“This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice—blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.” Stephen graham jones, author of ledfether and demon theory
“Benjamin Whitmer’s Pike captures the grime and the rage of my not-so fair city with disturbing precision. The words don’t just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames. Pike, like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn’t mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one’s going to haunt me for quite some time.” nathan singer, author of chasing the wolf and a prayer for dawn
“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility, Pike is one righteous mutherfucker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer’s balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he’s willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.” ward churchill, author ofpacifism as pathology
“Whitmer’s writing is swift, brutal, precise poetry, formed into the shape of people—breathing, hateful, murderous, vulnerable people that I care about deeply now. His characters are broken to begin with, and yet he breaks them open again and again, each time revealing a darker, thicker black sludge inside, and yet, this is also a story about innocence and trying to protect what tiny amount there is. There isn’t a trace of sentimentality in here, but whatever tiny embers of warmth that are to be found in this devastated landscape (a landscape so bleak it approaches, at time, allegory, and yet remains disturbingly visceral), those embers are completely earned and the meager heat thrown off by them all the more valuable because of it. I feel covered in blood.” charles yu, author of third class superhero and how to live safely in a science fictional universe
Switch · blade (swch’blād’) n.
different slice of hardboiled fiction where the dreamers and the schemers, the dispossessed and the damned,
and the hobos and the rebels tango at the edge of society.
THEJOOK
GARY PHILLIPS
I-5: A NOVEL OF CRIME, TRANSPORT, AND SEX
SUMMER BRENNER
PIKE
BENJAMIN WHITMER
THE CHIEU HOI SALOON
MICHAEL HARRIS
Pike
By Benjamin Whitmer
Copyright © 2010 Benjamin Whitmer
This edition copyright © 2010 PM Press
All Rights Reserved
Published by:
PM Press PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover designed by Brian Bowes
Interior design by Courtney Utt/briandesign
ISBN 978-1-604-86434-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912456
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA recycled paper
For my wife, Brooky, and my children, Maddie and Jack.
All I can say is thank you.
PREFACE
The kid’s left arm angles out of the dirty snow like a stick of broken black kindling. Derrick prods the body with the toe of his cowboy boot. Not a twitch. He holsters his Colt 1911, scanning the alley. The redbrick industrials loom over him, an ancient fire escape peeling away from the building, threatening to pull down the entire degenerating wall. Ahead down the alley, a dead end into a dog run, home to a pair of pit bulls trained to take chunks out of white cops. Derrick turns and walks back toward Cincinnati’s Main Street. The morning still, his boots crunching through the slick snow in time to his heartbeat, cold and regular in his chest.
The kid had sure as shit known what was coming. Had to have, the way he played it cool right up until he caught Derrick with his face bent down over a flaring cigarette, then turned and broke out through the kitchen door, nothing but an Afro blur and shoe heels. By the time Derrick got his .45 clear of his holster, the kid was already ten yards gone, running for his life.
And he played it smart for the first four blocks. He stayed off the side streets, making a spectacle of himself to the locals. There were a few of them up too, sitting on their wrecked doorsteps, watching the scene play out through their beer-reddened eyes. A couple even stood, thinking to get involved. Derrick changed their minds, snapping his sights on the closest, barking out he’d shoot the first dumb sonofabitch to step in his path.
But then the kid made two mistakes. The first was cutting down the alley. That was the easy one to see. But the second was actually an error in judgment he’d made much earlier, probably sometime the day before, when he picked out his shoes. He’d picked elongated shoelacesthat trailed after him like rattails. And he tripped over them. Fashion victim. Derrick stopped, steadied himself, pulled the trigger twice. His pistol jumped in his hand like something alive, and the big .45 rounds sent the kid tumbling forward like a face cord of dry wood in a hard wind.
He was twitching when Derrick walked up to him. His lips parted, his mouth and nose foaming blood. He was blinking, trying to speak, the sky pressing down from above like an invisible hand. Derrick let loose one more round, pounding a smoking hole in his head.
He’s almost out of the alley now. Twenty feet to go, less and less. Two boys step around the corner, blacking out the sun in their winter coats. The smaller of the two whistles, his white face round and all but translucent in the winter morning, his thin blue eyes watering in the cold. An electric chill flashes up Derrick’s spine, he raises the .45 on them. “Back up.” They do, against the wall. Lazily. Unimpressed.
“Shot him, didn’t you, motherfucker?” the bigger boy says, his big, brown fists clenching.
Derrick keeps walking, .45 trained on him. “Tripped over his shoelaces.”
“That right? And just managed to drop his brains all over the place?”
“Could have happened to anybody. Could even happen to you.”
“Bet we get ahold of you, motherfucker.”
Derrick picks up the pace, no more than five feet. A wizened woman in a maroon housecoat and galoshes peers around the corner, checking the commotion. He shoves past her and he’s out, jogging. Ironwork and stone storefronts. The sidewalk ruptured as if blasted by an earthquake, and the few trees lining the street blown over with sooty snow. The gutters and sewers awash with last night’s beer cans and cigarette butts and one red high-heeled shoe. Derrick skids to a stop in the middle of the street, takes his bearings. There, the limestone façade and iron balcony of the Hanke building. He starts towards Central, quick. There are more of them now, a lot more, poking their way out of the apartment buildings, stumbling out into the street. He runs.
A whistle from back towards the alley. He knows better, looksanyway. The white kid with the round face. A beer bottle whips through the air, grazes his arm, skitters smashing on the cold blacktop. He runs. A howl goes up somewhere to his left. Another beer bottle slips in front of his face. Smashes. Then a rock. Derrick ducks, it cuts the air not more than an inch over his head.
He runs. His cowboy boots slide in the slush and the beer, he doesn’t fall. His car’s parked behind the kid’s apartment. No chance of reaching it. He hears the cold snick of a pistol’s slide being yanked back. He doesn’t look this time. The gun cracks out four times in sharp succession, the rounds slapping the street off to his right. Gangbanger, never seen the inside of a shooting range, no chance of hitting him. Derrick barrels towards downtown.
Side street to his left, a blue four-door sedan sitting at the stop sign. Derrick bolts for it. A Mexican man in a blue pin-striped suit, drop-jawed at this lone man in cowboy boots being chased by a roaring, flashflood mob, spilling out of their apartment buildings now, pouring down the street. Derrick snatches the back door open, jams his gun in the side of the Mexican’s neck. “Drive,” he rasps, jerking the door shut.
The mob boils towards them in a fuming mass. Derrick grabs the Mexican’s chin, forces his head towards downtown. “Vámonos. Ahora.”
The Mexican’s foot finds the gas. The car squeals through the intersection, lurches down Main Street. “They looked angry,” the Mexican says.
“It won’t be the last time,” Derrick answers.
BOOK I
And blended horrors stare before her eyes,
Even in that time, when all should be at rest,
When not one thought should discompose her breast
— Blind Harry
CHAPTER 1
~ You ain’t nearly as big as I expected.~
There’s no trouble spotting Dana. She comes through the door leading with her greasy pelvis, wearing a pink winter coat that looks to have been run over by a garbage truck. A dirty black-haired girl skulks behind her, maybe twelve or thirteen, wearing a tattered sweatshirt an inch too thin for the weather. Dana’s eyes land on Pike as if she knows him, and she shambles over and shoves the girl in his booth, then slides with her head ducked down like she’s afraid somebody might see her. There’s little doubt anybody hasn’t. The diner’s filled with miners heading in for the first shift, slurping coffee, rustling newspapers, calling to each other as they shoulder in and out of the cold, all of them with half an eye in her direction from the moment she stepped through the door. It’s a small town, Nanticonte.
“You ain’t nearly as big as I expected,” she says.
Pike ignores that. “How’d she die?”
“Give Wendy some change,” Dana says. “I saw a newspaper machine on the way in. She likes to read.”
Pike digs a quarter out of his pocket. The girl snatches it, pushes past Dana. She’s holding a gray and white kitten in her arms. It stretches its jaw and its pink tongue flicks out at the grease in the air as though trying to catch snowflakes, its eyeteeth like slivers of ice.
“How did she die?” Pike repeats.
Dana snuffles, wipes a long stream of snot down her pink coat sleeve. “She overdosed. Heroin.”
It’s not a surprise. But Pike misses when he ashes his cigarette at the ashtray. Tobacco embers swirl in the greasy air, rest sizzling in the thick black hair of his arm. He barely notices them. “When?”
“Last week.” Dana reaches across the table and swipes one of his filterless Pall Malls and lights it with his lighter.
Wendy returns, a newspaper folded clumsily under her right arm. Pike ticks his head at Iris, the waitress. She elbows her way to their table, arriving at the same time as Wendy. “Take her to the bar and get her some blueberry pancakes,” Pike says. He looks at Dana. “You need anything?”
“I could use some coffee,” Dana answers.
“C’mon, honey,” Iris says. She lays a hand on Wendy’s shoulder, leads her away.
Every seat in the diner’s full. Iris grabs a plate that’s almost empty off the counter and tells the miner who had been eating that he might want to get out in the world and work for a living. The miner sits for a minute, smoking his cigarette and staring at her as if expecting she might return his plate. When she doesn’t, he keeps staring at her like he might get angry about it. Finally, he plants his John Deere hat on his head and stands, shaking his head in amazement. Iris sits Wendy down, yelling out an order for blueberry pancakes. The girl hunches down on her stool, stroking her kitten’s head, her narrow face pale and her wide blue eyes darting around the room, scared and over-stimulated.
Iris returns to the table with Dana’s coffee. “She’s adorable,” she says. “Your daughter?”
Dana snorts. “I can’t have kids. I was born with two uteruses growing against each other. I had to have both of them chopped out when I got pregnant after my father raped me.”
Both of Iris’s eyebrows raise. She turns and walks away.
Dana snorts. “Uppity bitch, ain’t she?”
“Who’s the girl’s mother?” Pike asks.
Dana grins maliciously. “Sarah.”
Pike nods. As if there was any way that wouldn’t be the answer. “Did she find the body?”
“No, and you can thank fucking Christ she didn’t. Not after what they’d done to it.”
“They who?”
Dana shakes her head, shudders.
“I can’t take her,” Pike says. “I don’t have anywhere to put her.”
“If there was anybody else, I’d be talking to them.”
“What about Sarah’s mother?”
“Alice?”
Pike nods.
“Alice caught a case of lung cancer. She’s been dead for years.” Dana’s eyes are like powderburns. “When was the last time you talked to Sarah?”
Pike draws on his cigarette.
Dana takes another drink of her coffee and sets her cup down solidly on the saucer. “No more of this horseshit,” she says, standing. “I’m leaving.”
“Hold on.” Pike peels a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. She eyes the bill like she’d like to crumple it up and throw it in his face. “Take it,” Pike says. “For your gas and your time.”
She grabs the bill and fists it in her pocket.
Pike pulls another twenty out of his wallet, holds it between his fingers. “Where was she living?”
Dana wipes snot down her slimy pink sleeve. “In Over-the-Rhine,” she says finally, snatching the bill. “Cincinnati, 400 Mulberry Street.” She makes for the door, dragging the eyes of every diner in the restaurant in her wake.
CHAPTER 2
~ Iris looks at him like he’s grown a second head. ~
Pike’s face closes, he can’t help it. He thinks of Sarah and blood pours into his ears like a vessel has burst somewhere back in his brain, flooding away the sounds of the diner in an oceanic roar. The patrons hush around him, a cloud of thick viscous quiet spreading out from him like an oil spill, but he can’t stop himself from thinking about her. He stops trying. For a minute. Then, “What’s up, man?”
Pike chisels his daughter off his features. Rory stands over him, his square-jawed face screwed up in curiosity.
“You okay?” Rory asks. He’s wearing jogging pants and a sweatshirt, a light sheen of perspiration across his blonde buzz-cut head.
Pike nods slowly. Rory slides in the booth. “Smile or something, before somebody calls a cop,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “We working today and I forgot?”
Pike shakes his head. “I had to meet someone.”
“Who?” Rory’s left eye narrows. “You ain’t got no friends.”
Pike fishes a Pall Mall out of his pack, his face slipping back into the funereal scowl. He rolls the cigarette in his fingers without lighting it.
“Not that hooker that just walked out of here?” Rory shakes his head. “Pike, you’re old, you’re ugly and you’re mean, but even you can do better.”
“What’re you having, Rory?” Iris asks, suddenly standing by the booth.
“Heya, Iris.” Rory gives her a boyish grin. “Half a grapefruit and a glass of orange juice.”
Iris jots down his order. “I don’t think that girl’s ate anything indays,” she says to Pike. “She’s been through three orders of pancakes already.”
“What girl?” Rory asks.
“That little girl over there.” Iris points with her pen.
Rory cranes his neck. Wendy’s at the bar, working over a fresh plate of blueberry pancakes, her snow boots hanging off the stool, dripping dirty water in a pool beneath her. “Who is she?” he asks.
“She came in with one of Pike’s friends,” Iris says. “The kind we always knew he had, but could never prove. Looks like she left her here.”
“Rory gave you an order,” Pike says to her. “Go get his food.”
Iris taps her pen on the palm of her hand, looking at Pike.
“Fine.” Pike sets his jaw. “Fetch her.”
“Can do,” Iris says, smiling big and turning on her heel.
“I think Iris likes
you a little bit,” Rory says, when she’s out of earshot.
Pike ignores him, watching Iris talk to Wendy, ruffling her hair. Then she and Iris are standing at his table.
Pike clears his throat. “Do you know who I am?” he asks her.
The girl shakes her head, the right corner of her mouth twitching angrily.
“I’m your grandfather.” Pike exhales cigarette smoke through his nose. “You’ll be staying with me.”
Iris’s jaw drops over the girl’s head, Rory whistles softly. Wendy just glowers. “I don’t want to.”
“I’m not sure how many options you have.”
Wendy’s eyes crack like twin windows smashed in a hailstorm, then flood through with tears. “Shh, baby,” Iris says, holding her shoulders as she tries to wriggle away.
“Fuck you,” Wendy says over her shoulder. She whips around at Pike and spits full his face. “Fuck you, too.”
Pike peels his glasses off and wipes the spittle on his T-shirt. “You’ll be safe with me.”
“I don’t want to be safe. You fucking pedophile.” She drops her chin, her broad forehead looming over her raging eyes. You can tell it’s the worst thing she can think to call somebody.
“Let her go,” Pike says.
Iris looks at him like he’s grown a second head. Then seeing he’s not joking, she relaxes her hands and steps back from Wendy.
“Tonight you stay at my place,” Pike says to her. “Tomorrow if you’ve got anywhere to go, I’ll stand you the money for a bus ticket.” He speaks slowly, enunciating his words carefully like he’s talking to a spooked horse. “But you can stay as long as you want, too. The only thing I’m asking is that you sleep on it. Sleep on it for a night.”
She stands very still, as though carved out of a block of slow dried ice.
“I’m gonna step outside and have a cigarette.” Pike pulls on his work coat. “I’ll wait for you until I’m done. There ain’t much I can do if you decide to run off. But I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”
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