Jack Palms Crime Series: Books 1-3: Jack Palms Crime Box Set 1 (Jack Palms Box Sets)

by Seth Harwood

  In the distance, Jack hears the ringing in his head, and then it comes back in full and it’s all he can bear. He closes his eyes.

  When he looks again, Niki has Flattop up off the hood and backhands him hard across the face once, then twice, followed by a stiff cross to the nose. Jack sees a stream of blood slap across the car’s fractured windshield. Vlade says something to Jack, reaching across the driver’s seat, jostling his shoulder. At least in some respect his hearing is still there, he can hear rough sounds, but not words—more of the underwater effect. Then Vlade waves his hand at Jack to get out of the car, and he crawls out across the driver’s seat, onto the asphalt on his hands and knees. Realizing there’s glass all around him, he tries to stand and, by putting his hands against the car, is able to brace himself and get up. Vlade picks up Niki’s gun off the floor of the car and hands it back to him as Niki comes around to where they are. There’s not much left of Flattop: Jack can see where his head broke the Ford’s windshield as it crashed, and there’s a lot of blood pooling around him on the hood.

  Vlade grabs Jack by the shirtfront and starts to pull him away from the cars, toward the sidewalk. Jack wonders if they should head north, thinking that if they can get onto BART or the Muni, that maybe they can disappear into the crowds and get far away from this whole scene, but Vlade pulls him toward an adult video and porn shop on the other side of Mission. Niki follows. On the sidewalk, the few witnesses look at them awestruck, their mouths open. Jack’s sure he looks like hell, maybe worse. The drivers of the other cars that hit the Ford seem to be calling something out to them, their cell phones to their ears, no doubt calling the police, but Vlade doesn’t stop. He leads them into an auto detailing and repair shop next to the porn store, where some Asian guys in blue jumpsuits look on, horrified. Then Vlade says something they can understand in a language that Jack can tell isn’t English. He makes wide arm motions and talks at them fast. Even though Jack’s still underwater, the sounds are shorter and faster than how he thinks English would sound.

  The guys in jumpsuits take Jack and the Czechs to the back of the repair shop, and there Vlade pays off a guy at a desk by peeling off fifteen crisp hundred-dollar bills and dropping them in front of him. The guy’s face gets brighter and brighter with each one. Finally, he nods and another guy in an oil-stained jumpsuit shows them a back exit and leads Jack and Niki out to a dirty white van. He opens its sliding side door and motions for Jack and Niki to get inside. Then he goes around to the driver’s side and lets himself in. They’re in an alley parallel to Mission, removed from any other cars. With what works of Jack’s hearing, he can make out police sirens calling from not far off.

  Another guy in a jumpsuit comes out the back door of the shop with Vlade, shows him to the van, and closes the side door behind him when they’re all inside. This guy gets into the passenger seat, and then the driver starts the engine and pulls away.

  Jack can’t see out the back of the van because it has no windows, and from where he’s sitting on the floor, all he can see out the front windshield is some tall buildings and blue skies. He sees a few street lights pass over him, but can’t tell where they’re going.

  Gradually, the sound of the van comes through his ears and he starts to hear the rudimentary elements of life: the rumble of the van, the sound of wind blowing in through the windows, the sound of people talking—Vlade on his cell phone and the two guys in the frontseats arguing—and the occasional car that has a huge bass system banging outside on the streets. Somehow the thumping of these sounds gets through.

  The van drops them off at another Asian auto repair shop, this one somewhere in the Tenderloin. The two guys let them out without saying anything else.

  Vlade walks up to the front window, says something to the passenger, and hands him a few bills. The guy reaches behind him and pulls the side door shut as the van drives off. Jack can see the Mustang right away, a new tire on the back wheel, and hopes that Al and David didn’t drive her here on the flat, knows they probably did.

  He walks over to his car, looking at the bullet holes, and counts them again, three in the door and two on the side of the trunk. He runs his hand across the door, feeling the welts, rests his head on the top. “Fuck,” he whispers. He gets down low and crouches to see the holes, looks at each one to see if it went through. In the backseat, it looks like a bullet went through the door, but he can’t see any damage inside.

  He opens the door, and slumps down into the driver’s seat tired and somewhat defeated. The pristine body of a ‘66 Mustang Fastback does not come into one’s life often. And now Jack’s is gone. His hearing is still partly wrecked too, and now he and the Czechs are probably wanted by the police. Or they will be. He closes the door behind him to sit in the quiet of the car’s interior by himself. Outside, the Czechs are talking, gesturing with their arms. After a few breaths, Jack takes the cell phone out of his jacket: no calls. They have less than an hour to get to where they’re supposed to meet the Colombian. He figures he’ll probably be hearing from Hopkins about what just happened before the hour’s up, if not sooner.

  Vlade comes over to the car and taps on the passenger window, so Jack reaches over and unlocks the door. Vlade gets in, sits down, and starts talking to Jack.

  Jack looks at his face, trying to get a sense about what Vlade’s saying.

  “What? My hearing’s fucking fucked.” Jack points to his ears. “They shot up my car.”

  Vlade holds up his hand and rubs his thumb against his first two fingers: money. “You want to go back to the hotel and get the money for the meet?” Jack asks. Vlade nods. “Good,” Jack says. “Something should come out of this.” Vlade nods again. Then he reaches across the seat and takes Jack’s face in both hands, pulling him forward. Normally, Jack wouldn’t be comfortable with this, but right about now, with the world a quiet ringing place, a little human contact seems to narrow his spectrum in a good way. Vlade’s face looks serious, but his eyes are calm, relaxed.

  “Jack,” he says. He may be shouting. By the look of his face, he probably is. But Jack can just barely hear him, make out what he’s saying by reading his lips.

  “You are okay?”

  Jack nods.

  “Good,” Vlade says. “We need you.” He lets Jack go.

  Jack nods again. He gives Vlade the thumbs-up.

  Outside the car, the other Czechs are looking in at Jack. He gives them the thumbs-up, and they seem to look relieved: Their faces soften into smiles. Then Vlade takes out his wallet and shows Jack some kind of official-looking ID card with words written in an alphabet Jack guesses is Cyrillic. Vlade points to the big letters on top: a K and then a Greek gamma and then a funny-looking lowercase b. Then he points to himself and Niki.

  “You’re KGB?” Jack shakes his head, does his best to speak, but he realizes it’s difficult when you can’t really hear.

  “No,” Vlade shouts. He makes an X with his arms. “We are ex-KGB. No more.”

  “I don’t know,” Jack says, shaking his head. “Explain to me later.”

  Vlade nods. “Okay, but let me tell you. These men, the ones we left back there, in their car. These are KGB too. These are not happy because we leave. We left. Now they see us here and they do not like. There is also … there is also something that they are doing here.”

  He says something else to Niki out of the car, then shuts the door. Niki walks over to a new rental, a too-big white Escalade that Al probably picked out. Niki and David and Al get into it.

  Jack looks over at Vlade, and the Czech nods. “I’m riding with you,” Jack thinks he says.

  When Jack starts the Mustang engine, it breaks through his world of silence and ringing with the roar of its 289cc V8. The sound washes waves of relief over him—because he can hear it and also because it still sounds like it should; he can tell right away it didn’t catch any bullets. It’s not the biggest engine around, but it makes enough noise for you to know it’s alive. And alive is how he wants it. The body of the car h
e can fix, maybe, but the engine, that’s a much more serious job. He closes his eyes, living in the sound that he can hear, revs up the engine louder and then still louder, enjoying the noise until Vlade taps him on the arm. He opens his eyes, then pulls out behind Niki and the Escalade, following them out onto Polk, heading downtown.

  They make a quick stop at the Regis, long enough for the Czechs to go up and get a briefcase of money.

  Jack washes his face a few times in the brass-sink bathroom off the lobby. He doesn’t look good, but the water helps bring him back to his senses and, pushing his fingers into his ears, he feels his hearing come back. It’s been returning slowly since he started driving, but he’s still a little cloudy. The downtime in the bathroom, his face in a sink full of water, definitely helps.

  Next they head north toward the waterfront and the meeting with Alex Castroneves. In the car, Jack drives with the windows open so he can hear the air rushing past. It sounds like a vortex, but at least it sounds. Vlade motions for Jack to roll up the window, and Jack does. “I guess you must want to say something,” Jack says.

  When he gets the window up, Vlade says, “I want to say something.” Jack nods. He’s watching the road but steals a glance at Vlade and sees he’s serious. “Niki and I, we were KGB, Jack. We have connections to make that problem go away.”

  Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know about in your country, man, but here shit like that doesn’t just disappear. That was a big fucking mess back there. Fingerprints, witnesses—”

  Vlade nods. “That is why I tell you.” He opens his hands on his lap. “We are sorry. I am sorry. We did not want to get you involve in all of this, but now it is too late.”

  “Too late? Now we’re driving around in a car with bullet holes in it, my car, the ′66 Fastback K-Code. Bullet holes, Vlade. Fuck.”

  “Yes. We are sorry, I can tell you.”

  “Fuck. Fucking holes. Five of them in my car.”

  Vlade puts his hand on Jack’s knee and yells, “We will pay you for the damages, Jack. We will pay!”

  “I can hear you,” Jack says, shaking Vlade’s hand off his knee. “You don’t have to yell anymore.”

  Vlade turns to Jack, surprised. “Good. It is good you can hear again. You should be normal soon.”

  “It’s okay,” Jack says. “I’m just upset about the car.”

  “Then okay. But let me tell you what I was saying to you, Jack.” Vlade waits a second, then continues. “Niki and I have been agents for KGB. We are from Czech, but working for KGB in East. Then no more. Now we know other agents come here to work in drug industry. They do not like that we left KGB.

  “That man, the one who shoot at us in car and at club last night, he was also agent. Russian. That is why this is serious. There will be others here too. His friends. More Russians who do not like us Czechs or that we left KGB.”

  Jack watches the road; he’s doing his best to make out everything that Vlade’s saying, put all of the pieces together. “What about Al and David?”

  “These others, David? AI?” He waves his hand dismissively. “Pfft. This is all fun and games for them. They want to have good time and explore American country. But to us this is serious. This is about life and money.”

  “And what about Michal?”

  “Yes,” Vlade says. “He was ex-KGB too. That is why we are so upset when he got killed. Why we have to revenge him.”

  Jack’s getting closer to the piers; he looks back in the rearview and sees that Niki and the others are right there behind him. “And now you did?”

  “Yes. But there will be others.”

  “Okay, but my guess is that that mess back there is going to come after us, even if it takes a little while. Our prints were all over that car.” Jack takes his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. “You see this? When it starts ringing and it’s a policeman on the other end, he’s going to want some answers. And if he doesn’t get them, he’s going to bring our asses in.”

  Vlade shakes his head, pointing to the Bay and the bridge, and beyond that the roads that lead east. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will be gone.”

  They park near the piers in one of the expensive multilevel pay lots for tourists. Normally Jack would want to spend some time looking for a parking lot that had an easy way out, but they’re late enough, and he doesn’t want to miss Castroneves. It’s a late-summer Saturday evening in San Francisco, which means the piers are jammed with tourists in the remaining light—more than crowded, they’re packed wall-to-wall with people watching the sea lions, leaving the aquarium, and getting off the boats that go out to Angel Island and Alcatraz. Jack and the Czechs have to go all the way up to the top level to find open parking spaces. From here, they can look down on Pier 39, where they’ll be having the meet. Jack leads the Czechs to the edge of the roof and then points down to where Alex will be. There are a lot of tourists walking around, watching the street performers, and shopping. Almost everything below them is a restaurant or some kind of boat trip into the Bay. At the meet, Jack will be surrounded by the crowds, which is good: No one will have an open shot if anything goes wrong.

  Jack turns back toward the parking lot to face the Czechs. “He only wants one of you this time,” he says, and then, knowing who it’ll be, “Who’s going to come?”

  Vlade steps forward.

  Jack nods. “The rest of you can watch us from up here. When you see us coming out from behind that building”—he points to the Hard Rock Café, the first of the shops on the pier—“bring this rental SUV piece of shit down there and get us. We don’t need to be out there with this kind of product for too long.”

  Niki looks down on the crowd, positions his arms like he’s holding a rifle and sighting down onto the pier. Even if he had the gun, he’d never get a clear shot. If shots are fired, most of the tourists will either panic or hit the deck, maybe both. He nods and gives Jack the thumbs-up.

  “Right,” Jack says. “If something, anything, goes bad, get your asses down there in the car. Fast.”

  Vlade says something else to them in Czech that David and Al respond to. This leads the three of them into a heated discussion, Al pointing at David and Vlade and yelling, then David chiming in. Jack watches for a minute and then interrupts. “Guys. Guys.” He taps on his watch. “Time to go.”

  They cut it short, and David gives the briefcase to Vlade.

  “Listen,” Jack says. “This is good. I told you we’d have this stash for you tomorrow and now we’ll have it today, Saturday. We’re way ahead of schedule. Great, right?”

  The Czechs look less enthused than Jack would have hoped. He reminds them they’ll be on the open road soon, having good times and laughing about all of this. “Okay?”

  They nod. “Okay,” David says.

  Al looks like he just wants to shoot up the whole pier and Castroneves, like he won’t be happy with anything less.

  “Fuck.” Jack nods to Vlade. “Let’s go, then.”

  From the foot of the parking lot stairs, it’s a short walk across the street and over a small patch of damp, bumpy grass onto the Waterfront Park area, where the crowds begin: Tourists walk around wide-eyed, and the Navy and Marines have set up stands for recruiting. The Saturday evening crowds are dense, watching all of the Wharf events happen around them. On a stage outside the Hard Rock Café, a group of four female singers and an all-male backup band plays to whomever will listen—mostly tourists from out of town and families with matching sweatshirts that say “SF” on them, probably bought because they didn’t expect the weather to be so cold here in sunny California. Some of the people have on T-shirts and shorts; some have jeans and sweatshirts. It all depends on whether you’re in the sun or not. Jack’s gotten used to the weather, but he still gets cold all the time. Now he’s got his leather jacket on and checks his phone: still no call from Maxine.

  “Task at hand,” Jack whispers to himself, repeats it like a mantra. “Task at hand.”

  Vlade starts tapping his ring again
st the handle of the briefcase, and Jack’s glad he can hear it—it’s a small sound in all of the crowd noise and the music—though Vlade’s tension puts him on edge. Now would be the perfect time for a cigarette, but Jack pats himself down with no luck. They’re back in the car somewhere, not in his pockets. With this many people around them, it could be hard to smoke anyway; they have to weave through the crowd to get anywhere, go wide around the gathering at the front of the bandstand. Groups stand around talking: Some browse at the restaurant windows, looking at menus; others walk quickly from the escalator exit of the San Francisco Aquarium. Farther out, Jack can see a huge NFL shop and more restaurants advertising as many kinds of seafood as you can imagine. Kids are running everywhere.

  “So you were KGB?”

  Vlade nods.

  “What’re you doing here, then, partying it up and buying cocaine? How’s that fit?”

  The two walk closer together. A kid runs right at them and only realizes at the last moment that Jack and Vlade aren’t going to part and let him through; he almost crashes into Jack’s legs, but manages to turn himself at the last second.

  “David and Al are our friends,” Vlade says. “Al is just a businessman, but he thinks he is KGB.”

  “He’s fucking crazy,” Jack says.

  Vlade laughs. “He is not all bad. A little hotheaded, yes. But good in business.”

  They pass a small ice cream stand similar to the one where Juan José bought Jack a cone the last time he was here. There’s still no sign of Castroneves. Jack looks at his watch: They’re ten or fifteen minutes later than he planned, just over the two-hour mark. He hopes Castroneves hasn’t left, understands he’d be spooked given what happened at The Mirage and might disappear if anything didn’t feel right. They walk around the line of people waiting to get ice cream.