by Seth Harwood
Down the bar, Jack sees David and Al standing at the stage, holding bills up to a brunette who’s putting one of her high heels on Al’s green shoulder. As she bends forward to take Al’s bill between her breasts, David is already laying a twenty across the bridge of his nose.
Jack laughs. “That shouldn’t be too hard.”
The next morning Jack wakes up later than normal—he didn’t get in until after four—and when he reaches the kitchen, there are already three messages waiting on his machine. He hits the button and starts taking out a bowl and the cereal. Fuck today’s run.
First there’s a beep and then, “Hi, Jack. This is Maxine from The Coast. From last night. Hope you liked your seltzers with lime. So sorry you and your friends had to leave before we got off. I’ll call you again later.”
Nice one, Jack thinks. The girl’s aggressive. Not afraid to find his number or to call first. He considers calling her back, but she probably got in later than he did and is still sleeping it off. Jack thinks back to her breasts, the little silver cups over her nipples, the tight choker around her neck. He hears the second beep. “Yo, Jackie, this is Ralph. Nice show last night. I’m icing my head to wake up this morning and I just got a call from the Colombian. He wants to meet this afternoon and get acquainted. Know what that means? Anyways, come pick me up when you’re moving and I’ll tell you what’s next.”
Jack guesses the Colombian will have some questions about this Czech money and if it’s as green as he likes. That or he doesn’t know Ralph as well as Ralph wants everyone to think. Probably the Colombian wants to feel Ralph out before he gets into any deals with his friends.
Maybe it’s the cards he’s been dealt, more payback for all the drugs he did with Victoria, all he took out of life after Shake ’Em Down, that make Jack a hired hand in all this, the guy who has to go pick up Ralph at his house, but he can take it. He has to admit he had fun last night; even acting like a bodyguard-concierge, it felt good to get out again, better than anything he’s done in a while.
He knows the longer he goes with Ralph, the harder it’ll be to get out. But maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe he’s ready for something-even something like this.
The answering machine beeps again. “Jack Palms, this is Sergeant Hopkins from the SFPD. I’m sure you remember me from when we made that little visit to your house three years ago. The one your wife requested?”
“Fuck,” Jack says out loud to the morning. He remembers them taking him away in handcuffs as the papers snapped pictures of him like he’d just robbed the White House. How could he forget? Or forget Sergeant Mills Hopkins, the cop who brought him in?
“Well, it’s just come onto my desk that there may be a few new reasons for us to have a talk sometime soon. Do you think you could call me back and save me the trip out to your place?” Jack can hear sarcasm and something like joy in the officer’s voice as he leaves his phone number. “That’d be the greatest. Thanks.”
Hopkins, the fucking Sausalito cop who took Jack away that time Victoria called, tipped off the papers about the wife-beater story, and had a fun time doing it. Jack remembers the guy laughing in his squad car, his big, thick neck rolls contracting and expanding as his head bobbed up and down, so pleased with all he’d done, the reporters snapping pictures of Jack in the backseat as the squad car pulled away from his house.
Now that motherfucker’s going to call? That makes sense, Jack considers, thinking it would be too much to ask for the good to start coming again that easily.
Jack pours the milk, looks out over the Bay to see the sun coming out in force near Treasure Island. As usual, a stream of fog covers the Golden Gate and West San Francisco. Downtown, where the money is made and spent, is still in the sun.
He spoons the first mouthful of cornflakes into his mouth.
An hour later, showered and cleaned up but wearing an Adidas warm-up suit—because it’s clean and why the fuck not?—Jack cruises across the Richmond—San Rafael Bridge toward El Cerrito to get Ralph. Jack likes the feel of being out of the house, doing something without going to the gym first, and the chill breeze coming in his window. No way he’ll catch any visits from Sergeant Hopkins today.
It doesn’t surprise Jack that Ralph’s already been up and calling. The old Ralph partied till morning four or five nights a week and still made all his meetings, talked the movie dicks blue until his clients got whatever roles they wanted. Now he’ll probably do the same to the Colombian, which means Jack’s job today should be pretty easy.
In front of Ralph’s house, a tan one-family in the middle of a street of tan one-families, Jack sees a white pickup and a green Chevy sedan. Either way, Jack knows why they’re using his car. On the lawn Ralph’s planted a big Beware of Dog sign, but as Jack gets out of the car and walks up to the door, he doesn’t hear any barking. Ralph, himself, is probably the dog to beware of.
Jack tries the bell and doesn’t hear anything happening for a while, so he knocks twice, waits, then knocks twice again before trying the door.
It opens before he can turn the knob. At a normal person’s house this could be weird, but at Ralph’s, it’s not that out of the ordinary. The last time Jack came over, he found the front door unlocked and Ralph tripping his head off on mushrooms in an upstairs bathroom, eating pizza in a bubble bath, and listening to Led Zeppelin as loud as his stereo would play it. That was enough to keep Jack away for a while.
Inside, only thin strips of sunlight shine onto the living room furniture through the closed blinds. Jack smells a musty warmth as he steps into the foyer, where he is surprised to see a good-looking mountain bike, something he can’t imagine Ralph ever using. “Ralph!” he calls into the house, and hears nothing in return.
Stepping up onto the living room rug, Jack hopes he doesn’t have to see Ralph naked in his tub again. A big couch dominates the dark living room: a wraparound sectional, situated in front of an extra-large TV console, with a dark wood coffee table in the middle. TV guides and magazines cover the top of the table, along with some half-finished drinks in various nonmatching mugs and cups from various food chains. Jack notices a few magazines on the couch: Stuff and Maxim, a Penthouse. He crosses the living room and enters the kitchen: a small room with a brown linoleum floor and counter space cut into the wall; a pass-through connects it to the living room. There’s a pizza box open on the kitchen table, a single pepperoni slice left in it.
“Ralph, I found your breakfast,” Jack yells. “It’s ready!”
He steps back into the living room and listens: no sound. He waits, hoping to hear some movement upstairs, Ralph flushing the toilet or walking across the floor. Nothing. No Zeppelin, no bathwater, no singing.
Next to the phone in the kitchen is a small pad of notepaper with a few names on it: The top one is Tony Vitelli, scratched out; the next is Joe Buddha, an old friend of Jack and Ralph’s from the movie days back in Hollywood and the producer on Shake ’Em Down. He’d been one of Jack’s chief backers from the start, the guy who took him from bartending on the party scene to movie scripts and let him star in Shake ’Em Down. When it came down to the sequel, Shake It Up, Joe Buddha had never backed off; it was the other producers, who feared Jack was heading for an explosion, who decided to pull out. Joe Buddha’s a good guy: short, funny, always smiling, big belly. But his name is also scratched out.
The next and last name on the pad is Jack’s. There’s no line through it, but instead it’s been underlined. Seeing his name here in Ralph’s house, under these others, Jack gets a soft chill up his spine. He doesn’t like the thought of these other names scratched out, his being left.
All the furniture and mess in the living room and kitchen are what Jack would have imagined he’d find in Ralph’s house, but through the kitchen window he sees a pool. That’s his second surprise: not because Ralph can’t afford it, but because Jack can’t imagine Ralph ever swimming. And the pool looks new; Jack can’t remember it being here on his last visit. But it was raining, and Jack never went ou
t back. Maybe the point of the pool isn’t exercise, Jack considers. Maybe Ralph’s got it to show off.
Jack notices a shape outside that’s strange, a dark mass under the patio table, something he can’t discern: old, dark clothes or a folded-up rug. But it looks like it could be something else too.
Jack finds the sliding glass door off the living room open and moves slowly onto the patio, looking under the table. As he gets closer, he can see that it’s not old clothes or a rug. Whatever it is is surrounded by a puddle of something dark. He pushes a chair out of the way and moves the table back. He still can’t understand—or believe—what he’s seeing. Then he gets the whole picture: dark fur.
With the table moved aside, it’s clear that the dark shape on the concrete is—was—Ralphs’ dog, a chocolate lab. Now, lying on her side, her head rolled back so her neck and muzzle face up, she lies in a pool of her own blood.
“Shit,” Jack says. He stumbles back a few steps and collides with one of the cheap plastic chairs that go with Ralph’s table, almost falling backward. He catches himself on the chair, holding it underneath him, but then its legs buckle and he falls slowly, sideways, down onto the deck. Eventually he’s down, the chair wedged between his legs, suspending one of his feet up in the air.
He rolls himself off it and sits up on the concrete. From here he sees the dog’s wet belly, too close, and he pushes back, moving onto his hands and feet, and stands into one of Ralph’s hedges. It’s just a big green guy, no prickers, but the small branches scratch at his skin through his tracksuit.
But he’s on his feet.
Jack moves forward and, with the toe of his sneaker, rolls the dog over to see her other side. It’s completely wet, the fur matted in crimson. Jack can’t see what happened, but the result is clear. He shifts her back as he found her and closes the dog’s eyes. He pats her head a few times, hoping to send some good wishes into her doggie afterlife.
“Jesus,” Jack says. He walks over to the house, puts his head through the patio door, and calls out, “Ralph, what the fuck you been doing here this morning? You taking your fuckup pills again?”
But now when he doesn’t hear a response, part of Jack knows something’s wrong. Back inside, he calls Ralph’s name loudly into the house. No answer. “Ralph, I know you’re tripping hardcore up there somewhere, but we’re going to get you out of this. I know you’ve got some Popsicles in the freezer, and when I find you we’ll sit down and have some. They’ll really calm you down.”
Jack listens, unsure whether he’s yelling for himself now, to calm his nerves, or if he really thinks he’ll see Ralph on the stairs and hear him say, “Shit, Jack. I did a really fucked-up thing to my dog this morning.”
Jack knows that’s not going to happen. Even if he’s gone over the edge himself a few times, passed out in a bad way-needed a friend to pull him off his bedroom floor and shove him into a cold shower-he’s never done anything like this. It’s because of those times, though, and those friends, that he feels an obligation to find Ralph and see what’s going on.
Jack follows the carpeted stairs up to the second floor, to where Ralph’s bedroom and bathroom are. He starts down the hall, calling Ralph’s name into the quiet house as he moves. On his right, the first door opens onto Ralph’s office: a bright room with a black computer and a flat-screen monitor on the desk, bookshelves of plastic-jacketed comic books. No Ralph.
The first door on the left is locked. From what Jack remembers, this is the bathroom where Ralph had his bubble bath. He knocks and retries the handle: still locked. At the end of the hall, Jack finds Ralph’s bedroom and a huge waterbed, the sheets on it strewn about as if a couple of Mavericks’ big waves rolled in overnight. A skylight illuminates the room with sunlight that probably woke Ralph this morning.
The place is a love nest: big TV, DVD, surround-sound speakers mounted high up on the walls. The place even has zebra-print wallpaper and a thick shag carpet to complete it. Jack would have to give Ralph a little credit if it weren’t for another open pizza box—this pizza half eaten-and a crumpled pair of tighty whities in the middle of the floor.
From the bedroom, Jack can see a second door into the bathroom, this one wide open. When he walks through the doorway, he forgets it all: all of Ralph’s mess, the drugs he took, and everything good that happened last night. The first thing he notices is a red spray of blood against the wall, some kind of discolored mess in the center that he knows isn’t vomit. Then he sees Ralph, fully clothed, lying facedown in his Jacuzzi with a good chunk of his skull missing. And Jack knows Ralph won’t be sleeping on that waterbed ever again.
He moves a little closer, sees the white of bone and something else, something gray that might be Ralph’s brain, through the back of his head. The mess on the wall must be a spray of blood from where Ralph was standing when they—whoever it was—shot him. If he’d been facing the wall, then slipped down onto the bottom of the tub, it’d leave a trail like Jack sees now. It would have made a mess this big only if they shot him at close range—held the gun to his head and told him whatever it was they wanted him to hear last in this life before they blew out the better part of his brain.
Jack stumbles to the toilet and brings up this morning’s cornflakes, bracing himself with one hand against the wall and one hand on the back of the John. He’s seen enough; he stumbles out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, tripping over the thick rug and falling on the floor. He’s got a feeling in his stomach like it’s just been lined with metal. He can still taste the steel in his mouth. On the floor, he looks up, realizes he’s got his hand on the underwear, and throws it across the room. He sees the edge of the bed just inches from his head, is glad he didn’t hit it and knock himself out-then they’d find two bodies here in the house and he’d be fucked.
“Goddamn,” Jack says.
Jack looks up at Ralph’s ceiling and at the blue sky through the skylight. He takes a few breaths. Mercifully, Ralph let the zebra wallpaper stop at the walls and left the ceiling plain white. Jack covers his eyes with the heels of his hands, presses against his face, and irons his forehead smooth with his palms.
“What the fuck?” he asks. He can feel his heart pumping fast, faster than it does on the treadmill, faster than when he’s lifting weights or jogging in the morning. Jack takes deep breaths, trying to slow it down. “Fuck,” he says.
An image of Ralph’s body in the bottom of the tub flashes across his mind’s eye. He shakes his head, trying to clear it, sees the dog, her wet side. Then Jack struggles onto his feet, holding the bed for support, and tries to control his breathing. He sits down on the edge of the waterbed, careful to keep his weight on the hard frame-not wanting to wash away-and holds his hand over his heart.
“Shit,” he says, gasping for air. He’s never had an asthma attack but feels like he’s heard them described: like he’s breathing through a straw, only able to get small tastes of air. Like he’s a fish taken out of the water. He feels his heartbeat in his fingers.
In a minute or two, when his heart stops racing, Jack sits up and looks around the bedroom. He knows he needs to leave, that whoever killed Ralph could come back or the cops might show up and find him in a crime scene, the house of a dead guy, but he can’t move. The thick shag carpet is actually pretty nice, he decides. Sure, it’s the kind of thing you can trip over and don’t see anymore since the seventies, eighties at best, but when you’re down on your hands and knees, it’s good stuff. He looks around the edge of the room, past the TV and the chair piled with clothes. He looks past the bathroom, doesn’t need to see more of Ralph.
From the fast look he already got, Jack knows Ralph had on a different Hawaiian shirt from last night and tan shorts, short ones that look like he might have been planning a swim. It’s a good way to cure a hangover, Jack’s heard. Maybe that’s why Ralph got the pool. But Jack knows Ralph didn’t plan on going out of the house in that outfit, not with those shorts.
He looks at the dresser and to the nightstand: There
’s a big bottle of ibuprofen, a roll of condoms hanging out of a drawer. The clock blinks 12:00 A.M. Ralph’s wallet is next to the clock: a thick leather job that only Ralph could fit into his back pocket. Ralph’s keys are on top of the dresser with a pile of change, next to a few credit cards, which seems odd. Why not keep them in his wallet? Jack gets up to look at the wallet, takes a few tissues from the night table, and uses them to pick it up. It’s full of cash. Ralph has a stack of papers, receipts that must date back to the nineties, and a wad of green that could finance strip club trips for a week, even at last night’s pace. He looks through the rest of the wallet, but only finds more credit cards, so he’s still not sure why the others are on top of the dresser. He pushes them apart so he can look: a Discover card and a MasterCard are on top, both in the name Izzy B. Strong. Fucking Ralph.
With the tissues on his hands, he opens the dresser drawers, starting with the bottom one. In it, with a few pairs of Ralph’s underwear on top, Jack finds four clear plastic bags of white powder. These are large bags, keys, Jack would guess, though he’s never seen this much quantity before. They called them keys in his movie, in others he’s seen, so he guesses they’re keys. Without touching too much of what’s here, Jack moves a few pairs of big, Hawaiian-print boxers to the side—what was it with this guy and Hawaiian prints?—and on the bottom of the drawer, to the side of the blow, finds a snub-nosed .38 revolver, pearl handled, with a six-shot cylinder.
“Ralphie boy,” Jack whispers. “What the fuck were you doing?” He takes the gun and tucks it into the back of his pants, thinks about taking the keys, and decides against it. Protection he can use. Keys of coke he doesn’t need right now. He closes the drawer gently with the tissues and finds just clothes, T-shirts, socks, and more swim trunks in the other two. As he closes the top drawer, he gets a chill as if someone might be watching, and all of a sudden he doesn’t feel like he’s alone in the house.
