The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  The Velasquez kid might just as easily have fallen into a fissure where Kenilworth 's memory had lapsed or gone lax or just been forgotten.

  The deeper the madman probed into the House of Usher, the nearer he drew to the insanity ruling all. And in the end when Roderick Usher loses his mind, the house - Poe's paradigm of Roderick's actual head, the skull of the doomed and hypersensitive man - splits right down the middle and caves into the tarn.

  He'd bring it up to Jamaica when they next had leisure. Right now it was climb baby climb. Jonathan would just be one more errant corpuscular lump crawling down the wrong tube. He should zip out before he made Kenilworth Arms sneeze.

  Which reminded him.

  'Get me that little black plastic vial out of my parka, would you please? Right-hand outside pocket.'

  She brought him the coke with some amusement, watched while he laid and snorted thick lines from the back of his hand without spilling any, and then helped herself.

  'Cheers,' she said.

  Jonathan heard the peculiar dog-whistle squeak in his ears. They popped. He felt the top of his palate dry, setting off coke's special form of post-nasal drip. He sniffed and swallowed twice.

  All the internal renovations done here, he thought. All the nails driven, doors removed, walls altered. Bones broken, then splinted to heal in new directions, to grow new bone where none was needed, to function improperly. Like someone who has suffered too many operations.

  'Help me with this.' He established a push-up brace against the far rim of the tub and backed his legs out the window. It was the only safe approach; no way was he going out head first to slam and dangle. This way he could hang by his elbows on the sill and catch traction.

  Jamaica knelt, taking advantage of his defenseless position. 'Kiss for luck?'

  'Absolutely.' He smiled, not expecting to.

  She took his face in her hands and laid one on him that nearly collapsed his grip on the tub. They made pleasurable noises back and forth, their hunger resurging. When she broke away, her resinous amber-green eyes tried to swallow him. He would have been enveloped willingly, but for a small chore yet undone.

  'I think you sucked the breath out of my lungs,' he said, woozed.

  She spotted him during his exit, hefting him by the shoulders. The toes of his boots banged the steel lining and slipped. He spread his legs and got a foothold.

  She snugged the red glove-pulls around his wrists while he hung from the sill.

  'Okay. No talking. It'll echo like hell. When I get to the bottom and give the line three tugs, haul up the bag and feed the line back down.' He did not want to tuck it into his belt and then lose or break it halfway up.

  She nodded and took her post at the sill. He felt her lips give him a peck on the forehead.

  'Go,' she said, and he did.

  TWENTY

  When Cruz crawled out from under the sedatives he found himself flatbacking it in a hospital bed with crib rails and staring at Marko, who bore a brotherly resemblance to the gorilla that had tried to mangle him in the Oakwood slammer.

  'About time you woke up. I was getting tired of reading that fuckun Sports Illustrated.' If it had been the swimsuit issue, of course, things would have been different.

  The TV shined down godlike from a wall bracket. No sound. It filled the dim room with an eerie cobalt glow that made Marko's tack-head eyes iridesce. Cruz saw that his dislocated arm was expertly taped to a bedrail and that IV leads were plugged in and dripping glucose. He was wearing a johnny and could feel its butterfly knots pressing into his spine.

  'Helluva shiner you got there.'

  Seen from the inside, the eye injury was frightening. The TV light made it tear.

  Marko was wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. It stretched tight across the tit. His curly blond hair was kinky and wet; he looked like Gorgeous George, the wrestler from Rosie's heyday. Marko's face was the sort that funnybook artists, lacking time or ability, hastily sketch in for background thugs, disposable bad guys, all square jaw and piggy eyes and sloping brow and no human character whatsoever.

  'You were in the bathroom,' Cruz said. He remembered Bauhaus asking questions, his expression that of a man who has lost a major lawsuit and been advised by his attomies against showing any emotion. He had most likely put the screws to Jamaica to see if their answers harmonized.

  'You are on drugs,' Marko returned.

  'Time is it?'

  Marko consulted his Casio. Entry level brain scans n hundred-function display. Now that technology had provided precise digits, it was easier for people like this to tell time. ' Two thirty; thereabouts. Two thirty-three.'

  'What does Bauhaus want?'

  Meaning: It took grease to get you in here at this time of night, and has my tail sprung a leak I don't know about? Bauhaus smacked his lips when people dug their graves with their own tongues. Pretend you know everything, say you're just double-checking, and let your victim spill his or her guts right out. Just like Emilio, back in Florida, posing innocent what-ifs and toying with his platinum razor. Sing off key and we customize your face, easy as carving white meat or dark off another kind of turkey.

  'Bauhaus just wants to be sure you're okay.' The butt of a large-caliber auto pistol in Marko's left armpit spoiled the line of his overstressed suit.

  'If that's true, then you must've searched my place already.' Cruz's eyes sought the toupee commercial marching silently across the screen above. He wanted his monogrammed shirts, he wanted his Miami mugginess back. He wanted out. As soon as this goon hulked away, he'd hazard a mayday to Rosie on the bedside phone…

  … which Bauhaus probably had bugged.

  'Your place was clean. You're smart, not to try and fool Bauhaus. You shoulda seen what happened the last guy tried to fuck with him.'

  'He told me. Guy's laid up at Menard Penetentiary for raping a minor.'

  Marko smiled. It was not a jolly thing to behold. 'Maybe you ain't so smart.' Lightning logic in action.

  That upped Cruz's vital signs a notch. 'What are you talking about?'

  'I knew that kid. He ain't in prison. He's gone. He's history.' Cruz could see conflict shading the bovine eyes. In this exchange, Cruz was supposed to reveal all the information. Marko was not here to clue him to the ins and outs of Jimmy McBride's leavetaking. But he had played a key part, oh yeah, and like most sadists Marko got hard by recounting nasty details. The hideous pains he had specially engineered, the moist and inglorious deaths he had precipitated. This man had killed more times than he could count even with his size thirteens off. And he got high on the act. And when you have something you love so much you cannot keep it all to yourself… you brag.

  'So? What's the scoop?' Cruz tried hard to broadcast annoyance, a fed-up air that this creature, this killer with his blunted sensibilities and narrow range of emotions, could receive legibly. 'You just here to jerk my dick, or play watch puppy, or threaten me, or what?'

  The chiseled eyes flared crimson. Had an insult just been hurled?

  'C'mon, ace, read my lips. Bauhaus told me Jimmy McBride got shitcanned for twistin' piston inside some junior high school gash. Now you tell me Bauhaus had him killed.'

  'Stupid.' It came out stoopud. Marko's knuckles went bloodless on the rail as he leaned to loom in Cruz's face. 'Ain't no fuckun Jimmy McBride. Guy before you, his name was Boner. That's what we all called him. If he had a real name I didn't know it. But it was him, and he got killed, and you just better watch your fuckun ass and be glad Bauhaus' two keys din't turn up in your fuckun apartment or you'd be suckun the air conditioning in the fuckun morgue right now.' He jabbed a thick finger as each noun was expelled; pithecanthropoidal punctuation.

  Having said his thing, Marko lifted the bedside phone and punched in. It was amusing for Cruz to watch someone else steam at hurdling Bauhaus' telephonic obstacle course. Perhaps it was just a morphine notion - whatever the ladies in white at St Jude's had jammed him with for the pain was mellow, like brown writing on yel
low paper - but it seemed goofily simple to fill in Bauhaus' half of the ensuing conversation.

  Marko the body-buster went: 'Yeah, it's me, Mister. And Bauhaus would say: Skip it. Did Cruz tell you where that guy Jonathan lives?'

  'Uh, nossir, not yet. I…'

  'Well FIND OUT, asshole, and get over there and search and I do mean right goddamn now!'

  'Yes sir. I will. Does…?'

  'And find out where that rent-a-cooze Jamaica got to. Make Cruz tell you. Pinch his IV lead shut or find a hypo and fill it with Windex…'

  'Yes, sir. I'll get right on it.'

  Marko hung up and paused to seethe. A good, foamy head of anger would stab hellfear right into Cruz's heart.

  But Cruz slid home ahead of him. 'Say - did you question that guy, whatsisname, Jonathan? Can't remember his last name. Bauhaus saw him, though. I'm sure he told you.'

  'Huh? No. I mean, yeah - of course he did.'

  Cruz tried hard to keep Marko off balance, to pretend a brilliant solution had just landed. 'That Jonathan guy lives in the same building, man, how could you miss it? Apartment 323. Go down the hallway past the elevator. It's on the far side of the building. Use the Garrison Street entrance. You'll see the apartment numbers on the mailboxes downstairs.'

  'What about that whore? Bauhaus said she was with you when-'

  'Well obviously she's in bed with me right now globbing my knob,' Cruz interposed. 'How the hell should I know? She's probably off hitting the bricks, doing what ladies of the night do. If I was you, I'd worry about nailing Jonathan down first… you know what I mean?'

  Marko shot a gaze of daggers and disfigurement. In a moment he'd stomp away to patch the cracks in his shoddy shakedown, or Bauhaus would feed his weenie to a Rottweiler.

  'You better fuckun be right.'

  The sight of Marko's back, rushing out, hit Cruz like a shot of Jack Daniels and made him feel perversely good. Marko's grimace was akin to the scrunched expression of a stone Mayan idol taking a dump.

  In a moment he heard the elevator ding. All quiet on this ward, tonight.

  The night nurse had left a pocket spindle of gauze on the bedside tray. Cruz checked his chart and found out he was due for a peek in five minutes. Once the nurse had done her duty, he unplugged his IV lead and bandaged his arm. He had not needed another injection. Taking along a syringe might be a good idea, for later.

  His clothing would be in the closet.

  ***

  Victor Stallis lent the weather a barrage of choice cuss words. Since midnight the blizzard had been knocking calls around like bowling pins on the police bands.

  Flurries whiplashed inland by monster salvos of air rolling unstoppably off the Lake Michigan chop now lifted free snow and pitched it maliciously into any object dumb enough to stand against the storm force. It was abrasive and torturous. The blizzard was hungry, and insisted on grabbing nourishment directly from the psyches and property of all Chicagoans, from the Division Street junkies to the penthoused worthies on Lakeshore Drive. Wouldn't want to own their picture windows tonight, Stallis thought. Open the curtains and it would look like an impossibly big TV screen filled with roiling static. The cost of replacing the glass would equal his wages for a year.

  His unit was faced into the wind. The frontal attack of the storm strobed his wipers. Useless. He did not dare roll along at more than a steady thirty on this late tour. The Oakwood patrol grid assured about five square miles. The most persistent drawback here was boredom. At least that was better than the panic ulcers of most of the officers that worked in the Loop.

  Victor Stallis was a policeman in decline. He had let his exercise regimen slide ever since Liz had left that stupid note on that stupid dresser. The one her stupid mother had bought her at antique store mark-up, as a fourth anniversary gift. Liz was a closed case now not because Stallis was a cop, but because his ideas of sexual progress and hers had dovetailed late in their third year together. He had begun to suggest things. Calisthenic alternatives. Jellies and devices. Submissive-dominant positions. New orifices. The kind of lovemaking that left the marks of a severe interrogation. Handcuffs and pimp sticks.

  Stallis rode the brake and tried to grind the sleep from his face. He was unsaddled, his belt and gear dumped on the shotgun seat. Five of Oakwood's twenty-man force were downed tonight by bugs and the runs, the numbing depletions that came of working too many double shifts in blizzards. Tonight he had rolled solo, with nothing to look forward to except B&E calls and a domestic or two wintertime cabin fever made people pull the weirdest shit.

  He thought about tearing off a piece with the hooker the station guys had nicknamed Little Oral Angie. Things were slow, so he went through the motions. He reported a vagrant with a head wound needed to be dropped at St Jude's. Then he went on the prowl for a vagrant. Angie held forth from a condo two doors from the turn-in for St Jude's emergency bay. Usually you could get a sympathetic orderly or nurse to chase the paper. In the time it took, a cop with a good sense of schedule or an alarm on his watch could fly by Little Oral Angie's and get his torpedo sluiced.

  But Angie had been riding the rag tonight of all nights, bloated and surly, her glands puffed with some busily incubating infection. Stallis had bid her a hasty adieu, cursing the snow and the cold once more. He had dealt the baton to his chosen vagrant smartly. The head injuries were convincing. But his side trip to the ER had been a total waste of time, not counting the paperwork.

  Victor Stallis' assessment of his own sexual condition was sympathetic and rationalized. Police were exposed to so many tough scenes over a decade of service that the accretion of emotional callus was inevitable. You got so you required more and more stimulation to feel basic reactions. His own genital appetites had become afflicted as a byproduct of his sensual neutrality. In his own words, these days he needed to swing much wider to hit the sweet spot. Liz had not been understanding. Hell, Little Oral Angie could comprehend this sort of psychology without needing it explained chapter and verse. Stallis had even given her money. Twice. He tried to be a decent guy.

  Now alone in the AM, he sat in his cruiser, a hard-on inflating, then ebbing, then retumescing as he thought about what he'd missed with Angie, the poor bitch. There was certainly no street action on Oakwood's ice-encrusted sidewalks this night, and his stuck-up mate was far gone.

  The radio blipped, chasing channels, then crackled and fuzzed completely out. It was like trying to listen to punk music, for godsake. Stallis thumbed the volume down to minimum. The scanner LEDs continued marching. It was too freezing to coop; if he tried catching some naptime he'd wake up an icicle in the St Jude's morgue. Three o'clock seemed continents distant. After tonight's run he'd be switching shifts from day to night. He'd get off at three and wouldn't have to go back on duty until midnight the following day.

  He had so counted on Little Oral Angie.

  In the middle of this stormy night, the glacial mounds of snowfall reflected sizzling bright. Tornados of flying snow inched visibility to zero. Even using his low beams, Stallis could not see more than a few feet ahead. The street lamps were at lull power and he could not see them, only their hazy light, coming and going like clouds dashing past the window of a jet. High beams would just throw his own light back in his face. He thought of a high-mountain whiteout. Fresh snow piled up in the poorly plowed avenues.

  It was too goddamned cold for criminals to be afoot.

  He was not even sure of which street he had wheeled onto until he recognized Jamaica 's beat-to-shit Honda Civic, half-interred by a rising summit of white. He reached over to crank down his passenger window and looked up at the Garrison Street entrance to Kenilworth Arms.

  Now there was a notion.

  If Jamaica was holed up in Kenilworth tonight, it would surely have something to do with the aftermath of the bust in which Stallis had partaken. Maybe the dopers were massing to flank, or that scumbag Bauhaus had ordered a relocation. Retreat and regroup. Stallis enjoyed the game; dope dealers and their idiot operat
ives were always so predictable. He could say he spotted suspicious local activity, to justify a follow-up. If Jamaica was inside, she would squat-thrust this beef bayonet just to avoid more jail, more hassle, more black copy on the big bad yellow sheet. She'd take it up the ass and bark like a whippet if he ordered her to.

  He dismounted, buckled his gunbelt and zipped up his high-collared, insulated coat. A grim smile above, a loaded gun below. Stiff upper lip; stiff lower tip, as Reinholtz incessantly joked.

  Curtains fluttered wildly from an open ground-floor window, one of the corner ones. Inside it was totally dark, and through the blizzard the window looked smashed. If anyone was sleeping in there they would have blocked the window up by now, he thought.

  Even in this craven-cur weather, it looked like a burglary, by god. Maybe a death.

  Both in the military and on the force, Stallis had seen a heavy helping of dead people. He had killed two or three himself; it depended on what you counted as people. Death, he theorized, was one of the things that had hardened him… as opposed to making him hard.

  Damn Liz anyway. Wives were supposed to be supportive.

  He waded over and found the windowsill to be a couple of feet higher than his eyebrows. No obvious clues visible from his position. Should he call this in? Should he bother?

  To protect and serve. He thought it would be better to protect once he had been serviced. After his below the belt needs were taken care of, he could get official.

  The storm's wild tarantella provided peachy cover noise. He grabbed the sill and hoisted himself up for a fast peek. The likely answer was that this was a vacant room whose glass had been blown in by the blizzard. His boots thunked the slippery bricks and his hardware clattered. It was all subsumed by the howl and pelt of the wind. Snow stung his cheeks so hard he wondered if they were bleeding.