This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  But instead of feeling André’s bull rush, Jack hears a crash, then more of them—as if human bowling balls were knocking down garbage cans.

  He looks up to see Freeman standing over a demolition derby of garbage and Suits. The big man grabs Gray Suit’s gun hand and bites the guy’s fingers until he screams. Freeman throws the gun to the ground, spits out something white—skin?—into the garbage, and shakes his head. Gray Suit freaks out, covers his hand, but not before Jack sees blood dripping down his wrist. André starts to get up, but Freeman kicks him once in the face, then stomps down hard on his ankle. André barely stifles a scream.

  As Gray Suit starts to stand, still holding his hand, Freeman punches him in the temple. He buckles, and Freeman kicks him to the ground.

  Then Freeman lifts Jack up by the shoulders, dropping him roughly on his feet. Jack touches his nose and looks at his hand: He’s thankful it’s not full of blood. He wipes his eyes.

  “I’m okay.”

  A sound comes from the garbage cans as André starts to move. When André’s half standing, Freeman stabs his neck with two pointed fingers. André coughs, grabs his Adam’s apple, and doubles over, hacking on his own voice box. Freeman punches him in the side of the head with a left hand as big as a five-pound potato. The guy falls into the garbage cans again, hard. Gray Suit’s standing, looking at his gun on the other side of Freeman.

  “Yeah. There it is.” Freeman nods at the gun.

  The Suit looks at the gun and at Freeman, thinks it over for a second, and decides there’s no way he’s getting past Freeman. He pulls his friend upright, and they start shuffling toward Columbus.

  “Should I stop them?” Freeman asks.

  “Probably.” Jack puts his hand over his nose again, feeling along its bridge to see if it’s broken. “Whatever.”

  “You all right, bro?”

  Jack opens and closes his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be okay. Just give me a minute.” Jack shakes his head to clear it, spits some blood on the ground. Then he looks down the alley and sees the Suits are gone.

  By the Dumpster, Freeman picks up the gun and looks it over—down the barrel and along its side. “Not a bad piece,” he says. He looks at Jack, then back toward the street. “We need those two, we can find them. I seen them around from time to time.” He comes over to Jack and offers him the gun. “You got to protect your interests.”

  “What took you so long?” Jack tries to keep a straight face. “I was just starting to kick some ass here. But, you know, I didn’t want to be the only one having a good time.” He takes the gun, slips it into the back of his pants.

  “Not a problem, my man.” Freeman pats Jack on the shoulder. “You can thank me later. I’m with you now; there’ll be plenty of fun to go around.”

  “That’s good.”

  Freeman grabs Jack’s face with one hand and takes a careful look at his nose. “Your nose ain’t even broken. You were a quarterback, you’d be thanking me.”

  “Thanks. What would Junius have said if he took a beating like that, had a guy put a gun to his head?”

  “Junius?” Freeman laughs, then tilts his head to get another look at Jack. “Palms, my man, Junius would never let that shit happen. You got to take better care of yourself.” He slaps Jack lightly across the cheek and heads to the mouth of the alley.

  9

  The next morning, Jack wakes up late and has a nice, full breakfast in the St. Francis’s main dining room. He thinks about inviting Freeman to help him ring up the charges on Hopkins’s credit card, but it’s probably still too early for the big man. Their plan is to meet in the afternoon and go over to Walnut Creek.

  Jack scours the newspapers while he drinks his coffee, but the facts don’t add up: There’s nothing about the girl in any of the papers.

  After a lengthy description of O’Malley’s car and the names of the detectives in Walnut Creek working the investigation, the piece in the Chronicle veers off to an interview with O’Malley’s mother. She never wanted him to join the force, it turns out. “I wanted him to be a pharmacist or a doctor.”

  Apparently he’d even had a nice roast-beef dinner with her on the night of his death. So he was well fed when he came to Jack’s house to kill him—a comforting thought.

  The last paragraph of the article has one interesting fact: O’Malley had been on the SFPD’s vice task force for the past four years.

  After skimming the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News for anything more and finding nothing, Jack hits the hotel gym to try to sharpen up as Freeman suggested. He knows he’ll feel better after sweating some of the kinks out, something he didn’t do nearly enough on the road.

  After his shower, Jack finds a message from Mills Hopkins on his phone: the name and number of a guy in Walnut Creek who works at the car impound where O’Malley’s Saleen is being held.

  So a look at the car will be Jack and Freeman’s first stop.

  Freeman picks Jack up outside the hotel in Junius Ponds’s silver Mercedes Benz. Jack has to wonder if it still has a trunk full of guns, but he doesn’t bother to ask.

  In the car, Jack fills Freeman in on what he knows about O’Malley’s death and how the now-dead cop tried to put a bullet in him. When he tells Freeman about the Russians burning his bed, the big man’s interest flares up.

  “That’s a big-time hit to burn down your bed, Jack. Sends a loud message.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “You fucked. They saying we can get at your ass where you sleep—where you live.” Freeman’s eyes go big. “That’s what that says.”

  “Lots of people know where I live. Didn’t you read about me in the papers?”

  Freeman laughs, a short loud grunt. “I don’t read that shit, Jack. Fuck. Tabloids are there when I go to the supermarket, but I be reading the fitness magazines.”

  Jack looks at Freeman. The thought of a three-hundred-pound-plus NFL lineman with a tattoo on his face shopping at a supermarket surprises him. But everyone’s got to buy food, right? Jack shakes it off, watches the cargo ships in the distance as Freeman drives across the Bay Bridge.

  “That’s why I got a hotel room.”

  “You feel safe there?”

  “Safer.”

  “Somebody lining you up, Jack, getting you set in they sights. This dude in your backyard, if he’s working with them and then he gets dead, they really cared whether he completed the job.” Freeman holds up a hand so Jack doesn’t interrupt. “Plus, someone lined that fucker up.” He shakes his head. “Planned that shit and then did him mob-style. It takes brass balls to kill a cop. Everyone knows that’s fit to bring down the serious shit.”

  “Those dicks said they work for an old friend of ours. Guy from Vitelli’s. That bald dude from the Coast.”

  “Him?”

  “Some dude named Alexi Akakievich.”

  “Oh, shit.” Freeman bites his lips for a moment. “That’s the name of the other dude at the Coast?”

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “He is large in the city right now. You don’t want to mess with him.”

  “That’s why I’ve got you.”

  “Shit.” Freeman makes a face, and this reaction does more to intimidate Jack than anything that happened last night in the alley. “Then we both have to watch our backs. And that means paying me extra.”

  Jack shrugs, figures it won’t hurt to tell Freeman who’s footing the bill. “O’Malley was SFPD, but they’re not allowed to run the investigation. Walnut Creek called this because it happened in their mall, and no one at SFPD said boo. The top line called them all back.”

  “You saying?” Freeman follows the center lanes off the bridge to get onto 580. He eyes Jack, waiting for more. When his dark eyebrows go up, Jack nods.

  Freeman looks back at the road. “So. We watching Walnut fucking Creek?”

  “SF does like a hundred murder investigations a year, Walnut Creek more like six. Who does a better job?”

  “
Someone don’t want this done right.”

  “Someone with pull. Word came down from on high. Right when the SF boys are about to roll out, they get told to stay home. That’s how we come in: A cop gets killed, other cops want revenge, even if their hands are tied. They need a name.”

  Freeman ignores the road; he studies Jack’s face as if he’s trying to decide whether it’s all a joke. “And they called you?”

  Jack waves his hand at the dash, trying to get Freeman to acknowledge the other cars. “Hey, man, it’s strange to me too. But they’re paying, so we go take a look around, right?”

  Freeman nods. “Shit. Long as they paying.” He laughs, finally turns back to the road. Jack tries to hide his big intake of breath.

  After that, they stay quiet. The Mercedes rolls through the maze, onto 580 and then to 24, heading toward the Caldecott Tunnel.

  “But that’s what I’m saying,” Freeman says. “We push up against Alexi Akakievich, we could get some serious shit rained down. Word on the street is same as you just said—he’s protected from the inside. Someone with power—on the police, the city council, who knows who else—be putting his dick in Akakievich’s bitches. I’m not just saying—” Freeman shakes his head. “Let me tell you: In North Beach, you want that young, off-the-boat, white-girl pussy, you go to Akakievich. And I heard he got some clients high up in the city’s food chain.”

  “So, Walnut Creek,” Jack says.

  Freeman shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the road. They’re coming to the tunnel, and even in the middle of the afternoon, the traffic slows.

  “Let me ask you,” Jack says. “When you were with Junius, you barely said shit. Now you’re talking like a normal person.”

  The big man snorts. “J liked it that way. You know? Strong and silent. He thought it made us more intimidating.”

  “You think that would work for us?”

  “No. Anyone saw that movie you did, they won’t be scared while you’re around.”

  Jack studies Freeman’s face and sees no smile, though it’s hard to tell what’s happening behind the tattoo. “You didn’t like Shake ’Em Down?”

  Freeman laughs. “Palms,” he says, tilting his head, “that was actually some pretty good shit. Good as far as action goes.” He shakes his head. “Shit. Take it easy. That’s the other thing different now: I’m warming up to you. We getting to know each other.”

  He reaches over and claps his hand around the back of Jack’s neck, squeezes. Jack tries to push the big hand away with his shoulder blades, but it doesn’t move. Freeman laughs, massaging Jack’s neck.

  Jack hopes he can handle having this new friend.

  10

  At the impound lot, Freeman pulls up to a high chain-link fence, and even before they get out, a pair of big German shepherds charges up to the fence, barking, front paws up on the metal, incisors flashing. Then, just as suddenly, the dogs calm down, drop to the ground, all four paws in place as if they were in a show.

  Jack opens his door to get out of the car.

  He follows Freeman to the gate, where a wrinkled little man with shocks of white hair poking out from underneath a stocking cap walks up toward them. He removes a small, metal dog whistle from his mouth. When he sees Freeman, his face breaks into a smile.

  “I hear they send a movie actor, but Shaw didn’t say anything about ugly. Jeez!” The little man laughs.

  Freeman grunts. “He must be talking about you, Jack.”

  “We came to see the Mustang, the yellow Saleen.”

  “Where you get tattoo?”

  “Shut it, little man. Show us the car.”

  The guy unlocks the gate slowly, still laughing, and ushers the dogs away. He waves Jack and Freeman in, still holding a hand in front of the dogs to keep them calm.

  “Caesar, Brutus, back to you house.” The dogs turn and run away from the fence.

  “So where’s the car?”

  “It here,” the man says. “Just come in yesterday. Nice car, but a hole in it like I never see.” He whistles.

  “Yeah?” Jack says. He walks quicker, ahead of Freeman now. “What kind of hole?”

  “You see. You see.”

  They come around a corner and Jack sees the Mustang. Now he can see the word saleen on the bumper, right below the license plate and above the centered twin exhausts. In a sea of taupe sedans, the yellow sports car is the hottest, loudest thing in the lot. But the little man’s right—even from ten feet away, Jack can see the hole in the roof.

  Jack hurries over. Looking through the hole, he can see that something big came through and tore its way out of the driver’s-side door. Both holes are big enough to swallow a man’s hand. “What did this? A hot baseball?”

  Freeman shakes his head.

  As Jack walks around the car, he can see the metal layers of the door, the torn leather, the window well. The front seat’s covered in dried blood and white specks. Where the driver’s window is cracked into a web, Jack sees a single brown hair caught in its center. The dashboard is a mess of little pieces—pieces of person and glass.

  “Fuck,” Jack says, turning away.

  Freeman whistles. “That is one sweet ride. What’s a cop doing driving something like this?”

  Jack glances at the big man. “Sweet if you like piece-of-shit, retro-craze, wannabe redos. How’s this thing compare to my ’66?”

  Freeman laughs. “Easy, man. Nothing personal.”

  “I’m just saying. Shouldn’t even be called a Mustang.”

  “Well, it’s lighter, same horsepower, more speed, probably handles a shitload better—”

  “Save on gas,” the little man adds.

  “Look at this design. Total fucking rip-off.”

  Freeman walks the length of the car, running his finger along the curve of the roof. “Come on, Jack. This is a pretty nice car.”

  Jack nods at Freeman. “Fuck you.” He hits the roof. “Tin. But what could go through a car door like this? Shit, through a whole car?”

  Freeman comes up beside Jack. “Only a fifty. That’s the one thing.”

  “A fifty?”

  “A fifty-cal. It’s a big-ass assault rifle. Big as fuck. They’re around, but they’re mostly military use. This one cop I know said he tried them out on the force, just to get a feel. The army used them in Desert Storm. Now they using them in Iraq. But these are illegal as shit over here.”

  “Especially in California,” the old man says. “The Barrett rifle highly illegal here. But—” He shrugs. “You can buy online.”

  Freeman looks over at the little man. “Really?”

  He nods. “I not shit you.”

  Freeman looks as if he’s considering this, but doesn’t say anything.

  Jack asks, “So who’s using this gun to tear up the guy’s car?”

  “Another question for the list.”

  Jack looks through the roof again: A huge amount of white matter and dried blood is caked against the driver’s side door. It’s worse than the mess in Ralph’s bathroom. The windshield of the car is gone, smashed out, little pieces of glass across the floor, the dash, and in between the seats. The place with the least glass is the seats—where two people must have been sitting. “What knocked out the windshield?”

  Freeman shakes his head. He bends his knees to get eye level with the driver’s window and looks inside. “Judging by these two big-ass holes, we know the fifty didn’t shoot through the glass. Shot could’ve come through the windshield from inside, weakened the glass and it popped in on itself.” He shrugs. “That could be our second bullet.”

  “Or maybe the first.”

  “Right.” He nods. “Did your cop tell you anything about this hole?” Freeman stands up and puts his hand through the car’s roof. He wiggles his fingers.

  “He didn’t mention it. I saw a picture of the car from the passenger side, no view of the roof.”

  “You think they were hiding this until they could find anything about who did it?”

 
“Shit if I know.” Jack walks around to the passenger side of the car and looks through the roof hole at the hole in the door, trying to judge the angle of the bullet that made the damage. He traces it out with his hand and looks up to picture an imaginary building, how high and where it’d have to be for someone to make the shot.

  “How’s someone shoot through the roof of a car and know what they’re going to hit?” Jack asks. “You shoot at this angle, you couldn’t possibly see O’Malley in the front seat.”

  “Spotter?”

  The old man walks around the trunk of the car, looks in through the rear window. “Spotter would work,” he says. “But you have a gun like this, you don’t need worry too much about missing. It make easy shot.”

  Freeman moves to look at the backseat of the car, and Jack does the same from the other side. With the tinted windows. it’s impossible to see the upholstery.

  “Mind if I?” Jack reaches for the handle.

  “Whoa. Hold on.” Freeman comes around to Jack’s side and pushes his arm back up into the sleeve of his jacket. He touches the door handle with the sleeve, opens it carefully.

  “I know I don’t want to get fingerprints on this fucker,” Jack says. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and waves it in front of Freeman.

  Freeman shrugs and pulls the door open. The passenger seat is already buckled forward to reveal the car’s small backseat. Jack puts his head in to take a closer look at the leather and doesn’t see any blood on it. It’s clean, exactly as Hopkins said.

  “Girl wasn’t killed here.”

  Freeman grunts.

  “And why would O’Malley put her in the backseat instead of the trunk? You’d be okay driving around with a girl’s body, even with tinted windows?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t the one who put her in,” Freeman says.

  Jack nods. From the inside, he sees leather hanging down from the hole in the car’s roof. Some of the roof’s insides are visible, but only a few scraps of metal are bent in.

  “You think a bullet could go through my Fastback like this?”