The Oculus Heist

by Alex Moss

  An LA icon.

  Tilman parks around the back of the joint. The engine cuts out as he depresses the ignition and removes the key and both he and Kenny jump out, leaving Stelson on the back seat to space out and stare at the overflowing rubbish bins nearby–the empty bottles of beer, bourbon, and food boxes. Kenny and Tilman open the left side passenger door and snigger.

  “The night waits for no one. Hop to it, son,” Tilman says with eagerness.

  Stelson turns his head in slow motion and looks at them both with a blank face.

  To him, their smiles are warping into painful expressions of horror.

  They remind him of his brother Bobby’s face of nightmares, so he’s not put off. He’s okay with it, for now. He nods and climbs out, testing his balance and footing all the way, but surprised that his body works the way it should. He follows them to the back door of the club. Before knocking, the two cops reach for their ankles, pull up their trouser legs to reveal holstered Glocks. They draw the guns and shake out their trouser legs and take a big breath.

  They check Stelson’s mood.

  He’s cool.

  Kenny knocks then lifts the gun prone. Tilman follows so that his line of sight crosses Kenny’s to triangulate a kill zone. Stelson is behind them, staring at the nape of their necks–wondering whether they are soft enough to bite into like a blood orange on a warm August day. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking this but the drugs are possibly forming bizarre takes on the munchies.

  Or is there more to this? Do other people ever lust for acts of cannibalism? He knows he has the ability to kill, and has proven this to himself, but gorging on his victims? Is it just a narcotic-fueled fantasy? There is a long moment for this to be considered while Kenny and Tilman wait for the door to swing open. When it does, the alarmed bouncer steps back in prep for the assault.

  Kenny and Tilman push in, advancing hard on the bouncer who stumbles backwards. Stelson tracks them, watching their moves with fascination. None of them say a word. It’s stealthy and fast. Down a dim, halogen-lit corridor to a junction, left down another short corridor and two closed doors, and a right toward a shimmering glass beaded curtain that sways in the mixing of cold and warm air.

  Light reveals the clientele of “Live Girls” enjoying varied interactions with assorted buxom goddesses. Some talk, some touch, but it’s mainly tame.

  The quartet freeze at the juncture to watch for a moment and then Kenny’s attention turns on a dime toward one of the leftward doors. He’s looking at it in a way to suggest he knows what’s behind, and it’s more compelling than the girlie show. He pushes his Glock into the bouncer’s left eye socket.

  “Open the fucking door.”

  “What door?”

  Tilman pistol-whips him. The bouncer starts to bleed around his ear lobe.

  “Don’t make me wrap your key chain around your sweaty fat fucking neck.”

  The bouncer stays calm and untroubled by the pair, but does what’s asked and leads them to the door where he tools one of thirty odd keys in the lock from his telescopic key chain and turns. After knocking on the door in a precise manner first, Kenny pushes the door open.

  Stelson follows them inside.

  In the room, there’s a poker game going down but it takes Stelson a moment to work that one out–because all it really seems, at first sight, is a bunch of well-heeled dudes sitting around a table staring at a pile of money. Some of the cash is crisp new dollar bills, others more crumpled to give an impression of a meaningfully arranged modern art exhibit. There are seven guys at the table and every one of them has placed their cards flat on the felt table, ready to grab the cash, but not one of them has made the move–like there is a pact between them, or a fear of getting a bullet in the head for hoarding the spoils of war. It would be hard to justify that you were protecting the stake. Paranoid minds would instantly assume you were part of the take down, so this works in Kenny and Tilman’s favor.

  They both fan out, covering the room, at the same time searching for an item to carry the money. The bouncer retreats, ashamed. The room is sparse with just a hotel mini-bar in the corner–probably containing provisions for the long game. The walls are painted black and a crystal chandelier hangs above the card table.

  Kenny and Tilman leave Stelson to watch over the table–the distraction as planned–because each member of the card game turns to get a good look at Stelson and his bright green eyes, absorbed as Stelson’s deep wells become more intrusive–the drug-induced high wearing thin and his pupils returning to eyelet size.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” exclaims one of the blank-faced men at the card table.

  Stelson seems confused–why are these fellas so distracted by his presence? What’s with the gawking?

  “They seem to be impressed with you, Stelson,” remarks Kenny. He waves his Glock around a bit more for effect. “Now every sonofabitch keep their hands flat on the table.”

  Tilman picks up an airline carry-on case from beside the mini-bar in the corner of the room. He passes it carefully to Stelson. “Fill it fast. Don’t say a word.”

  Stelson opens up the case on the floor, ready to receive the offering. He then gets up and leans over the table and sweeps as much of the money as he can onto the case. There is an assortment of denominations ranging from twenties to hundreds. If one were to hazard a guess at the total take, it could be in the one-fifty to two hundred thousand-dollar ballpark. Useful, but not life changing.

  Next time Stelson leans over the table, the poker-faced dude sort of snarls at him. Stelson clears the rest of the table and fills the remainder of the case. After a moment, temptation gets the better of the snarling dude and he leaps from his seat and dives on Stelson.

  “Heyheyhey!” Kenny’s boiling over.

  Tilman is covering the other six players.

  The dude, instead of going for the money, is now on top of Stelson and punching him and clawing at his face, breaking the scab that’s formed on the bloody cut over his left eye.

  The dude has absolutely no interest in the money. He’s looking at Stelson’s eyes and he’s trying to drive his fingers into the sockets to get at the soft membrane that glistens back at him.

  Stelson is tossing his face side to side, avoiding the attack and now there is a gun jammed into the back of the dude’s head.

  Kenny is standing over the pair. “Get the hell away from him.”

  The dude sits up, places his hands on his head, and glares at Stelson. “Good for you. Good for you.”

  “What’s so good for me?” Stelson asks.

  “To be so stupidly naïve.”

  “He’s just jealous, Stelson. We got your back.”

  “What does he mean?”

  The dude gets up and sits back at the table with Kenny’s gun trained on him until he places his hands flat again.

  Tilman looks at his watch. “Time to go.”

  Stelson rolls over and zips up the case. Kenny grabs it and they run out the door and down the corridor, through the beaded curtains, laughing their asses off. Stelson is close behind, dazed and confused, fingering the cut over his eye while ogling the topless girls: a hostess with a tray full of beers; an enthusiastic pole dancer on a low-lit stage; others seated on laps or huddled in corner booths whispering bullshit in the ears of men in loose pants.

  They are out the front door in a flash and crossing La Cienega with the carry-on case, dragging it in the style it was meant. Kenny and Tilman hop a merry dance as they holster their Glocks at their ankles and head straight for a quaint looking establishment with a low-key neon sign with a large hand and the words PAST // FUTURE stenciled underneath.

  From the outside, it looks more like a place to get your fortune told, but the new sexy curtains and colored lighting suggest its so-damn-cool transition into a speakeasy joint.

  There is a bell to ring. Kenny bangs
on the door instead with his fists. A suave fellow opens the door and points out that the bar is full. No standing. He can call them when some stools are available.

  “You’ll need to make an exception on our account.” Kenny pulls out his badge.

  The suave fellow waves them inside, eyeing Stelson’s ruffled state with distaste.

  Inside, the bar room decor is vintage or retro with bizarre twists of the circus and cabaret. You would be hard-pressed to define which decade you were in if planted here without any context.

  They roll up to the bar to order, shoving a couple of stool-perched drinkers aside, making enough room to prop themselves up and leaving the carry-on case at their feet.

  “Two Thugs for us and a Flim-Flam for our friend.”

  A barman half listens and nods politely while staring the length of the counter toward the door where the bouncer gestures an approval.

  The clock on the wall has the time at 1:18 a.m. Stelson is slumped in the corner of the bar. He’s on his own with his head buried in his hands while Kenny and Tilman sink another cocktail. They are the only customers. The barman remains cool as he wipes down the surfaces and collects glasses.

  “Gentlemen?” The barman only has to say one word.

  Stelson seems to be crumbling, sinking lower, the floor beckoning.

  Tilman checks him from the corner of his eye. “Well, obviously Flim-Flams don’t mix well.”

  “We could send ‘em back but I don’t think George Clooney over here would like that very much.” Kenny smiles at the barman.

  The barman raises his left eyebrow and carries on.

  “Go get him,” Kenny nudges Tilman.

  Tilman steps over to Stelson and pulls him up with two firm hands under the armpits.

  “Can we go to Candy Jack’s now?” Stelson mumbles, deliriously. He’s drunk and high.

  Tilman laughs and turns to Kenny. “This sonofabitch wants to go to Candy Jacks. He can’t get enough.”

  “Always said you couldn’t keep a good man down. This little shit is relentless. A real piece of work.”

  They’re now driving cautiously. Driving is probably a stretch. The car is all over the place as Tilman tries to focus. He runs a red and nearly hits a vagrant idling across the road.

  “If you drive faster, you might drive straighter,” suggests Kenny.

  Tilman floors it. “Good thinking, bro.” He cuts the corner at Sunset while taking a heavy right hand turn. Car horns blare out and oncoming vehicles screech to a halt. “Shit.” Tilman straightens the car up. “Screw steering.”

  Kenny giggles like a freak.

  Stelson is flat out on the back seat but his eyes are open and he’s mesmerized by the changes in ambient light and shadows that wash over him. “Are we at Candy Jacks’s yet?” Stelson is wide-eyed and hopeful.

  Kenny and Tilman grin.

  “Candy’s is more of a state of mind than a place, but you make of it what you want. Go apeshit,” says Kenny.

  Tilman takes a hard left. It’s a sober effort. They cross Hollywood Boulevard on a green light and screech to a halt outside a dive bar with a neon lit sign above it that reads Powerhouse in a vertical strip. It has a red painted frontage, an incendiary aged old green door with a zebra-striped awning hanging over the sidewalk. It looks buzzy with low rent-chic. Kenny climbs out, steadies himself, and enters with a fist bump for the bouncer on the door.

  For Stelson, it gets a little hazy now as his weariness takes hold of him. He’s watching the bouncer judging, meeting, greeting, and talking people away from the bar depending on the attitude they roll up with. Tilman has the radio on, listening to some late night talk show that sounds like a gravel-voiced foul-mouthed DJ ranting about small insignificant grievances that the common man can potentially relate to.

  Kenny breaks through a small crowd that’s formed outside Powerhouse and bangs on the car window holding up a small plastic sample bottle with some brackish liquid inside. Tilman pops open the passenger door and Kenny jumps in.

  Tilman pulls away, cutting across a couple of cars. Kenny is fiddling with a fresh syringe and traps the sample bottle between his knees and sucks up the liquid inside with the syringe. Once full, he flicks out the air bubbles, and caps the sample bottle and turns in his seat, brandishing the syringe to face Stelson.

  Stelson looks at him blankly.

  “One last score,” Kenny whispers into Stelson’s ear.

  “What?”

  “That’s the message for Victor, from Anna.”

  “That it? One last score?”

  “You remember that. If you make it until tomorrow.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Now brace yourself.” Kenny reaches for Stelson and pumps the syringe into his neck in the same place as before. “Candy Jacks awaits you, my friend.”

  Then the colors of the night seem to merge into one and brighten all at the same time.

  Lift off.

  The flashing lights of an LAPD black and white light up the space around Stelson–an expansive patch of cracked, weed-ridden concrete just outside Candy Jacks.

  This is the aftermath of the rush. The come down. The euphoria for something longed for but removed from reality.

  There is a dead, clown-faced man lying on his side.

  Two cops jump out and approach with caution, then kick the body of the dead man and pull him onto his back. This hasty action causes the left side of his face to give way. The concrete had been supporting the man’s skull, all the grey matter intact now crudely disseminating along the concrete fissures like lava. The cops look down on it with nonchalance. “Brains all messed up over the place. Who is this sorry son of a bitch who just pooped sideways from his dumb skull?”

  Stelson feels the back of his head, as though he had been hit there. He’s not sure why.

  Also, the bloody cut above his left eye has completely healed. In fact, there is no trace of it whatsoever.

  He looks at one of the cops, seemingly relieved, as though a valve had opened up and released a bottled up vintage Champagne around his shoulders, neck, and cranium.

  “I think it was my brother, Bobby. Bobby Floyd.”

  One of the cops kneels down and removes Stelson’s sunglasses and takes a good long look. Stelson’s eyes are bright wells of molten energy. Chlorophyll green, setting off pupils that seem dilated, narrow, and predatory because they are different and clearly inhuman, yet artificially bright and penetrating.

  The cop smiles, then looks up and nods at his partner and a quick firm impact to the back of the head causes the world around Stelson to go dark.

  FOURTEEN

  Stelson’s eyes flicker open. He’s splayed on a bench in a lobby area and someone is tapping him on the shoulder. The tapping turns into more of an aggressive shake. He grabs the person’s wrist and glares at the assailant–a female cop with a kindly, helpful looking demeanor. Stelson releases his grip and quickly composes himself.

  “Mr. Floyd. Detective Lesko will see you now. Follow the hall through the double doors. His office is the seventh on the right hand side.”

  He gets up and strides along the hall. He pushes through the double doors. The seventh office is the only one with a closed door. The name-plate reads:

  Det. Victor Lesko

  Stelson knocks loud enough to wake a bear in winter.

  Stelson is seated in a clean, clinical room, on a rather contradictory worn leather couch that’s seen better days and God knows what else since it left the showroom. Stelson tries to maintain a cocky, overly sure-of-himself posture, but the deflated padding in the couch just makes him look awkward and ill-at-ease. That’s probably the point. Sitting at a large desk in front of Stelson is Detective Victor Lesko.

  “How’d you like my new couch?”

  He rolls some chewed up gum between his thumb and forefinger like a miniat
ure squishy stress ball. It seems to irritate Stelson. Victor smiles.

  “I’ve reached a low point,” Stelson says.

  “And you believe you’re still falling, huh?”

  “Yeah, something happened in the past. Something traumatic.”

  “That you want to remember?”

  “Think so. Keep having these dreams. Usually wanna keep all that bad shit locked away.”

  Victor stops rolling the chewed up gum, caught up in thought for a moment.

  “Sometimes it takes a trauma to remember a trauma. Hair of the dog that bit you. You get me, Stelson?”

  Stelson looks down at hands that have started to shake. He lifts his twitching right hand to scratch his face.

  There is no evidence of any of the jagged scars across his wrists. Like the cut above his eye, these have also vanished.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, I think. I feel different.”

  “Did Anna tell you anything about me?”

  “Only good stuff. You helped each other out, right?”

  Victor seems suspicious. He starts rolling the gum back and forth more rapidly.

  “She wants something. Am I right?”

  “Don’t all women?” Stelson says, speculatively.

  “Tell me. When did you and Anna first meet?”

  “Weeks, months ago–a blur. It was all so strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “Like it was meant to happen. But also, like it wasn’t me going through all this, meeting her. Falling for—”

  “Tell me what happened?”

  “I got up early that morning just so I could be alone.”

  Victor looks him in the eye, expectant, attentive now and on the back foot, as the pale green pigment in Stelson’s eyes grows larger and well-like, starting to become molten in its consistency until it sucks in its surroundings–an enormous, all-consuming black hole until BOOM–the molten green explodes into a million shards that diffuse in every direction. A total whiteout fills the space and a cacophony of imagery starts to play out.

  It’s everything Stelson’s been through, flashing forward at a high clip-rate: