In the snapshot the ghoul kid holds ‘her’ heavy severed head up in defiant triumph, his fist knotted in the head’s still wavy coif of tarnished gold hair, the head’s mouth fallen wide open in an eternal frozen scream, exposing long yellow teeth jutting from the long embalmed black gums in an enviably perfect grill.
The ghoul kid is oblivious that all the other dead in that cemetery, whose buried faces he’d walked across getting there, were writhing in their coffins laughing at him. Row after row of interred carcasses beneath their tombstones and monuments, within their mausoleums and sepulchers, filling that graveyard’s murky, enfolding subterranean darkness.
You cannot disrespect us, those Boise dead say to the ghoul kid silently, with surprising kindness. You will be with us soon enough . . .
The caller after the ghoul kid was from a little old lady in Baltimore eating cat-food out of a can, wondering if her overdue Social Security check was finally coming the next day or not. Carmel hung up on her quick – no way the old biddy could afford it.
Those were the ones she always cut short: the ones with dust-covered hopes, where it was obvious they didn’t have the money. People telling her they were getting evicted and wondering if their dead spouse had hidden any valuables in the house. Single moms on welfare with no food in the cupboard, wondering if their ex was going to feed the kids soon.
Carmel blew all those ones off fast. The hell with company orders. The hell with the fact that her priority number was already starting to drop and she could look forward to getting less and less calls as unshirkable conscience sabotaged her meal ticket.
After she hung up on the little old cat food lady, the phone didn’t ring for a while. Her ranking was already falling then.
No good deed goes unpunished: the tumble had begun.
Was she relieved? Or was it dread she felt, knowing that soon she’d have to focus on her own life instead of being an eavesdropping voyeur spying on the suffering of others?
Carmel made a fresh pot of coffee, just as happy to have this break no matter what the down-time portended for her current ‘career.’ She only had a few smokes left but she chained two in quick succession, shuffled and dealt the cards into a Tetractys spread and then a Horseshoe, keeping her spiritual link to the deck open.
The phone rang.
“Psychic Dragon,” Carmel said, going for a seamless optimistic flow of words with this one, steeling herself to milk the call hard. “How are things tonight?”
“Not good,” the woman on the other end said, with perfect conviction. The woman’s voice was strong but had the papery creak of an over-tightened guitar string being plucked too hard.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Well, I’m just wondering when I’m going to get my daughter back.”
Carmel opened the deck: the Nine of Swords, showing a woman sitting bolt upright in her bed in the deep of the night, both hands pressed tight to her face in a desperate and futile effort to hold in the mortal agony, swords suspended in the darkness above her and about to fall. Not a good card, nope not at all. A really bad scene for this particular lady.
“I see,” Carmel said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “I know it’s difficult when you’re separated from your loved ones. You must be worried about her.”
“No, actually I’m not.” Again no sign of doubt in her voice.
Carmel stropped the edge of the deck with her thumb and racked her brain, feeling for the vibe but just missing it, her intuition conveniently deciding to come up blank on this one.
“I’m sure you two will be together again soon?” Carmel mouthed a silent curse at herself as she realized she was asking rather than telling, a mortal sin for a phone psychic claiming to actually be able to make predictions.
“No,” the woman said. “Sarah’s in two counties right now, so they’re saying. I just want to know if it’s true, and if so when they’re going to give all of her back to me. And I want to know if they really won’t be able to find her head in time for all of her to be buried together.”
Carmel laid her deck down aghast, cards and phone-psychic-ing forgotten for a moment as empathy crashed home against her will. “Ma’am, can I ask what happened?”
“Well, they tell me she was murdered,” the caller said, not mentioning the sordid fact that it was Carmel that was supposed to have all the answers here. “If they’re to be believed, they identified her from her tattoos. Sarah has this beautiful yellow sun inked on the small of her back, with blue birds flying over it. The Gila County sheriff says he has that part. She has this angel on her right ankle – Sarah always calls it her guardian. The coroner up in Flagstaff claims to have that leg.”
The creak in the caller’s voice had gotten a lot stronger – it sounded like she was about ready to split right open.
Carmel felt physically crushed down into the ground, felt more humble than she ever had – Carmel was absolutely powerless and deeply ashamed. Here was this woman in undoubtedly the darkest hour of her life, and the best she could muster up was Carmel, some faceless bimbo on the other end of a phone connection that was siphoning a dollar a minute off her phone bill.
“Can I ask your name, ma’am?” Carmel asked gently.
“Irene.”
“Irene, what about the rest of your family? You’re not alone through this are you?”
“Well, my son’s here, sleeping on my couch. But he’s being less than helpful.”
“How’s that?”
“Well – he says I was a bad mother. He says it’s my fault Sarah’s dead.”
Afterwards Carmel never remembered exactly what they talked about after that. But she knew she stayed on the line a long time, speaking softly to Irene like you would to a severely wounded animal encountered at the side of the road, or to someone standing on the ledge of a very tall building. The call amounted to a decent addition to Carmel’s next paycheck, but Carmel would’ve parked her nails in the face of anyone crass enough to have mentioned that fact.
When Carmel finished with Irene’s call she needed a break bad. But first Carmel selfishly shuffled the deck for herself, whispered the silly question she’d once asked the cards daily when she was a little girl and her aunt was first teaching her how to read them: “Is my prince out there somewhere?”
The ‘little girl’ portion of her heart felt a million miles away these days, and it had been years since she’d asked that cootie-catcher of a question. But after Irene, Carmel somehow felt the need as harshly as any of her customers.
She looked at the card she’d pulled from the deck, the same one that had often made a habit of showing up in answer to that question: the King of Swords, a grim crowned man holding a sword, sitting on his throne in a windswept world of chaos. She felt a pang run through her belly that she couldn’t interpret as she caressed that old familiar piece of pasteboard.
The phone rang.
Carmel looked at it with a mixture of loathing and longing: part of her wanting to run as far as she could from the loud horrid little piece of technology, another voyeuristic part wanting to pick it up and listen to one more tale of desperation.
Had she really thought she could run away from all the bad memories of home just by coming down here to the Bay Area? Had she actually thought she could escape Humboldt?
“No matter where you go, there you are,” she told the empty room. She reached for a smoke but her pack was just as empty.
The phone was still ringing the entire time it took her to grab her black leather jacket and walk out the front door to buy another pack.
Chapter 4
“There must be a UFO overhead,” Marla said matter-of-factly, groping around inside the parakeet cage.
Little Willy was perched on the edge of the of the hotel room’s single worn sofa, staring down at his raggedy Adidas trainers sticking out the frayed cuffs of his bellbottom floods. He didn’t how long he’d been sitting that way – time had a habit of blurring or skipping when he went off into one of his blanknes
ses.
His gaze darted up to examine Marla, wondering if she’d even noticed his spacing out. Her pedal pushers hung loose on her drug-spindly legs.
Her bony face held no readable expression at all as she pulled her hand out the cage with her parakeet perched on her extended index finger, the nail of which was chewed to the quick. “I can always tell when a UFO’s around – it makes my titties tingle.”
As far as Willy could tell she was dead serious – not that he was doubting her. Everyone had their little theories they were attached to.
Little Willy knew this one tweaker named Eddie who sincerely believed Catholic Secret Service hitmen were on his trail just because he’d discovered their existence. Eddie would only go out on cloudy days; he tried to keep his hands hidden when he was out of doors and never looked up at the sky – Eddie explained once to Willy that the Pope had an extensive fleet of spy satellites and Eddie didn’t want to star on Vatican TV.
“Are the UFOs Catholic?” Willy asked.
He wished that Ghost would hurry. Marla always gave Willy a funny feeling in his stomach whenever he had to relate to her. Willy wondered idly just how much longer Ghost was going to keep her around – it was plain Ghost didn’t like her much.
As Little Willy watched, the parakeet started humping Marla’s finger, its tiny bird eyes rolling up in trembling ecstasy.
“Oh, look,” Marla said. “It’s beating off. Isn’t it cute?”
The opening of the bathroom door cut off whatever reply Willy might have made. Ghost took a single graceful silent step out into the tiny hotel room and pointed his blank hatchet-faced stare down at Willy as if appraising him, or perhaps guessing his weight for a bar bet.
Ghost was wearing the zip-up sweater Little Willy had never seen him take off. As always Ghost had his hoodie up and cinched tight.
Willy shivered and his gaze dropped to the stained carpet as he often did when Ghost aimed that empty sketch of a face in his direction. It was good that Ghost was his friend.
Ghost saw the masturbating parakeet, apparently without surprise. “Put the bird away,” he said, voice distracted.
Marla obeyed, well-schooled by now. Ghost sat in the tape-mended easy chair across from Little Willy and studied him without saying a word, with that unselfconscious unblinking stare that Willy had gotten used to long ago.
Willy had also grown accustomed to Ghost’s extended silences, the times when it seemed like Ghost was thinking hard or maybe even praying (although Willy found the second possibility unlikely). Little Willy knew he had his own foibles: his own long fugues when he was unable or unwilling to speak, the times he slept for days on end when one of his narcoleptic trances descended.
Ghost didn’t down on Little Willy, and in return Willy didn’t judge on Ghost. How many other friendships were founded on lesser bases than that? But in the case of Ghost and Little Willy it went beyond mutual tolerance – Willy had decided long ago that the two men were very much akin in some ungodly way.
“Marla is a junkie,” Ghost observed, as if vocalizing his latest contribution to a previously silent conversation. “But she has her uses.”
Glancing at the dirty dishes stacked to teetering heights in the kitchenette sink, Willy had his doubts. Whatever Marla’s obvious sterling qualities and strengths, housekeeping at least did not seem to be one of them: mold covered the filthy plates.
Little Willy wondered if some microscopic civilization might have arisen there since the dishes were last washed – Willy halfway expected to see a miniature rocket launch from the midst of the plates, a microscopic space program for the sink’s bacterial scientists to explore their world. But Little Willy was too keyed up with need now to be distracted for long by whimsy.
He was relieved when Ghost finally came around to why they were here, and laid out the details of the score in that disconnected way Willy had also gotten accustomed to in the course of their dealings. Despite the vapidity of Ghost’s expression, as he spoke Willy knew he was intently gauging Willy’s reaction to his words.
But Willy didn’t care how eccentrically Ghost briefed him on the mission. Little Willy had learned long ago you had to pay to play, and that first you needed to earn. And, as Fat Bob used to be fond of saying, ‘it was time to do the dirty deed.’
Marla’s apartment was on the third floor. Willy went down the same stairwell he’d come up, walking along the outer wall of the stairway so no one on the floors above or below could see him. He silently shut the stairwell door, padded silently across the tattered carpet of the empty lobby and silently slunk out the back way onto the loveless night streets of South Berkeley.
Thick fog had rolled in off the Bay while he’d been in Marla’s apartment. He could hear buoys clanging out there, echoing across the water. He could hear a foghorn in the distance to the northwest, sounded like maybe the one at the Marina South Light.
When Willy had been a kid, there must have been a hundred foghorns around the Bay. He’d listened to them all, aligning and tuning to each individual horn like they were members of an aural constellation.
It had always felt to him like the Bay’s chorus of foghorns signaled the end of a journey, welcoming him to some invisible haven where he could finally rest if he was only able to find where it was at. But each year there were less and less foghorns, and Little Willy mourned them as they passed – there were only a few dozen left throughout the Bay Area.
If the fog was thick enough to bounce the sound along, Willy could still sometimes hear (and identify by name) the ones that remained. The one at Point Bonita at the Bay’s entrance; the two horns on the Golden Gate – the two-tone diaphone at mid-span and the one on south tower; the several that were still operating on the Bay Bridge. Or the two on Alcatraz Island. He particularly liked Alcatraz South; it sounded like the opening bars to some beautiful piece of music, even if the rest of the song never materialized to follow.
Little Willy crossed San Pablo and commenced a zigzagging prowl south and east through the residential backstreets, staying off the main drags as much as possible. The houses loomed out of the fog as Willy approached them only to disappear as he went by, all of them homes to people he’d never get close to, harboring families and friendships he’d never be part of. Willy felt the whole world surrounding him as he walked, a planet full of drones and puppets stumbling through unexamined lives – and him an alien spy on this monkey planet.
But now he had to get back on track. He had to remind himself that this was the approach, the march into danger that he’d made too many times before.
Little Willy knew some bandits that had to puff a joint or slam a couple 40-ouncers before they could muster the nerve to rob, but for him it was the other way around. Getting high before the job just let the fear in, the cold sapping the strength from his bones until he was too paralyzed to face the mark.
Willy always worked straight even if he got as high as possible as soon as possible after he got the loot. He always worked alone too, at least since Speedy had gone inside. No one to snitch you off that way.
Ghost kept trying to involve himself in the jobs he set up for Willy, like he’d get a charge off of watching or something. Little Willy knew he let Ghost push him around a little too much, but Willy had managed to draw the line there at least – he’d never let Ghost see him commit a crime. No one outside of his homeboy crew had ever witnessed Little Willy taking somebody off. Besides the mark, of course.
Willy crossed Sacramento Street – there were no cars driving by at that moment to see him, but he could hear the muffled moan of distant traffic a few blocks in both directions.
Ordinarily, creeping up on a score he’d be swiveling his eyes like they were snapping around on rubber bands, watching for cops scoping him out from donut shop parking lots, or for bored old ladies memorizing his face from window vantage points. Tonight the fog changed everything for the better, hiding him like this.
He was invisible, protected from all unfriendly eyes. Willy was the
only person in the world out here in this clean sea-smelling calmness, and the islands of light from the haloed streetlamps were far enough apart in the white blankness that he didn’t feel threatened by their exposure at all.
Despite the dangers he knew lay ahead, that old feeling of well-being and rightness came up to enfold him, the one that used to rise and encircle him whenever he and Speedy had been on the hunt together.
Tonight, he could pretend that Speedy was still with him – he could pretend he was as bad as Speedy, pretend he was Speedy. He was the one to be scared of now, Willy affirmed to himself. No one could threaten him; he was strong enough to stand on his own two feet despite what everyone else might think.
But now his thoughts slid further sideways toward his big brother Speedy, locked up in prison among the rest of the walking dead. And toward Fat Bob, who’d had nothing to do with Willy for so long. Reflexively, Little Willy shied away from Speedy’s and Bob’s memory with a mental cringe.
Still, between the concealing fog and the familiar surge of pre-heist excitement, things almost felt good – a feeling Little Willy rarely got to experience. That was nice at least. He could pretend he didn’t have a care in the world, that Ghost wasn’t behind him pushing him full-speed ahead, and that there was no cash-vomiting mark at the end of the line pulling him forward like a magnet to satisfy his drug need.
And with that he was here, where he’d find the score: a shabby double-decker motel a few blocks south of the Ashby BART Station on Grove. The motel was in North Oakland (AKA ‘the Pole’), specifically the Bushrod Park district. The night’s target was a guy in a second floor room facing the motel’s rear parking lot.
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