, hard, and full of sky and sails. She was talking about a BBQ grill.
“Let’s take it to the point,” her boyfriend suggested. “Scrambled duck eggs at dawn.” He was lean and fit, L. L. Bean. I was in too good a mood to dislike him for having what I might have had in a different life. For some reason that made me go internal. That woman had made a BBQ with her own hands, with the express purpose of taking it to the beach, and that dream realized had been expanded to duck eggs at dawn. I needed that. I needed that more than I needed any of this other shit, and it was possible. Unlikely, but we were all going somewhere. Maybe it was the hooch; Nicky Dong-ju eased back out of my head a little. I more watched than listened at that point. By drink number four I had a secondhand surfer buzz.
I left before any of them wiped out, feeling okay for the first time that day, emotionally smeared. The fog was a little thicker as I walked back to the hotel, but it seemed less menacing, less like something full of hidden danger and more like something I could hide in. I waved at the little Lebanese clerk at the front desk of the Best Western and took the two flights of stairs up to my room. Before I slid the pass card through the electronic door lock, I put my hand around the ball bearing in my pocket.
The room was empty. I shot the bolt on the door and went to the balcony, pulled the curtain aside, and opened the sliding door. The heavy night air that rolled in smelled like ocean and wet street. I added some cigarette smoke to it as I reviewed the day.
On impulse, I went to the portfolio Dong-ju had given me and took out all the Roland Norton flash, spread it over the bed. I picked up each one in turn and inspected it closely.
They were definitely the originals. Flash from that period was generally done on a type of pressboard, which was essentially several sheets of paper glued back to back. Thick, sturdy stuff. They had the manufacturer’s faded green stamp on the back and all the water damage was consistent with what I remembered.
Still, the sheets had been tampered with. Restored, I guess is the word. The edges had been faced with a nonreactive tape I recognized from other old collections, but which I didn’t use myself, and the new facing held in place a thin sheet of UV acetate to protect the surface from exposure to light and moisture. An expensive job had been worked on the pieces, very professional.
I put them back in the rich leather case and went back out on the balcony. My return flight was in the morning unless I wanted to change it, and I couldn’t see any reason to. I sat down in one of the white plastic patio chairs and fired up another smoke, listened to the surf I couldn’t see through the thickening fog. I was essentially blind to the world around me right then. Also half drunk in a city I didn’t particularly like, and I’d just met with a killer who was always right in front of me. But I’d managed to hit my emotional reset button, so it was the perfect time and place for a little late-night reflection.
I took in a big breath of ocean air. The distant Pacific tide pulsed like a giant heartbeat, scraping across the sand and rocks in the darkness. Tomorrow the planet would rotate around to the sun again, and my little late-night puzzles would seem different to me. No matter how I played the hand I’d been dealt, no matter what I decided, for better or for worse, I’d be out of that fog by noon.
I got up and went to the minibar, poured myself a drink, then went back to the patio chair to smoke with it as I listened to my train of thought. Roland Norton. I’d looked him up on the Internet and so had Delia. There was nothing, not even a whisper of a digital rumor that he had ever walked the Earth. Roland Norton might have left a trail, even as an alias, but he hadn’t. Delia had taken it personally and spent
hours and hours before she finally gave up. Red Avery had mentioned the black market, and Dong-ju had smelled like it. He’d reeked of it. The feds, the weirdo games. The coke and the disturbing whore women. That terrible painting. The feds had never actually seen the flash. They didn’t realize how shitty it was, how it had to be part of a bigger picture in some way. I put my smoke out, went back in and poured two more fingers of whiskey, then pocketed the room key and my smokes and took the stairs down to the lobby.
It was still quiet. The lone desk clerk was sitting in front of the computer at check in, fighting off the sleepy jazz drone Muzak with a jumbo coffee. He looked up and smiled. I tossed my head at the guest center computer.
“Okay if I use that for a few minutes?”
“Go ahead. Need help just let me know.” He looked back down.
I carried my drink over to the little computer station. It wouldn’t take more than a minute. I typed “Panama 1955” into Google search. Remon-Eisenhower Treaty. I didn’t even bother reading it. Instead I sipped and scrolled down. A dude named Jose Antonio Remon Cantera had died. Sad news, but I didn’t do it. There were images for Panama 1955. A treaty was signed. The president was slain.
I considered reading all of it. I was tired and a little drunk, past tipsy. It was the kind of research that might not lead anywhere, but there was a possibility of finding something. I yawned and then scrolled back up to the search bar. “Panama Black Market Crime 1955.” The sound of my fingers on the keyboard echoed with déjà vu.
I hissed. Then I sat down.
Two hours later I went back into my hotel room and poured myself another drink, tossed my notes on the dresser. After I gulped it down I poured another and then spread the Norton flash back over the bed again, this time face down.
The backs all had a code stamped into them in faded green, right under the paper manufacturer’s stamp. It was the same set of numbers in two of the sheets. I wrote them all down and then carefully studied each one again. The coffee stains and random pen and pencil marks, the smudges and signs of wear were all consistent with flash that had seen active duty for a few years, then been stored in a box in a forgotten corner of a storeroom in a tattoo shop in a rainy city. I rearranged them a few times to see if an impressionistic code image emerged. None did. Then I turned them back over and studied them ugly side up.