San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

Street court by Seth Morgan[12]

Outer Mission

The state of war with the Wah Ching mandated that the Sing brothers stay constantly on the move. To find them, Joe loitered in Chinatown Park, searching out one of their minions for instructions. There, dozing behind his pulleddown porkpie hat beneath the checker pavilion’s snapping pennants, the wizened pigtailed dopepeddler known only as Firecracker.

“Barkersan!” Firecracker cackled once Joe roused him from his stupor. Bright beady eyes laughed from a face like a desiccated apricot. “Doggone no see, long time.”

Hastily Joe asked where Joe and Archie Sing were to be found. Firecracker knew the Barker was trusted by the brothers and issued a convoluted set of directions. Thanking him, Joe halfturned to leave, then stopped, flinging back his head and puffing his cheeks disconsolately. Releasing his breath with a curse, he turned back.

“Front me a dime of your gunpowder, Firecracker.”

Surprise further wrinkled Firecracker’s face. He’d never known Barkersan to use coke. But his next knowing cackle guessed Joe had a good reason for wanting it now. With a motion subtle and fluid as the T’ai Chi performed by nearby youths in martial pajamas, Firecracker swept off his porkpie hat, plucked a plastic pane of white powder from its band, and palmed Joe a quarter gram.

The vast import warehouse near the piers at the foot of Telegraph Hill was owned by one of the brothers’ innumerable relatives. A loft that could be reached only through labyrinthine secret passages was on their rotation of hideouts.

“Heard you booked Rooski out of the Troll’s just before the cops nailed him,” said Joe Sing, the elder of the two almost identical Chinese brothers seated on futons facing Joe in the tan speckled light of bamboo blinds. Their tight facial skin was a luminous saffron not unlike the multitude of ceramic Buddhas sold below.

Joe sat crosslegged, facing them. “News travels.”

“Where you got him?” Archie asked.

“Stashed at a chick’s crib in the Tenderloin. She’s out running credit cards, he’s on a nod.”

“You figured what to do with him?” Joe Sing asked.

“Book his skinny red ass as far out of Dodge as I can.” Joe tipped his head. “You know the Fat Man’s porno movie palace on Jones?”

“Yeah, only I thought it shut down with the rest. You know, home videos, new blue laws.”

“The Kama Sutra’s about the last. The Fat Man only keeps it open for the betting bank he runs out of its basement. I’m gonna rip it.”

The elder Sing’s obsidian stare narrowed; the Barker wasn’t known for daring capers. “You taking down the Fat Man?”

Joe nodded. “Had the idea for months.”

“Dangerous dude to fuck with,” Archie observed.

“Not as dangerous as the cops if they get their hands on Rooski. I’m dogmeat then.”

It was Joe Sing’s turn to nod. “What are your drawings?”

The brothers listened with implacable half smiles as Joe outlined his plan. From below arose the sound of the engines and crashing gears of delivery trucks picking up orders. A large ceiling fan stirred the smells of sandalwood and cane, sawdust and varnish, and from somewhere frying fish.

“Right on Front Street,” Joe summed up. “Blast in big as Dallas, have Rooski cover the patrons while I throw down on whatever motherfuckers are in the basement.”

Joe Sing’s brow arched lazily, like a cat stretching. “You’re using Rooski?”

“Got to. Cant do it solo. And I need more firepower. I cant use this...” Joe withdrew the Browning from the back of his pants. “Rooski’s been dropping things lately and I cant risk the cops tracing this through the Troll to us.”

Joe Sing’s eyes vanished when he laughed. “We thought you might bring along the Troll’s piece to barter... You must have heard about... lunch at the Golden Boar yesterday.”

Joe grinned crookedly. He’d counted on the Sing brothers giving him the ordnance used in the restaurant massacre. It was a switch they’d pulled a year earlier. The Sings had knocked off a Republican campaign office fat with cash contributions. The next day Joe and another addict used the same guns and disguises to jack an abortion clinic overstocked with painkillers. Both were alibied for the hour of the others’ crime, flummoxing the cops.

Joe dry fired and shot the sliding bolt with a clang, then handed the automatic across. Archie Sing took it behind a screen and emerged with a slideaction, pistolgripped Mossberg Bullpup and a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard, a .38 favored by criminals for its trigger shroud, which prevented snagging on belts and clothing at critical moments.

“Just ditch em close to the scene.” Joe Sing’s eyes disappeared again.

Archie also handed Joe a paper sack. Peering in, Joe chuckled. He pulled out two rubber masks, the kind that pull down to cover the entire head. One was Ronald Reagan, complete with textured pompadour; the other Donald Duck, blue tasseled cap and all. At the sack’s bottom were other essentials: plastic wrist restraints, surgical gloves and tape, extra shotgun shells, wire cutters.

“I owe you guys one,” Joe said.

“No,” Joe Sing said. “We owe you.”

Joe gathered his booty and rose. “You guys figure you can find a party or something to go to around six or seven tonight?”

The Sing brothers nodded in unison.

“Playing against the Fat Man’s a dangerous game,” Joe Sing warned one last time, “and teaming with Rooski only lengthens the odds.”

“Aint no long shot, it’s my only shot,” Joe said with a peculiar laugh. He halted halfway through the beaded curtain, smiling slyly. He reached in the paper sack and lifted out the Reagan mask like a Medusa head.

“But I’m bettin I can win just this one for the Gipper.”

If Nadine Ackley had her druthers, she would have used surgical gloves to collect their money and issue tickets to the Kama Sutra’s patrons. No telling where the hands slipping the bills through the cutout glass halfmoon had been. Better yet, Nadine would have preferred the ticket kiosk was fitted like a NASA lunar unit for collecting moon rocks, with robotic arms. That way she wouldn’t have to worry about their icky breath either. Breath from strangely breathless mouths which also seemed always, well... wet. Her ticket booth was a shark cage, and her leaking innocence, the blood drawing the solicitors, slobberers, outright flashers, and — though it hadn’t happened yet, she was certain any night — rapists.

This nippy evening a copy of People magazine lay open on her lap. With her customary seamless blend of outrage and astonishment, she read between ticket sales the perky paeans to people who feasted at the same groaning boards of life where she starved. From time to time she inadvertently touched the photographs as though feeling for the substance behind the designer sportswear, capped teeth, and flashbulb eyes.

She was feeling up Sylvester Stallone and scowling at the tart towering at his side and thinking as long as Rocky was going to wear elevator shoes, he should at least make sure they made him taller than his bimbos, when there came two taps on her glass. It was growing dark, and her vision was impaired by her own reflection in the glass, and at first she thought someone was furiously squeezing a tube of Finesse Creme Rinse at her, like the kind she used at home. That’s what the chubby pink tube and stuff splatting the glass looked like. Only when the tube accordioned back into itself like a giant clam’s head did she shriek and grab for the Mace. By then the “perp,” as she’d heard TV police call them, was long gone around the corner of Jones to Turk. She replaced the Mace with a jug of 409 and roll of paper towels she kept for just such emergencies. Only she couldn’t reach the drippy smear through the small halfmoon aperture. And it was so wet, so... alive.

“Tu-two, please.” A pale freckled hand slipped through a ten.

“Help me clean up that n you can go in for free,” Nadine pleaded, pushing back the ten along with the 409 and a wad of paper towels.

“Help her,” said the second man. He stood with his back to the street wearing one of those dimestore rain ponchos. He clutched a big paper sack beneath his arm. Probably obscene ointment and such, Nadine didn’t care. All depravity paled next to the secretion crusting her window like a squished jellyfish.

“You’re so kind, sir,” wheedled Nadine, “but you’re only spreading it.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The hand fleeced with pale red hair redid the job somewhat better, although with some difficulty since its owner kept his other hand hiding his face. Nadine didn’t wonder why, only why he bothered with her window smeared with that opaque... shudder.

“Thank you,” she said primly and let Joe and Rooski into the Kama Sutra for services rendered.

“Ha... Ha... Ha,” Fabulous Frank honked sarcastically when he saw Ronald Reagan clomping down the concrete steps to the basement office; he hummed a few bars of “Hail to the Chief”: “Dum dum dee dum dum...”

The bookie was playing gin with Quick Cicero on the metal desk. Quick didn’t seem to get the joke. His snaky pale eyes slitted; his lip shivered and curled.

“What’s the matter? It’s just Lou playin one of his practical jokes.” Lou was the bartender down at the Silk’n’Spurs on Geary, Frank’s favorite watering hole. “For a guy named Quick, sometimes you aint... Hey, Ronnie! What’s in the paper sack? Rubber turds? Ha!”

El Fabuloso was still laughing, discarding the deuce of hearts, when the muzzle rose from beneath the poncho.

“Both of you pootbutts. On the floor.” Rather than muffle Joe’s voice, the latex mask acted like a diaphragm to amplify and resonate it. When the expug made a move for the open drop safe, the Gipper’s likeness loudly vibrated: “NOW! Out here, side by side. Face down! And nothing sexy, I’ll dust ya, I swear you’ll die...”

Fabulous Frank had too often heard the selfhypnotic cadences of men desperate enough to kill to lose any time hugging the concrete. Yet Quick lay down slowly and carefully beside him as if worried about his goddam drycleaning bill. Trying to stall. Now where’s the percentage in that? The gambler in Frank was real curious. He felt something plastic looping and cinching his wrists. Those nifty new disposable cuffs the cops had started using. Seemed every new wrinkle the cops came up with, the crooks turned around and used on registered Republicans like Francis Stutz.

Joe sprang to the open safe. He set the Bullpup on the desk and scooped out several buff envelopes stuffed with cash and betting slips. He didn’t have to open them, he could feel they contained only a few hundred. That’s why the safe was open, the runners hadn’t come in yet.

Oh shit, Rooski, howled Joe’s heart as his hand searched the safe’s bottom — hardly enough cash to get you to Oakland... Hold the phone, what’s this?

Joe withdrew a velvet pouch. He used his teeth to untie its drawstrings and shook out what resembled a big compass with a blue stone hinge. Joe held it up close to the mask’s eye slit, regretting that the Gipper had always to grin, narrowing them. Christ! The hinge stone was a blue diamond bigger than Joe’s left nut! Could it save Rooski?... No, too hot to hock, raced Joe’s mind. Too big to fence. It would have to be hidden for a long time. But there wasn’t any time, not with Tarzon breathing down their necks. Time for Joe to defend himself from Rooski was running out where Front Street deadended in a basement on Jones.

“Take the Moon n you’re dead n stinkin, punk,” Quick Cicero spit.

Ronald Reagan leaped across tromboning a round in the gun and jammed the muzzle in Quick’s ear. Fabulous Frank waited for the roar, squeezed his eyes tight so flying skull shard wouldn’t poke one out.

Suddenly, commotion above; Ronnie looked at the ceiling, cursed. With wrist flourishes worthy of a rodeo roper Ronnie whipped surgical tape three times around their heads and across their mouths. Then he stuffed the cash envelopes in the paper sack, replaced the diamond necklace in its velvet pouch, stuffing this inside his clothing, and snatched the Bullpup off the desk again.

The next thing heard by Fabulous Frank, Dean of the Daily Double, was the gallop of boots up the concrete steps. The lights went out, the upstairs bolt was shot, and he and Quick Cicero were left in the dark trussed up like Christmas turkeys.

The scene upstairs did what the White House never could, aged Ronald Reagan eight years. He told Donald Duck to just wait for him at the top of the basement stairs situated right inside the entrance. Station himself in the back by the projection booth and make sure none of the audience got wise — and wait. Nothing too out of place about a jackoff in a Donald Duck suit in this theater. When Joe finished robbing the basement bank, they could slip out unnoticed.

But nooo, not this Donald Duck. The lights were up, the movie still running — looked like the Statue of Liberty blowing a freight train. And beneath the screen it looked as if Donald had organized a summary round pound. Waving the Bodyguard, he had all eleven moviegoers ranked buck-naked before the first row of seats, clothing piled at their feet like guys at an Army physical. Except half these guys had hardons in various stages of tumescence. Nervously they shifted from foot to foot, one eye on the guntoting duck, the other fastened to the Bearded Clam That Ate San Pedro, which was being squeezed down by dirty fingernails the size of steamshovels onto a flesh-toned Washington Monument.

Ronald Reagan ran down the aisle crying, “What is this, a circle jerk?”

Some porno buff al buffo was just destined to ask: “Who are these masked men?”

“Shut the fuck up!” screamed Ronald. The comic saluted. “Yo, boss.”

“Dont get mad,” begged Donald. “The projectionist opened the door and asked what I was doin in this...” Rooski touched his duckbill.

“Pack that meat in, you cumsuckin bitch!” kibitzed the comic. It was hard not admiring her enthusiasm as, vigorously posting up and down on the monument, she began blowing a shiny black submarine, glans to gonads. The comic was flogging up a big one. Ronald had to slap the Miracle Fibre feathers on the back of Donald’s head to retrieve his attention.

“Thu — that’s it. Before I could get out the gun, he slammed the projection booth door and locked it. I knew we was made so I did this...” Donald swung the two-inch barrel at his prisoners.

“Dont point that thing at me!” one yelled.

“Sorry,” Donald mumbled, dropping his bead obligingly.

“Squish... SLURP... squish,” went the onscreen orifices.

“Phone! Is there a goddam phone in the booth?” cried Ronald.

“I forgot to check. I was just waitin on you to help me clean out these guys.”

Ronald snatched the .38 from Donald and slapped the shotgun in his hands. He shouted at him to cover these perverts and ran back up the aisle. Behind him the Clam That Ate San Pedro was going whole hog, wedging the black sub up its companion valve. The screen filled with two pistons chugging in tandem into twin cylinders someone had the practical sense of humor to disguise as human genitalia.

Joe banged on the projection booth door with the Smithy butt and hollered, “Open up or I’ll blow the lock off!”

“I’m comin, OH GOD I’M COMIN!” the soundtrack answered.

Christ, and that emetic soft rock endemic to department stores and airport lounges. That shlock street characters called shoplifting music. Bad enough alone, but accompanied by the stagey grunting, arty ooomphing, and all the other phony phonetics these method players had read some smutty where and were faithfully reproducing for the silver screen — Joe was grateful that the mask was so faithful to the Gipper’s physiogomy as to reproduce his partial deafness by stopping the ears with latex.

He decided to skip shooting the doorknob. Probably only worked on TV. Just his luck, it’d ricochet and blow off his foot. He checked for telephone wires. None. Probably just an intercom to the basement.

BOOM! The shotgun blast from below stopped Joe’s heart two beats. He stared aghast at the silver screen, where the two Titan missiles had withdrawn their warheads from the Great Divide and were supposed to be geysering like twin Old Faithfuls to the strains of the “Star Spangled Banner” according to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass — there instead gaped an enormous ragged hole ringed with smoke.

Rooski had gotten too far into the spirit of the thing and discharged at the same climactic moment.

His neglected fold bolted up the opposite aisle.

Up the ruptured screen rose the pathetic wail: “Jo-WHOA!”

No time to stop the runaway audience. And the zip damn fool just used his real name. Luckily it matched that of the mask’s last user. In this instant Joe acknowledged to himself what perhaps he’d known all along he had to do. Had to do before Rooski did the same to him. It’ll hurt me more than you, ran the old nursery con through his head.

He rushed down the aisle, grabbed Rooski, and hustled him out the fire exit giving onto an alley. There, in an abandoned Pontiac, he ditched the masks, the robbery gear, the Smithy. He wasn’t breaking faith with the Sings by keeping the Bullpup. It was enough that it was seen.

In any event, it would be found with Rooski at the end.

While outside, Nadine Ackley was telling herself she always knew it would come to this. A screaming horde of bucknaked smutcrazed rapists banging on her glass ticket kiosk. She crossed herself, and with a single prayer commended her soul to the Lord’s Everafter and consigned her flesh to the Devil’s own Here and Now.

It was a firegutted Victorian on Treat Street, pooled with black water, where wind through the gashed roof dirged and the homeless and hunted found hospice. In the front parlor Joe shook out the paper sack into the trough of a soggy mattress. Rooski tore open the envelopes, making a paltry pile of betting slips and cash. And nary a dead president could so much as smile; they shared the same look of bemused reproof as the characters staring down at them.

“We would have done better breaking into video games,” Joe announced sourly.

“No, it’s enough,” Rooski wanted him to believe; and began raking the bills together. They rustled like dead leaves.

“Enough for what? Coupla weeks of jailhouse canteen?”

“Cmon, Barker, dontcha look so blue.” Quickly he counted the money. “Over five hundred. Six, if we down the trombone. Enough to blow town.”

“Christ, Rooski. If it werent for bad luck we’d have none at all.”

“We gotta make a little good luck of our own,” Rooski remonstrated, “cantcha see?”

“Sure,” Joe tried shoring up his voice with conviction. Truth was they were trapped like the rats scrabbling behind the charcoaled walls.

“Keep the faith. You always say that, Barker.”

Right. Faith. You got to have a little, he always said. But faith in the sidepocket bank shot and that talk walks and money talks; faith in the sucker around each corner and the perennial next score. Not the Faith illumining mean days with grace; not the Faith brimming empty hearts with hope — that faith like a shell game had mocked Joe all his life. Though never so cruelly as now Rooski’s fate was subordinated to his biological imperative to defend his own worthless breath.

Nearby mission bells tolled vespers. It was time. Ice twisted along Joe’s sinews and lumped under his heart. Now he had to act. He said, “I got one of La Barba’s sacks we can split.”

“I’ll second the fuck outta that emotion!”

Joe always went first. Fumbling and cursing over his ruined blood mains, daggering himself repeatedly. Rooski knew better than to offer help or even talk. Joe liked doing his penance right along with the sin. Taking off his Levi’s, he at last struck strong blood high in his groin. With an exhalation mixing weariment and wonder, he handed the works to Rooski the way an officer might hand a blooded sword to his batman after a hard day on the killing field.

“I got it all figgered, Barker,” Rooski was saying preparing his shot. “Hook a bus, hook a freight, anything making southward smoke. Sunup day after tomorrow we’ll be waking up on the beach at Mazatlan. They got little boys there, Barker, for pesos... mere pennies... they’ll catch you a fish and cook it for you right on the beach... What you puttin in my cooker?”

“Lil Andes candy...”

“I hate coke,” Rooski whimpered. “I get the wrong kick.” But the glitter was already melted in his heroin solution.

“I need you to fire a bombida, Rooski,” Joe said softly.

“Why? With the Edison medicine, shootin speedballs makes me double crazy...” But he already had the point poised over a vein.

“I need you a little extra crazy.”

“Why?”

“I’m goin out to steal a car to run for the border. A nice car, Rooski. We got that comin... But while I’m gone I cant have you noddin out n the police come creepin on you. If they do, you gotta hold court in the streets.”

Rooski plunged the bombida into his bloodsteam. His angled frame snapped rigid, his brow sprang a halo of sweat; his eyes shot fire like sparklers. Joe asked if he’d heard what he said; Rooski nodded tightly, eyes spinning now like slot machine lemons.

“Down at city prison I seen one of the cons whose cat you got killed,” Joe lied. “He said soon as you fell he’d get you. Said whether its firecamp high in the Sierras or the deepest hole at Folsom, he was going to find you, cut out your heart... and eat it, Rooski.”

“Hold court in the streets,” Rooski repeated the dire oath with squinch-eyed resolve.

“Got to, my homey. You cant let em take you.”

“You know,” Rooski said, “even if they caught me I wouldnt give you up. I’d die first. We all gotta go sometime. Why you cryin, Barker? It’s gonna be all right.”

“Aint cryin, Rooski.” With the hem of the dragon jacket he wiped away tears not even heroin could staunch. “It’s somethin in the air here. They must have used chemicals to put out the fire...”

“That’s good, cuz I dont want you worryin, aint nothin gonna happen. No one knows we’re holed here. What in hell you doin?”

Joe was trembling so violently he jammed the Bullpup trying to jack a fresh shell in its breech. Rooski took the weapon, spit in the breech, and tromboned the shell home with a clash, saying, “And I thought I was the one who could fuck up a wetdream.”

“Guess I’ll be goin,” Joe mumbled.

“Guess I’ll just pray no police come while you out.”

“That’s a good idea, Rooski boy... So long and good luck.”

“You’re all the luck I ever needed, Barker,” said that ghost about to be born.

In the blackened hallway, Joe stopped and pulled the bigass diamond from beneath his shirt. It burned a depthless blue. He had to hide it, but where? Its light licked the walls with tongues of flame, blue wavey shadows reminding Joe... Then he knew where to stash it. Not just in plain sight. On exhibit.

But first the call.

On the corner across the street, a booth stood empty. Its light seemed both to beckon and rebuke — Come, none will overhear your treachery on my dark corner. He ran to it, stepped in, and covered his mouth with his jacket sleeve. If 666 was the number of the Beast, then the number he dialed was the Judas code — 911. “Gimme Homicide... Homicide? Take this address, 183 Treat... Chakov’s holed there... He’s hopped up and heavily armed and swears he wont be taken alive...”

Oh, that black sump pump in his breast only a doctor would call a heart. Fast, so he needn’t further ponder the enormity of the betrayal — steal a car to drive to Golden Gate Park. He couldn’t chance a cab. Joe wanted no one to know the watery repository he’d chosen for the diamond Quick Cicero called the Moon.

The valet parking lot attendants at Rossi’s Famous Seafood Restaurant hustled hard for tips. Otherwise they wouldn’t make it on the minimum wage Mr. Rossi paid. When patrons were preparing to leave, the head waiter called them at their shack at the front of the lot. That way they had the cars waiting at the curb, one hand holding the door open, the other palm up for the dollars Mr. Rossi liked to call gratuities.

Often both were absent from the shack delivering cars at the same time. That night neither saw the Porsche Carrera drive off the rear of the lot or noticed its keys missing from the shack until it was called for in the midst of dinner rush two hours later.

Joe was the day’s last paid admittance to Steinhart Aquarium. The usher at the turnstile tore his blue ticket, returning him the half bearing the imprint of a leaping dolphin, and warned him the building would be closing in fifteen minutes. Joe smiled — “Long enough.”

He knew the aquarium’s corridors as well as the hallways of half the city’s flophouses. Times like this when few visitors were around he liked best. When the teeming colors were brightest, the symmetries more fantastic, the liquescent shadows most hallucinative.

Here he was. The plaque introduced the mako and tiger sharks, with a profile of each and world maps showing their ocean ranges. A brief description noted neither was dangerous to man — unless provoked. Joe looked up smiling into the flat black eye of one gray form gliding past, its flexing speckled gills recalling the bamboo blinds in the Sings’ loft. Certainly whatever hand brought forth that shape was possessed of the macabre. No more perfect articulation of sudden, silent death was imaginable.

He turned his attention to the tank display. A shipwreck motif. From the Jolly Roger tangled in the helm canted in the sand, a sunken pirate craft. Beside the helm a cutlass, cannonballs, a binnacle, and belaying pin — all arranged around the centerpiece: Davey Jones’s locker, an overturned treasure chest spilling its hoard of jeweled dirks and diadems, gold doubloons, and crucifixes; rubies, sapphires, pearls, and diamonds; yes, diamonds, within which galaxy the birth of one more star, a blue one even, would go unnoticed until Joe returned for it.

“We’re closing, sir,” a guard reminded him politely.

“Yes, I’m coming.” He leaned across the railing and peered upward, spotting several gaffs hanging from hooks along the catwalk that crossed over the tank. He’d use one of them to retrieve the Moon when the time was right. He slanted both ways to make sure he wasn’t being observed, then used the stolen credit card he kept in his boot to slip the lock on the door marked: no admittance, employees only.

Out went the lights; the aquarium corridors became tunnels of wavery marine light. The colors of the shark tank were cobalt and coral. In a moment, a gasblue scintillance attached to a golden V fell, swinging slowly like a jeweled leaf to land near the treasure chest. The Tiger shark flinched at the puff of sand; then sculled its scythelike tail, gliding on.

“COURT’S IN SESSION!” was Rooski’s last scream. The concussion of the first blast blew out the parlor’s last remaining window. The second round of Double 0 exploded a door in a maelstrom of cinders. The third rocketed straight through the ceiling from where he lay in puddled black water, the .357 Magnum verdict burrowed deep in his chest.

All Joe had to do now was ditch the Porsche, then get Kitty and maybe they could get shut of this old Life. Go to Galveston, lay low until it was safe to return for the diamond; escape the cooker, crooks, and cops, who had nothing on Joe now if court was adjourned.

But he had to make sure, see for himself. He turned up Divisadero toward Twin Peaks. You’re almost home, you’re almost home, the tires whispered on the fogdamp asphalt... Oh no, Rooski boy. Was it me laid you low? Me? raved his heart. With an effort he steeled himself. It was self-defense, pure and simple. More: it was euthanasia. Better to die a man in the streets than an animal behind walls.

He turned onto a side street and parked in its culdesac over the streetcar tunnel. He walked to the railing overlooking the tracks and leaned against a streetlamp that looked, in the swirling mist, like a giant dandelion atop a wrought iron stem. The N Judah car burst out between his legs, rattle-trapping down the cutbacks through the steep backyards, jiggling in its yellow windows like corn in a popper newspapers, crossed legs, a woman applying lipstick. Scanning the gray density of buildings, Joe spotted the house on Treat Street by the police lights. They pulsed in the fog like red amoebas.

He was just in time to see the morgue attendants lug out the stretcher. Coming down the front steps, they lifted it perpendicularly, raising the corpse, and Joe thought he saw Rooski’s face splattered once, twice, three times with spinning red...

Then, with a suddenness snatching a cry from Joe’s throat, the circular chill of steel at his neck, the familiar cold, clipped voice:

“I knew I’d find you close. A rat’s never far from its hole. You found him first, saved your ass by setting his up for me to blast. You made him hold court in the streets. You better pray you wont have to pick a jury on a prison yard. Because you’re going down for the car. You’re penitentiary bound... motherfucker.”

The numbers game by Craig Clevenger[13]

The Sunset

Jimmy Rehab’s showing a nine up against my dual eights. The high count is my green light to buck tourist strategy so I split for a hard eighteen-fifteen then stand. Jimmy’s ace in the hole gives him a soft twenty which costs me another six thousand milligrams of tetracycline.

Fifteen blocks from here, young mothers push strollers through Golden Gate Park and the electro-poets sip six-dollar coffees at sidewalk tables along Irving. Keep walking west and the bright afternoon grows indecisive at 19th Ave. You hit 25th and take off your shades but can’t tell the difference, the light bright enough to see by without throwing any shadows. Come 43rd, you haven’t seen another soul for ten blocks and the stores are either empty or closed. The colors vanish along with the shadows, the current drains from the sunlight.

The Outer Sunset, another ghost town trailing another gold rush, the postwar housing boom following the first feeding frenzy a century prior and the dot com locusts forty years later, this is where Jimmy and I play blackjack by the light of a camping lantern, where I’ll play two and a half million hands before I see sunlight again.

I’m here because of the Numbers, because this is the one place some very bad people won’t know to find me. I’m here because I made a wager and I make good on my bets. I’m here because I keep my word.

Skinner Jones said that would be the death of me and he was half right.

We did a jewelry store together a couple years back. No fireworks, all business. After the dust had settled, the adjusters left the owner with a firm handshake and a fat check. Skinner moved the product, cleaned the cash and handed over my cut. Next day, I’m using the restroom at the doughnut place on Polk. One second I’m holding two bearclaws in a paper bag between my teeth while I take a leak, next thing I’ve got Smoke and Mirrors on either side of me.

“Johnny Pharaoh.”

“Yo. Johnny.”

I was shaking off the drops when Smoke slapped the bracelet on my right wrist and gave me to the count of one to pack everything up before he cuffed my left. He pat me down way too familiar-like while Mirrors read from his Miranda card. His fingers followed the words as he sounded them out, like he was asking directions with a phrase book.

I was drooling on the doughnut bag in my teeth when Mirrors said, “Do you understand these rights as they’ve been read to you?”

Yeah.

“Out loud, shithead.” Smoke tapped the back of my skull so I dropped breakfast into the hot pool at my feet. Greasy white bag floating with the cigarette butts and that blue chemical puck.

“Not sure I did. Could you run ’em by me one more time?”

Smoke and Mirrors. Bad Cop, Worse Cop. Eleven hours under the light, cuffed to a chair on the business end of their bad day.

“Are those batteries fresh?” I thought the red light on the camera blinked a coupla times.

“Not sure.”

“Could be. Or not.”

If that camera went dark, I was gonna hit the floor hard, two or three times. All I had to say were two words, Skinner Jones, and I’d walk, but I didn’t. Taking a job means keeping your mouth shut. Getting stabbed in the back isn’t license to likewise shank a brother.

Keeping my word meant keeping quiet which meant doing a year inside, the most they could give me without Skinner.

Jimmy can’t shuffle so I do it for him.

“You gonna make me deal for you this time, too?”

He doesn’t answer. Jimmy Rehab’s silent treatment, day fifty-five.

“You lazy fuck.”

His stare is starting to unnerve me.

Jimmy’s got a four up and I’m looking at a hard sixteen so I stand. His hole-card is a ten followed by another four, so I push 2,500 more milligrams of tetracycline his way and pray I don’t get sick before I can win them back.

I bust three hands in a row and Jimmy doesn’t say a word, his expression doesn’t change.

I’ve lost thousands in a single sitting at some big tables and I’ve always had enough to cover my marker. Most of the time. I can quit any time I want, as long as it’s not while I’m playing. If you’re anything like me, you tell yourself you’ve got it under control, but you don’t.

One year later I walked through the gates, but my celebration was cut short the same day. Dear Cardholder didn’t place and Undisclosed Sum came strong out of the gate but finished dead last. Some old habits die hard and others not at all. That afternoon at the track dumped me twenty grand into Hoyle’s pocket. Hoyle knew I was good for it because I keep my word but Hoyle didn’t want to look weak. Skinner Jones and his brokering skills were the only things keeping me above the dirt. His driver had been kicked back on a parole violation so Skinner offered me a job.

“Guy blows an early release ’cause he bought his piss from Keith Richards,” he said. “He’s safer in Folsom.”

“I hear that.”

Neither one of us said anything for a moment.

“Wasn’t me.” Skinner slid the car keys toward me.

“Wasn’t you, what?”

“The jewelry store. Wasn’t me who gave you up.”

So there was my chance, served up like a fancy umbrella drink. Call him on it or let it go.

“Forget about it.”

“Far as this job goes, you wait and you drive.” Skinner let it go faster than I had, went back to talking the job. “Shit hits the fan, Plan Q is still in locked and loaded. We’re in, we’re out, we hurt nobody and you’re off the hook.”

“And I won’t see a penny of it.”

“You won’t have pennies over your eyes, either.”

True, indeed. His ex-driver’s fuck-up and my own were conjoined like circus sideshow babies, two and the same.

A good plan leaves nothing to chance, but a professional knows chance is a long-haul player. Drink enough, gamble enough, sleep around, skydive, hitchhike, or play the lottery and your luck won’t run out, but it will change. Skinner and I had been at it for a long time and our luck changed.

Come 10:21 a.m. the next day, I was gunning through red lights down O’Farrell with my back windshield in pieces, my ears ringing and Jimmy Rehab riding shotgun with glass in his hair and blood on his pants. I turned up the police scanner and kept to the speed limit once I was off Lincoln.

The cityscape levels out the same time I stop seeing people, around 14th and Judah. Clapboard craftsman shacks swap rot with crumbling Victorians sandblasted by ocean wind and salt, their bright candy colors dulled to the shade of the surrounding fog. Judah’s dead-end disappears along with the horizon, a blur of neither ocean nor sky. Even on a clear day it’s like looking at a faded photograph, a plateau of muted roof lines tethered by utility cables at the edge of the world.

Plan Q: a two-bedroom Spanish bungalow on the outside, pure Boy Scout bomb shelter on the inside. Chemical toilet in the bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling warehouse shelving throughout the master bedroom and living room. Bottled water, canned food, foil pouches of freeze-dried field rations with Russian or German labels, two footlockers marked with red crosses, a portable television and a propane-run generator with an exhaust hose that disappeared through a hole in the back door. A briefcase of clay chips with four new card decks and enough liquor to drown the cabin fever. Skinner had shut off the utilities, boarded up the windows and in every respect ensured that a man could wait a long time inside the place. The punch line to it all was the kitchen cabinets labeled Ralph & George, every inch packed with tins of smoked oysters, sardines, albacore tuna and Alaskan salmon.

Skinner had a big soft spot for his cats, but they gave me the creeps. The half-Siamese named George had eyes the color of a gas flame and this unwavering, blinkless blue stare, like he could bend metal with his mind. My watch stopped if I pet him too long and I think he tripped my car alarm a couple times, knocked out the street lights when he saw me coming. The other one, Ralph, was a leaden stump of orange fur. I never saw Ralph move from his spot on Skinner’s balcony, not once, but I never saw the same pile of feathers beside him either.

Skinner Jones, secretly sentimental bastard, had planned on spoiling them when the apocalypse came while he lived on protein bars and dried noodles.

“I’m hit.” Jimmy sat slumped in a folding chair. His right leg had gone dark and a wet flap of his jeans hung from his bloody thigh.

“You drip anything outside?”

“Fuck you. I’m gonna bleed to death, you don’t get me to a hospital.”

“You’ll bleed to death if you don’t relax.” I rummaged through the medical trunks, found rubbing alcohol, bandages and everything from basic first aid to field surgery gear and bootleg pharmaceuticals. “Get your jeans off so I can take a look.”

“I’m not letting your wannabe-doctor ass play operation on me.” Jimmy stood, favoring his good leg. “Where the car keys?”

“By the door.”

The dumbshit turned to look. I yanked the cap from a bottle of rubbing alcohol and splashed his wound, but good. Jimmy said mother, clenched his teeth and dropped back to his chair.

“If you were hurt serious, you’da bled all over my car.”

“It is serious. Fucker shot me.”

“Maybe. Looks like a movie bullet to me.” Starting with the rip in his thigh, I sliced his jeans open while he called me a choice name or two. “Best you not struggle while my knife’s this close to your nutsack.”

“The fuck’s a movie bullet?”

“One of those statistically mythical rounds, the kind that only hit your shoulder.”

“That’s my leg.”

“Or the leg.” I doused the wound with more alcohol and Jimmy twitched, then clamped himself still. “They never hit an artery and they never mushroom or fragment. The kind of shit that only happens to heroes in movies while people in real life drop dead.”

“Or a guy drops dead ’cause the quack sewing ’im up decides to make a clever speech while his fucking blood pours down the drain.”

Nothing but a few slices in his skin and a wedge of glass that dropped out of his jeans. I decided against going gently with him, poking at his leg with a pair of needle-nosed pliers as I looked for errant shards.

“The guy fired at us from behind, genius. You cut yourself on some glass. Any ideas?”

“Your windshield.”

“This is from a mirror. You hit something when they chased you out of there.”

“I don’t remember. That sawed-off came out and I just ran. Crashed through all kinds of shit.”

Once clean, I sealed the cuts with Krazy Glue then wrapped his leg with gauze. Jimmy asked for a hospital again and I said no, that we’d stay out of sight and wait for Skinner.

I cleaned my hands and listened to the police frequencies. Nobody in custody, my car last seen on Van Ness.

“Skinner take anything with him when he split?”

“Big-ass gym bag. Fucker was full, too. Way overdue for pickup,” Jimmy said.

“Lotta handjobs.”

“And then some. The place is a collection point.”

The score was a massage parlor in the Tenderloin. Normally not the most lucrative hit, but I trusted Skinner had his reasons and I was right.

“So they count it and bag it before they kick it up the ladder,” I said. “That’s gotta be cash from a half dozen handtowel lube shops.”

“At least. After they cut a slice for the cops, the bagmen disappear the rest.”

“I don’t suppose you know which cops they’re friendly with.” I tore off a strip of surgical tape with my teeth and sealed his bandages.

“Same ones we all are.”

My insides turned to lead. Skinner Jones had pulled a one-eighty on his own plan midway through a job, the job itself both a good score and a calculated burn aimed at the city’s two most rancid cops and their double-barreled hard-on for yours truly.

“Skinner didn’t fill you in?” Jimmy said.

“He told me nothing.”

“Lemme guess. ‘No fireworks, all business.’”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“You bein’ in the dark with Skinner. I don’t like it.”

“I like it less.”

“How come you know about this place?” Jimmy opened a can of warm PBR. The four-by-four stack of cases between the chairs could double as a card table.

“Belongs to Skinner.”

Jimmy took a long pull from his beer, kept his glare fixed on me.

“Chill, Rehab. Anyone tries following the paper trail, they’ll starve to death before Skinner’s name turns up.” I resumed tossing through the medical supplies. “He called this Plan Q, his last resort if anything went thermonuclear, shit-fan wrong. He could wait out the heat, right under their noses. First time I’ve actually been here. Wasn’t sure I’d memorized the right street number until I walked inside.”

“Who else knows about it?”

“Nobody.”

“You positive?”

“Of course.”

“How’s that?”

“I gave Skinner my word, Jimmy. You oughtta know me by now.”

“I need a shower.” Jimmy crushed the can and reached for another. “Wouldn’t mind uncovering one of the windows. Place feels cramped.”

“Nobody knows this place is occupied. Utilities are cut. We stay inside, keep the windows boarded and doors locked water tight. The full Houdini.”

“What if I need some fresh air?”

“We stay inside.”

“Because?”

“Because that’s the plan.” I found a bottle of black market tetracycline amidst the painkillers, aspirin and antihistamines. “Start taking these. Whatever it says on the label.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jimmy said.

“Think about where you got those cuts and whether or not a little rubbing alcohol was enough to clean them.”

“I don’t like pills.”

“You don’t like pills.”

“Can’t swallow ’em. Unnatural.”

I wasn’t going to ask about his name.

“Learn to make it natural, partner, because I’ll gut you in your sleep before I take you to a hospital.”

We played Texas Hold’em all afternoon and ate beef stew fired over a camping stove. We kept playing cards into the night. Jimmy killed a case of PBR and I took his every last chip but Skinner never showed.

“Skinner’s in the wind.” Jimmy moved slowly onto the cot, lifting his leg as though it were made of glass. “I’m outta here tomorrow.” He put on a set of headphones and closed his eyes.

Skinner Jones was holding my twenty grand for Hoyle. Alive or dead, anyone found Skinner would tie him to the job and then to me. Smoke and Mirrors would mount his head on their precinct wall and muscle every snitch in the city for the word on Johnny Pharaoh, every day, for the next hundred years unless Hoyle’s Numbers found me first.

Nobody met Hoyle. Hoyle was a disembodied name, three degrees removed from the game but still playing the board from a distance. You did business with a guy who worked for a guy who worked for some people. Eventually, the chain of command stopped with Hoyle but nobody made it that far.

Anybody got too close or defaulted on a debt, Hoyle said to handle them by the numbers, as in normal procedure. This often required duct tape. Maybe a trunk or perhaps a body of water. It always demanded discretion and, above all, silence. Hoyle’s figure of speech became a running joke among the ranks, who each in turn met with the guy’s disapproval for one reason or another. When the last man breathing had forgotten the joke, the joke became rumor, then legend: The Numbers, Thing One and Thing Two. They could reckon the layout of a darkened room from the echo of a dripping tap. Thing One could freeze locks with his breath, Thing Two could walk through glass, and they could measure your sleeping heartbeat with their ears against your door.

A spider clung to the dry lip of the kitchen faucet, a drop of black oil suspended from eight bent, black needles, its red belly mark like a symbol from a church window. In a blink, it vanished up the pipe. I stuffed a wad of newspaper into the opening and tamped it tight with my thumb.

I didn’t sleep. Every itch or stray thread brushing against me in the trapped air of the crumbling house became a drop of black widow oil, poised to plant her cocoon below my skin. Her dark little beads would hatch inside my blood while I waited for Skinner Jones, while I hid from Smoke and Mirrors, Hoyle and the Numbers.

“We can’t do shit here.” Jimmy coughed, leaned over and hawked into a garbage pail. Two days of poker, canned food, police scanner static, network news and no Skinner Jones. I was restless and Jimmy was sick.

“Too bad. We’re gonna stay.”

“I need a hospital.”

“They’re watching the hospitals.”

“They?”

“They.”

Jimmy argued until a coughing fit seized him and he covered his face with a T-shirt.

“Christ. A few minutes of fresh air, for fuck’s sake. There’s a coffee place on Ninth, across from the Muni stop. Lemme run out, grab us a couple lattes, maybe some deli sandwiches. On me.”

I knew the place. Soon as Jimmy mentioned it, I could almost hear the rumble of the train down Judah and picture the burst of greenery in the park, the shape of crashing waves.

“How long you think we could last in here?” Jimmy said.

“A long time.”

“How long?”

“We’d die of boredom before we ran out of food. I’d probably kill you before that happened.”

“Come on. Guess. I say six months.”

“Both of us.”

“Yeah. If we had to.”

I surveyed the house, its fallout shelter food and black market drugs, the liquor supply, the plywood window sheets blocking out the sun and trapping in the bad air.

“Sounds about right.”

“Like doing time, though.” Jimmy shuffled the deck and flaunted his one-handed cut, the only card sleight he knew.

“Then I guess you’ve never done time.”

His fingers slipped and the cards hit the table.

“Maybe I should deal.”

“Maybe we should up the stakes.” He gave me his idea of a bad-ass stare.

“To what?”

“Time.”

I shoulda seen this coming.

“We’ve got a hundred and eighty days each.” Jimmy reassembled the deck. “Five-day ante, two-day raise, ten-day limit.”

“Won’t work.”

“Why not?” He shuffled.

“Suppose I win your whole six months. That mean you walk out of here?”

“Good point.” He shuffled a second time. “How ’bout we play for days outside? Each day we lose is a day we stay locked in here.”

“But I want to stay locked in here.”

“So you can’t lose.”

Fuck-up though he was, I got why people hired him.

“I’ve seen you play, remember.”

“Like I said, you can’t lose.” Jimmy shuffled the deck a third time and set it between us.

“Texas Hold’em.”

“Draw for the high card.”

“Don’t bother.” I cut the deck and said, “Deal.”

Jimmy had been working on his game. He used to be pure shark food. He’d play loose, never check, and he’d see every bet, big or small, to keep chasing some lone longshot card for that mythical winning hand. He was playing tighter now. He checked and folded more frequently, calculating my best possible hand instead of his own.

He might take longer to get eaten, but he was still shark food. He went to sleep three weeks poorer, and the next afternoon he was down a whole month and a half when the news ran a story about another Golden Gate suicide.

“Wonder what makes this guy’s high dive worth the airtime.” Jimmy checked his cards and tossed a five-day chip onto his two-day ante.

Good question. Unhappy civilians outnumbered the pigeons. Jumpers hit the bay like clockwork.

“... won’t release the identity of the man found floating...”

I met his five and raised him ten. Jimmy folded and I scooped away another week of his life outside.

“... may be linked to several high-profile robberies throughout the Bay Area...”

My vaporous suspicion condensed to certainty.

“Skinner Jones.”

“How do you know?”

“One of those things.” I stared at my chips, the stack of Jimmy’s days together with mine.

“Least we know what happened to the man. You still wanna stay here?”

“Not now, Jimmy.”

“Skinner Jones couldn’t take the heat, sounds to me like. Let’s get out.”

“Watch your mouth, Rehab.”

He hadn’t heard me. He’d stuffed the balled-up shirt to his face to stifle another coughing jag, spat a heavy glob into the garbage pail, then, without warning, shoved his remaining chips into the pot.

“The fuck?”

“All or nothing,” he said.

“Jimmy.”

“Your homeboy’s a floater. And if it wasn’t an accident then they know where to find us.”

“They?”

“Pharaoh, or whoever took out Skinner Jones.”

“Just because you’d start singing at the first whiff of immunity—”

Jimmy hit the television with his fist. The bottle-blonde anchorwoman shattered into pixels and noise.

“You think that was a botched plea bargain? Jesus.”

The anchorwoman reappeared. She flashed a smile insured for millions, moved the blank papers around on her desk and nodded at the weatherman.

“All or nothing,” he said again. “You lose, I walk. You win, we both stay until provisions run out.”

I couldn’t figure what angle he was playing. Jimmy didn’t know angles. Jimmy did the shit work for the guys who did. So, my angle was win the game and stick to the wager. Jimmy gets drunk, mopes for a day, crawls to the table to win it all back. When I have a plan and decide it’s safe to leave, Jimmy’s luck will improve.

“Sounds like a bet,” I said.

I shuffled. Jimmy cut. I dealt two hands then the flop: ace of spades, ace of clubs and the eight of clubs. The game was Sudden Death Hold’em and we could discard and draw in lieu of each betting round. By the final draw, the six of clubs and the eight of spades were face up with the others.

I called. Jimmy showed. He held a pair of clubs, the king and the two. The odds of drawing a flush in a typical game are five hundred to one. The odds against a king high flush are greater still, and if you’re Jimmy Rehab, you start writing zeros until your arms falls off. His game had indeed improved but he was still Jimmy Rehab, shark food.

“Get used to battlefield meals.” I dropped my eight of diamonds onto the flop for a full house. “You try sneaking out tonight and I’ll gut you.”

Jimmy was pale. He stood, cracked open a beer and limped toward the bunk room.

“I’ll win it all back tomorrow,” he said. That calm of his, again.

First thing, I made coffee, thirty-weight black. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I heard the deafening headphone hiss from his CD player eight feet away. Seven hours since he’d crashed and his eardrums were in shreds. I pulled the headphones away and like the spider darting up the dormant faucet, the smell hit my nose, rebounded off my brain and crash landed in my stomach. I’m supposed to say Jimmy, hey man, wake up, but I don’t bother. His lids were slack beneath my thumb, the thin skin pliant as an empty rubber glove and his eyes had gone to frost.

I hooked my knife at the cuff of his left leg and sheared his jeans, ankle to thigh. The bandages beneath were damp with something thick and yellow. The veins in his leg had darkened with the trail of infection that had run rampant for the last three days. I dug the antibiotics from the pocket of his coat, the bottle unopened and every capsule accounted for.

I dragged Jimmy to the bathroom, cradled his neck over the toilet and emptied out his blood with a knife stroke. It sounded like the time my father dumped his aquarium but lasted longer. I dropped the carcass into the bathtub and set to tearing Skinner’s place apart for the next hour, searching for tools, empty paint cans, anything.

I drew a line above Jimmy’s eyebrows and cut around his skull with a hacksaw and pulled at the top of his head until it broke suction with a loud wheezing kiss. His brain held fast to his spine until I dug into both sides with a set of screwdrivers.

“You’ve never used this thing in your life. Give it up.”

It shot loose, bouncing off the shower tile and slipping down to the drain like a lump of gray soap.

Happy Bastille Day, Jimmy.

The guts and brains Jimmy never displayed in his life lay submerged in seven different gut-buckets of paint thinner, rubbing alcohol, or vodka and sealed with duct tape.

Skinner was dead, Ralph and George weren’t going to show up. The six hundred cans of gourmet meat were mine, the two hundred fifty pounds of cat litter were Jimmy’s. I folded his arms funeral-style, rolled him into a sheet, and returned him to the bathtub, buried in Tidy Cats.

A week passed. I monitored the police and fire frequencies, that godless ocean of misery and chaos beyond the glittery tidepool of evening news. I heard dispatches to investigate suspicious odors but never for this neighborhood. Somebody was always decomposing somewhere else. Thing was, I knew those other addresses, each one. I knew the dead guys and they knew me, but they hadn’t known where I’d end up. My word kept me alive while the Numbers kept looking.

I ate canned salmon and drank warm beer. Outside, civilians drank at the Blackthorn, ate pizza by the slice and rode the N Judah through the fog. I breathed bad air and played solitaire and single-deck blackjack, betting painkillers, germ killers, matchsticks, money or cigarettes. I wagered on the closing of the Nasdaq, the next day’s weather and sports scores. I lost twenty-five tins of smoked oysters and six candy bars to the house when Foreign Object came in dead last, so I quit the ponies altogether. The civilians on Irving fell in and out of love, in and out of bars, hailed cabs and racked up parking tickets, while I mastered the dart board. I dug damp litter from the bathtub with a gardening trowel and dumped fresh litter in its place. After four fifty-pound bags, it stayed dry.

Jimmy’s face could have been cut from a rotting saddle. His lips were pulled back from his teeth for a hardened, loveless smile and his eyes were windows to nothing but the hollow of his head. I don’t have a single good reason for having exhumed him from his catbox coffin, though I have many bad ones. A steady diet of boredom and paranoia, spiked with bourbon and painkillers consumed in isolation, has impaired my judgment to such a degree that propping Jimmy in a chair seemed funny during the moment. I’d been wagering against an imaginary and anonymous house and now the house had a name.

I shuffled and cut. Watch and learn, Jimmy Rehab, or at least watch. You can do that much. I burned the top card and dealt the next two and turned them over for the high card. I came up with the two of hearts while Jimmy showed a queen.

“Your deal, Jimmy.”

I want to believe I’m still here because of my word. The truth is, between the law and the Numbers, I’d survive an hour above ground on a good day. I’m safe, and staying here is the only way I’ll ever be certain that Skinner Jones didn’t hand over a map to Plan Q before they snuffed him, which means Skinner Jones never said Johnny Pharaoh so he could walk away from the jewelry store.

Jimmy’s expression never changes. He pulls his hands close with his fingers curled inward, clinging to a phantom noose. His fingernails keep growing and I play his hands for him.

I chase my bad run with a big bet, ten thousand milligrams to break even. Jimmy deals me a hard twenty, two kings against his six up. My luck’s turning but Jimmy doesn’t flinch. I split the kings for a hard twenty and a hard seventeen before I stand.

Jimmy draws a five. Jimmy draws an ace. House rules call it a soft twelve so he hits. The king breaks his winning streak and I drag twenty thousand milligrams into my bottle. My luck is changing but Jimmy Rehab doesn’t say a word, doesn’t blink. It’s unnerving, I tell you. He stares right through me like he’s been doing for weeks.

The woman who laughed by William T. Vollmann[14]

Tenderloin

The Zombie had a room in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, next to a “health club,” and on Sundays he sat in Boedekker Park and listened to the whores say, “Wherever you be going, I be going,” and he watched the dark gray pigeons fixed like statues on the roof-ledge of the building adjoining Big Red’s Bar-B-Que, while old women sat across from him, combing their hair for hours. Here he whiled away the day, tasting blood as he licked his decaying gums. (The Other did the same.)—“If you ain’t got nothin’ else, then ’bye,” he heard a whore say. Pigeons gurgled and chuckled and waddled fatly. A man in a black hat leaned against the lamppost smoking, and the smoke was thick like milk. A woman in a tan coat sat bent over her knees, scuffing her tennis shoes to keep the flies away, and then suddenly raising her graying head, more or less as a jack-in-the-box will pop abruptly out of its gay metal coffin. The Zombie saw that she was weeping. Beside her sat The Woman Who Laughed.

He had found the rooming house when he cane-tapped down Turk Street past The Woman Who Laughed, and a lady on crutches was purring, “I smell fire,” at which The Zombie swiveled his head up on his long stem of neck to see smoke coming out of one of the barred windows of a black brick building that looked old and dirty and hopeless, and there was a sign saying ROOMS AVAILABLE — LOW MONTHLY RATES, and The Woman Who Laughed came rushing up and sniffed the smoke like an animal, snorting and laughing. The hallway smelled like dead fish and never stopped humming with slow fat flies. There was a security camera in the elevator, under which some knowing soul had scrawled RAPE ITCHES ANYHOW. The Zombie lived on the eighth floor, a special place for special people, where the hall lights were burned out and the carpet was charred. The door to his room bore hatchet marks. Inside was a dirty sink which he used as a urinal, a three-legged bed with a greasy mattress, and a window that looked out upon a brick wall. It was very dark and still in that room. The Zombie hid in his bed and looked at the brick wall through the window. Perhaps it was this lack of a view which had impelled him to go wandering in the Blue Yonder. (Oh! Had he lived in a mansion on Russian Hill, then he never would have become The Zombie; is that what I am saying? — Not at all; I do not want to investigate causes and hypothetical has-beens; The Zombie was a thing without a cause.) — He did not go out much when he was The Other, either; — for more or less the same reasons that blood in a dead body soon becomes permanently incoagulable, The Other had never been a good mixer. Sometimes The Zombie woke up with a fever headache, the chills racing up and down his fingers like the arpeggios of a concert pianist, and there was a meaningless throbbing in the soft tissues of his buttocks. He lay rubbing his neck and staring up at a brown stain on the ceiling. An ammoniac smell sometimes came to his nostrils then, caustic and clean, as if he had gotten chlorinated water in his nose or sustained a sharp blow to the face. This meant that The Woman Who Laughed was sitting outside on the front steps with her dress hiked up, tapping her toes on the concrete and laughing.

She had a very round pimpled face. She might have been Indian, for her nose was flattish and she had black bangs and high cheekbones. She stank. He did not know where the clean smell came from. Her black eyes were tolerantly knowing, mocking you without malice, as if she had seen every sort of death and found it funny, but if you tried to look into her eyes she would cover herself with her arm and shake with laughter. If you tried to talk to her, she ran away. (She dreaded the warning-pangs of encounters which might poison her laughter, as Carolina had dreaded the defilement of her drinking cup, for we all want to keep something clean, no matter if it is a lump of ice dwindling in our hotly protective hands.) Once a tweed-suited radical woman came marching and smiling down Turk Street, distributing leaflets, and The Woman Who Laughed accepted one politely and read it and started to laugh so hard that her fat legs quivered, and The Zombie heard her laughter up on the eighth floor, so he went downstairs and stared at her through the bars of his golden eyelashes and held a quarter in front of her to draw her inside, and she kept laughing and reaching for the quarter as she followed him step by step, dragging her two black garbage bags behind her through the hallway, and he pulled her and her bags into the elevator in a familiar way, with his hand on her shoulder, and she laughingly suffered his touch because she knew him, so he suffered himself to breathe her stench all the way to the eighth floor, while the security camera emitted its death-rattle and a drop of dirty water slunk down the elevator wall, until finally the doors opened and he showed her the quarter again to impel her down the hall, so that then he could unlock his door, sweeping moldy underwear off his one chair and sitting her down on it as he lay back on his bed like a crocodile floating on the surface of some dirty brown river. There he watched her nod her head and spread her hands and wave at the air, and then as her shoulders would sag she’d shake her head and begin to laugh helplessly. She knew him! Her feculence aroused his disgust and anger to a degree bordering on sexual pleasure. (How could she smell so bad?) Sitting in his chair, stroking her trash bags tenderly, she unwrapped a lifesaver and ate it. She looked at the wrapping and laughed and laughed. When she laughed on Turk Street or in the brickwork park, passersby smiled slyly behind their hands, thus proving that humor is indeed contagious, especially when joy-wrapped in idiocy and stench; so she contributed some cheer to the world, although of course it was not the reward of the world’s scornful merriment which elicited her good deeds; it could not be, because she kept laughing in The Zombie’s room even though The Zombie did not laugh or smile or do much of anything. (All he wanted was to know why she smelled so bad, and where the other clean smell came from.) What made her so happy? (She smelled like rotten wharves, like tuna-canning factories, like a mass grave on a hot afternoon.) Sometimes the sweet smell of lifesavers on her breath would overpower her odor temporarily, like a soothing cherry coughdrop to put a dead woman to bed. Her hair was washed and done up in a neat mare’stail; who could have helped her? — She laughed and pointed at the window. For the first time, The Zombie saw something there other than the brick wall next door: — Pigeons were tapping at the window with their wings; they wanted to get in. The Zombie got up and ran his fingers through his hair and opened the squeaking groaning window (he had never done that before), and The Woman Who Laughed peeked over her shoulder to make sure that no one would rob her or hurt her and then took a slice of blue-moldy bread from one of her trash bags and threw it on the floor, and the pigeons rushed down into the room jostling each other in a cloud of feathery dust, dirty-black pigeons and dirty-gray pigeons, and they crowded on the floor around the bread waddling fatly with downcast heads and pecked until all the bread was gone; then they pecked at each other, and the Woman sat there with her black trash bags clutched to her, working her mouth as the pigeons ate, and the smell from her got worse and worse. It was a sweetish rotten smell. Laughing, she opened the other bag to show him. Inside were dead pigeons, so decomposed now as to be squashed fans of feathers stuck together by slime, and flies buzzed out of the bag and landed on The Zombie’s underwear and some of them whined and went greedily back inside that dark stinking bag and settled between the feathers and on the sharp black pigeon-heads and walked into the black pits where the pigeons’ eyes used to be. Looking at this made the Woman very happy. Oh, how she laughed! (Was she a murderess or just a collector?) The tears rolled down her cheeks. She laughed and laughed and shook her head in smiling humorous disbelief at the ways of the world. Then she sat still for a while, resting her pimpled cheek in her hands. Heat and dust streamed in through The Zombie’s window.

Ash by John Shirley[15]

The Mission

Ash watched the police car pull up to the entrance of the Casa Valencia. The door to the apartment building, on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission district, was almost camouflaged by the businesses around it, wedged between the standout orange and blue colors of the Any Kind Check Cashing Center and the San Salvador restaurant. Ash made a note on his pad, and sipped his cappuccino as a bus hulked around the corner, blocking his view through the window of the espresso shop. The cops had shown up a good thirteen minutes after he’d called in the anonymous tip on a robbery at the Casa Valencia. Which worked out good. But when it was time to pop the armored car at the Check Cashing Center next door, they might show up more briskly. Especially if a cashier hit a silent alarm.

The bus pulled away. Only a few cars passed, impatiently clogging the corner of 16th and Valencia, then dispersing; pedestrians, with clothes flapping, hurried along in tight groups, as if they were being tumbled by the moist February wind. Blown instead by eagerness to get off the streets before this twilight became dark.

A second cop cruiser arrived, pulling up just around the corner from the first one, which was double-parking with its lights flashing. By now, though, the bruise-eyed hotel manager from New Delhi or Calcutta or wherever was telling the first cop that he hadn’t called anyone; it was a false alarm, probably called in by some junkie he’d evicted, just to harass him. The chunky white cop nodded in watery sympathy. The second cop, a black guy, called to the first through the window of his SFPD cruiser. Then they both split, off to Dunkin’ Donuts. Ash relaxed, checking his watch. Any minute now the armored car would be showing up for the evening money drop-off. There was a run of check cashing after five o’clock.

Ash sipped the dregs of his cappuccino. He thought about the .45 in the shoebox under his bed. He needed target practice. On the slim chance he had to use the gun. The thought made his heart thud, his mouth go dry, his groin tighten. He wasn’t sure if the reaction was fear or anticipation.

This, now, this was being alive. Planning a robbery, executing a robbery. Pushing back at the world. Making a dent in it, this time. For thirty-nine years his responses to the world’s bullying and indifference had been measured and careful and more or less passive. He’d played the game, pretending that he didn’t know the dealer was stacking the cards. He’d worked faithfully, first for Grenoble Insurance, then for Serenity Insurance, a total of seventeen years. And it had made no difference at all. When the recession came, Ash’s middle management job was jettisoned like so much trash.

It shouldn’t have surprised him. First at Grenoble, then at Serenity, Ash had watched helplessly as policy-holders had been summarily cut off by the insurance companies at the time of their greatest need. Every year, thousands of people with cancer, with AIDS, with accident paraplegia, cut off from the benefits they’d spent years paying for; shoved through the numerous loopholes that insurance industry lobbyists worked into the laws. That should have told him: if they’d do it to some ten-year-old kid with leukemia — and, God, they did it every damn day — they’d do it to Ash. Come the recession, bang, Ash was out on his ear with the minimum in benefits.

And the minimum flat-out wasn’t enough.

Fumbling through the “casing process,” Ash made a few more perfunctory notes as he waited for the armored car. His hobbyhorse reading was books about crime and the books had told him that professional criminals cased the place by taking copious notes about the surroundings. Next to Any Kind Check Cashing was Lee Zong, Hairstyling for Men and Women. Next to that, Starshine Video, owned by a Pakistani. On the Valencia side was the Casa Valencia entrance — the hotel rooms were layered above the Salvadoran restaurant, a dry cleaners, a leftist bookstore. Across the street, opposite the espresso place, was Casa Lucas Productos, a Hispanic supermarket, selling fruit and cactus pears and red bananas and plantains and beans by the fifty-pound bag. It was a hardy leftover from the days when this was an entirely Hispanic neighborhood. Now it was as much Korean and Arab and Hindu.

Two doors down from the check-cashing scam, in front of a liquor store, a black guy in a dirty, hooded sweatshirt stationed himself in front of passing pedestrians, blocking them like a linebacker to make it harder to avoid his outstretched hand.

That could be me, soon, Ash thought. I’m doing the right thing. One good hit to pay for a business franchise of some kind, something that’d do well in a recession. Maybe a movie theater. People needed to escape. Or maybe his own checkcashing business — with better security.

Ash glanced to the left, down the street, toward the entrance to the BART station: San Francisco’s subway, this entrance only one short block from the check-cashing center. At five-eighteen, give or take a minute, a north-bound subway would hit the platform, pause for a moment, then zip off down the tunnel. Ash would be on it, with the money; escaping more efficiently than he could ever hope to, driving a car in city traffic. And more anonymously.

The only problem would be getting to the subway station handily. He was five-six, and pudgy, his legs a bit short, his wind even shorter. He was going to have to sprint that block and hope no one played hero. If he knew San Francisco, though, no one would.

He looked back at the check-cashing center just in time to see the Armored Transport of California truck pull up. He checked his watch: as with last week, just about five-twelve. There was a picture insignia of a knight’s helmet on the side of the truck. The rest of the truck painted half black and half white, which was supposed to suggest police colors, scare thieves. Ash wouldn’t be intimidated by a paint job.

He’d heard that on Monday afternoons they brought about fifteen grand into that check-cashing center. Enough for a down payment on a franchise, somewhere, once he’d laundered the money in Reno.

Now, he watched as the old, white-haired black guard, in his black and white uniform, wheezed out the back of the armored car, carrying the canvas sacks of cash. Not looking to the right or left, no one covering him. His gun strapped into its holster.

The old nitwit was as ridiculously overconfident as he was overweight, Ash thought. Probably never had any trouble. First time for everything, Uncle Remus.

He watched intently as the guard waddled into the checkcashing center. Ash checked his watch, timing the pick-up process, though he wasn’t sure why he should, since he was planning to rob him on the way in, not on the way out. But he had the impression from the books that you were supposed to time everything. The reasons would come clear later.

A bony, stooped Chicano street eccentric — aging, toothless, with a squiggle of black mustache and sloppily dyed black hair — paraded up the sidewalk to stand directly in front of Ash’s window. Crazy old fruit, Ash thought. A familiar figure on the street here. He was wearing a Santa Claus hat tricked out with junk jewelry, a tattered gold lamé jacket, thick mascara and eyeliner, and a rose erupting a penis crudely painted on his weathered cheek. The inevitable trash-brimmed shopping bag in one hand, in the other a cane made into a mystical staff of office with the gold-painted plastic roses duct-taped to the top end.

As usual the crazy old fuck was babbling free-form imprecations, his spittle making whiteheads on the window glass. “Damnfuckya!” came muffled through the glass. “Damnfuckya for ya abandoned city, ya abandoned city and now their gods are taking away, taking like a bend-over boy yes, damnfuckya! Yoruba Orisha! The Orisha, cabrón! Holy shit on a wheel! Hijo de puta! Ya doot, ya pay, they watch, they pray, they take like a bend-over boy ya! El-Elegba Ishu at your crossroads shithead pendejo! LSD not the godblood now praise the days! Damnfuckya be sorry! Orisha them Yoruba cabrones!”

Yoruba Orisha. Sounded familiar.

“Godfuckya Orisha sniff ’round, vamanos! Chinga tu madre!”

Maybe the old fruit was a Santeria loony. Santeria was the Hispanic equivalent of Yoruba, and now he was foaming at the mouth about the growth of his weird little cult’s power. Or maybe he’d done too much acid in the sixties. Or both.

The Lebanese guys who ran the espresso place, trying to fake it as a chic croissant espresso parlor, went out onto the sidewalk to chase the old shrieker away. But Ash was through here, anyway. It was time to go to the indoor range, to practice with the gun.

On the BART train heading to the East Bay, on his way to the target range, Ash let his mind wander, and his eyes followed his mind. They wandered foggily over the otherwise empty interior of the humming, shivering train car, till they focused on a page of a morning paper someone had left on a plastic seat. It was a back-section page of the Examiner, and it was the word Yoruba in a headline that focused his eyes. Lurching with the motion of the train, Ash crossed the aisle and sat down next to the paper, read the article without picking it up.

Yoruba, it said, was the growing religion of inner-city blacks — an amalgam of African and Western mysticism. Ancestor worship with African roots. Supposed to be millions of urban blacks into it now. Orisha the name of the spirits. Ishu El-Elegba was some god or other.

So the Chicano street freak had been squeaking about Yoruba out of schizzy paranoia, because the cult was spreading through the barrio. Next week he’d be warning people about some plot by the Vatican.

Ash shrugged, and the train pulled into his station.

Ash had only fired the automatic once before — and before that hadn’t fired a gun since his boyhood, when he’d gone hunting with his father. He’d never hit anything in those days. He wasn’t sure he could hit anything now.

But he’d been researching gun handling. So after an hour or so — his hand beginning to ache with the recoil of the gun, his head aching from the grip of the ear protectors — he found he could fire a reasonably tight pattern into the black, manshaped paper target at the end of the gallery. It was a thrill being here, really. The other men along the firing gallery so hawk-eyed and serious as they loaded and fired intently at their targets. The ventilators sucking up the gunsmoke. The flash of the muzzles.

He pressed the button that ran his paper target back to him on the wire that stretched the length of the range, excitement mounting as he saw he’d clustered three of the five shots into the middle two circles.

It wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok, but it was good enough. It would stop a man, surely, wouldn’t it, if he laid a pattern like that into his chest?

But would it be necessary? It shouldn’t be. He didn’t want to have to shoot the old waddler. They wouldn’t look for him so hard, after the robbery, if he didn’t use the gun. Chances were, he wouldn’t have to shoot. The old guard would be terrified, paralyzed. Putty. Still...

He smiled as with the tips of his fingers he traced the fresh bullet holes in the target.

Ash was glad the week was over; relieved the waiting was nearly done. He’d begun to have second thoughts. The attrition on his nerves had been almost unbearable.

But now it was Monday again. Seven minutes after five p.m. He sat in the espresso shop, sipping, achingly and sensuously aware of the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his trench coat.

The street crazy with the gold roses on his cane was stumping along a little ways up, across the street, as if coming to meet Ash. And then the armored car pulled around the corner.

Legs rubbery, Ash made himself get up. He picked up the empty, frameless backpack, carried it in his left hand. Went out the door, into the bash of cold wind. The traffic light was with him. He took that as a sign, and crossed with growing alacrity, one hand closing around the grip of the gun in his coat pocket. The ski mask was folded up onto his forehead like a watch cap. As he reached the corner where the fat black security guard was just getting out of the back of the armored car, he pulled the ski mask down over his face. And then he jerked the gun out.

“Give me the bag or you’re dead right now!” Ash barked, just as he’d rehearsed it, leveling the gun at the old man’s unmissable belly.

For a split second, as the old black guy hesitated, Ash’s eyes focused on something anomalous in the guard’s uniform; an African charm dangling down the front of his shirt, where a tie should be. A spirit-mask face that seemed to grimace at Ash. Then the rasping plop of the bag dropping to the sidewalk snagged his attention away, and Ash waved the gun; yelling, “Back away and drop your gun! Take it out with thumb and forefinger only!” All according to rehearsal.

The gun clanked on the sidewalk. The old man backed stumblingly away. Ash scooped up the bag, shoved it into the backpack. Take the old guy’s gun, too. But people were yelling, across the street, for someone to call the cops, and he just wanted away. He sprinted into the street, into a tunnel of panic, hearing shouts and car horns blaring at him, the squeal of tires, but never looking around. His eyes fixed on the downhill block that was his path to the BART station.

Somehow he was across the street without being run over, was five paces past the wooden, poster-swathed newspaper kiosk on the opposite corner, when the Chicano street crazy with the gold roses on his cane popped into his path from a doorway, shrieking, the whites showing all the way around his eyes, foam spiraling from his mouth, his whole body pirouetting, spinning like a cop car’s red light. Ash bellowed something at him and waved the gun, but momentum carried him directly into the crazy fuck and they went down, one skidding atop the other, the stinking, clownishly made-up face howling two inches from his, the loon’s cocked knee knocking the wind out of Ash.

He forced himself to take air and rolled aside, wrenched free, gun in one hand and backpack in the other, his heart screaming in time with the throb of approaching sirens. People yelling around him. He got to his feet, the effort making him feel like Atlas lifting the world. Then he heard a deep, black voice. “Drop ’em both or down you go, motherfucker!” And, wheezing, the fat old black guard was there, gun retrieved and shining in his hand, breath steaming from his wide nostrils, dripping sweat, eyes wild. The crazy was up, then, flailing indiscriminately, this time in the fat guard’s face. The old guy’s gun once more went spinning away from him.

Now’s your chance, Ash. Go.

But his shaking hands had leveled his own gun.

Thinking: The guy’s going to pick up his piece and shoot me in the back unless I gun him down.

No he won’t, he won’t chance hitting passersby, just run—

But the crazy threw himself aside and the black guard was a clear-cut target and something in Ash erupted out through his hands. The gun banged four times and the old man went down. Screams in the background. The black guard clutching his torn-up belly. One hand went to the carved African grimace hanging around his neck. His lips moved.

Ash ran. He ran into another tunnel of perception; and down the hill.

Ash was on the BART platform, and the train was pulling in. He didn’t remember coming here. Where was the gun? Where was the money? The mask? Why was his mouth full of paper?

He took stock. The gun was back in his coat pocket, like a scorpion retreated into its hole. His ski mask was where it was supposed to be, too, with the canvas bag in the backpack. There was no paper in his mouth. It just felt that way, it was so dry.

The train pulled in and, for a moment, it seemed to Ash that it was feeding on the people in the platform by taking them into itself. Trains and buses all over the city puffing up, feeding, moving on, stopping to feed again Strange thought. Just get on the train. He had maybe one minute before the city police would coordinate with the BART police and they’d all come clattering down here looking to shoot him.

He stepped onto the train just as the doors closed.

It took an unusually long time to get to the next station. That was his imagination; the adrenaline affecting him, he supposed. He didn’t look at anyone else on the train. No one looked at him. They were all damned quiet.

He got off at the next stop. That was his plan — get out before the transit cops staked out the station. But he half expected them to be there when he got out of the train.

He felt a weight spiral away from him: no cops on the platform, or at the top of the escalator.

Next thing, go to ground and stay. They’d expect him to go much farther, maybe the airport.

God it was dark out. The night had come so quickly, in just the few minutes he’d spent on the train. Well, it came fast in the winter.

He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Maybe he was around Hunter’s Point somewhere. It looked mostly black and Hispanic here. He’d be conspicuous. No matter, he was committed.

You killed a man.

Don’t think about it now. Think about shelter.

He moved off down the street, scanning the signs for a cheap hotel. Had to get off the streets fast. With luck, no one would get around to telling the cops he’d ducked into the Mission Street BART station. Street people at 16th and Mission didn’t confide in the cops.

It was all open-air discount stores and flyblown bar-b-cue stands and bars. The corners were clumped up, as they always were, with corner drinkers and loafers and hustlers and people on errands stopped to trade gossip with their cousins. Black guys and Hispanic guys, turning to look at Ash as he passed, never pausing in their murmur. All wearing dark glasses; it must be some kind of fad in this neighborhood to wear shades at night. It didn’t make much sense. The blacks and Hispanics stood about in mixed groups, which was kind of strange. They communicated at times, especially in the drug trade, but they were usually more segregated. The streetlights seemed a cateye yellow here, but gave out no illumination — everything above the street level was pitch black. Below on the street it was dim and increasingly misty. A leprous mist that smudged the neon of the bars, the adult bookstores, the beer signs in the liquor stores. He stared at a beer sign as he passed. Drink the Piss of Hope, it said. He must have read that wrong. But farther down he read it again in another window: Piss of Hope: The Beer that Sweetly Lies.

Piss of Hope?

Another sign advertised Heartblood Wine Cooler. Heartblood, now. It was so easy to get out of touch with things. But...

There was something wrong with the sunglasses people were wearing. Looking close at a black guy and a Hispanic guy standing together, he saw that their glasses weren’t sunglasses, exactly. They were the miniatures of house windows, thickly painted over. Dull gray paint, dull red paint.

Stress. It’s stress, and the weird light here and what you’ve been through.

He could feel them watching him. All of them. He passed a group of children playing a game. The children had no eyes; they had plucked them out, were casting the eyes, tumbling them along the sidewalk like jacks — You’re really freaked out, Ash thought. It’s the shooting. It’s natural. It’ll pass.

The cars in the street were lit from underneath, with oily yellow light. There were no headlights. None. They didn’t have headlights. Their windows were painted out. (That is not a pickup truck filled with dirty, stark-naked children vomiting blood.) The crowds on the edges of the sidewalk thickened. It was like a parade day; like people waiting for a procession. (The old wino sleeping in the doorway is not made out of dog shit.) In the window of a bar, he saw a hissing, flickering neon sign shaped like a face. A grimacing face of lurid strokes of neon, amalgamated from goat and hyena and man, a mask he’d seen before. He felt the sign’s impossible warmth as he walked by.

The open door of the bar smelled like rotten meat and sour beer. Now and then, on the walls above the shop doors, rusty public address speakers, between bursts of static and feedback, gave out filtered announcements that seemed threaded together into one long harangue as he proceeded from block to block.

“Today we have large pieces available... The fever calls from below to offer new bargains, discount prices... Prices slashed... slashed... We’re slashing... prices are... from below, we offer...”

A police car careened by. Ash froze till he saw it was apparently driving at random, weaving drunkenly through the street and then plowing into the crowd on the opposite side of the street, sending bodies flying. No one on Ash’s side of the street more than glanced over with their painted-out eyes. The cop car only stopped crushing pedestrians when it plowed into a telephone pole and its front windows shattered, revealing cracked mannequins inside twitching and sparking.

Shooting the old guard has fucked up your head, Ash thought. Just stare at the street, look down, look away, Ash.

He pushed on. A hotel, find a hotel, a hotel. Go in somewhere, ask, get directions, get away from this street. (That is not a whore straddling a smashed man, squatting over the broken bone-end of a man’s arm.) Go into this bar advertising Lifeblood Beer and Finehurt Vodka. (Christ, where did they get these brands? He’d never...

Inside the bar. It was a smoky room; the smoke smelled like burnt meat and tasted of iron filings on his tongue. One of those sports bars, photos on the walls of football players... smashing open the other players’ helmets with sledgehammers. On the TV screen at the end of the bar a blurry hockey game played out. (The hockey players are not beating a naked woman bloody with their sticks, blood spattering their inhuman masks, no they’re not.) Men and women of all colors at the bar were dead things (no they’re not, it’s just...), and they were smoking something, not drinking. They had crack pipes in their hands and they were using tiny ornate silver spoons to scoop something from the furred buckets on the bar to put in their pipes, and burn with their Bic lighters; when they inhaled, their emaciated faces puffed out: aged, sunken, wrinkled, blue-veined, disease-pocked faces that filled out, briefly healed, became healthy for a few moments, wrinkles blurring away with each hit, eyes clearing, hair darkening as each man and woman applied lighter to the pipe and sucked gray smoke. (Don’t look under the bar.) Then the smokers instantly atrophied again, becoming dead, or near-dead; becoming mummies who smoked pipes, shriveled — until the next hit. The bartender was a black man with gold teeth and white-painted eyelids, wearing a sort of gold and black gown. He stood polishing a whimpering skull behind the bar, and said, “Brotherman, you looking for de hotel, it’s on de corner, de Crossroads Hotel — You take a hit, too? One money, give me one money and I give you de fine—”

“No, no thanks,” Ash said with rubbery lips.

His eyes adjusting so he could see under the bar, in front of the stools — there were people under the bar locked into metal braces, writhing in restraints: their heads were clamped up through holes in the bars and the furry buckets in front of each smoker were the tops of their heads, the crowns of their skulls cut away, brains exposed, gray and pink; the clamped heads were facing the bartender who fed them something that wriggled, from time to time. The smokers used their petite, glimmering spoons to scoop bits of quivering brain tissue from the living skulls and dollop the gelatinous stuff into the bowls of their pipes — basing the brains of the women and men clamped under the bars, taking a hit and filling out with strength and health for a moment. Was the man under the bar a copy of the one smoking him? Ash ran before he knew for sure.

Just get to the hotel and it’ll pass, it’ll pass.

Out the door and past the shops, a butcher’s (those are not skinned children hanging on the hooks), and over the sidewalk which he saw now was imprinted with fossils, fossils of visages, like people pushing their faces against glass till they pressed out of shape and distorted like putty; impressions in concrete of crushed faces underfoot. The PA speakers rattling, echoing.

“... prices slashed and bent over sawhorses, every price and every avenue, discounts and bargains, latest in fragrant designer footwear...”

Past a doorway of a boarding house — was this the place? But the door bulged outward, wood going to rubber, then the lock buckling and the door flying open to erupt people, vomiting them onto the sidewalk in a keystone cops heap, but moving only as their limbs flopped with inertia: they were dead, their eyes stamped with hunger and madness, each one clutching a shopping bag of trash, one of them the Chicano street crazy who’d tried to warn him: gold roses clamped in his teeth, he was dead now; some of them crushed into shopping carts; two of them, yes, all curled up and crushed, trash-compacted into a shopping cart so their flesh burst out through the metal gaps. Flies that spoke with the voices of radio DJs cycled over them, yammering in little buzzing parodic voices: “This Wild Bob at KMEL and hey did we tell ya about our super countdown contest, we’re buzzing with it, buzzzzzzing wizzzz-zzzz—”

A bus at the corner. Maybe get in it and ride the hell out of the neighborhood. But the vehicle’s sides were striated like a centipede and when it pulled over at the bus stop its doorway was wet, it fed on the willing people waiting there, and from its underside crushed and sticky-ochre bodies were expelled to spatter the street.

“... one money sale, the window smoke waits. One money and inside an hour we’ll find the paste that lives and chews, prices slashed, three money and we’ll throw in a...”

He paused on the corner. There: the Crossroads Hotel. A piss-in-the-sink hotel, the sort filled with junkies and pensioned winos. Crammed in between other buildings like the Casa Valencia had been. He was afraid to go in.

Across the street: whores, with crotch-high skirts and bulging, wattled cleavages and missing limbs that waved to him with the squeezed-out, curly ends of the stumps. (It’s not true that they have no feet, that their ankles are melded into the sidewalk.)

“One money will buy you two women whose tongues can reach deeply into a garbage disposal, we also have, for two money...”

The whores beckoned; the crowd thickened. He went into the hotel.

A steep, narrow climb up groaning stairs to the half door where the manager waited. The hotel manager was a Hindu, and behind him were three small children with their faces covered in black cloth (the children do not have three disfigured arms apiece), gabbling in Hindi. The Hindu manager smiling broadly. Gold teeth. Identical face to the bartender but long straight hair, Hindu accent as he said: “Hello hello, you want a room, we have one vacancy, I am sorry we have no linen now, no, there are no visitors unless you pay five money extra, no visitors, no—”

“I understand, I don’t care about that stuff,” Ash babbled. Still carrying the backpack, he noted, taking stock of himself again. You’re okay. Hallucinating but okay. Just get into the room and work out the stress, maybe send for a bottle.

Then he passed over all the money in his wallet and signed a paper whose print ran like ink in rainwater, and the manager led him down the hall to the room. No number on the door. Something crudely pen-knifed into the old wooden door panel: a face like an African mask, hyena and goat and man. But momentum carried him into the room — the manager didn’t even use a key, just opened it — and momentum, too, closed the door behind him. Ash turned and saw that it was a bare room with a single bed and a window and a dangling naked bulb and a sink in one corner, no bathroom. Smelling of urine and mold. The light was on.

There were six people in the room.

“Shit!” Ash turned to the door, wondering where his panic had been till now. “Hey!” He opened the door and the manager came back to it, grinning at him in the hallway. “Hey, there’s already people in here—”

“Yes hello yes they live with you, you know, they are the wife and daughter and grandchildren of the man you killed you know—”

“What?”

“The man you killed, you know, yes—”

“What?”

“Yes they are in you now at the crossroads and here are more, oh yes—” He gestured, happy as a church usher at a revival, ushering in seven more people, who crowded past Ash to throng the room, shifting aimlessly from foot to foot, gaping sightlessly, whining to themselves, bumping into one another at random. Blocking Ash, without seeming to try, every time he made for the door. Pushing him gently but relentlessly back toward the window.

The manager was no longer speaking in English, nor was he speaking Hindi; his face was no longer a man’s, but something resembling that of a hyena and a goat and a man, and he was speaking in an African tongue — Yoruba? — with a sound that was as strange to Ash as the cry of an animal on the veldt, but he knew, anyway, with a kind of a priori knowledge, what the man was saying. Saying...

That these people were those disenfranchised by the old man’s death: the old armored-car guard’s death meant that his wife would not be able to provide the money to help her son-in-law start that business and he goes instead into crime and then to life in prison, and his children, fatherless, slide into drugs, and lose their hope and then their lives and as a direct result they beat and abuse their own children and those children have children which they beat and abuse (because they, themselves, were beaten and abused) and they all grow up into psychopaths and aimless, sleepwalking automatons... Who shoved, now, into this room, made it more and more crushingly crowded, murmuring and whining as they elbowed Ash back to the window. There were thirty in the little room, and then forty, and then forty-five and fifty, the crowd humid with body heat and sullen and dully urgent as it crowded Ash against the window frame. He looked over his shoulder, peered through the glass. Maybe there was escape, out there.

But outside the window it was a straight drop four floors to a trash heap. It was an air shaft, an enclosed space between buildings to provide air and light for the hotel windows. Air shafts filled up with trash in places like this; bottles and paper sacks and wrappers and wet boxes and shapeless sneakers and bent syringes and mold-carpeted garbage and brittle condoms and crimped cans. The trash was thicker, deeper than in any air shaft he’d ever seen. It was a cauldron of trash, subtly seething, moving in places, wet sections of cardboard shifting, cans scuttling; bottles rattling and strips of tar paper humping up, worming; the wet, stinking motley of the air shaft weaving itself into a glutinous tapestry.

No, he couldn’t go out there. But there was no space to breathe now, inside, and no way to the door; they were piling in still, all the victims of his shooting. The ones killed or maimed by the ones abandoned by the ones lost by the one he had killed. How many people now, in this room made for one, people crawling atop people, piling up so that the light was in danger of being crushed out against the ceiling?

One killing can’t lead to so much misery, he thought.

Oh but the gunshot’s echoes go on and on, the happy, mocking Ishu said. On and on, white devil cocksucker man.

What is this place? Ash asked, in his head. Is it Hell?

Oh no, this is the city. Just the city. Where you have always lived. Now you can see it, merely, white demon cocksucker man. Now stay here with us, with your new family, where he called you with his dying breath...

Ash couldn’t bear it. The claustrophobia was of infinite weight. He turned again to the window, and looked once more into the air shaft; the trash decomposing and almost cubistically recomposed into a great garbage disposal churn, that chewed and digested itself and everything that fell into it.

The press of people pushed him against the window so that the glass creaked.

And then thirty more, from generations hence, came through the door, and pushed their way in. The window glass protested. The newcomers pushed, vaguely and sullenly, toward the window. The glass cracked — and shrieked once.

Only the glass shrieked. Ash, though, was silent, as he was heaved through the shattering glass and out the window, down into the air shaft, and into the innermost reality of the city.

About the contributors

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) was a journalist and satirist who contributed to and edited a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco News Letter, the Californian, and the Wasp. His best-known works include the scathing collection The Devil’s Dictionary and the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been adapted into film, radio broadcasts, and teleplays.

Craig Clevenger was born in Dallas, Texas and currently lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two novels, The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, and is currently working on his third. He can be found at www.craigclevenger.com.

Janet Dawson created Oakland, California private investigator Jeri Howard, who has sleuthed her way through nine novels. Jeri’s first case, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for Best First Private Eye Novel, and earned Shamus, Macavity, and Anthony award nominations as well. Her short story “Voice Mail,” in the collection Scam and Eggs, won a Macavity Award. Another story, “Slayer Statute,” received a Shamus Award nomination. She works at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fletcher Flora (1914–1968) wrote over sixty mystery and noir stories for major crime publications such as Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He also wrote sixteen novels and coauthored many more, including Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene, a crime novel about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

Joe Gores, a former San Francisco — based private investigator, is the author of dozens of screenplays, television scripts, biographies, short stories, and novels, including the acclaimed DKA detective series. A Northern California resident, he has won three Edgar Awards and Japan’s Maltese Falcon Award.

Don Herron is best known for leading the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977, giving him a long working acquaintance with the city of the 1920s and hardboiled stories pounded out for publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask. He is the author of various books, including The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs and Willeford, a survey of the life and times of cult noir author Charles Willeford.

Jack London (1876–1916), a San Francisco native, is best known today for his adventure novel The Call of the Wild and his pro-socialist dystopia The Iron Heel. But during his lifetime his greatest successes were his prolific short fiction, many of which are set in the Bay Area.

Peter Maravelis has had a lifelong involvement in the world of arts and letters. For over twenty years, he has been a bookseller and events producer. He is currently the events director at City Lights Bookstore. He was born and raised in San Francisco, where he currently lives.

Seth Morgan (1949–1990) published only one novel, Homeboy (1990), which won him high critical praise in many cities including San Francisco, where the work is set. The novel’s preoccupation with heroin addicts and convicts perhaps best captures Morgan’s own troubled life of drugs and crime. He won the PEN essay contest for convicts while incarcerated for armed robbery in the mid 1970s.

Marcia Muller, a native of the Detroit area, has authored thirty-five novels, three of them in collaboration with her husband Bill Pronzini; seven short story collections; and numerous nonfiction articles. Together she and Pronzini have edited a dozen anthologies and a nonfiction book on the mystery genre. The Mulzinis, as friends call them, live in Sonoma County, California, in a house full of books.

Frank Norris (1870–1902) was born in Chicago and moved to San Francisco at the age of fourteen. After attending Berkeley and Harvard, Norris embarked on an expansive writing career as a news correspondent in South Africa, an editorial assistant for the San Francisco Wave, and a war correspondent for McClure’s Magazine during the Spanish — American War in 1898. Heavily influenced by French naturalism, Norris’s most notable work, McTeague (1899), explores the life and trials of a dentist at the dawn of twentieth-century America in the city of San Francisco. McTeague has also been captured in different film versions and as an opera. His other works include The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).

Oscar Peñaranda left the Philippines at the age of twelve. He spent his adolescent years in Vancouver, Canada, and then moved to San Francisco at the age of seventeen. His stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized both nationally and internationally. He is the author of Full Deck (Jokers Playing), a collection of poetry, and Seasons by the Bay, an award-winning story collection.

Bill Pronzini has published seventy novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and thirty-three in his popular Nameless Detective Series. He is also the author of four nonfiction books, twenty collections of short stories, and scores of uncollected stories, articles, essays, and book reviews; additionally, he has edited and coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries. In 2008 he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest award. He has also received three Shamus Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America, and six Edgar Award nominations.

John Shirley is the author of numerous novels, including Cellars, Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin’, Eclipse, A Splendid Chaos, and, most recently, The Other End. He was coscreenwriter of the film The Crow, and his recent novel Demons is in development as a movie at the Weinstein Company.

Mark Twain (1835–1910), born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is among the finest contributors to the canon of American literature. He began to gain fame when his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” appeared in the New York Saturday Press in 1865. His book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is widely considered the Great American Novel. Its predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), is also remarkable for Twain’s play with language and his attention to the innocence and imagination of childhood. Twain’s literary career evolved when he headed west for San Francisco. There he continued as a journalist, began lecturing and met his wife, Olivia Langdon.

William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of various books, including The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, and a series of novels entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. In addition, Vollmann’s works of nonfiction include An Afghanistan Picture Show and Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, and Granta. In 1999, the New Yorker named Vollmann “one of the twenty best writers in America under forty.” His most recent work, Riding Toward Everywhere, was published in 2008 to great critical acclaim. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.