The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  What did they know about her? She remembered talking about Pierre at least once in the hotel, but what had she said? Only his name—and Pierre wasn’t even his real name. But there was only one Pierre, and he wasn’t hard to find. Just go to Sixth Street and ask around. Everybody knew him.

  What about herself? What had she said about herself? She had mentioned being born in Sacramento. She had talked about having gone to jail in San Francisco and Alameda. Had she said she lived at the Auburn Hotel? She couldn’t remember. Had she said how old she was? Each question brought a new wave of guilt and fear. Why had she talked about herself? She normally didn’t go on and on like that. It must have been all the pills they’d been feeding her. She remembered that they had her phone. And they had taken pictures of her. Her body sweated. The television in the hotel room was playing an infomercial about an exercise machine. They had her phone. They had her wallet. They had her California ID card. The address on the card would lead them to a drug program on Treasure Island, but with the phone they could easily get hold of Pierre. Please don’t pay your fucking bill, Pierre. What would they say to him? He wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t just start talking, but still, she had to get over there, she had to warn him, she owed him that much. And besides, Sixth Street was her home. She certainly didn’t feel safe here.

  She had to do something about the money, too. She sat and stared at the stacks and counted them again. Eighty-eight stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Each stack had a hundred bills, ten thousand dollars a stack. Plus one short stack of what was now twenty-three bills. She couldn’t be walking around with all that.

  The money was a problem and her head was a problem. She needed some pills. Everything they had given her had worn off. She needed pills. She couldn’t think straight. She was hurting. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt. It was like the whole inside of her was fucked-up. She was so scared. She needed some relief. She needed to relax. She vowed in her head that she would not smoke crack, but she needed something, and she was rich now.

  She called Jules Gunn from the hotel phone. Jules was a stripper at the Market Street Cinema. She was Emily’s best friend. Emily asked her to bring eight thousand one-dollar bills. “Yes, Jules, eight thousand.” She told Jules she would pay her sixteen thousand dollars to bring her the eight thousand bills and a bottle of pills. She had to repeat herself a few times and swear it wasn’t a joke. “That’s one hundred percent profit,” she told her. Jules was the only person Emily knew who could do something like that. She was the only friend Emily had who could be trusted. “Don’t get followed,” Emily said.

  Six hours later, Jules pulled up into the parking lot of the motel. Emily snuck out from her room and jumped into the Escalade. Jules looked like an R&B singer in rehab; she was wearing a pink warm-up suit and she had big hair and bright nails. She smelled of perfume. She was pretty, but tore up, too. She kept trying to ask Emily what the hell was going on, and she looked mad every time Emily refused to explain.

  “What the hell you need eight thousand ones for?”

  “I lost a bet.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, mama is going to worry if her little chicken egg starts doing all kinds of crazy things.”

  “I know, Jules.”

  Jules didn’t turn her head. She just stared out the Escalade. “And why you at a hotel? Come stay with me.”

  “I needed to get away.”

  “Needed to get away. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say some man’s got you working the track. Where’s Pierre’s punk ass at?”

  “Jules, I’m in a hurry, sweetheart.”

  Emily gave her the sixteen thousand dollars (unbundled, ruffled and piled in a plastic bag).

  “What the fuck is this?” said Jules, looking at the bag.

  “It’s all there,” said Emily.

  Jules gave her the pills first, then the money. Emily took a Dilaudid and kissed Jules, who leaned away.

  “I’ll call you soon,” said Emily.

  Back at the hotel room, alone again, Emily crushed up another pill and snorted it. She was finally feeling a little bit better. She dumped the one-dollar bills on the bed, checked again to make sure the door was locked and the blinds were closed, and began counting out stacks of ones. She made eighty stacks and slipped the bands off the hundreds and slid them over the small bills. Then she took the hundred-dollar bills and put one on top and one on the bottom of each stack. It was hard to waste all those hundreds, but you had to pay to play. Dummy stacks. It worked on TV. It cost almost twenty-five thousand dollars, but that was all good if it bought you a last ticket out, a backup plan. She filled the bank bag up with the good stacks and stuffed it under the bed. She put the dummy stacks into a pillowcase and jammed that into a closet. Always gotta have a backup plan.

  Six days. She had been holed up in this new motel for six days. The only time she’d stepped out of her room (besides with Jules) was to go to the front desk to pay for another couple of nights or to get some toilet paper or plastic cups. She had been too scared and depressed to leave, but she needed to get the hell out of there. She needed to get back to the Tenderloin, back downtown, back to Sixth Street, back to her life. She didn’t feel safe in this hotel.

  She had to change her look first. She stood at the door and talked herself up until she had the courage to walk to the Walgreens on Lombard. The walk there was a nightmare. She still didn’t feel right, and she had left the gun in the hotel. Everything was scaring her. She felt weak, like she had the flu. People seemed to be staring at her. She felt like men were following her. Tall men were standing everywhere, talking on cell phones and looking at her. Every car was an SUV. Every car was a van.

  The Walgreens was all bright lights and endless aisles and Filipino women working and tall blond ladies in exercise clothes drinking big bottles of water. The aisles were too small to let anyone pass. She kept bumping into things. She finally found a large black duffel bag and put it on over her shoulder to test it out. The price tag said two-for-one. She grabbed another. She found a black San Francisco Giants jacket, a matching baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and some black sweatpants. She picked up some dark sunglasses and some scissors and paid for it all feeling like she was committing fraud. Even with all the new money, she still felt poor. It was the most she had ever bought in a Walgreens—in fact, it was the most she had ever bought in a store. On the way out she stopped near the door and put on the cap, glasses, and jacket.

  Back at the hotel she went into the bathroom and began snipping at her hair. She tried to keep its general girlish shape intact, but it didn’t work. She ended up with a short, punkish cut. She looked like a crazy little boy with lady skin. She put on her sunglasses and looked at herself. She put on the hat, lowered the bill down. She looked like one of the dykes who lived at the Auburn; like a little Mexican boy-dyke.

  She picked up all the hair from the sink and wrapped it up in a ball of toilet paper and put it into the trash. She put the turtleneck, the blue sweater, and the pants from the Russians into the trash, too. They were hateful clothes. She threw everything into a Dumpster in the parking lot.

  She put the hundred-dollar stacks in one duffel bag and the stacks of ones in another. The bags felt equally heavy. She put the empty canvas bank bag in the Dumpster with the clothes and the hair and moved the other trash around to hide it. She drank some water and ate some candy. God bless Jules Gunn, she thought. God bless Jules Gunn.

  After walking through the room with the Indian manager she was given her cash deposit back. He didn’t seem to notice the haircut or the new clothes. He just nodded and nodded.

  5

  Elias didn’t sleep after the Rada Harkov incident. Instead he lay on his couch and let panic grow inside him with every single breath. Don’t leave the body. You should know better. You don’t leave the body. It was Trammell’s fault. Don’t leave the body. Don’t leave the body. Don’t leave the body.

  He crept into the bed
room and put on black pants and a black hooded sweatshirt while his wife snored in the bed. He found his black gloves in the hallway closet and grabbed some duct tape, his phone, his gun, and his badge. He walked out to his Dodge Nitro and called Trammell. It rang four times and then went to voice mail.

  The green clock on the dashboard said it was 5:15 a.m. The sun would rise within the hour. He had to get back to Rada Harkov’s house and get her body out before the sun rose. It felt more like a religious fact than a compulsion.

  There was no traffic on 101. He drove ninety miles per hour. If they wanted to pull him over, they could. This was a police emergency.

  He drove past the airport and called Trammell again: voice mail. This is Sam, leave a message. Five twenty-five a.m. Were there cameras on the freeway? Were people awake in Rada Harkov’s neighborhood? What if the body had already been discovered? It wasn’t out of the question.

  He got off on Hillside and forced himself to slow down. As he drove past a deserted mall he wondered if he had reached the upper limit of fear. Fucking Rada Harkov. Fucking Trammell. Every traffic light was red; it was maddening, the world had aligned itself against him. A police cruiser drifted by headed in the opposite direction on Hillside. There were people up already delivering the Sunday newspapers.

  When he got to Poplar Street he parked in the exact same spot as before. He hit the green talk button on his phone: straight to voice mail.

  His door grated when he opened it. He closed the door, but it didn’t latch, so he had to lean backward on it. It was 5:37 a.m. It would be a sunny Sunday morning in thirty-three minutes. He walked around the car and covered the front and back plates with duct tape. Birds had begun chirping in all of the trees.

  He began to move quietly toward the house. He had his beanie on and his gloves and he was dressed in black and he knew you couldn’t choose a more suspicious outfit, but it had to be that way—he had to gamble on not being seen.

  Stupid fucking asshole. He turned and hurried back to the Nitro. What was he going to do, carry her body? He had to park in the driveway. He had to. There was nothing to be done about it. Life is a cold pool, his father used to say. You just have to jump in.

  He drove with his lights off past the driveway and then backed into it, parked behind Rada Harkov’s car, killed the engine, and surveyed the street. He listened to the sound of the engine cooling down with little clicks. His stomach growled.

  If the cops had been there, they certainly hadn’t left any sign. The neighborhood was silent. He walked to the back gate; the fence was locked just like last time, only this time he didn’t have his little pocketknife. He had taken it off his belt before lying down on the couch. It was 5:42 a.m. If he got caught he would blame everything on Trammell.

  CHING-DING-DING-DING. His phone rang out in a flurry of chimes. Fuck me. Was it Trammell? He pulled it out. It was his wife, Julie. He could kill her. He could kill her and kill himself. It was all too much.

  He pulled himself up and over the wooden fence and landed on the other side with a little thump, then moved straight to the bathroom window. He would have to ruin the toothpaste spackle job he’d done. He didn’t have the crowbar with him. He didn’t have anything, but somehow he managed to jam his gloved fingers under the window and force it up an inch and then all the way. Legs kicking, he pulled himself headfirst into the bathroom. The shower was still running. The air was cool and humid. The mirror, the walls, the window, everything was fogged and beaded with dampness. He stood and looked in at the body. It was still there, the skin so bright white it looked blue, her hair bright red.

  He reached into the shower and turned the water off, trying his hardest to avoid looking at her body. It was horrible. He didn’t know if he could do this. The chirping noises coming from the birds outside had grown louder. The sounds of cars driving by the house were coming more frequently.

  He stepped to the hallway. Just five hours ago he had been moving through the house with such ease, and now here he was on the verge of a personal breakdown. He needed Trammell.

  He found a linen closet and inside it a paisley sheet and walked back to the bathroom, put the sheet on the floor, and bent over and grabbed the woman by the skin under her underarms and pulled her out of the tub. It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. It felt like she weighed five hundred pounds. Her skin was white with red splotches. It was horrible. It was hell. The shampoo he had put in her hair seemed like a sick joke.

  He pulled her into the hallway and struggled to roll her in the sheet. The arrangement was all wrong, but by now he didn’t care. His pants were wet and the floor where he had dragged her was wet, too. All he wanted was to get the hell out. He pushed the sheet under the fleshy part of her arm, but as soon as he moved his hand, the sheet fell away. No matter which way he did it she was always half rolled. He went to the linen closet, his head pounding, and grabbed another blanket and went back to the hallway and threw the blanket down over her and then poked the loose ends under her body like he was tucking her in and then he squeezed his hands under either side of the bundle and lifted her up. It was all blanket and sheets and limbs; it was all legs and arms and fingers and hair.

  Strange thoughts passed through his mind while he worked: he thought about a guy he knew in high school who had moved to Los Angeles and become a sports agent, and now posted pictures of himself with beautiful women and apparently drove a new Porsche. He thought of his mother and how her birthday was coming.

  He got her up and carried the bundle, wet and heavy, sidestepping as he went, toward the front door, then placed her down on the couch where he and Trammell had sat before they left. Except for one hand with its brown nail polish, and one pink-white-and-blue-fleshed foot, she was covered. He listened. Everything was quiet. His phone said it was 5:54 a.m.

  He should have never bet on that Stanford game. If he had bet on San Jose State instead he could have taken the winnings and put them on an over-under the next week. The restaurant he had invested in had been called the Blue Note. Why had he invested in a jazz restaurant? He didn’t know anything about jazz or food.

  He walked out the front door, carefully closing it behind him, and opened the back of his car. He looked at the houses on the block. They were all 1970s, American-paradise style. They had roofs that sloped up and two-car garages and lawns with grass. A car drove past. The sky was turning brighter by the moment.

  He walked back into the house, wrapped his arms around the trunk of the woman’s body, picked her up, and walked to the front door. The screen door made a loud metal racket when he kicked it open. He carried her—she was as heavy as a bag of bricks—to the car and dropped her into the back. The blanket and sheet both slipped down and he was confronted with her face, with her lips, nose, and cheeks, but mainly with her dull eyes peeking out through the slits of her dead eyelids. He tried to pull the sheet back into place, but it was pinned under her. He had to roll her all the way off the blanket and onto the floor of the cargo area and then rearrange the blanket to cover her entire body. His hands shook violently.

  Back in her room, he rifled through her drawers until he found a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. He didn’t know what he was going to do with her, but he knew he couldn’t have her be naked. He could dress her later; now he had to leave. He threw the clothes in the back with the body and lowered the door and pushed it closed.

  Bruce Springsteen, sounding young and confident, was singing on the radio. Elias felt that the world was ending. It hurt to drive so slow. He wished he had cancer. He wished he was a sports agent.

  Airport Boulevard. Where was the damn freeway entrance? He didn’t even see the cop behind him until there was an explosion of red and blue lights in his rearview mirror, and still it took a second to understand that it was a cop. It was a cop and he was a cop. Calm the fuck down. He pulled over to the side of the road and breathed in and out. Calm down. Calm down.

  The officer took a very long time to get out of his cruiser. Why didn’t he p
ut clothes on her? Things would be easier if she were just fucking dressed. Elias pulled his badge out. He wanted wine, he wanted water. He wanted to reach back and make sure she was still covered, but he knew he couldn’t. He waited for the cop.

  The officer walked toward the driver’s door, holding a flashlight up near his ear, his right hand resting on his gun. Why was he touching his gun? Elias’s own gun was under the seat; his badge was on his lap. He watched through the mirror, his head not moving, as the officer got closer to the back of the car. The light from the cop’s flashlight passed over the cargo area, then shifted toward the front as he stepped forward.

  Elias was holding his badge up to the window. The cop, looking very young, skinny, and nervous, stood back at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “I’m off-duty and unarmed,” called out Elias.

  “Who you with?” asked the cop.

  “SFPD.”

  “Let me see it.” He was Chinese, maybe twenty-five years old. He took the badge out of Elias’s hand like he didn’t want their hands to touch.

  You don’t take another cop’s badge, thought Elias.

  “Your license, too.”

  Elias didn’t have his wallet. He was dressed in black, head to toe, beanie, hoodie, everything (the gloves, at least, were off). It was not the way to be. He tried to breathe deeply so he could project some kind of calm.

  “Listen, I don’t have my wallet. It’s a long story. My name’s Leo Elias, star number 1282, I got my PD ID in there with the badge, call it in, call the station, call Gang Task Force.”

  “Stand by, sir,” said the cop, walking back to his car.

  Elias fumed. If they were in San Francisco, he would have kicked his ass. But he had to sit there and take it. His heart was breaking. He couldn’t deal. Surely there was a limit to the shit one man was able to endure. The sun was beginning to rise.

  The cop came back with fast, loud steps.

  “Here you are, Officer Elias,” he said, handing him his badge.