Noir

by Christopher Moore

  But before I got another step, a mug stood up at the counter and turned and I felt my stomach drop, because grabbing his hat off the counter and fitting it onto his big coconut was no other than Pookie O’Hara. “Two-Toes,” he slurred, coming at me. “I been looking for you.”

  And calm as you please, Lone Jones took my shoulder and pulled me around behind him like a mother bear shielding her cub.

  “Stop right there, nigger,” Pookie said, and he rolled right up to Lone, put his hand on Lone’s white shirtfront, and pushed the big man back out the door. Lone let him, and I tumbled out onto the sidewalk behind them both.

  “Your kind ain’t welcome in there, boy,” Pookie said.

  The change in the neighborhood, the integration, was why the department had to transfer Pookie off the street. For twenty years he single-handedly tried to beat the Tenderloin white—to the point that one judge even admonished him to try to bring a suspect in occasionally not wearing a turban, which was to say, without bandages on his noggin, and some suspects of the dark-skinned persuasion did not live to make it to the courtroom. When the war sent the black population from five thousand to more than thirty-five thousand, the department couldn’t take the bad public relations anymore, and Pookie was too connected and knew too much about everyone for them to fire him, so he became the head of vice. I’d never seen him in Cookie’s before this.

  “But, sir,” Lone said, backing up past me, almost to Milo’s cab. “I ain’t black.”

  “Are you talking back to me, nigger?”

  Pookie was drunk. Mad drunk. Drunk enough to forget he was there for me and fall into old hatred, and still moving well enough to be dangerous. He started to reach in his back pocket, where I know he keeps a lead-weighted sap, but then Lone stopped backing up.

  “Sir, I’ma be a Secret Service man for President Roosevelt, and they don’t allow colored men to do that job, so I’m in disguise.”

  “Are you sassin’ me, boy?” And then Pookie stopped reaching for his sap and started to reach into his coat, where I know he has a .45 auto slung in a shoulder holster. “I will end you, nigger, and no one will do a goddamn thing about it.”

  So I hit him. I brought my cane around in a full arc, both hands, like I was DiMaggio swinging for the fences, and clocked him right across the back of his hat. The impact made a crack like a home run, too, but in that second I realized it was the sound of my cane breaking, not his melon caving in.

  Pookie stumbled, one step, then continued to draw his .45 as he turned to address me, no little displeasure on his mug. But the gun didn’t even clear his jacket before Lone hit him—the sound of slapping a baby with a pork chop—and Pookie dropped to the sidewalk like a fucking rock. Out. His face bounced on the concrete. The .45 clattered into the gutter.

  “We sho’ in trouble now,” said Lone, shaking his head.

  I hopped past my pals, who were staring down at the unconscious cop, and pulled open the back door of the cab. “Lone, throw him in the back.”

  Lone didn’t question, he just took the big cop by the collar and the belt and slung him into the back of the cab. There was a distinct, squishy thud as Pookie’s face hit the window on the opposite side. I scooped up the .45 and shoved it in my belt. Only then did I look around. Miraculously, no one was looking. Some famous actress from the theaters on Market had gone into Cookie’s behind us and everyone’s attention was turned to her.

  “Milo, get him out of here before anyone notices.” I was already climbing into the passenger side.

  “I don’t know, Sammy,” Milo said. “This is my busy time. I don’t like driving—”

  “Give me the fucking keys, Milo, before I shoot you and take them,” I said, somewhat emphatically.

  “Hey, there’s no need for that kind of—”

  Milo held out his keys. I snatched them out of his hand and slid across the seat. “Moo, come on. If he comes to, clock him again with this.” I handed my cracked cane to Moo Shoes as he climbed in beside me.

  “There’s a sap under the dash if you need it,” Milo said, helpfully.

  “Lone, go home. Now. Milo—uh, carry on.”

  “I was gonna have me a meat loaf,” said Lone.

  “Home!” I yelled as we pulled away, Moo still trying to get the door on his side closed.

  8

  A Receipt for Pookie

  I cut the corner way too tight turning off of Sutter onto Hyde, the tires screeched, the cab hit the curb, and we went up on two wheels for a bit. Not circus stuff, but enough so Moo Shoes slid across the seat into my lap, knocking my hands off the wheel. We almost hit a parked car before I got control again, and there was some more tire squealing and lurching.

  “Do you even know how to drive?” asked Moo.

  “It’s been a while.” I whipped the wheel for another right but missed the curb, and there was much more tire squealing, but Moo held on to the door handle, so this turn went much smoother.

  “Why are you going so fast?”

  “To get away.”

  “From who?”

  “From Pookie.”

  “Pookie is in the backseat. You are not escaping.”

  I backed off the gas somewhat. The big cop moaned.

  “Hit him.”

  Moo tried to swing my cane over the back of the seat and only managed a few rattling blows that wouldn’t damage a banana cream pie, let alone a hard-hearted cop. “I can’t get any leverage.”

  Pookie moaned again.

  “Well, climb over and give him a good swat or two.”

  Horns blared, headlights flared, and I barely missed colliding with an oncoming car.

  “Holy shit, Sammy,” said Moo, as he fell into the backseat on top of Pookie. “Washington Street is one-way here.”

  “It is not. I go this way down Washington all the time.”

  “Walking.”

  “Oh,” I said. I made some navigational adjustments, which threw Moo against a back window and caused Pookie to groan further.

  “Hit him.”

  “I’m hitting him. This cane is broken. I can’t get a good lick in.”

  “Well then, choke him.”

  “I’m not choking him.”

  “You told me the Chinese have hundreds of deadly techniques of hand-to-hand combat.”

  “We do, but I don’t know any of them. Give me his gun.”

  “What, you’re going to shoot him? What will we do with the body?”

  “Well, what are we going to do with him alive?”

  Despite our street-savvy appearance, it turns out that Eddie Moo Shoes and I are less than first-rate when it comes to perpetrating crimes.

  Pookie groaned. Moo banged on the cop’s coconut with my broken cane to no effect except to make a ha-wang noise like a sprung screen door with every blow.

  “Give me his gun,” said Eddie.

  “No, we’re not shooting him.”

  “I’m not going to shoot him. I’m going to hit him with it. It’s heavy, right?”

  “That won’t work.”

  “Well, you train on the heavy bag. Why don’t I drive and you hit him?”

  “Fine. But see if he has handcuffs on him.”

  “Got ’em,” said Moo, holding the cuffs above the seat.

  “Put them on him. He may be cross when he wakes up.”

  “Yeah,” said Moo. “Cross.”

  So I pulled up at the curb and set the parking brake. Moo and I did a Chinese fire drill changing places. When I was kneeling astride Pookie’s body, I tried to figure if I actually wanted to hit him in the back of his noggin with my fist, or if I preferred to smack him a couple of times with the butt of his .45. The gun, I decided, because I needed my hands for my work and for touching the Cheese and whatnot.

  “Where we going?” said Moo, putting the car in gear.

  “I don’t know. You’re driving.”

  “Where were you going when you were driving?”

  “I didn’t know then, either. I was gonna ask you.�
�

  “I got a place. My Uncle Mao has a place.”

  “I thought you were an outcast from the family.”

  “I am, but Uncle Mao is more of an outcast than I am.”

  Moo took off and headed down Jackson Street toward Chinatown. Pookie groaned and started to move around. I wound up to hit him with the gun, but then I figured maybe the hammer would poke a hole in his noggin and his brains would leak all over Milo’s cab, so I took his hat, which was a pretty nice heavy-felt fedora, and fit it on his melon nicely, then wound up and smacked him a good one with the flat of the pistol, to which he responded with a groggy but loud “Ow! Fuck!”

  “Choke him with your belt,” said Moo.

  “Do I tell you how to drive?”

  “Okay, but if he wakes up, he’s probably going to kill us.”

  Which was a good point, so, since I was warmed up, I drew back and smacked Pookie just behind the ear twice hard with the flat of the Colt, which did the trick.

  “Piece of cake,” I said.

  “This is it,” said Moo, as he turned down an alley so narrow I was thinking the fenders were going to scrape the brick walls. “You might have to get out, move some garbage cans and crates.”

  I was lost. See, Chinatown is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a wonton, and fried. Which is to say, I never even knew any of these alleys existed until Moo led me down them. This one smelled like piss, diesel fuel, and rotting cabbage. The headlights picked up tiny red pinpoints in the shadows, rat eyes, like dancing embers, blinked out as the vermin scurried. Moo Shoes stopped the taxi in a spot where the alley widened. There was a naked lightbulb over a red steel door with a hatch in it—speakeasy-style.

  We were parked in a pullout in front of the door where a couple of cars were parked but there was no room to open the door on the driver’s side, so Moo Shoes slid across the seat and got out on the passenger side.

  “Wait here.”

  He went to the door, knocked, waited, knocked again. The little hatch opened and I could see the top of a silk cap. Moo fired off something in Cantonese and then stepped out of the way. A pair of narrowed eyes peeped over the edge of the hatch. I waved—making friends. Next the sound of heavy bolts being thrown and a tiny man appeared in a strip of yellow light. He was dressed in traditional Chinese garb—maroon silk pillbox cap and the long silk caftan thing with the peg-and-loop buttons. He was old, like one of the scrotum-built guys from the noodle joint.

  Moo Shoes and the old guy went back and forth in Cantonese for a minute, the little guy seeming somewhat furious. Moo broke off and came back to the car. I opened the car door and swung my feet out. Pookie’s feet dropped out, too.

  “That your uncle Mao?”

  “Uncle Ho. Don’t say ‘Mao’ in front of him. In fact, you should call him ‘venerated elder.’”

  “He helps us with this lug, I’ll slap him on the ass and call him Debbie, he wants.”

  Uncle Ho appeared by the car, started twanging orders at Moo Shoes, who translated. “He says to get him inside.”

  I tried to pick Pookie up by the collar, but I couldn’t get a good grip and he was a giant sack of staying put, so Moo grabbed one foot and I grabbed the other and we dragged the big cop out of the car backward—his forehead bounced on the rocker panel, then on pavement.

  “Oops,” said Moo Shoes.

  Pookie groaned. I pulled the .45 out of my belt and wound up to make Pookie go night-night again, but Uncle Ho barked something to Moo in Cantonese.

  “He says wait,” Moo translated.

  So I waited. We waited. The old guy ambled back through the door, was gone a few seconds, then came back out holding a long, stainless-steel hypodermic needle. He brushed me away and jammed it into Pookie’s neck, pushed the plunger halfway.

  “Shit. In the neck?”

  “You were going to smack him with a pistol,” said Moo, which was true, but a needle in the neck just looked worse.

  Uncle Ho said something in Cantonese. Moo translated. “You want him dead?”

  “No,” I said.

  Uncle Ho pulled out the needle, capped it, squirreled it away in one of the big pockets of his caftan. More exchanges with Moo Shoes, who looked like he was not taking Uncle Ho’s news in stride.

  “He says we need to get Pookie inside. He can keep him knocked out, but it’s going to cost us for the drugs and to pay his people to clean him up and keep him from dying.”

  “How much?”

  Moo asked. Ho answered. “A lot. Depends on how long.”

  I didn’t know. This was my first kidnapping. “How long before he won’t remember anything?”

  Moo asked. Ho answered. “He says it would be cheaper to just kill him.”

  “Let’s say a week,” I said. Like in a week I would all of a sudden know what to do with a racist killer cop.

  Moo translated. Ho named a price.

  “We don’t have enough money,” Moo said. “He wants two hundred bucks.”

  That’s a month’s pay for me. “Tell him in a week I can get him some top-of-the-line snake whiz for his noodles. All he wants.”

  “Where you going to get that?”

  “I got an angle. It was going to be a surprise. Tell him it’ll give him the dick of death.”

  “The snake whiz isn’t a good idea. Uncle Ho isn’t interested in that sort of thing.”

  Before I could think of something, the old guy gently pried Pookie’s gun out of my hand and said something to Moo Shoes.

  “He says this will buy you two days. He says after that, you bring more money or he dumps Pookie on the street.”

  “This how he treats family?”

  “He’s charging for the risk.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. I did the quick arithmetic of how my own dear Pa, Northwest regional paper salesman, would negotiate for the service of stashing a dangerous, knocked-out cop for a week, and I figured this was what he’d described as a seller’s market.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Mao did a lot of waving and twanging and it was clear we were to bring Pookie inside, so Moo took the handcuffs off the cop and each of us took an arm. We hoisted Pookie up enough so we could drag him through the big steel doorway. Inside, the place smelled like incense, but sickly sweet, with a note of rotting fruit underneath. The place was barely lit, and after Uncle Ho led us down a hallway, we came into a room that was set up with low cots all around the walls. Each was like a little curtained booth, with a guy lying on it, some zonked out, lying on their side, others lying back, like they were waiting. Beside each bunk was a copper basin the size of a mixing bowl. Some beds had a little teapot beside them, others not. There was soft Chinese music playing somewhere, just random notes, like they were being plucked on a harp or something, not that Chinese stick-fiddle stuff you hear from the musicians working Grant Street that sounds like cats fucking. Amid the bunks old women moved like ghosts, lighting a long pipe and holding it for each guy until he got a good puff, then he’d lie back, glazed. Other old ladies came in pairs, turned the guys on their sides, held the copper bowls under their heads while they vomited, then scurried away with the results. Made me feel a lot better about my bartending job.

  Mao directed us to shove Pookie into one of the bunks and turn him on his side.

  “If you don’t turn them on their sides they will throw up and choke on their own vomit,” said Moo.

  “Pookie is no way going to let some old lady light up an opium pipe for him,” I said.

  “No, Uncle Ho will use heroin on him. He’s very good at dosages. Pookie won’t wake up unless Ho wants him to.”

  “Let’s put the handcuffs back on him, just in case. He does wake up, I don’t think these grannies will be much of a match for him.”

  I helped Moo Shoes cuff the cop to the bunk. Uncle Mao pulled the curtains closed over Pookie and turned to us. The old man took a pad out of his pocket, scribbled something on it with a pencil, tore off a sheet, then held it out to me. “Two d
ay,” he said in English.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your receipt,” said Moo.

  Uncle Mao said something, Moo translated. “He says you don’t have your receipt, he can’t guarantee you get your cop back.”

  “I don’t want him back.”

  “Just keep the receipt,” said Moo Shoes. “He started with the family laundry business. He’s very big on receipts.”

  “Two days,” Moo said. He took the receipt.

  He bowed. Uncle Mao bowed. I bowed.

  Uncle Mao gave me the hairy eyeball.

  “What? Everyone was bowing,” I said. “Two fucking days, then.”

  Then? I didn’t know.

  * * *

  I drove. We needed to get the cab back to Milo. I parked it a block away from Cookie’s, left the keys under the floor mat. Moo called the diner from a pay phone, left a message telling Milo where to find it. We headed back toward Chinatown together, walking down Geary Street.

  So I asked, “You think Uncle Mao is really serious about dumping Pookie after two days if we don’t come up with two hundred bucks?”

  “Yeah, and don’t call him Mao, call him Ho. Get in the habit. Mao is a nickname. Not a flattering one.”

  “Why, what’s it mean?”

  “It means ‘cat,’ but the full nickname is Gao Mao Yow.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “‘Cat fucker.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. It’s why he’s shunned by the family.”

  “Someone caught him—”

  “My father. Yes.”

  “And that’s not allowed?”

  “No! They were going to eat that cat.”

  “Oh, well that makes sense then.” I thought it through. “So that’s why he wouldn’t be interested in the snake whiz? I mean—”

  “Yeah. He’s sensitive about his appetites,” said Moo Shoes. “So don’t call him Mao.”

  “Got it.”

  * * *

  “Pair of cluckberries, staring at ya!” Stilton called. “Burn some whisky and smear it with cow paste!” She slapped the ticket into the window, stabbed her pencil into her hair, and left it there. Phil, the fry cook, a rangy, scruffy mug who looked like he’d flunked out of sad clown school, slid the ticket over and peeked at it like it was his hole card in blackjack, frowned, and turned back to his grill.