American Static

by Tom Pitts

  “I need a new one. Steven here just smokes it.”

  Raja looked up from what he was doing with knitted eyebrows. “Really? Fuckin’ waste.” He took the piece from the scale and held it up with two fingers to examine it before passing it across to Teresa. He quickly carved off another piece and dropped it into his spoon without weighing it.

  Steven watched as Raja added water and cooked the heroin with a disposable lighter. The acrid vinegar smell struck him where he sat. He looked over at Teresa; she had produced a spoon from nowhere and was going through the same ritual, although she’d broken her piece in half and left a portion sitting on the table, presumably for Steven. They both rolled tiny wads from the cotton ball and dropped them into the spoons. For a moment, Steven wondered if his brother had ever been into heroin, or just speed.

  When they were both ready, Raja tore open the bag of new syringes, handed Teresa one and kept one for himself. They each carefully drew up the coffee-brown liquid into their needles.

  Raja said, “I’ll be right back.” He got up and left the room without saying anything else.

  When he’d gone, Teresa explained. “He’s got trouble finding a vein so he goes in the bathroom. He can see better in there.” She stood up and undid the top button on her jeans. “Plus he’s a little shy.”

  She tugged down the back of her pants and stuck the needle into the topside of her right buttock. Slowly, she depressed the plunger.

  Steven watched in amazement. She didn’t flinch or whimper.

  When she was finished, she sat back down. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  Steven touched his forehead and ran his fingers over the protruding lump and didn’t answer.

  Teresa pointed to the wedge of heroin. “You don’t really want me to find you some foil to smoke that with, right?”

  “No,” Steven said. “I don’t want any. You keep it. I still need to talk to you about your dad. He’s waiting outside.”

  “Bullshit.” She smiled for the first time since they’d been in the house. Now that the junk was working its way through her system, she let down her guard a little, but only a little. “You’re serious? I thought you were a friend of Paul’s he sent in to keep an eye on me. How do you know my father?”

  “I met him in Willits. He drove me down here. He’s been searching for you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “That I met him in Willits, or that he’s looking for you?”

  “Both.” She eyed him for a moment, measuring his sincerity. “And you two get along, huh?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “You don’t know my father.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but he’s outside now. Waiting for you.”

  Teresa got up from the table, her smile twisted into a disbelieving smirk. “Where?”

  They left the makeshift porch and went back through the filthy kitchen and down the hall toward the front of the house. When they reached the front door, Steven put his hand on the knob and Teresa put her hand over his.

  “Wait,” she said. She stretched on her tiptoes and peered out the small frame of colored glass in the center of the door. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “He’s down the street a little. To the left. About five cars down.”

  He watched her from behind. Her T-shirt pulled away from her jeans as she stretched to look. Her skin was white as chalk. She was thin, rakish, beautiful. There was something gentle about her.

  “I still don’t see him. There’s nobody there.”

  “Sure there is. He’s right there in the car, sitting in the driver’s seat.”

  She turned back from the portal; her eyes wide and scared. “That’s not my dad.”

  Thoughts ricocheted through Steven’s brain. He’d been duped. Used. He thought about the fork sticking out of the fat man’s belly, wagging back and forth. He felt foolish. He’d brought something terrible with him into this girl’s life.

  She said, “I gotta go.”

  She skirted past him and ran back through the house to the porch room in back. There, she quickly began stuffing her things in her pockets. The small wedge of dope, the spoon, she grabbed the open bag of syringes and stuffed them into her boot at the inside of her right leg. “C’mon, c’mon” she said to herself. “He didn’t give us the speed. Where’s the fucking speed?”

  She reached over to Raja’s toolbox and flipped open the lid and grabbed a few of the plastic baggies inside and stuffed them into her pockets, too. She looked down at the box and grabbed the rest of them.

  He stood watching her. She was near panicked, looking around the room for an escape. She peeled back the posters and foil on the windows, searching for one that wasn’t painted shut.

  “Isn’t there another door to this place?” Steven asked.

  She thrust a finger at him. “Look, I don’t know who you are, or who that fucker outside is, but I ain’t going with either of you no matter what.”

  Steven wanted to tell her he was trapped, tricked. He felt as scared of Quinn as she looked right now. “I don’t know that guy. I mean, he found me. He fooled me. I’m afraid to go back out the front door. He’s…he’s fucking dangerous.” Steven heard his own voice degenerating into a plea. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to tell him. I thought he was your dad.”

  “There’s no time for this shit. I got to go, now.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “Fuck him.” She threw her shoulder against a window frame. It creaked as the paint cracked apart and it separated from the wood. She looked down at the drop. It was only one floor up. Below was a cramped yard filled with the same debris that polluted the inside of the house.

  “I’m gone,” she said as she threw a leg over the windowsill. “You coming?”

  He nodded, but she’d already dropped out the window.

  Chapter Ten

  Carl and Peters sat in a taqueria on 24th Street. Panzer had opted out of the meal but directed them to what he said were the best burritos in town. Carl shifted uncomfortably on the hard plastic benches. He peeled back the foil on his burrito and complimented the absent Panzer on a good choice.

  “Hell, I could eat two of these things,” Peters said. “I’m thinking of gettin’ another one to go.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish mine, you can have it.”

  They ate in silence, dripping the bright green avocado salsa onto the open ends of the burritos and tempering their pace with tortilla chips. They moaned with exaggerated delight.

  Finally, Carl sat down the stub of his burrito in the red plastic basket and said, “You heard from Perez?”

  “Nope,” Peters said with his mouth still full.

  “Why don’t we give him a call and see what he came up with during his hard day of investigation.”

  Peters agreed, wiped his hands with a paper napkin, and took out his cell.

  “Perez? It’s me, Peters. I’m down here with Carl enjoying the sights of the city and we was wondering what you come up with today.” Peters listened to the phone for a moment. “Eatin’ a real burrito, that’s what.”

  Carl motioned with his hand for Peters to give him the phone.

  “Perez? This is Carl Bradley. We’re gonna be needing you to run point on this thing back home. I hope that’s not too much trouble for you.” Carl paused and listened, then cupped the phone with his hand and told Peters, “He says they found the gray truck.”

  Carl asked Perez if they found anything in the truck, anything at all. Perez told him, no, it’d been wiped clean. Carl sighed; he had a feeling that’d be the case. Then Perez mentioned a stolen credit card used at a restaurant not two blocks away.

  “Why does that raise up your short hairs?” Carl asked.

  Perez told him two men used the card. They’d bought a meal about an hour after the murder. There were, Perez reminded him, two men seen going into the Oulilette place and one a piece in the vehicles seen leaving.

  “Well, might
be something to that. I think it’d be in order to go down there and talk with the folks at the restaurant and see what they remember about these two.”

  Perez told Carl he was way ahead of him. He’d already gone down to see the waitress and taken a statement. He took down a vague description of the two men. One in his forties and one in his early twenties.

  “Father and son?” Carl asked.

  Perez said he had no idea, but it felt like a start. Policemen’s intuition.

  “She say if the older man had a gut on him?”

  Perez said no. He was of average build. The waitress did say the older one was good-looking. “Movie star good looks” was what Perez had written down.

  “It’s not our boy Tremblay then,” he said to Perez while he looked at Peters. “I guess we’d better be talking to the owner of that credit card.”

  Perez said he already had, sort of. He’d spoken to a woman in Clear Lake who said her husband had been missing for four days. She reported his credit card missing after the first two.

  “That doesn’t sound good. It even gets my short hairs standing up a little. Well, thank you, young man. I’ll call back in the morning to see if we can’t get somebody up there to talk with her in person.” He thanked him once more, ended the call and handed Peters back his phone.

  “What’d he say?” Peters said.

  “He said you might as well enjoy your burrito, since he was the only one doing real police work today.”

  “He did not.”

  “No, but go ahead and enjoy it anyway.”

  ***

  When Tremblay returned to his motel room it was just as he left it. He’d bought his own bottle of Maker’s Mark at a liquor store on 6th Street on the way back. He tossed the unopened bottle on the bed. No chaser. He could always hit the soda machine later if he wanted. Or drink tap water. He was drunk, tired, and had no energy to get undressed. He tossed his cell on the bureau before the vanity and stood looking at himself in the mirror. Same old Tremblay. The city had changed but he hadn’t. He rubbed his gut and decided he was hungry, but not enough to order in.

  He leaned in toward the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot. His fleshy cheeks were red, too. Almost sunburned. After seeing Joe-Joe, he’d ended the day with a few drinks at a bar near Powell Street and wondered how he would find the girl. If the little bitch was strung out she probably wasn’t spending a lot of time on the street. She was probably shacked up with some dealer. Giving it up in exchange for staying high. She was young and still a good-looking kid, though. Too young to be whoring, too old to be out there begging change with the runaways. He wouldn’t mind a piece of her if he found her first. Richard would kill him, but there could be worse reasons to die. He smiled at his reflection in the mirror and picked up his cell and dialed.

  “Pino? It’s me.”

  Pino said, “Where you been, old timer?”

  “Around. Listen, I need some help with something.”

  “You know how that works. I could use some help with something too.”

  “I’m looking for a girl.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “I can give you a name to run, but I don’t think it’s gonna help much. I hear she’s living a transient lifestyle. You want to meet up? Have a chat about this little bitch?”

  “Sure. There’s something I want to talk to you about, too.”

  “Good news or bad?”

  “I’m thinking it’s bad.”

  Tremblay took the diminishing baggie of cocaine from his jacket pocket and held it up to the light. “Oh, and, Pino, maybe bring me a little something, I’m running low.”

  ***

  Quinn saw a shadow. A movement of some kind in the small, square opaque glass that served as a peep-hole in the front door of the house. Someone had been looking out. If his cover was blown, he may never get a chance to snatch the girl again. No way to tell if whoever it was saw him, but he was growing tired of waiting for Steven.

  “Goddamn shame. I thought you were a good kid, too,” he said to himself as he opened the car door.

  He got out and walked directly to the house. The .45 in his hand at his side. He went up the front stairs and tried the door. Locked. He tried to peek around the sides of the building, but couldn’t see anything. He sighed, stood back and kicked the front door right above the knob. It didn’t budge. He tried again and felt the old jamb give a little. On the fourth try it gave way and broke open. The first thing that hit him was the musty funk from inside the place. The only sound was a far-off electric guitar. Sounded like someone was playing the tune-up blues. The uneven warble of the stretching strings went on as he entered the house.

  He used his sleeve to open the first door on the right. Dirty mattress, piles of useless crap, mounds of clothes, three bicycles leaned on each other over a small pyramid of bike parts. The second door was padlocked from the outside. He moved on. On the left was another door. He tried the doorknob with his sleeve. Locked. A thin bar of light was glowing at the bottom of the door. A voice came from inside.

  “Busy.”

  A man’s voice. Not the girl; not the kid. Quinn knocked at the door.

  “I’m fucking busy.”

  Quinn knocked harder.

  “Get the fuck outta here. I’ll be out when I’m out.”

  The voice was snide, serpentine. Quinn banged hard with the side of his fist.

  “Who the fuck is it?”

  He heard a clatter now, something metallic falling on linoleum, someone pulling on their pants. No flushing, though. He pointed his gun at eye-level and waited for the door to open.

  When the door swung open a smallish man with a scruffy goatee and a sneer on his face snapped, “What?”

  Quinn fired. He shot the man right in the forehead. A fine mist of blood bloomed behind the man’s head and a rash of red splattered behind him on the bathroom wall. The man dropped to the floor and Quinn moved on.

  The guitar had stopped. Quinn heard footsteps coming upstairs.

  A voice saying, “What the fuck was that?”

  Quinn turned his gun in the direction of the voice. A swinging door near the kitchen opened and a chubby, long-haired man in a black T-shirt appeared. He stopped as soon as he saw Quinn. He started to say something, but never got out a syllable. Quinn fired twice and listened to the body tumble backward down the stairs. Quinn could hear the empty static of the amplifier and no other noise. He guessed there was no one else downstairs. He’d have to check, though. First, he moved on through the kitchen.

  “Fuckin’ disgusting,” he said to himself. The midday warmth had made the muggy stench almost unbearable. He moved to the back room, saw the drug paraphernalia strewn across the makeshift table, then saw the forced window. He looked out, looked down, and said, “Fuck.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Steven scrambled to catch Teresa. They scurried down the graveled alley behind the house. He called to her, but she kept moving. At the end of the block sat Precita Park, a block-sized oval of green grass and trees. Several dogs fetched for their owners while a few hobos parked on the benches. She moved right through it without turning around. By the time they hit Caesar Chavez, she was forced to stop for traffic and he caught up.

  “Hey,” he said. “Slow down. What’s going on? Who do you think that was?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said between breaths. “I told you, you don’t know my father. If someone came for me, it doesn’t make a difference if he sent them or not, it’s trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She looked him in the eye with all the sincerity she could muster. “Bad trouble.”

  Steven tried to take it all in, what it meant. “Are you in danger?”

  “If you brought one of my father’s friends to get me, then we’re both fucked.”

  “I don’t understand. Who is your father?”

  “An asshole. King of the assholes.” She looked behind them in the direction of the house, then turned and darted into the street bet
ween cars. Steven followed.

  They zig-zagged through the back streets of the Mission District and worked their way toward 24th and Mission. The crowds and bustle there didn’t calm either of them. Teresa looked impatiently up the street for the next bus and Steven looked for Quinn.

  “You got any money?” Teresa said as the orange and white Muni bus wheezed to a halt.

  Steven shook his head.

  “Let’s go.” Teresa led him onto the bus through the back doors. There were several grunts and curses as they pushed through riders exiting. Once aboard, they moved farther back and found two seats across from each other and flopped down.

  “Where’re we going?” Steven asked.

  Teresa, still breathing heavily, held her index finger to her lips and then shrugged her shoulders.

  Steven watched her. A film of sweat glistened on her forehead. She looked better than she had at the house, as though the open air had pumped new life into her.

  She looked back at him and said, “That fucking lump on your head looks terrible.”

  ***

  Before he left, Quinn went down the stairs into the cement basement. Like he’d suspected, there was no one there. The body of the overweight guitar player lay feet-up at the bottom of the stairs, the orange light on the amplifier glowed in the near dark. He stepped over the body and moved in the dim light of a bare bulb that hung suspended from the ceiling. Convinced there was no witness crouching in a corner, he went back upstairs.

  He moved again from room to room and found them vacant. He kicked open the padlocked door, tearing the bracket from the face of the door. There, too, he found no one. A replica of the first room—dirty clothes, dissembled electronics, more bike parts, and melted wax candles on most of the open surfaces. He turned and left.

  As he started the car, he thought about the young man Teresa was with. He’d shouted he’d be waiting in the park for Teresa. He didn’t think the young man had seen him, but thought he might be useful. He turned the car around in the narrow street and rolled down the gentle slope to Precita Park.