by Jeff Johnson
“Dong-ju’s gone,” Dessel said shortly. “Vanished.”
I shrugged. “Fuckin’ who cares.”
“Any idea where he went?” Agent Pressman asked, giving me his x-ray. Delia stiffened beside me. I patted her skinny plastic leg.
“Mexico,” I replied easily, “or maybe southeast Asia. Florida. Isn’t that where people go when the feds are after them?”
“Maybe so,” Dessel said. He cocked his head a little, trying to avoid Delia’s glare, focusing on me alone. Pressman had clearly met his match. He was looking away. “The question is, how did he know? Why did he go from lawyered up but cooperative to gone?”
“You think maybe I ratted you out?” I asked. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my hands behind my head.
“No. That’s not what I think.” Agent Dessel looked at me like Pressman had for the first time, really watching.
I realized then what Delia had evidently picked up on already. I’d been wrong about those two. Pressman might have been good, but he was the old man with the bad numbers on the team. It was Dessel who had been running the brain department from the start. He was brilliant at what he did, on a level that had cleanly slipped past my face-reading skills. I’d been outmatched in a game I played well. He’d been all over me, using Pressman’s surly demeanor as a distraction while he mopped up my reactions. He was doing it right then. Only the orientation of Delia’s body had tipped me off. She was pointed at Dessel like a cobra the snake charmer had failed to hypnotize. I was lucky he hadn’t busted me on something with that huge brain, but it was that kind of month.
“I need to get back to work,” I said, showing the sheaf of bills. “Gimme a little heads up when you need to use me as human bait again, Dougie. In fact, you still owe me a favor, as I recall. So I guess no in advance.”
“We’re even,” Dessel said. “For today.” They walked out without looking back.
“I’d watch out for that kid,” Delia said, hopping off the desk. “He’s a smartypants.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
The truth was that if a scumbag like Dong-ju disappeared, his empire would be gobbled up by his lackeys and butlers and stagehands. The feds would have plenty to do just keeping track of which new kings came from where. These would be the new suspects, who would figure large in the eyes of all the feds I hadn’t smarted off to, including Pressman and Dessel’s superiors. Nicky Dong-ju had been slated for a mysterious burial and they all knew it. The how and why might have mattered to someone at some point, but in the end, when everyone went home with their list of new names, after one short week, the truth of it would only matter to me.
Gomez and I had a contractor customer of mine go through the Lucky Supreme, the Rooster Rocket, and the Korean mini-mart next door. He gave us a laundry list of violations, from glaring electrical hazards to makeshift plumbing repairs, all of it in the Lucky and Gomez’s place. The old Korean lady had done much better over the years. We had to call in a translator to deal with her and her family. It turned out that they thought the Lucky was a hair salon. They’d never peeked in. They thought Gomez and Flaco ran the new incarnation of the porno theater that had been there before them. They had taken the news that the Rooster Rocket was a bar and that the Lucky was a tattoo parlor with an indifferent shrug, and as an afterthought one of them had asked that Flaco discontinue selling tacos. No one ever knew why. The grand total bill to fix it all was a little over fourteen thousand dollars. Gomez and I reluctantly split it, as Dmitri flatly refused to even listen to me when I approached him. Roland Norton and Jason Bling paid my half and the repairs were done in five days on the down-low, mostly at night. There was coke involved, and everything else was paid in cash. No inspectors hit up the Lucky during construction, and when they finally did, they grudgingly gave us permission to carry on for the time being.
When I called Obi to check in with him, he had interesting news.
“It’s gone, boss,” he said. “The Teething Hot Dog Tattoo Stand was gutted in the night about a week ago.” A week to the day after I’d rolled Dong-ju’s body into the river. “Even the sign is gone. I talked to one of the women at the hair salon next door. She came in last week and it was like a midnight fire sale had happened. I guess the building might be getting sold, too, though she didn’t really know.”
I told him where Bling lived and he went over to the apartment and found it empty, too. The neighbor, a very pregnant woman with bad acne, told Obi that she was on the lookout for Bling as well. He owed her fifteen bucks and change. I hadn’t seriously considered returning the money I’d taken from Bling, but I had considered it. He was probably gone for good this time, so I sent Obi five hundred bucks of it to give to Bling’s pregnant former neighbor.
On Halloween, which fell on a Monday night, I had an old tattoo artist friend of mine from Salem watch the shop, and I took the entire crew on a trip up the river on the Portland Spirit, a cruise boat that plied the Columbia with a fancy restaurant, a decent bar, and a shitty cover band. It was weird to see my people dressed up. Nigel wore a perfectly tailored vintage Italian suit, Big Mike some kind of upscale mall deal, Alex and Dwight off-the-rack Men’s Wearhouse. Both Alex and Dwight were still going to quit after everything that had happened, but not tonight. I wore my favorite black Armani, stolen from Sachs by a treasured old client. Everyone’s wives or girlfriends looked like models with real asses.
Delia wore a skimpy black dress, shiny six-inch pumps, and an imitation mink coat. Her date was a dirty punk kid in a rumpled tuxedo, none other than the lead singer from Empire of Shit. She introduced him as her dildo, but his name turned out to be Hank. We all called him Hank Dildo from then on, and the name stuck.
When we passed under the Steel Bridge, I looked across the river at the east side, at the distant pools of yellow light and vast rectangles of midnight, the black water that flowed through those shadows and the untold ruins of decades and secrets beneath it. Delia plopped down in my lap and stuck her boozy tongue in my ear, so we got into a tickling fight and knocked over the table and some chairs. When we passed under the bridge a second time, I didn’t even notice which bridge it was.
We all got roaring drunk. Alex threw up. Dwight’s wife did too, and almost fell over the side. My date was a gorgeous redhead who waited tables at a bistro around the corner from my apartment. We’d been flirting forever, but when she got that first real look into my personal life, she decided to latch on to the bass player from the band.
Delia was in rare form even for her, and got so loaded that she fell off the causeway and broke her ankle after we’d finally been kicked off the boat. Hank Dildo took her to OHSU in her car, and I planned on heading up there later after the worst part of the screaming and biting was over. It was the perfect time to present her with the Shuckins Taxidermy T-shirt I’d been holding in reserve.
That night I got back to the Lucky just after closing. My night shift stand-in David Knoll had finished up and gone out into the world to party before the holiday finally went to sleep. There was always a stand-in, a replacement, a sacrificial lamb. The Lucky didn’t take nights off, and it never would. I sat down in the dark lobby and lit a smoke, then leaned way back and stared out the window, upside down. Late at night, you could see all the wires in the sign out front, and the old girl seemed a little like a cadaver with her tendons showing. When I slowly sat back upright, I let my eyes play along the walls, the bright images muted and glossy in the faint rays of the permanent neon. High above me were the framed copies of the Roland Norton flash. I wondered about the mind of the man behind them again. I’d gone back to my storage space a few days before and peeled out all the treasury bills and bearer bonds in the final two pieces. A banker customer of mine had looked them over and told me that I had a little over a hundred thousand in redeemable paper. The rest, worth a fortune had they been salvageable, were too badly damaged. The seventeen that Dong-ju had stripped, mine and Wes Ron’s and the other one from San Diego, if that really was all he ha
d found, had netted untold millions.
I was going to take the copies down in the morning. The final sum total of Norton’s life and work would reside forever in a gun safe in a storage unit. I couldn’t have it on the walls. Roland Norton was long dead, but even the things he had made with his own hands, his art, however bad, would then vanish forever. The only person who would ever see it again was me, and I didn’t even like it. I couldn’t risk the interest of another Dong-ju, another monster on a treasure hunt. Norton would die the true, most final death of any artist, and become something forever forgotten in the long, blurry history of the Lucky Supreme.
I took a drag. Norton and Bling. Two generations of dirtbags who never even knew each other, Roland Norton moving panic money out of Panama and Jason Bling slinging pills and chlamydia. Time had not been a barrier for them, and the two turn-and-burn stencil jockeys had managed to stretch their hands out across countless miles and six long decades to steal each other’s watches and drop flies in each other’s drinks. I wound up killing someone. The murderer in such a long, long story was me, and I’d used my symbol, my ball bearings, objects that had meant something to me, to do it. I never found them that night. I never looked.
Accidents of that magnitude always made me feel like an accident myself, a shade in the shade of an anonymous Old Town. In that quiet period between closing time and the turning of the sign again, sitting alone in the dark and breathing in the perfumes that trailed from the ghosts of the long and dreaming day, I never thought anyone looking through the window would see anything but an empty chair. But on that rainy night, the ghosts were so real, and the red neon had changed for me in some way. I couldn’t help it in the end. It had finally become the color of my memory.
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A Long Crazy Burn
1
The phone rang just after three a.m.
Nothing good ever happens after three a.m. The screeching, static ending of a movie you couldn’t stay awake through. Crappy Chinese takeout, eaten by the light from the open refrigerator while standing in the kitchen in your underwear. Sex maybe, but the sloppy, big-booze variety. Furnace fires. No one calls with the winning lottery numbers at three-oh-five a.m.
The ringing stopped, then started again. I was kicked back at my desk in the back room of the Lucky Supreme, nursing lukewarm scotch from a paper cup and tinkering with one of my tattoo machines. It was a shader, made by a guy up in Washington named Paco Rollins. I ran the stroke long and mushy, so it had rattled itself to shit again. I didn’t enjoy dinking around with machines anymore, so I was still there mostly because I didn’t want to drive home. My sketchbook was out and I was halfway through a tortoise with a hat of some kind, but I didn’t want to work on that, either. Portland winter was in full swing, sleet mixed with snow on a thin crust of dirty ice. The steering wheel on my old BMW wagon would be so cold that the bones in my hands would ache just touching it, and after a twelve-hour shift they ached already. The car seat would freeze my ass on contact. I was partway through a seasonal mope and I knew it. Whoever was calling was only going to make it worse.
Ring.
It was still warm in the tattoo shop, even though I’d turned the little electric wall heaters off an hour before, when I put up the closed sign in the window and turned off the front lights. It hadn’t been a bad day for a Tuesday in February. I let my night-shift artist, Nigel, go home at midnight when it finally slowed down, so he could grab a few drinks with his new girlfriend before the bars closed. He had much going on in the way of skeeby on the side, and it was wise to give him time to pursue his activities away from the shop. My late-night drinking companion was once again the Lucky Supreme. It had been time for me to enter another period of tortuous woman-related activity for weeks, but I’d been putting it off, just like I was putting off the drive home. Everything had burnout written all over it. Maybe I’d decided, deep down inside, where thoughts grew up and then shuffled into hiding, that indecision was my only practical defense.
I studied the machine into the fourth ring. It was brass, and at some point I’d engraved Will Fight Evil For Food down the side in curling script. Every artist’s motto, whether they know it or not. It still needed a new rear spring and I’d have to cut one, but that, too, would be a pain in the ass. I set it down on the desk and picked up my scotch at the fifth ring.
In the last two months, I’d spent too many evenings sitting in that chair worrying about things I couldn’t do one damn thing about. Or wouldn’t. A few months before, I’d had a bad run-in with the feds and a worse one with a rich psychotic scumbag that the very same feds had under their microscope. My landlord was having mental health issues, following a decline that had begun more than twenty years ago. Dmitri was a study of ruination in too many ways for anyone’s comfort. As a person, he was a disgusting bummer of a human being. As a landlord, terrifying. The tenants fixed everything and said nothing. To even hint that there might have been a leak in the past, let alone the present, was to insult him, his sainted father, his entire family tree, and also by extension his ethnic heritage, which was unclear. Yesterday an insurance inspector had made a surprise visit and canceled my lame policy, citing the wall heaters, which were dangerously ancient. Now I needed an electrician to come in and upgrade everything so I could re-up the policy.
The ringing stopped. I looked at the phone and waited. It started again.
The back room was lined with shelves of art books. I stared at the collection directly across from me and then I squinted. A faint blue light was blinking over them, gently strobing in through the windows in the front of the shop and washing through the doorway to the back.
Portland’s Old Town had seen a renovation boom in the last year, but it struck me as unlikely that anyone could be working that late on a cold Tuesday night except the most desperate whores, the B-string skag hawkers, and me. I sighed. Ring. The construction in the neighborhood had been a drag on business. The bar next door, the Rooster Rocket, was down more than 30 percent, and that was a harbinger. I relied on bar totals as a forecasting tool. That and the weather, which was also shitty. The Rocket was owned by Gomez, the most enterprising Chicano in Old Town, and the business slump had hit him hard, mentally and spiritually. Flaco, Gomez’s brother or uncle or ancient cousin, had a taco operation in the old theater vestibule in front of the bar, and it was thriving. No one thought that was a good sign. And now some city crew had fired up something at three in the morning. My car was probably blocked in. I was just about to heave my boots off the desk and go check it out when I couldn’t stand the ringing anymore.
“Lucky Supreme, how may I direct your call?”
The line was static, lashed with wind.
“Get out of there, white boy.” It was little more than a gush of whisper. There was a click and the line went dead.
I took the phone away from my ear and looked up at the wall of books across from me. The blue light was still splashing over it, but it had been joined by dialing winks of red. Something huge was erupting on Sixth Street.
I walked through the shop to the front door and cautiously peered out the window, keeping well back in the darkness. The local police and I had a very specific arrangement, the very same one I’d recently cultivated with the feds—they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them, so we tried to stay away from each other. We were all very careful to stick to the program, too. So if they were out rounding up the nightlife as part of the new clean-up program, it would be in keeping with our arrangement for me to stay inside.
The block had been cordoned off at both ends. There were at least ten police cars I could see, plus three fire engines. And I was right in the middle of it. My car was parked down the street, past the north blockade. It was hard to tell from my vantage point if I was officially stranded, so I grimly decided to go fuck with them.
I unlocked both of the deadbolts on the reinforced door and stuck my head out.
The reaction was instant.
“Someone’s coming out!” a cop screamed.
“Get out of there!” a fireman yelled. He waved his arms to get my attention. “Move it!”
The words on the side of the engine closest to the fireman came into focus: BOMB SQUAD.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered.
A young cop sprinted down the sidewalk toward me, skittering a little through the slush. It looked like he might be going for a tackle, so I raised my hands above my head and stepped out.
“Run, you fucking idiot!” He slid into me and almost yanked my arm out of the socket. The kid had a power lifter’s build and was either fresh into his shift or adrenalized by terror. The door to the Lucky Supreme closed on the spring arm as the monster towed me at a flat-out run down the sidewalk to the corner, almost carrying me as I scrambled to keep up.
“Get in that fucking car.” He was panting as he opened the back door to the chicken coop of the nearest cruiser. All the other officers that had been milling around when I looked out less than thirty seconds before were crouched behind the nearest fire engine, the big one that read BOMB SQUAD.
“Fuck you.” I yanked my arm out of his meaty hand and pointed. “The bomb dudes are hiding behind a fucking fire truck, dumbass.”
“Get down!” one of the firemen yelled.
I stiff-armed the big cop in the direction of the fire engine. He stumbled a little and his hand went to his sidearm, fumbling at one of the fashionable tasers they’d been pronging old ladies and hobos with for the last year. One of the firemen grabbed the back of the kid’s jacket and pulled him down. I skirted the cop car and crouched at the edge of the group hiding behind the truck. The sleet was soaking my hair and the back of my T-shirt. My jeans were already plastered to my legs. I started to shiver.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked everyone in general. There were at least twelve cops and as many firemen behind the fire engine.