12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  He decided at this point the direct approach was best, but although he sat in the West Portal Café for almost three hours drinking their overroasted coffee she never showed up. It was a risk, sitting there. As he got up to pay he saw the missing-girl poster Scotch-taped to the counter. He put on his sunglasses, but no one looked at him twice.

  On the sidewalk he checked his watch. Just past three-thirty. The wind blew in sharp, sideways gusts and the waves were breaking at five stories high. Only that morning a young boy had been swept out to sea then saved by the Coast Guard. Chorizo thought of the ocean as an animal, something caged and fierce which occasionally escaped from its chains. Take that energy and use it, he thought, zippering his leather jacket. He knew that a warrior could advance in strength, or retreat with honor. Now was the time of strength.

  But it was too early to go to her office. He wanted to wait until she was nearly through for the day and he could woo her away. When, with any luck, she might be alone. A pity she didn’t come with him the last time. Or was it a pity? Chorizo crossed the street to look at the West Portal theater marquee. No, it was better this way.

  “Film’s been rolling for an hour,” the clerk at the theater said. He had purple hair and trendy eyeglasses and was reading a magazine put out by the American Motion Picture Association.

  “That’s all right,” Chorizo said.

  “You missed the best dialogue already.”

  “I thought this was an action movie?”

  “Exactly,” said the clerk.

  Chorizo took his time. He wasn’t hungry but he bought popcorn and a fourteen-ounce bottle of water and a hot dog without meat. He should be careful about what he put into his body but at the same time he needed to load up on carbs. Tonight he would need all his energy.

  But as he turned away from concessions he thought for a moment he could still hear the wind. Like a woman’s cry. Ghostly. It wasn’t often Chorizo thought of the ones he had killed, but that wind—there was something about it. He put the boxed popcorn on a counter and checked his front pocket for his passport. It would all be fine, he told himself. He was in the wings now, before the show. A little tense but okay.

  Gathering strength.

  * * *

  Nicola’s cell phone began to ring just as she was unlocking her car. She opened the door and set her bag of self-defense items down on the passenger’s seat. Inside, the air was hot and stuffy.

  “It’s me,” Davette said. Her voice sounded high and young with the vacuous tone of a teenager, and she told Nicola that Carmen and Lou were back; everything was okay. And Carmen had in fact found a few disks at the office.

  “I’m looking at one now. There are a couple of new files. One of them is a sliced image, an image of a hand.”

  “Whose hand?”

  “A man’s hand. There are a few other files here but they’re compressed and I don’t have the right decompression program.” Davette named a couple of applications that might work.

  “I have both of those in my office,” Nicola said. She shifted the phone to her other ear and began backing out of the parking space. “I’ll stop by and get them.”

  “If you tell me your e-mail address I’ll send you the hand image now,” Davette said.

  Nicola gave it to her, then turned out of the parking lot and followed the road alongside the highway, looking for the entrance ramp.

  “Okay, done. But listen,” Davette went on, “I wanted to say something else, too. It’s just—well, I feel a little bad about Dave.”

  “About Dave?”

  “I feel like I kind of just abandoned him.”

  Nicola passed another strip mall entrance, a Quickie Lube, and a motel with a marquee which read, WELCOME BACK MABEL MCKEYS.

  “Listen to me. Is Dave on the boat?” she asked.

  “What?” Davette asked.

  “Is Dave on the boat or is he off the boat?”

  “What boat?”

  “It’s a figure of speech, you know what that is?”

  “Oh, a figure of speech, okay. Okay, well yeah, he’s off the boat.”

  “It was his decision to get off.”

  “Yeah, I know, it was his decision.”

  “Then go on; let him be. Let him do what he wants.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you can do what you want.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Because you know what? You’re a strong woman. You make good decisions. You’re intelligent. You pay attention. And anyone, any guy, can be with you or not. They can come along or not. Because you’re the boat, Davette. Did you know that? You are the boat.”

  “Okay. Um, I don’t really get that,” Davette said.

  Nicola smiled to herself. “I’m really glad you’re doing this with me, Davette. You’re really good at all this.”

  “Really?” Davette asked. She sounded pleased.

  “So I’ll stop by my office for those programs and then call you from there.”

  * * *

  Nicola found the entrance ramp and as she merged with the oncoming traffic she began to accelerate but not too much because it was really windy now and she could feel it beneath her car moving the frame slightly back and forth. A power line was down next to the BART tracks and a couple of cars were stopped on the meridian, though maybe for reasons unrelated to the weather. Still, it must be really bad on the bridges, she was thinking. Once when she was going over the Golden Gate Bridge in a windstorm she had the brief sensation that she was floating on the pavement with no steering and no power—it was as if the car had been lifted slightly and taken from her control. Of course, the wheels were still touching the ground and she must have been in control no matter what it felt like. Or was she?

  She glanced at the bag of goodies from the gun shop. What would her mother think if she saw them? Her mother, who often told Nicola to stick up for her principles. Nicola was fairly sure this wasn’t what she meant.

  The problem was she didn’t know where the nearest police station was—or any police station, come to think of it. Did she have time to stop for a latte or something beforehand? She was nervous and it seemed fairly certain to her that her story would sound foolish.

  There’s a man who tried to pick me up … I saw this missing-girl poster and the same night she vanished a man tried to pick me up.… My landlord took an overdose of methadone and I believe this is connected to.… My landlord took an overdose of methadone yesterday. Although seemingly unrelated, a man tried to pick me up and I think he picked up this other girl who then vanished …

  Nicola frowned. It sounded ridiculous—ridiculous, all of it. But what could she say? What would they pay attention to?

  “A crime has been committed,” she said aloud.

  The car swayed in the wind then steadied itself. Nicola slowed down. It was becoming clear to her that in order to go to the police one has to agree to appear stupid. Could she agree to appear stupid?

  Christ, Nicola thought—she hated this indecision. A gray hill rose up in front of her and the highway turned itself into a narrow, busy, city street. A flock of pigeons flew up from the roof of a Presbyterian church that doubled as a day care, and as Nicola watched one of the birds detached itself from the group and fell behind the building. A sick bird? A dead bird?

  Oh my God. Nicola suddenly pulled over and stopped in a bus zone. She dialed Lou’s cell phone number. Oh my God, I get it, she thought.

  “Hello?”

  “Lou, thank God you’re there,” Nicola said. “Listen, I just figured something out. Can you get to the library? There was this article in the Chron last Friday; Chorizo was reading it. It was about a rash of pigeon deaths near Civic Center. It’s been going on for a few weeks now.”

  “Pigeons?” Lou asked.

  “Chorizo was reading it at the café that day. They were all poisoned, and I bet you anything it was methadone.”

  “The same thing that killed Robert,” Lou said.

  “Exactly,” Nicola said.
r />   “Chorizo,” Lou said.

  “Right. A practice run.”

  They agreed they would meet at her office, or she would call him if she finished up early and went home. Her heart was pounding hard. How would she find the nearest station? On the other hand, going there was going to take a lot of time and she wanted to get the program disks to Davette as soon as possible so they could show the police something useful. Or did she mean believable? Her office was actually really close to where she was now. She sat with her hands on her lap, still parked at the bus stop, and a Volvo veered by erratically as if the driver was constructing a bomb from a kit while he drove.

  Why was she thinking about bombs? She looked down and noticed her hands were shaking. Outside the moon was rising early like a lopsided grin and Nicola watched a row of palm trees pull back like slingshots in the wind. She compromised: she would go to her office and look up the nearest police station address, and just grab the disks quickly. Maybe she could give them to Audrey.

  That’s a good idea, Nicola thought. Maybe Audrey could drop them off at her house while she sat and said—what?—to the police.

  There’s this guy, he’s running this Web site, it’s hard to tell but I’m pretty sure the girls are dead. He runs it from a server from Finland …

  Christ, Nicola thought again. Through the rearview mirror she could see a bus coming; its blinker was on, it was going to pull into the stop. Nicola turned the key, looked back at the lane of cars, and headed out toward her office.

  * * *

  Chorizo stepped out of the movie theater and began walking down the street to Nicola’s office building. In the theater bathroom, just for fun, he had thrown a rune to see what he would get. It was Hagalaz: the rune of disruptive natural forces. Chorizo smiled to himself. Change, freedom, liberation—this is what Hagalaz represents. Expect a great disruption, says the rune. Expect something strong. Here comes change, here comes power, here comes the big boss and it is you.

  Well, that was fine. That was good. Chorizo crossed over the muni tracks and the wind blew sideways at him with that sound, that sudden wail. Chorizo tried to close his mind to it. He knew that his own nature was creating what was happening. Sometimes he thought about karma, but more often he did not. Would his karma be favorable at this point, or not so much so? Two women carrying copies of The Watchtower stood on the street corner and as he walked by one of them noticed him looking.

  “Like to take home a copy?” she asked.

  Chorizo shook his head. “I’m not from around here.”

  “God doesn’t care about that.”

  “Your God might not.”

  The light was red and he didn’t mind talking to them a little. One was quite pretty, though a little too old for him—that is, around his age.

  “All God is one,” said the other woman, the one who was not so pretty—she had small eyes and lips that stretched unevenly over her teeth.

  The light changed to green. He was a block away from Nicola’s office.

  “Is that right,” Chorizo said, starting to step away.

  “All God is one all-merciful being,” the not-so-pretty one told him.

  Chorizo looked back at her for a moment. “No,” he said. “Your God is merciful. My God is just.”

  * * *

  It took her a while to find parking, which was always the case around this time of day and made Nicola think again how good it was that she could take the muni to work without changing trains once and how she really wanted to stay in her home. But what would happen now that Robert was dead?

  She took the side staircase up to her office, hoping Guy had gone home already, but when she got upstairs she remembered that he and Aria were at a Japanese management retreat for two days. Everyone else seemed to be gone too.

  “Hey there,” Audrey said. She was putting a sweater into her backpack. “I thought you were sick.”

  “Oops, I forgot,” Nicola said. She smiled.

  “They’re all gone anyway. I was just about to leave myself.”

  “What’s up? It’s barely five o’clock.”

  “When the cat’s away,” Audrey explained.

  Nicola went over to the bookcase and took out a couple of software packages. “Listen, could you do me a favor?” she asked. She looked around for a paper bag. “I have a couple of things I’d like you to drop off at my home for me.”

  “Sure, but why can’t you do it?”

  “That’s a long story,” Nicola said.

  * * *

  Chorizo heard the elevator coming down as he climbed the front staircase, holding onto the metal handrail and feeling something—what? Almost like joy. The building was stucco, old-fashioned, and made him think of Los Angeles in the 1940s—an image he had from late-night television. He had never actually been to Los Angeles. So far he had only been to two places in America: San Francisco, and New York. He had made a lot of money in New York but he couldn’t go back there anymore because of the extortion charges and whatever other petty crimes they had on file. It didn’t matter. Of the two, he preferred San Francisco.

  The building seemed quiet and he hesitated when he got to the second floor. Which office to try first? He chose the one to his left. A bell sounded as he pushed open the door and crossed the carpeted threshold. A woman sat behind a glass window partition reading a magazine. No one was in the waiting room.

  The woman looked up at Chorizo and frowned. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked. “Dr. Mursky is just finishing up for the day.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone, a dental hygienist,” Chorizo said. “And I’m not sure if she works here or not.”

  * * *

  After Audrey left Nicola looked up police stations in the blue government pages in the front of the phone book. She was still wearing her coat. As she suspected, there was one right here in West Portal only a few blocks away. Should she call and make an appointment? Do police take appointments?

  She decided to check her e-mail first.

  * * *

  When the woman told him none of their dental hygienists were named Nicola, Chorizo tried the next office. This one had no piped-in music and inferior wall-to-wall carpet. He could hear the faint sound of drilling from behind the interior door. In the waiting room, two men sat on opposite naugahyde chairs with computers on their laps. One wore a suit.

  “Hello,” he said to the receptionist. He looked through the open window and noticed her beautiful nails. “I’m looking for someone who works here,” he said.

  * * *

  Nicola opened Davette’s e-mail attachment and when the image came up on her screen she gasped. It was Chorizo’s hand, no doubt about it. By enlarging the picture she could just make out his beautiful nails and a few silver chainlinks from his chainlink bracelet. She could not mistake that bracelet. She enlarged it some more, then fooled around with the contrast a little bit. The colors looked a bit washed out. Also, she wanted to see if she could get more of the hand, a thumbnail, the tip of a finger. Something more distinctive. She thought the image might have been snipped from something—one of the videos? She looked at the file on her desktop again. The icon was blank; the computer couldn’t read what kind of file it was, and Nicola began to think that maybe the file was actually a video file and not a still image. Maybe the file name was deliberately misleading.

  I bet this is the last frame of a video, Nicola thought. I need those decompression programs I gave Audrey. Damn.

  She began to look around her office to see if any of the computers had one of the decompression programs installed. Audrey: no. Carlos: no. Then she looked at Christian’s huge, souped-up computer.

  Ah ha. Here we go.

  * * *

  Chorizo closed the dentist office door behind him and stood in the hallway, confused. The receptionist, like the other receptionist, had never heard of a hygienist named Nicola. But he had definitely seen Nicola walk into this building and there were only two dentists here. Wait, though; she had been with t
hat other girl. Perhaps it was the other girl who worked here, not both of them? Perhaps she was just walking her friend back to work? Chorizo felt a tick of annoyance. He had assumed Nicola worked here, which was a mistake. Never assume, he scolded himself. A true warrior doesn’t guess; he seeks the truth.

  He pressed the elevator button. He didn’t want to leave, but what could he do? He really needed to find this woman and he felt himself getting upset.

  But what was that? Chorizo turned toward the front of the building. Again, for a moment, he thought he heard the wind. Like a woman’s low voice asking why.

  Ridiculous.

  “Relax, remove,” he told himself. “Distance yourself from the problem.”

  He wished he could sit still for a moment, have a minute of yoga. That always cleared his head. Chorizo closed his eyes and let himself run through the options one by one. Should he give up and try again tomorrow? Should he go to the café once more? Should he plant himself somewhere on the street and hope she walks by him on her way home?

  How was he going to find her?

  The large white downward arrow lit up and the elevator doors opened. Chorizo hesitated. Wait, he thought. What about the other girl—the friend? If Nicola was walking her back here, the friend might be here now. She might be able to help him. There was only one office left in the building, an Internet design firm up on the third floor. It was a long shot, but why not try? Chorizo pressed the up-arrow button this time. As he waited, his cell phone began to ring.

  “Yes?” he answered. He listened. The elevator came and he got on. He put his phone to his other ear and frowned as the elevator ascended. When the doors opened onto the third floor he stepped out, but as they started to close behind him Chorizo suddenly turned and reached out to catch them.

  “Where are you?” he asked, quickly stepping back inside.

  * * *

  Nicola heard the elevator ding and then a man’s voice. After a moment she rolled her office chair back to look out the open doorway but all she saw was a man’s trouser leg as whoever it was went back into the elevator. Probably looking for one of the dentists, she figured. It happened all the time.