Every Man a Menace

by Patrick Hoffman

  Shadrack watched her, wondering what advantage she was pushing for.

  She went on. “If Arthur wants to send someone to look in on us, under the false pretense that you and I”—she waved her hands back and forth in front of her as though drying her fingernails, pointed at him, then set them down gently on the desk—“that you and I have a problem with each other, then here is what I propose: instead of denying any beef, we should exaggerate it.” She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She continued, “Fine, we don’t get along. We play this man—this rude interloper—off each other. Keep him engaged in petty conflicts.” Shadrack’s face showed concern, but she waved him off. “I have ways of handling men. Let me worry about that. But as soon as he arrives, we start handling him: give him drugs, keep him awake, don’t let him sleep. We keep him busy, running this way, that way, and then—only then, when he’s ready—we really begin to play him.”

  Shadrack sat silently, studying her. Her face remained serious, but underneath it, in her eyes, Shadrack could see that she enjoyed this stuff. It made her feel high. She loved it.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “If Arthur wants to put his nose in our business, then it’s time for him to go. This ten percent deal is no good. Who pays for it? You do! No, no, no, no good. But you can’t just push a man like Arthur out.” She raised her hands from the desk, rubbed them together. “Let me ask you a question. What if the man that Arthur sent decided to rip us off?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I’m saying, what if it looked like he did? Couldn’t we say, then: ‘Sorry, Mr. Big Dick, but no more points, ‘cause your man stole from us?’”

  “And how the hell you gonna make it look like that?”

  She squinted. “You make him do things that a man preparing a rip-off would do. Make him get a fake ID. Make him buy a plane ticket to Mexico. Make him buy guns. I don’t know. Make him stop communicating with Arthur. Make him tell his family to move to a safe place. But finally, most importantly, the both of us—two separate camps—we both tell Arthur that his man stole our package. And even more to the point, if the Israelis have a problem with us pushing Arthur out, then we now have a reason. We have good cause. We can show them why we did it.”

  “So where would that leave me, exactly?” Shadrack asked. He couldn’t hide his anger. “You want me to play Arthur? Next thing I know there’d be a contract on my ass! I’d wake up in the morning and find some Aryan Brothers sitting in my bedroom with condoms on their dicks and knives in their hands. Shit! You got no idea what you’re talking about. Cut Arthur out? Nobody gonna cut Arthur out.”

  “Calm down,” said Gloria. “Nothing happens to you. You’re just being you. Normal you. Crazy Shadrack. Doing LSD, changing your cash into jewelry. Wearing dirty clothes. Not showering. Everything you’re already doing. He can’t kill you for that.”

  “And what about the man he sends?”

  Gloria held her right hand up in the shape of a gun, dropped her thumb, and made a popping noise with her mouth. “Buried. Bottom of the bay. Never heard from again. He flew to Mexico with our shit. He’s gone.”

  They sat staring at each other for a long moment.

  “And so what the fuck am I gonna do? You want me acting all crazy? I’m not a damn actor.”

  “All you have to do is blame everything on me. Just blame me. Use all that anger that you feel in your heart, right this second, and push it on me. Ice cold, you can curse me up and down. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Nah,” said Shadrack, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I gotta take a pass on this one.” He put his hands on his knees as though preparing to stand.

  “That’s fine,” said Gloria. “No hard feelings. But that means that you and me, we’re done. I wash my hands of your dirty scent forever. I can’t sell you anything. Deal over. No ten times, no nothing. You can go fuck yourself. Maybe you can go back to growing marijuana in Eureka. It’ll make it easier for me. I’ll just give your spot to Arthur’s man.” She sat there breathing hard. Her face darkened.

  “You are one coldhearted lady. You know that?” he said.

  She smiled.

  Four days later, Arthur called Gloria to give her final notice that his man was coming.

  “His name’s Raymond Gaspar,” Arthur said. “He’ll be there in less than two weeks. He’s done some good work for me. He’s my partner. You understand?” She could read the threat between the lines. “He’s a good kid. Smart. I want you to welcome him with open arms. You can trust him. He’ll help you deal with Shadrack.”

  Gloria thought about telling him, one last time, not to send anyone. But he’d already been warned. The fact that Arthur was sending the man right before the first big shipment had all but proven her case for her. He was making a move; she was sure of it.

  Jackie Santos began watching Gloria as soon as she returned to San Francisco. The woman wasn’t hard to find. She owned five different homes in the Bay Area, but she lived in a modest two-story house in Daly City.

  One of Jackie’s occasional boyfriends, a man named Johnson Lake, was a war vet. He’d been with the Special Forces in Afghanistan; he had that time memorialized above his heart with a tattoo that read: THE QUIET PROFESSIONALS. He had been honorably discharged for medical reasons after being arrested in Kabul carrying a pound of heroin. He avoided prison by making a single phone call to an associate at the CIA. The associate had shown up within the hour and had the whole misunderstanding cleared up within the day. Johnson Lake returned to California with a beard and a nasty heroin habit. He told Jackie all of this in bed the first night they met, two years before her trip to Miami.

  When Jackie presented him with the hypotheticals of the Gloria job, he said he could put together a team of three other soldiers in exchange for 50 percent of the take. It was painful, but she agreed to it.

  She spent the next few weeks tracking Gloria. She watched the woman from her car, following her from place to place. She stared at doors and waited for them to open. It was a time characterized both by dullness and a desperate hunger. Jackie wanted to pull things off so badly that it felt like a physical craving. But what was the plan?

  The truth was she didn’t know. She would wait and watch, and see if an opportunity presented itself. For fifty million dollars’ worth of Molly, it seemed reasonable enough.

  On the twenty-third day of her surveillance, at 7:52 p.m., Gloria left her office and got into the minivan that normally drove her home. Jackie was prepared to follow the van south, to Daly City, but instead it circled around and headed in the opposite direction, toward downtown. It was almost two hours later than Gloria’s normal drive home, and that, coupled with the change in direction, made Jackie’s pulse quicken. This is what she wanted to see: change, variance.

  She followed the van down Mission Street, staying a few cars behind. At Nineteenth, the driver pulled a U-turn, passed a parking spot, and backed into it. Jackie continued driving, and then double-parked. She turned in her seat just in time to see Gloria and the driver get out of their vehicle and buzz the front entrance of the Prita Hotel.

  Jackie found a parking spot on Eighteenth, fixed her hair in the mirror, applied red lipstick, and walked toward the Prita. A black guy trying to sell her drugs said, “Wassup, mama? Outfits, outfits, outfits. I got two-for-ones.” She ignored him. At the Prita, she buzzed the bell and ascended to the second door. It looked to her like a third world jail. Jackie pressed the second buzzer. Behind the front desk, a bulletproof box with a ticket slot on the bottom, sat an Indian woman. The smell of Indian food filled the air.

  “How much for a room?” Jackie asked.

  The female clerk stretched her neck to see Jackie. “Thirty-five,” she said without smiling.

  A guest sign-in sheet sat on the other side of the glass. Jackie could read it from where she stood. Gloria had signed in to visit someone named R. Gaspar, in room 32.

  “Who’s in thirty-two?” asked Jackie. “Is that Robert Gaspar?”


  “We don’t give out information,” said the woman, shaking her head.

  Jackie took out forty dollars from her back pocket, held it up for the woman to see, and then slid it through the slot. “There’s a man named Gaspar that used to stalk me,” she said. “I don’t want to stay with him if it’s the same one. He’s dangerous.”

  The woman got out of her seat and took the forty dollars. “His name’s Raymond Gaspar,” she said.

  “What’s his date of birth?” asked Jackie.

  The woman stood there. Jackie slipped another twenty through the slot. “He might be my stalker’s brother,” said Jackie. “Come on, woman to woman.”

  The woman looked through a box of notecards on the desk. “March twenty-second, nineteen eighty,” she said.

  After warning the woman not to mention anything, for her own safety, Jackie thanked her and left.

  Later that night, she looked Raymond up on the Internet. A private investigator database that Roberts had installed on her computer revealed that the man had a criminal record, but it didn’t give any details. She switched to the California Department of Corrections Inmate Locator Site and entered his name. He had been released from prison just that week. An almost narcotic feeling of excitement filled Jackie’s chest.

  She called in Johnson Lake for another set of eyes. She began following Raymond Gaspar, while one of Lake’s men stayed on Gloria. She followed Raymond to Shadrack’s house on Colby Street, and followed the two of them to the house near Dolores Park. After seeing a few other people enter the party, she joined a group and went in. She tried to listen as Raymond spoke to the people near the fire. The man was clearly high on something. When he kicked over a glass of wine, she helped clean the floor. The next day, she had Lake put a man on Shadrack, as well.

  At night, when she went home to rest for a few hours, she had trouble sleeping. Her excitement felt like an infection. They were getting close. The shipment was coming. But that excitement had to be filtered through the drudgery of twenty-four-hour surveillance, and a near constant state of anxiety. But she couldn’t stop. She learned to pee into a bottle—not an easy thing for a woman. She brought her meals for the day with her each morning. Her back ached from sitting so much. It was hard to stay awake. The days started to blend together.

  She arrived on Gloria’s block at 7:15 a.m. The man she was relieving, Johnson Lake’s man, was parked three houses in front of her. He tapped his brake twice to signal his departure before driving off. Gloria typically left at twenty minutes past eight, and things proceeded as usual that morning. The tan minivan was parked in the driveway, as it always was. The driver came out first; he sat there alone for a while, maybe three minutes, with the engine running. Finally, Gloria emerged and stepped into the van. The driver backed out of the driveway and pulled away.

  The moment Jackie turned her car on, she sensed something was wrong. It was like a vague premonition, something in the air. She sat there for a moment and considered whether she should follow them as planned or whether, today, she should just let them go. The van was disappearing around the corner in front of her. She counted to three and made up her mind.

  When she rounded the corner, she was surprised to see the van sitting there, stopped in the middle of the street. Jackie stopped twenty yards behind it. Another car stopped behind her a moment later.

  Nobody honked. They all just sat there.

  Jackie watched as the door of the van popped open. The driver stepped out and began walking toward her. She still could have driven forward then, swung hard onto the sidewalk and made her way around them, but she didn’t want to show her hand yet. It was a suburban Bay Area street; it wasn’t illegal to be there. She decided to sit tight and feign innocence. She breathed in deeply and arranged her face into a look of friendly confusion.

  The man wasn’t Gloria’s normal driver. Jackie had seen him coming and going over the last few weeks; he looked to be nearly sixty. He was skinny, and wore sunglasses. His cheeks were pockmarked. His pants were silky, and he walked with a friendly gait. Jackie looked in the rearview mirror and saw that a young Asian man sat waiting in the car behind her. Gloria’s driver had reached her door. She lowered her window a few inches, smiled, and asked if she could help him.

  The man returned her smile. As he did, the reverse lights on the rear of the van lit up. It was backing toward her. Now her car was truly pinned in. Her eyes went back to the man at her window.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  The man reached out and tried to open her door but it was locked. Jackie, in a panic, rolled her window up. The man removed his sunglasses and hung them from the top button of his shirt. Then he put both hands against the windshield and lowered his face to it. It was the kind of gesture a joking grandfather might perform for a child, but the effect was not the same. He smiled, and she saw that one of his front teeth was capped in gold.

  She could ram the van, she thought, but she told herself that she could still act her way out of this. She held both hands up near her head in confusion.

  “Open it,” the man said. He produced a black pistol and tapped her window with it. It made a horrible sound, cold and hard: tap, tap, tap.

  Everything blurred from there. The man, after looking all around to confirm they were unobserved, began screwing a silencer on to his gun. When he was done, he pointed it toward her head. She unlocked the door.

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked, when he’d pulled it open. “What’d I do?”

  “You’re not police?” asked the man. He had a Filipino accent. His face looked genuinely concerned. He held the gun loose at his side now.

  “No, I’m—what? I’m driving to work.”

  “Ah—and your work involves what?”

  “I work at a school,” Jackie said. “I’m a teacher.”

  The man used the gun to point at the watch on his left wrist.

  “It’s a little late to be teaching, right? Teachers go to school at seven thirty. It’s after eight thirty already.”

  “I don’t know who you think—” She willed authority into her voice. “It’s not acceptable to go around and …”

  “I’ve never met a teacher who follows a woman for days on end.”

  Jackie’s mind went blank. “No?” she said.

  He bent down so that his face was close to hers. The scent of cigarettes, coffee, and the soap on his skin drifted into her car. “I’m going to sit down in that seat,” he said. He pointed at the passenger seat with his gun. “I’m sure it’s a little mistake, a simple misunderstanding. You can explain everything, and then we’ll have you on your way, back to your classroom. Please, don’t do anything stupid.” With that he closed her door and walked around the back of her vehicle.

  She watched him in her rearview, and then turned and watched him approach the passenger side. She could still lay on the horn, ram the cars. But she didn’t do anything. She couldn’t. He opened the door and sat down.

  “Good,” he said. He leaned toward her and pressed the horn gently. The car behind them backed up.

  “Drive back that way,” he said.

  “I have no idea what you think is happening,” she said.

  “It’s fine—nothing—back up, back up,” he said.

  She had to turn halfway in her seat so she could see. The man with the gun stayed facing forward, a dreadful look hung on his face. As the car reversed, she spoke slowly, sounding out each syllable to emphasize her innocence: “I don’t know who you think I am. Please, I’m begging you. I wasn’t trying to follow you. If it seemed like I was, I apologize.” She used her American accent. She sounded like a girl born and raised in California.

  “Back in there,” the man said, pointing at a driveway. “Back into it and then turn around. I’m sure it’s fine. I guarantee you, no problem.” He pointed his gun at the van in front of them. “But she wants to talk to you before the police are called. You know? Normal business. Go.” He pointed toward Gloria’s house.

  Jac
kie, unable to stop her hands from shaking, steered the car back toward the house. Her chest clamped shut with fear.

  “Please pull into this driveway,” said the man.

  Jackie turned into Gloria’s driveway, the same one she’d been watching for weeks. The car that had been behind her parked on the street. The tan minivan pulled behind Jackie, boxing her in. Gloria sat in the driver’s seat.

  The man next to Jackie rubbed his forehead as though he had a headache. Jackie looked at his gun, imagined snatching it out of his hand, but couldn’t bring herself to try. The front door of Gloria’s home sprung open and a young man dressed like he’d been asleep came out. He was talking on a cordless phone. He walked right up to Jackie’s window and looked in at her. He spoke Tagalog; Jackie couldn’t understand him. She looked at her rearview mirror and saw Gloria speaking into a cell phone. They were talking to each other.

  “This is so stupid,” said Jackie. She shook her head and held her palms up.

  “I know,” said the man with the gun. His expression made him seem as annoyed as she was.

  “I’m going to be late, and I’m fucking pissed,” said Jackie. She banged on the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.

  The man standing outside ended his phone call. He leaned down and studied Jackie’s face for a moment, as though trying to recall if he’d ever seen her before.

  “I have no clue what you want,” she said, speaking loudly through the closed window. “This is insane.” She ratcheted up her anger. “I’m going to call the police, I’m going to sue each and every one of you for false imprisonment, and I’m going to get really fucking pissed off if you don’t let me go. You hear me?” She sounded genuinely aggrieved.

  The man outside her window straightened up and looked around at the neighboring houses. He opened Jackie’s door and motioned for her to get out. Jackie didn’t move. The man in the passenger seat pulled her keys from the ignition and dropped them into her purse.