Devil's Arcade

by Robert Bucchianeri

  Carlos gave me a cold stare, nothing more.

  “When was the last time you talked to Bobby?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the last time he was at the gym. A week ago, maybe, perhaps longer.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What did he seem like? What was his mood?”

  “I don’t know. Same as ever. He was a nervous guy.”

  He was a decent liar. He didn’t seem shocked at all at the mention of Bobby. If he knew about the murders, he was acting like he didn’t.

  This was all bullshit. I glanced behind me, surveying the crowd. No one was making a move to re-enter. I knew I didn’t have much time. I thought about planting Carlos’s head in a planter until he started telling the truth, but it would be hard to hide the commotion from the lookie-loos and, since I was supposed to be dead, I didn’t want any calls to or intervention from the police.

  “You’re lying to me. You’re in trouble. I don’t know what your story is. Why someone with a successful business like this would be involved in a casino cheat. I don’t care at this point. I’ll let the cops sort that out with you. And that’s the least of your worries. Soon, Poe’s going to find out you were stealing his money, and then you’re going to be knee deep in it.”

  He shrugged.

  “Has Jewel handed over your share of the take yet?”

  He gave me a blank stare.

  “Leslie tells me she stiffed him so far.”

  He stayed tight as a drum.

  I needed more time with him. I needed to get him alone.

  “You don’t have any idea where Jewel is now?”

  He rolled his eyes dismissively.

  “This is your last chance. It’s all coming down, and it’s going to bury you. I’d say this is the last day in the flower business for you. Give me a little help, a nudge in the right direction, and I’ll remember it. I’ll do what I can when the time comes. With the police and with Poe. I have a little influence in both quarters.”

  Carlos laughed, but his eyes didn’t look amused. “Yeah. I trust you.”

  “You can trust me a whole hell of a lot more than you can trust Jewel Allen. She’s double crossed just about everybody she’s ever been involved with.”

  “She’ll never double cross me,” he said. “She loves—” He stopped, swore. “Get the hell out of my store,” he muttered.

  “You’re a fool. Watch your back, Carlos. They’re coming for you.”

  I left him there, opened the shop door, the little bells merrily signaling my departure, and waded into the anticipatory faces of the crowd of former customers.

  “My mistake,” I called out. “It was just a garter snake. Big one though. I was sure I heard it rattling, but Carlos says its harmless.”

  I left them there, nervously eyeing the formerly heart-warming, but now fraught-with-peril, shop.

  Twenty-Seven

  Carlos kept turning around every few seconds, surveying the landscape behind him, as if he knew that I was following.

  I was sure he hadn’t spotted me. I stayed roughly fifty yards behind him, favoring shadows cast by the morning sun, the entries of various death-related enterprises, and the trunks of Cypress and Eucalyptus trees.

  I’d shaken his tree, and he was responding as I’d hoped.

  He gave a little speech to the customers waiting anxiously outside—I couldn’t hear his words from my vantage point inside the shop of a headstone dealer across the street, but it was obvious that he was reassuring them about the snake and perhaps claiming that I was either a nut case or a hysteric.

  He waved at them with a big smile, and the customers, one after the other, turned and slowly wandered away.

  He re-entered the shop alone, and I could see him bustling about inside. He spent a couple of minutes talking on his cell phone, gesticulating to beat the band.

  I waited, fending off a salesman trying to interest me in the elaborate marble headstone fit for an Egyptian Pharaoh that I was standing beside.

  After around ten minutes, Carlos flipped the sign on the shop door from open to closed and stepped outside where he locked up and hurried away on foot.

  I knew that he lived less than a mile from the shop and figured he either walked or cycled back and forth.

  He was heading south, toward his house on E Street in Colma, opposite the Italian and Japanese cemeteries. Carlos was surrounded personally and professionally by dead bodies, and I wondered if that had finally gotten to him.

  My cell phone vibrated in my front pants pocket, and I let it go, taking cover within the curlicued arches made of faux granite marking the entry to a funeral home. The shadows cast by two towering elms served to conceal me. I let Carlos move farther away from me now that I was sure he was headed home.

  I slid out my cell phone and glanced at the screen where I found the shockingly off-putting message:

  You’re Dead!

  Attached was a link that I clicked on taking me to the website of the San Francisco Examiner. The story there gave more details about the murders the previous night at the Beachside Motel, most relevant of which were the names of the three victims: Bobby Fenderdale and his daughter, along with the name of a local private investigator of a sort, Max Plank. The only other thing mentioned was that I lived on a boat at Fisherman’s Wharf. That fact was added, I’m sure, because the reporter knew that the lifestyle fascinates people. The romantic life of a now dead P.I.

  You might have envied him, but look, he’s dead now.

  I must say that reading about your own death has a bracing effect. I looked forward to the obituary, if it came to that, wondering if they’d dig up any tasty morsels of biography that I’d tried to bury.

  I typed in a quick response to Marsh—“Better dead than sorry”—and put the phone back.

  Carlos was out of sight now, so I walked out onto the bright sunlit curb and, pacing myself so I wouldn’t catch him before he neared home, took my daily dose of vitamin D from the half-blazing rays.

  I caught up with him as he turned from the El Camino Real onto E Street.

  I darted up F Street, to the south of his home block, and trotted up past a park and recreation center, a tennis court, and then a large apartment building. I rounded the corner at Clark Street, hurrying until I reached his tree-lined house on the corner of E and Clark.

  It was surrounded by a white picket fence enclosing intricately patterned flower beds featuring Greek statuary—toga-clad maidens posing with wine jugs and a fountain with burbling water.

  Beside the fence was a white door with a knocker that looked like the front door to the house leading into the first-floor level.

  I glanced around the corner and spotted him half a block away. I backed up and sheltered myself behind a giant Eucalyptus tree that bordered one side of his house beside a stairway that rose to its second level.

  A few seconds later, Carlos used that staircase, rather than the front door, to enter his house.

  I waited until he was safely inside and then followed in his footsteps.

  Twenty-Eight

  The door was hidden from the street by the trees, so I put my ear to its scarred wood surface without worrying about what the neighbors might be thinking.

  As I strained to hear any little telling sounds, John Malkovich’s sing-song voice from the Saturday Night Live skit where he’s scaring the hell out of a group of innocent children—not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse—ran through my mind.

  Perhaps the knock on the head had taken its toll.

  I shook off the notion and John Malkovich.

  But I hadn’t heard a thing.

  I stepped back and studied the porch, a stoop really, and the door itself and contrasted that to the first-floor entry, considering my options.

  The first floor was open to the street, and though all was deserted at the moment, the view was visible from several nearby windows and any passersby who might suddenly ap
pear.

  Whatever I decided to do up here on the porch would go unnoticed save for the cardinal currently looking up at me from its perch on the shoulders of the stone cold Greek lovely caressing the jug at the bottom of the stairs.

  I thought about just charging the door using my body as a battering ram. It didn’t look all that strong. But the stoop didn’t provide room for me to build up any kind of momentum, and unless I busted it off its hinges in one fell swoop, it would completely foil any attempt at a surprise entrance.

  I trotted gingerly back down the stairs and, watching my surroundings, tried my luck at the two windows I’d spotted earlier in the back yard.

  Locked, as I’d expected.

  I glanced over at the front door and quickly surmised that it looked sturdier, presenting a bigger challenge that its upstairs sister.

  I watched the cardinal watch me for a few seconds before it got bored and took flight. I realized I was just avoiding the only viable option and that maybe my mind was still disordered from last night’s hit.

  But then, suddenly, I was struck by a thought, an aha moment.

  I returned to the stairs and climbed half-way up before stopping. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and retrieved the business card where I’d recorded the information that Leslie had given me.

  Then I tapped in the number that I found there.

  It only took Carlos around fifteen seconds to open the porch door and scramble down the stairs.

  As I expected, he cared deeply about his Greek maidens and was distraught to hear a stranger telling him that someone was in his yard with a baseball bat smashing them to pieces.

  I tripped him as he rounded the corner, and he landed face first into the low-maintenance white gravel. At that moment, he probably wished he’d planted grass instead.

  He grunted, whined, screamed, but I was on him, my hand muffling the sound bursting from his battered lips. I grabbed him from behind, holding his belt and shirt, and jerked him to his feet.

  He was a mess, his mouth full of gravel, his forehead and cheeks and chin cut and bleeding. He looked at me with crazy eyes and tried to swing at my face, but I spun him around and then march-stepped him back toward the stairs. He stumbled forward, trying to resist, so I stomped on his heel and kicked him in the ass, and he groaned again and started to shout. I reached around, slapped him hard on the side of the face, and snarled in his ear to shut up or I’d kill him, or something like that.

  He whined and cursed, but with less volume and gusto, and I pushed him to the stairs and forced him up with my knee between his legs, threatening more damage.

  When we reached the porch, I steered him through the open door and then pushed him hard, and he stumbled and fell onto the black ceramic tile entryway. He grunted, rolled over, looked up at me, and covered his bloody mess of a face with the palms of his quivering hands.

  “Now,” I said, “we’re going to get—”

  And for the second time in as many days, my head exploded, the lights went out, and I was lost to the world.

  Twenty-Nine

  I came to with an all-of-a-sudden start, a jerk of my head.

  My eyes flashed open.

  My mind was remarkably clear, as was my vision.

  But it hurt. It really hurt. The pain behind my eyes was astronomical. If I had the choice of getting rid of that pain or dealing with the everlasting fires of hell itself, at that moment, I would have chosen the latter.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to gasp or burst into tears. I made no sound but felt drops of the liquid stuff running down my cheeks.

  I gritted my teeth, opened my eyes, and grimaced, whimpering while looking around.

  I was lying on a white bearskin rug in front of a Swedish fireplace in the middle of a room that looked like a hunting lodge. I vaguely registered mounted birds and rodents or mammals of the high desert along with a couple of big cat heads on the wall.

  Carlos was full of surprises and contradictions. With every new bit of information, I liked him less.

  I tried to get my bearings, to think about what had happened, who had hit me. I tried not to think about how damn stupid I’d been.

  Suddenly I remembered arming myself from the hidden compartment in Acapella Blues. My hands scrambled for the gun inside my coat.

  The holster was empty.

  I groaned and reached down to feel for the knife strapped to my shin and found that I’d been stripped of that too.

  “Plank, you’re an idiot,” I whispered, biting my lip from the pain in my head.

  My thoughts were even more slanderous of my character.

  Despite feeling that if I moved a muscle, the pain might render me unconscious again, I managed to prop myself up on my elbows.

  I heard muted voices coming from somewhere nearby. At least two people, maybe more. And one of them was a woman.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think.

  Was Jewel Allen here?

  God, I wanted to meet that woman, but, I thought, the current circumstances were just a tad short of ideal.

  Carlos had let slip that he trusted her, that they had a close relationship. He’d actually almost said that she loved him, hadn’t he?

  So her presence here shouldn’t have been surprising.

  Should it, Plank?

  Idiot.

  I patted my front pants pocket and, as expected, found myself phoneless.

  No means of protection or communication so I’d have to use my wits.

  Big trouble.

  If these were the murderers—and if they weren’t, none of this made much sense—I could see no reason why they wouldn’t continue their spree. They were probably discussing the best way to dispose of my body right now.

  At that moment, I would have sold my soul for a full bottle of Oxycontin. I wanted to curl up into a ball and die. I wanted to cry out for my mommy.

  Instead, I struggled up into a sitting position, and slowly, slowly turned my head on its unsteady axis to study the room for an escape route.

  I was on the first floor in a weird facsimile of a hunting lodge, which was just a large converted bedroom that someone had centered with the Swedish fireplace, painted red, and run a flue up, impractically and expensively, two stories.

  Which meant that they’d dragged me downstairs after knocking me out. I pictured Carlos, in an angry revengeful mood, dragging me down the stairs by my legs, my head bouncing hard against each wooden step.

  I noticed a single closed door that I assumed led into the main part of the house. That was where the voices were coming from.

  There were three. Two men and one woman. The two men were agitated; the woman seemed calm, cool, collected.

  This worried me.

  I preferred adversaries that were in a state of panic.

  On the side opposite the door were two windows covered with blinds, each of which were four-paned, several feet off the ground.

  I got up on my hands and knees, my teeth hurting from the grinding I was giving them. With a muted grunt, I lifted myself up and onto a decidedly unsteady footing.

  I had no idea how long I’d been out, but I didn’t think it had been more than a few minutes. The light streaming in from the blinds was bright, and it just felt like not much time had passed. Perhaps that’s why I had been left alone for a while because they didn’t expect me to recover so soon.

  Was there any reason for them to keep me alive?

  I couldn’t think of one. Not after Carlos told Jewel about my line of questioning.

  Even though my death wouldn’t solve all their problems, they still had Poe to deal with. And Marsh. They didn’t realize what kind of wrath he would unleash if they harmed me. Killing Bobby and Paula proved how foolish and impulsive they were.

  I couldn’t rely on logic or mercy.

  There was never enough logic or mercy in this fallen world of ours, but I decided not to spend time mourning that fact right then and there.

  The door to the room suddenly burst open,
and Carlos appeared with a gun in his hand.

  It wasn’t mine, but that gave me no comfort.

  Behind him, I glimpsed the shadow of a female form.

  He shouted at me, “What the hell?” He raised the gun and ordered, “Don’t move a muscle.”

  My body pleaded with me to obey him. It really did.

  It wanted the bullet to end my pain.

  I turned back toward the window, hesitated not even a moment, and charged it with all my limbs wind-milling like the completely crazy man that I felt like.

  Just before I hit the window, I lowered my shoulder and felt something whir and whistle by my face.

  A half-moment later, I burst through, shards of glass and splintered wood exploding in the air around me, as I tumbled and arced my body, end over end, attempting to land on the gravel outside with my ass.

  I landed on my side, feeling a rip and burn in my left shoulder, but I’d found temporary relief from pain via the adrenaline pumping through my veins.

  I lay there for a moment, dazed, without a thought.

  Carlos appeared at the window, again leveling the gun toward me. I scrambled in the gravel, twisting my body this way and that, feeling pathetic and hapless.

  “Hey, Mr. C,” a young boy cried out from his bike across the street. “Who’s that guy in your yard?”

  That gave Carlos pause.

  And me an opening.

  Using one of the Greek stone maidens for support, I scrambled to my feet, glancing back to find Carlos, his blood-streaked face a mass of anger and frustration, his eyes jumping from me to the young boy, his gun out of sight now.

  Behind him was a woman whose face was half-hidden in shadow.

  I turned and ran clumsily, lopsidedly, out of the yard and down E Street, shuffling like a madman.

  Thirty

  Now that pay phones have gone the way of DVD players and dinosaurs, I had a hard time scaring up a call.

  Or, more accurately, I scared everybody I approached who was using a cell phone on the street. I couldn’t really blame them. I must have looked a fright, and my words were a jumble of confusion.