by James Grady
“How are you spelling that?” said Cari.
“See? You do know poetry!”
She glanced out the window: “An unmarked cop car just parked out front.”
We crouched below the window ledge and stared out to the parking lot below.
A balding man in a cheap gray suit closed the driver’s door of a Crown Victoria with two radio antennae on its trunk. He looked from side to side as if to be sure that he was alone. The cop in the cheap gray suit marched towards COYOTES door and out of our angle of vision.
The angry electronic buzz told us the door had opened.
“I’m not getting trapped up here!” I said, filling my right hand with the Glock .45.
“What about Zane?” said Cari.
My left hand shot up: Quiet!
We scurried across the bare floor like mice in a cat’s house, eased down narrow wooden stairs that somehow granted our wishes and didn’t creak. Just past the bottom of the stairs, all that separated us from the sales room of the porno video store was the doorway filled by a moldy green curtain.
Smells like wet wool, I thought as I crouched beside that green curtain to peer through the gap between its edge and the door jam. Cari crouched behind me—I’d never let her be there if I hadn’t trusted her. She could see over my head, shared my curtain’s-gap narrow vertical view of the world.
We saw the cop shove a video cassette across the counter to the cadaverous clerk, say: “Might be more stuff I can find here that you need to let me check. But don’t worry, I’ll keep it all off the books.”
The clerk said: “You cops are always too good to me.”
Zane opened the door and activated the buzzer.
The cop turned to face the sound of a man walking through the front door—and as he did, his suit jacket rebelliously flipped open to flash the badge on his belt, busting who he was for any self-righteous, letter-writing, phone-call-making citizen. As he registered the sight of white-haired stranger/hard eyes, the cop’s right hand instinctively brushed to his side and he growled: “What the hell you got in those bags?”
Zane blinked. Said: “Food. Vietnamese.”
“You bring food… in here?”
Can’t tip who we really are to either the cop or the clerk! Zane told himself, said: “Don’t you get hungry?”
“Yeah, but I know when and where I’m supposed to eat.”
Zane winked at the cop: “Guys like us eat where we want?”
‘Got that right,’ thought the clerk. ‘Fuckin’ cops take it off the top.’
Nastiness wrinkled the cop’s brow and he told the white-haired freak: “You mean something by that?”
Behind the curtain, Cari pushed me aside—
Stormed into the store.
I barely dodged getting seen by the cop or the clerk. Or Zane. My hand held the .45 beside my face in High Ready stance as I hugged the wall beyond the curtain.
“Oh man,” said Cari, talking her way into the video store racks as the clerk, the cop and Zane turned to watch her come. “The bathroom here is disgusting.”
‘Fuck you,’ thought the Clerk. ‘You got it for free.’
He caught the female Federal Agent’s don’t-fuck-with-me glance she threw him as she joined the other two badges and told the white-haired one: “We don’t need any help.”
‘Yeah,’ thought the clerk, ‘like you Feds could handle any real shit without back-up.’ But the clerk knew when to obey the four magic words.
“Hell!” said the local cop. “You got a woman with you!”
“What’s the matter,” said Cari. “Don’t you think I can get it done?”
The cop flushed or blushed, depending on point of view. “What I think—”
Zane talked right over him: “Think we’ve got no trouble here.”
Cari stole the reply from the cop and told Zane: “None we can’t handle.”
“Can’t is a pretty big word,” said Zane.
The cop said: “Hey! Ain’t you talking to me?”
“Who else we got?” said Zane.
Behind the curtain, the gun barrel pressed my cheek.
Cari said: “We gotta be talking to you. It’s not like we’re crazy or anything. Not like something’s made us fall off into the deep end.”
“Like somebody who just shows up when you least expect it,” said Zane.
“You gotta be ready,” said Cari.
“But somehow, you never are,” said Zane.
Veteran of a thousand interviews, the cop knew these two citizens who’d walked in and caught him were trying to say something without coming right out and admitting it. His badge had them spooked, which was good, but he had to get them where he wanted them. The cop swallowed. “Sometimes unexpected stuff works out like, off the books.”
“Yeah,” said Cari, “like that. Nothing to write about.”
“Hey!” said the cop. Show these mere fuckin’ freaky citizens who was boss. “You people wanna get written up?”
“Nah,” said Cari. “Though it might be a pretty good story.”
‘That’s right,’ thought Cadaverous Clerk, ‘cover your asses, cops.’
Zane smiled at the cop. “Hope we ain’t keeping you from going.”
The cop heard that as a confession masking a plea.
The clerk heard that as a putdown masking a kiss off.
The cop thrust his forefinger at the freaky duo of citizens whose plea indicated they were smart enough to forget he’d ever been here. One last time, he warned them: “You be careful.”
‘Wow!’ thought the clerk as the door buzzed and the local cop stalked outside. ‘A benediction! One tough guy cop blessing another. Just like on that old TV show HILL STREET BLUES!’
Zane told the clerk: “He’s really not such a bad guy.”
“Oh yeah,” said the clerk who knew that cops always stick up for each other. “He’s a sweetheart. Just like you.”
“No.” Zane’s skull shaped his smile. “He’s nowhere near as crazy as me.”
“Back to the salt mines,” said Cari.
As they walked towards where I waited behind the curtain, I holstered my gun.
We floated upstairs with the scented clouds of steamed Asian food.
“Close,” said Zane.
“Very,” said Cari.
Zane angled his head towards the porno store floor where they’d not gotten busted, told Cari: “You’ve got some nice moves.”
“You don’t do so bad yourself,” she said, “for a crazy old guy.”
I said: “And I’m just glad you both know what you’re doing!”
“Yeah,” said Cari.
“Yeah,” said Zane.
“That’s good news for all of us,” I said, pulling the tops off cups of steaming tea.
They looked at me and opened carry-out plates of Hanoi barbecued pork skewers over long, thick, limp and somehow sweet white noodles.
Russell phoned and got the all clear to come in. He spotted our empty food containers. “We ate seafood at a wild place from a 1940’s movie between the motel and the metro. Caddy’s parked under the carport. Can’t see it from the street, can’t scope it from a ’copter. I rode the subway here.”
“Alone?” I said.
“Solo and cool.” He pointed at Zane, at Cari. “You two ride the subway home. Eric’s scheduled tonight’s last shift for Vic and me. I drew you a map, bought you fare cards.”
“Just the two of them?” I repeated.
“Only way to keep the Caddy under cover. If Hailey’d come with me to chaperone their way back, Eric would be alone with the babble of TV commercials from other motel rooms. She didn’t want to order him to grab onto the bed and do nothing else until we got back to help him cope. He’s, ah, gravitating to uncontrollable absolutes.”
Cari glared
at me.
“Besides,” said Russell, picking up the binoculars and scanning the glow of Mail 4 U!, “we gotta trust Blondie out there with just one of us sooner or later. All Zane needs to do is get her on the train home.”
Zane said: “I think we can handle that.”
47
A train rumbled through the blue night. In the porno movie blaring from the TV in the store below Russell and me.
Outside, taillights of passing cars streaked the night red.
“Surveillance sucks,” said Russell.
The Mail 4 U! manager had been relieved by A Distinguished Older Gentlemen who wore a tie while he sat behind the counter waiting for customers in the yellow glow of that store. Our binoculars showed him reading a book but I couldn’t make out the title.
A woman’s voice came through the floor: “Where are you going?”
“I’m going nowhere,” said the man riding a train in the movie under our shoes.
“What makes a woman fall for a man?” I asked Russell.
“If I could answer that, I’d be the master spy.”
“We can’t do this here—can we?” said the movie woman.
Russell said: “Women think that what makes us fall for them is…”
He jerked his thumb towards the floor.
“What are you wearing under your dress?”
Russell said: “Man, if only it were as simple as it is downstairs!”
“Ohnn-unn-!”
Russell pleaded: “Please God, stay with the sound of the train! Or the fucking!”
God answered his prayer.
Said NO.
The rumble of a train through a blue night. Groans and sighs. ‘Baby’s!’ and ‘Yes’s!’. All those acceptable movie sounds were wiped away by heartless computer-faked jazz, the kind of elevator noise a soulless person might think would flicker candles.
“There is a cosmic law,” said Russell. “Don’t whore the music.”
“Women,” I said, paused to find the perfect phrasing.
“Forget about it,” said Russell, jumping my pause. “Don’t talk to me about love.”
“Who said anything about—”
But he was on his feet. I scooted my chair so I could see the glowing Mail 4 U! across the night traffic of Georgia Avenue and still watch Russell pace.
“Women,” he said. “What I went through—what I really went through, what we found out in New York… You’d have thought my Op would have given me Zane’s problem—the big one, not the heat freaks or the nightmares. I got lucky there, but…
“What’s been gnawing me—I hate that fucking music!” Russell glared at the floor. Paced over it but the sound still came through its thin wood.
“What I did, OK: extreme, but I was there out of love, right? Love of country. Love of freedom. Justice. That girl strung up in the bathroom stall… What pushed me into whacko was I did that out of love. I couldn’t save her so I had to love her enough to…”
Russell stomped on the floor.
“Stay with me!” I said.
“Where the fuck else can I go! We are fucking here. We are fucking doing it. Because we love to do it. Because we love not getting it done to us. Because we love the sheer bold rockin’ of this Op. Because…”
He stomped on the floor again.
“Women!” I said as porno music swelled. “Love!”
Russell loomed in my face. My arm flowed up to ward him off, my weight sank in preparation to rocket him back. I tried to sense him and not lose sight of the glow across the street where an old man sat reading and still alone.
“What drove me crazy was the bridge of love.” Russell whispered above the faking it music. “What if you always had to walk from love to death?”
His words sprayed me. “What if love always means killing?”
“Would be a problem,” I whispered.
“Wait one.”
And he stormed out of the room. Left me on watch.
OK, gonna be OK. Russell’s had breakthrough, must still have calming drugs in his bloodstream. Even if his crazy is more than just What He Did In The War…
Across the street: Old man, still sitting there, reading, nobody else with him, cars flowing by on Georgia, coming up on closing time, gonna be OK!
Floor vibrating with the rumble of a train. A scream—train whistle? Two actors?
BAM!
Glass shatters, tinkles… quiet.
Feet pounding up the rear stairs. My gun fills my hand.
Russell strides into the room.
Saying: “Where was—oh yeah, the love-death-murder thing. What I figured out in New Jersey is how all that was crazy dumb, not just crazy.”
“Russell… You shot the TV.”
“Only once.”
“The clerk…?”
“He’s got a broom and no customers. I told him to fill out a reimbursement form.”
“What if he calls somebody?”
Russell turned from the window. With eyes of fire, he said: “Would you?”
All was quiet in the night above the porno palace. We stared out the window.
Russell sighed. “Surveillance sucks.”
48
Midnight. The straight-up tick between a yesterday and a tomorrow.
Walking in the lime green second-floor hallway of our motel that was a grenade toss across the Maryland border into Washington, D.C.
Russell. Me. Corridor walls of closed doors.
“What I love about surveillance scenes in movies is that something always happens,” he said as carpet ate our footsteps. “The hero always sees what’s going on.”
“What good is a hero who doesn’t know what’s happening?” I said as caffeine from a cold Coke in my hand jangled my exhausted nerves.
Russell stared at me: “But you gotta have a soft spot in your heart for the hero who doesn’t know what’s happening.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Yeah,” he told me. “You suppose.”
He stopped us at door 2J. The DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from its gold knob had identical friends hanging on the next two doors. “You’re in here with me. Next door is Zane and Eric, and up against the wall there are Hailey and Blondie.”
“Her name is Cari.”
“Whatever. As shaky as Eric is, Zane might be sleeping solo. Eric is probably curled up at the foot of Hailey’s bed. Works for me. Puts two of us on Blondie.”
A door opened and Hailey peered into the hall. She pressed her finger to her lips, flashed us the hand signal for all-clear. Vanished back inside her room and shut the door.
“You really want to be sentry?” Russell unlocked our room, handed me the key.
“Somebody has to.”
“Damn. Lucky me. Four whole hours of sleep.”
“Wake Hailey and Eric at 5, drive them up to post, come back and crash. Before you go, wake Zane so he’ll be on duty while the rest of us are sleeping.”
Russell gave me a nod and a strangely sad smile.
The door clicked shut to a room where one of two beds waited for me. Made the DO NOT DISTURB sign dangling from its doorknob sway.
The ice machine clunked at the far end of the hall.
As tired as I was, I knew better than to sit down. Walking the corridor towards the windows at the far end, my finger tap sent the DO NOT DISTURB signs swinging. When I got to the dead end wall and the top of the stairs going down, I looked back: the signs now hung still. So much for me passing by.
Windows in the walls showed me the night. Out one side were high rises that had grown up around this motel built back when being a 20-minute drive from the White House meant you were out of town, not just in the extended city. Out the other window was a vacant lot sloping up to tracks for both the subway and real trains. Beyond them were office buildin
gs dotted with cleaning crew or workaholic lights. Lonely yellow eyes slid over the streets. After the birth of the 21st Century, an extortionist sniper team dropped an innocent citizen five blocks from here, the desk clerk had told Russell. But cops caught those stranger killers, so we only had to worry about snipers who knew our faces.
I swigged the cold Coke and glimpsed my watch: four minutes past midnight. If I’d picked up the right pennies, in less than four hours I could crawl into a bed and fall asleep alive.
Coke shook in the bottle I held. Couldn’t blame the caffeine. Or the cool night.
How shaky were the others? Tomorrow is our seventh day off our meds. Not counting our NYC contraband highs, Zane calculated we’d only last seven days.
Watch me walk back down that motel’s pale emerald hall. Like I was in a movie.
The first DO NOT DISTURB sign swayed with the wind of my arrival.
Cari was in there. With Hailey. And maybe… My ear suctioned to the wood of that old door. Yes, a man’s snoring shook that wood, the strongest sound: Eric, but with his fitfulness came feminine sighs that let me hope for their sweet dreams.
The second DO NOT DISTURB sign trembled before I got there. My ear didn’t need to kiss 2L’s old wood to catch muffled sounds beyond it. Zane. Who for years in Maine fought nightmares. That was the alone battle in there now, squeaking the bed, sending sounds out to the hall that could have been ‘No! No!’ or ‘Oh! Oh!’ All I could do was walk on. Hope he’d make it through his Saturday night horrors.
The third DO NOT DISTURB sign. Too late. Russell was already in there.
Walk on. Get to the other end of the hall. Stand sentry to the windows of the night and the closed doors. Hands shaking. But I knew where I was and what was going on, and that let me pretend it was all like a movie.
Any minute now, the lights will come on.
49
The stubbled clerk behind COYOTES’ cash register waited until the door buzz died and I was inside his domain from the morning sunshine, then said: “What’s that?”
“Coffee.” I nodded at the white paper cup I’d taken from a gray paper tray of four such covered cups and set on the counter. Hanging from the ceiling behind me was a TV with a giant black tape X across its hole-blasted screen. “The boutique kind with steamed milk that sells for as much as a handful of bullets.”
