The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  Just when Jamaica wanted to ask why Bauhaus gave a pinch of shit about helping some out-of-state 'caine slinger, she spotted the Haliburton case on the dining room table. Dealers who watched too many movies just loved them. This one would be full of dope or greenbacks or both.

  'Relax, Bauhaus.' Emilio stood up. He was shorter than Jamaica. 'Shelve it. I'm positive that little Jamaica - that is your name? - only wants to help and dislikes being grilled and threatened. Here.' He clasped her forearm gently. 'Let me show you something that'll make you wet.'

  He led her to the Haliburton, clicked the combination latches and flipped back the lid. Inside both shells was wall-to-wall money. Seven stacks across, three vertical, Treasury-banded Franklin notes.

  'Nice.' Jamaica kept her eyes on Emilio.

  He slipped a hundred dollar bill from one of the stacks, rolled it into a tube as though preparing to whiff a line, and instead slipped it behind Jamaica 's left ear like a reserve cigarette. He paused to grace her feathered earring with thick, dark fingers. 'Nice,' he said back.

  Her stomach tried to clench. No way. Not with this guy, not ever.

  USE me, the gun insisted. Jam me into that overpriced dentition and blast his slug brains across one of those abstract nightmares Bauhaus bought as a tax deduction.

  'Such gorgeous green eyes,' Emilio said to his good pal. 'Green attracts green. Your girl likes money, Bauhaus. I don't think we'll have any difficulty.'

  She suffered his touch as long as it stayed around her face. Seeing the money made her consider an alternate angle of attack.

  'Inhospitable outside tonight.' Bauhaus' tone was blase and bored now. He was so sure he steered, all the time. 'Too late for the better private clubs. The drive would be inconvenient. Hazardous, even. Please feel free to employ any of my guest rooms; they're all made up.' He jerked his head in the direction of the black, lacquered doorways beyond the kitchen. 'The red bedroom's the nicest in cold weather. Champagne? I'll have Lord Alfred fetch it for you.'

  'P.J.,' said Emilio. 'I like the flowers on the bottle.'

  'Chilled and ready.'

  'You got cameras? I'd like to run some tape.'

  'Every room. In fact, the tripod is in the red bedroom just now. I am delighted to have anticipated your excellent tastes.'

  Bauhaus had smelled Emilio's anus and was making a happy face. Jamaica realized it was critical for Bauhaus to impress this creature. Was Bauhaus afraid of Emilio?

  'You may lead,' Emilio said to Jamaica.

  She clicked on her work face. They had to buy it. Emilio's hard-on for her had put the Cruz mission on hold. Eyes lidded, now sassy and feral, she reached into the Haliburton and peeled away two more century notes, crumpling and tucking them into one of the snap pockets on her bomber jacket.

  She did her strut toward the red room, making them watch. Chari started snoring on the couch, popcorn crumbs in her pubic hair.

  Emilio grinned like a mandrill. Plenty of time to deal with Cruz; all the disadvantages were his. Chicago was a happening place.

  He did not want his reckoning with Cruz to come swiftly. He wanted the payoff to linger, savorably. He had faith in his power over women, and it would be sporting to win Jamaica 's trust, then run her betrayal past Cruz seconds prior to the whistle of the axe. Emilio loved the reactions of patsies and suckers when they tipped. They made the funniest faces. Then he made the faces even funnier, and more garish, with his razor.

  He might slice this bimbo just for laughs. Cut her while he was shooting off into her. That was a pleasure he had not availed himself of for a while. Chiquita had been born to bleed for him, and Cruz had thieved away that joy. Other women had suffered fast because of it.

  Jamaica led but did not take Emilio's hand.

  The choice of rooms in Bauhaus' tacky mini-motel really didn't matter. Jamaica had, at one time or another, fornicated in all of them.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I'M A LITTLE STINKER, read the T-shirt worn by the glistening thing pasted to the far corner of Kenilworth 's creaky elevator. The shirt was pink with watery blood and the logo was darkened wetly. Mid-sternum it trailed away to tatters, exposing an undercarriage of dorsal plates and pitted moist tissue like some mad amalgam of snake and slug. Puckered pores secreted mucoid lubricant; dry tracks of it shined silvery on the walls of the car.

  When the doors opened and it saw Cruz standing there it recoiled, its idly twisting tail making wet dishrag noises as it slapped the floor and close walls, leaving stains.

  It had Mario Velasquez's face, sort of.

  The child's eyes had been reproduced too large, as though inspired by a velvet painting in a 'family motel'. The irises were copper, lacking pupils. The mouth was too wide, too big, a downtured lipless slash, an overstated clown-frown spoiled by the crowd of needled fangs ganged within. The slim points meshed crookedly and jutted like thorns in a hedge. An ill fit all around.

  While Cruz stood there, mouth agape and doing nothing, it yawned back, imitating him. The sounds it made were nasal and congested. Cruz thought of a python's jaws, dislocating to swallow prey wider than its head. He thought of the savage meat-gob with steel teeth he'd seen in ALIEN, his favorite party flick back in the real world.

  No fucking way, dudes.

  As he stood rooted, still doing nothing, the slippery little beast sucked in one more labored wheeze of breath, then looped its segments up the wall of the car and out the open ceiling hatch. Its blunt, olive-colored tail-tip flicked through last.

  Cruz remembered his bumpy elevator ride to the second floor. That's when it fell on top of the ascending car, maybe got hamstrung in the cables; that was why the car had convulsed to an unscheduled halt between floors. Maybe its bottom half had gotten pinched in the gears and tom away. Maybe…

  Yeah, and maybe he wasn't really seeing any of this. He forced himself to move cautiously; go slower. Remember Spider Man and his fate by blowtorch. That guy's clear sensorium had left him with absolutely no doubt he was seeing and feeling dozens of icky spiders crawling all over his spiderless body. What else had he seen before he flinted his flame? What visions accompanied him into the emergency ward, his lung tissue fried golden-black by freebasing? What had he been looking at seven days later, when he died wearing a straitjacket?

  Cruz opened his eyes. No monster prawn in the elevator. The bloodslime trails still gleamed in the car's wan light. A clot of gunk collected on the service hatch dripped free and hit the car's grimy floor like a warm pat of butter.

  Time did its elongation trick. Bustworthy as Hitler, Cruz stood there, thinking with a perspicuity awesome in its precision and focus: It lives in the gap between floors; that's where it hides out, and if I want to stash stuff there, I've got to kill it.

  Still, all those teeth.

  The sun was on the rise. If he looked out a window right now he'd see a filthy bedsheet of sky snugging taut to ruin everyone's morning. His eyes felt red, the lids pinned back. His sinuses were petrified; his joints called in sick. He could feel his neckbones grate when he turned his head. He was aswim in that insomniac anxiety that six lines of really good coke - or ten of bad - could deliver, out-of-tune brass band and all. Did the dope make him nervous? Nahh. The thing that made him nervous had just scuttled into the elevator shaft, a head on a body that had no physical right to exist.

  Simple, then. It flashes mug, you blow it away. The Sig Sauer was loaded with smooth-bore subsonic rounds, flat-nosed motherfuckers that could tear away pounds of meat wherever they hit.

  Instead of a rumble, Cruz could just burn ass out of this dump. No reason he couldn't just split.

  Hide the kilo. Oh, right.

  His nape hairs rose like fog-stirred reeds and he caught the prickle of eyes monitoring him, as though he was still in range of Bauhaus' security cameras. Any second now a stampede of cops would buzz all over Kenilworth Arms in a pushy search for their stolen brother in blue - the cop whose coat was stiffening in several quarts of blood down in 107. It would be a spectacle…
but not one Cruz could afford to hang for, because he had just watched a book vanish into a bloody slit in the wall of Jonathan's apartment, a fissure that had folded petals and erased itself, leaving a scar on the wall. He hadn't believed that, either. And now another monstrous joke had just slid contrary to gravity and hoisted its coils into the darkness of the elevator shaft. These were not hallucinations, not paranoia, pain, nor drugs. He had seen these things.

  Powerful persuaders were held in his hands. He could power up that shaft, blast the Snail Pail Kid to filets and tuck away his dope wherever he goddamn well wanted to stash it! Electricity fired in his extremities, hot, pure, insistent. Two more toots would kick him into high-burn and he could play superhero.

  He dug in with his index finger and did the fun thing, feeling his ears pop as he snorted. Ice-white contrails climbed nimbly, then Stuka-dived to cannonade his brain, one salvo for each hemisphere.

  He lifted the hall table to use as a temporary step-up. The Folger's can with the plastic flowers went rolling, clanging too loud, too long, too much.

  An accusatory face poked out about three doors down. 'Hey, stop making so much noise out there, man!' The face was youngish, brownish, dirty.

  Cruz's lip spasmed. He hauled the Sig Sauer full out, aiming like a killer and bellowing. 'Go fuck yourself, asshole!'

  The door slammed shut with amazing speed and lack of further protest.

  What hey, this stuff really works!

  His mouth worked, chewing what was not there, yet chewing it well and fully. The table would easily allow him to poke his head through the service hatch for recon.

  Trap, he heard a voice warn.

  He tossed the Folger's can through underhand. It fell back and clattered. He already hated the noise it made. With the table chocked in place he eased up, gun-first. More nothing.

  The shaft was dim, faintly very descent, showing shadows but few details. Cruz's eyes adjusted and pain stroked rearward from his temples. The thin table legs wobbled. About ten feet above the car he thought he could discern the band of dead blackness girding the shaft.

  Nobody knew about this secret gap but him. Well… him plus one other tenant, soon to embrace past tense.

  There was no practical way to ascend, one-armed, and cover himself, short of asking Slug Baby to lend a tentacle. He heard the table leg snap just before the jolt of upset snatched away his balance. His hand flailed for the hatchway, missed, then captured it just as the arc of his fall had begun. He caught the metal lip with his fingertips, hearing the knuckles wrench apart and feeling the sharp edge bite through the bone. They slipped free and down he went, collapsing into the corner where the monster baby had started out.

  He hit the floor with his fist clenched, hot blood seeking the inside of his coatsleeve. The car jounced like a bad mattress and the back of his head skidded against the wall with enough friction to scalp him.

  God, but he hated the sensation of being cut! The feel of that thin edge shivering through to kiss your skeleton. He thought of the way a blade tasted the pruny, delicate pad of your wet thumb when you perpetrated some dumb accident in the kitchen. Perhaps that was why his fear of Emilio's straight razor had always been elemental, a fear beyond mere retribution. Cruz knew what that pitted platinum would feel like, penetrating him to cut loose the running red stuff, carving tissue with no pressure at all, slicing deep because that was what that stropped end was supposed to do and do smartly, cut, and cut, and…

  The elevator car was moving. Going down.

  The doors had not bothered to close. Just as Cruz thought to roll out, the first floor dashed upward too fast and was lost. He clenched his bleeding fist tight and watched his escape opportunity come and go in a fingersnap. Fresh blood trickled through the interstices of his fingers and provided his sole coloring; in the last fifteen minutes or so his pallor had gone ashen.

  The car stopped with the ease of a sofa flung from a fire escape. Cruz had not even regained his knees when he was pitched forward by the stop, to whack his cheekbone hard against another wall of the car and crush his wounded arm in its sling. The broken table and Jonathan's rucksack slid toward him; the car was stopped at an angle. He heard springs and cables squeaking. Had he just fallen two stories in an elevator?

  The mushy splatting noise, he already knew.

  Anger gushed in to bursting. He clawed the dropped automatic out from beneath him, fliped off the safety with a bloody thumb, and fired at the service hatch just as the goggle-eyed thing that looked like the Velasquez brat got its toothy face up for a peek. One, two, three shots. Ejected brass rang and rolled while the explosions of report bashed in Cruz's eardrums in the confinement of the car and punched the air from his chest. His too-clear sensorium permitted him to see the first shot plowing into the creature's right eyebrow. It whipcracked backward and stayed down. The ceiling of the car won two more smoking punctures while a can-can line inside Cruz's head tried to kick out his eyes from behind, one-two, boom-cha-cha.

  The gun slipped from his grasp, lubricated by his own bloodshed.

  Again the goddamned car had stopped where it wanted. Only a crack of, free space showed near the foot of the door track. If Cruz wanted out, he'd either have to widen that opening or force the car to go further down.

  He had not considered that the elevator might go to Kenilworth 's basement, or beyond.

  Cruz surely wanted out, but tried to stand perpendicular to the floor, which was a goof. His own weight yanked him toward the open door and bounced his face off bare concrete, the shock rattling his bones and giving his gray matter one more good stir, kind of like keeping the Hershey's syrup in your chocolate milk agitated. He felt the shiner rise on his face. Down-time in the hospital had calmed it, but now it had been summoned anew to bloat and darken, a reopened wound.

  The car was hung up at about a forty-five degree slant. Impossible. Cruz did not care.

  He no longer had a 'good' arm, so he braced his less injured one against the tilted wall and jumped against the floor, feeling the car lurch.

  'Move, goddamnit!'

  He thumped the panel buttons with the heel of his hand, leaving a thick smear of blood on the L button, which jammed and did not pop back out. Below, the crack of space had widened. Now it was a thin triangle, admitting pale light from outside.

  'Come on- come onn!'

  The triangle grew nearly a foot with a metallic shriek. It was a noise like tomb doors being crowbarred open. Cruz could make out tiny metal shavings littering the door track. Fresh ones. Just a few inches more and he could squirm through to confront his next test.

  When he licked his upper lip he tasted coke and blood. Not bad.

  Rest for thirty. Capture some breath. He slumped with his butt wedged into the vee formed by the car's slant and dug into the rucksack for some chemical refreshment. Close to two grams were already pushing and shoving in his bloodstream.

  Up-down, like being bowstrung and fired. Yes.

  His head pulled itself toward his knees. He felt almost as if he were in a hundred-mile freefall toward a pillowy bunch of clouds. The smell of fresh linen. He made sure to hug the kilo close, just in case he happened to pass out.

  Emilio jerked awake with a snort, pissed off before he was even fully conscious, angry at the dream that had been piloting itself so weirdly. In the dream, he had built an elemental rage; he simply dragged that rage with him when he felt the callback pull of the real world.

  He never woke up easily. Not anymore. Always a sharp start that yanked him to full sit-up with his pump pounding. Rosie had once accused him of getting high on stress. Emilio had laughed; yeah, sure, riiight.

  Me worry? For what?

  Because he was engirded by cutthroats who would greedily appropriate the network he'd built; who would fuck over years of service in his name for the right cash advance? Because the entire federal fucking government was devoted - during polls, at least - to the downfall and incarceration of him and anyone that fit the profile? Because nothing
, not even his wealth and power, could stop the reflex tightness in his sternum whenever his limo breezed past a police car on a city street?

  Rosie had relaxed. Has been relaxed, that old warhorse. Permanently relaxed, when Emilio had gotten the skinny on Cruz.

  Sirens, now, outside, and with the sound came the clench of muscle in his chest. Great - that sound would goose him into a coronary someday.

  Sirens? At the House of Bauhaus?

  The morning had proceeded tastily up until now.

  Emilio had always been fond of stripping his bitches personally. He enjoyed the pop of buttons and the patterns in which filmy panties could shred. Party girls were paid to indulge, of course, but he also savored the token protest - the bleat of surprise, or even better, that wistful quiet he got when he destroyed something the squiff had favored. You could read the hate in their eyes and they had to fuck you anyway. Power. You do what I say.

  Bauhaus' heroin was pure as the driven… well, Bauhaus sure knew it, and Emilio found out quickly. Just the prescrip to mellow him out from the coke. Emilio had no wish to doze out while he had the use of Jamaica, though, so he chased the bitter bite of his crank cocktail with some of Bauhaus' collector's edition scotch. Drugs to go up. Drugs to go down. Pretty soon his body chemistry was going up and down faster and faster. Emilio resonated. He could probably hold oscilloscope leads between his fingers and make a'sine wave on the screen.

  He had rucked her bomber jacket to the floor of the red bedroom. She understood it was to stay there, so she peeled out of her Beverly Hills sweatshirt while they stood nose-to-nose. Sly, he thought. Practiced.

  Just how good was this one?

  His eyes indicated the floor. She dropped to her knees and undid the myriad buttoms and zippers to be found at his groin. When the sword-pleated Verri Uomo trousers pooled (without the telltale chink of loose change; Emilio never carried coins because they were vulgar), she rubbed her face, kittenish, against the stiff and wiry hair of his crotch. Emilio had shaved his pubis for a full year, subscribing to the adolescent theory that it would grow back thicker each sweep. Apparently the myth had paid off. Today he could gather a fistful, pull hard, and feel no pain.