by John Levitt
“The stone’s not mine,” I told him. “Any idea at all where they come from?”
“Not a clue. Until two minutes ago, I thought it was just another bogus pipe dream. You know, like an urban legend?” He stared down at the table where the stone had been. “Hey,” he said, as a sudden thought struck him, “why not ask Rafael? If anyone would know, that’s the dude.”
“I’d love to. Can’t find him. Nobody’s seen him for months.”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“He got busted. Not dope this time, something heavy. Kidnapping, I hear.”
“Kidnapping?”
“Yeah, kidnapping and rape.”
I shook my head. “Rafael? Hardly. He may get out of control sometimes, but there’s no way.”
“Tell that to the cops. That’s what they popped him on.”
“When was this?”
“A couple of months ago. They’re holding him down at the Hall of Justice. I think his bail is like, a jillion dollars.”
Six
So it was the good news/bad news thing. I’d managed to locate Rafael, but talking with him was going to be difficult. But not impossible. I stopped by an Office Max and picked up a plastic I.D. holder with a metal clip and a blank card, a marker, and a loose leaf binder with some sheets of paper. It was still only early afternoon so I walked down to Sixth Street and then across to Bryant.
The Hall of Justice is a large gray building that takes up the entire block between Sixth and Seventh on Bryant. The main floor holds the various courts, the parking violations office, and the like. The upper floors house the jail complex. I know quite a bit about the place from previous incidents that I won’t go into.
Most of the inmates are in for short-term misdemeanors, simple assaults and petty thefts and the like, but the jail also houses serious felons awaiting trial before being shipped out to state prison. They are stashed away up on the seventh floor, along with inmates pending appeal and long-term residents. That’s where Rafael would be.
Sherwood once worked at the jail as a volunteer for the California Service League. Always doing good. Once a week she taught anger management classes to some of the more irritable residents. I remember she’d had a jail clearance I.D. with her picture on the front and the words JAIL CLEARANCE in big letters on the back, along with some other writing. The Service League, among other things, provides volunteer GED tutoring for those inmates wanting to get their high school diplomas. A lot of them are considered either escape risks or too dangerous to attend classes, but they still get to learn, with one-on-one help in a locked interview room.
I didn’t feel like waiting for regular visiting hours, which are only once a week anyway, so I decided to pass myself off as a GED tutor. With the black marker, I printed JAIL CLEARANCE in large letters on the blank card that came with the plastic holder, and slipped the card through the plastic so it could be read through the back. In the front I put my driver’s licence. It didn’t fit very well, but that didn’t matter.
I held it between my hands and made some sounds. It took three tries before it looked appropriately blurry. I’m not very good at this sort of illusion. Making one thing look like something else is fairly easy, but this called for more subtlety. The trick was to fashion it so that whoever looked at the card would see whatever they expected to see. As long as the basic form was similar it could pass for anything.
Now, if I just handed it out cold, all anyone would see was a blur. But if I gave it to a jailer and said it was a clearance card, that’s exactly what they would see—a jail I.D. in perfect detail. There are plenty of practitioners who wouldn’t have to go through all this, who could create an illusion out of thin air, but I’m not that good.
Telling Louie to find somewhere warm to wait, I put the loose-leaf binder under my arm and walked up the steps into the building. I passed through the metal detector with no problem, drawing a blank-eyed stare from the bored cop manning the post. Clipping the makeshift I.D. to the collar of my jacket, I waited at the elevators next to the snack shop, the ones that go directly to the jail floors. A sheriff’s deputy in his tan uniform gave me a friendly nod as we got on the car together. I punched the button for the seventh floor and he got off at three.
The elevator on seven opens into a compact steel mesh cage with a door controlled by an electronic buzzer on one end. Once through that, you enter the jail proper through a reinforced steel door, also electronically operated. The doors work in sequence; if one is open the other won’t function until it closes. The guard on duty sits by a console behind a narrow bulletproof window that looks out onto the cage, kind of like what you see in bank teller windows in high crime areas. A sign with large letters warns about contraband. No weapons. No drugs. No cell phones. It didn’t say anything about magical gems so I figured I was okay. I approached the window and pointed to my mythical I.D., flipping it over so the no-nonsense black woman sitting there could see the “jail clearance” stamp.
“GED tutoring,” I told her confidently. She gave it a cursory glance and, apparently satisfied, buzzed me through the door. The second door buzzed as soon as the first swung shut.
Immediately through the door is a large guard room and a long hallway stretching past it left and right. Another steel mesh door on the right leads to the felony cell blocks. I walked over and stood in front of it, acting as if I knew what I was doing. The guard suddenly shouted, “Hey!” at me and I turned around casually. No problem. That’s what my outward demeanor projected. Inside was another story.
“You forgot to sign in,” she said, gesturing at a large logbook by the door that I had overlooked.
“Sorry,” I apologized, walking the few steps back to the station. The book had a place for name, agency, time in, time out, and inmate visited. From the scrawled entries above it didn’t look like anyone took it too seriously, so I scribbled something illegible on the page. The guard looked at me with a spark of curiosity.
“You new here?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been doing it awhile. Been out at San Bruno mostly.”
“Nasty place,” she commented.
“That it is,” I agreed.
I walked back to the mesh door and this time she buzzed me through. A row of tiny interview rooms lined one side of the corridor, a couple of them occupied with inmates talking to what were obviously attorneys. At the end of the corridor was another guard station. Right behind it a broad yellow line striped the floor and a sign on the wall warned unauthorized people not to cross. The guard at the station, a clean-cut white guy, glanced incuriously up from his magazine as I approached.
“Yeah,” he said.
“GED tutoring.”
“Who do you need?”
“Ramirez.”
“First name?”
“Rafael.”
He picked up a master list, flipped over a few pages and ran his finger down the line of names, muttering, “Ramirez, Ramirez.” He stopped his finger and said, “Ramirez, Rafael, A-8.” He picked up a walkie next to him and said, “‘A’ block, send down Ramirez.” A voice came back asking him what for. He turned to me.
“GED,” I reminded him.
“GED,” he said into the radio. He motioned to the interview rooms. “Take any one that’s empty. He’ll be out in a minute.”
“Thanks,” I said, choosing the one farthest away from the station. Inside was a table bolted to the floor and two yellow molded plastic chairs, scuffed and dirty. I sat down, leaving the door open, and about two minutes later, another guard arrived with Rafael in tow. He was wearing the usual orange jumpsuit and when he saw me he walked in and sat down without changing expression. The guard closed the door and locked it behind him. We looked across the table at one another.
Rafael and I go back a long way. We’d played together in a salsa band called Ritmo Caliente back in the day, and he’d been wild even then. He started out as a part-time criminal and turned it into a full-time job. When his crimi
nal activities started interfering with his musical ones he quit playing music entirely, got heavy into crystal, and started carrying a gun. Whenever he was doing speed he got mean, although he was always cool with me. Still, people who hung with him always seemed to end up getting shot or stabbed or something. Self-preservation has always been an overriding concern of mine so after a while I stopped hanging out with him.
He himself had no talent, but a cousin of his did, and he had told Rafael a lot more about the life than he should have before finally going on to die of an OD. Rafael figured out early on that I had some of the talent, though no idea of how much, and I never enlightened him. He brought it up a few times but I always deflected his questions. He was way too unstable to be a confidant. Still, he was fascinated by the whole scene and heard more of practitioner gossip than I ever did. I was hoping that even in jail he might have heard something useful.
“Mason,” he said. “When they told me there was a GED tutor waiting for me, I knew something was up. It’s been what, a year?”
“Close enough. How long you been in here?”
“About three months. My case keeps getting postponed. You come to get me out?”
“Sorry, I don’t have that kind of money,” I said. “What kind of mess have you got yourself into, anyway?”
“Hey, this time it’s totally bogus. A bullshit beef.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Oh? A frame-up, right?”
Rafael laughed “Well, no,” he admitted. “Not exactly. What happened was this: I’d been dealing crystal for a while, making a shitload of cash. Business was good, I was just rolling in money, you dig? So, one weekend I get an o.z. at my crib and I decide to party. Now, you remember I always liked hookers. I mean that’s my thing, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, so I call up this hooker I party with sometimes, real high-class, you know, but real nasty, too? She comes over and we’re down with it doin’ blow and partying and shit, and she’s having such a good time she doesn’t want to leave. So I figure, great, why not, and she stays there all weekend getting fucked up and stuff.
“So when she finally decides to split, it’s like Monday or something by then, and I notice that most of my stash is missing. Okay, I tell her, you’re not going anywhere until I get my stash back, in fact you can give it up right now or strip down right here in front of me and she says ‘fuck you’ and so I have to slap her around a little and finally I get my stash which she’s got stuffed down you know where and I’m so pissed by then that I just kick her out on the street buck naked.”
“Which she doesn’t care much for.”
“Right. And what I don’t know is that her pimp has been looking for her all weekend and she’s afraid he’s going to beat on her and all for flaking on him so she tells him I wouldn’t let her leave or call and that I raped her and stuff. Hell, we didn’t even have sex, just blowjobs, you know? Anyway he decides to call the police. A pimp! Calling the fucking cops! Can you believe that?
“So then the cops show up and she’s got all these bruises and shit ’cause her pimp beats on her anyway for lying to him but she says it was me, so they pull me out of my crib and arrest me and shit for kidnapping and rape ’cause she said I kept her prisoner, and then they were going to drop the charges ’cause they don’t really believe her but it turns out that there’s a prostitutes’ union, can you believe that, and there are all these hookers and stuff down at the courtroom protesting and so the DA decides to go ahead and prosecute after all. Is that fucked up or what?”
“Hey,” I said, trying not to laugh. I mean, he could do some serious time over this. “What do you expect? This is San Francisco.”
Everybody in jail has a story, and all the stories are self-serving, but this one did have a certain ring of truth.
“You got a lawyer?” I asked.
“The best. She better be. I already paid her five thousand dollars.” He sat there quiet for a moment, then laughed and punched my shoulder. “Anyway, what’s up with you, man? What you doin’ here?”
I dug the stone out of my pocket and placed it on the table between us. Rafael looked at it without expression.
“What can you tell me about this?” I asked.
He picked it up and hefted it a couple of times, trying to get a feel for the weight. Then he put it up to his eye. He kept it there for a long time. Then he lowered his hand and hefted it a couple more times before closing his hand into a fist. He looked across the table at me and his usual easygoing expression had vanished, replaced by that mean, suspicious, hard demeanor that I’d only seen when he was doing meth. That Rafael was a dangerous guy.
“Where did you get this?” he said, more an accusation than a question. I became painfully aware that we were sharing a small room with a locked steel door.
“Dude. Chill. It came off a dead man.” He continued staring at me for a full thirty seconds, then, gradually, his expression lost its hard edge and the old Rafael was back.
“Sorry,” he said. “Actually seeing it was a trip. I thought for a moment you were fucking with me.”
“So you’ve seen it before.”
He shook his head. “Actually, no. But I spent two months trying to get hold of it.”
“If you never saw it before, how do you know it’s what you were looking for? And what is it, anyway?” Rafael gave me the same unbelieving look I get from Lou when I’m having steamed vegetables for dinner.
“Jesus, Mason, have you looked at it? You think there’s more than one of those things in the world?” Actually there were at least three, but I didn’t want to complicate matters. “And you want to know what is it?” he continued. “Damned if I know.” His suspicious look made a brief reappearance. “It seems you’d know a lot more about it than I would, anyway. I mean, look at it. Is it my kind of thing, or yours?”
Rafael might not have any talent himself, but he’d been around people who do most of his life. He could recognize a magical object even if he didn’t know what it was.
“What do you mean, you spent two months trying to get hold of it?” I asked. He leaned back as much as the molded plastic chair would allow.
“Well, here’s the deal. I heard about this special jewel…”
“How?”
He flashed a sly grin. “You know me. I got contacts. Anyway, it was supposed to be something special, worth a shitload of cash. I heard a hundred grand.” He held up his fist, still holding the gem. “Maybe more. Now that I’ve seen it, much more. There’s nothing else like it, right? The only problem was, the guy who had it was one of you guys.”
“A practitioner?”
“Yeah, right. A practitioner. Well, I didn’t want to mess with him, but I found out where he lived, and I figured I could wait until he was gone, slip in the house, find it, and he’d never know what happened to it.”
“You were going to rip off a practitioner? Bad idea, Rafe. Bad idea.”
“Yeah, no shit. Anyway, I scoped out the place for a while and finally got up the nerve to go in, so I pry open this window and climb through. At first everything was cool, nothing scary, just a bunch of empty rooms and stuff, but then something happened. There was this mirror on one of the walls, and when I walked by, my reflection got stuck. I mean, like I was just frozen there inside the mirror, you dig?”
I did. It was an image capture spell, flashy but not that difficult. A security camera would have done just as good a job.
“It totally freaked me out. I could barely make myself go upstairs.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “There’s something here you’re not telling me. I know you like money, everyone does. But not that much. It’s not like you’re ever even broke. You knew what you were getting into, breaking into a practitioner’s house. It’s not worth it. Why didn’t you get the hell out of there?”
Rafael nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. The thing is, I also heard that this jewel could do things. That it was special. Like, if I had it I could be just like you guys.�
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Now it made more sense. Rafael had always been jealous of those with talent. Talent was the one thing he’d always wanted, more than money, more than sex, and he’d risk his life for a chance to acquire some. He started rubbing his forehead abstractedly.
“So then I go upstairs. There are like, three rooms, and so I go in the first one and it’s mostly empty, and there’s a door leading out on the other side. So I go through that, but then somehow I’m back downstairs where I started.
“Now I’m really scared. I figure, screw the jewel, it’s time to get out of here, so I climb back out the window, only that doesn’t work either. I’m on the other side of the house, but I’m still inside. Weird, you know? So then I tried the front door. Same thing. I tried a bunch of other stuff. But I couldn’t get out.”
“Well, you got out somehow,” I said. “You’re here.”
“Yeah. Which is just great, you know? Anyway, I ended up sitting on the floor, just waiting. It must have been a couple of hours. Then I heard a key unlocking the front door, and it opened partway, stopped, and then swung all the way open. I don’t think I ever was so scared in my life.”
“Who was it?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. That’s the last thing I remember. The next thing I know I’m walking down the street about a block from my crib.”
A memory wipe. I should have known getting information wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Do you remember where the house was?” I asked. He shook his head.
“Not a clue. I don’t even remember who the guy was who lived there. And I don’t want to. I think maybe I’m lucky it wasn’t worse.”
He was right about that. Memory wipes on ordinaries are highly discouraged, since one occasional side effect can be the complete destruction of higher brain function. So. Dead end on this line of inquiry.
