Portland Noir

THE WRONG HOUSE BY JONATHAN SELWOOD

Mount Tabor

I’m working the pry bar along the north side of Mount Tabor Park trying to scrape together enough to make a buy off the Mexicans on 82nd. Normally I cop from Voodoo Mike downtown, but I’m already into that dreadlocked cock-sucker for almost a hundred.

The neighborhood is practically virgin this far up the hill, without a single security door along the whole block. I start off with a well-kept dark blue Victorian that looks like it got flipped right before the housing market went to shit. There’s an old Sam Adams campaign poster still on the lawn and not one but three of those stupid plastic horses wired to the iron hitching ring on the curb. One of the smaller side windows is painted shut, but not latched, so I loosen it with the bar and slip in through what turns out to be a bathroom.

Inside the house, the primary décor is giant action photos of a middle-aged lesbian couple climbing, biking, and even riding an elephant in some Third World country. The place is stuck in the last millennium when it comes to electronics-they’re still using a fucking VCR-but I score big with a dresser drawer full of heirloom jewelry and some antique-looking carved Buddha heads on display above the fireplace.

The sliding glass backdoor of the neighboring split-level ranch isn’t locked, so I just walk right into what turns out to be medical marijuana central. Even congested and junksick, the place smells to me like a flatulent skunk doused in patchouli. I spend a good twenty minutes turning the place upside down, but despite finding a bunch of dope scripts and a collection of vaporizers rivaling the Third Eye, I never manage to locate the actual weed. On the plus side, the place is a fucking gold mine of game consoles. By the time I’m out the door, I can barely zip my piece-of-shit duffel closed.

As usual, the jonesing part of me wants to just hoof it straight down the hill and see what Tearoom Timmy will give me for it all, but popping these rich fucks’ houses is like shooting monkeys in a barrel. It’d be sin not to rip at least one more.

Skipping a couple lots down from the last one I hit to throw off any eyeballing neighbors, I settle on a beige Craftsman with the standard black thumb landscaping of bark mulch and rhododendrons. All that separates the miniscule backyard from the park is a six-foot chain-link, so I can get a good look without actually having to trespass-the blinds are pulled, but it seems quiet enough.

Fuck it.

I hide the duffel in some blackberry thorns by the tennis courts for safe keeping, and hop the fence.

When I get to the backdoor, I notice that there’s at least an eighth of an inch gap between the door and the jamb, so I slip the pry bar in easy and give it a hard pull. The rotted wood splinters like fucking matchsticks and the door just swings open.

I step quickly into the house and push the door closed behind me to get out of view, then stop and listen for sounds of life. The forced air is blowing as background noise and the fridge is humming in the kitchen, but other than that the place is dead silent. I wait a few more beats just to be sure, then head up the short staircase out of the mud room and into the kitchen.

Immediately I sense something is off.

All of the major appliances are brand new and top-of-the-line, yet sitting on the granite kitchen counter is one of those cheap-ass single-serving coffee makers with a metal carafe. The thing stands out like a pile of dog shit on a putting green. It even has a fucking Motel 6 sticker on the side.

I don’t usually bother with kitchens, but I’m so thrown by the coffee maker that I find myself opening the cabinets anyway. They’re all filled with roughly the right kind of stuff, but the shit’s just jammed in there at random-Froot Loops next to the Liquid-Plumr, Hamburger Helper on the same shelf as a Costco-sized box of panty shields, and Bob’s Red Mill Quinoa under the sink with a whole case of laundry borax. It’s like the place was stocked by a fucking schizophrenic.

My brain still trying to puzzle out what’s going on with the kitchen, I head down a narrow hall to the front living room, and I’m finally stopped cold. The whole fucking thing is decorated with the kind of crappy stuff they rip out of remodeled office buildings and hotel rooms and then sell discount-butt-ugly baby-blue love seat, hideous plaid couch, and a mammoth black enamel entertainment center dating from at least the late-’80s.

What the fuck?

As if in answer, I hear a woman’s voice behind me.

“Freeze.”

I’m so surprised that I spin around to face her before the meaning of the word sinks in. I actually see the flash of the pistol.

When I come to, I find myself sitting on the rug, with my legs splayed and my back partially propped up by the love seat. I have no clue how long I’ve been out.

“I have a gun! I have a gun!” the woman starts shouting as soon as she realizes that I’m awake.

“No shit,” I manage to whisper.

She stops shouting and takes a step toward me. I force my eyes to focus. Generic thirty-something blonde dressed like she’s about to drive her hybrid SUV to the yoga studio. Christ, if it weren’t for the Ruger 9mm in her left hand, she could be in a Whole Foods commercial.

“Don’t move or I swear, I’ll… I’ll kill you.”

“I can’t move. My legs don’t work.”

I look down at my lower abdomen and see the little hole in the front pocket of my hoodie. There’s no blood, but somehow just looking at it cuts through all the endorphins and sends the first wave of pain rolling across my torso.

“Did I hit you?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

She takes a step back again and tries to calm herself down by doing some sort of ridiculous deep breathing/grunting exercise.

“Huh-uuuunh… Huh-uuuunh… Huh-uuuuuunh…”

I put my right hand on my thigh. There’s no feeling in the limb at all-it’s like I’m touching someone else’s leg.

“Why the hell did you break in here?” The blonde stops hyperventilating for a moment. “I mean, are you psycho or something?”

“Lady, I need an ambulance. Did you call 911?”

“The cops? Are you crazy? You know I can’t call the cops.”

“It’s okay.” The second wave of pain hits and lingers awhile. I grit my teeth and try to reassure her. “I’m just a junkie who broke into your house. Legally, you’re in the clear.”

“Legally?” She lets out a semihysterical laugh and starts with the ridiculous breathing exercises again. “Huh-uuuunh… Huh-uuuuuuunh…” I swear to God, it’s like the bitch is in labor or something.

I’m about to speak again, when the third wave of pain hits, and just stays. It feels like somebody left a hot soldering iron in my stomach. I decide to change tactics.

“Look, you fucking cunt, you shot me in the stomach. If you don’t call 911, I’m going to fucking die, and you’re going to fucking prison for the rest of your fucking life.”

She finally stops with the deep breathing, hesitates a moment, and then pulls out her phone. She hits the speed dial, and to my surprise, starts talking to somebody in rapid-fire Spanish. Not the lispy shit you might learn from a college year abroad in Spain, but Mexican street slang. The conversation moves so fast that about all I can pick up is the name Esteban. This bitch isn’t just fluent, she’s a goddamn native speaker.

“He wants to know who you work for.” She flips the phone shut and switches back to an equally native-sounding English.

“Work for? What do you mean?”

“He’s sending someone. He says to keep you alive.”

“Who’s sending someone?”

“Esteban.”

“Esteban?”

She nods.

“Who the fuck is Esteban?”

“I’m going to see if there’re any bandages in the bathroom.” She ignores my question. “I swear to God, if you move while I’m gone, I’ll kill you.”

“I told you, I can’t move. I think you hit my spine.”

“Good.”

She leaves the room and I’m left to ponder why she speaks native Mex slang, who the hell Esteban is, and why the bitch doesn’t even know what’s in her own medicine cabinet. I look down again at the bullet hole in my hoodie. There’s still no blood.

A minute later, she comes back with a roll of duct tape, paper towels, and a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol.

“Lady, I’m a fucking junkie. Tylenol is not going to cut it.”

“That’s all there was.”

“Well, maybe if you called a fucking ambulance they might have something a little stronger?”

“I told you. Esteban is sending someone. Do you want the Tylenol or not?”

“No.”

“All right, I’m going to see if I can make a bandage.” She puts the Ruger and Tylenol over on the coffee table out of my reach, and then kneels down next to me with the duct tape and paper towel.

“Christ… is that blood?” She notices my soaked jeans.

“It’s piss.”

“Eww!” She recoils.

“I’m fucking dying here and you’re scared of a little piss?”

She does her best to regroup and folds up a piece of paper towel into a half-assed square, adding strips of duct tape to the four sides to form a makeshift bandage.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s the best I can do, is what it is.” She does a few more deep breathing exercises, and then slowly lifts my hoodie and T-shirt.

The hole seems almost ludicrously small-about an inch below, and an inch to the left of my navel. My whole stomach is smeared with blood, but not a Hollywood amount. For some reason, exposing the wound to the air makes it hurt even more, and it’s all I can do to keep from screaming.

“You don’t have HIV or anything…?” She hesitates at the sight of the blood.

“No,” I lie.

She looks at the hole for a few more seconds, building courage. “Did the bullet go through?” she asks.

“How the fuck should I know?”

She reaches gently around to the small of my back to feel for a hole.

“It must still be inside you.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

She shrugs, and adds a few more strips of duct tape to the paper towel bandage.

“Okay, this is the part that’s going to hurt.”

She uses an extra sheet of paper towel to carefully mop up the blood around the gunshot hole, and then slaps the bandage on.

I scream.

She’s so startled that she momentarily lets go.

I keep screaming.

She puts pressure on the bandage again and begins to tape it down.

I keep screaming.

She lets go.

I stop screaming. And then promptly shit myself.

“Oh gross!” She jumps back from me, covering her face with her hand to try and block the smell.

Somehow the change in bowel pressure shifts things around, and I have to start screaming again.

“Shut up!” She grabs the Ruger off the coffee table and waves it at me for emphasis. “Shut up or I’ll fucking shoot!”

I manage to stop screaming, but it’s not going to last.

“Look, you fucking cunt, either finish me off or get me something for the pain.”

She hesitates.

I start to scream again.

“Shut up!” She slaps a hand over my mouth.

I try to bite it.

“Look, just shut up for a minute and I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

I shut up.

She speed dials the number again, and there’s more rapid back-and-forth in Spanish. After a few seconds, she covers the mouthpiece with her hand.

“He says someone will be here soon.”

“How soon?”

She’s back on the phone for another few seconds, but then her expression changes and she covers the mouthpiece again.

“He wants to know who you work for.”

“Who I work for? No one. I’m a fucking junkie.”

She’s back on the phone, and this time actually winces at whatever Esteban is telling her.

“He says he needs to know right now.” She walks over and kneels next to me again, keeping her face turned away from the smell. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

She winces again at what she’s hearing over the phone, and then reaches out with her free hand and presses on my stomach.

“AHHHHHHHH!!!”

“Tell me.” She keeps her hand there.

“AHHHHHHHH!!!”

“Tell me and I’ll stop.”

“Okay! Stop! Stop!”

She lets her hand up.

“Voodoo Mike.” I gasp for air. “I work for fucking Voodoo Mike, all right?” The idea is completely absurd, but it’s the first name that pops into my head. Besides, I owe him money.

She relays this information to Esteban, then flips the phone shut again.

“You fucking blond bitch. You fucking cunt whore cooze. I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking cocksucking motherfuck-ing-” “I think someone’s here.” She runs over to look out the front window.

I hear what sounds like a truck pull into the driveway, and then a door slam. The blond bitch heads back to the coffee table for the Ruger, then sprints to the front door and opens it. A moment later, a uniformed EMT walks in.

“Esteban sent you, right?” she asks.

The EMT just nods. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but immediately takes charge of the situation.

“How is he?”

“I… I tried to bandage him, but-” the blond bitch stutters.

The EMT shoves past her and comes straight over to me, putting his box of supplies down on the carpet next to where he kneels. He snaps on the latex gloves, and I tense up figuring he’s going to lift my hoodie and inspect the wound, but instead he starts checking the veins on my arms and hands.

“These are fucked. Where are you shooting now?” he asks.

“My legs.”

“I think the best bet is the jugular.” He examines my neck for a moment, then pulls an IV bag out of the box of supplies. “This is saline. You’re losing blood and need fluids to keep you from going into shock.”

“You’re not going to bandage it?” the blond bitch asks.

“There’s no point. He needs surgery.”

The guy is good and hits the jugular no problem. I can feel the cold of the saline rushing down my neck. Somehow the fluid triggers another wave of pain, and I start screaming again.

“Oh for Christ sake, shut up!” the bitch yells at me.

“He needs morphine.” The EMT turns to look at her.

“Well, give him fucking morphine then!”

“I can’t. They keep track of our supply.”

“So what the hell do you want me to do?”

The EMT just looks at her.

I keep screaming.

“No way. Esteban would kill me.” She shakes her head.

“We don’t have a choice. He wants him alive, doesn’t he?”

“No.” She keeps shaking her head.

“Yes.” The EMT nods.

“AHHHHHHH!!!” I scream.

“All right, this is all on you.” The blond bitch throws up her hands and disappears down the hall.

“Where the fuck’s the trolley?” I manage to stop screaming long enough to ask the EMT.

“Sorry,” he says.

“What the fuck do you mean, Sorry?”

I’m about to start screaming again when the bitch comes back with what looks like a blob of beige packing tape.

“I’m telling you, this is all on you.” She hesitates in front of the EMT. “I want no part of it.”

“Fine.”

He holds out his hand until she finally gives him the blob, and then uses a pair of medical shears to cut the tape away from one corner. Despite ten years of being a junkie I’ve never actually seen a whole kilo outside of TV news reports, so it takes me a second to comprehend what it is.

“Is that… Is that a fucking kilo?” I ask.

“Do you have your works on you?”

“What the fuck are you doing with a kilo?” I ask the blond bitch, but she’s back to the deep breathing exercises.

“Do you have your works on you?” the EMT calmly repeats the question.

I point to my right sock.

“I’m not going to get stuck, am I?” He hesitates.

“No. It’s capped.”

He pulls out the works and then heads back to the kitchen with the spoon to get some water-just leaving the kilo there on the freakin’ coffee table like it’s nothing.

“What the hell is going on here?” I ask the bitch.

“I need you to promise me something,” she leans in and whispers so the EMT can’t hear in the other room. “When Esteban gets here, tell him this was all the paramedic’s idea, okay?”

“Why the fuck do you have a fucking kilo of chiva in your house?”

The EMT comes back before she can answer and starts loading up the spoon straight from the kilo.

“What are you? A gram a day?”

“Gram and a half.”

He taps a tiny bit more in.

“Hey, you’re going a bit light there,” I point out.

“Trust me, this shit is pure.”

“It’s black tar. How pure can it be?”

“Pure.”

He cooks it over my lighter, then barely lets it cool before skipping the cotton ball and loading it straight into one of the horse syringes from his box.

“Jesus Christ, this is a fucking stash house, isn’t it?” I ask them both.

Instead of answering, the EMT sticks the needle into a little side branch of my IV line and pushes the heroin directly into my jugular.

The shit hits me like a fucking Amtrak.

I’m not sure how long I nod, but when I come back, the pain is just a dull ache.

The EMT is gone and the blond bitch is on the phone with her back to me talking to someone in Spanish again. I spot the EMT’s horse syringe on the carpet about a foot from me. With her attention focused on the phone call, I try to see if I can reach it. Everything below the waist is dead and my arms feel like boiled spaghetti, but now that the pain is gone, I’m able to shift my upper body just enough. I grab the syringe, hide it behind me, and shift back to where I was. It’s not much of a weapon, but if the bitch tries pressing on my stomach again, at least I can stab her.

Outside I hear a car pull into the driveway and multiple doors slam. The bitch flips her phone shut.

I don’t know what I expected Esteban to look like, but the light-skinned Mexican guy who walks into the living room strikes me more as a male model for one of those multicultural Benetton ads than a drug kingpin. The fucking guy is wearing a neon orange button-down with a baby-blue tennis sweater tied around his neck. If it wasn’t for the white pit bull at his side and the keloid scar across his neck, he could pass as fuck-ing Eurotrash.

“What happened here, Connie?” His accent isn’t very strong, but it’s true Mex, not Chicano.

“Esteban, he broke in… and I shot… and I shot him.”

“It’s okay. Give me the gun. I’ll get rid of it.”

She hands him the Ruger.

Without saying another word, Esteban walks over and steps on my lower abdomen. Even with the heroin, it hurts like a motherfucker. I can’t imagine what the pain would be like if I were straight.

He watches my reaction.

“You’re high, aren’t you?”

I try not to look at him.

“That’s okay, man. I’ve got some Narcan back at the other house. A little of that and you’ll feel it plenty.”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s funny, you know. That’s just what the mayate said.”

He yells something in Spanish down the hall, and two other Mex guys drag Voodoo Mike in. He’s out cold with his hands zip-tied behind his back and a duct tape gag covering his mouth. His face is so fucked up it looks like somebody put a Rasta wig on a blob of hamburger meat. They drop him right on top of my legs, so that his head is faceup in my lap.

“Your friend here doesn’t listen good.” Esteban shakes his head. He says something in Spanish, and the shorter of the two Mex guys comes over. Shortie actually giggles as he bends down and pinches Mike’s nose closed.

Mike comes to fighting for air, and his eyes practically pop out of his head. If it wasn’t for the hamburger face, he’d look like a fucking cartoon. Esteban waves Shortie off, and Mike’s eyes finally retreat back into their sockets as he starts snorting in air again.

All three of them laugh, and then crack up completely when the phone in Mike’s front pocket begins playing some crappy Mariah Carey ringtone at full volume.

“Aren’t you going to answer your phone, mayate?” Esteban asks.

Mike continues snorting, either ignoring the question or just oblivious.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with his ear? No?” Este-ban’s brow furrows in mock concern.

“El lapíz.” He snaps his fingers and Shortie hands him a pencil. Squatting down next to Mike, he grabs hold of his dreadlocks with one hand and whispers in his right ear. “Can you hear me now, mayate?”

Esteban gives me a wink, and then jams the pencil hard into Mike’s ear.

The blond bitch lets out a scream and Mike starts writhing as Esteban digs around with the pencil. Shortie giggles, but the other Mex has to look away.

“Hey, Connie,” Esteban calls out, “I can’t find anything. You try.”

“Esteban… I… Please.”

“Come on.” He digs in farther and Mike starts to go into convulsions. “It’s fun.”

“No. Please. I… I can’t.”

“Okay,” Esteban sighs, and pulls the pencil out.

Mike stops convulsing. His eyes stay open, but the right one goes all wonky and looks off to the side.

Esteban stands back up and then seems to notice the kilo for the first time.

“Connie? Why is there an open brick on the coffee table?” He starts to twirl the pencil in his hand.

“That’s not on me, Esteban! That paramedic you sent said-”

“What did I tell you about opening the product?”

“It wasn’t me! Ask him!” She points to me.

“Him?” Esteban laughs. “You mean, the pendejo you shot in the stomach?”

“Tell him!” Connie begs me. Her blue eyes are wide and she’s starting to go pale.

I don’t say anything. All I can think about is the phone in Mike’s pocket.

“Please! Just tell him it was the paramedic!” Her voice breaks into a squeal.

“Cálmate, mujer.” Esteban smiles, still twirling the pencil. “I think our amigo here just needs a little motivation.”

Mike’s phone makes a whooshing noise to indicate that whoever called left a voice mail, but Esteban ignores it and steps on my abdomen again.

“You don’t want to help the poor güera over here?” he asks.

“Fuck you.”

“You know I’m going to kill you, no?” He presses down harder.

I try to speak, but can’t.

“Just tell me who opened the brick.” He takes his foot off, and gives a squeeze of the IV bag to bring me back around. “If you do that, I’ll let you load a few grams into that syringe you’re hiding behind your back, and you go off to junkie heaven…” He reaches over with the pencil and tickles my ear. “Or, if you want, we can always play a little more of Hide the Pencil.”

“Esteban…” Connie tries to intervene.

“Shhhh.” Esteban waves her off and speaks to me. “What do you think? Do you want to die the easy way or like the fucking mayate?”

Connie’s given up and is just staring at me.

Shortie and the other Mex guy are staring at me too.

Esteban is smiling.

Fuck it.

“It was her.” I tilt my head at the blond bitch, figuring it might buy me some time.

“No! Esteban, he’s-”

“Está bien,” Esteban reassures her. “Connie, do you really think I’m going to take a pinche junkie’s word over yours?”

“No, but I-”

“Está bien, okay?”

She nods, uncertain.

“Why don’t you help Jaime and Mario move the bricks out to the truck. This house isn’t safe anymore.”

Connie just looks at him.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

She reluctantly heads back into the hall, followed by the taller Mex, but Shortie lags behind and looks to Esteban for instructions.

Esteban hands him the Ruger and nods.

Shortie giggles as he slips the gun into his coat and trails the other two out into the hall.

“I guess we’re going to need a new güera.” Esteban walks back over. “And you know what? I think I changed my mind. We are going to play Hide the Lapíz after all.” He tickles my ear with the pencil again. “But first, I’m going to get that Nar-can.” He gives some sort of command in Spanish to the pit bull, and then leaves.

I listen to his footsteps going down the hall, my eyes fixed on the faint outline of a phone in Mike’s front pocket. Knowing I’m only going to have one shot at this, I wait until I actually hear the backdoor open before making my move. I can barely lift my arms and my hands are so clumsy that they feel like oven mitts, but after a minute or so of struggle, I manage to pull out the phone.

There’s a muffled gunshot down in the basement, followed by Shortie’s giggle. The pit bull lets out a tentative growl.

“Good doggy.”

I use my teeth to help flip the phone open, and then use my knuckle to dial.

Nine…

One…

Shit. I hear the creak of the backdoor and footsteps coming quickly down the hall again.

I fumble with the phone and manage to jam it in the pocket of my hoodie just before Esteban walks in.

He spots it anyway.

“I knew I forgot something.” He pulls the phone out of my hoodie and checks the numbers on the screen. “Ninety-one! Oh… you were so close, amigo.” He laughs.

“Fuck you.” I try to spit, but it just dribbles down my chin.

Despite the fact that it was barely audible, for some reason this final Fuck you seems to get to him. He bends forward as if he’s gonna hit me, but stops short at the last second. The smile returns, and instead of smacking me, he laughs.

“You know, I’m going to tell you a little secret.” He bends forward to whisper in my ear. “I believe you, amigo. You’re not working for the Tijuanans. You’re just some piece-of-shit junkie who broke into the wrong house, no?”

Esteban stands back up and waits for my response, but I don’t give him one.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” He laughs again, then pulls out the pencil again and gives it a slow twirl. “So now we get to play our little game just for pleasure, no?”

He pockets both the pencil and the phone, and then blows me a kiss before leaving.

Once Esteban’s gone, everything just drains out of me.

I look down at Mike. His right eye is still all fucked up and looking the wrong way, but his left is staring at me. Almost pleading.

“Sorry, man. I tried.”

Figuring I might as well speed things up, I make a feeble attempt to pull the IV out of my neck, but my arms are so heavy I can’t seem to raise them above my shoulder anymore.

The pit bull growls again at my movements, and I start to wonder if there’s any way I can provoke him-hell, even getting mauled by a pit bull has to be better than that fucking pencil.

“Hey, dog. Fuck you,” I try to yell, but it comes out more like a whisper.

The pit bull promptly trots over and starts licking my face.

Goddamnit.

Out in the hall, I hear what must be Connie’s body being dragged out, and then the backdoor slam shut. There’s another giggle from Shortie outside in the driveway, and after a minute or so, the truck drives off.

The pit bull curls up next to me on the carpet, and I begin to feel lightheaded. There’s something oddly comforting about just giving up, and the pain actually recedes a bit. For some reason I think about my stepmother, and how before she got cancer she used to try and grow radishes in that vacant lot next to the gas station…

Just as I start to nod again, I hear a snorting noise and glance back down at Mike.

His one good eye is still pleading.

“What?”

His eye starts to move. First looking at me, and then down at his jeans. He keeps doing it. Over and over.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

And then I hear it. A faint ringtone coming from Mike’s other front pocket.

BABY, I’M HERE BY MONICA DRAKE

Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital

Rebar’s first day out of the big loony bin on the hill, just checked into transitional housing, I agreed to meet him at the Marathon Taverna. I should’ve said no. Bad plan. But I went along with it. Over the phone, he said, “I need to get out, see people. Get back in the swing.”

I said, “The only people you’ll see at the Marathon are drunks. Maybe your dad if we stay late.”

He said, “I need to see you, Vanessa.”

And I gave in.

Before that, he’d wanted to meet up at my place. Problem was, my place was his. He owned the house. If I let him in, he’d never leave. He’d pick through my things looking for his things, any sign of him and me together, like playing husband and wife or some other sorry story. His was one of the last shacks set between warehouses in deep Northwest. Rebar’d said I could use it until he got out-out of jail, out of detox, out of the Mental Motel that was part of his sentence. Sounded like a long enough list, I hadn’t expected him back anytime soon. He’s not known for good behavior.

I took a bus down Twenty-first and walked along Burn-side. Overhead it was a gray sky. My raincoat flapped against the wind like a dying bird, slapped my knee with each step. Traffic lined the street thick as a parking lot. More cars jammed the McDonald’s. Across the way, somebody’d built a high-rise condo. The whole town was turning into a city of glass pillars.

A guy in a pickup held back at a green light. He let me cross Eighteenth. When I got to the other side I smiled and waved thanks, wiggled my fingers in the air. The man smiled too. Looking my way, he stepped on the gas and T-boned an idling Smart Car wedged in the intersection. There was the crunch of metal, a broken headlight, something swimming-pool blue that skidded over the macadam. I pretended not to notice because the thing is, that man had been sweet. I didn’t want him to feel bad about his driving problem.

Inside the Marathon, I found a table and peeled off my coat, put down my pocketbook. The tavern air was murky, thick with sweat, beer, and smoke, but warmer than outside. And it was dark. Instant night, in the middle of day. Scattered popcorn on the carpet was the glow of stars. I looked for the North Star, some guiding light in that mess, like an explorer let loose on a new world. Rebar, now sober, crazy, and adjusting to antipsychotics, he was a new world. A new planet. I had no idea how to handle him.

Taki, the Greek who ran the place, dropped his rag. He said, “Ah, Vanessa, my beauty. What can I do for you?” He wiped his hands on his pants.

He always said my beauty. It didn’t mean much, but I liked it, and liked him for it. I said, “I’ll have a beer and Snappy Tom’s, if you got it.” In that bar, beer meant Budweiser. There was nothing else.

Taki said, “You’re alone?”

I said, “Not alone. With you.” My hair was thick and hung heavy over one eye. I shook it out of the way, but it fell back again. One of these days I’d get a real haircut.

Taki brought the drink to my table. “If I wasn’t working, I’d take you someplace better than this. I’d take you to Greece. You been there?”

I hadn’t been anywhere. I’d walked the same city blocks long as I could remember. An old guy at the bar rapped his glass against the wood. Taki had to get back. Other than people like me and Rebar, who went there for cheap drink, it was geezers who inhabited the Marathon Tavern. Men who lived in single rooms for rent upstairs. When I found the place, I’d lived down the street in the Tudor Arms apartments with a guy named Ray.

The door opened to let in a big slice of midday sun, traffic, and exhaust. It was Rebar, his shadow joining the dark with the rest of us. He saw my red beer. “Shaking off a hangover, Angel?”

I said, “Wish I had a hangover angel. Somebody to come rub the aches away.” This time it wasn’t a hangover I wanted to shake, but a life of mistakes, wrong men, places like this dive I found myself in all over again.

Rebar said, “Here I am.” Like he was my angel.

His black hair stood up in front. His jeans were stained with cement mix, from the rock wall he’d been building before he got picked up. Instead of his work boots, he was wearing Sketchers, tennies right out of Payless Shoes. They were as out of place as hospital slippers on Rebar’s big feet. But still he was beautiful, wiry and strong, an olive-skinned James Dean. He was comic-book thin, muscled and taut. He said, “Got a hello for me?”

I stood, let him pull me close. He lifted me off my feet, squeezed my ribs, tipped me out of my stilettos. I lay my arms over his shoulders. He’d been gone for months. Now he smelled like soap and shave cream. He smelled like a man on parole, trying to do things right. That wouldn’t last. When he let go I said, “Didn’t they wash your clothes in that place?” I sat, to put a tiny table between us.

He said, “Maybe. This stuff doesn’t come out.”

“Maybe nothing changes.”

Rebar put his fingers around my wrist. “Maybe I changed.” His fingers were handcuffs.

Before Rebar went in the hospital, he hadn’t been sleeping. He hadn’t been drinking in the last days of his crazy spell, but was talking to strangers in sounds that weren’t real words. That’s against some kind of law, I guess, because the cops knocked him flat on the sidewalk, tased him in the bus mall outside of Pioneer Square, did what they called “subdued.” They hauled him off.

Now, between the rash of razor burn and a scar on his forehead where he hit the sidewalk, he had the face of a baby and an old man at the same time. Least he wasn’t wide-eyed, wired, ready to crack someone’s jaw. He didn’t look electric. He said, “Feels like I been gone for years.” His voice was shaky. That wasn’t new. His voice was always shaky.

I said, “Just stay off the sauce.”

He nodded, and squinted at that soundless TV on in the corner. “Got a bracelet.” He pulled up his pant leg. I’d never seen him wear shoes without socks before. His calve was wrapped in a brown plastic band with two boxes, one on either side. “Transdermal, they call it. Scram.”

“Scram?” I thought he wanted me to leave. I was more than ready. I reached for my pocketbook, pulled it to my lap.

“Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor,” he said. “SCRAM. I don’t think this sucker works, though. Supposed to read your alcohol level through sweat. Five percent of everything you drink comes out through the skin.”

“They made you take a class in it.” I could tell, by the way he talked.

“If I don’t drink, they won’t know I been here, right?”

“Booze leaches through the walls in this place. It’s in the air.” I sipped my red beer. I ran my fingers over the glass. I ran my hand, wet from the glass, over my forehead and across my neck.

Alcohol-induced psychosis. That was the theory doctors offered for Rebar’s tripped-up month, like he drank more than anyone else. He sure didn’t drink more than the men who lined the counter, those old sea gulls on their posts. It didn’t mean anything-he was crazy. Drinking made him crazier.

I turned a clean amber ashtray over in my palm, felt the weight of it, sharp edges of beveled glass. That ashtray was solid. My plan was to quit taking things I didn’t need. I didn’t need anything. I’d already filled Rebar’s shack with salt and pepper shakers, coffee cups, sunglasses, doormats, hood ornaments, construction barricades. I had a plastic lawn Santa to watch me all year long, keeping tabs, naughty or nice.

The ashtray was a sure thing, hard and sharp. I slipped it in my purse. Rebar rolled a cigarette. I shifted one end of the tavern’s orange curtain to see the street and knocked a curled and faded Help Wanted sign from the window. There was no one outside except traffic, and hardly anyone in the tavern. Rebar’s eyes on me, his body so close, made the place crowded.

“You need to start eating,” I said. I threw a piece of popcorn his way.

“Did you miss me?”

“I’m glad you’re better.”

“Yeah?” A fleck of tobacco danced on his lip. When he reached for my fingers, I pulled my hand back. He held on. “You don’t give a rip.”

I pushed with my other hand against the rock of his forearm. His skin was a thin cover over muscle. “I want to drink my drink,” I said.

He pulled me closer, until my ribs leaned into the side of the table. My hand grew hot; a candle burned in a red glass globe on the table below. Rebar whispered, “When I was crucified by those cops, you were the voice in my ear. You were laughing, but you were at my side.” He let go of my arm and I fell back, tipped the rickety table enough to slosh red beer against the rim of my glass. Slosh wax against the inside of the candle’s little world. I lifted my glass and let beer drip.

Taki put the Help Wanted sign back in the window. He ran a rag over the table. “Don’t break anything, you hear?”

“Like my arm,” I said.

Taki said, “You okay?”

I nodded. My wrist felt the residue of Rebar’s strength. I tried to rub it out. His cigarette burned in the ashtray, a long ash off the end. I couldn’t stand that smell, and yet I lived in a cloud of smoke. I said, “If you’re going to smoke, smoke. Don’t burn ’em like incense.”

Rebar said, “So, when do I get my place back?”

I knew it’d come around to that. “Thought they set you up, a place to stay.”

“Only till I can prove I got my own.”

“You’ll have it back. Just give me time to pack, wouldya?”

“You could stay,” he said, and his eyes got soft in that way that made me want to head for the door.

I found lipstick and a compact in my purse. I painted my lips red. “With you? A happy home, all over again?”

He nodded, watched me.

“Not in the least likely.” I clipped the lid back on the lipstick. Dropped it in my purse and signaled Taki for another drink.

Then Tino came in the alley door and went up to the bar without looking our way. He held his jeans pocket down from the outside with one hand and pulled money out from inside the pocket with the other. He bought a six-pack of cans to go, in a bag, and one beer in a bottle to have opened. His hands didn’t shake when he counted out change. When his hands didn’t shake, that meant he’d been drinking already.

Tino worked as a narc for Lincoln High, catching truants, once in a while patting them down for weapons. On the side, he’d confiscate drugs from kids and sell them back to the janitors. Janitors sold the same score back to kids. Tino wasn’t getting rich, but kept his head out of water.

Rebar followed my look. His neck was stiff; he had to turn in his chair. Tendons came to the surface. He said, “Your boyfriend’s here.” He rapped a foot against the leg of the table. It might’ve been more of a kick, but those Sketchers softened the blow.

I caught the table, stopped it from rocking. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

If Rebar hadn’t been there, just out of the psych ward, working hard to not drink and keep his head together, maybe I would’ve walked over and reached for Tino. Maybe I’d call him a boyfriend, or close enough to it.

I never did get the dating thing, where it stopped and started.

Tino saw us. He said, “Hey. What’s up?” He looked tired, his eyes ringed with circles. His top lip was chapped, cracked in a brown spot of dried blood.

Rebar said, “When do I get my Dr. Martens back?”

Tino half-laughed, blew it off.

I said, “Criminey. Not the shoes again.”

Rebar’d lost his Dr. Martens to Tino in a minor drug deal. Rebar made his dough in construction, old houses, but that didn’t always come through. He’d been broke that day. The shoes, as a trade, were a compromise. Rebar couldn’t let it go.

He said, “Serious.”

Tino said, “I’m not a hawk shop, friend.” He was wearing the shoes.

I said, “Rebar’s fresh out of the funny farm. Trying to put a life together. Those shoes might be part of the picture.”

Rebar’s house was a bigger part of that picture.

Tino said, “Down here, or up on the hill?”

“I was up on the hill,” Rebar said, and he said it so quiet his mouth barely moved. He shook his head, like he didn’t get it himself.

Tino said, “I’m headed to Good Sam.”

Rebar said, “You going nuts too?”

“Going to see Eileen.” He turned a chair backward, sat on it that way, then lit a cigarette. “She had an aneurysm in her brain.” He pointed to his head with the orange tip of the smoke, his thumb aimed at the ceiling. His hand was like a gun, at his own head.

I said, “No way.”

Rebar said, “Who’s Eileen?”

I said, “Waitress at Chang’s, dyes her hair.”

Tino said, “Living with Ray Madrigal.”

That was the part I didn’t want to say, and didn’t want to hear, the reason I knew who Tino meant-Eileen and Ray. Ray, who I’d lived with, before. I pulled the ashtray out of my purse, kept it hidden by my palm, and put it back on the table. I didn’t need that ashtray. But I couldn’t let go. I moved it to my purse again.

Tino said, “They cut her head open and clamped a vein or something shut. She’s fine, but she’s bald.”

I slid a salt shaker into my purse and said, “No shit?” Ray’s new girl, with hardware in her head.

The bathroom at the Marathon was down a glowing turquoise hall, like a pool drained of water, and it smelled from mildew. It was the hallway to the rooms for rent upstairs. Just outside the women’s bathroom somebody had written in black marker, MEN WHO FATHER CHILDREN LIVE HERE. I read those words every time I turned the corner. I’d memorized the writing-all capital letters and jagged angles. The sentence stuck with me. It seemed wrong, reversed, blaming the men for where they lived instead of what they did, maybe even asking for sympathy, or renovation on the building. MEN WHO LIVE HERE FATHER CHILDREN, it should say. MEN WHO LIVE HERE ARE BAD-but the men in the building weren’t bad, only lost and lazy. Drunks. Only men nobody should have kids with in the first place. Men who father children live everywhere.

I came out of the bathroom. Tino was in the hall. We went out back, to the alley between buildings, beside the dumpster.

Tino pulled a pipe from his coat pocket.

Pot smells good in the cold. There’s the density of it, that soft sweetness. I’d like to find that same sweet edge in something solid.

Tino passed the pipe to me. I didn’t reach for it. “You shake down a freshman for that herb?” I said.

“Maybe.” He was still holding smoke in his lungs. “What’re you doing with Rebar?”

“Helping him out.” I shrugged.

Tino said, “Watch him close. I don’t want to lose more teeth.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“They don’t come back.” He smiled, to show a gap at the side near the front. His eye tooth, his dog tooth. A fist, a party. Like two years before, but it seemed forever. I put my lips to his cracked lips, kissed his gap-toothed mouth, breathed his secondhand pot smoke. I held onto the fake sheepskin of his Sears corduroy coat. Tino’s skinny body blocked the wind. One time, when he was still underage, Tino’d been busted for dealing and his folks sent him off to boot camp in Idaho. He broke out, hitched home, and hid in Forest Park at night when he couldn’t find a place to crash, until he hooked up with me for a while. I don’t know what happened to him out there in Idaho, but now, best thing about Tino was he wouldn’t leave the neighborhood. He said it himself-he’d never go anywhere he couldn’t walk home from.

One of these days I’d go as far away as I wanted, and I knew he’d be there, home, when I got back. Tino was home, and he was mine.

We went back in the tavern. Rebar worked his muscled jaw. Maybe it was time for more meds, I had no clue.

Someone said my name, Vanessa, in the hiss of a whisper. I looked. The men lining the bar had their backs to our table. Music rattled under bad speakers. Nobody said my name. It was just noises, a cloud of tavern sounds; my name was a patchwork put together from scrap.

Tino said, “Come see Eileen. She’d like it.”

My hands were light and far away with the cold. I rubbed them together. “I don’t think we should visit Eileen. I’m fine here.”

Rebar said, “Jesus, Vanessa, she had brain surgery.”

I said, “Hospital-land. It creeps me out. All that mortality.” Then again, the bar was lined with vulture fodder.

Rebar said, “I started to like it.”

Tino said, “Ray won’t show up.”

I said, “You going?”

Rebar shook his head.

I said, “Okay.” So I’d shake off Rebar. Maybe I’d get lost on the way too. Except when I stood, Rebar stood. He said, “Swap shoes with me, man.” He kicked off a Sketcher. Tino ignored him. Rebar worked his shoes back on and hustled to catch up, snagging my arm to hold me back.

The hospital halls were miles of white, somebody’s idea of a sterile heaven, broken by red emergency phones and inset shrines of faded saints. Rebar put his arm over my shoulder. I hadn’t shaken anybody. He stooped to bring his face closer to mine and said, “Where I was, we had big rooms and new carpets. We had coffee machines.” His big feet swung out, ready to knock things down.

I heard my name again, in a whisper: Van-ess-a, Van-ess-a… It was under the swish of clothes and the wheels of the carts. Rebar’s coat sleeve rustled against my ear.

Tino skipped the reception desk.

“You been here before?” Rebar asked me.

“I was born here, but never been back.” The hospital was its own world, all clean, creased green uniforms. Aluminum carts, Formica. It was a different place from the world outside. In the hospital, pretty much I didn’t know anybody.

Rebar, Tino, and me-we were a walking cloud of tavern air, smoke, and beer breath. I reached a hand, laced one finger through Tino’s belt loop.

Vanessa.

I heard my name in the squish of shoes on hard linoleum, and the breath of coats as they exhaled. This time, though, when I turned, it was real. It was Mrs. Petoskey, our old grade school teacher. “Vanessa.” She said it.

She was in scrubs.

Rebar, Tino, and me, we stopped together. I said, “Hi.”

Mrs. Petoskey said, “Good to see you. How’s your mom?”

I shook my head. Brushed my hair out of the way. My mom? I didn’t know. I said, “Fine.”

Mrs. Petoskey smiled.

I said, “Still in the slammer.” Tino laughed, flashing his gapped teeth like it was a joke, and the funny thing was, it wasn’t. Mrs. Petoskey moved some tubes around on her cart. I said, “Meth charges.” Then I asked, “You don’t teach school?”

Mrs. Petoskey said, “No, well, things change.” And she waved a hand over her cart, pulled on a face mask, and pushed on through a set of swinging doors. “Take care.” Her voice was muffled by the mask.

Tino said, “Didn’t she have cancer before?”

I didn’t remember, but she probably did.

Eileen was in bed, watching TV, same as everyone in every dank hole of a tavern all over town. Her head was shaved and bandaged. Her face was puffy. She’d put on makeup and it sat like paint over her drained skin.

I said, “They told me there was a dead hooker in here.”

Eileen said, “Thanks a lot. Got years ahead’a me.”

I said, “Isn’t that how every story goes?”

I gave her a kiss on her pale forehead. I wasn’t glad to see her, but that wasn’t her fault. She was the only patient in a room with two beds, wearing a powder-blue hospital gown. She leaned against pillows.

“’S good to see you,” she said. Her voice was slow and stuttery.

Tino pulled a can of beer from his paper bag.

Eileen asked, “How ’bout a cig-rette?” There were two No Smoking signs.

Tino pushed the door closed. I sat on the windowsill. Rebar leaned against the wall too close beside me. When Tino passed around the rest of the six-pack, I said, “This man’s got the shoes and the booze.” I wouldn’t’ve said it without a few drinks in me already, but I wanted a little space. To set Rebar back. I ran a hand over Tino’s shoulders, that bony armature of a human.

Rebar looked at the shoes, his shoes, on Tino’s feet, and he took a beer.

I said, “What about your bracelet?”

“I’ll try not to sweat.” Rebar tipped the can. He drank like drinking was breathing, like he’d been held under water and here was his can of air.

“Rebar just got out of the other one. On the hill,” Tino said.

“No kiddin’?” Eileen lit a cigarette, keeping an eye on the door. “Haven’t ’moked all day.”

“The alarm’ll go off,” I said.

“What’ll dey do if dey catch me-frow me out?” This was the lisp of her stroke, her brain stutter like a car with sugar in the tank.

I sat on the empty bed. Tightened my rain coat around me in case some fire alarm sprinklers went off. “What the hell happened?”

Eileen said, “Went out for drinks after work… my hands started feelin’ weird.”

Tino said, “Must’ve felt pretty weird if they brought you to Emergency.”

I felt my own hands, imagining my head as light, losing blood and circulation. I looked for Ray at the door, waited for the alarm to scream. I was ready to skedaddle.

“It was,” Eileen said. “Cut my head open like dis.” She drew an invisible L on the bandage, down from the top and across one side.

Rebar said, “How many channels you get?”

The dark circles under Eileen’s eyes made her beautiful, like a face-lift patient or a drug addict in treatment. She was being taken care of, and that meant cared for. The blue hospital robe rested against her skin at her clavicle in a way that said fragile and yet still living, meaning strong. Who would’ve known light blue and bandage white could be so dreamy?

I said, “You’re gorgeous.”

She patted the bed beside her. I lay down, watching out for tubes and her food tray. She said, “You know, Ray doesn’t talk about you at all.”

“Music to my ears.” I sipped my drink. Tapped the can.

Tino and Rebar watched TV like TV mattered.

She said, “I mean, he’s doing it on purpose. Like if he said your name, it’d all come back…”

My nail polish was chipped red. I chipped it off more, letting red flakes rest on Eileen’s white sheets.

She whispered, “If you wanted Ray back, you could do it.”

I said, “Don’t worry. I don’t take anything that doesn’t belong to me.”

“Since when?”

“Since now, okay? He’s yours.” My purse was bulging with the ashtray, the salt shaker, who knows what else.

Rebar crumpled his empty can. He made it small, and put it in his coat pocket. Tino hit the remote, changed the channel.

Rebar said, “Hey, who’s the asshole?”

Tino waved the remote, raised his hand. Asshole: present and accounted for.

I said, “You going to let him get away with that?” Like it mattered.

Rebar let the TV be his pacifier, eased into a new channel.

Tino changed channels again. I got up, off Eileen’s bed. I put a hand on Rebar’s arm, said, “Keep a level head.”

Rebar said, “What’re you, some kind of counselor?” He ran his fingers through my hair.

“I’ve got a few good tips.”

He let his fingers latch on, tug, and he laughed, like a joke, but he pulled my head back and my neck gave in so easily, Rebar’s face was close to mine. My hair was long, he held it, then he let go.

I was done there.

Time to go home, pack, get out of Rebar’s shack in the warehouse district. I said, “You need to manage yourself.”

And I moved away, behind Tino, behind Eileen’s bed, far from Rebar’s reach. I ran one arm over Tino’s shoulder and said, “Those shoes suit him better anyway. Don’t they?”

It wasn’t the shoes. It was everything. Rebar was a loaded gun.

“Have another beer.” I tossed one of the last two to Rebar. “Calm down. I’ll be back. Bathroom.” I shook the nearly empty can in my hand.

Eileen said, “Use mine.” She pointed to a door off the side of the room.

Eileen’s bathroom was small, like a bathroom on the back of a Greyhound, only clean. Everything was made out of stainless steel and pressed board. I looked for signs of a hidden camera in the ceiling. Maybe a hospital kept watch in stray corners. What did I know? A second door on the opposite side of the toilet’s small space meant a nurse or another patient could walk in, and I was afraid I’d touch something meant to stay clean. I wasn’t drunk, but was on my way, and drunk was where I’d rather be.

When I stood to flush, I saw I’d peed in an aluminum pan meant to catch a urine sample. The pan hung inside the toilet bowl. I’d peed in Eileen’s collection cup. For all I knew, Eileen’s pee was there too. I hadn’t looked first, and wouldn’t touch it afterwards. Eileen’s urine and mine, they’d go to the lab together.

Then I heard Ray. His hoarse voice. I heard him in the hall. He knocked on the door to Eileen’s room. He yelled, “Eileen? Baby? I’m here.” I didn’t run the water. I listened.

Tino yelled back “Baby, we’re all here.”

Eileen said, “Come on in, sweets.”

I listened for my own name, Vanessa, but didn’t hear it now. MEN WHO FATHER CHILDREN LIVE HERE. I read the words across the bathroom’s blank wall, saw those lines and jagged angles. The last time I’d seen Ray, he’d given me three hundred bucks and walked me to the Lovejoy clinic. What I didn’t tell him back then was, I’d already lost his kid. He left me on the corner, bleeding in ways he didn’t know anything about, with a pocketful of cash. Now he was back.

I tipped my beer can upside down over the urine collection tray, then put the can on the floor and crushed it.

On the other side of the door, Ray said, “Bushmills. Excellent stuff.”

Eileen laughed, said, “Blood thinners and painkillers.”

Rebar was a soft murmur at the far wall, saying things I couldn’t hear.

I turned the handle on the second door. The hallway was out there. I could walk out and keep going. I had my coat. We hadn’t gone so far I couldn’t walk home.

I leaned into the mirror, fixed my lipstick. Rebar, on the other side of the door, said, “You think you’re some kind of fucking comedian?”

Now Ray was the murmur I couldn’t hear. If Rebar was drinking Bushmills, let them be Christ crucified. I wasn’t going back.

The ashtray in my purse was like brass knuckles. Solid, hard, and beveled.

There was nothing in the bathroom worth anything unless I needed a plastic yellow pitcher or a roll of toilet paper. I wanted a powder-blue robe. A souvenir. A robe soft and sweet as pot smoke in cold air.

I found a place where the counter opened from the top. I opened the piece of hinged pressed board, and down below was a dark hamper. Linens. There was the peeping corner of a robe. I reached in. I’d take one.

On the other side of the wall Tino said, “Where’d Nessa go?” There was my name.

“She’s here?” Ray said.

I could leave. Leave Ray, the one man I wanted to stay with. Leave Rebar, who I couldn’t get away from. And then there was Tino. There was no place far away enough.

I closed my fingers around a robe in the hamper. When I lifted the cloth, there was the blooming flower of watery bloodstains. Maybe it was Eileen’s blood. Inside the hamper, instead of clean pillowcases and sweet robes, there was a pile of bloodstained sheets, towels, and robes twisted and tangled. The hospital linens were thick as bodies. They were a pool of what’s left after you slice open a brain, arms and legs, hearts and lungs, clamp a vein shut. They were soaked in all that life, intertwined.

I dropped the bloody robes. Washed my hands. I wasn’t getting anything here.

I went back in Eileen’s crowded room. I leaned against the bathroom door. “Ray,” I said.

Ray looked at me. He looked me up and down, took me in with his eyes, and when he did, it was like he was stealing something. Something I didn’t want to give up.

I reached for Tino. I gave him the longest, deepest kiss I could. I let his lips crack against mine, let his blood seep, so full of salt, find its way to my mouth. I ran a hand over his hair. I breathed in Tino, drank his sweat and salt and alcohol, and he gave in. He put a hand to the curve of my back, put a cold beer to the side of my neck.

Because when there’s nothing else, there’s comfort in skin.

I had barely pulled away before there was the crack of Rebar’s fist, Tino’s tooth breaking. Tino fell backwards, hit his head on a steel tray on the way down. It was that car wreck all over again, like metal on metal. Eileen screamed. She screamed, and flung an arm so fast, her IV pulled out. Blood ran from her arm where it tore. It marked the white sheets.

“Now whose the friggin’ asshole!” Rebar yelled. He yelled at Tino on the floor, and at his own shoes. But then his face went white, his knuckles red. He pulled back. He’d lost it. He knew he’d lost. He knew the answer to his own question. And Tino didn’t get up. I kneeled, and called his name.

I said, “Get a doctor.”

Ray was too stoned to move fast.

Eileen hit the buzzer on the wall beside her bed. Tino pooled a slow leak of blood on the floor.

When the cops got there, they’d cleared the room out. Tino was in Emergency. Rebar was in a cop car, on his way back to jail, the psych ward, or Hooper Detox. I didn’t know which. Eileen had gone back into testing, something about blood pressure, busted veins. Only me and Ray stood in the hallway, answering questions.

A cop asked, “What’s the victim’s name?”

I said, “Tino Schmino.”

He said, “Tino Schmino? What’s that, a joke?”

“It’s for real. His folks were Pig Latin, maybe. I never could figure it out.”

He said, “Listen, lady, we’re not playing. If your pal doesn’t come out of that sleep, somebody’ll be looking at murder.”

I said, “That’s the name I knew him by, the name he gave me. If there’s more to it, get one of your gumshoes to sort it out.”

He said, “Tell me what happened.”

I said, “I have no idea. We were all getting along famously. I stepped into the ladies’ for powder.”

Eventually they left me and Ray there, outside Eileen’s room.

I said, “Tino’s a good man.”

Ray said, “You always have been an idealist.”

“What do you mean?”

He said, “A good man? There’s no such thing.”

I shrugged. “It’s just you and me now.”

“Is that what you wanted?” He reached out, ran a calloused hand over my cheek.

I said, “I don’t ask for anything, you know that.”

“But you want something, don’t you?”

Rebar’d be back in the slammer for a good long time. Tino, who could say. I leaned against the doorway. “There’s one thing I want.”

Ray looked at me. I reached out, brushed his hair out of his eyes, let him catch my hand and hold it.

“Come with me, Ray, back to my place.” I wouldn’t have to pack for a good long while, now. “The one thing I want is to not be alone, not again, not tonight.”

COFFEE, BLACK BY BILL CAMERON

Seven Corners

Twenty-five years a cop, seven working homicide, and this is what I’ve come to: staking out Starbucks in the middle of the night in the hope of catching a vandal in the act of bricking the windows. Welcome to retirement. I’m parked in the shadows outside the food mart at Seven Corners, a tangled confluence of streets at the southeast edge of Ladd’s Addition. Starbucks is across Division, part of a corner development that includes a day spa, a pasta restaurant, and a cramped parking lot apparently designed in anticipation of the oil bust. Three nights, and the most exciting thing I’ve seen so far is a half-naked couple humping in the cob outside the kitchen shop on the opposite corner. I snapped a few pics, but even with the shutter wide open, it’s going to take someone with more Photoshop voodoo than me to make the shots Internet ready.

Just after midnight, as I’m thinking about taking a piss behind the dumpster next to my car, I catch sight of a figure approaching down 20th. He high-steps across the parking lot, elbows flared, as if he learned his ninja moves off Cartoon Network. Jeans, black hoodie pulled tight around his face, medium height, medium build. Cigarette held behind his back, a smoldering tail light. About what I expected, some nitwit tweaked on vodka-’n-Red Bull who thinks he’s striking a blow against insatiate corporatism.

I slip out of my car and rest the long lens on the roof, sight through the camera’s LCD. The light isn’t good, a silver-jaundiced mix of mercury vapor and sodium streetlights, sky-glow, and the gleam from the quickie mart. It’s adequate. I’m not shooting art photos. I just want to capture an identifiable face.

As I snap the first pic, I hear the scrape of a shoe and turn as a broad, dark shape swoops across the roof of my car. I duck, but not fast enough. Fabric nets my face and shoulders. Hands grab me from behind, shove me hard against the car. A sound whuffs out of me, half shout, half gasp. I drop the camera and thrash, grab the cloth on my head, realize I’ve got the arm of a jacket. For an instant, I’m in a tug-o’-war, unable to see my opponent. Then the sleeve starts to tear and someone hisses, “Just leave it, doinkus!” The hands release me and I windmill backward onto my ass. As feet slap pavement, fleeing, I hear the sharp, brittle crash of breaking glass.

I shout, yank the jacket off my head. My assailants are gone, the camera with them. No sign of the ninja either, but across the street I see a fresh lattice of cracks in one of Star-bucks’ oversized windows.

My employer is an insurance company, a circumstance I see as having the moral equivalence of working for the Russian mob. They’ve been buying glass at least twice a month since Starbucks went in. They bought me for five nights, about the cost of one double-paned window. The camera and lens have to be worth two windows easy, maybe three. Helluva lot more than me, anyway. I’m not looking forward to explaining to the adjuster how I not only failed to stop the vandal, but also let some miscreant make off with his company’s camera rig.

I drag myself to my feet and lean against my car. All I’ve got to show for myself is the jacket in my hands, and it’s nothing to get into a twist about. Blue, softer and darker than denim, white cotton lining, one sleeve half ripped off. I check the pockets, find a matchbox embossed with a logo-a pair of stylized legs suggestive of wisps of smoke-and a happy hour menu from the Night Light Lounge, a louche neighborhood joint two blocks down on Clinton. Stakeout blown, I figure it’s the only lead I got.

The Night Light isn’t my typical hangout. Smoky, dense with poseurs and reckless youth. Local art on the walls, dim light the color of old cream. I find an empty table next to the open door-a nebulous link to fresh air. Eventually a waiter approaches, drops a Bridgeport coaster on the table, and stands there. I think I’m supposed to order.

It’s the kind of joint that’ll sell you a Pabst Blue Ribbon for a buck and a half or a microbrew for five. I refuse to pay five bucks for a beer, but I haven’t absorbed enough Southeast Portland self-conscious irony to drink shitty beer from a can. I order coffee, black, and settle back to survey the crowd.

I see a lot of piercings and even more tattoos, some more artful than others. The best peek out, mostly hidden, around the edges of straining wife-beaters-de rigueur uniform for most of the girls on hand. The music is loud, the voices louder. Cigarettes trend toward Camel straights and American Spirits. With the state-wide smoking ban due in January, everyone around me seems desperate to take advantage of indoor privileges while they can.

I lock eyes with a woman sitting alone at a table in the middle of the floor. She swirls her beer. Not a PBR. She’s wearing a white camisole, Georgia O’Keeffe flower tattoo sprouting from her cleavage. Hair the color of Velveeta in a style bought off the cover of a grocery store tabloid. She’s a touch thick, not quite shed of her winter fat, but she wears her flesh with oblivious self-assurance. I have no doubt a man ten years younger than me and with a flatter belly could pay her bar tab and bed her the same night, with no idea of the problems she’ll cause over breakfast.

There’s no sign of my coffee, and rather than wait around I heave myself to my feet and amble over. Her gaze brushes across me, and I lift the jacket for her to see. With no sign of recognition, she says, “Join me?”

“Sure, why not?” I drop into the chair across from her.

Some guy approaches the table from the direction of the back room, sees me, looks confused. “Dude-”

She cuts him off. “It’s okay, Zeke.”

“But he’s sitting in my chair.” He’s wearing baggy shorts and an oversized Winterhawks jersey that conspire ineffectively to hide his bulk. Too big in every dimension to be my ninja-big enough, in fact, that if he decides to evict me I won’t have much to say about it.

But she just shoos him off with one hand. “Idiot.”

I have no opinion on that, but I am wondering why she gave me his seat.

She fishes through a purse next to her, hooks a pack of Parliaments. “Want one?”

I doubt she’ll be impressed with, No thanks, I quit. Almost anywhere else, the smoker would be on the defensive, but here in the Night Light, I’m the outsider. So I pull out the box of matches with the embossed legs and offer her a light. I can’t tell if her eyes linger on the matchbox, or if I just want them to. She inhales and says through smoke, “You’re the cop that’s been sitting outside Starbucks the last few nights.”

So much for my unobtrusive stakeout. Jesus. “Not a cop anymore. I’m retired.”

“Well, you’re not going to catch them.”

“Them?”

“The anarchists.”

“Anarchists.” I lean back in my chair. “You’re kidding, right?”

“That’s what they call themselves.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“Everyone around here knows the anarchists.”

I can’t tell if she’s shining me on. “Is your buddy Zeke one of them?”

That nets me a giggle. “Zeke is about as militant as a kitten.” She looks over her shoulder to where her hulking boyfriend hangs off the end of the bar. He’s drinking PBR. I can’t quite make out his expression in the dim light, but friendly it’s not. She waves at him, then turns back to me. “I think he wants his seat back.”

“Tell me where to find these anarchists and he can have it.”

“If you don’t know about them already, maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Now you gonna leave me blue-balled? You brought it up.”

She laughs again. “Okay, Mr. Not-A-Cop. You know the Red and Black?”

A café a block or so up Division from Seven Corners. Worker-Owned, proclaims a sign over the door. I’ve driven by, but never gone inside.

“You are kidding.”

“They have a problem with corporate coffee.”

“How about you? How do you feel about corporate coffee?”

She brushes invisible ash off her tattoo. “I can’t say as I’ve given it much thought.” Zeke joins us, puts his hand on the back of the chair like he’s worried I’m gonna walk off with it. I take the jacket and head out into the clear night air, curious about my new friend’s game. Never did get my coffee.

The phone wakes me too early, the adjuster at Mutual Assurance. He’s a big-voiced fellow named Hamilton whom I’ve never met in person. When I describe the events of the previous night, he says, “I apologize if I was unclear about this before, Detective Kadash-”

“It’s just Mister now.”

“Whatever. The point is we hired you to stop this crap.”

“I thought you hired me to photograph the ne’er-do-well doing this crap.”

“You didn’t manage that either.”

“This isn’t just a little vandalism. I got mugged, for chris-sakes.” “I thought you were a cop.” I can almost hear his smirk. He’s quiet for a moment. “Under the circumstances, I think we’re going to go in another direction.”

“What’s that mean?”

“There’s no need for you to continue the stakeout.”

I guess I can’t blame the guy, but I was counting on five nights. Nothing’s getting cheaper except the value of my pension. “Maybe I could look into these so-called anarchists, get a line on the camera.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mister Kadash. Just invoice me for three nights.”

I’ve never written an invoice. “I was just thinking-”

He hangs up without saying goodbye.

You’d think I’d know what I’m doing. Maybe I should take a class, learn how to do the job right if I’m going to pretend I’m some kind of private investigator. But that wasn’t in the plan when I retired. The plan was to hang out at Uncommon Cup, my friend Ruby Jane’s café, and drink coffee. The only reason I originally agreed to the stakeout was because of her. RJ has been trying to get me involved in freelance investigation since I retired, but it took a coffee case and a fat paycheck to get my attention. Turns out she knows a guy who knows a girl who sleeps with the manager of the Seven Points Star-bucks. Apparently my name came up at some java maven’s secret society meeting. Next thing I know, I’m salivating over how much insurance money five nights sitting on my ass is worth.

I figure the least I can do is let RJ know how it worked out.

I catch her at her Hawthorne location, a few blocks east of the Bagdad. The place is three-quarters full and hopping when I arrive, the air thick with chatter and the smell of coffee. Customers cluster around tables or hunker down in the soft, well-worn couches against the walls. I order a black coffee and grab a table to wait until Ruby Jane can take a break.

When she finally joins me, her eyes are bright. She doesn’t blink as she examines my own sunken orbs. Her chestnut hair is shiny and full, a round cap that seems suffused with its own light. “Rough night?”

“I look that good?”

“I’ve seen prettier road kill.”

I don’t argue. I give her a rundown of my evening: the ninja, the jacket, the stolen camera. When I get to the Night Light and the woman at the table, Ruby Jane interrupts me.

“Wait. Orange hair, mammalian, acts like she owns the joint?”

“Yeah, that’s her. Who is she?”

RJ is quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “Well, in point of fact… the competition. Her name is Ella Leggett.”

“Oh?”

“She’s got a shop at the other end of Hawthorne. Not direct competition, I guess-there’s no foot-traffic overlap. But, you know, another shop owner.” She purses her lips. “What did she say to you?”

“Not much. She turned me on to some anarchists.”

“Red and Black.”

I’m not surprised she knows about them, or about Ella Leggett. Ruby Jane makes it her business to stay informed about the coffee crowd in Portland.

“She thinks they’re responsible for the windows at Star-bucks.”

“She might be right.”

“Seriously?”

Ruby Jane shrugs. “It’s no secret George Bingham, the lead partner there, has been pissed ever since that Starbucks opened. He thinks it’s cutting into his business.”

“What do you think?”

“Well, the chains mostly appeal to a different kind of customer than indies do.” She tilts her head. “Maybe I’d spin a different tale if one opened across the street, but I think they mainstream the idea of quality coffee. That helps all of us.”

I recall Ella Leggett’s phrase. “Corporate coffee as a gateway drug.”

She grins. “Something like that.”

“But the anarchists don’t see it that way.”

“I’m not sure George qualifies as an anarchist. He and his team are just small-timers like me trying to make it work.”

“Still, you think they might take out their frustrations on Starbucks?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re just working to stay afloat. It’s something of an open secret the building owner wants them out so he can redevelop the whole block, add upper-story condos and high-end retail on street level. When you’re working your ass off just to make rent, there may not be a lot left over for extracurricular vandalism.”

“Chucking bricks wouldn’t take a big bite out of someone’s free time.”

“You’re the cop.”

“Ex-cop. Ex-investigator too.” I tell her about Hamilton letting me go. “I should have taken that kidnapped dog with the MySpace page you told me about instead.”

“What are you going to do?”

Ruby Jane once described me as having the determination of a rat guarding a chicken bone. I’m not sure she meant it as a compliment, but I take what I can get. “Gonna earn out my contract.”

I’m curious about Ella Leggett, but I decide to start with the Red and Black. It will probably turn out to be a dead-end; too easy, really, to blame the anarchists. But the sight of the glowering, dreadlocked fellow behind the counter, arms folded across his chest, suggests maybe I shouldn’t be so hasty.

“You must be George.” His stature matches my ninja, but I see no evidence of a hoodie.

“And you must be that asswipe who’s working for Star-bucks.”

Hamilton’s decision to can me is starting to look pretty good, considering how effective my attempt at a covert operation had been. I step up to the long, wooden counter. The wall behind looks like it belongs in a tavern, though on closer inspection the lined-up bottles turn out to be a variety of flavored syrups and cane sugar soft drinks. Booths run along the opposite wall. The place is half-full, the customers a mix of young hipsters and older tweedie types. Talking politics, I presume.

I want my usual-coffee, black-but I decide to test George and order a grande latte. “We call it a medium here.” I hand him a five, leave the coins behind when he slaps my change on the countertop.

“What’s your beef with Starbucks anyway?” My tone is chatty. “Besides the jargon, I mean.”

He turns his attention to my latte, disinterested in enlightening an asswipe. He fills and tamps the portofilter, pulls the shot with his hand on a knob. He moves with fluid confidence, no wasted motion. The espresso dribbling into the shot glass is the color of warm caramel.

He notices me watching him. “You know what we got here?”

“Cockroaches?”

“Ambience.”

I look around. Red stars on the wall, monochrome photos of Latin American men and women picking coffee beans. Ra-diohead posters, Che Guevara. The music is a hip-hop remix of a Ramones song.

“And you know what else?”

There’s no need for me to answer. He’s given this speech before.

“Free WiFi.”

I stare, bemused.

“At Starbucks, you have to sign up first, use one of their cards. They want your secrets before they let you surf.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t get it.”

“Maybe if I had a laptop.” Or secrets.

“Couple of times a week, I’ll see a guy sitting at one the picnic tables outside.” George steams milk as he declaims, rotating the frothing pitcher and checking the temp with the back of his hand. “On his comp, surfing the web. Drinking from a Starbucks cup.” He shakes his head as he adds milk to the espresso in a ceramic cup.

“I can see where that would piss you off.”

“Hell yeah, it pisses me off.” He presents the latte with a flourish, a work of art, the surface foam an artful swirl resembling butterfly wings. “Try it.”

I take a sip. It’s like drinking silk, as good as any latte Ruby Jane ever served me. Not that I’ll tell her that. “It’s excellent.”

“Exactly. That’s because I give a damn. Nothing’s automated here, none of that homogenous chic interior design. This is an authentic café run by actual people with genuine pride in our work. We don’t charge for our WiFi, but is it too much to ask that you at least buy your coffee from us when you sit down to use it?”

“You can’t possibly believe that Starbucks is sending them down here.”

“They’re part of a larger problem.”

“So you respond by busting out their windows.”

That earns me a derisive snort. “I’d just be doing what they want.”

“You think Starbucks wants you to break their windows?”

“They want the Red and Black to fail. Cast us as villains, turn the neighborhood against us. We don’t have a corporate behemoth propping us up during slow times. One bad month, and we could lose it all. They’re counting on that.”

I’m dubious. I remember what Ruby Jane said about the chains, how they cater to a different customer base. I doubt anyone at Starbucks loses any sleep over the Red and Black. They’ve probably got their hands full with McDonald’s. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t others who might benefit from R &B closing. The landlord, for instance, who maybe wants the space for something other than a coffee commune.

All that remains is to ask George where he was shortly after midnight last night. I don’t see the point. He’s not the tearful-confession type. I finish my latte and mutter a thanks, head for the door. “Come back anytime.” I’m tempted to take him up on it.

I find Hot Leggett’s Café in the ground floor of a building midway up the long block between Sixteenth and Maple on Hawthorne. Great spot for foot traffic from Ladd’s or the Buckman neighborhood to the north. The construction looks recent, reminds me of Ruby Jane’s description of what R &B’s landlord wants to do. I see evidence of a roof-top garden three stories above, espalier pears growing along the anodized balustrade at roof’s edge.

Inside, almost every table is in use by the kind of middle-years affluent types that seem to always find a way to spend half the morning kvetching over lattes in the neighborhood café. The furnishings are IKEA, the music reedy instrumental fusion, the aprons an ionizing shade of green. The only surprise is the Hot Leggett logo, a stylized demitasse emitting steam shaped like a pair of legs. I dig out the matchbox-the logo’s the same. I hadn’t noticed the cup the night before.

I don’t see Ella, but one of the baristas catches my eye. Zeke. He frowns, but finds a thin smile as I step up to the counter and surprise myself by ordering a small cappuccino.

“Dry or wet?”

RJ would approve of the question. “Dry.”

He takes my three bucks and gives me back a dime. The same at Uncommon Cup would be forty cents less, but then Ruby Jane isn’t paying for chi-chi recent construction and eight hundred square feet of Swedish furniture.

Unlike R &B, the espresso machine is fully automated, bean to brew. A half-minute of grinding, bubbling, and hissing, then Zeke sets a to-go cup in front of me. Guess he doesn’t want me hanging around. I take a sip. It’s fine.

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

He looks confused a moment, then recognition hits him. “You mean my sister?”

“Ella is your sister?”

“You thought she was my girlfriend?” His laugh is scornful. Last night he was the idiot; this morning I am.

“Either way, is she here?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“You mind if I ask you some questions?”

“I don’t know anything about the broken windows.”

“What about this?” I show him the matchbox and he sniffs.

“I don’t know why we have those. We’re nonsmoking.”

“Ella’s not nonsmoking.”

“It’s still a stupid thing to spend money on. This isn’t a bowling alley.”

Color dots his cheeks. He’s clearly not on board with the Leggett legs matchboxes. But when I tell him where this one came from, his face goes carefully blank. “That could be any-one’s.”

“I’m sure.”

“We give them away.”

“What size do you wear anyway? Jacket-wise, I mean.”

I give him a hard stare, but he meets it without expression. I hear movement and a pair of women in hand-woven cotton blouses approach the counter, their salty hair pulled back with contrived insouciance. They smell like skin cream. There are two other baristas, but Zeke says, “Excuse me. I need to help these ladies.”

Chalk that one up to fumble-tongued luck. It never occurred to me to check the jacket’s size. Some investigator. But it’s still in my car, and upon inspection I can see it’ll never contain Zeke’s beefy shoulders. Probably fit Ella just fine though.

I return to Uncommon Cup. Ruby Jane is working the counter, so I show her the jacket. “Would you wear this?”

She shrugs. “Maybe, though it’s a men’s cut and I prefer my clothing not to hang in tatters. Why?”

“I’m still working things out. Do you mind if I use your computer?”

She directs me to her little office in the back. Within a few minutes I learn that the owner of record of Hot Leggett’s Café is Leggett Partners LLC-company officers, Ella and Zeke-while the business license for the Red and Black is held by one George Called Bingham, whatever the hell kind of middle name that is. No wonder he’s an anarchist. Leggett Partners owns a scattering of small businesses and mixed-use buildings around Southeast Portland, a humble empire. That gives me an idea, but it turns out R &B’s building is owned by a real estate holding firm out of L.A. It will take more digging to discover what connection, if any, exists between the holding company and the crowd here in Portland. I have one more thought and check on the Starbucks landlord. Not Leggett Partners, not the L.A. company, but a branch of the Schnitzner family, which seems to control half the commercial real estate in Portland. It’s hard for me to think they’d give a wet fart about the Red and Black.

Up front again, I ask Ruby Jane if I can borrow her car. Too many people know mine. I can tell she enjoys the idea that her old beater Toyota might be party to a caper. She tosses me her keys and a few minutes later I’m rolling past Hot Leggett’s. Zeke is still inside, working the counter. I loop through Ladd’s and return to Hawthorne a couple of blocks up. There’s a space on the street in front of an Ethiopian restaurant, close enough to see who comes and goes from Hot Leggett’s, not so close I’m likely to be noticed. Of course, with my recent track record, I probably shouldn’t get too cocky.

This stretch of Hawthorne isn’t as busy as the run nearer to 39th, but in recent years as more shops and restaurants have gone in, foot traffic has increased. Hot Leggett’s is getting its share, as well as the froufrou ice cream shop and the furniture boutique adjoining. A loading zone in front of the boutique allows me an unobstructed view. On the backseat, I find a two-week-old edition of the Mercury, Portland’s hipster alt weekly, and settle in for a wait.

An hour into my vigil, the paper’s snark exhausted, a white Prius stops in the loading zone. Ella jumps out and trots around to the passenger side, gesticulating toward the café. I start the car. As she climbs back into the Prius, I hear her shout, “Hurry the hell up, idiot!”

Zeke storms out of the café, carrying a nylon duffel bag in one hand and flipping Ella off with the other. He gets behind the wheel, and an instant later bounces Ella’s head off her headrest as he peels out. I keep a couple of cars between us as we head down to Powell and then across the Ross Island Bridge. Traffic bunches us up through the south edge of downtown until the Sunset Highway, but they don’t seem to notice me. Ten minutes later we take the Sylvan exit, make a couple of turns, then park in the lot outside an anonymous office building. Three stories of glass and stucco hunkered below an ivy-clad hill. I wait until they’re inside, then head for the foyer. No sign of them, but a quick scan of the building directory gives me a pretty good idea of where they’ve gone.

Suite 210, Mutual Assurance of Oregon.

Mutual Assurance is a single large room, a cube farm. From the landing, I can see the front desk through glass double doors, no receptionist. A sign on the counter next to a telephone reads, Press 1 for deliveries. I don’t plan on making a delivery, though if my guess about what’s in Zeke’s bag is correct, I might make a pickup.

I hesitate, then figure I got nothing to lose and push through the doors. It’s hard for me to picture Ella Leggett with her orange hair and tattoo in this leaden space. The air is heavy and cold, the sounds of white-collar work deadened by the B-flat hum of fluorescent lights and acoustic ceiling tiles. At first, I don’t see the siblings, but then I glimpse their heads moving among the cubicles off to my left, a third figure-a man-with them. I tack right, keeping them in sight as I mosey along the outside wall with forced nonchalance. I pass a number of occupied cubes, but no one speaks to me-well-trained to avoid questions or, heaven forbid, confrontations.

The trio stops at a cube, huddles together to confer. I watch, hands folded in front of me. A woman catches my eye from a nearby cubicle, and I stare back until she drops her gaze. Maybe she’s afraid I’m there to downsize her.

After a moment Ella raises her voice, but all I can make out is a petulant squeak. Zeke throws up his hands, semaphore for Calm the hell down. When the three return the way they came, I scoot up the passageway between cubicles from the opposite end, stop when I see the nameplate affixed to cube wall fabric. N. Hamilton, Adjuster.

The camera, long lens attached, rests on the desk. My first instinct is to grab the whole rig, but then I realize there’s no need for felony theft when a misdemeanor will do. I slip into the cubicle and open the back of the camera, pop out the CompactFlash card. When I step back into passage, hands in my pockets, the man I assume is Hamilton is coming toward me.

“Can I help you?” Definitely the adjuster’s voice from the phone. He’s an unremarkable specimen, round head, brown sidecar hair, suspicious eyes.

“Restroom?”

He looks into his cubicle, seems relieved. Like I could hide the camera in my sock. Or maybe he was afraid I took a dump on his chair. “It’s out on the landing.” He points with his chin. “To your left.”

He has no idea who I am. Something to be said for doing business strictly by phone.

Back at Ruby Jane’s, I hand her the camera card, ask her if she can download the pics.

“Easy peasy.” She leads me back to her office and plugs the card into the CF jack on her computer. After a moment, a blank window appears on the monitor. Ruby Jane shakes her head.

“There’s nothing there.”

I sit back. It only makes sense they already downloaded the pictures.

“Don’t panic.” RJ snatches the card. “This is a coffee shop. If there isn’t a geek sitting out there right now, there will be before the afternoon is over. I’ll find someone who can undelete whatever was on here.” She leaves me there, stewing in my own techno-cluelessness.

I turn to Google, hoping to redeem myself by trolling for background info among the dot-govs. An hour later, about the time my eyes are boiling out of my head from reading too many poorly formatted web pages, RJ is back with the flash card and a CD. “There were a lot of fragmented files, but we were able to recover some photos from a couple of days ago with intact metadata and one picture from last night.” She inserts the CD into her computer, and this time the window opens populated with thumbnails.

The first dozen or so are of the couple in the cob across from my stakeout. I remember when they started building these cob structures around town, oddly shaped public benches tarted up with ceramic-shard mosaics and glaze. Some guy appeared at my door one day, all breathless as he explained that I, too, could join the cob revolution and transform my front yard into a community living room. I live in the kind of neighborhood where people grow grapes and sweet corn in the parking strips, so a mud-and-straw bench with a thatched awning wouldn’t draw a second glance. But when it became clear I’d be responsible for construction and materials, I told the guy to go sell crazy somewhere else.

Others don’t share my reticence, including the folks who run the kitchen store across from Starbucks. And amazing to an old curmudgeon like me, people actually use the cobs-and not just my humping couple.

As I’d suspected, the photos are murky, but I can make out the guy leaning back on the cob bench, the woman straddling him. Their faces are in a shadow, but that doesn’t really matter. Even in the dark the radioactive cheez framing the woman’s head is unmistakable. I click through the images. In the last, the couple has turned to face the camera. On to me.

I click again and there’s the ninja in front of Starbucks. Better light, better focus. Hair hidden by the hoodie, but it doesn’t matter. The face is clear enough.

“What do you want me to do?” RJ asks.

“Fire up the printer. I got some calls to make.”

I catch Hamilton at his desk, which saves me the trouble of shakedown via voice mail.

“What can I do for you, Kadash?” No Detective, no Mister. His tone suggests it had better be nothing, but I disappoint him. I tell him to meet me at the Night Light at 6. “Ella can tell you where it is.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Don’t be coy.” I hang up without saying goodbye.

The Night Light’s main area is smoke-free until 10, so I’m not surprised to find the gang tucked away in the back room. Zeke sits in the rear of the circular booth, taking up space and refusing to make eye contact. Ella is to his left, a beer in front of her and a smoldering Parliament in her hand. Hamilton sits hunched to Zeke’s right, nursing something urine-colored and on the rocks. When I arrive, Ella blows smoke my way. I slide in next to Ham.

I wonder if the coffee I ordered last night will finally appear. “Should we get appetizers?”

Hamilton isn’t in the mood. “Get to the point.”

I chuckle and toss the CF card onto the table, along with some printouts from Ruby Jane’s inkjet. In the first, Ella’s face peeks out from inside the ninja hoodie. In the others, her hair shines out from the cob like a flame.

“What kind of a perv are you anyway, taking pictures of people like that?”

If Ella expects me to blush, I’ve got news for her. “I’m not the one screwing in the community’s living room.”

She looks like she wants to argue, but Hamilton is on point. “You were supposed to be watching Starbucks.”

“Is that you?” I tap the silhouette of Ella’s cob partner, then drop another sheet of paper on the table before he can answer. Hamilton snatches it up. He can read, but I don’t want to leave the others hanging. “Quotes from a half-dozen glass vendors to replace the window broken at Starbucks last night. You might notice a number there from Allied Commercial Glass.”

“So?” Hamilton says, but Zeke is shaking his head, disgusted. I’m warming to the great oaf.

“It’s a lot less than the insurance payment you authorized to Allied for that same window earlier today.”

Hamilton and Ella exchange looks. I can see the wheels spinning, the hamsters scrambling. “You requested these quotes?”

I nod.

“There was probably more to the job than you realize.”

What Hamilton doesn’t know is I had help with the quotes. RJ’s friend of a friend, the Starbucks manager, has been dealing with these broken windows for years. He knows exactly what’s involved in the job.

Ella swallows beer, breathing smoke into the glass. I wonder if she’ll give up cigs when the big ban kicks in next year. She doesn’t strike me as one to go down easy.

“All you had to do was watch the store for five nights,” she says, “and then get paid.”

“Sure, help you guys cover your ass with a little sham due diligence for Mutual Assurance management. Almost worked too, especially with you feeding me crap about a coffee war. If not for these photos, I never would have guessed you were running a low-rent insurance scam, arranging to overpay a Leggett Partners glass company to repair your own vandalism.” And if the Red and Black happened to go down in the blowback, a Hot Leggett’s could anchor redevelopment there quite well. I don’t want to get into speculation, though, nor my suspicion that the scam is running at more than just Seven Points Starbucks. “What I am curious about is what the hell you were doing in that cob.”

“She wanted to spy on you.” Zeke’s voice has a bitter edge. “She thought it was funny. It never occurred to her you’d turn the camera on her.” He drops his chin. “You stupid bitch, I told you to stay away from this guy. But no, you and doinkus here”-he thrusts a thumb at Hamilton-“have to go draw his attention. And that retarded stunt last night… well, he ended up with the pictures anyway, didn’t he?”

That shuts everyone up. Ella stubs out her smoke. Zeke fumes into his chest. Hamilton picks up the CF card, gazes at it with a rueful smile. “So, what do you want, detective?”

Detective. I’m back on the case.

When I was still a cop, that question wouldn’t have even come up. My job was to make cases, not express personal desires. But now I’m a guy living on a barely sufficient pension, without prospects. I don’t give a shit about their scam. “I’ll settle a full five night’s pay, and the promise you’ll throw me a little work every now and then.” I look Hamilton in the eye.

“And I’m telling you right now, I don’t write invoices.”

GONE DOGGY GONE BY JAMIE S. RICH & JOËLLE JONES

Montgomery Park

VIRGO BY JESS WALTER

Pearl District

My side of the story… you want my side of the story?

That’s funny. The suits at the newspaper said the same thing when they fired me-that I should give my side of the story.

As I usually do, I chose to say nothing, and the next day the Oregonian ran its “Public Apology to our Readers” full of righteous puffery about how I “acted maliciously and recklessly,” how I “broke the sacred trust between a newspaper and its readers.”

Well, here we are again… someone pretending to want my side of the story, as if the truth were a box that you could simply flip over when you want another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, no truth.

We both know you don’t want my side of anything. You don’t want to understand me, you don’t want to know me, and you sure as hell don’t want to feel what I felt.

This is what you really want to know: Why did he do what he did?

Fine. You want to know why I did it? I did it to let her know how much she meant to me. That’s why I did it, all of it-for her.

This all began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath.

I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” I gathered my things. Carried four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards down to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw… him.

Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up 21st like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.

He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. A sous chef at Il Pattio, Mark Aikens was one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy… listened. It had grown dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on-the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: she’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort. But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time.

I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.

The light went out.

I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was… they were…

I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him awhile to get his prosthetic on.

When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

“You always did make people nervous,” my father said. Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father-son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I said.

“Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

Before all of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work. As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day, but my favorite (because it was Tanya’s favorite) was “Inside Living”-page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O-with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with the simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

Now, to some, I may indeed be-as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me-strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence, but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets. And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

“Dante’s.”

“Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

“I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

“Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

“Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

“Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

“That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

“I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”

This was true. I do love celebrities.

“Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”

It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day… she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to… you know, get busy, bump uglies, bury the dog in the yard… was when she got five stars on her horoscope.

Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars and I changed it to five.

So sue me. It didn’t even work.

Obviously, though, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on and not launched my horoscope warfare had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

“Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

“Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

“There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

“Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

“Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

“Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days. “Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,” Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to: “One star: watch your back.” It was glorious, imagining her read that.

Horoscopes are cryptic and open-ended: “You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.” In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic Sharon Gleason, I wrote, “Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.” For the arrogant sports columnist Mike Dunne, “Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.” For the icy young records clerk Laura: “Cancer. Four stars: would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes (thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor… me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment-“One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal… One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath… One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was Jerk and changed the clue to Mark Aikins, e.g. Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pat-tio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked, having symptoms consistent with salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.

He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma-an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

My father was a Virgo.

In their glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.

In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read the heartfelt plea, “Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry.”

Dad pulled out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.

And Tanya? Even after the story in the Oregonian-from which I hoped she’d at least glean the depth of my feelings for her-I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.

This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to become sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I really was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.

There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “a kind of public stalking.” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’m crazy. And maybe I am.

But if you really want my side of the story, here it is:

Who isn’t crazy sometimes? Who hasn’t driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn’t haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn’t toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence e-mail, watched the phone praying that it will ring; who doesn’t lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?

I mean, Christ, seriously, what love isn’t crazy?

And maybe it was further delusion, but as I sat in the car down the block from our old building, I was no longer wishing she’d take me back. Honestly, all I hoped was that Tanya at least thought of me when she read our page.

I really do think I’m better.

And so when I started the car to go home, and they crossed the street toward Tanya’s condo, I was as surprised as anyone to feel the ache come back, an ache as deep and raw as the one I felt that night in late October when I first saw the lamp go out.

I told the other officer, the one at the scene, that I didn’t remember what happened next, though that’s not entirely true.

I remember the throaty sound of the racing engine. I remember the feel of cutting across traffic, of grazing something, a car, they told me later, and I remember popping up on the sidewalk and scraping the light pole and I remember bearing down on the jutting corner of the building and I remember a slight hesitation as they started to turn. But what I remember most is a spreading sense of relief that it would all be over soon, that I would never again have to see the light come on in that cold apartment.

THE RED ROOM BY CHRIS A. BOLTON

Powell’s City of Books

Jacob Black catches the kid’s reflection in the window of the bookstore coffee shop and can tell right away he’s the one. He knows nothing about his potential client-the brief, terse e-mail exchange only led to Powell’s City of Books as the meeting place. Jacob IDing himself by the pile of books next to him: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The client picked the titles. Not exactly subtle.

The kid appears in the large doorway separating the Gold Room from the Coffee Room, wearing an oversized army coat with anarchy symbols and a giant messenger bag spattered with dried mud, carrying a dirt-crusted bike helmet, and whipping his head around like someone’s hollering his name. Sitting at the window despite a roomful of empty tables, Jacob follows the kid’s reflection in the glass and for a moment considers leaving the books and walking right the fuck out of there.

Jacob Black is used to trouble. A guy who finds clients by answering craigslist ads for obscure jobs like “cat walker” and “breast feeding for adults” deals exclusively with trouble and the sorts of people who deeply embroil themselves in it. To seek out the kind of person who knows about Jacob Black, and where to place the ad and what to put in it, requires a level of desperation that may cause cancer by close proximity. But this one-this kid in his early twenties, soft and clueless, a Reed College trust-fund brat who likes to dress up and pretend he’s living in the gutter-this blend of trouble smells too strong.

The kid finds Jacob before he makes up his mind. “Are,” he begins-but has to swallow, nearly chokes on it, and starts again. “Are you him?”

“I’m he,” Jacob says. “Sit down, you’re making the coffee nervous.”

The kid perches on the next stool and tries to size Jacob up. Jacob himself would admit he isn’t much to look at: a face that hasn’t seen a razor since Portland last saw the sun, T-shirt and khakis that look and smell like he yanked them from the bottom of his dirty laundry pile (which is, in fact, his only laundry pile), and a disheveled head of unruly hair that used to be dark blond but has turned muddy with gray.

“So, uh, what’re you exactly, like, a private detective?”

“I’m a guy who does jobs. You got one?”

The kid glances around, as though he could spot anything suspicious if it were there. “What’s your rate?”

“It varies.” The kid gives the coffee shop another scan and Jacob says, “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to tell me what the job is.”

The kid chews his lip, sucks it under his front teeth, chews some more. Finally he lets out the breath he’s been holding. “I got something that someone wants.”

“Don’t be specific or anything. Just give me lots of pronouns.”

He reaches into his army coat, produces a heavily wrinkled manila envelope with a small, square bulge only a few inches long. “It’s a videotape. Wanna know what’s on it?”

“Nope.” Jacob stands, launching the kid’s eyes, hands, his whole being into a frenzy of frantic motion. “You blackmailed some asshole, now you want me to be your bag man? Fuck off.”

“Five hundred,” he whispers in desperation. “Half now, half later.”

Jacob turns away, all set to walk and never look back. The kid reaches into the other side of his coat and flashes the cash. “I’m good for it.”

Jacob plops back onto his stool.

The kid spits out the rest in one breath: “There’s a reading upstairs, ten minutes. The guy’ll be in the audience. His coat’s folded up on the chair next to him, with the money under it. You sit in the next seat-take his coat, then leave yours in its place with the tape underneath.” The kid reaches into his messenger bag and hands Jacob a brown Members Only jacket. “That’s it. Come get your two-fifty.”

Jacob thinks it over. Plays it out in his head, looks for all the flaws, every conceivable way this goes sour. He finds a dozen in under ten seconds.

The kid presses: “No risk, either-it’s totally in public.”

“It’s a book reading. I’ll be lucky if we aren’t the only two people there.”

The kid counts out 250 dollars, slaps the cash into Jacob’s hands. “I’ll wait for you in the Mystery section. Who’s your favorite writer?”

“Michael Connelly.”

“That’s where I’ll be. You come find me, okay?” The kid is half-sitting, half-standing, one foot solid on the floor, both eyes scrutinizing Jacob. “Okay?”

He holds the envelope out. Jacob pockets the money, thinking about his empty cupboards back home, and grabs the envelope from the kid’s clammy fingers. Thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

Knowing full well it isn’t.

Jacob arrives a few minutes early for the event. He walks up three flights of stairs, marveling-as most do-at a four-story bookstore that encompasses an entire city block. Each room is color-coded, which either makes things easier or more confusing, depending on how readily you associate gold with genres like Sci-Fi and Romance, purple with Military History and Philosophy, and orange with Cooking and Business.

He remembers dating a woman who worked here back in the late ’90s, wonders if she’s still around. Her name lost to him. Probably wouldn’t recognize her anymore. Pierced, tattooed, dyed Goth hair, and a fondness for industrial wear back then; now she’s probably got a house, family, hybrid car, and those Mom jeans that turn a woman’s ass into a denim landing strip.

Jacob enters the Pearl Room wondering what’s “pearl” about it, why “pearl” and not “silver,” not that there’s any silver to speak of, either. A few rows of folding chairs fill the Basil Hallward Gallery next to the art books. A dais is set up beside a cart loaded with books to be signed-though, judging by the half-dozen people scattered about the seats, they won’t sell many copies tonight. Jacob glances at the author’s name-no one he recognizes-then pretends to be extremely interested in a 200-dollar book containing photographs of fat men in diapers.

He finds his mark instantly-a tall, muscular black man with curly hair cut close to the scalp and shoulders so broad and thick they need their own chairs. The guy sits in the back row, a high school letterman’s jacket neatly folded on the seat beside him. Tight short-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into faded blue jeans. Beige hiking boots. Cell phone in a holster clipped to a leather belt.

What interests Jacob even more is the man hovering by the shelves of remaindered books. Black leather jacket, T-shirt tucked into dark blue Levi’s, sunglasses resting on the back of his head. Military-style buzz cut and a thin mustache. And he’s “reading” an oversized book about Gustav Dore while discreetly scanning the room.

Jacob calmly descends the stairs and strolls back to the Gold Room. As the kid looks up from a used copy of The Clos-ers, startled, Jacob presses the jacket, the tape, and the cash into his arms.

“Turn around,” Jacob says. “Get the hell out of here. Don’t look back. This never happened.”

Jacob heads through the Blue Room toward the entrance. The kid is right on his heels, completely ignoring his advice. “What’re you doing? I told you, it’s easy, just two minutes and-”

“And I’m dogshit. Those are cops, kid. At least two, maybe more. But you knew that-that’s why you paid me. You are way out of your league. Walk away and hope they never find you.”

The kid lurches ahead, blocks Jacob’s path. “They pulled a Mexican out of his car and beat him.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“You don’t wanna see what they did to his wife.”

“I don’t wanna see what they’re gonna do to you. Because they’ll catch you. They’re police. Probably dumb police, since you caught them on tape-but you’re even dumber, so they’ll catch you.”

“You know CopStalker?”

Jacob nods, Of course. A band of “concerned volunteers” whose goal is to hold police accountable for their actions-or that’s how it started. CopStalker now mostly consists of bike messengers, anarchists, and indie media activists who need something to do while sober. They follow Portland’s Finest on their bikes, documenting every traffic stop and harassment of the homeless, then post the accounts on a website whose cluttered design and abbreviated text make it nearly impossible to decipher.

Fifteen years ago, Jacob would have been one of them.

“My girlfriend shot the tape,” the kid says. “She’s scared shitless-jumps every time the phone rings or someone knocks. I told her I’d take care of it.”

“So you blackmail cops. Brilliant.”

“Not for myself,” the kid says, sounding hurt. “For the victims. They’re too injured to work, they barely know English, and they’re terrified to leave their apartment. This is all they got.”

Jacob stares into the kid’s eyes, searching for a tell. The slightest hint he’s being lied to. If the kid isn’t giving him the truth, he’d make a killing in the World Series of Poker.

Jacob Black doesn’t possess what can be called a sense of civic duty. Nor much empathy. But years ago he had a badge, and then he didn’t, and the circumstances that cost him his badge suddenly feel too familiar.

He takes the bundle from the kid. “I sense the slightest fuck-up, I walk. You’ll never see me again.”

“Fair enough.”

Jacob takes his time going back. He glances at the journals tucked into the Mezzanine, then lingers in the True Crime section of the Purple Room. Little memories bobbing to the surface like bodies in the spring thaw. When he dated the woman who worked here-what the hell was her name?-he’d wait for her shift to end in a different room. Can’t recall if he made it to every room in the store before things ended.

Mostly they’d just fucked. Sometimes they smoked a joint in bed afterward and she told him stories about all the weird customer incidents at Powell’s. Mainly junkies in the bathrooms. Though there was the time someone found a homeless guy who’d climbed up one of the twenty-foot bookcases in the Purple Room and fell asleep on top until a manager heard him snoring. And the time a crazy woman tried to abduct a six-year-old girl, so the store went into total lockdown-no one allowed in or out-while the employees combed top to bottom, front to back, until they found the girl in a restroom stall.

When he heads back up to the gallery, a paunchy, bushy-haired cowboy in snakeskin boots is reading a poem about the desert being both his mother and his lover.

The black cop has never looked more out of place. Long, muscular arms draped across the seat backs to each side, he bounces one leg impatiently-a leg almost as thick as Jacob’s torso.

Jacob takes the seat next to the letterman jacket. The leg stops bouncing.

Shoulders keeps his gaze fixed on the dais, trying to appear interested, but his senses have clearly zeroed in on the man in the wrinkled T-shirt and khakis who dropped into the hot seat.

Jacob listens through another stanza. Pretends to glance at the art on the gallery walls, peripherally spotting Mustache as he crosses from the remaindered books to the info desk. A perfect spot to cut Jacob off from the stairs.

He waits. They wait.

The Poet Laureate of Somebody’s Backyard declares his yearning to make love to a cactus, and Jacob makes the switch. Scoops up the letterman jacket and in the same movement drops the Members Only one in its place. He’s up and away from the seats and heading for the stairs before he realizes what his hand knew at a touch-there’s no money under the jacket.

Mustache comes right behind Jacob, following him to the top of the stairs, when Jacob wheels around so suddenly they almost collide. Their eyes meet, and for a moment neither is sure what the other will do.

Jacob says, “Excuse me,” and steps around the cop. Walks across the floor, past the info desk with its narrow-eyed employee typing on a computer, and enters the Rare Book Room.

The ancient, balding custodian of this quiet, carpeted, precisely climate-controlled cell hunches over a book at his desk, folding Mylar over a dust jacket. He doesn’t seem to register Jacob’s arrival-nor, from appearances, much care about anything that doesn’t have brittle old pages and hand-woven binding.

Jacob browses a hundred-year-old atlas displayed on top of a waist-high bookshelf, allowing him to watch the door as Mustache comes in. Roughly as tall as his partner and just as wide, but with a case of beer where Shoulders has a six-pack. Mustache stands directly on the opposite side of the bookcase, hardly feigning interest in the musty tome he opens.

“Boy, I’ll tell you somethin,” he says. “Life, huh? Whole lotta foreplay, not a lot of fuck.”

Jacob glances at the book in Mustache’s hands. “Mark Twain said that?”

The cop lifts his dark eyes to fix an amused gaze on Jacob-not unlike a sadistic child pepper-spraying flies. “You know you got an empty jacket, right?”

“I don’t mind. It’s chilly out.”

“And I bet my buddy’s got an empty jacket too. So. How we both gonna get what we want?”

“We could swap pants. But mine’ll probably be loose in the crotch.”

“Can I help either of you gentlemen?” the guardian of rare books calls out, loud enough to communicate his disdain for human voices.

“Just browsing, thanks,” Mustache says. Then turns back to Jacob and says, in a softer whisper, “I know you’re not him. Just some idiot took a few bucks to make a handoff. I got no beef with you.”

“If you knew me, you might.”

“One-time offer. Now or never.” He reaches for the inside pocket of his leather jacket. Jacob tenses, and before he can recoil a brown paper bag lands on top of the bookcase. Thick, square-shaped, like a brick.

“I don’t mind spendin the money. I just don’t wanna give it to some shit-stain thinks he can screw me and my partner. Laugh about it with his retarded cronies on their stupid tiny bikes. That chaps my ass, man.”

“Mine too. I hate those little bikes.”

Jacob stares at the bag, so much thicker than the measly bundle in his pocket. His lack of civic duty coming back to him.

“The full amount,” Mustache says. “Twenty grand, all yours. Just give me the punk.”

Jacob’s gaze returns to the dark eyes. The amusement is gone, replaced by a barely contained fury that reminds Jacob why he changed his mind.

Mustache taps the bag gently, steadily. “You don’t gotta do nothin ’cept point him out. He’s here in the store, right? Wouldn’t be smart enough to meet somewhere else.”

Jacob shrivels inside. Now who’s the dumb one?

“Point me to him, take your money, go free and clear. No harm, no hassle. You don’t ever gotta know what happened to him.”

“Twenty grand, huh?”

Mustache nods confidently, his smirk returning.

“A man who’ll pay twenty might go fifty.”

The smirk dies. “You tryin to extort me?”

“You’ve already been extorted,” Jacob says. “I’m just haggling.”

Mustache slaps his hand over the bag, big enough to cover the entire brick. The smack it makes jars the custodian’s last nerve. “If you wish to converse,” he snaps, “there’s a coffee shop on the ground floor.”

“We’re talkin books!” Mustache says. Back to Jacob: “Don’t fuck with us. They’ll never find all your pieces.”

“Send Mr. Shoulders to an ATM. We can read to each other while we wait.”

The bag goes back into the jacket. “Money’s off the table. You had your chance, fuckface. Now you show us to him or we start breakin bones.”

Evidently not intimidated by the cop’s size and ferocity, the custodian of the Rare Book Room has shambled to their side and is about to utter another protest when Jacob turns to him, holding up the atlas he’s been thumbing. “I’ll take this one. Do you gift wrap?”

Jacob finds Shoulders standing guard outside the room, even less amused-looking than his partner. Mustache grabs Jacob’s arm, steers him toward the windows by the Photography section. “I got you a present,” Jacob says, handing him the atlas.

Mustache flings the book aside. “Your mistake is thinkin you’re safe long as you’re in public.”

Shoulders adds, “It’d be real easy to get you someplace private.”

“And then we’ll have some goddamn fun.”

“I can see you guys mean business,” Jacob says. “Final offer. You keep the book, I’ll take the money, and I’ll go set up an introduction with my client.”

Mustache and Shoulders bookend Jacob, glaring down at him from impressive heights. “You know what we are, right?” Shoulders says. “Fuck with us, you ain’t safe crossin the street. Ain’t safe in your home. From here on out, there’s no such thing as you bein safe, ever again. Got it?”

Jacob holds out his hand expectantly. Mustache looks at Shoulders, who nods, then Mustache takes out the money and fills Jacob’s palm.

Jacob goes downstairs, the cops trailing him-hanging back far enough to be inconspicuous to anyone who doesn’t know what to look for. Jacob pauses on the Mezzanine entrance to the Gold Room. Then he walks over to the Green Room, the front entrance.

Glancing around, Jacob notices the cops are tense, ready to spring if he even looks at the front doors wrong. Jacob, never very good at improvisation, tries to work out his next step.

He lingers by the best-seller shelves, peering around with a confused expression he hopes is halfway convincing. The cops don’t look convinced. They watch him with massive arms crossed in front of their huge chests, grinding their jaws.

Out of the corner of his eye Jacob steals glances toward the front doors. A constant stream of customers flows from the cashiers out onto the sidewalk, which is crowded with what appears to be a gang of suburban tourists. Mothers and their young children, mostly, perhaps wondering why anyone would make such a big deal about a bookstore.

Jacob considers his chances. He could bolt, catch the right moment, get a few people jammed between him and the cops. He might get away.

Then again, he might spend the rest of his life in a convalescent home.

He approaches the cops. “Not here.”

“No shit. So where is he?”

“We had a backup meeting place,” Jacob says, “in case either of us got nervous.” The cops look skeptical as Jacob leads them back to the Mezzanine, up the stairs to the Purple Room, and then a sharp left into the Red Room.

He pretends to pretend to browse the travel guides while looking around for a client who isn’t there. The cops might see right through this performance, but they’ll let it play out for a few minutes before their patience finally gives out. Jacob weighing his options, hoping a few minutes is enough time… but for what?

Across the room, he catches sight of a memory.

The young female employee with the tattooed arms slouching at the info desk reminds Jacob of the woman he dated. She could be her, frozen in time. He wonders how many twenty-something kids wander into this job with temporary expectations and stagger out years later, trying to recall where they’d misplaced their youth.

Celeste. That was her name-the one she gave Jacob, at any rate.

And now he remembers the way things ended. When she’d told him she was seeing someone else now. Jacob thinking, That’s fine, it’s just casual sex. Surprised to find himself lying awake in a bed that felt too big. Picturing some other guy touching Celeste’s tattoos in ways Jacob never would again. His hand stroking the roses twined around her calf. Lips caressing the blackbirds fluttering above the swell of her breasts. The Celtic knot on her upper arm expanding, contracting, expanding, shiny in her sweat, contracting again as she clings to his shoulders.

A lanky young man with limp black hair, who’s wearing eye makeup and tight jeans that proudly display his androgyny, leans on the info desk and the employee puts her hand gently on his forearm. She beams with an unguarded warmth that no one has directed at Jacob since he was their age. In return, Lanky affects a bored expression, acting like everything else in the room is more interesting than she is.

Jacob catches the cops’ eyes. Nods his head to the info desk.

Shoulders knits his brow with confusion.

Jacob nods emphatically, mimes “jacket” in his best attempt at charades, then indicates the inside pocket. Mustache eyes the studded jacket folded over Lanky’s arm, and starts toward him. Shoulders hesitates another beat, clearly thinking this doesn’t add up, but knowing better than to abandon his partner.

Jacob would love to stick around and see that asshole’s expression as these giants hook his arms in theirs, but schaden-freude is a luxury he can’t afford just now. He dashes back to the Purple Room, bounds down the stairs to the Mezzanine, runs across to the Gold Room-never move in a straight line when you don’t want to be followed-and hurries up the aisles.

He finds the kid standing at the endcaps, right out in the open.

Jacob grabs the kid by his elbow, steers him through the Blue Room as fast as they can hustle without looking too suspicious. He shoves the paper bag into the kid’s hands, talking right over his meek protests: “Get out of here. Get on your bike and ride your scrawny ass off. Keep off major streets, ride the wrong way down one-ways. Don’t go home till you know you weren’t followed.”

“Wait, I don’t-”

“Tomorrow you and your girl move to another city. Don’t tell your friends, don’t leave a forwarding address, and don’t come back.”

“Can’t we just-”

Jacob yanks the kid’s arm, hard. “You got all that?”

The kid nods, and as they proceed into the Green Room, he glances past Jacob and his eyes widen with alarm. Jacob doesn’t have to look, but he does, looks as he keeps moving toward the front entrance, sees the cops descend the steps from the Purple Room to the Mezzanine.

They spot him at the same instant. Both men start as if to run, but think better of it, fast-walking past postcards and books about Oregon. Huge legs clearing the short distance quickly.

Jacob shoves the kid toward the front doors, putting himself between the kid and the cops who are fast approaching. He flings himself at the info desk and the two managers chatting behind it. He doesn’t have to fake the urgency in his voice: “My son’s missing! He’s only six!”

One of the managers darts for the doors-just as the kid disappears into the night air. The other manager picks up the phone and her voice crackles over the PA system: “White Rabbit. We have a White Rabbit.”

“White Rabbit,” Celeste had explained to him once. “Y’know, like Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole and getting lost.”

Employees spring into action. Cashiers rush over from behind the counter to stand guard by the door, where the first manager has stopped a middle-aged woman and her son on their way out. “I’m sorry, ma’am, no one can leave just now. This should only take a few minutes.”

The cops stop short. Shoulders goes for his wallet, starts to say something, but Mustache grasps him with a firm hand. Shakes his head. Wrong place, wrong time to flash a badge.

Shoulders paces a small circle, seething, utilizing every ounce of self-control to keep from punching something, someone, anything.

Mustache turns to Jacob, that sadistic gleam back in his eyes.

Jacob is too busy describing his nonexistent son-and the balding, fussy old man he’d last seen talking to the boy near the Rare Book Room-to say anything to Mustache that would get him killed.

When the manager dashes off to share the description, Jacob leans toward Mustache. “Purple Room. On the far right after you get up the stairs. Up on the top shelf, you’ll find what you’re looking for. And maybe a sleeping homeless guy too.”

Mustache unfolds his arms, easing off his scowl a bit. “Think that’s it? You just walk away scot-free?”

“The kid’s gone-you’ll never catch him,” Jacob says, surprised to find he hopes it’s true. “And I’m not worth risking your badges. Just a bag man.”

Mustache scans Jacob’s face like he’s committing the details to memory. “Don’t be too sure,” he says. Then nods at his partner and they stalk away, Shoulders brushing past Jacob hard enough to knock him off balance. Jacob rights himself against the info desk, watches them take the steps to the Purple Room two at a time.

Jacob looks out the front doors and tells the manager standing guard, “Oh, there they are!” He points at the crowd of tourists milling outside-could be any of a half-dozen kids with their mothers. “Thank you so much,” he says, then calls, “Honey, over here!” as he blows past the manager and out the doors.

Thinking as he goes out: This really is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.