While outside, Nadine Ackley was telling herself she always knew it would come to this. A screaming horde of bucknaked smutcrazed rapists banging on her glass ticket kiosk. She crossed herself, and with a single prayer commended her soul to the Lord’s Everafter and consigned her flesh to the Devil’s own Here and Now.
* * *
It was a firegutted Victorian on Treat Street, pooled with black water, where wind through the gashed roof dirged and the homeless and hunted found hospice. In the front parlor Joe shook out the paper sack into the trough of a soggy mattress. Rooski tore open the envelopes, making a paltry pile of betting slips and cash. And nary a dead president could so much as smile; they shared the same look of bemused reproof as the characters staring down at them.
“We would have done better breaking into video games,” Joe announced sourly.
“No, it’s enough,” Rooski wanted him to believe; and began raking the bills together. They rustled like dead leaves.
“Enough for what? Coupla weeks of jailhouse canteen?”
“Cmon, Barker, dontcha look so blue.” Quickly he counted the money. “Over five hundred. Six, if we down the trombone. Enough to blow town.”
“Christ, Rooski. If it werent for bad luck we’d have none at all.”
“We gotta make a little good luck of our own,” Rooski remonstrated, “cantcha see?”
“Sure,” Joe tried shoring up his voice with conviction. Truth was they were trapped like the rats scrabbling behind the charcoaled walls.
“Keep the faith. You always say that, Barker.”
Right. Faith. You got to have a little, he always said. But faith in the sidepocket bank shot and that talk walks and money talks; faith in the sucker around each corner and the perennial next score. Not the Faith illumining mean days with grace; not the Faith brimming empty hearts with hope—that faith like a shell game had mocked Joe all his life. Though never so cruelly as now Rooski’s fate was subordinated to his biological imperative to defend his own worthless breath.
Nearby mission bells tolled vespers. It was time. Ice twisted along Joe’s sinews and lumped under his heart. Now he had to act. He said, “I got one of La Barba’s sacks we can split.”
“I’ll second the fuck outta that emotion!”
Joe always went first. Fumbling and cursing over his ruined blood mains, daggering himself repeatedly. Rooski knew better than to offer help or even talk. Joe liked doing his penance right along with the sin. Taking off his Levi’s, he at last struck strong blood high in his groin. With an exhalation mixing weariment and wonder, he handed the works to Rooski the way an officer might hand a blooded sword to his batman after a hard day on the killing field.
“I got it all figgered, Barker,” Rooski was saying preparing his shot. “Hook a bus, hook a freight, anything making southward smoke. Sunup day after tomorrow we’ll be waking up on the beach at Mazatlan. They got little boys there, Barker, for pesos … mere pennies … they’ll catch you a fish and cook it for you right on the beach … What you puttin in my cooker?”
“Lil Andes candy …”
“I hate coke,” Rooski whimpered. “I get the wrong kick.” But the glitter was already melted in his heroin solution.
“I need you to fire a bombida, Rooski,” Joe said softly.
“Why? With the Edison medicine, shootin speedballs makes me double crazy …” But he already had the point poised over a vein.
“I need you a little extra crazy.”
“Why?”
“I’m goin out to steal a car to run for the border. A nice car, Rooski. We got that comin … But while I’m gone I cant have you noddin out n the police come creepin on you. If they do, you gotta hold court in the streets.”
Rooski plunged the bombida into his bloodsteam. His angled frame snapped rigid, his brow sprang a halo of sweat; his eyes shot fire like sparklers. Joe asked if he’d heard what he said; Rooski nodded tightly, eyes spinning now like slot machine lemons.
“Down at city prison I seen one of the cons whose cat you got killed,” Joe lied. “He said soon as you fell he’d get you. Said whether its firecamp high in the Sierras or the deepest hole at Folsom, he was going to find you, cut out your heart … and eat it, Rooski.”
“Hold court in the streets,” Rooski repeated the dire oath with squinch-eyed resolve.
“Got to, my homey. You cant let em take you.”
“You know,” Rooski said, “even if they caught me I wouldnt give you up. I’d die first. We all gotta go sometime. Why you cryin, Barker? It’s gonna be all right.”
“Aint cryin, Rooski.” With the hem of the dragon jacket he wiped away tears not even heroin could staunch. “It’s somethin in the air here. They must have used chemicals to put out the fire …”
“That’s good, cuz I dont want you worryin, aint nothin gonna happen. No one knows we’re holed here. What in hell you doin?”
Joe was trembling so violently he jammed the Bullpup trying to jack a fresh shell in its breech. Rooski took the weapon, spit in the breech, and tromboned the shell home with a clash, saying, “And I thought I was the one who could fuck up a wetdream.”
“Guess I’ll be goin,” Joe mumbled.
“Guess I’ll just pray no police come while you out.”
“That’s a good idea, Rooski boy … So long and good luck.”
“You’re all the luck I ever needed, Barker,” said that ghost about to be born.
* * *
In the blackened hallway, Joe stopped and pulled the bigass diamond from beneath his shirt. It burned a depthless blue. He had to hide it, but where? Its light licked the walls with tongues of flame, blue wavey shadows reminding Joe … Then he knew where to stash it. Not just in plain sight. On exhibit.
But first the call.
On the corner across the street, a booth stood empty. Its light seemed both to beckon and rebuke—Come, none will overhear your treachery on my dark corner. He ran to it, stepped in, and covered his mouth with his jacket sleeve. If 666 was the number of the Beast, then the number he dialed was the Judas code—911. “Gimme Homicide … Homicide? Take this address, 183 Treat … Chakov’s holed there … He’s hopped up and heavily armed and swears he wont be taken alive …”
Oh, that black sump pump in his breast only a doctor would call a heart. Fast, so he needn’t further ponder the enormity of the betrayal—steal a car to drive to Golden Gate Park. He couldn’t chance a cab. Joe wanted no one to know the watery repository he’d chosen for the diamond Quick Cicero called the Moon.
* * *
The valet parking lot attendants at Rossi’s Famous Seafood Restaurant hustled hard for tips. Otherwise they wouldn’t make it on the minimum wage Mr. Rossi paid. When patrons were preparing to leave, the head waiter called them at their shack at the front of the lot. That way they had the cars waiting at the curb, one hand holding the door open, the other palm up for the dollars Mr. Rossi liked to call gratuities.
Often both were absent from the shack delivering cars at the same time. That night neither saw the Porsche Carrera drive off the rear of the lot or noticed its keys missing from the shack until it was called for in the midst of dinner rush two hours later.
* * *
Joe was the day’s last paid admittance to Steinhart Aquarium. The usher at the turnstile tore his blue ticket, returning him the half bearing the imprint of a leaping dolphin, and warned him the building would be closing in fifteen minutes. Joe smiled—“Long enough.”
He knew the aquarium’s corridors as well as the hallways of half the city’s flophouses. Times like this when few visitors were around he liked best. When the teeming colors were brightest, the symmetries more fantastic, the liquescent shadows most hallucinative.
Here he was. The plaque introduced the mako and tiger sharks, with a profile of each and world maps showing their ocean ranges. A brief description noted neither was dangerous to man—unless provoked. Joe looked up smiling into the flat black eye of one gray form gliding past, its flexing speckled gills
recalling the bamboo blinds in the Sings’ loft. Certainly whatever hand brought forth that shape was possessed of the macabre. No more perfect articulation of sudden, silent death was imaginable.
He turned his attention to the tank display. A shipwreck motif. From the Jolly Roger tangled in the helm canted in the sand, a sunken pirate craft. Beside the helm a cutlass, cannonballs, a binnacle, and belaying pin—all arranged around the centerpiece: Davey Jones’s locker, an overturned treasure chest spilling its hoard of jeweled dirks and diadems, gold doubloons, and crucifixes; rubies, sapphires, pearls, and diamonds; yes, diamonds, within which galaxy the birth of one more star, a blue one even, would go unnoticed until Joe returned for it.
“We’re closing, sir,” a guard reminded him politely.
“Yes, I’m coming.” He leaned across the railing and peered upward, spotting several gaffs hanging from hooks along the catwalk that crossed over the tank. He’d use one of them to retrieve the Moon when the time was right. He slanted both ways to make sure he wasn’t being observed, then used the stolen credit card he kept in his boot to slip the lock on the door marked: no admittance, employees only.
Out went the lights; the aquarium corridors became tunnels of wavery marine light. The colors of the shark tank were cobalt and coral. In a moment, a gasblue scintillance attached to a golden V fell, swinging slowly like a jeweled leaf to land near the treasure chest. The Tiger shark flinched at the puff of sand; then sculled its scythelike tail, gliding on.
* * *
“COURT’S IN SESSION!” was Rooski’s last scream. The concussion of the first blast blew out the parlor’s last remaining window. The second round of Double 0 exploded a door in a maelstrom of cinders. The third rocketed straight through the ceiling from where he lay in puddled black water, the .357 Magnum verdict burrowed deep in his chest.
* * *
All Joe had to do now was ditch the Porsche, then get Kitty and maybe they could get shut of this old Life. Go to Galveston, lay low until it was safe to return for the diamond; escape the cooker, crooks, and cops, who had nothing on Joe now if court was adjourned.
But he had to make sure, see for himself. He turned up Divisadero toward Twin Peaks. You’re almost home, you’re almost home, the tires whispered on the fogdamp asphalt … Oh no, Rooski boy. Was it me laid you low? Me? raved his heart. With an effort he steeled himself. It was self-defense, pure and simple. More: it was euthanasia. Better to die a man in the streets than an animal behind walls.
He turned onto a side street and parked in its culdesac over the streetcar tunnel. He walked to the railing overlooking the tracks and leaned against a streetlamp that looked, in the swirling mist, like a giant dandelion atop a wrought iron stem. The N Judah car burst out between his legs, rattle-trapping down the cutbacks through the steep backyards, jiggling in its yellow windows like corn in a popper newspapers, crossed legs, a woman applying lipstick. Scanning the gray density of buildings, Joe spotted the house on Treat Street by the police lights. They pulsed in the fog like red amoebas.
He was just in time to see the morgue attendants lug out the stretcher. Coming down the front steps, they lifted it perpendicularly, raising the corpse, and Joe thought he saw Rooski’s face splattered once, twice, three times with spinning red …
Then, with a suddenness snatching a cry from Joe’s throat, the circular chill of steel at his neck, the familiar cold, clipped voice:
“I knew I’d find you close. A rat’s never far from its hole. You found him first, saved your ass by setting his up for me to blast. You made him hold court in the streets. You better pray you wont have to pick a jury on a prison yard. Because you’re going down for the car. You’re penitentiary bound … motherfucker.”
THE NUMBERS GAME
BY CRAIG CLEVENGER
The Sunset
(Originally published in 2009)
Jimmy Rehab’s showing a nine up against my dual eights. The high count is my green light to buck tourist strategy so I split for a hard eighteen-fifteen then stand. Jimmy’s ace in the hole gives him a soft twenty which costs me another six thousand milligrams of tetracycline.
Fifteen blocks from here, young mothers push strollers through Golden Gate Park and the electro-poets sip six-dollar coffees at sidewalk tables along Irving. Keep walking west and the bright afternoon grows indecisive at 19th Ave. You hit 25th and take off your shades but can’t tell the difference, the light bright enough to see by without throwing any shadows. Come 43rd, you haven’t seen another soul for ten blocks and the stores are either empty or closed. The colors vanish along with the shadows, the current drains from the sunlight.
The Outer Sunset, another ghost town trailing another gold rush, the postwar housing boom following the first feeding frenzy a century prior and the dot com locusts forty years later, this is where Jimmy and I play blackjack by the light of a camping lantern, where I’ll play two and a half million hands before I see sunlight again.
I’m here because of the Numbers, because this is the one place some very bad people won’t know to find me. I’m here because I made a wager and I make good on my bets. I’m here because I keep my word.
Skinner Jones said that would be the death of me and he was half right.
We did a jewelry store together a couple years back. No fireworks, all business. After the dust had settled, the adjusters left the owner with a firm handshake and a fat check. Skinner moved the product, cleaned the cash and handed over my cut. Next day, I’m using the restroom at the doughnut place on Polk. One second I’m holding two bearclaws in a paper bag between my teeth while I take a leak, next thing I’ve got Smoke and Mirrors on either side of me.
“Johnny Pharaoh.”
“Yo. Johnny.”
I was shaking off the drops when Smoke slapped the bracelet on my right wrist and gave me to the count of one to pack everything up before he cuffed my left. He pat me down way too familiar-like while Mirrors read from his Miranda card. His fingers followed the words as he sounded them out, like he was asking directions with a phrase book.
I was drooling on the doughnut bag in my teeth when Mirrors said, “Do you understand these rights as they’ve been read to you?”
Yeah.
“Out loud, shithead.” Smoke tapped the back of my skull so I dropped breakfast into the hot pool at my feet. Greasy white bag floating with the cigarette butts and that blue chemical puck.
“Not sure I did. Could you run ’em by me one more time?”
Smoke and Mirrors. Bad Cop, Worse Cop. Eleven hours under the light, cuffed to a chair on the business end of their bad day.
“Are those batteries fresh?” I thought the red light on the camera blinked a coupla times.
“Not sure.”
“Could be. Or not.”
If that camera went dark, I was gonna hit the floor hard, two or three times. All I had to say were two words, Skinner Jones, and I’d walk, but I didn’t. Taking a job means keeping your mouth shut. Getting stabbed in the back isn’t license to likewise shank a brother.
Keeping my word meant keeping quiet which meant doing a year inside, the most they could give me without Skinner.
Jimmy can’t shuffle so I do it for him.
“You gonna make me deal for you this time, too?”
He doesn’t answer. Jimmy Rehab’s silent treatment, day fifty-five.
“You lazy fuck.”
His stare is starting to unnerve me.
Jimmy’s got a four up and I’m looking at a hard sixteen so I stand. His hole-card is a ten followed by another four, so I push 2,500 more milligrams of tetracycline his way and pray I don’t get sick before I can win them back.
I bust three hands in a row and Jimmy doesn’t say a word, his expression doesn’t change.
I’ve lost thousands in a single sitting at some big tables and I’ve always had enough to cover my marker. Most of the time. I can quit any time I want, as long as it’s not while I’m playing. If you’re anything like me, you tell yourself you’ve got it
under control, but you don’t.
One year later I walked through the gates, but my celebration was cut short the same day. Dear Cardholder didn’t place and Undisclosed Sum came strong out of the gate but finished dead last. Some old habits die hard and others not at all. That afternoon at the track dumped me twenty grand into Hoyle’s pocket. Hoyle knew I was good for it because I keep my word but Hoyle didn’t want to look weak. Skinner Jones and his brokering skills were the only things keeping me above the dirt. His driver had been kicked back on a parole violation so Skinner offered me a job.
“Guy blows an early release ’cause he bought his piss from Keith Richards,” he said. “He’s safer in Folsom.”
“I hear that.”
Neither one of us said anything for a moment.
“Wasn’t me.” Skinner slid the car keys toward me.
“Wasn’t you, what?”
“The jewelry store. Wasn’t me who gave you up.”
So there was my chance, served up like a fancy umbrella drink. Call him on it or let it go.
“Forget about it.”
“Far as this job goes, you wait and you drive.” Skinner let it go faster than I had, went back to talking the job. “Shit hits the fan, Plan Q is still in locked and loaded. We’re in, we’re out, we hurt nobody and you’re off the hook.”
“And I won’t see a penny of it.”
“You won’t have pennies over your eyes, either.”
True, indeed. His ex-driver’s fuck-up and my own were conjoined like circus sideshow babies, two and the same.
A good plan leaves nothing to chance, but a professional knows chance is a long-haul player. Drink enough, gamble enough, sleep around, skydive, hitchhike, or play the lottery and your luck won’t run out, but it will change. Skinner and I had been at it for a long time and our luck changed.
Come 10:21 a.m. the next day, I was gunning through red lights down O’Farrell with my back windshield in pieces, my ears ringing and Jimmy Rehab riding shotgun with glass in his hair and blood on his pants. I turned up the police scanner and kept to the speed limit once I was off Lincoln.
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