by James Grady
“I thought the edge of D.C. would be… I don’t know,” said Zane. “Not like this.”
“Times change,” I said. “Places, too.”
Zane left our white Caddy, crossed the street towards the liquor store. Walked right past the shouting Black woman wearing lime green shorts and a white sweatshirt stenciled with the gold glitter letters RE SKI S. Her right hand gestured with an opaque plastic glass and her rant came through our open window.
“…an’ this is an ILLEGAL MEETING! And there’s nothin’ in this here cup ’cept dietary cola!” Her eyes trapped mine. “Here a’ comes a rip!”
Watching her meant not covering Zane. I let sunshine and shadow smells of the street stream into me until he jogged back to our car.
Told us: “I found a Vietnamese barbershop. Been awhile since I spoke Saigon, but the old man in charge was an officer for us way back when. He told me where to go.”
Zane directed the white Caddy down a road lined with trees, over a bridge in a park, past a gas station. We glimpsed painted houses with manicured lawns and back decks. A blonde mom who traced her roots to George Washington’s officer corps strapped her daughter into a minivan babyseat while an Ethiopian nanny watched.
“One world on top of another,” said Russell as we turned onto a narrower street.
“Only one?” I asked.
“There’s a police station coming up ’bout a quarter mile on the right,” said Zane.
Hailey shuffled her maps. “You sure we’re going the right way?”
Cari slowed the Caddy, said: “We can ask her.”
‘Her’ was a flashily dressed, white 60ish woman strolling on the sidewalk the same direction we drove—whirling around to stalk the other way, waving her arms and shaking her curled hair, bobbing down like a robin after worms and snapping back straight again to stir her hand in the air, all the while working her pink lipstick mouth.
“No wonder they can’t find us,” said Russell as we drove past the pink lipsticked woman directing the traffic in her own frenzy. “There’s a crazy on every corner.”
One block past the cop shop with its parked cruisers, we took a right at a bus station where global citizens waited in the crisp afternoon air, their hands close to their suitcases and bulky black trash bags, their eyes watching the white Caddy of yesterday’s wealth motor past. We drove past a “metaphysical meditation chapel” housed in a former insurance agency, past a barber shop where an elderly Italian man in a blue smock waited in his doorway, past a comic book store with windows filled by cardboard posters of Superman and the latest pointy-breasted, market-born Hero Babe. We parked at a meter on a block of stores built for our 21st Century.
“Eric,” I said, “go with Zane. You know what we need.”
“I’ll come, too,” said Hailey. The smart move was for her to stay close to Eric.
Zane grabbed coins from our cup to feed the meter and vanished into a store.
“Don’t like this,” said Russell from the back seat. “Parked in the open, split up.”
“Me in the driver’s seat,” said Cari next to where I sat.
“Me right behind you.” Russell shrugged. “I’m getting used to us.”
“It’s not a good idea to be out here,” I said, “but it’s the best chance we’ve got.”
Tick-tock, my watch would have said if it had been built the same year as our Caddy. But Mister Tick-Tock was dead. Life was no longer work then recovery, hard then soft. My watch’s second hand swept its circle with a monomanical tick tick tick.
We sat sweating in the cold white Caddy of that spring afternoon. Cars drove past. A city bus. Late lunchers ate at a franchised Mexican café. The steel-beamed skeleton of a building rose from the next block. A hardhat wizard walked an I-beam above the last long fall. I sat in our dead man’s dream machine.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Hailey strode out of the store holding a white plastic bag. Eric carried two bigger bags. Zane walked with empty hands, ready hands.
“God bless us everyone,” said Hailey when we were all in the car, doors slammed, Cari keying the engine. “We live in a time when you can buy three disposable cell phones, charged and ready to go for cash on the counter.”
The white Caddy slid into traffic.
Zane told our driver. “Great idea.”
“Thanks,” said Cari.
That had to be a smile of professional pride she couldn’t hide.
Eric used white tape and a black pen to label the phones Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.
“Got car ’n’ wall socket chargers,” he said as he programmed each phone with the instantaneous dial/connect numbers of the other two.
“How long until we’re there?” asked Hailey.
“Twenty minutes,” said Zane.
Wrong: 16 minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of a mattress store on Georgia Avenue, a decades-old, low slung suburban commercial strip.
“We can’t quite see it from here,” I said. “They can’t quite see us from there.”
Russell sighed. “Still wish we could drive right up and rock ’n’ roll.”
“Sure,” said Hailey, “but this is where Nurse Death got her mail and we’re spies, not commandos.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I said: “If we don’t make it back…”
“We’ll come after you,” answered Russell.
Cell phone Alpha filled my hand. I punched the number programmed for Bravo, and 11 ticks later, the phone in Russell’s hand rang. I slipped my transmitting phone in the right chest pocket of my leather jacket. One of the flash/bang grenades and ammo magazines rode in the jacket pocket above my heart, while barely covered by its unzipped leather, the holstered Glock .45 coiled on my right hip.
Zane and I slid out of the white car to walk up that road.
Russell took our place in the front seat. Rode shotgun like he was born there.
My voice said: “Let’s go.”
43
“Damn it!” I said as Zane and I stood between a parked van and a family SUV facing the address Hailey’d tricked from the cell phone billing department.
Russell’s muffled voice crackled from the chest pocket of my jacket: “What?”
“Op silence!” I told the voice from a man who wasn’t there. Not that such spy protocol seemed necessary. Not now.
Traffic whizzed past behind us on busy commercial/commuter Georgia Avenue.
Four flat storefronts faced us from across their parking lot. Second store from the left had the address Hailey’d scored painted on its glass front wall, plus the words:
Mail 4 U!
Zane said: “It’s a postal drop. ‘Berlow Industries, Suite 413’ is really box 413. We got nothing.”
“Maybe nothing is more than it seems,” I said. “Cover me.”
Bells tinkled as I pushed open the glass door and stepped inside Mail 4 U!
In front of me was the ‘business center’ counter. Back from the counter stretched a room that held two desks where the store’s staff sat. Past those desks was a long table with spooled brown wrapping paper, tape dispensers, a vase of scissors and styluses and marker pens. A second table held two FAX machines, a computer. Five sizes of cardboard shipping boxes hung on a wall beside samples of gift-wrapping paper. Other displays sold labels, mailing tubes in three sizes, padded envelopes.
To my left rose a wall of mailboxes, all with combination locks, all facing the glass wall to the street, and all centered by their own square glass window. My casual stroll & scan found box 413: its peephole showed me empty.
Back at the business counter, I stared at the two employees.
A balding Black man sat behind the desk deepest into the business center. A photo of men on a factory floor hung on the wall behind his squeaky chair, photos of a wife and
three kids stood on his desk. He looked tired. Wore a maroon sweater.
The woman with her red shoes propped on the desk near the counter blabbered into her cell phone. She could have been in college except she wasn’t. Low cut white jeans were painted on her thick thighs. Her green blouse strained to contain the flesh roll hanging over her waistband. She wore vivid mascara and lip-slick. Absolutely every hint of other color had died in her wispy jaw-cut peroxided hair.
I coughed. Coughed again, louder.
She told the cell phone: “So I was like, n’un-unh, and then he was all like,—”
“Excuse me!” I said.
The man in the maroon sweater glanced up from an open file to see cell phone girl hold a forefinger up to me as she said: “That is so not, like, the thing, ’cause I’m like…”
Maroon Sweater closed his eyes, then the file on his desk, brought it with him as he walked to where I stood at the counter. As he passed Cell Phone Girl, he put the file on her desk: “Trish, go ahead and re-file the active applications.”
“Like, what?” said Trish, her eyes on Mister Maroon Sweater—then into the cell phone, she said: “No, not you. Don’t worry, it’s like, just some work thing… Do so!”
Maroon Sweater pointed to a short green file cabinet. “Please put them in there.”
“Sure!” Trish’s quick smile vanished into the phone: “Like, no way!”
He shook thoughts of homicide from his head as he joined me at the counter. “Sorry. The boss’s daughter. But she’s coming along.”
“So I see.”
“How can we help you?”
“I’ve been thinking about getting a mail box.”
“We can do that.” He quoted me rates by the month, by the quarter, by the year.
None of the corners held surveillance lenses, nor did I see any “innocent” objects along the wall that might hide a video camera.
“I’m concerned about image,” I told him. “What kind of people rent here?”
“We get all kinds.”
He handed me an application form.
“Thanks.” I put the application in my jacket pocket beside the flash/bang grenade and the spare ammo mags. “When are you open?”
“We unlock at 6, lock up at 11. Somebody’s always working the counter. We used to provide unmonitored access to the boxes for 24-7 service, but we got vandalism.”
“Too bad. You been doing this long?”
“Some days it feels like I’m not even here. Some days the two years I’ve been parking out back feel like forever.” He nodded to the photo on the wall behind his desk. “I was production manager for a jacket manufacturer. Had 57 people under me, most of them good. First, computers programmed either yes or no to half the questions I used to create answers for, then, the owners moved the factory to the free trade zone in Mexico.”
Trish told her cell phone: “Like, that is just so forget-about-it.”
He said: “At least I’m still a manager.”
“There is that.”
“Funny thing is, now it’s happening to the folks in Mexico who got those jobs. The jacket plant is moving to China.” The quiet smile that stretched his black skin came from more than funny. “At least I didn’t waste my time trying to learn Spanish.”
I gave him a laugh. Nodded to leave, then like I’d had an afterthought, said: “If I was looking to rent couple rooms or so for an office…”
My gesture swept across his ceiling. “Your boss got any extra space here?”
He shook his head. “There is no upstairs in this place.”
“Afraid of that,” I said. “See you.”
And walked out through the door in the glass wall.
44
“We’re crashed,” said Zane as we leaned against the back of a van in the parking lot outside Mail 4 U! That van blocked Maroon Sweater from seeing us through his wall of window. Trish wouldn’t have seen us if we were pressed naked against that glass.
The voice in my jacket pocket said: “What’s happening?”
What’s happening?
Sunshine warms our faces in the cool spring air. Steel presses our backs as we lean on a plumber’s van. Smells of asphalt and car exhaust and nerves swirl around us. With every beat of my heart, another Georgia Avenue car wooshes past our blank faces staring out at that great American artery.
Across that road’s three lanes going north, across the one-step-wide concrete divider, across the three lanes going south waits a flat two-story mall, a rigid ‘C’ shaped gray concrete sprawl of wall-sharing shops. The All Things Jewish store. Ye Olde Magic Shoppe. The Used & New Uniforms store where red lipped mannequins posed as nurses. The Viet Mine restaurant with dirty red curtains pulled shut over the windows behind a displayed square of newspaper. Red dragons emblazon the next shop’s window, along with the name of a kung fu style I’ve never heard of. A Chinese grocery store so crammed with merchandise the window wanted to burst. A store with opaque swirled windows crossed by a banner that reads ADULT VIDEOS DVDS MAGS; above that fogged glass door hung a blue neon sign reading COYOTES.
What’s happening?
Woosh.
What if our Op is over. What if we got nothing to do, nowhere to go.
Woosh.
We get caught. We get five coffins. And Cari…
Woosh.
I slumped on the side of the road.
Woosh.
“Victor? Vic! Don’t zone out on—”
Woosh sunshine swirling bright light… cool.
“Zane, what if it wasn’t just Nurse Death’s box?” I nodded to the uniforms store. “That’s probably how she found this place, but here is perfect as a drop for an Op. The subway is a 15 minute walk south, the Beltway’s a 5 minute drive. This mail drop isn’t convenient to her house or to her cover job at Walter Reed hospital. This is a Cool Zone: out of casually passing-by eyes of watchers, with easy and quick access to anywhere. Combination lock, nobody needs a key. There could be other outlaw spooks like her who use that box, come here. If we catch one of them, he’ll lead us to Kyle Russo.”
“You’re really reaching here, man.”
“That’s the only way to get anything.” I shrugged. “Besides, what have we got to lose?”
“There is that.”
“So we go for it,” I said, angling my head back towards Mail 4 U as I pulled the cell phone from my jacket pocket. “They haven’t seen you in there. Not that that matters if you get Trish.”
45
“I’m all brown!” said Russell 30 minutes later as the six of us stood beside the white Caddy hulking in the back row of the nearby subway stop’s huge parking lot.
“That’s how you’re supposed to look.” Hailey suppressed a grin. “Brown shirt, brown pants, and that trendy brown baseball cap.”
“It’s not a baseball cap!” said Russell. “If I were wearing a ball cap, at least I’d look like I was a college goofus instead of just a brown dork.”
Russell gave a handful of coins, crumpled dollar bills, and the receipt from the New & Used uniform store to Zane. Zane added change from his own purchase at Mail 4 U! to Russell’s cash, passed it to Eric, who was one of the Outside Crew. If shit hit the fan, cash might help an Outsider run.
Zane sorted the dozen copper pennies out of Eric’s cupped hand…
Threw the pennies helter-skelter across the subway’s deserted cement parking lot.
Cari said: “What are you doing?”
“You know how it works,” Zane told her. “If you find a penny, it’s good luck. Minority fundamentalists believe that if the penny is face down, you shouldn’t take it because that’s bad luck. I’m not sure I believe that.”
“But you believe the other?” said Cari.
“I believe in luck. And call it confidence or heightened awareness of possibilities or whatever, if yo
u think you’re lucky, you’ve got a better chance of being lucky.”
Cari blinked. “But why throw away pennies?”
“I’ve been lucky.” Zane shrugged. “Seems right to pass it on.”
“You’ve been locked in a loony bin,” said Cari, “your family is dead, your only friends are stone whackos, you’ve never been able to be in love, and you call that lucky?”
“Just because I’m a virgin doesn’t mean I’ve never been in love.”
“Oh shit, Zane, I’m sorry! They gave us your files, so—That was a cheap shot.”
“Hey,” he told her, “I’m lucky just to be here for you to hurt.”
Traffic whizzed by on Georgia Avenue.
Cari shook her blonde head. “No wonder they locked you up.”
Zane smiled: “And now I’m a penny you’ve picked up.”
I said: “We’re ready. If it doesn’t work…” I trailed off.
“We’ll come running.” Hailey jingled the keys to the white Caddy.
Five minutes later, Zane, Cari and I came striding, not running, towards the ‘adult’ video/magazine store with the blue neon COYOTES sign in the two-story concrete strip mall on Georgia Avenue’s river. I jerked open COYOTES clouded glass door and freed an angry electronic buzzer.
Off to our left, tall shelves crammed with colored video boxes ran in ranks towards the wall covered by other boxes with lurid photos of human beings in circus poses. At the rear of the store, a moldy green curtain covered a doorway between shelves of DVD boxes. Cassettes filled the wall to our right behind the cash register counter. A color TV hung from the ceiling. In the TV, a shellacked blonde naked woman with breasts swollen like concrete balloons ripped off the white shirt of a muscle punk who had a snake tattoo ‘s’-ing its way up his spine. The door clunked shut. The buzzer stopped screaming. We sank into TV blare and sensations of hard carpet, pine disinfectant, carcinogenic smog.
The pale creep perched behind the elevated cash register clinked a zippo to light a cigarette. His head and his face both showed a three-day stubble.
