Bad Luck City - Matt Phillips

by Near To The Knuckle

  “This you?”

  “This is Palmer, who is this?”

  “It’s your boy,” the voice said. “From South End.”

  J–Bird. The kid with the attitude and wire hanger. “What’s up, J–Bird?”

  “You remember that bald guy I told you about?”

  I sat up and started to search for my shoes. “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “His car was parked down here. I saw the girl, too,” he said. “She was staying in a motel out here, kind of by where you dropped me off yesterday.”

  “Was she okay?” I pulled my shoes on, but left them untied.

  “Looked like she was half–asleep to me,” he said.

  I stood and slipped on my blazer, checked for the Colt .38. It was still lodged in my waistband. “Where are you, J–Bird? Tell me right now.”

  “This motel called ‘Daisey’s.’ It’s not a nice place. I saw Richie roll up, followed him around back and there they were, bringing her out. One guy kind of carried her. I could see it was her. Same hair and nose and eyes.”

  “They put her in the car?” I slammed my apartment door and lurched down the stairs, my head not quite clear from the medication.

  “They put her in the back. Richie got in there with her.”

  “Stay right fucking there,” I said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  ***

  I was in no state to drive, not with the beer and oxy in my system, so I half–jogged toward the main avenue. About a block from the apartment, I hailed a yellow taxi and it swung a U–turn and pulled to the curb. I hopped in and the cabbie turned to eyeball me. He was a rough–looking guy with a white stubble beard and shoulder–length black hair. His big tattooed forearm dangled over the seat; the tattoo said: ‘USMC.’ He loosed a crooked grin and said, “Where you headed this morning, pal?”

  “I’m headed to Daisey’s. It’s South End, I think.”

  He turned around and pulled into the neon–lit street. “Yeah,” he said, “I know Daisey’s. I’ll have you there in a few.” His eyes caught mine in the mirror.

  ***

  The cabbie’s name was Amos.

  He said he’d driven the cab for three years. Before that he worked private security for one of the casinos. Six years in the United States Marine Corps before that. This gig was a way for him to save money for his master’s degree—elementary education, he said. His eyes darted at me in the mirror while he spoke. After giving me the abbreviated résumé, he said, “You look pretty amped up, pal. You on something?”

  I thought about whether I should tell him anything. Of course not, I thought. He wasn’t a cop or a reporter or a crook. He was just a cabbie in a gambler’s city. But it felt right to say something, like I needed somebody in the foxhole with me, so to speak. “I’m looking for my sister,” I said. “But I didn’t know she was my sister until last night—she might be in some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  I pulled out the revolver. I held it up where he could see it. At that moment, in that state, I could think of no other way to show this man how serious I was; I couldn’t think of trouble as anything but bullets and blood and guns. The gunshots from earlier rang in my ears. “This kind of trouble,” I said.

  Amos nodded. His eyes darted from the gun to me, back to the gun. “Looks like you’ve got it all just about handled,” he said.

  I slipped the revolver back into my waistband and tried to focus my eyes on the lights whirring past us. “Just about,” I said. “Just about.”

  ***

  J–Bird was gone when we reached Daisey’s.

  Amos parked the cab a half–block from the motel and said he’d wait.

  I walked down the street and studied Daisey’s. It was a small motel, twenty rooms or so in one long line, one of these places that didn’t mind renting rooms for half a day. I walked into the lobby and gave the clerk a broken smile. He perked up behind his glass kiosk. “You need a room?”

  “The girl,” I said. “I need her room.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “The one the pimp in the black Mercedes just came for,” I said. “Do you know now?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  I pulled out the revolver and tapped it twice against the glass. “Please, tell me I don’t look like a cop,” I said.

  He pulled a gold key from the wall and slid it beneath the glass facade. His face was loose skin over flat bones, lost and uncaring.

  ***

  When I opened the door, it hit me. Chelsea was drugged. They kept her there. For what, I couldn’t imagine. These thoughts pelted my brain: I wanted to find her and tell her that she had family. I wanted to tell her that she had me. Family, the word still felt funny.

  There was a heart monitor in one corner. At least, I thought it was a heart monitor. That’s what it looked like. There was an empty IV bag hanging from a tall coat rack and there were sheets in a crumpled pile. Six beer bottles were stacked in the trash bin, but there was nothing else. I wandered into the bathroom and found an empty syringe in the sink. I looked in the mirror and was sickened by my own reflection. I turned around and saw him in the doorway; my dad. He was skinny and tall and his coat flared out in the soft breeze. His jaw worked back and forth and a hard glint filled his eyes, like he was staring at me harder than he needed to. “Dad,” I said, “is that you?”

  I blinked and he vanished. Damn ghost.

  I got down on my hands and knees and searched under the bed. All I needed was the smallest clue, anything to tell me where they took her. I swiped my hand under the bed, into the darkness where I couldn’t see. My fingers grasped a small rectangle, a business card. I pulled it out and stared at it. It said: “Stalwart: Logistics and Shipping.” There was an address below that, but no phone number. The card felt familiar somehow. It felt like I’d seen the card somewhere, even though the name and address meant nothing.

  Odd font. All serifs and flourishes.

  I took Mathis’s card out of my coat pocket, the one he slid across the bar on Friday night. There it was—the same odd font on both cards.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Back in the taxi, I handed Amos the card with the address. He swung a hard right at the first intersection and pulled into thin traffic headed north. His voice was rough as old carpet; “It’s a few miles from here.”

  With one hand, I felt my face. My fingers touched plump lips and tender skin—the oxy was starting to wear off a bit. My thoughts came to me faster, more clearly. I didn’t feel so aimless and unfocused as I did before I fell into bed. My thoughts turned, swirled, gathered on themselves like storm clouds. I went back to Friday night, when I met Mathis at the bar. I cycled through the events that put me in a taxi at that moment: First, that meeting. Mathis used a fake name. Maybe he thought I’d know who he was, that he’d been friends with my dad. So, a fake name. Then, he gave me the images of Chelsea. What was it that drew me to her? I tried to tell myself it was the story, the potential for a story, but it had nothing to do with news or the public good—it wasn’t any of that. It was me, looking at that picture of Chelsea, connecting with a young woman I’d never met. Family. That’s all. You do what you can for family. Then came that queer interview with Stan Evers. After that, a beating from Richie Fresco and then, well, and then it was following Mathis to his cruel death. I grunted and gripped the .38 revolver.

  Up front, Amos lit a cigarette and exhaled. “More trouble, huh?”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “I can’t seem to stay away from it these last few days.” I stared out the window. The streets were empty.

  I glanced at my cellphone: 4:18 in the morning.

  In a thoughtful tone, Amos said, “I’ll tell you what you do. Wave that gun in someone’s face, just tell them how it is. That’ll get it done for you. Works almost every time.”

  “First time I’ve had to use it,” I said, “but yeah—it seems to work as advertised. Well, sort of.”

  ***r />
  Amos pulled his taxi alongside a warehouse that appeared to stretch for at least a block. Down a long alley, I spotted the black Mercedes near a single–door entrance. The door was flanked by loading docks on each side, all closed, their covers locked down like a hundred metal eyelids. The warehouse’s windows were high above my sight–line, along the ceiling, but I saw the warm glow of lights from a few of them. “Pull up there,” I said. “I’m going to need you to wait again, if that’s okay.”

  Amos puffed on his cigarette and smirked. He swung the taxi to the curb a hundred feet farther up the road and switched it off.

  I climbed out and said, “Give me about a half–hour. If I’m not here, you can take off,” I handed him forty dollars in cash.

  “You got it.”

  I walked toward the Mercedes, but stopped to look back at the taxi. Amos stared at me in the sideview mirror’s reflection; his gray–blue eyes seemed to aim at me like bullets. I rounded the corner and the taxi was out of sight.

  I approached the Mercedes and peered inside the driver’s side window. Nobody inside, but the door was unlocked. I opened it and leaned across the seat to check the glove box. I shuffled the papers inside. Nothing there. The back seat, too, was empty. I turned around and saw a sharp black shape come at me—a pistol grip. Red hues exploded behind my eyes. I tried to hold my head aloft, but my neck was weak and I fell to my knees. For a few moments, I was back in that kitchen with Richie Fresco pounding my face. I was leaning against a wall while that old couple asked me if I was okay. I was huddled in a taxi beside Gloria, the kimono–clad bartender. I snapped back and slapped hard against the pavement, rolled onto my back. A thin, dark spiral circled above me, but I forced my eyes to stay open and my vision cleared. I caught a glimpse of a fitted collar and sharp jawline. It was one of Richie’s men, the one who shot Mathis.

  “I have to hand it to you,” he said. “You sure as shit don’t give up. You’re one tough motherfucker.” He shoved the pistol into a shoulder–holster beneath his coat. “Glad to see you made it down for the party. You can never have too many people at a party.”

  I groaned and rolled onto my side. A throb stretched from my temple down to my chin, a blaring siren that wouldn’t shut up, a pounding light that burned my eyes. The guy grabbed my collar and dragged me around the Mercedes to the warehouse door. I closed my eyes and listened to him fiddle with the locks.

  My head rolled to one side and my eyes focused on the middle distance. At the end of the alley, I saw a figure shimmer in the darkness. The figure slinked from the shadows and stepped into a small lighted area. It was Amos, watching. Richie’s guy got the door open and dragged me through it. I clutched at the pavement with one hand, dug my fingernails into the hard surface, scraped and clawed, but I couldn’t find a grip. The door slammed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I heard a snort. And then another one, longer the second time. I heard a slow release of breath. A grunt. I opened my eyes. Across from me, at a desk in a dingy office full of push–pinned city maps and the lingering smell of cheap tobacco, was Richie Fresco. He snorted two lines of cocaine off an empty picture frame and leaned back into his chair. “There he is, wide awake,” he said. “Thanks for coming down.”

  I straightened, felt my arms tied together behind the chair.

  Richie laughed a big hearty laugh that made the skin on his neck jiggle. “You must really like pain, Palmer.” he said. “You can tell a lot about a guy by the way he takes pain.” Richie pointed at me with one fat finger. “I got respect for you, Palmer. I got respect for the way you take pain.” He lifted a glass of brown liquid and sipped, chirped his lips as he swallowed. “Bourbon. Good stuff, too.”

  “How about a little for me?” I said. “You know, for the pain.”

  Richie pulled a bottle and glass from a desk drawer. He poured a few fingers of bourbon and slid the glass toward me. “Drink up, Palmer.”

  I pulled at the bindings around my arms. “And will you untie me, so I can take a drink?”

  Richie grinned wide, shook his head. “There it is, sitting right out in front of you, Palmer. But you can’t have it, can you? You know what you want and you see it, you can see it right there in front of your face, but it’s too far away—feels like shit, doesn’t it?”

  The bourbon waited for me in the glass, still as a frozen lake. My dose of oxy had weakened and sharp needles poked along the ridges of my face. I blinked hard and groaned.

  Richie pulled a gun; my .38 revolver, my dad’s old gun. He laid it on the desk and raised his eyebrows. “What were you planning to do, Palmer? You want to shoot somebody?”

  “I was looking around.”

  “That’s what you said yesterday—looking around.”

  “It’s my job.”

  Richie pointed at the gun, took another sip from his glass. “That’s your job. I wonder what Finnegan, over at the Caller, would say if he could see you right now?”

  “He said I could do what I want, that I should get the story.”

  “This isn’t about a story. We both know that.”

  “I guess so.”

  We sat in silence for a long minute. Richie finished his drink, set the glass down, picked mine up and sipped from it. “You ever love something, Palmer?” He tilted his glass into the patchy light. His eyes glared into the brown liquid. “You ever love something so much you’d do anything to keep it alive—I mean anything?”

  “You love money,” I said without answering him, “and drugs.”

  “No. I like money. Drugs, I’m addicted to those. But neither of those have to do with love. Real love, the kind that never goes away.”

  “So, what? You’ve got a barfly that you can’t live without? That it?”

  “A daughter,” Richie said. “I had a daughter. You don’t have any kids, Palmer. You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about. See, when you have a kid everything changes. It’s like the world, the world just shrinks away and you’re living…” His voice died.

  “What are you doing with Chelsea—where is she?”

  Richie set the glass down and poured more bourbon. He slid the glass across the desk, looked at somebody over my shoulder. “Untie him.”

  Hands pried at mine, and then the ropes fell away. I reached for the drink and picked it up. It felt good in my hand. Not quite as good as a weapon, but good. I took a sip, closed my eyes and savored. “Not bad,” I said. “Not bad at all.”

  “Stan Evers, he’s kind of queer,” Richie said. “Chelsea caught his eye. That’s all this ever was, with all the girls.”

  “What is it?”

  “A kind of art project, I suppose. A bit extreme, yes, but then all genius is extreme. Or, so they say.”

  “Tell me.” I rose from my chair, but two firm hands pushed me back down.

  “Patience, Palmer. I’ll tell you what you want to know. It won’t matter after tonight.” Richie leveled his beady eyeballs at me and turned his lips toward his chin. “I lost my daughter, so I know how it feels.”

  “How what feels?”

  “How it feels to lose someone.”

  Family. The word surfaced in my head again, breached my thoughts: Family, I thought, family. “Will Chelsea die? If she does, I promise, I’ll kill you… and it’ll hurt.”

  Richie raised his eyebrows and snapped his fingers. “I bet you want to see her, huh? You want to see Chelsea? Alright, Palmer. Let’s go.”

  ***

  Richie led me down a long hallway flanked by office doors. The guy who surprised me while I was digging through the Mercedes—his name was Frankie—plugged a gun into the small of my back and pushed me along. We walked for a short time and came out into a loading bay—there were liquor pallets scattered haphazardly and two forklifts parked along a far wall. We moved through the pallets and came to a white door with another one of Richie’s guys guarding it. Richie nodded at the man and the door swung open before us.

  We moved past him and stepped through the doorway.

>   A gurney was in the center of the room. On it, unconscious and naked, was a woman. Her hands and feet were strapped to the gurney, and her long brown hair spilled over its edge, dangled like tentacles. I recognized the face—it was Chelsea Losse. The room spun against my head; I lost control of my eyes and they fluttered back and forth in their sockets. Darkness whirled along the ridges of my pupils and my feet grew numb. I tilted, wavered, started to fall. A strong hand grabbed my collar, lifted me. I pivoted my head from the gurney, began to see the entire room. A few feet from me, I saw fat little Stan Evers. He had an easel set up with a blank canvas, and next to it a small folding table with all his paints and brushes. His eyes were pointed at me like gun barrels. There was a short man in a surgical gown and mask near Evers. He wore blue gloves and held both hands near his shoulders, as if to keep them clean.

  I tried to make sense of the entire scene, but I still couldn’t grasp it. I knew that Chelsea was there, my sister, in the same room with me. The feeling came back into my feet and I shrugged off the hand on my collar. I straightened and glared at Evers, but I said nothing.

  Evers turned to the man in the surgical gown and said, “How does it look, doc? Are we set to go?”

  The reply: “I’m ready.”

  Evers said, “Good, that’s what I like to hear.”

  I finally said, “What the hell is all this?”

  Evers moved to his blank canvas and ignored me.

  Richie stepped toward Chelsea. He stared at her naked body, looked her over from head to toe, and then turned to me with a plain look on his face. “It’s an art project, Palmer. Just like I said.”