This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  To the right of the doorway, Jack sees a dark, empty room with a lot of red velvet. There are curtains hanging down the far wall and big armchairs, a fireplace with a big L-shaped couch in front of it. The curtains are a nasty thing to see; Jack knows they can be hiding anything: another entrance, a way to the back rooms, heavy artillery, more guards. “Fuck,” he says.

  “Run it.” Shaw nods at the curtains. “Tear that thing down.”

  43

  Jack looks at Shaw and then back at the curtains. If there’s a chance what’s back there is going to shoot at him, he’s not going to wait. He lets the weapon start its dance, rumbling around in his arms, blasting into the room. Then he holds down the trigger and lets the weapon go full auto, firing and firing, shocking Jack’s arms with the repeated kick and recoil. He runs it back and forth across the curtains until no one could be standing behind them. When he lets his finger off the trigger, pieces of the curtains drift through the air; scraps of velvet float to the ground.

  “Jack,” Shaw says.

  He can see a small doorway through the shreds, a gap in the middle of the wall. It’s empty. And there was no one hiding behind the curtains—he’s glad of that.

  “Jack,” Shaw says. When Jack looks over, Shaw nods toward the dead guy in the chair. “That is the Kalashnikov AK-74. It’s a newer, better version of that AK-47 you just went crazy with.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take it,” Shaw says. “You spent that whole clip.” Jack removes the clip from the AK and releases the round from its chamber as he’d been told to when rehearsing for Haggerty’s shooting scenes in the movie. He lowers the gun to the floor and tucks the magazine into a back pocket.

  Jack looks down at the bigger gun, its long, curved stock, before he takes it out of the dead man’s hands. There’s a moment when the guy’s fingers hold, but then Jack pulls the gun free.

  “Good,” Shaw says. “Now say hello to this fuckface right here.”

  Shaw holds his guns in the face of the guard, tells him to raise both hands. When the hand comes away from his nose, Jack can see a splatter of blood on the guy’s face and chest. His nose is a mess, more shattered than broken. He’s starting to see how Shaw rolls.

  Jack turns his new weapon on the man.

  “Watch that other room,” Shaw commands. “Anyone comes through that little doorway, you tear them up.”

  “Unless it’s a nice little pretty-looking girl. Right, Officer?”

  Shaw grunts.

  “Shaw, something tells me you didn’t learn this shit in Walnut Creek.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jack. Act like you know what you’re doing.”

  Jack steps into the room with the nice furniture and trains his gun on the door, his back to Shaw.

  “Where your boys?” Shaw demands of the guard.

  “Boys?”

  “Your backup! Who’s in this place?”

  Jack shakes his head, both impressed with and worried by this new side of Shaw. He wishes that he had time to smoke a cigarette, that this night wasn’t turning into a cherry-busting party for him: his first kill and his first time shooting real rounds from an automatic weapon.

  When the guard speaks again, his accent is thick and Eastern European, a Russian accent Jack’s heard enough now to differentiate from the Czech he heard on the road. The guard says something about how he doesn’t understand, and Shaw hits him in the nose with one of the guns. Jack hears the sound. The guy doubles over and screams; Shaw hit his button. “Okay. Okay. I will tell.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Shaw’s hand hold the barrel of the gun in the guy’s face.

  The guard slumps to the ground against the wall and holds his hands above his head. “Please do not to shoot.”

  And then Jack hears a quiet woman’s voice saying something in another language, a sound like Russian. “Hello?” he says.

  “You see someone, you shoot,” Shaw tells him.

  She steps through the doorway and into the room, a tall pale girl of sixteen or seventeen wearing only a lacy black negligee.

  “Relax, Alvin,” Jack says. “It’s just one of the girls.”

  “You be sure that’s all it is, Palms.”

  Jack goes to the girl. She’s thin and pale like the others, but with long, straight blond hair and high cheekbones.

  “Hello?” she says when she sees Jack. She tries to force a smile, the look of a girl who’s happy to see him, but Jack can see through it. He knows she’s scared, a girl too many miles from home, in a city she doesn’t know, a house she’s probably not allowed to leave except when she’s on a call, and he sees the pain in her eyes, pain and maybe a tiny shred of hope that what she’s just heard—the shooting and the yelling—means something might be changing, that this night might lead to a better life for her.

  Jack holds up his hand for the girl to come no farther. She remains beyond the tattered curtains, her hands above her shoulders, the negligee covering only the very tops of her thighs.

  “This is it,” the guard says, pointing to his dead friend. “No one but Nathaniel and me.” Jack’s never heard of a Russian guy named Nathaniel, but he’s not going to stop this guy’s story and ask about that. Nathaniel’s dead now anyway.

  “We are only ones left. We have small duty.”

  “Where’s Akakievich?”

  The guy shakes his head. “He is not here. He leave tonight to Nathaniel and to me. We the watch out now. I am Isaak.”

  “And?” Shaw raises his voice, losing patience with this guy.

  “And?”

  Jack looks away as he sees Shaw hit the guard again. He hears the sound of a fist hitting raw meat.

  Jack takes another look at the girl and lowers his AK; it feels ridiculous to hold a gun like this on a girl. He waves for her to lower her hands, but she won’t; she keeps them held high. Jack sees the head of a second girl stick out of a room down the hall behind the blond. She says something to the blond, and in a soft voice, the first girl tells her to wait, says something in Russian that makes the other girl disappear inside. Before she disappears, though, the girl takes one look into the front room, directly at Jack. There’s no hope in this girl’s face, no fake smile, just fear.

  Shaw barks at the guard, “Where’s Alexi?”

  Isaak frowns; he shakes his head, moving his chin from shoulder to shoulder.

  Shaw punches the guard in the face twice, hard. Blood spurts from his nose, even more than before. From outside the house, Jack hears sirens: police.

  “There’s no one else here?” Shaw asks.

  Isaak shakes his head. “No. It is just me and the girls.”

  Jack asks, “How many girls?” raising his voice to be heard in the next room.

  The guard stops shaking his head. He raises his upper lip, what’s left of it, and runs a bloody tongue across the front of his teeth. He finds the gap in the middle of the row, the place where Jack can see Shaw has knocked out or broken a tooth or two. Looking down, he says softly, “There are now only five.”

  44

  “What the fuck?” Shaw says. “You mean all this shit’s come down for five girls?”

  “There were more. Eight of the most beautiful girls. Now we have less.”

  Jack whistles. The prices must be as high as he’d been led to believe, the clientele so high-level he’s surprised Shaw got in the door.

  “This is private club,” Isaak continues. “Very exclusive.”

  The pale blond girl stands with her hands up. There she is: a human being with a definite price. The idea is so pre–Civil War that Jack feels like he’s in a time warp. Still, if Gannon was right about San Francisco, if sex slavery is a part of the city, it didn’t begin and won’t end with Akakievich.

  “Whose is she?” Shaw points to the girl.

  “No.” Isaak shrugs, shakes his head. He makes a clicking sound with his tongue. Jack can’t tell whether the noise is intended to mean they’re way off, or if it’s just a noise this guy’s broken mouth
makes now. He waves a finger at them, and Jack figures this means the sound was the first. “These girls, even I do not know. Alexi send them out. We do not know.”

  “Where’s your list?”

  Isaak shakes his head, a small gesture, his chin barely moving from side to side. “No list. Only Alexi know. Alexi and André.”

  Jack comes over to the small foyer. “Who killed the other three girls?”

  “Killed?” Isaak looks puzzled. “No girls.”

  “Where did the other three go?”

  “Just they leave. Left here.”

  Jack reaches out to Shaw’s arm, lowers the gun. “Relax, big guy. Sounds like we know more about this than he does. Plus, we can show the girls pics to get their Johns later.”

  At that moment, Jack hears a floorboard creak in the living room near what’s left of the curtains; he sees a dark figure as he turns and drops into a crouch with the Kalashnikov pointed into the room. A dark-clothed man stumbles in, a heavy machine gun raised in front of him. He wears a suit, no tie. Beneath his ashen face, his shirt is red with blood, darkest around his left shoulder. The gun’s pointed at the front of the house, the covered windows to the right of Jack’s position.

  “What you want me to do?” Jack asks Shaw. He steadies his crouch, holding the weapon with one knee on the floor and the other knee raised, supporting his elbow. “This guy’s in trouble already.”

  The man makes a noise: not a word, but something Jack hears as an appeal. There’s something about his face Jack recognizes, something familiar.

  “That’s the fuck from the Ford at the café,” Shaw says. “I already shot that dude.” He raises his gun and shoots him again, hitting the other shoulder. The guy staggers back and keeps his balance like a mummy in an old movie, lowering his gun as he does so. Then, moving slowly, he starts raising the machine gun, lifting the barrel and swinging it toward Jack, his finger on the trigger.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Shaw shoots him again, this time in the middle of the chest. The guy wheezes but keeps raising the gun. “Fuck is wrong with this asshole?”

  Jack raises the Kalashnikov and aims it right at the guy’s face. He looks almost like he’s dead already, like there’s no point shooting him anymore. But even now, his gray arms keep lifting the machine gun.

  “Fuck,” Shaw says. “Shoot his ass, Jack. Carve him up!”

  Jack holds the Kalashnikov with both hands, sees the guy’s face at the other end of the barrel, his eyes practically closed. There’s a trickle of blood at his temple.

  The guy’s less than fifteen feet away. Jack touches the trigger. The cold metal is a foreign feeling, and Jack knows that the last person to touch it is dead now. He sights on the guy’s face and sees Freeman’s: the look of pain that he had in the hotel and his resigned emptiness at the hospital; Jack sees the face of the Russian he shot outside the café, the last look in his eyes after Jack shot him again; he sees the face of the girl, the blond who’s moved to the side of the room now, crouching into the corner with her hands over her face, shaking in fear; and finally he sees the guy, his eyes closed and his face drained of blood.

  It’s one of the Suits from North Beach that first night, Jack realizes, the ones who tried to rough him up in the alley. This is the guy who first followed Jack, the one with the cell phone. Mr. Gray Suit.

  Then his head shoots back at the same time that there is a loud explosion, and in a blur of red and white, part of his forehead comes apart before Jack’s eyes. The guy steps back, then falls down hard on his back, his gun pointed straight up into the air. He starts to fire, riddling the ceiling with bullets, sending white plaster and dust spraying into the room.

  Jack closes his eyes, covers his head.

  And then the shooting stops. When Jack uncovers his head, smoke fills the room—smoke and plaster dust.

  “You freeze up on me like that again, and you’ll be the one I shoot.” Shaw’s voice is cold. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Shaw grab the Russian guard by his shirtfront and hit him hard again in the face with the heel of a gun, the Beretta this time.

  “Oh!” The guy shoots both hands to his nose, holding the middle of his face. He starts yelling in Russian, screaming about what Shaw’s done.

  In the hallway, a big piece of ceiling comes loose and falls onto Gray Suit, breaking in half when it hits him. The guy doesn’t move. If he feels anything, this piece of plaster isn’t enough to break into his awareness.

  Jack looks around. He lowers the automatic rifle.

  “You hear me? You want to get us killed?”

  Jack thinks back to the guard he shot on the street, how he’d protected Shaw there, but he doesn’t say anything. “Yeah,” he says. “I hear you. Next time I shoot.”

  The girl pokes her head up out of her hands and leans forward to see what’s left of the guy. She looks concerned, or worse. Jack realizes he wants this to be the start of the end of this life for her, wants her to be able to become something different. But what that is, he has no idea. Maybe she’ll wind up in the same state of flux he’s in.

  Jack stands up and goes over to the body of the Russian. The gun still sticks up in the air, though now the guy’s chest and face are obscured by the plaster. Jack pulls at the gun, and for a second it’s stuck, then it comes free of the dead man’s fingers. He tosses it onto the ground toward the curtain.

  The girl says something softly, whispers a name Jack can’t make out. Then she looks at Jack. He offers her his hand and helps her to stand up.

  She says something else he can’t make out and pulls him toward the small opening in the wall.

  Jack can’t resist following her out of the front room.

  “Shaw,” he calls back. “This girl’s leading me somewhere. I think she wants to show me something.”

  “Don’t go with her, Jack. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  But it’s too late; the girl’s pulling Jack out of the room and into a dark hall. A small red bulb attached to the wall on Jack’s right spreads what little light it has to offer.

  He wants to go with her and find the rest of these girls, find them and dress them and take them out of here, bring them to a shelter that can offer them some help, something that will help them make a new start in this world.

  She turns, opens a black door Jack hadn’t noticed, and pulls him into a small dark room with dim red lights and taffeta curtains. Here, two girls sit on a bed staring at Jack, both in the same state of undress as the blond. She lets go of Jack’s hand and moves toward the wall to a dresser. He looks at the two other girls, tries telling them to stand up.

  “We’re going to get you out of here,” he says. They don’t respond. “Help me explain to them,” he tells the blond.

  He looks at her. She stands against the wall holding a small revolver in both hands, pointing it at Jack.

  45

  “No,” Jack says. He raises his hands and shakes his head in exaggerated motions—anything he can do to let her know he’s okay. He takes his hand off the handle of the Kalashnikov, holds it by the barrel as someone might hold a wooden walking stick.

  “Palms!” Shaw calls from the front. “Where are you?”

  “One minute!”

  “Jack. Get your ass back out here.”

  Jack stays where he is. “We’re here to help you.” He leans the gun against the wall, holds up both of his hands. “Help,” he says. “We help.”

  The blond holds her gun on Jack. Jack hears a gunshot from the front, then a short scream. The girl looks puzzled—puzzled and concerned.

  “You are police?”

  This is when Jack starts to feel warm, really warm, and he notices the heater on the other side of the room: one of the electric ones with the bright red elements behind a grill. It makes sense, the girls in negligees like this.

  The girl says something Jack doesn’t understand. “No,” he says, shaking his head again. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  The girls’ faces are cold.
They look at Jack like he’s only the latest in a long line of guards they’ve seen, guys with guns. They look on edge, frightened from the shots. They know some of the other girls aren’t around anymore.

  The girl says something else, and from the front of the house, Jack hears a shot. Then another.

  “Palms!”

  Jack holds his hands up, looks down at the Kalashnikov. “In here,” he says.

  Shaw knocks the door open and floods the entrance with his body. He holds the Glock pointed at the blond, looks at her and then back out into the hall. “Take the gun from her, Jack.”

  “What, I—”

  “Take the gun, Jack. These girls are more afraid of you than they are of these Russians. They think if they go with you, then anything can happen. If they stay here, at least it’s a known.”

  Another series of shots comes from the front of the house.

  “Do it!” Shaw yells. “We’re taking them out of here with us!”

  Jack crouches as though he’s reaching for the Kalashnikov against the wall. The girl doesn’t know what to do with her gun now; she’s waving it back and forth between Shaw and Jack. Jack makes his move fast: stands and catches the girl at her wrists, pushing the gun up toward the ceiling. She lets go as soon as he gets both hands on the weapon.

  “Come on,” Shaw says. “Get them out of here and into the hall.”

  The girls seem to understand. They nod at Jack, and the two on the bed stand up. Jack looks down at the flimsy bedroom slippers on their feet. “Do you three have anything else you can wear?”

  More shots come from the front of the house. “Jack. We got to get going. The SF blues are outside in heavy numbers. They’re going to surround this place.”

  Shaw crouches, fires a few shots into the front room.