Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  The downed dread struggled to his feet. Jumpy aimed the SAW at his chest.

  “So what’re we going to have here? Two dead assholes?”

  “No, man. Don’t be doing that. Ain’t no need. We just get the fuck up and be gone.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jumpy said. He fired the SAW into the air and the two men sprinted off toward the neighborhood where lights were coming on in bedrooms.

  Jumpy got out of the Chevy and walked over to the Oldsmobile. “We got about ten seconds. You coming? Or you want to stay here and get the police point of view on things?”

  Guy trotted over to the Oldsmobile and got in.

  Jumpy pitched the SAW onto the backseat. Guy could smell its oily warmth. Jumpy must’ve used nearly forty rounds. Which left one-sixty still in the magazine.

  Guy started the car. Put the shifter into drive and made a U-turn.

  “Can you use any of that?” Jumpy said when they were five blocks away, cruising down Douglas Road into the ritzy jungle shadows of Coconut Grove.

  “Think I can,” Guy said. “Yes sir. I think I most certainly can.”

  Guy dug the little Sony from his front pocket and found the record button and he started to speak into the miniature device. Jumpy smiled and took them south toward the condo parking lot where he’d left his old Civic.

  Sirens filled the night like the wails of predatory beasts circling their night’s meal.

  “What’s this mean?” Jumpy held up a sheaf of papers.

  He was standing in the doorway of Dr. Guy Carmichael’s tiny windowless cubicle. Guy’s office hours were from 4 till 6. At 6:15 his evening graduate fiction workshop started and ran till 9:40. At the moment it was 5:30, so at worst he’d have to deal with Jumpy for fifteen minutes before he could claim he had to rush off to class.

  “Could you be more precise? What does what mean?”

  “Okay,” Jumpy said. “What the fuck is this? A fucking C minus on my story.”

  “Did you read my comments? Is there something you’re confused about?”

  Jumpy looked down the hall, then checked the other direction. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and blue jeans and loafers without socks. Trying to fit in with some preppie image of a college student still surviving from his first fling at higher education back in the early ’70s.

  “I wrote what happened. You were there. You saw it. This is what happened. And that’s all it’s worth? Not even a fucking C? What’ve I got to do, kill somebody to get an A?”

  “It’s the writing,” Guy said. “Not the events you describe.”

  “On my paper you said—shit, where is it?” Jumpy started fumbling through the typed pages, looking for Guy’s tiny scrawl.

  Jumpy used a battered Royal typewriter and he whited out his mistakes with big glops smeared across paragraphsized portions of his paper. Guy admired his stamina, hunched over the tiny machine, those enormous fingers drilling letter after letter onto the white page. Stamina was one thing. Talent was another. Guy had tried hard with Jumpy, made him a special project, devoted hours and hours to one-on-one’s in his office and in a bar on Biscayne. But after a minute or two of anything short of unadulterated praise, Jumpy glazed over and slid back into the murky grotto inside his bulletproof skull.

  Jumpy found the comment he’d been searching for and put a finger on Guy’s words as he read.

  It’s not credible that two such dissimilar men would pair up for such an effort. That’s what I mean. Not credible But we did. We paired up. So why in fuck’s name is that a C minus?”

  “You have to convince the reader it’s credible.”

  “You’re the reader, Guy. You were fucking there. You were fucking standing right there pissing your fucking Dockers. And you don’t believe what happened right in front of your fucking eyes? I’m missing something here.”

  One of Guy’s grad students, Mindy Johnston, stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Ooops. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Mindy was a poet, aggressively ethereal. Wispy red hair, enormous breasts that defeated her every attempt to conceal them.

  “I just came by to drop off my assignment. I can’t be in class tonight. Migraine’s acting up.”

  Guy accepted the paper and told Mindy he hoped she felt better soon.

  “Try a pop of heroin,” Jumpy said. “Blow that migraine right away.”

  Jumpy’s gaze was fixed on Mindy’s bosom. A smile slathered on his lips.

  “Heroin?” Mindy said.

  “Say the word, and I’ll drop a couple of hits off at your apartment. Special delivery. First two are free.”

  She squinched up her face into something between a smile and a scream.

  “That’s a joke, right?” Mindy backed out of the office and floated quickly down the hallway.

  “Inappropriate,” Guy muttered.

  Jumpy said, “You got anything going Saturday night?”

  Guy drummed the nub of his red ink pen against his desktop.

  “Not more gun dealing,” Guy said. “I’ve had my fill of that.”

  “I got so much shit going on I gotta get a bigger appointment book,” Jumpy said. “Name your poison. Something that’ll get me an A this time.”

  “I remember one time you mentioned organized crime. That caught my attention. There’s a place in the book I’m working on, I could use some details.”

  “The mob,” Jumpy said. Then he looked around Guy’s office at the framed diplomas, the photographs of his kids and wife and two little dogs.

  “Might could arrange something,” Jumpy said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  “And about that C minus,” Guy said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll read it again. Maybe I missed something the first time.”

  “That’s cool,” said Jumpy. “Maybe you did.”

  Jumpy picked Guy up in the Pink Pussycat parking lot at 1 a.m. on Saturday. He was driving a green Jaguar convertible, top down. Chrome wraparound sunglasses and a black aloha shirt with red martini glasses printed on it.

  Guy got in, and without a word or look in his direction, Jumpy peeled out, slashed into traffic on Biscayne. Once they’d settled down into the flow of vehicles, Guy smoothed his hand across the leather seat. His long blond hair tangling in the wind.

  “Car yours?”

  “It is tonight.”

  “A loaner,” Guy said, smiling, trying to get with the lingo.

  Jumpy looked over. His expression was dead tonight, maybe he was working himself up, or he was nervous, Guy couldn’t tell. That had been his biggest challenge, trying to capture the interior life of a man like Jumpy. Was he constantly on drugs and so blitzed there was no coherent thought rolling through his head? Or was he dumb, just incapable of nuanced feelings or thought? Based on the writing Guy had seen, he was tilting toward the dumb option. Jumpy couldn’t string two sentences together without making half a dozen errors of grammar, syntax, or logic. By the end of a paragraph, Jumpy’s ideas were so insufferably scrambled, making sense of his story was impossible.

  Guy was getting good detail from these ride-alongs, some nice asshole-puckering moments of violence, but overall, Jumpy wasn’t giving away a lot about his psychodynamics. What pushed the man’s buttons? Who the hell could tell?

  After tonight, Guy figured he’d bail on this whole enterprise. He’d had enough of the street for a while. A night or two like the gun-buy last week could keep Guy satiated for a good long time. His wife, Shelly, had no idea what he was up to. But she could smell the fear on him when he returned, the stink of sweat and cigarette smoke and the prickly tang of danger. And she was beginning to make irritable noises.

  So after tonight Guy was done. Cash out, walk away with his winnings. Spend the rest of the semester using this brief immersion in the back-alley world of Jumpy Swanson to fuel his imagination for one more crime novel.

  He didn’t know how Jumpy would take it, him making his exit. Or what quid pro quo Jumpy was expecting. C minus was alre
ady a mercy grade. And Guy wasn’t about to fudge on his own academic values as payback for a half dozen adventures on the South Florida streets. There would come a day, Guy was pretty sure, when Jumpy would stomp out of his office disgusted with Guy’s failure to give him the secret key to the kingdom Jumpy so passionately and unaccountably wanted. Jumpy Swanson, an author? Oh, get serious.

  Jumpy headed north off Biscayne into neighborhoods Guy didn’t recognize. Residential, middle-class, or maybe edging down to lower-middle. The cars in the driveways were mostly midsize, newer models. The houses were dark, probably retirees or working-class folks who’d had their fill of TV movies for the evening and had headed off to the sack.

  It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood Guy had been expecting. Though Jumpy had revealed only that his mob friends were eager to meet Guy, a professional writer. Guy assumed the gangsters had the customary overinflated sense of their own glamour and the resulting ambition to have their lives portrayed on the screen, or on the pages of some runaway bestseller.

  Guy was always ambivalent about being introduced as a writer. On the one hand, it embarrassed him to be the object of admiration to people who had no inkling what the artistic endeavor was all about. It felt silly to get the little bows of courtesy from illiterates. On the other hand, in an instance like tonight, meeting men for whom crime was a way of life, having some professional connection with the larger world was, to Guy’s way of thinking, like wearing Kevlar. Sure, he was a snitch. But it was all in the open, and for commercial, not legal gains. He’d make sure these guys got a copy of the next book, maybe even put their nicknames on the acknowledgment page. Johnny “The Nose.” Frank “Hatchet Breath” Condilini.

  Jumpy wheeled into a yard that was crowded with cars. They were parked in every direction: beaten-up compacts, a brand-new white Cadillac, a couple of BMWs, a pickup truck from the ’60s. Hard to decipher the demographics, but the haphazard parking jobs suggested the occupants had arrived in haste and under the influence of dangerous substances.

  There was a peephole in the front door. A cliché that Guy saw instantly he would be unable to use. The man whose face appeared was fat and his greasy skin danced with colored lights. Guy could feel the throb of bass music rising up from the sidewalk, a beat that was as hypnotically slow and primitive as the heartbeat of a dying man.

  “Who’s the pussy?”

  “I told Philly I was bringing him. He’s the guy, the writer.”

  “What’s he write?” the thug said. “Parking tickets?”

  “Open the fucking door, Moon.”

  The door opened and the wall of music rushed like dark wind from the house. Guy waded past Moon. The man was at least four hundred pounds and he moved with a sluggish wobble like a deep-sea diver running low on air.

  “What is this place?” Guy spoke an inch from Jumpy’s ear but wasn’t sure he heard. Jumpy made no response, just led the way across the room.

  The living room stretched half the length of the house and through sliding doors looked out on an empty swimming pool and a dark canal. The strobes were covered with colored lenses and Guy was almost instantly seasick. No furniture, no rugs on the terrazzo. Half a dozen mattresses sprawled around the room, where knots of naked people squirmed in the flickering light.

  “You brought me to a freaking sex party, Jump?”

  The music cut off halfway through his question and Guy’s voice echoed through the room. Someone tittered and there was a muffled groan. A second later, as Guy was still processing his embarrassment, the music restarted, something faster and even louder, and the strobes picked up their pace as well. The air was tainted with chemical smells, booze and weed and other compounds he could only guess at.

  Guy followed Jumpy over to a makeshift bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of longnecks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.

  “Relax you, put you in the mood.”

  He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.

  “To improving my grade,” Jumpy said.

  “To creating credible characters.” Guy wasn’t backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hashish den.

  Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit, mano a mano.

  Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the ’60s. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such spaces forbidding, but given the present circumstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.

  At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.

  Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back. “You wanted to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. Isn’t that the idea?”

  Guy felt his fear collapsing into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt suddenly trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he’d bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.

  “Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly.”

  The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped undershorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby. It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding glass door had a view across the canal, looking into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow-dancing under paper lanterns.

  Philly shook Guy’s limp hand and stepped back to size him up.

  “This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit.”

  Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he’d come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.

  Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.

  Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.

  The gin and tonic was spinning inside his skull.

  “You son of a bitch.” Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”

  “Hey, professor, come on in, the water’s fine.” It was a woman’s voice he vaguely recognized.

  He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

  She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

  “Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”

  Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize.
In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred—meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred—round magazine.

  Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

  “A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.

  The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.

  “You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”

  “I used you, Guy? I fucking used you?”

  Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

  “Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”

  Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

  Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.

  “Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”

  Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right biceps and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

  “This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”

  There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.

  DEAD STORAGE