by Jeff Johnson
Books by Jeff Johnson
Lucky Supreme: A Darby Holland Crime Novel (#1) (2017)
A Long Crazy Burn: A Darby Holland Crime Novel (#2) (2017)
Dead Bomb Bingo Ray: A Novel (2017)
Knottspeed: A Love Story (2017)
Everything Under the Moon: A Novel (2016)
Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink (2010)
Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Johnson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Gigi Little
Cover photo credit: Morguefile
Print ISBN: 978-162872-975-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-162872-979-5
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
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The night the frenzy under the surface reached a rolling boil, I could see my breath in the neon spilling from the windows. The steam made the glow pretty in a sulfurous way. Something had come to town, and I could feel it in the tremors of the wet sidewalk and hear it in the hiss of tires, feel it watching from the orange halos of all the electric lights.
Around 3:00 a.m., after the bars close and Portland’s Old Town powers down, that was when I could sense it most. Change. The bad kind. The spirit of the city was a hobo’s garden, almost gone every second it was there, and Ming’s Shoe and Boot Repair was a holdout in the middle of it all, a relic like myself, too stubborn to move and too blind to understand it should change, so not long for a new world that kept getting newer. The old neon boot icon was set to slow blink and so was I. It was Wednesday. No matter how hard I tried, I wound up drinking in the alcove in front of it two or three times a week. Recently, more often.
A giant figure stepped out of the rain and loomed over me. Television huge. Dark blue suit. Expensive hair and spendy shoes. The dead eyes of a professional beating machine. He didn’t frown in disappointment or smile in wry disgust. I was a creature from days past; bomber jacket and jeans, combat boots, plastic bottle of vodka, lounging in a doorway. Part of the old Old Town, and he looked at me the way you look at apes in the zoo, expectantly, waiting for me to freak out or do something funny. When I didn’t do anything, he held out the greasy paper bag he was carrying.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Teriyaki doll head for all you care,” Santiago growled. He knelt next to me, but he didn’t sit. The Mexican Conan was too dapper to touch the tiles. I passed him the vodka and he took a little nip, blew out the fumes, and his face finally wrinkled in disgust. “You own a bar full of top-shelf booze and you drink discount snake juice.”
I took the sandwich he’d brought out of the bag and started in on it. Pulled pork, balsamic arugula, pine nuts, and Turkish fig aioli. It was from the appetizer menu at Alcott Frond, the bistro that had risen from the cadaver of “mitri’s izza.”
“I was thinking about Yellowstone,” I managed, my mouth full.
“You were?” Santiago considered, then took another nip of vodka. He set the bottle down next to me and dusted his hands. “Never been there. Went to the Tetons once.”
“Yeah?” I crammed the second half of the sandwich in my mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed. “Good times?”
“Went with a woman.”
We watched a car go by. I wiped my hands on my pants. Santiago took his cigarettes out and offered me one. I accepted. We fired them up and smoked, and he seemed to admire the view. There was a trash can right across from us, beyond that a new cubist Lego Modern apartment hive.
“Good turnout tonight,” Santiago commented after a little while. He knew I didn’t care, and I knew he was going to tell me anyway. Our relationship was unlike any I’d ever had before. Santiago Espinoza had been an ex-con working for a real estate developer when I first met him. For a variety of reasons, I’d drugged his boss and sent him off to die in Russia after I ripped him off. Then, after beating the shit out of him, largely by cheating in that fight, I offered Santiago a job. His dream job, as it turned out. He’d prospered wildly in the last year and for some reason he still felt I was responsible for it, even though he’d done all the hard work himself. I’d told him the truth, time and time again, that I’d needed him just like his last boss, that he was doing me the favor and not the other way around, but Santiago never bought it. That’s why he brought me sandwiches at 3:00 a.m.
“Kid puked in front of the Lucky,” I said. The Lucky Supreme, my tattoo shop. “Flaco hit it with some Windex. Rain got the rest.” Flaco, from the taco kiosk next to the shop, was not a world class problem-solver.
“Need a ride?” Santiago straightened his suit coat.
“Nah. Catch a cab over on Burnside. I’m not done hanging out yet.”
Half an hour later, I got up and shook out the cold, tossed my empty in a garbage can, and headed for a cab, sticking to the awnings and getting wet anyway. Store decorations were pumpkin heavy, with a multicolored Indian corn sprinkled in the mix. I stopped and looked through the dark window of an overpriced café and stared at an ear of it. The Cadillac of corn.
On Burnside, I stood on the corner down from Voodoo Donut, a purely bizarre place the new version of the city couldn’t kill, and got scooped up by one of the cabs that circled it at all hours. The driver was a white kid. Portland is a white, white city. He sported a stylish blend of heavy metal and new hippie. Guy was a talker, too. I gave him my address.
“Just off work? You a bartender?” He seemed a tiny bit excited. Strong coffee or a slow night.
“Nah.”
“Partying?”
“Kinda trapped in a never-ending party, so no. Not really.”
“Huh.” He glanced in the rearview. “You from here? Swear I know you from somewhere.”
A year ago my face had been all over the papers. Massive federal manhunt after a bomb went off downtown and blew the shit out of most of a city block. I hid out in a bartender’s house, eating sardines and stale cake while I recovered from a near-death beating that left me in a dumpster and resulted in the cool-guy scar on my face.
“I get around.”
“Me too.” The kid shook his head at the grooviness of it all. “Life behind the wheel, man. You all set for Halloween?”
“Need to get some decorations for the house. Maybe some of that corn I ke
ep seeing. My chick is in Seattle, so I might drive all the way the fuck up there again. Dunno. The whole party thing just pisses me off anymore.”
“Always the strip clubs, baby. This is Portland. One on every corner.”
“Dude. Do not get me started.”
“So lemme get this.” He glanced in the rearview again. “Dicey long-distance woman scenario, not interested in parties and the club scene. Cruising Old Town at what, like, four in the morning?” He snapped his fingers. “You’re a Method actor!”
I laughed. “Busted.”
“Checkmate.” He giggled. “It’s like I have telepathy.”
I tipped him an extra few bucks when we pulled up in front of my place, and after he jetted away down my tree-lined street, I stood in the rain and stared at my house, testing the feel of it. It was an old Victorian duplex with me on the first floor, a big porch, and the Oregon standard rhododendrons on either side of the stairs. Dark windows.
Haunted.
The place had taken on a different kind of vibe in the last month or so. It wasn’t that my girlfriend, Suzanne, had taken a job in Seattle and moved out of the daily picture, leaving a void where her soft morning singing and moods bright and terrible had been. It wasn’t the change in the weather, having the sky turn into a featureless gray cave roof. It wasn’t that I was dragging the ghost of change and judgment out of the bones of Old Town every night. It wasn’t even a combination of all that. There was something new and wrong about my house, like radiation, there but invisible, and looking at the dark shape of it made me want to go back to the shoe and boot alcove.
“Hello,” I said to nothing.
It was impossible to prove, too. As I went up the stairs and fished the keys out of my pocket, I mentally drifted over the faces of all the people I’d pissed off in my month-long bout of paranoia. Pretty much everyone. I silently unlocked the door and slowly, slowly opened it.
Dark. Warm. Quiet. It smelled like Dollar Store furniture polish, coffee, and books. No broken windows or I would feel the difference in the air. I reached in and turned on the light. Chops and Buttons, my two cats, were asleep on the couch. They woke up and blinked at me. Chops yawned before he closed his eyes again. Nothing from Buttons.
I locked the door behind me and took off my wet jacket and boots, left them by the door. As I went through the place I turned on the lights. Dining room with a big table, where for years I never sat, then ate at morning and night with Suzanne, then stopped using again after she left. Kitchen. Very tidy, almost like no one ever cooked there anymore. A bathroom off to one side that smelled like masculine Dial antimicrobial soap and wet towel instead of ten kinds of tall woman. And the bedroom, lavish in an old antique way, filled with furniture I’d finally gotten around to restoring courtesy of Suzanne’s subtle scorn. It was a bedroom that belonged in a showroom, or the bedroom of a guy who slept on the couch in his wet clothes.
Empty. No phantoms, cops, women, killers, art dealers, rivals, former employees, drug dealers, feds, or girlfriends. I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a nightcap and carried it out to the couch, turning all lights off as I went. Sitting in the dark made me feel grounded. If there was a presence in my house, it put us on the same creepy playing field. I eventually lit a cigarette and sipped the absurdly expensive scotch I’d transitioned to and listened to the familiar soundtrack of “old house at night.” When the glass was finally empty, I turned on my cell phone. Sixteen missed calls since I left the shop, at precise thirty-minute intervals, all from Delia.
Delia was the largest of my current problems. Certainly the most colorful. Definitely the loudest. My sidekick, my most trusted confidant, my best employee, was leaving Portland. Leaving the Lucky and the glory of Old Town. She was emerging as an artist of merit in other mediums and haring off to Austin. Before she left, she was dead set on marrying the idiot douchebag she’d been supporting for the last year, the semi-cretin lead spaz of the punk band Empire of Shit, the infamous Hank Dildo.
The marriage part of her transformation was beyond implausible. Delia was a genius. She was the best artist I’d ever worked with, hands down, but it was more than that. What was hard for the rest of us, she stepped over effortlessly. Delia was a tiny, titless, mouthy fireball and in every way that counted she was the biggest woman I’d ever known. It was terrible of me, and my troublesome girlfriend, Suzanne, would laugh bitterly if I said it out loud, but it seemed irresponsible for someone with so much going for her to marry a musician. Especially one like Hank.
Hank, for instance, liked spray paint. As a refreshing intoxicant. I thought it was all for show in the beginning, the kind of facade one would expect from the front man of a mad punk band like Empire of Shit, but now I suspected otherwise. Hank liked other drugs in a generalized way, but thankfully punk music on his level didn’t net the kind of funds required to become a proper junkie. Not yet. Probably. Hank didn’t strike me as especially clean, either. He most definitely wasn’t a romantic. But the worst part was that the bastard was so charming I was having trouble hating him. He lit up the room, like Jude Law’s bipolar little brother.
Delia. Suzanne. The creamy transformation of the City of Roses. I missed all kinds of things that weren’t quite gone yet. I got up and drifted silently back into the kitchen, sloshed a little more scotch in my glass. Then I looked out the window at the neighbor’s backyard. There was a forlorn old Big Wheel, upside-down and worn and broken, just visible in the dim light from their back porch bulb. The grass was dead, and staring out at the Big Wheel a few nights ago had given me an idea. The tracks around the thing, specifically. I set my drink down on the counter and went silently to the front window, peeked out at the street. All quiet. No new cars, no pedestrians, steady rain. I opened the front door just wide enough to slip through and went out low and fast.
Willing myself to be a half-drunk shadow, I vaulted the porch railing and dropped barefoot into the wet yard on the side of the house, then stole toward the backyard. At the edge of the house, I cautiously peered around the side. Empty. The back of my shirt was soaked and the wind hit me as I rounded the corner and slunk up to my bedroom window. I’d pulled all the grass out below it in a frenzy a few nights ago. The bare spot was roughly the size of a welcome mat. It was too dark to see clearly, so I dug my phone out and flipped it open, turned the tiny blue screen toward the patch of wet earth.
Boot prints. The rest of my warmth gusted out of my rib cage.
Someone had been looking through my bedroom window, and from the freshness of the prints, they’d been there moments ago, when I’d turned on the bedroom light and stood there, staring at Suzanne’s pillow.
My phantom was real.
Everything about the new and improved Lucky Supreme, that pinnacle of neon whorls and gold leaf, old-fashioned barber chairs with polished chrome and speckled star field vinyl upholstery, the refurbished ’50s jukebox with bubbly lights and Cash Only, it was all my idea. My doing. I was rich, after all, and we’d been rebuilding from scratch. There was some resistance at first. Delia had nitpicked and micromanaged everything, at every step, attempting to distort my vision through willpower, tantrums, and cold, bony shoulders, and some of her had ultimately crept into the place. But in the end, the blame for transforming a venerable tattoo shop in Old Town into a swank bordello tangled with a phony yuppie stereotype was my bad.
I surveyed the assembled crew with a stern expression. I have a big scar on my face, so my stern is positively gnarly. Nine thirty a.m., Code Omega Red, emergency meeting. I was in no way trying to inspire confidence, which was what I usually had to do. This time I was sharing an unhealthy dose of terror. What I had before me in the dark tattoo shop was not promising.
“I think I speak for all of us,” Delia began, stepping forward. Behind her, the three guys frantically made “no, no” gestures. Delia was wearing an ancient Burger King kid’s tee and fire-engine-red overalls. “Now, I don’t know the Webster’s Dictionary definition of anything, not by heart, but
‘fruitcake’ means so many things that resonate with—”
“Dude, it wasn’t the bathroom window, right?” Chase interrupted. Chase was new. He had replaced my trusty former employee, Nigel. The period of time it had taken to transform the Lucky from a burned-out husk into the stale, soulless farce we stood in had given poor Nigel just enough time to get into the kind of trouble he couldn’t get back out of. A few weeks before the grand reopening, the two feds who’d been dogging me for three years busted him for moving gun parts, pills, and more, and the upshot was that he’d be cooling his jets inside until 2029. We sent letters and cookies, and I did a little more on the side. Chase Manhattan, who had perhaps the dumbest tattoo handle of all time, was also an old pal of mine. I trusted him to a point, and that’s rare enough. “I mean, you did check outside the bathroom, right? Darby?” Then he looked pained and shut up.
The other two guys, Stewart Something-Or-Other and Billy or Danny Who-Cares, didn’t say anything. I made them nervous quite easily, especially when I was trying to.
“Let me try this one more time,” I said evenly. I detached from the counter and started pacing. “Now, who here doubts I’m paranoid?” I stopped and stared. It was a confusing question, designed to shut them down. Delia bravely raised her hand and drew a breath to deny doing so. I stopped her with a glare. Chase shrugged, rolling with the moment, a very lost surfer. The two new guys looked at Delia, began to raise their hands in complicity, then stopped, then started again, clearly agonizing. “This isn’t a trick question.” They raised their hands.
“Or is it?” Delia simpered. Both guys lowered their hands and clasped them behind their backs, looked down. I rolled my eyes.
“Now, as a super-paranoid motherfucker, I notice all kinds of shit most people wouldn’t. Sometimes it makes no sense. This time it does. Someone is stalking me. For a month now, maybe longer. This is now an established fact. But why the fuck would I tell you guys? That’s what you’re asking yourself, right?”
Delia sneered at me. Chase had no reaction at all, just looked on, smiling, waiting for me to get to the point. The new guys both looked surprised, as if this had just occurred to them.
