Gecko

by Ken Douglas

  “ Jim Monday.” Jim held out his left hand as the right was in the cast.

  “ Hugh Washington.” The big cop took the hand with his own left, “and this is my partner, Ron Walker.”

  “ The Jim Monday?” Walker said.

  “ I didn’t think anybody still remembered.”

  “ How could a guy like me forget. I learned all about you in boot camp.” Now Walker was being respectful too. “You were like a god to us. I campaigned for you. I got all my friends to vote for you.”

  “ What are you talking about?” Washington said.

  “ This is Monopoly Jim Monday, Silver Star, Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He used to be our congressman.”

  “ That was a long time ago,” Jim said.

  “ Did you really get that name the way they say you did?” Walker asked.

  “ I really did.”

  “ I don’t understand,” Washington said.

  “ They called him Monopoly Jim because he loved to play the game. In Vietnam he had this set and when he wasn’t in the field, he played. They say when he couldn’t find anybody to play with, he played himself. That true?”

  “ Yes,” Monday said.

  “ They told us you only did two things in Vietnam, Monopoly and kill. They said that you didn’t go for the girls, you didn’t drink, you didn’t take R amp; R. They said you didn’t even like to eat. They said you were one crazy motherfucker.”

  “ I was.” He had spent a long time trying to forget, but now it was all coming back. The long days, the longer nights. He joined the Marine Corps to get out of school and they turned him into a killing machine, probably because they’d discovered he had an aptitude for it. However it changed him, made it so he was unable to communicate in a normal way. So he played the game.

  “ They said you played imaginary Monopoly when you were a POW to stay sane. They said you didn’t break under torture, you didn’t sign anything and you never gave an inch. They said it was because of the Monopoly you played in your head.”

  “ I still play, only now it’s for real. I buy and sell real estate.” He remembered the nights of the imaginary game. They couldn’t crack him because his mind was somewhere else. They could never understand that. He lived on Boardwalk and Park Place. He rode the Reading Railroad, paid Luxury Tax and tried to stay out of Jail. He played the game in his head and after a while they figured he was crazy and they left him alone. He used to wonder why they didn’t kill him and be done with it, but sometime about ten years ago he stopped wondering.

  “ I know who you are now,” Washington said. “You’re the Jim Monday that owns half of Long Beach. You own the building I live in. You’re my landlord.”

  “ Probably.”

  “ Are you still crazy?” Walker asked.

  “ No, now I’m rich.” Jim smiled, secretly pleased somebody still remembered him.

  “ We still have to take you in, sir,” Hugh Washington said. “Small matter of assault and battery.” His words brought back with frightening clarity the picture of David, dead and covered in glass. This wasn’t just a friendly conversation with two policemen. He was being arrested for attacking Bernd Kohler, a man he believed had tried to kill him. Twice. That meant that he would probably try again. Maybe he had someone waiting at the house, or the condo at the beach. He needed someplace safe. He needed it quickly, he needed it now and he needed a little time to plan. He needed to get even, but he couldn’t go running around with guns blazing. He wasn’t a kid anymore. It had been almost four decades since his war, he was five years shy of sixty and he’d always considered sixty old.

  But still, almost over the hill or not, he had to find out what he was up against.

  “ It doesn’t seem right bringing you in like a criminal.”

  “ It’s okay, Walker, I don’t want any special treatment, never have.”

  “ You want us to call someone? Your lawyer maybe, so you can make bail as soon as possible?” Washington asked.

  “ I don’t have a lawyer anymore. He was just murdered on Second Street. He was my best friend.”

  “ I’m sorry,” Washington said.

  “ That’s okay, you couldn’t have known.”

  “ What do you want us to do, sir?” Walker asked.

  “ Take me in. Book me. Let me spend a couple of days in a cell. I need the time alone, to think. When I get everything straight in my head, I’ll make bail.”

  “ That doesn’t seem right. Don’t you have someplace you can go?” Walker said.

  “ I have a condo in Huntington Beach I use sometimes, but somehow I don’t think that’s safe, because if someone is trying to kill me, they’d know about that. No, I think I’d rather spend some time in the lockup.”

  “ It doesn’t seem right, a man like you in jail,” Walker said.

  “ A few days behind bars isn’t going to bother me much. For a man like me it would almost be like a resort hotel. I’ll be safe from whoever is trying to kill me. I’ll be able to think. I’ll be able to grieve, alone. I need the solitude.”

  “ There’s no solitude in our jail, Mr. Monday. It’s full of drunks, drug addicts and punks.”

  “ That’s okay, Walker, for me that would be solitude. I don’t want any favors, except one.”

  “ What’s that?”

  “ Forget about me. Pretend we never had this conversation. Just book me like you would anybody else. In forty-eight hours the public defender will come to see me and find out I’m not a charity case. Then I’ll make bail. That’s all I ask.”

  “ That’s what you want, you got it,” Walker said.

  “ Don’t sound right to me,” Washington said, “but if you want us to forget about you, well then I already forgot.”

  Chapter Two

  Donna Tuhiwai opened her eyes and lay still. She was back in the dream. This time she didn’t ask questions. She didn’t want to be forced away. She would keep her thoughts to herself. She would observe, nothing more. She would watch the dream like a television. She would be good. Then maybe the dream would let her go and she could wake up.

  She studied the man on the bench in front of her. Rumpled clothes, like they had been slept in. Unshaven face, deep hooded eyes, weak chin, thick mustache, hollow cheeks, balding head with a scabbing cut over the right ear, like he’d fallen down recently. Not a nice face.

  His clothes were spotty and stained, dark pants, open flannel shirt and a black tee shirt underneath. On the front of the tee shirt, sticking out and glaring at her through the open flannel, was the caricature of a one-eyed pirate and the word, Raiders.

  “ That’s one of those American football teams,” she thought aloud.

  “ Who said that?” She heard a man’s voice, but didn’t answer.

  “ I didn’t say nothing, buddy,” the rumpled man said.

  “ Then who did?” The man’s voice again.

  “ Just you and me in here and I didn’t say nothing.” The rumpled man scratched under his left arm.

  “ You sure?” the man’s voice said.

  “ You hard of hearing? I told you, I didn’t say nothing.”

  “ Okay, sorry, I must have imagined it. I’ve had a bad night and I’m having an even worse morning.”

  “ I’m not exactly having a picnic here myself.”

  “ What did you do?” the man’s voice asked.

  “ So now you’re talking to me. All night you been sitting there staring off into space. People coming and going and you don’t say a word and now you want to talk? Well la-de-da Mr. Big Shot, maybe I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “ Then don’t.”

  “ I know who you are, Mr. Monday, Mr. Jim Monday. I know who you are and I know what you did.”

  The rumpled man was looking right at her, but he called her Jim Monday. “Why?”

  “ What?”

  “ I said, I know who you are.”

  “ I thought you said something else.”

  “ Well I didn’t. I said, I know w
ho you are. You’re a rich bastard. You’re in deep trouble and I’m glad.”

  “ Why, what did I ever do to you?”

  “ You made your money off the backs of the working class. You keep your workers down by paying low wages, so you can sit in your big house and drive hundred thousand dollar cars, while your employees can barely afford twenty-year-old Chevys.”

  “ I live in a rather small house, I drive a five-year-old Ford and I don’t have any employees.”

  “ You’re a millionaire big shot.”

  “ I may be wealthy, but I’m no big shot.”

  “ Oh, yes you are. The way people talk about you, you’d think you shit gold.”

  “ Think what you want, I don’t need the conversation anyway.” Donna felt herself lean back and then it went dark.

  “ Don’t turn out the lights!” She screamed the thought and instantly it was light again and she saw the rumpled man glaring at her. Then her eyes involuntarily roamed around the room. She saw benches, a toilet without a seat, a sink, bars. She was in a jail somewhere. She was dreaming that she was in jail.

  “ Voices, I’m hearing voices.” She instinctively knew she was hearing the man who had been talking with the rumpled man, only now he wasn’t talking, she was hearing him in her head.

  “ Me, you’re hearing me!” It was her dream. If the voice could hear her, then she could talk to it. Maybe it wouldn’t send her away this time.

  Jim closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.

  “ No, please don’t send me away again. Please don’t turn out the lights.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “ Thank you.”

  “ Something wrong?” the drunk sitting across from him said.

  “ You ought to try minding your own business.” Jim had had just about all he could take from the man.

  “ Big man.”

  Jim stood.

  “ Sorry.” The drunk cowered back, pushing himself against the wall.

  “ That’s your last word.” Jim stared down at him. He wasn’t usually like this. He’d spent the better part of his life learning to roll with the punches. It was like all the years since Vietnam were being washed away.

  The drunk nodded, fear in his eyes.

  “ Did you have to talk to him that way? It wasn’t very nice.”

  Jim tried to clear his head.

  “ No, I’ll be good. Please don’t send me away.”

  He stopped trying to fight the voice. “Who are you?” he thought.

  “ I am Donna Tuhiwai. I am asleep in the Park Side Motel, in Fungarei and this is all a bad dream.”

  “ Great, I’m going crazy,” he said.

  The drunk started to say something, but checked himself. Apparently he had no desire to tangle with a crazy man.

  “ It’s my dream. I can hear you fine if you just think the words.”

  “ This is not happening,” Jim thought. He knocked on his cast, heard and felt the knock, therefore this was happening. It was real.

  “ I am Donna Tuhiwai, I am asleep in the Park Side Motel, in Fungarei and I am dreaming,” the voice repeated.

  “ Where is Fungarei.”

  “ Come on, it’s the biggest city in the North.”

  “ Never heard of it.”

  “ What pakeha doesn’t know that we pronounce “w-h” with an “f-u” sound. Whangarei then, now don’t tell me you don’t know where that is.”

  “ No, I don’t.”

  “ Who are you, Jim Monday?”

  “ Right now I don’t know.”

  “ Where are you?”

  “ Jail, but you probably know that.”

  “ What Jail?”

  “ Long Beach City Jail.”

  “ Long Beach? Where? In California? In America?

  “ I am going crazy.” Jim got off the bench, started to pace the cell.

  “ If you talk out loud, you just make that man curious. And even though this is only a dream, I don’t think I like him.”

  “ This is no dream.” And to underscore his thought, he knocked on his cast again.

  “ It can’t be real.” Donna thought.

  “ It is for me.” Jim couldn’t put his finger on it, but the fact that she was in the same boat as him, sort of made the situation easier to take.

  “ Then where does that leave me?” Donna thought. There was anxiety in her thought-voice. She seemed young.

  “ I don’t know, where are you?”

  “ New Zealand.”

  “ You’re kidding?” Jim was stunned.

  “ No.”

  “ Let me think this through.”

  “ Does that mean you’re going to send me away again?”

  “ I don’t know. When I push your thoughts out of my head, is that when you go away?”

  “ I think so.”

  “ Where do you go?”

  “ I don’t know. It’s dark. I don’t like it.”

  “ Okay, I won’t force you away, but you have to let me think.” He sat back down.

  “ I won’t think a word.”

  Jim fought the panic threatening to rise. Somehow he was receiving a woman’s thoughts from halfway around the world. Unless, of course, it was some kind of an elaborate hoax, but that didn’t make sense. Who would do such a thing? Who could do such a thing?

  He got up, started pacing again, five steps across the cell, five back. It was some kind of telepathy, he reasoned. It couldn’t be anything else. Somehow he was tuned into this woman’s mind. He remembered hearing a story, when he was a kid, about a woman who spoke Chinese under hypnosis. She was supposedly picking up the thoughts of a peasant woman in China. Everybody thought she was faking. She probably was. But this, this was real. He was hearing another person’s thoughts like they were his own. It was frightening and fascinating and it was something he had to keep to himself. One word of something like this and it was the nuthouse for Jim Monday.

  And it would also be the nuthouse if he went around saying his wife’s lover was trying to kill him. He was sure of what he had seen in Kohler’s eyes, but it was possible for the doctor to hate him and not want him dead. He made a giant leap based on nothing more than his own feelings for the man. Maybe Kohler was innocent.

  Even the rifle shot through the back window of the police car could be explained. Plenty of people hate the police. It could have been a drug dealer or someone high on drugs, who saw a squad car and took a shot at it for kicks, or maybe Washington or Walker had enemies, maybe somebody they once arrested. The rifle shot couldn’t have been for him. He was being paranoid.

  But paranoid or not, David was dead and he was in jail, charged with assault and battery. How stupid, letting his emotions control him like that. Kohler was probably going to sue and he would have to pay, whatever the amount. The last thing he wanted to do was to go into court against Julia’s lover. No matter how much he despised the man, he still loved her. If they wanted more money because he attacked the son of a bitch, he would just pay it.

  “ That’s dumb,” Donna thought.

  “ It’s how I feel. If she wants money, she can have it. I can make more.”

  “ I don’t know much about your situation, but from what I just picked up, it looks to me like your wife and her lover are playing you for a fool.”

  “ That may be, but I just want it over. I want to get on with my life.”

  “ Jim Monday.”

  Jim started at the sound of his name, looked up and saw a uniformed officer and a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in an expensive suit, caring a black leather briefcase that matched his shoes.

  “ I’m Monday,” Jim said.

  “ I’m your attorney,” the man said as the officer was unlocking the cage. “We need to talk.” There was something about him Jim didn’t like.

  “ My lawyer was killed about eight hours ago.”

  “ All I know is that our firm got a call about you, then I was told to come down here and bail you out.”

 
; “ Who hired you?”

  “ I don’t know, but when old Mr. Cobb tells me to jump, I jump.”

  “ What about the assault and battery business?”

  “ Dr. Kohler isn’t interested in pressing charges, but there’s a small matter of getting the city to go along. You did assault a respected member of the community in front of dozens of witnesses, including, may I add, two police officers. If the city wants to go to the wall on this, we could have problems.”

  “ So where do we go from here?”

  “ It’ll take them about an hour to process your bail, meanwhile I’d like to talk to you, in private,” he said, indicating the man on the other bench with his eyes. “The city of Long Beach has been kind enough to furnish us a private room.”

  “ Okay, let’s go.” Jim left the cell, following the uniformed officer and the young attorney out of the lock up area, through another set of doors, up a flight of stairs and down a well lit corridor.

  “ You can talk in here.” The officer stopped before an oak door. He poked his head into the room, then added, “Wait a sec.” He went inside, came back with a chair, set in next to the door. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  The young lawyer motioned with an arm extended, Sir Galahad style, for Jim to enter. He did and the attorney followed, closing the door after himself.

  “ It’s not much,” the lawyer said.

  Jim nodded.

  The room was furnished with a folding table in the center, the kind usually found in campaign headquarters or at rummage sales. Around the table were three chairs, government chairs, bureaucratic chairs, one on the side closest to the door, facing the window and two opposite, facing the door. The lawyer laid his briefcase on the table.

  “ Looks like one of those interrogation rooms you see on TV,” Jim said.

  “ Not quite, but close. They use these for what we’re doing, attorney and client chats.”

  “ And interrogation,” Jim said.

  “ Maybe.” The lawyer held out his right hand. “My name is Jeff Turnbull. I’m going to try and get you out of this mess.”

  Jim shook Turnbull’s right hand with his left, while holding up his right, letting the lawyer see the cast.

  “ Police do that?” Turnbull asked.