by Tim Maleeny
“No, really—hic—I mean it,” said Larry. “You never lost the car when you were stoned.”
“That’s because you always drove.”
“Oh,” said Larry. “I hadn’t thought of—hic!”
“Hold your breath.”
“Why? Am I waiting for something?”
“Two reasons, nimrod,” said Jerome. “First, to stop those annoying hiccups. Second, to get you to shut the fuck up so I can find our car.”
Larry took a deep breath, held it, and mumbled something through his bull-frogged cheeks that sounded a lot like, “Mmm-hmmm-mmm-aaa.”
“What?” Jerome asked.
Larry exhaled loudly, his bloodshot eyes watering. “It’s one block over.”
Jerome stopped dead in his tracks.
“You knew where our car was?”
Larry took in another lungful of air and said, “Mmm-hmm.” Cheeks bulging, he pointed with his right hand.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You didn’t ask.”
Jerome put his hands on his hips and turned slowly. Don’t take the bait. He moved stiffly to the corner and waited for the light to change.
Traffic was light in the Mission District this time of day. Some kids on their way home from school moved in small clusters along the sidewalks. Old women carried their groceries. Some teenagers were hanging outside a bodega, talking trash and making each other laugh. Just the normal comings and goings of a neighborhood where families tried to make ends meet, and where those that made it knew which corners to avoid, when to look the other way, and what time of night the streets belonged to someone else.
Larry took a shallow breath, followed by another, then smiled. He was about to say something when a hiccup interrupted him. So close. He drew as much oxygen into his lungs as a free-diver and followed his brother across the street. Jerome took advantage of the silence to think aloud.
“I think that went OK, considering.”
Larry raised his eyebrows theatrically and spread his hands in a gesture that implied, if you say so.
“What are you, a fucking mime?”
Larry didn’t say anything.
“I hate mimes, Larry,” snapped Jerome. “Everybody hates mimes.”
Larry exhaled. “Not the French.”
Jerome scowled as Larry took a breath, released. Another, in and out. So far so good.
Their car was untouched, a few minutes left on the meter. Jerome fished the keys from his pocket and hit the button to unlock the doors. Sliding behind the wheel, he started the engine as Larry got in the car.
“Maybe it didn’t go well,” said Jerome cautiously. “Hard to tell with a sociopath.”
Larry nodded, suddenly sober at the thought of Zorro. “Maybe we should talk to the cop.”
“Are you crazy?” Jerome flexed his fingers around the steering wheel but left the car in park. “We just talked to Z about making sure the cop isn’t our problem.”
“Do you trust Zorro, Jerome?”
“We’re criminals, Larry. Cops don’t talk to criminals—they arrest them.”
Larry shifted in his seat like a fidgety kid. “I don’t want to be a criminal.”
“I don’t want to get arrested.”
“Maybe he’ll let us off with a warning.”
“We didn’t get a fucking parking ticket, Larry. We moved pot for the Mexican mob, killed a guy and then covered it up.”
“It was an accident.”
“Which part?” Jerome swiveled on the seat, then turned and faced the windshield. His brother’s restlessness was contagious.
Larry sighed. “OK, not all of it was an accident. Only the big stuff.”
“By stuff, you mean the part where Walter fried himself on our toaster.”
“Yeah, that. That was an accident. It’s not like it was murder or anything.”
Jerome chewed on that for a minute. “But it was premeditated.”
“Because we thought about killing him. That’s not against the law. Married couples do it all the time—it’s only murder if you turn those thoughts into action.”
“So we got lucky,” said Jerome. “That’s our defense?”
“Works for me.”
“But you’re stoned.”
Larry shook his head. “Not so much. It’s wearing off…mostly.”
“Mostly.” Jerome chuckled. “I know that feeling.”
“What a surprise.”
Jerome didn’t say anything, just gripped the steering wheel as he watched pedestrians and cars flow past, oblivious to the brothers’ dilemma.
Larry cleared his throat, fought a hiccup, and said, “Hey Jerome.”
Jerome turned to face him. “Yeah?”
“You did good back there.”
Jerome looked for some hint of sarcasm or irony in his brother’s expression but found none. Larry was as limpid as a pool.
“Thanks, Larry.”
“I couldn’t have done that.”
“I was scared shitless.”
“Didn’t show.”
Jerome pushed a smile forward but couldn’t hold it. “You really think we should talk to the cop?”
“I was just thinking out loud.”
“We talked to him before,” mused Jerome, “and we’re still free men. Maybe we could do it again.”
“Might learn something.”
“Without giving anything away?”
“You never know till you try.”
“We’d have to find him first.”
“That’s easy,” said Larry. “We know where he lives.”
“True,” said Jerome. “But we don’t have a lot of time, do we?”
Larry frowned. “Not if what Zorro said was true. He said Sam was coming to him.”
“Then we do have to find him,” said Jerome. “Unless we want to get caught in the middle.”
“We’re already in the middle.”
“It’s the caught part I want to avoid.”
Finally the brothers agreed. Jerome asked the question on the tip of both their tongues.
“I wonder where Sam is now?”
Chapter Fifty-two
Sam spotted Buster on his usual corner, adjacent to the gas station. Spinning the wheel, he bounced the convertible across oncoming traffic and coasted to a stop in front of a closed service door of the garage, watching out of the corner of his eye to make sure Buster was tracking him and not running.
Buster had his headphones on, and Sam could hear the atonal whine of spilled music from twenty feet away. As he came within five feet, Sam took note of the gold hoops running from the top of each of Buster’s ears down to the lobes, only slightly hidden by his orange and blue locks. Sam counted eight hoops on each side and wondered if all the piercings had been done in one sitting.
When he was standing directly in front of Buster, Sam slid his left hand into his jacket pocket and palmed something. Buster only caught a glimpse, but it looked like a strip of paper.
Buster nodded to the beat of his music and gave Sam a smile with all the warmth of Everest. It reminded Sam of how he’d been feeling all day. Since leaving Jill, he could swear the blood in his veins had been replaced by liquid nitrogen, and it brought a crystalline clarity to his perspective. With his right hand, Sam fished his sunglasses from an inside pocket and slipped them on, then returned Buster’s smile and held out his left hand, palm facing upwards.
“Here, Buster,” he said. “I thought you might need this.”
Buster tilted his head forward and frowned, at first not registering what it was, then not understanding why Sam was showing it to him.
It was a Band-Aid.
As Buster raised his head to ask the question, Sam extended his right hand and tore four gold hoops from Buster’s left ear.
Buster screamed and staggered backwards. Sam let the Band-Aid fall to the ground and reached out again, this time with his left hand, and tore away four more hoops. Buster’s agony was now symmetrical.
Bust
er’s eyes bugged out in disbelief. When he raised both hands to his ears, Sam punched him in the nose. Blood spattered Sam’s glasses as Buster fell backwards onto the sidewalk.
Buster was trying to dig his heels into the concrete and push himself as far way from Sam as possible, but Sam stepped almost casually around Buster until he was standing behind him. Buster froze as soon as Sam’s shadow fell across his face. Sam bent at the waist and spoke quietly. “You don’t look too good, Buster. Guess I should have brought two Band-Aids.”
Buster spat blood. “You can’t do this—my rights—it’s fucking illegal. I could—” He stopped and spit again. “I could sue your ass.”
“Illegal.” Sam almost laughed. “That’s funny, Buster. You mean like breaking and entering into someone’s apartment?”
Buster tried to look defiant, but being upside and covered in blood, he was at a slight disadvantage. “Loco.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you tried to set me up.”
Buster coughed and tried to sit up, but Sam moved a foot onto his chest, saying, “You were too easy to find, Buster.”
Buster’s eyes went wide, but he managed a half-hearted snarl before Sam put enough weight on his leg to push the air out of him.
“Chingate,” said Sam. “Fuck you, Buster.”
Like most San Franciscans, Sam spoke enough Spanish to get around. And like most cops, the bulk of his vocabulary was profanity. Buster didn’t seem offended, though. He had other things on his mind.
Buster saw spots and thought he was going to black out, which is when he realized their terrible mistake. The very thing that had emboldened Zorro to act had changed the playing field against them. Sam was no longer a cop. But they had assumed, unconsciously, that he would still act like one—tough but measured, careful to remain on his side of the law. But they had made this personal, and when Buster really thought about it, they didn’t know a damn thing about Officer Sam as a person or as a man.
They didn’t know that Sam hadn’t felt like a cop in years, which is why he quit the force. He may not know what he was anymore, but measured probably wasn’t one of the adjectives he’d choose. Careful wasn’t on the list, either. On one hand, Sam was waking up, rediscovering that he was part of the human race, connected to the people around him. On the other hand, he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to be, because some people were just assholes. Marie had always believed people were fundamentally good. As a cop, Sam had always believed the opposite.
Now he found himself standing somewhere between the two realities, and he felt with disturbing clarity his own ability to move from one to the other without missing a beat.
“Hey, Buster,” he said gently, still looming over him. “Where’s Zorro?”
Busters fingers were criss-crossed with blood from his ravaged ears and nose, but his eyes had a calculated cruelty that even his pain couldn’t hide. “OK, I tell you. Zorro is—”
Sam raised his foot directly over Buster’s head and clucked his tongue.
“No mames, Buster,” he chided. “Don’t bullshit me.”
Buster sneered and started to say something, then stopped himself and muttered, “I don’t know.”
Sam waited, his foot only inches from Buster’s ruined nose.
Buster looked past the foot at Sam and said, “Chupar es mi pinga.”
“Wrong answer.” The foot came down hard next to Buster’s head and he sighed involuntarily, then gasped as Sam grabbed two handfuls of dreadlocks and dragged him across the parking lot.
“I thought these were extensions,” grunted Sam. “Must have taken you a long time to get your hair to grow out like this.”
Buster was kicking and cursing in a torrent of Spanish, English, and what sounded vaguely like Swedish, but Sam had all the leverage. When they reached Sam’s car, he twisted his wrists violently clockwise, causing Buster to flip over onto his belly.
“Maricon.” Buster’s voice was muffled by the pavement mashed against his face.
“Don’t get your hopes up just because you’re on your stomach,” said Sam, who released Buster long enough to pop the trunk. “You’re not my type.” When Buster got on his hands and knees, Sam kicked him in the belly, just hard enough to knock the wind out of him. While Buster wheezed, Sam rummaged through his pockets and snagged his wallet, cell phone, and a knife Buster had shoved deep in his right front pocket. It was a butterfly knife, a fixed blade covered by hinged handles that swung apart to reveal the business end of the weapon. Once you understood the mechanism, the knife could be opened one-handed almost as quickly as a switchblade. Sam transferred the items to his own pockets. Then he grabbed Buster by the hair and belt, threw him in the trunk, and slammed it shut.
Sam scanned the street and noticed quite a few people watching him but trying very hard to appear as if they weren’t. He didn’t hear a siren and didn’t expect to. He’d never thought of it from the perpetrator’s point of view before, but that was one of the nice things about assaulting someone in this part of town. He slid behind the wheel and adjusted the rearview mirror, catching a glimpse of himself in the process. He paused and took off his sunglasses, studying his expression as if looking at a stranger.
He didn’t really like what he saw, but it didn’t bother him all that much, either. Sam backed out of the gas station and drove away in no particular hurry, like a man who had yet to decide which way he was going to turn.
Chapter Fifty-three
“Turn here.”
Jerome ignored his brother and kept driving straight ahead. He wasn’t positive that driving down Mission toward the Ferry Building was really any better than turning onto Market Street, but like most San Francisco residents, Jerome hated driving on Market. You couldn’t turn left off Market; you couldn’t park; the goddamned buses and trolleys took up half the street, and if one of the electric buses jumped free of its overhead wires, you might be stuck for half an hour.
Market Street sucked.
And Jerome couldn’t abide how the city arbitrarily chose which parts of the street were going to be tourist-friendly and which parts would be ignored, often within the same block. On one side there might be some swanky shopping center and theater complex, while directly across the street was an abandoned storefront flanked by a ten-dollar whore and a homeless guy sleeping with his malnourished dog. The city had decided which corners were worth defending and turned its back on the rest. Jerome considered Market Street the perfect metaphor for the hypocrisy of city government. On one side it reeked of money. On the other, it stank of piss.
Lighten up, Jerome. All this responsibility was getting to him. He glanced over at his brother staring out the window as if pondering the secret of the universe. Larry’s hiccups had subsided and he seemed neither stoned nor panicked, just pensive and strangely at peace. Jerome felt a pang of envy. He took a deep breath. OK, so he hadn’t exactly quit the day job, but he had scored some points on Zorro—that had to count for something. Maybe it gave them leverage, but he couldn’t figure out the angle that would get them out of this mess without pulling them even further into it.
“Hey Larry,” he said. “We need a plan.”
Larry nodded but didn’t turn away from the window or say anything.
Jerome swiveled his head toward his brother and prodded. “Larry?”
Larry turned to face Jerome. “Yeah?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m gay.”
A horn blared as Jerome swerved inadvertently into oncoming traffic. He leaned on his own as he passed a battered Honda and swung back into the right lane. When it was safe to steal a glance, Jerome saw that Larry had resumed his vigil at the window as if he’d just said something about the weather.
Jerome asked, “When did this happen?”
“It doesn’t suddenly happen,” said Larry. “I mean, it’s not like I woke up with a cold.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Jerome, a little too quickly. “I mean, when did you…�
�� He faltered and tried to regroup but was struggling to find the words. Before he could, Larry took over.
“Change teams?”
Jerome nodded.
“I don’t think I changed teams,” said Larry. “I think I always knew, in a way. Remember how when we were kids, I always liked to play with dolls?”
Jerome stole a glance at his brother. “Those were GI Joes.”
“But they were still dolls, Jerome,” said Larry. “Remember those little boxers they used to wear—”
Jerome cut him off with an abrupt, almost spasmodic gesture. “What about high school?” he asked. “You dated that girl, wuzzername?”
“Jenny,” replied Larry, a wistful smile on his face. “We used to go to Star Trek conventions together. But it’s not like we did it, or anything. We were…just friends. Now that I think about it, she may have been a lesbian. Or maybe just a fag hag.”
“A fag hag?” Jerome grunted, secretly impressed his brother had the gay lingo down already. He wondered if Larry had been studying in his spare time, working up to this moment. “When were you gonna tell me?”
“I just realized it today,” said Larry. “Like an epiphany.”
“Epiphany,” Jerome repeated slowly, thinking it was kind of a gay word choice.
“Yeah,” said Larry. “I was thinking about you and Tamara, then Shayla, and I realized I wasn’t interested in either of them. And the more I thought about it, I realized I’d never been interested. Go ahead and tell me I’m full of shit, but if you’re not interested in those two girls, then you’re probably gay.”
“Or dead.”
Larry laughed, a low, confident chuckle that made Jerome turn his way again. His brother was the picture of calm, a skinny white Buddha of serenity.
They drove in silence for a while, Jerome concluding after a few blocks that his brother’s logic was flawless. Questions and rebuttals collided in his head like pinballs until only one remained. After a minute, he asked the only question that seemed to matter.
“Are you happy?”
Larry seemed to consider it, but his face already held the answer. So he said, “Just don’t tell Mom.”