by Sara Gran
It could have been a million other men, too.
He ran north. The cop got out of her car to follow him on foot. I hit the gas and sped toward the scene, hoping to catch him—and maybe run him over—in my stolen Nissan.
But another cop was pulling up in a black-and-white and I didn’t really want to interact with the cops just now. I kept driving, swung around the block, parked, got out of the car, and tried to run after him. I could see the man with white hair and the cop up a block ahead of me, and then two blocks ahead, and then three.
He was getting away. I couldn’t keep up with him and neither could the cop.
My adrenaline and fear and the uppers I’d taken kept me going for about one minute before my body started to scream at me. My lungs felt like someone was tightening a vise around them. I started to stumble and gasp and everything went gray and in a second that seemed like a year I realized I wasn’t running at all, I was falling, and it was like that dream where you need to run but you can’t because it’s like running in quicksand
something was pulling me down, everything was
and then pushed me down, and then just stopped as I fell down, soft black clouds everywhere
and it all went black.
* * *
“Hey, miss.”
I opened my eyes. The sun was East Bay bright and burned on my banged-up corneas. None of your bullshit San Francisco fog to smooth out the rough edges.
I kinda-sorta remembered where I was and I looked around and saw that I was mostly right. The man with black hair, a cop, a car, running—
I looked around a little more.
“Hey Miss.”
Before passing out I’d stumbled into the doorway of a falafel restaurant and likely looked more like a homeless man catching a nap than a participant in whatever it was that had happened two blocks back with the cars.
“HEY.”
The person saying HEY was a man standing above me. I looked at him. He looked about sixty and almost as wide as he was tall and spoke with an Egyptian accent.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“My doorway,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I was blocking him from entering his restaurant.
I tried to stand up and everything seemed effervescent, maybe carbonated, and I sat back down.
“Just one sec,” I said. “Don’t worry. I really gotta go. I have things to do.”
The Egyptian man sighed and kind of nudged me out of his way with his legs and stepped over me and opened his door and lifted his gates and went into his store.
I tried to keep my eyes open. For all I knew the man with white hair was still looking for me here in the neighborhood, although it wasn’t likely. The cops had probably scared him off, and I was likely safe for the rest of the day.
But still. Probably a good idea to get going.
I stood up again. White electric snow fell across my eyes and the street turned upside down.
I tried to sit back down but I was already sitting.
The Egyptian man came back out. He had a paper cup in one hand and something wrapped in wax paper in the other.
He held them out to me.
“Eat,” he said. “Eat, then go.”
I took them. He turned and went back in before I could say thanks.
In the cup was strong sweet mint tea and in the wax paper was a pastry made of cheese wrapped in phyllo dough. I didn’t think I was hungry but as soon as I took a bite I realized I was starving. I ate the pastry and drank the tea.
This time when I stood up, I stayed up.
I checked my pockets. Still had the Taser, twenty-two bucks in cash, and the bottle of pep pills.
I figured heading back to the Nissan might not be wise.
All I had to do now was steal another car.
* * *
I already looked the part, which made it easy. There was a local supermarket across the street but I knew there was a Whole Foods less than a mile away which I figured would have better cars so I walked to Whole Foods.
Whole Foods had a giant parking lot, and two security guards to cover it. Easy peasy to wander around without them noticing. It took about five minutes before the perfect woman pulled up to a corner of the lot in a black, recent Mercedes with dark-tinted windows.
I shuffled over to the Mercedes and timed myself to approach her just as she was getting out of the car. She was blond and wore gym clothes and was about my age, maybe a little older with Botox.
The first thing she did when she saw me, filthy and bloody, was smile.
“Hi,” she said. “How’s it going? You OK?”
I noticed a bad, old tattoo of a strawberry on her wrist and I knew she hadn’t always driven a Mercedes. She reached into her purse. I figured she was gonna give me a five or a ten. A five or a ten before I even asked. Most people would have run but here was this woman, this woman who needed nothing from me, reaching into her purse to give me five or ten bucks.
I stepped closer and she kept smiling. And then I kept walking to her, arranging myself so she couldn’t easily step by me, and then I took the Taser out of my pocket and held it to her neck and said, “I want your car and your purse.”
She made a wry look and nodded. She handed over her purse.
“Keys are in there,” she said. “Can I keep my phone?”
“No,” I said.
Then I opened her wallet and looked at her driver’s license.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “You seem like a really, really nice lady. But if you call the cops, or report your credit cards missing, before, let’s say, somewhat arbitrarily, midnight tomorrow? I’m going be heading over to”—I looked at her license—“1120 Rockridge Ave. and beating the shit out of your kids. So don’t do that. OK?”
“Yeah,” she said. “OK.” For the first time she looked scared. I wouldn’t hurt her kids, but she didn’t know that.
“Look,” I said. “I know this is scary. Just do exactly what I say and everything is going to be OK.”
I got in the car and started to drive away and saw her crying in the parking lot and I was going to stop and go back and give her her phone but security came running and I drove away, fast, and before they even got the cops on the phone, I was on my way to the highway with a full tank of gas, a credit card, an ID that could be me on a much, much, much better day, and 562 bucks in cash.
I tossed her phone out the window and in the rearview mirror I saw it skid and crumble across the blacktop until it was nothing at all. As we all would be, one day.
But not today.
* * *
After nine hours on the highway, watching the sun rise over the desert, stopping twice for caffeine, gas, peeing, and snacks, I pulled off the highway at the exit for Crab Orchard Road, checked the odometer, drove exactly thirteen miles, and then looked for the trail on the right, thinly etched into the sand like a Nazca Line, that I usually missed.
I didn’t miss it this time. I made a right on the unnamed trail and drove until I saw the first beaten-up beige trailer, then two more in varying desert-burned shades of white, and then, hidden behind more trailers and a pre-fab barn and a storage shed, a house. The house was handmade and a step above a shack, pieced together from scraps of wood and tin. The trailers all had dramatic brand names: Wildcat; Cougar; Mountain Bear.
A man came out of the shack-type house when he heard me drive up. He had angelic yellow hair to his shoulders and a weathered face that had once been beautiful and he held a shotgun in both hands pointed at the Mercedes.
The windows were tinted and he couldn’t see me through the glass of the windshield. He came over and tapped the gun on the equally dark driver’s-side window.
I rolled down the window.
“Fuck,” said the man with yellow hair. His name was Keith. He looked annoyed.
“I want to spend money,” I said.
“Well OK, then,” he said, looking a hair less annoyed. “Come on in.”
He lowered the shotg
un. I parked where I was and followed Keith into his little shack-house. The windows were covered with taped-up, yellowed pages of the Las Vegas Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Half of the shack was Keith’s living quarters—a bed with dirty sheets, a TV, a laptop, and a dirty armchair—and half was his lab: cooking tools and chemistry sets and vats of substances I didn’t understand.
“You don’t look so good,” Keith said. “You OK?”
“I will be,” I said.
“So what do you need?” Keith asked. He cleared some papers and books off a couple of old, smoke-scented armchairs and we sat in the chairs.
“A gun,” I said. “And something to keep me awake.”
“Well, I can help you out,” Keith said. “Got a couple of firearms I could spare. And uppers, woo boy, yeah. Yes. Absolutely.” He had a gleam in his eye and I knew this would be my one piece of good news this week.
Keith showed me a decent gun right away, a nice little Smith & Wesson with no serial number that probably started off life as an LAPD or LVPD weapon in the last year or two. Out behind Keith’s shack-house I fired a couple of rounds at a makeshift target he set up of empty oil and kombucha bottles and it did all the things a gun is meant to do. Keith asked for five hundred bucks. I told him I had two hundred for him now and four hundred more in a couple of days or weeks, for the gun and some pills. He agreed. I paid. Back in the shack-house Keith made tacos with nopalitos and refritos on corn tortillas. We ate three each as he told me about the pills.
“It’s not a stimulant,” he said. “MK44. It’s not, like, a pep pill. It just makes you not sleep anymore. It makes you focused. They developed it for soldiers. Like in the desert or wherever. They never sleep. Whole battalions of them. They’re testing it on civilians now.”
I’d heard of it. Usually I figured if the government was giving it out, I wasn’t interested in taking it. But.
I tossed back one of the pills with a bottle of water and bought fifty more.
“That’s good,” Keith said. “You gotta drink water with this shit. It’s like X. Easy to get dehydrated. Also you gotta remember to eat. Crazy. Totally kills your appetite and then you wonder why you’re seeing bugs everywhere.”
“So if I don’t sleep,” I asked Keith, “what happens to my dreams?”
Keith laughed and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let me know when you find out.”
After I paid Keith and drank some more water and made my goodbyes I started driving again. Soon I crossed the Nevada border and I saw my first casino. I pulled in. It was a Wild West–themed place with stores next door and an outlet mall across the street. In the vast multi-acre parking lot was an amusement park–type ride, like a roller coaster–type appliance at ground level, that made me wonder if I was dreaming. The ride was broken. The parking lot was less than half full. All around was plain undeveloped desert.
The casino was cool and dark and quiet and continued the Wild West theme. Shabby, aging, plaster-of-paris cowboys lurked in the corners, and a large papier-mâché bull/buffalo/undefined mammal hung out by the ladies’ room. There was a $9.97 buffet. I paid $9.97 and ate coffee, fried chicken, and fruit salad. At the little strip mall next door I found a store called 99C + DISCOUNT PLUS SAVE U MONEY. At 99C + DISCOUNT PLUS SAVE U MONEY I bought a pre-paid phone for thirty-five bucks and a white T-shirt and a paring knife. The phone came with sixty minutes free.
In my car I changed into my clean new white T-shirt and called Claude. I told him everything, as briefly as possible. Someone tried to kill me, followed the clues to Las Vegas, was OK for the moment.
It seemed unlikely that whoever had arranged this would have an immediate back-up plan. I’d solved a lot of murder mysteries. Never met a murderer with a solid back-up plan. Not that murderers never tried again, but that it usually took them at least a few days to reorganize everything. More likely a few weeks and most likely never.
I would still be very, very careful.
“So why are you in Las Vegas?” Claude said. “And who’s trying to kill you? What’s going on?”
“Well, if I told you,” I said, “it would ruin my big denouement at the end.”
I told Claude I would text him a list of things to do and that he should do them immediately. He agreed and we got off the phone. I figured I’d already pushed my limit with my stolen ID and credit card and I tossed them out in a trash can in the casino parking lot. Back in the casino I bought a large fancy coffee drink with an extra shot of espresso at a Starbucks knock-off and popped another two pills. I also bought a large white tote bag that said VEGAS in pink, a large bottle of water, some peanuts in a cardboard canister, and a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses.
In the hallway of the cool dark casino I texted Claude:
1. call Nick Chang
Nick Chang was my acupuncturist, doctor, and friend. He lived seven blocks away from me in Chinatown. He was also fluent in most Chinese dialects and could stumble his way through all of them.
2. tell Nick to call the guy who lives on first floor of my building named Billy Zheng, and explain to him how to get the emergency kit out of my safe (Nick knows what this means)(so will Billy)(Billy doesn’t speak English great so that’s why Nick)
3. Tell Nick to tell Billy to deliver the package to Nick at his shop.
4. You go pick it up from Nick and mail it to KITTY McCAIN at NERO’S INFERNO LAS VEGAS.
I’d owned the building I lived in in Chinatown for nine years. The Case of the Knife in the Heart paid for it. When I bought the building, paying actual cash, the first thing I did was find Billy Zheng. Billy was a professional thief and a minor con man who spoke little English and many kinds of Chinese. We weren’t friends but I knew him and trusted him. I’d offered him a deal: I’d give him cheap rent and he would deal with stuff around the building and, more important, we would provide a last-resort line of defense for each other when needed. I’d bailed him out of jail twice and given him cheap rent for nine years. He ought to do what I was asking now quick.
5. When u are done: go to Bix Cohen in Oakland find out whatever you can about the Cynthia Silverton comic books. Try to find who printed. Also you need to scan & send the last issue for me. Bring tools, use if needed.
Bix Cohen was the book dealer who had a complete set of all the Cynthia Silverton comics. Claude was charming and erudite and Bix would like him; if I’d thought about it, I would have introduced them on purpose. I could see them as friends. Claude knew that tools meant a gun; if Bix refused, Claude would force him at gunpoint.
* * *
I’d figured the Lincoln would be a dead end and it was. But I had to see it for myself. The address was a shitty little fourplex apartment building on a shitty block not far off the strip. I saw a few classic cars, all in bad shape, up and down the block: a 1963 Mustang, a beat-to-hell Jaguar from the eighties, and a couple of Mercedes of various ages and origins.
On one corner was a prostitute, trying to look tough and sexy. But it didn’t take more than a second look to see she was as exhausted as me, maybe thirty years old with circles under her eyes and a lifeless face.
She was trying, though. Trying to hold on to what life was left.
I went over to the prostitute. She frowned at me. I asked if she knew who owned the old cars.
“Sure,” she said. “That guy in there.” She pointed to the address I had for the Lincoln. “I think his name is Romeo? He’s got all the cars.”
“What’s he like?” I asked.
She made a face and I could tell the face meant: OK, but watch yourself.
I thanked her and went to knock on Romeo’s door. Romeo wasn’t in but his wife, Alicia, was, and she let me in. The apartment was neat and clean and much of it was covered in plastic, excluding a large Santa Muerte altar against the far wall.
“You want a car?” Alicia said. “All for sale.”
Alicia was a little younger than me, probably from Mexico or Guatemala, and hard as nails.
“Maybe,” I said. “
You sell a Lincoln Continental lately?”
She shrugged. “You wanna buy a car, I can sell you one.”
“Well, I may get a car,” I said. “But first, I’d like to know about the Lincoln.”
“I think you should leave,” she said.
“Well, OK,” I said.
I put my hand in my VEGAS bag as if I were looking for my keys. But I wasn’t looking for my keys. Instead I pulled out the paring knife I’d bought at the 99-cent store and grabbed Alicia by the hair and held the knife to her cheek.
The Taser might have needed a recharge and I wasn’t chancing it.
Up close she was wearing much more makeup than I’d noticed. I pressed the tip of the knife down and pricked her cheek until a tiny drop of blood came up.
“Now look,” I said. “I admire you for keeping people’s secrets. I really do. But I bet you’d rather keep your life.”
Alicia was scared—her face was turning pink and her heart rate was going through the roof—but she didn’t show it and kept her expression poised and bitchy.
“Yeah, OK,” she said. “Just let me go and—”
“Yeah, no,” I said. “No one’s letting anyone go until I get what I want.”
“OK,” she said again. “Some guy with blond hair came and bought the Lincoln two weeks ago. Two weeks today. He said his name was Albert but I didn’t believe him. Albert Holiday. He gave me an address, but I don’t think it exists. It’s in the kitchen there in the drawer. He said he was buying it for parts, but it ran. The Lincoln. Ran just fine.”
I eased up on her a little and took the knife off her cheek. She breathed a big sigh of relief and I felt her body relax. But I still kept one hand on her arm and the knife just off her skin.
“Tell me about him,” I said. “Whatever you remember.”
“He, he scared me a little, you know?” Alicia said. “He didn’t have to try. Didn’t do anything. Just scared me. And he thought he was smarter than us. With the fake name and all that bullshit. I didn’t need to hear his whole bullshit story. We just sell things here—cars, washer/dryers, whatever. Good things. Fixed.”