Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  ‘What about my record?’

  ‘Little trickier. Takes a court order to get it expunged. But all the convictions are misdemeanors, and I’ve got some IOUs to call in with the DA , who can make that happen.’

  ‘How naïve do you think I am?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he continued, undeterred, sincere, dead serious. ‘Which is why you know this is exactly how things work in the real world. You think it’s merit that gets these assholes on the force? You think they’ve got a thousandth of what you’ve got? I’ve seen the DA’s office seal worse records, when it’s necessary. And when they say, “What did this Benny Bunt ever do for us?” I’ll have an answer. I’ll be able to tell them, ‘I know Mr. Bunt to be a man of the highest character, bravery, and integrity. He has all the qualities that make for a good cop.” And I’ll say, “Mr. Bunt was instrumental in helping law enforcement crack a recent murder-for-hire case.” I mean, I really want to be able to say that.’

  ‘Alright,’ I said, thinking furiously, trying to figure my move, my best move, buying time, knowing only that right now I had to tell him what he wanted to hear. ‘I want you to be able to say that, too. I’ve always wanted to do what you do.’

  I went home to pack.

  I scoured the apartment, my hands stuffing my jacket pockets with road gear: cigarettes, lighter, gum, comb, deodorant, aftershave, toothpicks, spare change, fortune cookie, loose peppermints, batteries, flashlight, pens. Suddenly I noticed Donna standing in the doorway, watching.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ she said. ‘Your eyes are funny. What are you on?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re lying. Why are your eyes jittery like that?’

  ‘I have to go on a road trip.’

  ‘Somewhere with your asshole buddy, right?’

  ‘Don’t call him that.’

  ‘Going to Vermont? Because I hear they’ll marry you there. But you have to divorce me first, Benny. You have to divorce me first!’

  ‘It’s a mission,’ I said. ‘It’s an important government mission, and I can’t talk about it. I love you, Donna, but I’ve gotta go.’

  ‘Mission?’

  ‘Gonna be a whole new world when I’m back. You’re gonna see me put on a uniform to work every day. You know what kind?’

  ‘Two days? What takes two days? It’s that place in Nevada, right? That whorehouse with the rabbits in the name? The Furry Bunny Pussy Ranch?’

  ‘It’s called the Moonlight Bunny Ranch, but that’s not where we’re going. Guess what kind of uniform.’ I hummed the Miami Vice theme.

  ‘The lies, Benny, it’s the lies I can’t stand,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you just came out with it. If you just said, “Donna, sweetheart, I’m going whoring for a couple days at the Skanky Rabbit Snatch Ranch, stick my dick in some whores, maybe blow my boyfriend a few times.” If you just said, “Don’t worry, Donna, I’m gonna use a condom, so you don’t pick up any awful sex germs the next time we do it, maybe six or eight months from now.” If you just told the truth – – ’

  I drove my foot through the wall behind the TV, leaving a hole in the plaster. It filled me with nasty satisfaction. I believed I could tear down the walls and rip up the floor with my bare hands. Donna looked horrified, and I said, ‘That’s your luck. That’s so I didn’t hit you.’

  ‘You’re tweaking! I can’t believe you’re tweaking again, Benny, you sonofabitch!’

  Downstairs, the neighbors were screaming at me to stop the ruckus and banging their broomstick on their ceiling, the sounds thumping up from below. Grunting animal noises, I stomped the floor savagely six or seven times, outdoing their violence. The broomstick stopped. Donna was crying. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘I’m in no mood for people’s shit,’ I said. ‘I have a mission to go on.’

  ‘Did you even consider . . .’ Her voice was choked with sobs. ‘Did you even consider maybe I’d like to come along and have some fun too?’

  As I slammed the door I heard her screaming that she wouldn’t be there when I got back.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was early Sunday morning and we were going to kill someone today. Things were already getting wiggy. I hadn’t had a night’s sleep in three days and I itched all over as if scales had been grafted to my skin, my nails making a feverish circuit between my arms, legs, midsection, and shoulder blades. I kept thinking of the New Jersey man in the bathtub staring at his toes and waiting to die, the poor bastard just aching to have it over and done with, praying for the doorway to fill with the shadow of the gunman . . .

  ‘Some kind of plague?’ Junior said from his place behind the bar as he watched me claw my skin.

  ‘Rats carry plague,’ I said. ‘Are you saying I’m some kind of rat?’

  Junior said, ‘There’s a resemblance.’

  ‘ Well, your friendly neighborhood rat is a highly underrated creature,’ I said. ‘Centuries of bad PR over that Black Death business. Allegedly played a role in wiping out a third of Europe – as if we need more fucking Europeans anyway – only the truth is, he’s as much a victim as anyone else. A victim of the fleas. He trusted the fleas and they used him. He gave them a home on his body and they blackened his name forever. Can’t show his face at any of the respectable parties anymore.’

  Flying spring-loaded from my mouth came a memorized entry from my one-volume Complete Webster’s Family Encyclopedia, the one I got for $4.99 in the bargain-bin and kept in the bathroom so I could improve my mind during visits to the bowl. ‘The Black Death originated in the Far East and spread through Europe and England in May 1348,’ I said. ‘Pasteurella pestis. There are three forms of the disease, the most common of which is bubonic plague, in which fever, vomiting, and headache are accompanied by swollen inflamed lymph nodes – buboes.’

  ‘What are you doing here at six a.m., aside from dying of plague?’ Junior asked.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet Gus in half an hour. Not to mention rats make terrific pets.’

  ‘He cleared most of his stuff outta that room last night and hauled it back to his van, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. About fifty of those birdhouses. I even helped him carry out that goddamn freezer of his, which must weigh three hundred pounds.’ He added with a touch of hopefulness: ‘You think he’ll be, uh, moving on down the road?’

  ‘I think so. Business opportunity.’

  Junior nodded and tried to keep his expression blank, but I could tell he was pleased with this news. He had come to dread his handyman and the reminiscences he shared about Junior’s gook-slaughtering dad. The stories were always bloody and the death toll seemed to rise by the day.

  Now Junior was making his morning rounds, wiping surfaces and arranging bottles behind the well and brewing coffee, preparing for the early crowd. Through the wall behind him Gus snored like some kind of asthmatic zoo beast, deep, wheezy, stentorian.

  Junior listened with an expression of wariness and distaste. ‘I’ve gotta run out for bacon. Keep an eye on things,’ he said and vanished.

  Now here I was, alone at the bar in a speedfreak fog. The sounds of molars grinding in my skull and badger claws scrabbling at my skin: my own fingernails. Hands twitchy with the compulsion to tear open my shirt and rip loose the electronic snake twisting up between my nipples. You there, assholes? You listening, Munoz? How about you, Wein? Are you in my brain? Don’t wig. Don’t wig don’t wig don’t wig . . .

  After a while I looked over and saw I was not alone at the bar. A man sat three stools down in a soiled lime-green leisure suit. He must have come in without me noticing: a gaunt man with thinning hair and pale skin and hands shaking even more violently than mine. He held a racing form that rustled in his fever-grip. He made quick marks on it with a stubby pencil and I noticed a few of his fingers hung at bad angles, bent backward or sticking straight up from the back of his hands.

  An unrecognizable voice croaked from my throat: ‘Tony the Money. This is a sighting.’

  Preoccupied, he didn’t lo
ok up. His voice was flat and toneless as he said, ‘Nice to be remembered.’

  I heard him muttering what sounded like the names of horses and I asked, ‘What does the day look like?’

  ‘Privileged information. You’d have to be dead to know.’

  I could see the neat black circle where the slug went in at the right temple just beyond the line of his hair. His skin was a bad color — bloodless for 30 years will do that — and I noticed now that his fingernails were long and curved and that his thin hair, while nearly bald on top, hung halfway down his back like an old woman’s, and I remembered what people said about the nails and the hair continuing to grow, after.

  ‘I’ve always wondered,’ I said. ‘Do the dead gamble?’

  ‘Some can. But suicides get special penalties. The Almighty’s penal code. The whole universe is set up like a penal system, in case you didn’t know. So every day I get a racing form. Every day I get a pencil. Every day I know how the ponies are gonna finish. Here’s the curse . . .’

  One by one he pulled out his pockets and made little tongues of them. Every pocket was empty and all these tongues were hanging from his slacks and from his leisure jacket like so many wounds spitting flowers of blood. Then he looked at me with his pale face full of desperate pleading.

  ‘Look. Do a kindness to a poor ghost. Spot me a c-note?’

  ‘I haven’t got that kind of bread.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t understand. No, you can’t possibly understand. I’m guaranteeing a three hundred percent return. No rational man would turn that down. You’re a rational man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But you’re a smart man.’

  ‘No. I’m a fuck-up. Everybody knows that. And I’ve only got fifty bucks.’

  He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘I’ll break the rules, this once. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

  ‘I want to know who the smart money is on.’

  He studied the racing form and jabbed at it with his trembling pencil and said, ‘Well, Latin Sex Brigade is the odds-on favorite, of course. He’s won fifty of his last fifty-one races, even took a bullet once without breaking stride. Excellent musculature, and have you seen the dick on that horse? Win or lose, he’ll be put out to stud after another few races.

  ‘Hard Luck Bastard hasn’t won a race in a long time. These days, the insiders consider his prowess mostly hype, and there’s doubt he’s even running under his legitimate Christian name. Terrible habits. Bloat apparent. Then again, he knows the stakes: the glue factory if he loses. His last shot, and desperation does remarkable things for a horse.

  ‘The Gecko? An enigmatic horse, that. No one’s seen him yet. A wild card. Very exciting.

  ‘As for Snitch Jacket, no one’s betting on him. He’s pretty much fucked, a Number Thirteen. He’ll be lucky to get around the first turn without breaking a leg. It isn’t even clear whose race he’s running, really.

  ‘ What’s for sure is it’s gonna end disastrously for one, and maybe a couple, of these horses. At least one and possibly more will get put down by the end of it. I mean a real bloodbath. Carnage!

  ‘Those are my predictions. How about that fifty?’

  ‘You haven’t told me anything.’

  ‘ You think I’m bullshitting you? I’ve got a gift. I’m a fucking soothsayer.’

  ‘You’re just one of those hucksters on late-night TV, man. You’re like Miss Cleo or that psychic bitch down the block. You don’t tell people anything they don’t already know. You dumb dead motherfucker!’

  His face became a mask of guilty, pathetic desperation and he told me I just didn’t know what it was like, to be where he was. ‘Being dead’s like a horrible dream. You can’t keep stuff straight from one minute to the next. It’s all jumbled and tangled and shifty. Man, I really, really need that fifty . . .’

  Suddenly I hated this pale guy with his broken fingers and dirty dead-epoch threads. He was trying to do something terrible to me, sent by someone, fucking with my head, maybe planning to kill me. I was not going to let him. I heard myself screaming at him, calling him a liar. ‘Hair and nails growing after you’re dead is only urban legend, asshole! Dehydration and shrinkage of the corpse create that illusion! I read about it! I know things! So fuck you, man! Fuck you!’

  I lined up the last of the gray powder on the bar top and leaned in to take the blast and felt the chemicals strafing my esophagus and nasal cavity, and then I felt alright, I felt okay, brave and bold and Spider-Man-tight and not seeing any dead assholes in leisure suits. Who am I? I’m a secret government agent. I’m Steve Austin, the bubonic man. And the bubonic man always keeps his cool. Scan your surroundings. Impeccable meth logic screamed: this bar needs cleaning. Some serious tidying is in order. How did I fail to notice the condition of this place?

  In 30 minutes I had cleaned and spit-shined the bar, scrubbed all the stools, Windexed all the glass, swept all the sawdust off the floor and collected it in two Hefty bags by the door. I was wondering what color to paint the walls and where I could find some paint to do it when Junior returned saying, ‘What the hell you doing?’

  ‘Tidying up. I thought – – ’

  ‘Sawdust is atmosphere, not trash. You’re mucking up the atmospheric touches!’

  The angry little man upended the garbage bags and shook them out on the floor, cursing, muttering, ‘Benny, you tweaking again? I thought you quit.’

  The air filled with sawdust. It exploded upward and floated sideways and settled gently about the bar, like so many squalid white-trash snowflakes.

  Gus stood in the doorway of his room bleary-eyed and hustling his balls, reeking of liquor even from 10 feet away. Steadying himself with a hand on the doorframe, he said, ‘ What’s all the hoo-ha?’

  ‘Ask him,’ Junior said bitterly.

  ‘Let’s bail,’ I said. ‘I hate this place. I always have.’

  ‘I’m clearing out,’ Gus said, ducking into his room for a moment and then lumbering out with the last of his belongings, including his mattress and his box of war souvenirs, Jesse James slouching along arthritically at his feet.

  ‘You’re going?’ Junior said. ‘I mean — it’s a shame to be losing you. Mi casa es tu casa. You’re not coming back?’

  ‘I’m headed north,’ Gus said. ‘I can’t say much about the quality of playmates in this sandbox. Find the caliber of character pretty low. I need to be around some real human beings. Hope you understand.’

  They didn’t shake hands. In a flat voice Junior said, ‘Good luck.’ He wore no expression on his face as he watched us leave through the back door.

  My watch said 6:46 a.m.

  ‘You’re jumpy like a maggot,’ Gus told me in the van.

  ‘You’re totally tanked,’ I said, aware that he probably drank all night and crashed at two or three. ‘Maybe we should wait till – – ’

  ‘I hold booze fine. You’re with a professional. Plus we’re time-pressed, and it’s not like I’m letting you drive. Got that cannon?’

  ‘Right here.’

  I handed him the Smith & Wesson .38 and he turned it around slowly, feeling its weight. He said, ‘I guess it’ll do, for a ladies’ weapon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything smaller than a forty-five is essentially a chick’s gun.’

  ‘It’s blue-collar, meat-and-potatoes, just like you said. If you wanted a bazooka . . .’

  He popped the revolver, checked the bullets, and, shrugging, tucked the gun carefully into the waistband of his Levis. ‘Don’t get your asshole tight. I said it’ll do.’

  He took his necklace of ears out of his souvenir box and draped it around his neck. ‘ You and me are gonna kill us one motherfucker today,’ Gus said. ‘How you feelin’?’

  ‘I’m feeling really positive about it,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Real positive. I killed sixty-three children, nine men and twelve women. I’m blood and instinct, brother. I’m what a famous Jew writer from the
Sixties called a White Nigger. First, let’s get us some snackage.’

  With one lumpy fist on the wheel and the other hand hanging loosely at the V of his crotch, bleary Gus directed the rattling, bumping van down Harbor Boulevard. Behind us the wall-to-wall rows of junk thrummed and vibrated.

  Beyond the dusty windows, in the chill iron-gray morning, the sea fog hung thick over the streets and shrouded the storefronts and the still-lit lamp posts whose high, malaria-yellow eyes burned blurrily as they followed us.

  Watch the side-view mirror: the boxy white flower van bobbing out of the fog and disappearing into it again, pursuing steadily at a distance of a block or two.

  Other cop eyes everywhere, following from the skies and roads, invisible. All those unseen ears: pressed against the mike on my chest.

  Jesse James lay on his forepaws in a cleared space just behind the two seats of the cab. Every time I looked back the dog seemed to be looking at me. His wet mouth hung open and his cloudy old eyes studied me with unnerving fixity from that gray face, and I kept looking back and he kept staring.

  Then I remembered what Gus said about the dog’s preternatural powers and in an instant I was convinced the dog knew everything or strongly suspected: the dog smelled the flopsweat slicking my bones and the constabulary’s wire under my clothes, and soon his master would know too and – –

  When I was a kid, I once lured a squirrel into an empty coffee tin and clapped on the plastic lid. As it fought for life in the airless cage, I found myself unexpectedly terrified by the intensity of its panic. I set it free right away. I remembered it now because my heart felt that way: like something caged and thrashing and trying to claw its way out of my chest.

  The demon dog and its Zen powers. I read a science-fiction story once about a boy and a telepathic dog, and it ended with the boy feeding his girlfriend to the mutt and I thought it was a terrific story at the time, very imaginative. But now I was thinking – no, no, I was deadfuckingsure – the writer got it from a true story, there were such dogs, and I could almost feel the foul, hot breath on my neck . . .