by Jim Nisbet
One of the men replied, “Yessum.”
“We was just takin’ a break, lady,” said the other man. “Been at it all week long.”
“Well. Anyway, I appreciate your coming all the way out here at such an ungodly hour.”
“Yessum.”
“I’m sure my husband will make it worth your while.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Now let’s get this over with. You have the new one?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“How do you want to manage it?”
“Well… How about we just bring in the new one and bring out the old one?”
Nobody said anything.
“Ma’am?”
“What? Well of course. Let’s get on with it. It’s getting late.”
She led the way toward the house, followed by the shadow of one man dragging something out of the van and, a moment later, the shadow of the second man, taking up the end of the something. Between them stretched a horizontal shadow, about eight feet long and a couple of feet thick.
The woman entered the house first. The vista of city lights beyond darkened and reappeared. After a moment a light came on in the entryway, and Stanley could see that the two men were carrying a rolled carpet with fringe along its edges.
The front door closed behind them.
Someone locked it. The sound of a deadbolt sliding home was clearly audible.
The porch light went off.
Stanley blinked.
Then he lifted his legs over the Toyota’s gear shift, transferred himself to the passenger seat, and gently pulled the latch on the passenger door. The dome light blinked on. Stanley barely restrained a loud curse as he pulled the door to. This was the first time the dome light in this truck had worked in two years. He thumbed a switch on the light’s bezel. Then, taking a deep breath and ignoring the tingle in his lower back, he slid out of the passenger door.
Keeping low, he scuttled silently to the rear fender of the Toyota and peered beyond the tailgate.
The fog bank now spilling down off Twin Peaks rustled the grove of tall eucalyptus behind the house at the very end of the cul-de-sac, to Stanley’s right. Otherwise, all was quiet. Directly in front of him, the front door of the stucco house remained closed. No light shone from within.
As quietly as he could do it, Stanley ran across the circle of asphalt and slid into a crouch at the back of the van. The open back door exuded odors of stale cigarette smoke and foam carpet padding, transmission fluid and… an essence he couldn’t place. He hesitated.
What was that odor?
He shook off the query. He didn’t have time to think about it.
It was dark there, darker than he’d thought possible. He had to put his nose to the license plate and actually trace the raised metal to figure out its letters and numbers. This took time. 1E…L…T0…36. It could have been a zero or the letter ‘O’. No matter. A commercial license plate. 1ELT036. He could remember that: One El To Thirty-six. Like directions to a party in Chicago. Some party. Doubtless a California tag would attract the least attention. Even in San Francisco, two guys delivering carpet at midnight with a truck registered in Minnesota might look a little artless. He grasped the rear corner of the door and half-closed it. For this the light was better. A chrome script showed on the door panel: Ram. That would be a Dodge. Centered on the door above the model name was a magnetic sign. Cabrini. He could remember that. Nice Italian name. Probably Florentine. Also, Cabrini Green is an infamous housing project in the heart of Chicago. And the phone number — forget the phone number. This sign was obvious bovine scatology — it had to be. It was the license number he needed to remember. He eased the door back to its open position. What was it? One El To Thirty-six. The EL runs in Chicago, where Cabrini—. He heard a sound. The deadbolt. A door swung open.
CABRINI CARPET
Sales
Installation
Service
1338 Mission St
San Francisco
415-864-2825
A woman’s voice announced, “Well, that was painless.”
“Yessum.”
They were coming back. He wasted a look of pure nostalgia on the Toyota, but the truck may as well have been a mile away across open country in broad daylight.
Stanley backed away from the van, keeping its mass between himself and the front door of the house, backed across the asphalt in a direction at right angles to the one he would rather have gone, until he found himself in the shadows under a staircase. Just as he crouched toward a pair of plastic garbage cans a man appeared behind the van, walking backwards. Stanley ducked into the shadows behind the cans and watched the ground, his heart pounding.
Shoes scraped grit on the pavement behind the van. The two men grunted as they hadn’t before.
“Damn Afghans is heavier’n them Persians,” a man’s voice said.
“They got a tighter weave and a better arms deal with the Great Satan,” chuckled the other man.
“Maybe I should have kept it then,” said the woman icily.
“Oh Lord, lady,” said the second man. “Don’t change your mind now.”
“Hey!” hissed the first voice.
“Shit.”
“Oh my,” said the woman’s voice. But through the velvet tone of those two words passed a core of steel, like the tang of a knife through its handle.
“Ahm… Sorry lady. Vince is just… tired.”
“That’s… quite all right. The streets are… clean around here. Just don’t let the good side become… soiled. More soiled than it is, I mean. There might be… oil or something… where the cars park.”
“Yessum.”
“Pick it up, Vince,” she snapped.
“You heard the lady,” grunted the other man.
Stanley peered through the crack between the two garbage cans. He could make out several pairs of legs among the figures standing behind the van, though none of the torsos supported by them. The dramatis personae hadn’t changed. It was still two men and a woman.
Green Eyes was called “Sibyl,” when she wasn’t called “Ma’am.” The black guy was called Vince.
The two men were trying to get a carpet into the back of the van and, although they were talking about switching Afghans for Persians, it looked like the same carpet to Stanley, fringe and all.
But the black guy had dropped one end and now it splayed on the ground, partially unrolled. The white guy, unable to heft his end into the back of the van, still held his end of the carpet waist-high, and was muttering imprecations designed to encourage his partner to get his end aloft again.
As the black man stooped to gather up the spilled end of the carpet, Stanley glimpsed an extra hand there.
A white hand.
The hand was quite motionless, too. Its fingers folded an edge of the carpet against its palm, much as a sleeping child’s might cling to the hem of its favorite blanket.
As briefly as Stanley glimpsed this hand it was gone, crushed against the belly of the black man as he heaved up his end of the roll and, with the other guy, manhandled the whole thing into the back of the van.
The white guy climbed in after it. The black man closed the door behind him and, wasting no time, walked briskly to the front of the van and climbed into the driver’s seat.
The van’s lights came on, its engine started, and it backed out of the driveway and across the cul-de-sac, directly toward Stanley. Less than ten feet from his hiding place the van stopped, its brake lights turning the underside of the staircase a brilliant scarlet. A gear lever on an automatic transmission clicked twice, the brake lights extinguished, and the van recrossed the cul-de-sac, heading up the hill toward Market.
The woman stood in the gloom of the front porch, watching the van until it was out of sight.
Crouched under the staircase behind the two garbage cans, Stanley was almost talking aloud to himself, ordering, willing the woman to go back into the house, shifting his eyes from her shadow to the pickup
to the empty street at the top of the hill and back.
Still the woman lingered in the doorway, as if savoring the night air.
Stanley watched her in despair.
Finally she turned and went into the house. Stanley crouched toward the edge of the shadow beneath the staircase and waited, the fingers of one hand touching the asphalt just behind the shadow line, like a sprinter at his starting block. But he did not hear the front door close, nor the deadbolt slide home.
Straining for those audio cues, he waited. At the top of the hill you could drive east on Market, downhill, or west, up hill. If he sprinted to the truck, and if it started right away, and if the traffic up above wasn’t too dense, and if the van wasn’t driving too fast, and if the light wasn’t red — he would have a fifty-fifty chance of turning the right way to catch it.
But if the brunette heard the truck start now she would become suspicious. After all, they had been in this cul-de-sac for nearly an hour, and beyond the three vehicles involved in this game, not a single other car had come or gone. Surely she would think it odd that a car would start up and leave immediately after the departure of the Cabrini Carpet van?
She was clever or perverse or both — wasn’t she? — to tarry, as if to take the night air, while the van went on its way, while the van disappeared, into the big city. Just in case she wasn’t alone here, she waited.
Or maybe she really was taking the night air. Right.
Stanley crouched behind the garbage cans, immobilized by her delay.
Then he heard the front door close, and the deadbolt shoot home.
But just as he put his weight on his forward foot, all set to sprint for the truck, he heard a thump on the car deck. Then another.
It was a sound he’d heard before. He froze.
A car alarm squawked. A car door opened. A foot scraped. The car door slammed.
A starter ground and the motor caught.
The BMW.
Bright white light spilled around the black cylinders of the two garbage containers, and Stanley made himself very small behind them. The light moved, the shadows moved with it, and he receded along with them, until he and the garbage cans were cast into complete darkness again, as, with an application of horsepower, the BMW swept around and suddenly accelerated out of the cul-de-sac, up the hill, and was gone.
Stanley shot out from behind the two garbage cans. At the second step of his sprint a sharp pain tugged at his lower back, but he kept on. It seemed to take him forever to cross the asphalt circle, as if he were trying to catch someone in a dream. In the renewed darkness his left knee glanced off the rear bumper of the now-invisible Jaguar. Another inch or two to his left and he would have exploded his patella. He kept on. Gaining the white Toyota at last he fumbled at the door handle until it opened, and fell into the driver’s seat. The ignition key was still in the switch, and he twisted it. The engine turned over and caught. Breathing heavily he fumbled at the headlight switch, inadvertently pulling its stalk down so that, as he backed out of the driveway, the headlights came on and the left turn-signal began to blink. The passenger door was still open. He backed straight across the mouth of Perego Terrace, onto the wooden parking deck of the stucco house. He placed the gear lever in first, let out the clutch, and the rear wheels lost traction on the wood deck and squealed. The passenger door slammed itself shut as he accelerated out of Parajito Terrace and threw the little truck into second. The engine bogged. The old Toyota didn’t have quite enough moxie to make the grade in second. He forced the gears back into first. The engine revved up and the truck crested the hill at Market.
His light was red. Market Street flowed both ways beneath it, a solid barrier of fast traffic. Seeing no choice, Stanley swung right, grabbed second gear, and accelerated down Market Street. Brakes squealed and a horn sounded behind him. The street wound to the left around a tall median wall and back to the right. He punched the truck into third. There was no sign of the BMW. The mouth of a street flashed by on the right. Avenue of escape. He pulled it into fourth. No van — what was its license number? He’d forgotten it! No. He hadn’t. No, he wouldn’t. He concentrated. The intersection of Clayton passed by on the left. Another avenue of escape. One. That was it. One, EL, yes, T0, 1ELT0…
He was doing fifty now and the mouth of other streets shot by, left and right. Market Street was straightening out, the median wall had tapered down to nothing, and traffic was visible in both directions. He coaxed the stub of a pencil out of the ashtray and wrote the license digits on the vibrating note pad without looking at it, in large figures, remembering them as he drove. Commercial license plate, should be seven figures. Alphanumeric mix. Standard California pattern, a numeral followed by three letters followed by three numbers. OneELT … that would make that naught a zero, 1ELT0 — gotcha: 36. Thank you, brain. A brown Dodge Ram, license number Cal 1ELT036. As he scribbled this he heard the expanded metal grid of the BART air vents growling under his tires and realized he had descended nearly all the way to the intersection at Castro. He looked up. The light was red. Traffic and people were already streaming through the intersection, directly transverse to his line of travel. He slammed on the brakes with both feet, and his front wheels skidded to a halt, two feet into the crosswalk. A big leather queen with a bleached crewcut and a naked beer belly framed by a black vest patted the Toyota’s right fender, smiled, and kept walking.
People were everywhere. Not dull, Castro Street on Friday night. He was in the left lane of three, completely hemmed in by cars and pedestrians. A two-ply wall of gridlocked traffic inched across Market, heading south down Castro toward 18th Street. Hundreds of people thronged in the crosswalks in front of him on both sides of the intersection, and he dimly registered that, sixty yards away, the Castro Theater had just released a large audience.
He was stopped.
He scanned every vehicle. Every face. There were plenty of each.
No Dodge van. No white BMW. No certain white guy, no particular black guy. No exact brunette. No hapless sheetrock taper, either.
He’d lost them all.
Stanley placed his elbows on the lower rim of the steering wheel, tented his fingers before his face, and scrubbed his eyes with the balls of his thumbs.
“Ted,” he said. He peeled his hands down his unshaven cheeks and looked up at the windshield, no longer seeing the traffic and lights beyond. “I’m sorry, Ted.”
Chapter Sixteen
CORRIGAN WAS SITTING IN STANLEY’S RENTED WHEELCHAIR IN THE doorway of the shack, watching the pyramid.
“Come in,” said Stanley.
Corrigan didn’t move. “Never spent time in a wheelchair before. It’s pretty comfortable.”
“Yeah? You look about as laid back as a goldfish on a porch swing.”
Corrigan cast his eyes beyond the rooftop, toward the distant hills of Berkeley. “It’s true that a badge is somewhat alienating,” he conceded. “What’s your excuse?”
“I don’t like being forced to join clubs I never heard of.”
“That includes the human race?”
“They look like me, they walk like me.” Stanley shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I hate them.”
Corrigan produced his palm-top computer, held it up to the moonlight, and thumbed the ignition. “If you should become a statistic tonight, it’ll be because you got run over while walking the white line down the middle of the information highway.”
“Not because of a bum kidney?”
“As the good Doctor Sims says, you keep taking those antibiotics, you’ll be fine.” Corrigan pecked two thumbs at the tiny keyboard. “M-O-R-P-H-O-L-O-G-Y. That right?”
Stanley threw up his hands.
“Return,” said Corrigan, thumbing a final key.
They waited. Down on Brooklyn Place a car horn honked. An eastbound whisper from the ever-cool marine layer flirted with the threadbare wires draped over the alley, bringing with it hints of dialogue from a Chinese pornographic video, and the faint tintinnabulations of win
d chimes.
“Ah.” The two caustics of Corrigan’s eyeballs reflected tiny monochrome rectangles. “Branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of function.” He glanced up. “I’m a nickel-word man.”
Stanley sighed raggedly. “Well that’s just nickeliferous.”
Corrigan clicked his tongue. “That’s a good one.”
“You got mono-renal misanthrope in there?”
Corrigan didn’t even flinch. “I got one right here in front of me. Why waste batteries?” He snapped the lid closed. “Batteries is money, you know.”
Stanley wedged himself sideways between the wheelchair and the doorjamb, but before he got over the threshold Corrigan slapped a fat envelope under his chin and said, “When you get a light struck, have a look at these.”
Stanley dropped the envelope next to the sink. “Coffee? Codeine? Whiskey? Antibiotics?”
“Column A,” said Corrigan. He folded his hands over the palmtop and contemplated the view. “Quite the location you’ve got here.”
“You should see the parties I throw,” Stanley said, filling the blackened bottom half of the espresso-maker with water. “I feel I should warn you, Corrigan.”
“Warn me, Ahearn.”
“This espresso machine is aluminum, and they say aluminum accelerates your Alzheimer’s.”
“That’s okay, Ahearn. You should see what we drink out of at headquarters.”
“Ah yes, the public trough.” He tamped an inch of Safeway’s cheapest into the machine’s bail. “Styrofoam, I presume.”
“Actually,” Corrigan replied mildly, “it’s galvanized zinc. You pay rent here?”
Stanley set the machine on the stove and scratched a match.
“It’s worth at least three hundred a month, isn’t it? Four hundred? I’m curious. My career insulates me from some of the crueler facts of life.”
The propane ring bathed the base of the coffee machine in a soft blue flame. Stanley waved out the match and dropped it in the sink. “Come on Corrigan,” he said. “You know exactly what goes on here.”
Corrigan’s eyes were following the thin stream of headlights flowing west over the upper ramp of the Bay Bridge. Whoever decreed the upper deck of that particular bridge as westward-flowing really knew what they were doing. “Yeah, I guess I do. You pay no rent. No garbage or utilities, either. You have no telephone service. These practically add up to positive cash flow, in this world we are deconstructing for ourselves — or, as a cop I should maybe say, that other people are deconstructing for us. Still, it makes you pretty independent, being phoneless; hard to get in touch with; toward which, as a professional misanthrope, you are naturally inclined.”