by Ian Bull
“Kind of,” Sam says.
“Pull over, stop at that payphone,” Dozer says, pointing. Sam pulls the white cargo van over in front of Hamburger Mary’s on Folsom Street, and Dozer darts out and grabs the phone handle just before a bearded man dressed in only black leather chaps, boots, and a black vest can reach it. Dozer drops in his quarter, dials, listens, then hangs up and hops back into the van. “Make a left here, and head down to 3rd and Bryant.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if the pager were a phone too? And then you could talk on it, and even type messages to each other on it?” Sam asks.
“Don’t be stupid,” Dozer says. “Who needs that when there are payphones everywhere?”
Sam drives, making left-hand turns on the one-way streets south of Market Street until he finds 3rd and Bryant. A skinny brown-haired kid bounces on a street corner in the blustery fog, wearing just a thin blue t-shirt, shivering and waving. Dozer motions for Sam to pull over. The kid opens the back door and hops in onto the furniture pads lining the cargo area.
“Go one block under the 280 on-ramp. Hey, a new guy! How is it, new guy? I'm Vinny!"
Sam waves at him in the rearview mirror but doesn’t speak. A few turns later, Sam finds the dark surface street that runs under the freeway and pulls over. Vinny jumps out of the back and rummages through the thick bushes and comes back carrying a teetering stack of five VCRs in their cardboard boxes, pushes them deep into the van and climbs back in. Sam pulls away as Vinny slams the back door of the van.
“Yo, new guy, slow down! I almost fell out, dude!” he yells towards the front.” I got five JVC 900s. That’s fifteen hundred dollars for me, motherfuckers.”
Dozer peels off ten crisp Ben Franklins from his thick roll and holds them out to Vinny. “Try a thousand. When you hide them in a fucking bush the boxes get soggy,” Dozer says, pointing at the stained cardboard. “They’re so wet they’re falling apart. The cardboard it comes in is as important as the product, jackass.”
Vinny stares at the bills but doesn’t take them yet. “Come on, Dozer. I worked hard for those VCRs.”
“No, you didn’t,” Dozer says, and holds out the money.
“When do I meet Barnes?” Vinny asks. He scratches at his bare arms as if wiping away an army of invisible ants.
“Never heard of him. Is a VCR in every box, or do I have to check?” Dozer asks.
Sam stops at a red light on South Van Ness Avenue. Vinny scowls, grabs the money, and hops out the back. He slams the van door hard.
“Enjoy your next fix!” Dozer shouts out the window.
As Sam pulls away he looks at the fading image of Vinny, hunched over in his thin t-shirt, darting through honking traffic, clutching his money. Sam then catches his own eyes, then looks down at his new black leather jacket and pin-striped wool pants. He was just a few hundred dollars and a few days away from being Vinny himself.
Dozer’s pager goes off again and he smiles when he sees the number. “Screw that junkie. This is the best clip there is,” Dozer says.
“You want me to find a payphone?” Sam asks.
“She’s always at the same spot. Take Mission to the Embarcadero,” Cliff says.
She? A female thief? Sam wonders to himself. He follows Mission Street as it curves parallel to Market Street toward downtown. The looming grey two-level Embarcadero Freeway comes into view. Sam can almost see the lights of the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge between the gigantic cement pillars. Dozer whacks Sam’s arm and gestures for him to pull over to a corner bus stop. A woman leaves the Muni bus shelter, opens the back door and climbs in onto the furniture pads. She’s dressed in a long cashmere coat, a blue beret, a green silk scarf, and she carries a purse on a long strap.
“How’s it going, Kath?” Dozer asks, with the tone of a high school geek who’s got a crush on the unattainable cheerleader.
Sam glances at her in the rearview mirror, as she takes off her beret and shakes out her long brown hair. He knows her. She’s the woman shoplifter from Macy’s, who smiled at Sam and froze time. A shiver of cold humiliation and then hot anger runs through him.
“Head for 2165 Howard Street. It’s a garage,” Kath says, then looks around. “These Chevy vans are disgusting. You guys are making money, can’t you get something better? Or at least put some seats back here? Fix the suspension?”
“These get the job done just fine,” Dozer says. “Whaddya got?”
“Five hundred heartbeat monitoring kits.”
“Paul’s going to love that. That’s just the stuff he’s looking for.”
“Good. Then you can tell him to put a couch back here,” Kath says.
Sam makes a hard right, tilting the van onto two wheels long enough for Kath to slide across the back and bang her head on the wheel well.
“Hey! Watch it!” Kath yells.
“What are you doing, she could get hurt back there!" Dozer yells and hits Sam on the arm, his schoolboy crush a little too obvious. Sam waves his hand in apology but says nothing.
This section of Folsom Street in a semi-industrial neighborhood stuck between South of Market and the Mission District. 2165 Folsom Street is a one-story garage with a bow and truss curved wooden roof. Sam backs the car up against the sliding garage door, leaving Kath enough room to hop out the back. Sam kills the engine and gets out too, but not before putting on a pair of black Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and a black fedora hat with a red feather in the silk band.
“I’ll help you carry the boxes,” he says, tilting his head down to hide his face.
“Suit yourself. You can lift this door then too,” Kath says, and points at the heavy metal sliding garage door she just unlocked. Sam sets his feet, grabs the handle and lifts from his legs. The heavy door rolls up easily.
“Wait here,” she says, and goes into the dark garage and turns on one light. She returns with a cardboard box full of smaller boxes – the small but expensive heartbeat monitors.
“There’s more,” she says and hands them to Sam, who puts them in the back of the van with the VCRs. She goes back inside…and Sam disobeys and steps in and follows her.
Sam eases through stacks of office furniture – metal chairs, tables, and desks – and stacks of cardboard boxes full of new blenders, food processors, coffee makers, and electronics.
He finds Kath in an open section of the cement floor under a single dangling lightbulb.
He steps into the circle of light, and she jumps back with a gasp.
“I told you to wait outside,” she says.
Sam grins from behind his dark glasses.
“Moon too bright for you tonight?” Kath says. “Give me a break, please.”
“You and I know each other,” Sam says.
“Can it, Romeo. Just carry the boxes please,” Kath says, holding out another box.
Sam doesn’t take it. “We met downtown the other day,” Sam says. He takes off his glasses, tilts his head and flashes his lopsided grin that he practiced in the mirror for two years.
Kath grabs a lamp and swings it at his head. Sam ducks and plants a foot against Kath’s stomach and pushes her hard against an office desk. Before she can get back up, and before Sam even thinks, he pulls out the gun that Paul gave him out and aims it at her face.
She gasps and holds her breath, which makes Sam regret his move. Paul forcing him to take the gun was still in a grey zone but pulling the gun out and threatening her with it moves him past grey and straight to jet black. This qualifies as assault and battery with a deadly weapon, he realizes, and as an ex-con on parole, he’s just earned himself multiple years in prison, if he doesn’t handle this just right.
“Don’t hurt me,” Kath whispers, her eyes still wide.
“You mean like how you hit me?” Sam asks. He puts the gun away and helps her up. “I still can’t breathe right since you kicked me in the ribs.”
“I kicked you in the balls, not the ribs,” Kath says, sitting on the table.
“Whatever,” Sam says. He push
es open her cashmere coat, checking for weapons, then grabs her purse off the table. He rifles through it and pulls out just a few dollar bills. “That’s all you have?”
“I don’t like carrying a lot of cash, for this very reason.”
“Where’s my watch that you took?”
“I’m wearing it,” she says, and takes the gold and silver Omega Seamaster off her small wrist and hands it to him. Sam takes off his sunglasses so he can examine it, and notices the second hand is moving.
“Hey! You got it working!” Sam says.
“It seemed like it was worth fixing,” Kath says.
“This is great! This was my father’s watch!” Sam says with happy pride as he slides it onto his wrist.
“He had good taste,” Kath says.
Sam admires the watch, then smiles at Kath, who smiles back, embarrassed. That initial moment of mutual attraction again passes between them, until Sam remembers how angry he is.
“Give me your money!” he yells, his voice breaking.
“I just did, idiot,” she says.
Embarrassed, Sam looks around for more damage he can inflict. He spots a cassette carrying case on the adjacent desk, the zip-up kind with a handle that’s the size of a small briefcase that can hold forty music tapes for any road trip. He grabs that instead, along with the second box of heartbeat monitors for Paul.
“That’s all my music!” she shouts.
“You borrowed my watch, I’ll borrow your music,” he says, and backs out of the circle of light. He dashes out of the garage, pushes the monitors in the back of the van, slams the rear door, jumps into the front seat and tosses the cassette case on floor between him and Dozer, then starts up the van.
“What’s going on?” Dozer asks.
Kath slams two empty whiskey bottles against the windshield. They both shatter and the windshield cracks, creating two intersecting spiderwebs of silver light.
Dozer screams, and Sam slams the car into gear and tears off down Folsom Street.
Sam giggles as he makes a right on 17th Street and then another right onto Shotwell, then pulls over into an open parking spot.
“I like that girl’s energy,” Sam says, while Dozer hyperventilates.
“Let’s see what kind of taste in music she’s got,” Sam says as he pulls out a random cassette and pops it into the van’s cassette player. Iron Maiden’s debut album sounds like a bomb going off, and Dozer screams again. The bass vibration from the speakers makes the already soft broken windshield fall into the car, shattering into a million tiny pieces. Dozer’s eyes roll back into his head and he passes out. His forehead hits the dashboard and he stays there, lost in the deep sleep of narcolepsy.
“So that’s why they call you, Dozer, huh?” Sam asks the sleeping man.
Sam stares at the streetlights through the open front of the car, listening to the blasting music and waiting for Dozer to wake up.
CHAPTER TEN
I t's a bright, fresh spring morning in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, and Sam finishes his breakfast and coffee at Original Joe's and darts back up Turk Street to the Taj Mahal.
“Morning, guys!” Sam says to the Merchant Marines in their pea coats, and they all wave hello back. Sam almost gets past the front desk, but Mr. Pavel sticks two pieces of pink paper under his nose.
“You got two calls. Your parole officer wants to see you and a man named Barnes. Here are their numbers and their addresses where they want you to go,” Pavel says, and then wags the pink phone message notes until Sam takes them. “I don’t like it when the payphone rings so much, and I don’t like taking your messages.”
“Why don’t you get a phone answering machine then?” Sam asks.
“What is that?” Pavel asks.
“It's a machine that answers the phone for you if you don't want to answer it."
“Why wouldn’t I answer it if I am right here?”
“If you are away from the phone then, it will answer for you.”
“If I am away from the phone, I wouldn’t hear it ringing so it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
“What if the call is important though?” Sam asks. “In fact, aren’t we supposed to have phones of our own by now, that we can carry with us, so we can call people anytime? And even then, if we don’t want to answer, it will record a message for us.”
Pavel shakes his head and walks away. Sam looks at the two messages, deciding which he should deal with first. It’s a choice between the Saint Francis Yacht Club and the grey monolith that is the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street.
“Yacht Club first, Justice second,” Sam mutters. He’s afraid of Paul Barnes, but considering what he’s been doing, he’s much more scared to see his Holiness the Amateur Rabbi Hal Weinstein right now.
An hour later, Sam wanders down a dock alongside the St. Francis Yacht club, strolling between the boats. Paul Barnes appears on the deck of a Gulf Stream motor yacht called Irish Mist. He holds up a glass of champagne. "Hey, Sam! Over here!" Paul yells. "Glad you could make it!"
Sam walks down the dock and stops in front of the three steps that lead up to the deck of the black and white two-level yacht, which has a captain's crow's nest on top. He hesitates before getting on; after all, a moving yacht combines the two sensations he dislikes the most. First, on a moving boat, you can't just step off – you're trapped until someone brings the boat back to shore and sets you free, just like a moving prison cell. Next, you're in the vast wide open, like a floating cork on an endless sea. He's still not used to that much openness.
“Come on,” Paul says, gestures to him from the railing. Sam exhales and climbs on board. Paul signals to the crow’s nest and the pilot puts the boat into gear and backs out of the slip. Sam stands at the railing watching the dock recede, missing his chance to jump back onto land.
“Relax! You act like you’ll never see dry land again. You want a drink?” Paul asks.
“Jack Daniels,” Sam says. “And water.”
“Still a bourbon drinker, huh? I like that,” Paul says, then shouts through the open glass door into the main cabin. “Hey, Troublemaker! Get out here! And bring me a Jack Daniels and a glass of water!”
Paul drops into a plush easy chair on the open back of the boat. It’s arranged like the patio, with black and white outdoor furniture and a gas barbecue, but instead of being next to a pool you’re next to the San Francisco Bay, with just a metal and wire railing between you and miles of moving green water.
Sam shuffles in place unsure what to do with himself, until Kath comes out of the main cabin holding his drink and his glass of water. First, relief sweeps through him. Seeing her is a guarantee he won’t be killed. Paul still might hurt or humiliate him, but Sam now knows that at least he won’t die. Second, he feels a little rush of joy in his heart, happy to see her again.
“Why, it’s Little Miss Head Banger! How’s the Heavy Metal groupie today?” Sam asks, relaxing into his cocky persona. She puts the drinks on the table in front of Paul.
“Like I’m seasick and need to barf,” she says.
Paul opens a cooler next to him and pulls out a Pabst Blue Ribbon in a bottle, pops the top and hands it to Kath, then hands Sam his drink. “Here we are, the coach and his star players. It’s a beautiful day, and a great meal is coming. Do I take good care of my people, or what?”
Paul pops a cassette into the stereo and the Grateful Dead comes through the four large quadrophonic speakers on the back deck. Paul sips his own drink, a green smoothie concoction. Sam and Kath stand like wallflowers at the junior high school dance, refusing to move.
“It’s a party! Drink! Drink!” he shouts at them, and they obey.
Inge walks onto the back deck wearing a one-piece white bathing suit with black combat boots and black glasses, a perfect match with the black and white decor. She lays a tray of sandwiches and sliced fruit down on the table.
“What a nice lunch. Thank you, Inge. And keep that outfit on, I like it,” Paul says.
Inge smiles but
makes no sound, then disappears back inside. Paul bites into a turkey sandwich and turns to Sam and Kath.
“Let’s talk business. Kath, you can’t beat men up in the street for hitting on you. It embarrasses them. Sam has low enough self-esteem as it is. Not to mention that you can get arrested for both shoplifting and beating people up,” Paul says.
“What I do on my own time is my business,” Kath says.
“Everything you do is my business now,” he says, then points at Sam. “And you, give her money back.”
Sam sips his Jack Daniels. “Not until she gives me back my money first,” he says, crossing his arms and puffing up his chest – until the yacht goes over a swell and he must throw his hands and legs out to steady himself. Half his drink lands on the white deck.
Paul yanks a roll of cash out of his pocket and peels off hundred-dollar bills and throws them in Sam’s face. “There’s your money! Happy now?” Paul yells.
Both Sam and Kath scramble to catch the bills skittering across the deck before the wind blows them into the water. “You brats got what you need? You’re both worse than kids! You’re lucky I put up with you!”
Sam and Kath each count the bills they grabbed, then look at each other. “I’m square if you’re square?” Sam asks her, gesturing at her wad of money.
Kath nods. “Yeah, I’m square,” Kath says, and pockets her windfall.
“Good! Because I have a brilliant idea,” Paul says, plopping down into his chair to finish his sandwich. “I’m hooking you up together. From now on you’ll be working for me as a team,” he says, then bites and chews as Sam and Kath launch their verbal assault.
“Her? Dirty Harriet? If psychos could fly, she’d be their squadron leader!”
“Him? Mr. Scratch and Sniff? He leaves a scent trail fifty yards wide!”
Paul laughs, then glances at the main cabin. Inge stalks out, growling at them like a rabid Amazon. She reaches for Sam’s shoulder and he knocks her hand away, terrified of the pain she can inflict. Paul raises his hand and Inge falls into place behind her boss.
“Hear me out. Kath, you bring me the best high-end merchandise, but always in small quantities. You never get inside a warehouse for a bigger haul. Sam, on the other hand, can break into buildings and into safes, although the last time you did it, you did get caught,” Paul says, glancing from Kath to Sam. “By yourselves you’re not that much. Together you might add up to one decent criminal. What do you think?”
