This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  Freeman laughs. “Yes. Shit, Jack, this thing could shoot through a brick wall up to a half mile out.”

  Jack stands up, looks at Freeman.

  “Seriously?”

  Both of the other men nod. “Don’t you read Guns and Ammo?”

  “No,” Jack says. “Must’ve let my subscription run out.”

  “But you still get Cock and Balls, right?”

  Jack smiles, shakes his head.

  The old man clicks his teeth. “You want to look in trunk?”

  “Sure,” Jack says. He moves around to the back and pops the trunk using his handkerchief. When he lifts the lid, he expects to find a grizzly scene with lots of blood. But he finds nothing, only gray felt, the well for a spare with the spare in it.

  “This guy’s trunk is cleaner than mine.”

  Freeman comes around to have a look. He nods. “Yeah, that’s about as clean as I’d keep my trunk if I had this car.”

  “Anything in the glove box?”

  Freeman’s already moving around the car. He uses his sleeve again.

  “Nothing.”

  “Of course, if they find things in this car, the police keep,” the old man says.

  Jack nods. Freeman slams the door closed. “Time to ask your friend in SF some more questions.”

  Freeman starts away from the Saleen, following the old man.

  Jack takes a final look at the car: Other than the cracked driver’s window, the missing windshield, and the gaping holes in the door and the roof, it looks perfectly intact, near mint, from a ways away.

  Not that that’s saying much; it’s still a retro-craze, wannabe throwback made out of tin foil.

  11

  Nordstrom’s is at the center of the mall next to the two-level parking garage where O’Malley was found in his car. Jack smiles at the first thing he sees: a painting crew outside the department store.

  Freeman crosses the front of the store and pulls up next to the curb closest to the crew’s scaffold. The painters are starting to set up for their night’s work, pouring paint into trays and mounting new rollers onto long handles.

  Freeman asks, “How we play this?”

  “We walk up. You be muscle; I’ll be mouth. Take it slow. See how they respond.”

  “Fair enough.” Freeman opens his door, and Jack feels the car rise as the shocks rebound from the displaced weight. Before Jack can get out, he hears one of the painters whistle.

  “Whoo! Look who we have here!”

  As Jack stands up, he sees the guy closest to them put his hand on his hip and give Freeman the twice-over. He has his cap on backward and the same white, paint-spattered clothes that most painters wear, but with a short taffeta scarf around his neck.

  “You all see what I’m seeing?” He looks up at the other painter, but the guy is staring at Freeman. When Taffeta turns back to Freeman, he gets the same message his friend got: Freeman doesn’t like the attention.

  On the second level of the scaffold, not ten feet above Jack, the other painter whispers something to Taffeta. Jack can’t hear anything except for the letters NFL.

  “That’s right, boys. This here is Freeman Jones from the New York Jets, J-E-T-S. Formerly a five-time Pro Bowl selection.” Jack smiles at the painters, his hands extended like the ringmaster in a one-ring circus.

  “Sergeant Haggerty?” the guy on the scaffold says. This guy’s inked up like he put his own art on with a roller, his neck covered to his chin.

  Jack laughs; it’s been a long time since someone has confused him and Mike Haggerty.

  “That’s Jack Palms. Hey, what’s up, Jack?” Taffeta comes toward Jack with his hand out, takes Jack’s, and launches into a multistage handshake that moves from one grip to another without any signal as to what comes next. Jack lets his hand go limp and, like a bad dance partner, lets the guy lead him along.

  Taffeta ends his hand dance with a quick one-armed embrace.

  “Yeah,” Tattoos says. “That’s what I mean. Sergeant Haggerty from Shake Me Down. But serious, what the fuck happened to your hair?”

  “We just had a few questions. Like if you were here the night before last?”

  “Ha. Questions? I got one for you: How the parties at those LA hot spots, Jack dear?” Taffeta holds the back of his hand to his mouth, covering a big smile. “I seen you in the papers too. Broke up with your wife. Before you grew this terrible hairdo.”

  Freeman steps forward, and Taffeta goes quiet.

  “Questions,” Jack says.

  Tattoos nods. “We were here. We found the car with the dead cop in it. Saw the shit you heard about on the news.”

  “This all of you?” Jack gestures to the two, a small crew for a store as big as Nordstrom’s.

  “Bob’s still in the truck.”

  Jack looks over and sees a third painter standing by their van, smoking a cigarette. He tilts his chin up at Jack, takes a hard pull off the cigarette, and tosses it out onto the sidewalk.

  Jack says, “Tell me what you saw.”

  Tattoos drops down from the scaffold. “It was bad, like you probably heard. But there was a girl too. Somehow she didn’t make the papers.”

  “It’s like we all told the cops, bro.”

  “Tell it again.”

  Taffeta asks, “Why you guys want to know? You’re like an actor and a Jet. So why do you care?”

  Freeman starts toward him and that ends that line of inquiry.

  “Sure. No problem.” Taffeta steps toward Jack. “We were painting this side of the building and saw a car come in late, like after four a.m. Too late to be anything good, but we figured it was probably some teenagers looking for a spot to fuck. New Mustang, so probably the head cheerleader, you know?”

  “Anyway,” Jack says.

  The one called Bob comes up to where they’re standing and leans against the scaffold. He looks tired, tired of painting, probably tired of it all. “We had to go down to the station. Spent all day with those dickheads at WCPD.”

  Tattoos points at him. “They did give us donuts, though. Just saying.”

  Freeman steps forward. He’s getting impatient, but Jack doesn’t know what to ask, how to get more out of them other than by feeling them out. “So you guys found the girl?” Jack says.

  Taffeta says, “The girl, or the woman?”

  “Well, we didn’t find the woman.” Bob smiles. “But we saw her. And damn, who could forget that, bro?”

  “Smoking,” Tattoos says. “She comes across the lot in her skirt suit, pretty as you can imagine, like she’s just walking into the office. Four-thirty in the morning, and she gets into your boy’s yellow Mustang.”

  “So then I knew it wasn’t a couple of high schoolers.”

  “She gets done, she drives off. Walks back to her car, don’t even peel out.”

  “Bro, and that’s after the gunshots, keep in mind.”

  Jack wishes he was writing this down. “Who was she? What’d she look like?”

  Taffeta says, “Like he said, she was stunning. Blond, stylish, very adult.”

  “Huh?” Tattoos and Bob look at Taffeta as if they got a whiff of bad paint.

  “What was she driving?”

  “Car was mint. A dark pimp sedan with all-tint windows.”

  “Like the kind you slow down for on the highway. Undercover shit.”

  “Really?” Jack asks. He looks at Freeman.

  Bob raises his eyebrows. “You know those cars when you see them. And she had a briefcase.”

  “A Crown Vic,” Tattoos says. “But I didn’t see no briefcase.”

  Taffeta holds up his hand like he’s being sworn in. “Sure as I’m standing here, I saw her briefcase.”

  Bob and Tattoos look at Taffeta, and finally Tattoos shrugs. “I didn’t get that good a look.”

  “Anyway,” Jack says, “briefcase or not, did she come on the scene before or after you heard the shots?”

  “Before,” Bob says. “She was most definitely here when it all went down
.”

  “And you all agree it was two shots?”

  They nod. Jack looks at Freeman, who shifts his eyes toward the car. He takes a step in its direction, down off the curb.

  “Right. Anything else you can remember? Something we should know that you didn’t tell the cops?”

  “Who are you guys? Why you even give a shit?”

  Freeman cracks his knuckles. “Let’s just say we do.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Bob holds his hands up. “Scene in the backseat with the girl was nasty. Almost made me not come to work today.” He shakes his head.

  Taffeta says, “I couldn’t even tell my wife about it.” Bob and Tattoos look away.

  Freeman cocks his head toward the car again.

  “Thanks,” Jack tells the guys. He holds up his hand.

  “One of the shots was fucking loud,” Tattoos says in a monotone. “Louder than the first one.”

  “The loud one was first, bro,” Bob says.

  Taffeta and Tattoos both stop for a beat. “Yeah,” they both say.

  Bob goes on: “The loud one came first. Definitely.”

  “Loud?” Jack asks. “How do you mean?”

  “Like a cannon,” Freeman says. “The fifty.”

  Bob nods. “First one was like, boom! I mean that shit could’ve been a fucking truck exploding. It got your attention.”

  “Yeah,” Tattoos says. “That’s why I was sure the second one was a gunshot. I stopped dead after that. Like what the fuck?”

  “You tell that to the police?”

  “No,” Bob says. He hops up onto the bottom part of the scaffold.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they didn’t ask, bro.”

  Freeman says softly, “Or because they already knew.”

  “Alright,” Jack says. “Two shots, guys. Thanks for the info.”

  “When’s the Haggerty sequel coming out, Jack?” Tattoos asks.

  Taffeta pulls his scarf a little tighter. “And how about those parties in LA? Tell us what they’re like.”

  “Got to go,” Jack says.

  Freeman’s already getting into the car.

  12

  “Bunch of fucking losers,” Freeman says, driving across the lot. “Didn’t tell us shit.”

  “How about that woman they saw walking away? Who was she?”

  Freeman tilts his big head. “Yeah—”

  “Hold up. I want to see the spot where O’Malley was parked.”

  Freeman stops the car and looks at Jack, looks at him hard.

  “Let’s check out the second level of the garage.” Jack waves toward the two-story parking structure.

  “The fuck, Jack? You think this is what a real detective would do?”

  Jack looks across the car at Freeman wedged behind the steering wheel with the seat way back and reclining. “What would a real detective do?”

  “A real detective would sit at home and scour the Internet first, find out whatever he could about his dead guy, everything, and then he’d find out more. He’d poke around with the living people who knew the guy, people who can tell him something good. Those fucks?” He nods his head toward the painting crew. “They couldn’t tell you shit you won’t find in today’s paper. Maybe tomorrow’s.”

  Jack thinks it over. “I guess I’m more of a hands-on guy. You know, follow the clues that I come to.”

  “Did you read the newspapers today, all of them? And get everything you could out of your boy on the force, the guy who brought you into this?”

  Jack thinks about what Sergeant Mike Haggerty would have said at a time like this, what he would do about finding O’Malley’s killer. In Shake ’Em Down, Haggerty would have gotten attacked by the painters, who turned out to be secret agents for the mob, beaten them down, and then wound up pursuing their leader in a high-speed car chase.

  “You there, Jack? What’s going on in your head?”

  “I’m thinking about how I got my ass into this.”

  “That shit?” Freeman points at Jack’s temple and shakes his head. “Thinking won’t get you nowhere. You here now.” He points to the floor of the car. “It don’t matter how you got here, because you in it. You start second-guessing, it gets us both killed. I don’t want to get shot at or worse. You hear?”

  Jack nods.

  “Now,” Freeman says, but when he starts to say something, a look passes behind his eyes, a consideration of something else. Then it goes away. The big man puts the car into drive and heads into the parking structure. He follows the ramp up to the second level, where the Saleen was parked.

  “What would that slug do after it went through O’Malley’s car? Would it leave a hole in the ground?”

  “I want you to call your cop,” Freeman says. “Find out what he knows and what he doesn’t.”

  “We should also look for a building the sniper could’ve set up on.”

  “This ain’t no Dirty Harry, Jack. You not going to find a slug—”

  “But still.” Jack gets out of the car and starts across the lot. It’s late enough in the day now that whatever shoppers are still around have parked closer to the stores or downstairs. The upper level, more of an overflow lot than anything else, sits almost empty.

  He can see the painting crew about fifty yards off and the progress they’ve made on the side of the Nordstrom’s: about a third of the wall so far.

  Freeman gets out of the car and warily looks around. Jack starts searching the ground, looking for something on the tarmac, he’s not sure what.

  “Shit,” Freeman says.

  And then Jack finds what he wanted: an angled ditch in the concrete big enough to stick his toes into, not more than three inches deep. He looks down into it and doesn’t see anything; if there was something lodged here, it’s gone now. Maybe the Walnut Creek police aren’t doing such a bad job.

  “Check this out,” Jack says.

  When Freeman comes over, he whistles. “Good shit.” He crouches down and puts his fingers into the hole. From the way his arm points out of it, if the bullet went through the car roof to door, O’Malley wasn’t parked within the white lines. But at that hour he probably didn’t care. He’d have just pulled onto the lot, angled however he wanted. Jack looks up and sees the one building the sniper could have been on top of: a restaurant a hundred yards away with a big bing crosby’s sign on the roof.

  “Right about there,” Jack says, pointing.

  “Yeah.” Freeman stands up, and they both stay where they are, facing the restaurant, looking at its roof.

  “Hard to imagine putting a shot through a guy’s car from that far out, knowing it’d take his head off.”

  “You’d be surprised what these guns can do, Jack. Some sick shit.”

  “So who the fuck was that woman?”

  Freeman shakes his head. “I’m saying it’s time you called your friend the cop. See what more he can tell us.”

  Jack’s got the phone in his hand and is speed-dialing Hopkins’s number before Freeman can finish the thought.

  Hopkins picks up on the third ring.

  “I got some questions for you, Mills.”

  “You better get your ass down here to the Embarcadero, Jack. We just found something you’re not going to like. Another girl’s been killed. Looks like the same MO as the girl in O’Malley’s car.”

  13

  As the Mercedes comes out of the Caldecott Tunnel through the Oakland hills, headed toward the Bay, Freeman grunts and starts shaking his head. He carefully slides his hand underneath his long hair, then cradles the back of his neck in his palm and massages. Jack sees another tattoo at the top of his shoulder coming out of his shirt. He turns to look through the windshield, waiting for the familiar San Francisco skyline. The two of them have been quiet for more than fifteen minutes, and Jack knows the big Samoan will talk when he’s ready.

  “What’s up with the girl, Jack? You know how a girl like that ends up in this city? What type of shit she gets into?”

  Jack shakes
his head.

  “Slavery. Buying and selling of people. Here in SF. You spend enough time in North Beach like I’ve been and you know.”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “Ownership, Jack. That, plus someone with power in the city is protecting it. You sure you ready for that?”

  Jack watches the trees, thinks back to being on the road with the Czechs and the rush of feeling as if his life were in his hands. The bike put him out there on the edge, something he never felt when he was trying to get himself clean, reading and hitting the gym. Back then it was more about what he didn’t do than what he did.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I want to know what happened and how she ended up where she did. I want to know who sent O’Malley after me.”

  “These motherfuckers don’t play, Jack. You see how they killed her?”

  “They slit her throat. I saw the pictures.” As they come out of the hills, Jack can see the lights of downtown Oakland, and beyond that, the Bay Bridge.

  “If someone put down big cash on this girl, that person be pissed when she’s dead. Akakievich don’t have penny-ante clients. It could mean he’s ready to take issue with a big player. And now there’s a second girl?” Freeman shakes his head and whistles. “That could mean he’s going after something big, like he wants something. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just drop your ass off downtown and opt out of this shit.”

  “What?” Jack turns to Freeman, tries to read his face. “Now you’re the one who’s thinking too much. Are you serious?”

  “This is big.”

  Jack takes out his cigarettes. Freeman’s eyes dart toward Jack’s hands, and he’s already lowering the window before Jack has one out of the pack. “You smoke, that window comes down.”

  Jack lights up. The first drag slows him down and gives him a new outlook on what he sees through the windshield: They’re not just heading into the city, they’re plowing straight into a world of trouble.

  14

  When they get to the Embarcadero, Jack calls Hopkins from the coffee shop like he’s supposed to. He orders an espresso and downs it, heads outside to wait. Caffeine is Jack’s rush now—not like the woozy down from alcohol or the incredible highs he got from the Colombian marching powder. It’s caffeine, a cigarette to smooth it out, and Jack’s in the life. That’s his high.