by Seth Morgan
The hurried crackling was Sidney’s voice. The Grand Jury had come in an hour ago and handed down twelve indictments. Ten Pimping and Pandering, a False Imprisonment, and a Grand Theft Person. Sidney hadn’t read them yet, but the D.A. had issued warrants, so it was best if Jules surrendered before he was arrested. Sidney already had the bail up; they could settle the collateral later. The media had the Hall of Justice front steps staked out waiting for Faria to publicly announce the indictments. Jules should enter through the basement police garages and take the jail elevator upstairs. Sidney was already at the Ninth Floor booking desk awaiting him.
Listening to his attorney, the Fat Man’s jowls began quivering and his eyes sharpened to icepicks. He hung up without speaking. His face mottled like a planetarium’s production of Martian storms.
“What’s wrong, boss?” Quick patted himself down to make sure he was carrying the pills.
“Look!” Baby Jewels squeaked horribly, pointing.
Stella had tried to deepthroat the Mule. Tried for Antoine, tried for art. The second she felt his dork start its final spasm, she reached behind him and pulled her mouth down over its entirety. She made it, too. Clear to his stones. Then, for the cum shot, quickly started working it back out. But it clogged in her throat like one of the hero sandwiches it was her habit to eat before shoots as a sort of warmup stretching exercise. The pepperoni, onions, olives, and anchovies rose volcanically up her gullet, spurting first through her nostrils before the pressure built to a force that blew Stella’s head off the Mule’s dong like a faulty pipe fitting.
“Cut!” Antoine wailed. “Someone get some towels.”
“Dumb cunt!” spluttered Baby Jewels. “She knows better than to eat before a shoot.” He started gasping, slapping bright lights on his breast.
Quick Cicero bounded over and prodded two of the tiny nitroglycerine pellets in the Fat Man’s gasping mouth. In a moment the gelatinous blob overflowing the Stratolounger was wheezing normally.
“Help me up, Quick. We got an errand to run.”
PENITENTIARY BOUND
The penitentiary chain announced itself with a big brass gnashing of keys and bellowed names and steel slamming down the line. At each tank state commitments were picked up and handcuffed to the thirtyfoot length of casehardened links. Loaded, the chain impersonated a drunken centipede; whenever it halted, those in the rear didn’t hear the command and stumbled into those in front. Twice before it reached the elevators, it collapsed in a kicking, cursing confusion of arms and legs.
With a smile as big and bright as a Vegas casino greeter, Sergeant Nanu, the hulking Samoan transport officer, held open the doors as the chain wound into the elevator cage. Noting Joe’s idiotic grin he guffawed, “It’s the penitentiary you’re bound for, not the Promised Land.”
The elevator plunged to the basement police garage. The doors groaned apart revealing a black immensity blocking them, and Joe’s grin fixed like a skull’s. The cloying scent of lavender turned his heart to a lump of cold fat. There stood the Fat Man and Quick Cicero.
“One side, gents,” rumbled the big Samoan. “State property under escort.”
Baby Jewels moved like the parting of a vast black curtain, revealing the garage behind. Quick stepped to the other side. Joe could have sworn the pale furious eyes narrowed minutely, spotting him.
Then they were past, the chain wending through the blackandwhites and unmarked units and cars impounded for investigation. Chained beside Joe, Whisper Moran felt him sag and cupped his elbow. “I shoulda warned you. Fresh air’ll make you sick after a coupla months in the tanks … Just breathe deep and slow.”
Joe nodded weakly. He knew the effects of prolonged tank dwelling from experience, but was grateful to Whisper for supplying an excuse for nearly fainting. The sight of Moses and Cicero momentarily seized him with the certainty that he’d been set up for assassination. He glanced over his shoulder in time to watch the elevator shut the mismatched pair from view. Just a coincidence, he chided himself as they approached the transport van. They’re only here to bail out one of their McBimbos.
The second transport officer cracked the van’s rear doors while Nanu released the convicts from the chain and cuffed them in pairs for loading.
“Moonpie,” Nanu marveled at a hammer huge with irondriving Big Yard muscles. “Every time I turn around I’m truckin you back from Frisco to the pen. Why dontcha at least give another county the chance to commit you?”
“San Francisco’s my home,” Moonpie replied indignantly.
“No, the joint’s your home,” Nanu returned.
Moonpie jingled like a giant tambourine shrugging. “It be secure at least. Maximum, like it’s advertised. Twentyfourhour armed guard. Folks out there work their whole lives to buy theyselves into a high security community. And all they gets is their visitors announced. I dont care how many millions you gots, yo visitors aint gonna have their asses stripsearched and warrant checked like the Pie’s. I breathes a sigh comin home, Sarge. Out there …” Moonpie shuddered at the mere thought of the parlous bricks. “It be a jungle out there.”
The van vroomed up the ramp, bursting into the racketing glare of the Bryant Street forenoon. Joe choked a cry and flung his free arm over his eyes. His head throbbed like a stubbed toe; behind his lids rings exploded within blazing rings of light. Again Whisper apologized, this time for not warning him of the effect of daylight after months without sun.
Gradually, Joe could tolerate the whitehot splinters of light glancing off the glass and chrome. Through the steel mesh covering the van windows, he harvested his last free memories—the sights and sounds of a city he knew intimately, but which seemed already strangely unfamiliar.
The smallest details stood out, pinning themselves like tiny bright flags on the map of his perceptions. A bay window framing a jungle of houseplants behind the reflection of the Transamerica Pyramid; a fourfoot wooden wingtip shoe swinging over the doorway of Pepo’s Shoe Shop. The bright brass concentricities of a streetcar bell; the fungic musk of rising dough and big brown smell of roasting coffee; the way a young girl in lederhosen flipped long hair over her shoulder while bending to unlock her car, a mother who couldn’t help laughing as she scolded a child for spilling ice cream down the front of its sunsuit; the shadow of a solitary cloud turning windows bottlegreen and indigo; a west wind shivering newspapers in the hands of old men on park benches.
Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Joe exclaimed softly at the Pacific, rolling blue and free forever. With his free hand he gestured beyond the mesh screen. “It’s so strange. Like a déjà vu …
Whisper husked, “Nice place to visit, but I wouldnt want to live there.”
On they highballed north to the Northern Reception Center at Vacaville, the freeway singing to the rhythm of the tires bumping over its seams. The twelve riders were oddly subdued; gathering memorabilia, perhaps, of the world they were leaving—or implanting it with grudges to one day square.
Joe watched the passing cars, trying to read lives in the blank faces behind the windshields. He thought of his mother’s face under the casket glass. Funny, it was the only time she really looked like a whore, that drizzly morning at the cutrate funeral parlor behind Grand Auto in the Merced Plaza Shopping Center where the mortician had used gobs of cheap makeup to disguise the bloated scars from the fire started in her trailer by the Chesterfield she was smoking when the aneurism bubbled up and blew out her brain. They glued a cheap wig on her, not even her real color, and painted her lips redder than a strawberry sucker, pursing them in a sulky heartshaped moue, shaping the syllables forever branded on Joe’s brain: “Short time, sugar?” He spat on that face beneath the glass and the Juvie officer took him out back and busted his nose and hauled him back to the detention center where it was left unset and he still could smell the rough state blanket wool soggy with warm tears and hot blood.
Past subdevelopments and
convenience stores and filling stations they rolled; blossoming groves stretching to the hills, feed sheds and grain silos and roadside fruit and produce stands; gimcrack motels and fastfood stations ringed round with cars like feeding sharks; past oil wells like giant mosquitoes, steel suckers dipping deep, drawing the lifeblood of the newborn earth.
Moonpie was holding a seminar on the Northern Reception Center. Having left only a few months before, he was the van’s foremost expert on Vacaville. It was there all the felons committed to the state from northern California counties were dispatched. They’d receive medical and dental exams, psychological and aptitude testing, vocational skill assessments, and counseling. These results would determine to which of the satellite penitentiaries they’d be shipped to serve their time.
“Course all that be bullshit,” a hammer called Red for his rusty Brillo hair tossed in. “They send you wherever a pen be short of niggers. Democratics or somethin …”
“Demographics,” another voice corrected him.
“Them too. Sounds scientific, dont it?” Red said. “Not that it matters. Joints all the same, gladiator schools.”
Now the van was shuddering down a rutted twolaner past chainlink fences bordering a moribund orange grove. Through the naked stunted branches Joe saw the low squat sunbleached walls ranked with barred windows that stared into the lowering light. At regular intervals along interior fencework guntowers on iron stilts bristled with antennae.
They halted before tall rolling gates beside a concrete tower marked ARMORY. A large sign warned in stark red letters: IMPORTATION OF FIREARMS, DRUGS, AND OTHER CONTRABAND ONTO PENAL RESERVATION IS PUNISHABLE AS A FELONY UNDER SECTION 844 OF THE CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE. In the light of the dying sun the tower looked swollen and red, as though about to spurt stone seed.
A group of guards loitered by the Armory. They wore forestgreen jumpsuits and laceup hobnailed paratrooper boots. Each carried a threefoot riot baton. The sinking sun flamed their helmet faceshields.
“Goon Squad,” Whisper rasped.
“Who?” Joe asked.
“Search and Investigation … The guards of the guards, you might say. They make a practice of harassing Frisco commitments.” Whisper’s manacled hand gestured at their leader, a heavyset brute with sergeant’s chevrons. He carried a teargas launcher slung negligently over a shoulder that pitched with his each yawing step, tripping Joe’s memory, pinning his eyes wide. “That’s Rowdy McGee. Dont never cross him. He’s meaner than a boot fulla barbed wire.”
Nanu and the other transport officer alighted from the van. A key was lowered from the Armory tower. Nanu used it to unlock a door. He took the other’s sidearm and checked it with his own inside. Relocking the door, Nanu jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the van and said something. Rowdy McGee wrenched off his helmet and bellowed with laughter, and certainty hammered Joe’s heart like an anvil: he was staring at the freak who launched Rings’n’Things into the dicing fan blades.
“See that patch of white?” Whisper’s finger waggled, indicating the jagged swatch of dead hair slashing the brushcut Joe could never forget. “Underneath’s a steel plate they put in after we threw him off a third tier at Quentin. That’s how he got the limp, too. We meant to kill him but just left him meaner. Like I say, that’s one motherfucker you dont want to cross.”
It was Joe’s turn to whisper. “I already figured that.”
“Welcome home,” husked Whisper.
Nanu remounted the van alone and silent. The gates rolled open, they passed within. With glazed eyes Joe stared at the bonewhite blocks of stone as if they might yield some portent of things to come. Yet the walls behind their veils of chain spoke not at all.
NOT JUST ANY CAP
Lieutenant Rick Tarzon frowned fingering the Ziploc evidence baggies on his blotter. The tags identified their contents as the inventory of the stolen Porsche. Italian sunglasses, two Pentax camera lenses, road maps, an operator’s manual and maintenance log, various receipts, pens, the parking stub from Rossi’s Famous Seafood Restaurant, a pack of prophylactics, souvenir matchbooks, a Fort Baker brochure, a blue ticket stub bearing the imprint of a leaping blue dolphin.
All these items the Porsche’s owner, an aerospace engineer, had more or less identified as his own. After all, who keeps track of the minutiae accumulating in one’s car? The only articles at which he expressed puzzlement were the rubbers and blue dolphin ticket. This Tarzon ascribed to embarrassment: the guy was married.
He slipped the Ziplocs in a buff envelope marked AUTO DETAIL to be returned this morning with the Porsche. The insurance company was raising hell at having to pay for a replacement vehicle.
“What rathole did you stash the rock in, Speaker?” he asked aloud.
He stood and cramped his hands backward on his hips and arched. His spine cracked, pushing a groan up his throat. He crossed to the office door and snatched up the Venetian blinds. The slapping rattle startled several homicide cops dozing at their desks. Shaking his head in weary disgust, he plucked the packet of Hav-A-Tampa Jewels from his shirt pocket. It was empty; he crumpled and lofted it through the miniature basketball net fixed to the wall over the trash can, whispering swisshhh.
Reseating himself at the desk, he yanked open its bottom drawer and plucked a fresh packet from a case of Hav-A-Tampa Jewels. He started to shut the drawer when his eye flared like a horse’s about to bolt. He reached slowly behind the stash of stogies and withdrew a crimson carton, a videocassette seized in the Tender Trap raid. He set it on his blotter and stared as he had a dozen times before at the sticker photograph.
She was clamped by the wrists and neck in a chromium hightech pillory, gorging on a penis long and black as a nightstick. Her neck was twisted, aiming sideways at the camera that profound and distracted gaze of hatred Tarzon could recognize even through the eyeslits of the leather mask. The penis bulged her cheek, the same cheek that in a snapshot on his dresser bulged merrily with dulces knocked from a pinata he had hung for her fifth birthday.
It was his fault, his sin, it all began with his lie. He snapped the cheroot to his mouth, biting its plastic mouthpiece like a handgrenade pin. All along she’d known her mother hadn’t died as he had told her. Even when so many years had passed, and so much of his life was constructed on the lie that he almost believed it himself, she knew, denunciation and damnation ever trembling in her eyes. Everything that followed that monstrous event and the falsehood invented, he believed, to protect himself, was infected with perversity. It was a disease, progressive and fatal; the cassette, had he the stomach to play it, would bare the depth of the rot.
If only he could have faced it earlier he might have saved her, saved them both. Pregnant at eleven, addicted at thirteen, a dozen prostitution arrests before she could vote. All her life she sought to prove the truth by provoking him to repeat it; she craved exactly the fate he’d provided her mother. She couldn’t help it; her own destruction was all that could balance the scales, rationalize her universe. And when instead he mutely suffered her transgressions, she was forced into the streets in search of a surrogate.
And now her search was over. The cassette seized in the Tender Trap raid proved it. Its label read in jagged red letters like ones warning of high voltage, CLIMAX PRODUXIONS. Now she made bondage movies for the Fat Man. It was only one step further …
He must find her. Find and tell her the truth that he was at last desperate and frightened enough to acknowledge. Until he found her he must press with every resource to destroy his awful surrogate, Baby Jewels Moses. Destroy the Fat Man before he destroyed Belinda Tarzon. And for that he needed the diamond.
Firing up the Hav-A-Tampa with his Screaming Eagle lighter, he reached for the phone and punched a Sacramento number. It was time to have another talk with Speaker.
Kitty sat nude before the bathroom mirror, knotting a towel turbanstyle around her head. The mirror was veined with gold and misted
with the scented steam of the bath from which she’d just emerged. With the heel of her hand, she wiped a circular space to see her face. She frowned. Not at herself, but at the ornate bathroom. The golden fixtures in the shapes of mythological birds, the fluted blue marble seashell sinks, the sterling silver tub with lapis lazuli clawed feet, everywhere busy mosaics building geometric migraines.
No wonder Dan’s wife, Melissa, took the kid and booked. Only a whore could love this Turkish bellyache. Dan must have built it with just that fantasy in focus, to keep some bustout bimbo with a big ass and chichis in a style befitting Little Freakin’ Egypt.
“Shitfire,” she called through the partly closed door. “It must cost plenty to make a crapper look this cheap.”
“Come again, dahling?”
“Skip it, bozo!” she hollered. Jesus, what a lop. “El Paso.”
If there was one thing Kitty hated it was being called dahling like some highsociety floozie. Especially the way Dan did it, honking the a like a failed Hollywood actor. She knew just what he was doing lying in there on his Danslumber bed, wearing his silk monogrammed Danjammies beneath his chamois Dansplash robe—watching a kraut film classic on the VCR and reading a critical tome, copping egghead comments to drop at the upcoming San Francisco Film Festival. The fraud had been at it for a tragic week. Not that Kitty minded him boning up on his phoniness. Just so he didn’t practice on her. When he did she’d remind him, “If you wanted an undergraduate soulmate, you shoulda birddogged Berkeley, not the Blue Note … dahhhling.”
She made a face, scooping a hand over her tummy; the wall was building. She tweaked a nipple. Ouch, but was it sensitive. Before it started showing she’d have to tell Dan … tell him it wasn’t his. She reached for the hairbrush, but before she could lift it from the sink it blurred in warm, salty water.
Okay fella, I’ve gone all day and havent thought of you once, she credited herself, then it just comes over me like a chill. And each new time I think of you, I have a harder time remembering you, like a dream. Oh, I remember the little things, like your voice so tough but pudding underneath and the way the tip of your tongue sticks out when you concentrate on things like tying a shoe or jacking a shot, the way you got about sex. I just cant put you all together.