This Is Life

by Seth Harwood

  The blond girl moves toward Jack. His first thought is that she’s coming for the gun, but when she moves past him and follows Shaw into the hall, he sees she’s got other ideas.

  “It will all be okay, ladies,” he says, though he’s not sure how he’ll guarantee that.

  He follows Shaw and the girl down the hall, leading the last two girls. “Where are the rest of the women who live here?” he asks one.

  She squints up her face, says something Jack can’t understand. In the front room, shots riddle the boarded front windows. Shaw is coming back toward Jack in a low crawl.

  Jack drops low too; a fresh set of bullets tears through the wood on the far window. Shaw makes it to Jack and comes out of his crawl into a crouch facing back toward the front of the house.

  Another set of gunshots comes through the windows, and Jack gets down next to Shaw. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says.

  Shaw looks around them at the cramped hallway.

  From outside, the unmistakable squawk of a police bullhorn is followed by a stern cop voice telling them that they should come out with their hands raised, that the police have the house surrounded.

  Behind the house there’s got to be more houses; there’s no way the police can be all the way around. “How’d this fuck get in?” Jack nods toward the corpse under the white chunk of plaster.

  “Fuck if I know,” Shaw says. “But we better find out, because we’re not going out the front. I’m not shooting any cops.”

  The three girls watch. They’re agitated, standing on one foot and then the other. One of them says, “Police? You are not police?”

  The blond puts her hand on Jack’s wrist.

  “No?” she says.

  Jack shakes his head. “No. Not police. We want to help you. Help. But first we need to get the fuck out of here.”

  “Oh,” she says. “You help?”

  Jack nods. “We help. We help you.”

  She starts back into the house, past Shaw and down the hall.

  “Actually, I am a cop, in case you’ve forgotten,” Shaw says, but Jack cuts him off.

  “Come on.”

  As the blond goes down the hall, the other girls follow. Jack and Shaw bring up the rear, leaving the gunshots and the commands of the police at their backs. Along the hall are other doors with thin curtains covering them. The doors are very narrow, as if the rooms were designed to be small. Jack opens one to check for other girls, but the room is empty. Just a bed and a small shower in the corner.

  “Come on, Jack.”

  It’s warm in the house, warmer as they move down the hall. “Where are the other girls?”

  Shaw shrugs. “Not here. We’ll have to find out later.”

  The blond reaches a bookcase at the end of the hall. It’s been pushed out from the wall, and she slips behind it, out of sight. The other girls do the same. Shaw looks back, raises his eyebrows at Jack, and follows them.

  Jack touches the books and realizes that they’re hollow cardboard fronts, that the bookcase is actually the front of a door that’s been left open. Behind it, he finds a narrow set of wooden stairs descending into an unfinished basement.

  At the front of the house, a cop says through a megaphone that they’re ready to start coming inside.

  Jack can see one of the girls at the bottom of the stairs, but not the others. He hears something loud slam against the front door of the house, the sound echoing down the hall.

  “That’s our buddies,” Shaw says, already halfway down the creaky stairs. “You coming?”

  Jack pulls the bookcase closed. He looks for and finds a handle on the basement side, pulls on it until he hears the door click shut, maybe locking behind them. Then he ducks his head to avoid the low ceiling and the spider webs, and starts down the stairs.

  46

  The basement is bare except for what you’d expect—a hot water heater, a furnace, a bunch of old furniture. But as the girls walk around to the back of the stairs, the three of them start screaming. Shaw grabs two of them and holds his hands over their mouths. Jack quiets the blond the same way. When he does, he sees what set them off.

  A man hangs from a wide pipe that runs along the low basement ceiling, his toes barely touching the ground. Two straps lead up from his shoulders, wrap around the pipe, and tie off. As Jack looks closer, he sees the straps end in rusty metal hooks that go around the man’s back and into his shoulders. He can see their pointed tips sticking out in the front. Jack turns the girl away from the sight, back toward the stairs. He can feel her back heaving next to his chest, her sobs. Shaw pushes the other two girls underneath the staircase. They move along its side and to the wall, where a hole leads out of the room. When Jack sees they’re gone, he lets the blond go, and she follows them out.

  “Wait for us,” Jack says.

  Above them, something heavy hits the front door again. Jack can tell they’re under the front rooms of the house. Soon it’ll be flooded with cops who’ll find their way down to the basement. “Let’s go.”

  “One second.” Shaw walks closer to the hanging man, getting a better look. Jack can see a lot of blood staining what’s left of the guy’s shirt underneath his arms. The front of the shirt is torn open, revealing a tanned, hairless chest. The guy looks like he could bench press a lot, maybe three or four plates on each side. But now black marks dot his pecs, little blood trails coming down from them.

  “Are those—”

  Shaw grunts. “Cigarette burns. Yeah.”

  The man’s arms hang down from his shoulders in a way Jack doesn’t like. When Shaw starts to move one, he looks away, down at the ground to the guy’s black loafers. If you gave him a push, he would swing from the pipe.

  “Shit,” Shaw says. “These are not the Russian motherfuckers you want to upset.”

  Shaw pulls a knife out from his jacket, opens it, and cuts the straps. The guy falls into a heap on the floor, first leaning down over his feet, then his whole torso flops back and his head hits the wall behind him.

  Now Jack can see his face. He’s Asian, someone Jack’s seen before.

  “You know this guy?” Shaw asks.

  It falls into place: the other cop, O’Malley’s partner. Matsumoto. This is the guy who called Hopkins in for the meeting, who gave Jack the bad look.

  Above them is a crash that has to be the front door giving way to the police battering ram. Then more yelling, the sounds of Isaak and the cops going back and forth. Jack can’t tell what they’re saying.

  “Let’s go.”

  Shaw bends down to look at the guy’s face, looks back at Jack. “I think this fuck’s still alive.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Shaw nods.

  “You don’t want to take him with us, do you?”

  “Shit, no. Those are his boys upstairs. They’ll find him. Then he can—”

  A noise comes from Matsumoto, and then a bubble of blood forms over his mouth. He coughs and looks up at Shaw, coughs again, spitting a mouthful of blood onto his sternum.

  He manages to get out, “Thanks. Thanks for cutting me down.”

  Then Matsumoto looks up for the first time and sees Jack. He stares Jack down, smiling through the blood on his mouth. “Palms,” he says. “You’ll fucking die in this shit, just like Hopkins.”

  As fast as he’s said this, Shaw squats next to him and pulls the guy’s head back by his hair. It’s shaved almost bald on the sides, with spikes on top and long wisps in the back. Shaw’s got him by the long stuff.

  This is when Jack starts to hear heavy footsteps pounding through the front rooms upstairs. It won’t be long until they find their way down the hall, figure out the books on the bookcase are fakes and start knocking down the door.

  Shaw brings his face right down alongside Matsumoto’s and asks, “Who killed Mills?”

  Matsumoto laughs, coughs up more blood. “You did. Palms did. Who didn’t?”

  Shaw pulls down harder on Matsumoto’s hair, snaps his head straigh
t up. He chops Matsumoto’s neck across the Adam’s apple, then lets go of the hair when a fresh coughing fit starts up. As a last insult, Shaw slaps the back of Matsumoto’s head, knocking it forward, and Matsumoto promptly spits up more blood into his lap.

  “You killed him, you fuck.” Shaw stands, dusts off his hands.

  Shaw makes like a model on The Price Is Right and offers up Matsumoto like a prize. “You want to kick this fuck?” he asks Jack.

  “No.” Jack nods toward the hole where the girls left. “I think we should keep moving.”

  “Right,” Shaw says. He swings his right hand like a golfer and connects with a hard slap across Matsumoto’s forehead, sending Matsumoto’s head flying back into the wall. He follows this by stomping down on Matsumoto’s ankle, crushing it against the floor. This elicits a loud scream from the crooked cop, which brings a shuffling of feet and stomping upstairs.

  Jack starts to head toward the hole and sees a big sheet of linoleum on the floor in front of it. “Let’s go,” he whispers to Shaw.

  Shaw bends down, jabs his finger in Matsumoto’s face. “Never, ever sell out a good cop. You hear that?” He grinds down harder on the ankle but clamps his hand over Matsumoto’s mouth this time. “Do you hear me?” He nods Matsumoto’s head for him, hitting it against the wall as he does.

  Jack hears footfalls pounding down the hall.

  “Good,” Shaw says, whacking the mullet against the wall one last time and stepping away. He wipes his bloody hand on Matsumoto’s shirt sleeve, says, “You better hope I don’t see you again.”

  47

  Through the hole in the wall, Jack sees the girls waiting for him, no longer crying. They wave anxiously at Jack when they see him. They’re standing in a tunnel with white walls—bricks painted over—a single bare lightbulb hanging above them. From its direction, Jack guesses the tunnel leads back underneath the street. Wherever it goes, it’s a way out. For now.

  “Let’s get this,” Shaw says, lifting one end of the linoleum. Jack steps a leg through the hole and takes the other side. He holds the linoleum in place as Shaw steps into the tunnel, then the two of them position it against the basement wall as Jack comes all the way through. It’s definitely not impenetrable, but it might slow someone down for a minute or two—less if Matsumoto tells them where to go. Jack figures it won’t be long before he figures out it’s the police above him, starts yelling to tell them where he is.

  “Come on.” Shaw’s already starting down the tunnel, the girls right behind, moving like they’ve been through here before.

  At the other end of the tunnel is a step down and an entrance into what looks like another basement. Here the girls wait for Shaw and Jack to lead, to fight their way through the cobwebs that hang along the ceiling and the dusty furniture blocking any clear path through the room. Whoever owns this basement clearly hasn’t been down here in a while. How Gray Suit stumbled through, Jack has no idea.

  But they move around the old couches, dressers, and a file cabinet. The room doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—a set of wooden stairs heading up to the house appears to be the only exit—until the girls lead them to pile of toppled-over cardboard boxes behind the stairs, and beyond these there is another hole, which leads right into another basement.

  In this fashion, Jack, Shaw, and the girls make their way through four basements and two tunnels until they come to a basement stocked with food items and the girls head straight for the staircase up. Except for the second basement, the path has been more or less clear, as if Gray Suit had just stumbled through the same route, turning on lights and knocking down any barricades that lay in the way. But here the path ends: this basement, these stairs.

  “I guess this is the place,” Shaw says.

  Jack’s been trying to follow their movements in his mind, to connect them to his idea of the street above. “The café?” he asks.

  They watch the girls go up and then stop at the top steps. “You come?” the blond says. “You come.”

  The other girls look concerned, like they want to make sure they’re not alone in the world without Jack and Shaw.

  “Yeah,” Shaw says, drawing his gun. “Okay.”

  The girls stand to one side and let Jack go first. He climbs the stairs, listens at the door. From the other side, Jack hears low talking: a woman’s voice and a man’s. He left the Kalashnikov under a couch in the second basement because of its size, but he still has the revolver he got off one of the guys in the café. Now he removes the gun from the back of his pants, holds it next to his head.

  “Go on,” Shaw says. “Open it and let’s get out of here. This dust is fucking with my allergies.”

  Jack turns the handle slowly, trying to keep the door quiet. The latch releases, and he opens the door enough to see tall stacks of boxes: cases of coffee and sugar. He can hear the voices more clearly now. The woman has an accent and her voice sounds familiar, the man’s voice authoritative. But he still can’t make out what they’re saying.

  “All right already!” Shaw pushes through Jack and out into the room beyond the stairs. It’s a storage space, a pantry filled with everything you’d need to run a café. Shaw steps out of the small room through an open door frame, and Jack follows. They walk out behind the counter of Tedeschi’s Café.

  Standing in the café, looking at them in disbelief, are the girl who rang them up for a crème brûlée not an hour before and Black Suit. As far as Jack can tell, he’s wearing the same suit that he was back in the alley. They both raise their hands when they see Shaw’s gun pointed at them. The girl has fresh blood on her chest, possibly her husband’s.

  “Well, fuck me,” Jack says. “Seems we’ve run into each other again.” He comes around the counter and feigns a punch at the Russian’s crotch. The guy winces and starts to double over even before Jack pulls back.

  Shaw looks around the café. The dead men are in the same positions inside the room. The woman’s husband is gone from the sidewalk outside. “Your man get some medical treatment?” he asks.

  She nods, her hands still raised by her head.

  “That’s good,” Jack says. “He needed it.” He backs away from Black Suit toward the woman, and then turns fast, blindsides the Suit with a big, sweeping right cross. The Russian goes down hard on the floor. “That’s for the alley.”

  Shaw walks across the room toward the door. “That BMW out there,” he asks. “Is that yours?”

  Black Suit nods as Jack stands over him.

  Jack reaches inside the guy’s jacket and finds the keys. He thanks the guy.

  “Were the cops here?” Shaw asks.

  The woman nods.

  “But it’s too soon for them to be gone,” Shaw says. “They were barely here.”

  Black Suit shakes his head. He says in a rough voice, “We take care of our own people. We do not need police.”

  “Is that so?” Shaw says. “Well, then, we can be going. Let’s go, Jack.”

  Jack steps away from the Suit toward the door. This is when the three girls from the house step into the room.

  The woman lowers her hands to her face, says something in Russian. “Svedka,” she says, approaching the blond. The pale girl pulls herself away from the woman, steps toward Jack and Shaw. The other girls follow, backing their way to the front door of the café.

  Jack goes to the door, more interested in getting out of North Beach without a police escort than with any Russian reunions.

  As Black Suit sits up, he opens his mouth in a wide smile, and Jack sees the same crooked teeth he’d seen a few nights before, the same rows of tombstones.

  “You two are fucked,” he says. “You take Alexi’s girls from his house?” He shakes his head. “When he comes back, he will kill you.”

  “Where’s Alexi?” Shaw asks.

  Black Suit laughs. “He is coming here tonight, right now.” He starts to reach into his jacket. “Here,” he says. “Let me call and you can speak to him. Make appointment.”

  Shaw drops h
is gun right in front of the guy’s face, the barrel not eight inches away from the crooked teeth. “Let me guess. You’re André?”

  Black Suit nods. He hasn’t moved his hand since Shaw put the gun in his face.

  “Oh, you don’t want to shoot André,” Jack says. “He’s André.”

  “Nah. He’s not worth that.” Shaw pushes André’s hand out of his jacket with the barrel of the gun, then stands up straight. He switches his gun to his left hand and throws a punch right in the middle of André’s face. It’s a quick punch, and it knocks the guy flat. Jack hears his head hit the tile floor with a crack.

  For a full five seconds, the time it takes the girls to cross the room to the door, André lies stunned, not moving.

  Opening the door to let the girls out, Jack sees a black BMW M6 idling where Shaw must have seen it before and points the girls toward the car.

  André raises just his head—blood trickles down around his mouth—and smiles again, showing his bad teeth. “You should have paid attention to your burned bed, Jack Palms. You two will be dead before morning.”

  “Anyway,” Shaw says. “Thanks for letting us borrow your car.”

  Jack holds the door open for Shaw. “I drive,” he says.

  48

  Jack drives the BMW out of North Beach fast, going toward the waterfront and Fisherman’s Wharf, and then bears right toward the Embarcadero from the other side of Telegraph Hill. The girls in the backseat speak fast and quiet in Russian.

  “You believe that shit about the parrots?” Shaw says as they’re driving below Coit Tower.

  “Yeah,” Jack says. “Yeah, I do. Call Gannon.”

  Jack gives the M6 more gas and feels the muscle of the engine. This is a new-model car he can trust. The thing has a V10, 500-horsepower engine, even nastier than his old Mustang, and Jack feels a little guilty about his pleasure, as though he’s cheating on his wife with a younger woman. Still, when they get to the Embarcadero, he’s looking forward to opening it up.

  He knows Shaw understands that Gannon can smooth over the police situation on Prescott, that she’ll have to be the one to go back and shut the house down.