A Long Crazy Burn

by Jeff Johnson

  “I told the Russian we were quits. I just want to move on. He was very receptive.”

  “I see.” Dessel’s fingers played along the back of the seat. “I’m wondering so many things right now, Darby. Like why you didn’t just call him and leave a message, for starters.”

  “I like to make an appearance.”

  “I see.” Dessel nodded. “I obviously like doing the same thing. Timing is everything. Why so early in the morning?”

  “No appointment. Figured a rich dude might be the type to get an early start. Probably how they get rich in the first place.”

  Dessel tapped his temple. “Impressive.”

  I shrugged. Pressman grunted.

  “So paint me a picture.” Dessel said. “You used to be an artist. We can use this car as the nice warm canvas you’re used to and you can use words as your …” He snapped his fingers.

  “Pigments,” Pressman said.

  “Bingo!”

  “To start with, I totally ratted you fuckin’ guys out. It’s partly because I don’t like you, but also because I don’t want any confusion down the road. If you two godforsaken morons ever get this scumbag, some crazy fucker might blow up my house. I have two cats to consider.”

  “Cats,” Dessel said. He was grinning again.

  “They’re rude, but it gets so you like ’em. I don’t know why. It also struck me, and let me just take a page from your book, but it struck me that you two boys are like baboons. Big snouts. So if you go truffle hunting in this guy’s patch of dirt, I want to make damn sure he knows I’m not even close to involved.”

  “Baboons,” Dessel said, considering. “Truffles. I have to remember that.”

  “Yeah, nice of you to pick me up right in front of his place while his bodyguard is watching. Almost like a miracle of bad timing on your part. Speaking of timing.” I looked at the watch I wasn’t wearing.

  Dessel drummed his fingers some more. “I can’t say any of this makes me happy, Darby.”

  “Sorry to say I don’t give a shit.”

  Dessel’s boyish face grew hard. It was expression I never suspected he could pull off.

  “Bob,” he said softly. “Let’s pull over.”

  Agent Pressman pulled up to the curb. He’d been driving aimlessly, but we were still at least ten blocks from my car.

  “Get out,” Dessel said, every bit of chummy gone. “We can save our road trip to Idaho for another day. Like maybe tomorrow.”

  My car had a 108-dollar parking ticket on it. It didn’t surprise me. I threw the ticket in the gutter, fired up the engine, and turned the heater on high. After the inside warmed up, I lit a cigarette and fiddled with the radio. Nothing but commercials.

  The next stop was going to be depressing, but it had to be done. Dmitri. He used his lame pizza shop as an office and he often got there early. It was also probable that he had taken to sleeping on the floor behind the register. But it also meant I would be in close proximity to the ruins of the Lucky Supreme, and I didn’t want to see it just yet. I pulled onto 6th Street a few blocks down and parked. If Dessel and Pressman had stealthily followed me, they’d done a really good job.

  The partially burned out neon sign reading “mitri’s izza” pretty well summed up Dmitri in every way. He was old-school fucked up. Not only would the sign never be fixed, but to Dmitri it was a symbol, a testament. He believed that change was bad, that entropy was his personal curse, and above all that fixing anything encouraged the cosmic forces at work around him to break two things in return. The windows were wet with rain on one side and slicked with an accumulation of airborne orange grease on the other. I peeked in through the glass of the front door. Dmitri was sitting at a random table, doing nothing. He was wearing lime-green pants and a bulging parka of some kind. His eyes were closed. Either he was deep in boozy meditation or he was unconscious.

  The door was locked so I kicked it, hard. My hands were too cold to knock. Dmitri stirred and frowned and pointed at the street. He didn’t recognize me. I kicked the door again, harder this time, three solid whacks. Dmitri scowled and wobbled to his feet. He’d been a morning drinker for years, but some days he was better than others. It was evidently a vodka morning rather than white wine.

  His rheumy eyes seemed to focus, and his scowl transformed into almost comical shock.

  “Open this fuckin’ door!” I yelled.

  Dmitri walked slowly to the filthy glass and then just stood there, staring at me.

  “I didn’t do it!” I yelled.

  “I know,” he replied, so quietly I was reading his lips.

  “Then open the door!”

  He cranked the deadbolt and I pushed in.

  Mitri’s izza smelled like he’d been sleeping there for weeks, maybe since the explosion. Dmitri himself looked worse than I’d ever seen him. His dump-rejected wardrobe was spattered with mustard and beer and the crotch of his lime pants was darkened with either urine or something he’d spilled in his lap. His bizarre raft of gray hair was matted and shining like he’d rubbed his head with French fries. Even though he was a nutjob, he’d always maintained a certain edge in the past. The filthy, withered thing in front of me was a broken-down old man who’d lost his ghost.

  “It stinks in here,” I said.

  “Your face looks good,” Dmitri countered.

  “So, the police.” Dmitri walked back to the table where he’d been sitting. “They’ve been looking for you.” He sank down into the chair and stared out the filthy window at the rain.

  “I talked to the feds earlier, so I’m clear with the minor-level pigs for the time being.” I sat down across from him. The table was sticky, so I folded my arms.

  Dmitri shrugged and hunched into his parka. The place was dark, and so cold I could see my breath. I lit up a cigarette.

  “They’re coming,” Dmitri said in a slurred voice. His eyes slowly closed. “I’m only waiting now.”

  “Yes, yes,” I snapped impatiently. “I know. I have a few fucking questions for you, so wake the fuck up.”

  Dmitri squirmed deeper into his parka.

  “So how’d you know I wasn’t the bomber?”

  “How do you know I wasn’t?”

  I couldn’t tell him that I’d already beaten most of the information I need out of Ralston and put an ambitious pimp on the golf course, so I smoked.

  “Same reason.” I blew his way. “Why the hell would either of us do it?”

  Dmitri made a tutting sound, pleased.

  “So,” I continued. “You know about the Russian.”

  Dmitri’s eyes opened, but he didn’t point them at me. He was looking at something ten miles and ten years away.

  “Oh yes,” he whispered.

  “Well, isn’t that fucking great.” I slapped my left hand down on the table. “You goddamn piece of shit! Look at my face! This is what it cost me to find out!”

  Dmitri scowled at me. “I think it looks good. You look like Pierce Brosnan’s criminal brother. The young one. But you need a haircut.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Dmitri, you better start talking. You’re not my landlord anymore, remember? I always hated that word, by the way. ‘Landlord’ pisses me off just to say it.” I pointed at him. “So you, you’re just a piece of shit to me. How’s that for a new title.”

  Dmitri shrugged again.

  “And,” I added, “your new contract has an ‘I beat the fuck out of you’ clause. Optional.”

  “The police, they …” he trailed off.

  “I’m so not in the mood for your bullshit,” I said, my voice rising again. “You start talking right now or I wreck this place and smash your skull flat. Spit it out.”

  He roused himself enough to steeple his fingers beneath his chin.

  “Choices, choices,” he said softly. “Everyone keeps giving me the same ones, too.” He took a deep breath and blew some smelly air my way as a preamble. “You know that Old Town is changing, Darby. Lots of mone
y involved. My father bought these two buildings long, long ago. And now I’m going to lose them both. A man will come. A man with a briefcase. He will have papers in it. This will happen soon.”

  Not this week, I thought.

  “I feel bad for you, old man. Looks like you’re finally going to retire. You have to understand a few things now. Are you paying attention?”

  Dmitri made a tiny dismissive wave, his only response.

  “The way I see it, Dmitri, is that you owe me. And I mean big time. As in hugely. I’ve put up with your bullshit for way too long. For years, I fixed all the discount second-rate crap in that fucked-up building at my own expense. And then some shitwad Russian decides to move you out because you’re a crazy roach farm type of guy. The perfect target. You’re a fuckup, dude. And you dragged me down with you.”

  I paused and lit a new cigarette off the butt of the first one. My face scar was pulsing. Dmitri stared at me, blank.

  “So, fucktard, when that man with the briefcase shows up, you do two things. You know what they are?”

  Dmitri closed his eyes.

  “Here’s what they are,” I continued. “You sign those fucking papers, but with a provision. I’ll give you the details later, but you aren’t doing this alone. I’m going with you.”

  His eyes were still closed, so I reached out and slapped him as hard as I could. He tumbled out of the chair and landed on his back. Wild terror spasmed across his face and he cowered as I tossed the table aside and stood over him. I stared into his wide eyes and slowly ran my index finger down the new scar on my face.

  “You fuck up what I’m about to do, you get one of these, but I’m not really known for restraint. Get me? Understand?”

  Dmitri nodded, once. It was hard for him since he was on his back and it seemed like his mad hair was weighing him down.

  “Well then, we’re all good,” I said pleasantly. “You have a nice day. Go visit a barber and Nordstrom’s. Aruba awaits.”

  Then I went down to the street to visit the Lucky Supreme.

  People tend to trust a tattoo artist. We have a unique cultural bus pass, a strange ticket to the odd and often dark places inside of people, and I was potent in that already powerful way. Everyone knew I wasn’t going to rat them out. Not because of ethics, and certainly not because of honor. People understood, deep down, on a visceral level, that I wasn’t even close to fitting in. Whatever logic had guided me all the way to the fringes of everything, that was behind my improbable occupation and towered in the heart of my worldview in general, made me trustworthy in the same way a foreigner was trustworthy. I didn’t give half a shit what anyone was up to and they could tell. And on the off chance I did, no one would believe me.

  From that position, I’d been privy to a wide variety of things best not known. Stories of love gone off the rails, the unhinged ways of businesses great and small, the obscene hiding places, the complicated lies and desperate half-truths, the secrets the perpetrators themselves had long since rinsed from their minds with rivers of booze. Twenty years of that shit was hard-packed in my head and I’d never really needed to know any of it, not until now. The exotic burden of my station in life had been a naked knife I gingerly carried and accidentally cut myself with from time to time. It was all about to take on a different value. I was going to hold it by the handle and start disemboweling everything left in my way.

  That was the first real thought I had when the tidal wave of rage receded. The Lucky, my Lucky Supreme, was the most tragic thing I’d ever seen. I stood there alone in the rain and gaped at it for I don’t know how long. The windows had been swept into piles behind the tattered police tape that cordoned off the sidewalk. The door was gone completely. I could see into the darkness inside, and it was the strangest thing. A thousand memories scrabbled like phantoms through the wreckage. Every twisted chair had a laughing specter in it. All the wet, scorched trash still looked like art, a terrible joke made by Banksy on peyote. The pitted walls were pregnant with a magic that had cost something high in the currency of the human soul, and that magic was trickling away into the gutters right before my eyes. I could see Delia in there, laughing, and I knew that this was where she finally found herself after a lifetime of looking. This was where Nigel felt safe for the first time in his mysterious life, in a place paradoxically filled with danger, where he had built his first psychic nest. It was where Big Mike whiled away the minutes and seconds of his miserable existence and found momentary peace in the distraction of chaos. And it was where I had been something as simple as myself.

  Any doubt, any second-guessing, any discord between logic and passion inside of me vanished as I surveyed the ruination. I was halfway there and I’d done it all alone so far, and that was about to change. I’d killed a pimp who had beaten me half to death and left me for dead in a dumpster, then I’d stolen a ton of disgusting cash, pissed off some feds who already had every reason to want me in a cage, beaten a junkie bomber to within an inch of his life and robbed him, too, and I’d baited the Russian who hired him in an effort to stall him for a few days, in the hope that while he waited for the heat to die down I could steal the fire. It was a start. From there, I had to work more thoughtfully. But I was going to have to rise, once again, into a role I avoided whenever possible. It was time to become a gutter king and risk more lives than my own.

  The Rooster Rocket, which we shared our north wall with, looked salvagable. The windows were gone, but they’d been boarded up with sturdy plywood, as had the rectangular hole where the door had been. Gomez wouldn’t have gone to that much trouble unless most of the booze was still in the bottles. I’d have to call him soon, as in top of the to-do list.

  The Korean mini mart on the other side of the tattoo shop was toast. The brunt of the explosion seemed to have gone their way. I walked around and studied the situation. The epicenter of the blast was indeed the Lucky Supreme’s bathroom, left rear wall, back corner. A trash can had been there. The front of the shock wave had torn through the tattoo shop, but a powerful percentage of the energy had torn through the mini mart. Almost nothing remained. Their part of the roof had mostly collapsed, and everything left by the looters was trash. I never knew much about the family who ran the place. They didn’t speak English, and after twenty years I’d never bothered to learn a single word of Korean. It wasn’t like they were rude. They were a family and they stayed close together. They’d been scared. Old Town had been a shitty place for them to land, and I never had any idea how they wound up with the mini mart in the first place. The tattoo shop was a strange place for them to deal with, just like it was for many neighbors. We were handy to have around if bad shit went down, and car theft directly out front became less likely. But allowing neighbors to remain anonymous was part of the deal, and they’d been especially good at it.

  I went back and stood in front of the Lucky and tried to let some of my dreams, something of me, even if it was just my fury, shore up the place. It was one of my rare spiritual moments, but I was feeling something, and that almost never happened, so I went with it. I was about to whisper something cryptic, in Spanish maybe, when something moved inside.

  A dark figure flashed past one of the empty windows, stooped over and moving fast. I looked both ways. A few random cars were driving past, headlights on, wipers wiping. Down the street a woman was walking rainy-day fast, her face hidden by an umbrella. I ducked under the police tape and danced silently over the random bricks and chunks of masonry to the jagged rectangular hole where the front door used to be.

  Dane Bane was stuffing things into a second-generation black trash bag. He was a local junkie skate punk who harvested trust fund chicks cruising Old Town for coke and X. He came around the Lucky on a regular basis looking for handouts, and once I’d taken him to the hospital. I never liked him, but catching him picking through the remains of the Lucky brought the fury in me all the way back to a rolling boil.

  “Hey, fucker,” I said.

  His head snapped up, eyes bright
, his face sheened in sweat. He was high on something, but not the right thing. Probably coming up on Mexican tar time with nothing but speed. I wondered how many times he’d been in there, what he’d already taken.

  “Darby!” he gushed. He licked his lips. “I heard you were dead.”

  I stepped inside, out of the doorway and into the relative darkness.

  “C’mere,” I said.

  Dane Bane looked down at his trash bag and then back up to me. Slyness spread over his skinny face. His game was like an on/off switch. It was back on.

  “I was getting some stuff,” he said quickly. “Fucking people been in here, but they don’t know what to look for. I got some machines the other night. Tubes. The good shit. Idiots were in here stealing Band-Aids and paper towels. I was going to hold it for you or Delia. For some money, of course. I have better things to do than pick through your trash, man.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I knew you’d do the right thing. Guy like you.”

  “Fuck yeah,” he crowed. He peered out one of the windows, sketchy. “All the shit you guys done for me? But I still need some cash for all my effort.”

  “I have something for you,” I said. I smiled. He nodded, smugly appreciative of my diminished social standing. I held my hand out for the bag. He took one more look around and sauntered over and held it out.

  My first punch went into his hard gut just below the sternum and didn’t seem to do very much. Dane Bane was one of those mutant termite junkies who somehow stayed solid on a diet of lies and day-old donuts. I didn’t want to smash into his teeth with my naked hand, so I hammered him fast in the neck and the right temple in the same flurry and he went down. He looked at me with animal eyes; lost, trapped, dangerously empty.

  “You go to the train station from here, Dane, and you walk far out down the tracks and hop a freight. And if you ever come back to this town I’ll kill you.”

  He whimpered and crab-walked back into the deep trash in the corner. I kicked the bag at my feet and it ripped open. My flash. Some of Delia’s. It was wet, burned, warped, and ruined.