by S. G. Browne
Behind me, the same attractive Asian woman in a red coat from Starbucks steps through the front door, talking on her cell, saying that she just walked into the store.
I’m the first to admit I’m not much of a detective. It’s more of a day job than a calling. But I don’t have to channel my inner Columbo to know that something’s up.
I glance around, thinking maybe I walked into the middle of a robbery, but other than the guy in the suit, who walks past me and out the door past the Asian woman, who is now picking out a jar of Kalamata olives, no one else is in the store. I don’t know what’s up and part of me doesn’t want to know. I’m beginning to think I made a mistake coming in here, but I’m out of Mentos.
As I throw a couple of rolls on the counter and pull a five spot from my wallet, a black sedan with tinted windows pulls up in front of the store. Before I can get my change, the Asian woman walks up and puts a gun in my ribs.
“Hello, Mr. Monday,” she purrs in my ear like a promise. “Care to go for a ride?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really,” she says, nudging me toward the door. “After you.”
I’m guessing this is the setup that I thought didn’t happen. Silly me.
“Sorry, Nick,” says Sam.
“No worries,” I say as I’m escorted out the door and into the sedan. It’s the luxurious type, with the two back bench seats facing each other. I’m facing backward, sitting next to the Asian woman. I’m expecting Tommy Wong but instead, sitting across from me with a laptop next to him is a white man in a Brooks Brothers suit with swooping light-brown hair and a nose the size of the Transamerica Pyramid.
“This is nice,” I say, as the sedan pulls away from the curb. “Are we going to prom? Or is this a bachelorette party?”
“Nick Monday?” says the suit, looking up from the laptop. “Is that your real name?”
“Who wants to know?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“Does it matter that you’re a dead ringer for Barry Manilow?”
He laughs. It’s not a friendly laugh. More condescending, with a hint of malice. I never really liked Barry Manilow.
I glance over at the Asian woman, who gives me a professional smile, no teeth, and I wonder if she had a collagen injection or if her lips are natural.
We’re two blocks away when I realize I left my Mentos sitting on the counter.
“What’s in the bag?” Barry asks, indicating my leather backpack.
“Schoolbooks,” I say. “I’m going to night school.”
Barry glances at his watch. “At half past ten in the morning?”
“I like to make sure I get a seat in the front row.”
“Open the bag.”
He knows what’s in it. And I know he knows. So I open up my backpack and remove the bottle of Odwalla Super Protein, which the Asian woman takes from me and hands to Barry.
“What’s the grade?” asks Barry, holding up the bottle.
“Medium,” I say.
Even without the tinted windows and the black sedan, I figure the two of them work for the government. Considering the sedan is nicer than my apartment, I’m wondering if I should look into getting a job in the public sector.
“So what do you want?” I ask.
Barry looks at me with half-lidded eyes. I almost expect him to break into the opening lines of “Weekend in New England.”
“We could have you arrested,” he says.
I don’t know which branch of the government they work for: the IRS, seeking its cut of unreported income; the FBI, attempting to regulate luck poachers; or the FTC, looking to make luck a tradable commodity. Just because the government denies any knowledge of luck poachers doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of our existence. Whoever they are, I’m guessing they didn’t go through all of this trouble to audit my taxes.
“What. Do. You. Want?” I repeat.
He smiles. “Your assistance.”
“What kind of assistance?”
“Are you familiar with a man by the name of Tommy Wong?”
“I’ve heard of him,” I say, playing nonchalant. “Old Chinese guy. Well connected. Some kind of Lord of Chinatown.”
“That’s one way to put it,” says Barry.
“According to our sources,” says the Asian woman, “Tommy’s been buying up as much good luck as he can and using it for himself, which has made it virtually impossible for us to catch him doing anything illegal or come up with any evidence to convict him of racketeering or extortion.”
“Or murder,” says Barry. “And since we can’t seem to manipulate any of Tommy’s employees, we decided our best chance to get to him was to find a luck poacher. So we got ourselves a luck junkie and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“My ten o’clock Starbucks appointment.”
“Bingo,” says Barry. “Though we’ve been looking for you for the past couple of months, ever since Gordon Knight’s fortunes took a dive.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction, though I’m suddenly wondering if Tuesday Knight knows more about the circumstances of her father’s luck poaching than she’s letting on.
“We figured there was a good chance of finding a poacher in San Francisco when the mayor’s popularity plummeted,” says Barry, who spreads his arms out like a game show host. “And now, here you are.”
“Lucky me.”
“That depends,” says Barry.
“On what?”
“The way we figure it,” he says, “the only way to catch Tommy is to counteract the good luck he’s accumulated. And the only way to do that is to give him a healthy dose of bad luck.”
When it comes to bad luck, everything that can go wrong, will—sickness, bankruptcy, divorce, hair loss, impotency, sterility, car accidents, shark attacks, canceled flights, termites, flood damage, herpes.
And that’s just your garden-variety bad luck. When it comes to low-grade hard, imagine the worst thing that can happen to you short of death, then dip it in oil and set it on fire. Just a trace amount of the stuff can stick around like a bad infection—making you sick for two months, sending your business into the tank, and elevating Lucky Charms to a gourmet breakfast.
“So why do you need me?”
“To deliver the bad luck to Tommy Wong,” says Barry.
I shake my head. “I won’t poach bad luck. That’s not my game.”
“The game has changed, Mr. Monday. You’re playing by our rules now.”
“Maybe so. But there’s nothing you can do to me that would convince me to poach bad luck.”
“No,” says Barry, turning the laptop screen toward me so I can see it. “But we can do something to her.”
On the laptop screen is a photo of a woman walking out of the Starbucks on Union, the only other person living in San Francisco who can poach luck.
Amanda Hennings. Mandy. My sister.
Fuck.
“Fortunately for you,” says Barry, “the dirty work has already been done.”
Next to me, the Asian woman produces a metal case the size of a mass-market paperback. Something by Elmore Leonard or Sue Grafton rather than James Michener. She opens it to display a stainless steel vial encased in foam.
“Two ounces of low-grade hard,” she says, then closes the case and hands it to me.
I take it and hold it out in front of me like a used diaper filled to capacity. “What am I supposed to do? Just walk up to him and say, ‘Happy birthday’?”
“Tommy’s recently started contracting luck poachers from out of state to expand his search for good luck,” says Barry. “Paying top dollar for luck poached and delivered to him. We figure it’s only a matter of time before he contacts you.”
Barry needs to learn how to tell time better.
“When he does,” says Barry, “that’s when you deliver the package.”
“Deliver how?” I say, as the Asian woman pulls out her phone. “You can’t disguise bad luck as good luck. It’
s not possible.”
Good luck, no matter the grade, comes in varying degrees of white. The highest grade is the color of alabaster, while the lowest grade looks like diluted lemonade. Bad luck, conversely, is as black as the shadows in the barrel of a gun. Low-grade hard absorbs light like a black hole.
The sedan comes to a stop in front of Grace Cathedral.
“How you deliver it is your problem,” says Barry. “My problem is Tommy Wong. If you don’t take care of my problem, then you become my problem. Do we have an understanding?”
I look at the Asian woman, who is either texting or playing Angry Birds, I can’t tell. All I know is that it’s bad form to use your cell phone when you’re in the company of others. Some people have no manners.
“Can I have my luck back?” I ask.
Barry picks up the Odwalla bottle. “I think I’ll hold on to this for good luck.”
“You’re a funny guy.” I get out of the sedan and thank Barry and his partner for the lovely time. “We should get together for lunch. I know this really great Thai restaurant.”
Barry gives me a condescending smile and says, “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Monday.”
Then the door closes and I watch as the sedan turns right and vanishes around the corner.
The first thought that comes into my head is that it’s definitely time for me to cut and run. Grab a cab back to my apartment, pack up what I need, gather up the cash and fake IDs I have stashed away in my apartment and in my office, and head north to Canada or south to Mexico. I hear Vancouver’s nice, but I don’t really care for the snow. And now that I think about it, I hate Mexican food.
The destination isn’t important. All that matters is the getting out of town.
I’ve called San Francisco home for the past three years, and in spite of the problems I’ve encountered up until now, I figured I could manage to stick around for a while longer. But once you’ve been kidnapped and blackmailed by some unknown government agency that wants you to deliver thermonuclear bad luck to a Chinese Mafia overlord who has built up an impenetrable barrier of good luck and already sent a couple of his thugs to threaten you, it’s time to think about a change of scenery.
I’m even thinking it might be a good idea to give up the lifestyle altogether. Go legit. Maybe become a full-time private investigator. Sure, it would take some getting used to, but nearly half of my income since I moved here has been of the taxable kind, anyway. So I figure I’m halfway there. Besides, if Mandy could quit the lifestyle and live the so-called American dream, I don’t see why it would be such a hard adjustment for me to make.
I’m already starting to look for a garbage can to deposit the bad luck so I can pack up and get the hell out of here when I stop.
I see Mandy’s face on Barry Manilow’s laptop screen, and I hear his voice telling me that they can do something to her, and I know I can’t leave. I can’t allow anything to happen to Mandy. Not if there’s anything I can do to prevent her from getting caught up in this. I have to stick around until I deliver this bad luck to Tommy Wong and get the government out of the picture.
I sit down on the steps of Grace Cathedral and try to plan my next move. Which isn’t my strong point. It’s bad enough to have to deal with choices like buying a car or choosing a college or picking an entrée on the menu. But when you’ve been blackmailed by the Feds, threatened by the Chinese Mafia, and hired to find the mayor’s stolen luck, which you poached, figuring out what to do next can be kind of overwhelming.
I never was good at decision-making.
What I need is an adviser. Someone to help me come up with a plan. I’d even settle for a list of Things to Do:
• Buy groceries.
• Pay rent.
• Deliver bad luck to Chinese Mafia kingpin.
Even as a kid I had trouble picking which flavor of ice cream I wanted. I always felt that no matter what choice I made, it would always be the wrong one.
My father used to tell me he wondered how I managed to get dressed when I couldn’t choose between putting on my pants right leg or left leg first. Using the same rationale, he told me he never worried about catching me masturbating because I wouldn’t know which hand to use.
Which, by the way, constituted our entire conversation about the birds and the bees.
Thanks for the talk, Dad.
The first thing I have to do is figure out how to find Tommy Wong. And what to do with this stash of bad luck in the meantime.
The cable car comes rolling along California, headed toward Van Ness. I consider running over to catch it, but decide that jogging across traffic to catch a cable car at an unauthorized stop while packing extremely volatile bad luck isn’t the smartest idea I’ve ever had. Even catching a cab or the bus suddenly seems about as prudent as French-kissing an electrical outlet, so I put the case in my backpack and walk over to Huntington Park to find a bench and consider my options. When you’ve spent twenty-five years poaching luck, you understand the risks. When you’re suddenly walking around with two ounces of low-grade hard, the risks tend to increase exponentially.
Bad luck isn’t literally hard, like granite or Homer Simpson’s skull. It’s curdled and heavy, with the odor of sour milk and the consistency and color of hot asphalt. Except bad luck isn’t warm. It’s cold, like death. Poachers call it hard because of what it does to you.
Imagine paper cuts the size of the Grand Canyon or ingrown toenails with fangs. Phrases like industrial accident and burned beyond recognition come to mind.
Not exactly my idea of a good time.
Good luck, conversely, is soft. The higher the grade, the softer the luck.
Silk gloves against velvet pajamas. Goose-down pillows on a bed at the Ritz.
But even those analogies don’t come close to its texture. Top-grade soft is indescribable. I don’t even think the gods of Olympus had anything to rival it. Except maybe Aphrodite. I bet she felt like top-grade soft.
As I sit down on a bench in Huntington Park at the top of Nob Hill, a woman walks past wearing a white tank top, her long blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders. While she’s no Aphrodite, and while no one would ever confuse Nob Hill with Mount Olympus, it’s high enough above the fog that the August sun has actually made a cameo.
Several women in bikinis are camped out on the grass with laptops and iPods, while two shirtless gay men, one tall and black and the other short and white, compare six-packs. On the other bench to my right sits a middle-aged woman reading a paperback, one of those Dragon Tattoo novels, while a young mother chases her toddler around the water fountain.
I watch the young mother and think about Mandy—about what I can do to keep her out of this, about whether I should warn her, about how she’s going to be pissed off that she got dragged into my business.
We didn’t used to be like this.
After Mom died, Mandy and I got pretty close. She was eleven at the time, but even though she was two years older than me, I was already a more experienced luck poacher. Mandy tended to take after Mom. She didn’t think it was right taking something that belonged to others unless they deserved it. Which usually meant some bully at school or some stuck-up little princess who needed an attitude adjustment.
But with Mom gone and Dad emotionally unavailable, Mandy and I started hanging out together, watching out for each other, keeping each other safe. I didn’t have a lot of friends. None, actually. When you can steal luck, it makes it tough to develop any kind of camaraderie. Plus when you have that level of power at nine years old, you tend to acquire an overdeveloped sense of omnipotence. My mouth didn’t help matters.
Over the next few years, I helped Mandy develop her poaching skills. We didn’t use the luck we stole, but just discarded it or used it to water the garden or gave it to Grandpa.
Once Grandpa died, Mandy was all I had.
In high school, during my freshman year and when Mandy was a junior, we started full-on collaborating, stealing luck from the jocks and the rah-rahs and the so
cial elite and giving it to the kids who didn’t fit in and who got stuffed into gym lockers. Nobody knew what we were doing. Not even the nerds and social misfits we gave it to. We’d just process the luck and spike their sodas or milk shakes with it. Or bake it into cookies and give them out at band practice.
We were like social equalizers, smoothing out the disparity of the high school dynamic. Robin Hood and Maid Marian, robbing luck from the asshole popular kids and giving it to the geeks.
It was one of the happiest times of my life.
But once I started to poach for money as a sophomore, Mandy and I started to drift apart. She didn’t believe in stealing luck for personal profit, and I was starting to embrace the inevitability of my calling. The summer after she graduated high school, we hung out a couple of times and pilfered some luck from a bunch of yuppies for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t the same. When she met Ted a year later in college, she gave up the lifestyle entirely. We didn’t see each other much after that.
Once Mandy left, that’s when I realized I couldn’t count on anyone but myself, and that relationships would only end up causing me grief and disappointment. Grandpa tried to teach me that lesson years earlier, but at the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
A few years later, when Mandy and Ted got married and I missed the wedding because I was poaching luck from a lottery winner in Iowa, Mandy called to ream me out.
“Where were you?”
No “Hey” or “How’s it going?” Just right into attack mode.
“Where was I when?”
“Last weekend, asshole.”
“I was in Iowa. Why? What are you so upset about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m upset because you missed my wedding!”
That’s one of those ohhh moments, when you realize no matter what you say it’s not going to make things better.
“Ohhh. I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”
But you can definitely make them worse.
“You forgot?”
“Yeah. I was poaching from a Powerball winner who won three hundred and eighteen million dollars in the lottery.”