Edge of the Pit

by Bill Thesken

  When I was finished scrubbing and rinsing the plates and putting them in the strainer to dry she came into the kitchen carrying her purse.

  “I have to get going, I have a short shift today, just ten hours so I’ll be back at six tonight. Here’s an extra key.” She put it on the counter. “If you need it.”

  I wiped my hands on the towel and nodded. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me. I feel like you saved my life.”

  She bit her lip softly and I reached out and put my arm around her, pulled her close and kissed her. She didn’t resist and melted in my arms and when I let go again her eyes stayed closed for a moment like she was in a dream. The best medicine to make her forget about that other guy was to give her someone else to think about, even if I might never see her again. She’d saved my life and I owed her one. She opened her eyes smiling and then looked at the clock and got serious.

  “Don’t forget the key!” she shouted as she headed for the door, and just like that she was gone.

  My natural instinct was suspicion for all things and everyone, and I still could not figure out how a girl that looked that good would be single, no matter what the circumstances of her previous relationship, but there is one thing that I was absolutely dead sure of, when she kissed me back it was the real deal.

  I could hear her jogging down the stairs two at a time, and I cracked the drapes to see the little car pull out of the parking lot and merge onto the busy highway. It was six thirty in the morning and the sun was rising in the east over the mountains, while the smog rolled in from the coast where it had rested for the night.

  I made certain the stove was off and cool to the touch and went to the door and looked back at the couch, probably the most comfortable place I’d slept in the past few years. I stared at the key sitting on the counter where she’d left it, and thought about taking it with me, just for a moment thought about walking back over there and picking it up. Just in case I needed it. A port in the storm. And then that moment passed. It was too dangerous. I was too dangerous for a pretty little nurse like Amber Clark to be around until I cleared up this little problem of a missing singer.

  I cracked open the drapes again and scanned the area outside, then finally satisfied that it was safe, I opened the door and walked out.

  6.

  The city bus stop was right outside the little apartment complex and was packed at this hour of the morning. It seemed like everyone who lived within a block of this stop was either going to work or school and I found a place near the shed to wait.

  I pulled my hat over my eyes and watched the crowd. There was every sort of character you could imagine, every age and size and color and position in society, from a couple of guys in suits and ties to maids and plumbers and students, old people, babies.

  I blended in well and kept my mouth shut. Blacks, Asians, Whites, Chicanos, there was even an American Indian looking guy with a Mohawk. The bus top was a melting pot.

  A guy standing nearby smoking a cigarette asked if I had change for a twenty and I just shook my head and kept my eyes straight ahead. Mute.

  Busses came and went and the crowd thinned out, and filled up again. Pretty soon a bus rolled up with the sign on the front that I was waiting for, city center it said, and after the remainder of the crowd got on, I followed and stood in the aisle holding onto a strap while the bus lumbered and rolled down the highway belching smoke out the rear end.

  Riding on a city bus was about the best way to get around town without catching anyone’s attention. The unwashed masses took the bus, and it was like an underground sort of railroad leading from the slums to the promised land and all points in between.

  I knew people were looking for me and I needed to travel in secret, in a crowd. I was heading back to the scene of the crime, the intersection where the star got nabbed and I lost my bike and my memory.

  I figured that’d probably be the best place to start. It was Bell and Henshaw, that much I remembered and I stepped off the bus on Bell street two full blocks from the intersection and walked slowly, taking in the scene.

  There was a mixture of strip malls and residential neighborhoods and apartments along the four lane street, metered parking on both sides. I kept my head down and my eyes up scanning the entire cityscape in front of me as I walked. It was still early morning, not yet seven thirty and the morning rush was in full swing.

  I found a place along a wall with an alcove and parked myself in the shadow and watched the intersection up ahead. Bell and Henshaw. Two nights ago I’d rolled through here and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a hospital. Someone around here knew what happened. The set-up was planned well in advance, and someone close by was in on it.

  I heard a siren in the distance, and it seemed like it was heading this way, winding through the streets nearby, the wailing sound dimming and increasing in volume as it travelled.

  The funny thing about being near any city, around this many people crammed into a small area, there’s always some sort of trouble, and sirens become a way of life, background noise that you get so used to that you don’t even notice it, like birds in the countryside that you don’t really hear until someone mentions it and you perk up your ears and say, why yes, those birds are chirping rather loudly, I never even noticed they were here.

  It was a police car blasting down Bell street, hell bent on getting somewhere in a hurry. All the cars on the street pulled over into the slow lane and the police car took the center line head on, splitting the difference and blazing towards the intersection which had red lights showing on all sides stopping the traffic so the cop could get through without worrying about getting T-boned by a car coming through.

  And then I knew.

  That was it.

  That’s how they got me. The bastards. Modern traffic lights are wired together at an intersection, and when an emergency vehicle needs to get through an intersection all the driver needs to do is hit a button which triggers a strobe light on the top of the vehicle that points at a sensor on the traffic light and all the lights turn red and he just sails on through.

  After I went through the light on the bike, someone hit a switch and the light turned red and the car with the star and the escort all had to stop. Once I was out of the way the rest was easy. They knew I was somewhere out front, on a private security convoy like this, the perimeter guy is always out front, and once I was out of the picture they moved in. They couldn’t have known who I was, what I was driving, but when I turned around they pegged me, the guy on the motorcycle. It all happened right here.

  There was a curve in the road and I slowed the bike, downshifting gears so I wouldn‘t use the brake and alert anyone that it was me, the guy on the bike that was the perimeter guy turning around. I remembered. I did everything right, all according to the book.

  It was right here, I was standing right next to the curve in the road where I turned around and I scanned the buildings around me. Someone could have been watching from a second story window, or hiding in a car parked along the road. This is where I lost it, a block and a half from the intersection.

  Across the road was a Chinese restaurant, an apartment building, and an abandoned store that looked like an old department store that suddenly went out of business, windows both boarded up and missing along the front like teeth missing from a smile.

  An old oriental man was sweeping the steps of the restaurant, bent over from a long life of work no doubt, meticulously moving the flat broom along the corners of each step, sweeping the dust from the previous night into the flower garden on the side, getting ready for another day of business. At least one business was still going strong while the one next to it looked like a wreck.

  Besides the empty store and the restaurant, everything else along that side of the road was either a home or an apartment building.

  The goons from the agency who were questioning me in the hospital said that someone had found me in an abandoned building, hours after the incident. That was the building, next to th
e restaurant, I was sure of it. I decided to take a walk across the street and see what was on the menu.

  The good thing about the way I looked, semi light, semi dark, not too tall, not too short, light to medium build, basic features, unobtrusive stance and walk and demeanor, I was the average Joe on the street, or Jose, I looked like most of the people you would see on an average day almost anywhere in any country.

  I could fit in, and blend in just about anywhere. When I looked up and down the street, there were about ten other guys who kind of looked just like me, and that was a good thing.

  Hat down and eyes forward, I walked half a block up and away from the restaurant, waited for the traffic to ease and shot across the street, blending back into the cars parked on the sides.

  He saw me coming from far away, that much I was sure of. He kept sweeping the dust into the garden, but I could see him watching me in the hidden corners of his eyes.

  When I got closer to the restaurant he moved off the steps and started sweeping the sidewalk in front, pride in his place in life, his little slice of heaven no doubt.

  I stopped in front of the big window and read from the menu. They had all the good stuff, kung pao chicken, fried rice, …..

  “Good moring,” he said cheerfully in broken English. “You hungwy yes?”

  I nodded. It was still early. “What time do you open?” I asked him.

  He lit up. “Open now, always open, always open, you go in, go in.” And he shuffled me up the stairs and through the door leaving the broom on the doorstep but still sweeping, in a way sweeping me into the dining room and seating me at a table near the side window that looked onto an alleyway and the abandoned store.

  I sat on the side facing the doorway and angled my chair so I could see behind me and the rest of the dining room. He put a menu in front of me and hustled to the back of the restaurant towards the kitchen.

  I could hear some hushed discussion back there and kept my ears open wide for trouble. It wasn’t long before a younger version of the old man came out of the kitchen wearing a cooks apron. The way he walked reminded of a cat, the way they walk on the pads of their feet, slow and methodical, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

  He didn’t look too happy to see me, nothing like the old man, that was for damn sure. He stood next to the table staring at me, like he wasn’t sure what he was looking at or what to say, he looked confused and angry at the same time, mostly angry though, simmering under the skin, I could see it. Not one bit of happy happy joy joy thought was in this guy’s mind.

  “We’re closed,” he said finally.

  I measured him for a moment, and gestured towards the old man who was standing by the kitchen door. “He said you’re open.”

  “I don’t like cops.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I don’t like cops, because cops mean trouble, and I don’t like trouble, so I don’t like cops.”

  “I told you before, I’m not a cop.”

  “I know that.”

  “This conversation is going nowhere,” I said.

  “I know you’re not a cop, because they’re the ones looking for you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, they were here earlier this morning, real early, asking questions, showed me a picture of you, said to call them if I saw you again.”

  “What do you mean, saw me ‘again’?”

  He looked around the room and out the windows, then motioned the old man towards the front door and spoke in Chinese to him. The old man shuffled back outside and grabbed his broom again, and they could hear the steady sweeping by the steps.

  “You’re the one they pulled out of the building two nights ago.”

  “You saw me?”

  “I found you.”

  “What do you mean found me?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, just like the cops.”

  “Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  He studied me for a moment, and then nodded. “Alright. We came home real late that night, like two in the morning, the restaurant was closed. When we got back to the intersection two blocks down was closed, cordoned off, so we had to go around to get here. I was in the kitchen putting away the supplies, cleaning up when I heard a sound in the abandoned building next door. We’d been robbed a few times, and sometimes the guys who did it would camp out right there.”

  “So you heard a sound. Thought I was a robber.”

  “Yeah, so I grabbed my bat and a flashlight and went on a little patrol. I go in there all the time, I call it cleaning up the trash.”

  “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?” I asked.

  He grinned. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t like trouble but he liked danger, he knew how to handle it, could probably handle me right now with a karate chop to the head. “Yeah, it is,” he said, “very dangerous.”

  I think he meant for the other guy. “So you found me…”

  “Yeah, you were hurt, looked like you’d crashed through the front of the building and went right on through a couple of walls to the back.”

  My side twinged where the ribs were broke, and my head still remembered some of the throbbing pain.

  “Was my bike there?”

  “What was left of it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was stripped, wheels, handlebars, engine.”

  “The frame?”

  “Naw, it was all twisted, worthless. Plus it was wrapped around a metal pipe, they probably couldn’t get it off the pipe, so they just took everything else.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Right next to the metal pipe, I guess the bike’s frame saved you.”

  “So they stripped the bike and left me to die?”

  He grinned again. “Like I said, it’s a dangerous neighborhood.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “You actually didn’t look too bad, I was surprised. I think that motorcycle you were riding took most of the brunt of the damage, you must have just followed along after it as it was crashing through all those walls.”

  “But I was out cold?”

  “Snoring actually.”

  Like a log that sleeps, I thought. He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a slug from a bullet, a large caliber bullet, from a rifle, flattened on one end and round on the other.

  I’ve seen this type of spent projectile before, and I know how it’s caused. This is what you get when you fire a sniper rifle at a bullet proof vest. The kind I was wearing that night.

  “Where’d you find this?” I asked him.

  “My Grandpa. He likes to sweep, likes to keep the steps and the sidewalk clean. He even goes out into the street and sweeps out there. Cars have to go around him. He found it that morning.”

  “Right out front?”

  “Almost directly in front of our front door. There’s a skid mark where a motorcycle tire took an abrupt turn to the side.”

  “My motorcycle.”

  He nodded. “The track went right into the store.”

  It was midnight when we left the mansion in the security convoy with the star, heading towards the city. Midnight in a bad part of town when someone tricked the intersection light, and then shot me off my bike.

  “You’re Grandpa told me that you’re always open, but you said you were closed that night.”

  He narrowed his eyes. Asking a lot of questions again, like the cops.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He relaxed a bit. “We worked a function that night, catered a little party in the city, said they wanted the whole restaurant there, paid good money.”

  “Last question,” I said. “And then I’ll be on my way.”

  He sighed and nodded so I continued. “Who paid you to host the party?”

  He grinned. “He looked kind of like you.”

  My eyes narrowed.

  “I don’t mean he loo
ked exactly like you. He had lighter skin, taller, thinner, but he had the same look in his eyes. Yeah he was ex-military no doubt about it, and I don’t mean someone sitting at a desk, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. Someone with a gun in the middle of a war zone. That kind of ‘like me’.

  I got up to leave. “Thanks for the info.”

  “There’s one other thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “He had this little scar right here.” And he pointed to his cheek under his left eye. “It ran down this way almost like a tear from his eye. Like he was crying a scar.”

  Like he was crying a scar. I’d never heard it put that way before, but I’d seen something like it, once upon a time. An unusual mark on any face. Put it on an ex-military guy who looked ‘kind of like me’, and the potential suspect base narrowed quite a bit.

  “I owe you one,” I said and made my way towards the front door.

  “Use the back entrance,” he said. “I’ll show you the way. Just one thing though.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Don’t ever come back.” There was no grin this time, and I nodded.

  “I don’t plan on it. This neighborhood is a little too dangerous for me.”

  7.

  I zigzagged through the back alleyways and to a bus stop three blocks from the restaurant and got on the first one that came through. It wasn’t going the direction I wanted to go, but it’s always prudent in this type of situation to throw a little misdirection at anyone who might be following. I watched the cars that were on the same path as the bus as we travelled through the streets, noted the type and color of each one, and then when the bus stopped at a covered stop I got off and waited in the shade with my back against a pillar and studied the perimeter.