by Jeff Johnson
“Dessel.”
“Darby Holland from Lucky Supreme. I just wanted to call and tell you I got all my stuff back. Had to brag to someone. I’m in a questionable mood and I thought it might make me feel better.”
“What happened?” I could hear the clatter of federal industry in the background.
“I made an appointment with Dong-ju and explained everything. He gave my shit back. We drank some scotch. I came home. End of story.”
“Sounds easy.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew he wanted me to come in and tell him the entire story. He knew I wasn’t going to.
“You meet with him at his house?”
“If you could call it that.”
Agent Dessel laughed. “I’ve seen pictures. We have some limited surveillance stock, but there was a photo spread in Architectural Digest.”
I snorted.
“He whipped out the Matterhorn of cocaine, didn’t he?” Dessel almost sounded wistful. “Maybe offered up one of his half-sisters? You knew they were his sisters, right?”
I had no reply.
“Something we think he picked up in Russia. At least they do the same thing over there, anyway. Did you man up and blister the ass of one of them? Maybe both? Get all gacked out on Nicky’s fancy blow and do the public cowboy dance? Hoedown corn porn?”
“Up yours, Dessel,” I growled.
“They probably have just about every disease know to modern medical science,” Dessel said before I could hang up, “but no condoms allowed, am I right?”
“I didn’t … shit, man. I have style. Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“You’re damned either way, Holland. If you didn’t play Dong-ju’s little game it makes you a pussy in his eyes, and therefore sympathetic to pigs like yours truly. If you did … well, I’m just glad I’m not the doctor that’s going to be holding your rotting dick in my hand in a few weeks. I’d have to commit suicide. If you’d have called me first, I might have advised you to have Dong-ju mail your stuff back to you. Actually going down there was borderline … I mean, I have no idea what that was. You’re lucky we aren’t tweezering little pieces of you out of a carpet right now.”
“It’s over,” I replied. “The guy was nuts, but I’m out of it.”
“I doubt it. I guess”—he interrupted himself with a boyish laugh—“I guess I’m just surprised to be talking to you, Mr. Holland. People have this amazing way of changing forever after meeting Nicky in his home. But he’s probably never met anyone like you, because there can’t be any more of you. I bet you made him laugh.”
“I was high comedy, you creepy—”
“You know,” Dessel interrupted, playing at thinking out loud, “we have no idea how he travels. Master of slipping a tail. He’s in one place and then, like magic, he’s somewhere else. Are you calling from home? Peek under the bed for me.”
I admit I leaned forward and peered out at the front door.
“This man never misses a beat, Holland,” Dessel continued. “I have it all right here. Last year he bought a vintage Aston Martin in Saudi Arabia, had it transported to Italy. Five days later it was found off the coast in one hundred meters of water, as in dumped off a boat. Two days after that he deposits three million yen into a bank in Switzerland. Now what do you make of that?”
“Why are you telling me any of this?”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. He finally cleared his throat.
“I’m sure you’ve come across your share of pathological liars, Mr. Holland. But I doubt you’ve come across a hyperlogical one. Dong-ju toys with codes inside of riddles at the core of doublespeak as a warm-up exercise. Think about it, as it were. Did his driver tell you anything? It would have been at the very end of the night. This is key to understanding exactly how fucked you are. It’s a certain kind of speech, but there are variations. If he did, then—”
I hung up.
At times like that, and there were many of them, I thought about splitting town for good. I had Bling’s money and some savings of my own. I could hole up in Belize for a few years, eat beans and rice, maybe take up spear fishing. Sell weed or flip-flops on the beach, something harmless and stupid. Embrace my inner cretin, who was sitting in the corner these days, lonesome and ignored because no one had invited him to the party this month. Find some rich Eurotrash bimbo and learn the secret language of her bikini. Do some laughing. Learn how to tango and get good at it. It was a fantasy I had a few times a year, but it was the second time that week.
So I let myself dream for a few minutes.
I drove home from the Lucky once Dwight had packed it in and Nigel had finally arrived, early once again, and presumably armed. We put up the BACK IN TEN, GETTING HEAD sign and went into the back room.
“Delia told me you got the Norton crap back. Dude as psycho as she said?”
“Worse. You had to be there. Even the feds think the guy is going to kill me.”
“Shoot your mouth off?”
“Big time.” I shook my head, darkness in my eyes. “I couldn’t help it, Nige. I guess Bling’s dick is going to fall off soon, and that’s pretty much the bright side.”
“That is one yucky grande of a bright side, boss. I take it we’re still on red alert? Me and my gun are … okay hanging out during office hours?”
“Just don’t tell me about it, dude. No harm, no foul, but just so you know I was already aware that you’re packing. Of course you are, because everything is totally out of control, so why wouldn’t you be? Jesus.”
He looked almost apologetic. Almost.
“The red alert has moved up to spurting red, dudeboy. Plus, Dmitri has gone downhill and we have inspector issues. The city. So, ah, crisis.”
Nigel sat and rubbed his face. “We should move to fuckin’ Mexico. Start a tattoo shop in Cabo and change our names. Dibs on Coug, and I’m thinking I’ll go for the permanent aviator glasses look. You can be Little Bob Barracuda, ride a Ducati. Carry a sword. Delia can get a bunch of Communion dresses and pretend like she’s your autistic sister. Mikey can finally be a drag queen.” He sighed and kept rubbing. “But I’m probably the only one of us with a solid fake ID.”
“Think again. Belize, but I still have to check on the extradition, mostly because all the crime we’ll have to do to get out of this shit. Frito pie and BBQ joint, I run the kitchen with Delia, you take the bar, Big Mikey is the waitress. We can tattoo Europeans in the bathroom, lie low in style.” I sniffed. “What the fuck stinks in here?” It smelled like a locker room mixed with extra feet and Febreeze.
“Mikey. He’s been sleeping back here for the last two nights. He drinks beer, farts, snores between burps, farts, and eats pork rinds with hot sauce and sour cream and onions.” Nigel shook his head. “I sent him home until midnight to burn his clothes and rub himself down with turpentine.”
“Super. So one more bad. I need you to score some bags off of Lenny. Twenties, maybe five of them. Tell Lenny to put the word out that we’re expecting a robbery of some kind and we want his people one block closer and watching. First one who sees something and gives us a heads up gets the bags. They’re already looking, but this will bring it up a notch.”
“Why not just give Lenny a bill?” Perplexing Nigel with a mutant variation of Three Card Monte would normally make me smile. He looked like a convict taking an algebra test.
I shook my head. “He’d just keep it. But five bags is a convincing hard cash illusion. We have a slice of his pie, so we’re a repository worth guarding. We need to be a bank with credit cards for the next little while.”
Nigel nodded. “A bank with credits cards … Genius. This is on par with your Monique attack. You’re stepping up, man. Strategy and timing and guile, with th—”
I got up. “Thanks for the knob job, homie. Let’s hop to.”
Nigel got up too and started for the door. “Don’t mention it and I won’t. Gotta work on those teeth, boss. I think you swallowed some of my skin.”
I raised my fist and he ducked. When Nigel opened back up and got to work on his first job of the night, I watched the street patterns, looking for ripples. It looked like it was going to be reasonably quiet, which for once was good news. I told him I’d check in later and he gave me the double wink on Lenny, so I went back to my office, put the box of Bling’s pill cash in a paper bag, and headed out to my car. Two of Lenny’s boys were on the corner a block down pointed our way, so I went home to lie low.
It was dark by the time I pulled up in front of my place. I sat in the car for a while, listening to the soft patter of rain on the roof, thinking. I went in and greeted the cats, flipping lights as I passed through. There was a stack of mail on the floor in front of the drafty mail slot. I tossed it on the dining room table and put the bag with the cash box on the floor next to the curio cabinet.
I turned on the AM jazz station on my big antique radio and got out the Roland Norton flash again, surveying it one last time. I didn’t even know why. The old Navy and Merchant Marine garbage made a little more sense, but the flat, dimensionless flowers of unknown genus, the kid drawings of skulls, all the rest … in the end I had to grudgingly admit that it was what so many newbies and hacks in the field call “solid and well designed” as part of their phony stone-age worship mantra because they couldn’t draw and needed the line. I was being critical because I didn’t like the style, in the same way that I’m instantly critical of modern country music. Norton could have been their one-eyed god if he had made another hundred sheets. I shook my head. It was still amazing what Nicky Dong-ju wanted to pay for it. I didn’t know what to make of it all, but if the city came down on me hard in the near future, I would have to sell it back to him if he was still in the market. I might not have any choice.
A few years ago an old customer of mine had moved back east and left me his gun safe as a parting half-gift, as in he couldn’t afford to move it even ten feet. It was a six-foot, half-ton monster the size of an industrial refrigerator. Moving it myself was out of the question, so for reasons of my own I’d obligingly taken over his storage space. After Bling’s theft, I’d copied most of the valuable pieces of flash and stored the originals in it. When I’d put all the good originals in the half-ton metal closet for safekeeping, I’d put my other two Norton pieces in with them, mostly because the way the cats sniffed at them whenever they got into the closet I’d tossed them into made me suspect they had them pegged as a pee target. Many customers had a habit of leaving me other things when they moved, often trading for a final tattoo session or two. I had two broken motorcycles I still didn’t know how to fix stored with the safe, a driving lawn mower with a busted rototiller attachment, a crate of single-cask bourbon I didn’t want to keep at home because I’d get drunk every night, a huge Styrofoam monkey head from a parade float, and various other oddities.
I didn’t have any plans for the evening, so I decided to put the Roland Norton flash into the gun safe, as well as all of Bling’s cash. It didn’t seem like a good idea to leave either lying around the house with pissed-off feds and eccentric gangsters sniffing around. It was a perfectly shitty night for it, though.
I carefully wrapped the Norton flash in plastic wrap and then put it in a trash bag and taped it shut. Then I put the entire thing back in Dong-ju’s fancy portfolio and zipped it. The gun safe was airtight, but you could never be too careful. If it hadn’t been for Bling’s pill money, I might have put the trip off for another day.
I opened the money box and took out a small stack of bills and put them in the antique meat grinder in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, then taped the box closed. I considered it very possible that Dong-ju and Bling had had a chat after my last visit and that one way or another Bling had disappeared again, in which case I was a little richer. If I told Delia that I’d entertained the notion of returning any of the money, she’d probably slap me half to death. Nigel and Big Mike would both probably quit, reasoning that I had finally lost the rest of my mind.
The drive to the storage space was a somber one. I went down Burnside and took a right on MLK, headed north. I followed it to Broadway and took a left down toward the river. When I hit the interstate, I went north again, into the heart of the riverside industrial zone.
It was a bleak place with rambling, Stalinesque buildings of indeterminate function ringing the railroad switchyards. The Seed Factory was there, a blazing art co-op built in the shell of a desperately shabby brick building of esoteric historical rumor. The slow, wide Willamette reflected the lights of the downtown skyscrapers west across the water. Bright halogen lamps illuminated a muddy, rain-swept landscape dotted with clumps of rusting machinery and abandoned construction material. Nigel and I had spent a fine drunken evening wandering around the entire place, working our way through the undersides of the bridges and through the muddy lots. It had been a semi-traumatic evening in that we’d both been wearing suits. I’d been out on a date that had gone disastrously wrong when the woman in question had revealed herself to be a born-again Christian, and that the nature of our evening together had been a ploy to bring about my salvation. Nigel had been on a simultaneous date of similar quality, cut short for completely different reasons. The stripper for whom he’d bought two expensive bottles of wine, high-end caviar, and truffle pate to woo over a romantic twilight picnic, a true rarity for him in the romance department, had shown up for their rendezvous coked out of her mind with her super-pissed-off boyfriend/pimp. When my phone rang that night, I was dialing his number to see if he’d wanted to get loaded and help me find my way back to Satan. He’d been calling me because he was been afraid he’d broken his arm. We’d met at a bar minutes later and gotten half drunk, and then gone down to my storage unit to look at my motorcycles and drink Nigel’s wine. We ate the caviar and pate with our fingers because he’d lost the crackers. Nigel had declared the motorcycles to be crap and after the second bottle and some of the single cask we’d gone exploring, too drunk to drive, and Delia couldn’t be reached for extraction. The midnight exploration had ruined both of our suits and I’d wound up at one point washing my hands in a puddle he later informed me that he’d peed in moments before. A bonding experience between men. But I knew my way around what was over the fences and around the corners down there. It wasn’t pretty.
The U-Store-It was a giant yellow one-story concrete building abutting the underside of the Steel Bridge. It had probably been a storage facility for boat parts in the Second World War and converted for civilian use sometime afterward. My unit had outside access, so I parked directly in front of its roll-up metal door. It was raining a little harder. I cut the engine and got the flashlight out of the glove box. The wiring inside the place had burned out years ago or been shut off at the breakers, so there was no juice inside.
I gathered up my packages and sprinted the ten feet to the door. I was soaked by the time I got the two massive, crusty padlocks open and rolled the rusted door up high enough to duck under.
I thumbed the flashlight on and walked over the cracked concrete floor to the gun safe. The small space was cold and smelled like engines and rat poison. I’d completely forgotten about the bundle of deep sea fishing poles, the banjo, the old carousel horse with two broken legs, and the beanbag. All four tires on my riding mower were flat. I wished I’d brought gloves as I spun the heavy dial on the steel door of the gun safe with my frozen fingers. When I finished the combination, I pulled the hinge bar down and the heavy metal door swung open silently. I played the flashlight over the contents.
The stack of lumpy, bumpy Arnie Kirby flash was on the left. Next to it were my four Owen Jensen pieces, which I liked. One bitchin’ Cliff Raven. There were twenty or so others, mostly from Rex Nightly’s stylish LA hotrod set. I thought about opening the packaging on the Owen Jensen pieces to look at them again, but it was too cold and my wet hands were streaked with rust.
I put Bling’s box of cash on the empty ammo shelf at the top of the safe, wiped my hands on my pants for the tenth t
ime, and then took the Roland Norton flash out of the rain-speckled portfolio. The plastic-wrapped parcel was dry, so I placed it inside next to the one of the two pieces of Roland Norton flash Bling hadn’t stolen. On impulse I took one of them out and looked at it in the dim light.
It was the sheet of flash that had been at the very bottom of the box I’d found the collection in, stuffed away in Wally’s comically sloppy style in the back of the Lucky Supreme’s lounge, which at the time was just an extremely filthy storage room. It was so warped and water damaged, so mildew streaked and bent that I’d almost thrown it away along with the other one, which was almost as bad. It was also the crudest piece of them all, with a chubby, moth-like butterfly and the bust of a cross-eyed, big-chested woman with an empty banner underneath it. Most of the remaining surface was empty, like he’d run out of ideas after those two masterpieces.
The thick flashboard itself was peeling apart. I looked at the fraying edges and thought about the facing Dong-ju had done on the other pieces. It could be worth it to try and restore the last two and toss them into the collection for a few extra bucks. I turned it around and examined the upper right hand corner, the worst part, and frowned. The paper was delaminating into multiple layers. I struck my thumbnail into the center and gently pried it open to test the glue.
The thin sheets on the inside were … greenish. I angled the flashlight into the crack I’d opened and the light revealed a short sequence of faded black numbers. My heart thumped and I licked my lips. The wheels in my head were finally getting traction.
I peeled the front of the flash off in one smooth stroke. Behind it were layers and layers of treasury bills and bearer bonds, all of them circa 1955. Most of them had been destroyed by time and the water damage, but some of them were still intact. I looked at the amounts. Two thousand. Ten thousand. Twenty-one thousand. Five hundred. I had no idea what they were worth today, but I’d bet it all that Dong-ju did. Every piece had been stacked like this, I was sure. The new facing, the new edges … They had all been mined except for these two, the very last pieces in a million-dollar-plus collection. It was the best smuggling operation I’d ever heard of, but at some point everything had evidently gone horribly wrong, and Roland Norton’s operation had somehow been lost in time, shuffled away into boxes that wound up in the back of the Lucky Supreme and a few other places around the world. There was no telling how many pieces other than mine and Wes Ron’s Dong-ju had acquired, and who else knew about them. The people who had been looking for them for over fifty years would never have found mine if I hadn’t hung it up, if Bling had never crossed one of them. I looked up into the darkness and the memory of the blind fish in the slimy water swam up again.