“Give me a quarter piece for a hundred,” said Emily.
“Damn, girl, slow down.”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“That don’t make you God here,” said Pros, looking past her and down the street. Pros was a teenage Cambodian boy. Leavenworth Street, between Turk and Eddy, in the center of the Tenderloin, was where he held court.
Emily preferred to buy marijuana from him, or his cousins. They had the best customer service, they were consistent, and because Emily’s boyfriend, Pierre, was friends with their uncles, she never got ripped off. This was the first stop she made after returning to the Tenderloin.
“Y’all on some cop shit, or something?” said Pros. He wore a baggy white T-shirt, a black pea coat, a beanie, and baggy jeans. His face was scarred by chicken pox.
“Say what?”
“Man, they was on you.”
“What the fuck you talking about?” asked Emily.
“Last time you were here. Two white niggas was following you in a white van. Man, y’all went on some state’s evidence shit.”
Emily thought about the last time she’d tried to buy from him. It was right before she had met the Russian. She had asked and the boy had said, “No,” just like that, “No,” and then he’d walked away from her. It had pissed her off. She’d gone straight to the bar after that, and then she’d met the Russian. She tried to make sense of what the boy was saying, but she couldn’t.
“They were following me?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Who?”
“In a white van—it was all bad,” said Pros, shaking his head.
“When?”
“Like I said, last time I saw you.”
She tried to think through the problem. They had been following her before she met the Russian. It didn’t matter what it meant; she didn’t care. She didn’t come here to learn the history of who was following her. “Give me a hund sack—”
“And that ain’t even it,” the boy said, cutting her off. “Yesterday some other white dude came here like he knew me. Showed me a picture of you and said she ain’t in no trouble, woo woo woo, then he took a hundred-dollar bill, ripped it in half, gave me half, and told me if I saw you and called him he’d give me the other half.” He dug in his pocket and produced one half of a hundred-dollar bill. Then he pulled out his cell phone and said, “Should I call him?”
“No,” said Emily. “Shut up.”
Pros was a little drunk. His eyes were red and his breath smelled like cognac. He put the phone away and said, “You know I wouldn’t do you like that. You my older sister.” He handed her the torn bill. Written on it was “Emily 415.610.1822.”
“What’d he look like?” asked Emily.
“He looked like a military nigga, but he talked like a Terminator.”
“Was he older? Brown hair?” asked Emily, trying to describe the Russian.
“Nah, he was a little wiry dude, with short buzzed hair and a face like he was hella cold, eyes all bugged out—hella cutty.”
Emily remembered the ugly man.
“They got the wrong girl,” said Emily, shaking her head in confusion.
“Come on,” said Pros. A youngster opened the gate of the apartment building, and they stepped into the entryway. There were four young boys sitting on the stairs leading up to the front door. Emily put her two bags, which held almost a million dollars, down by her feet. Nearly thirty years of hustling had taught her that the safest way to act was to act like she didn’t care.
Pros leaned into her and whispered, “So you really want a quarter for a hundred and twenty?”
“I said a hundred.”
“My boy could do it right now.”
“Then do it, my nigga.”
Pros said something in Cambodian and one of the kids ran up the stairs into the apartment building. “It’s gonna take a little minute. Walk with me,” he said. Emily picked up her bags and they walked back out onto the street.
“They putting up all kinds of most-wanted posters for your ass. They on some Wild West shit. You fucked up.”
“It’s not me,” was all Emily could think to say.
“But you’re famous now.”
Pros got distracted by a car he knew and tried to wave it down. Emily had a moment to collect herself. She pulled her hat down and attempted to compose herself.
Pros came back from the car and led Emily up the street to the corner. He pointed at a light pole. Taped to the pole was a flyer with a black-and-white photo of her face. She had a vague memory of the flash going off. Say cheese. It had been taken at the hotel. Her face in the photo was slack, and she was looking just left of the lens. The words below the photo said: Emily Rosario is missing. Her family must talk with her. Please call 415.610.1822 if you see her. $1,000 reward for information leading to her location. Emily is 5’3”, 110 lbs, she has black hair. She is 31 years old. Thank you. Emily Rosario Family Rescue Counsel.
“What the fuck you do?” asked Pros.
“Nothing,” said Emily, looking around to make sure nobody was watching her, which, with hundreds of people out on the street, cars driving by, and five stories of apartment buildings on all sides, was hard to guarantee. She reached up to the pole and ripped the thing down.
Pros led her back into the entryway of 245 Leavenworth.
“What you got in your bags?”
“Nothing.”
“Why’d you cut your hair?”
“Why you think, stupid.”
“Man, y’all better get the fuck out of town,” he said. “Get your ass to Richmond or Sacto, outta state somewhere.”
“I’m about to.”
“What’s Pierre got to say about all this?”
“He knows I’m good.”
“Man, y’all better tuck your tail and run.”
“It ain’t like that.”
Emily felt small. She wanted the kid to return with her weed. How did she know the kid wasn’t going to call the Russians himself? How long was he going to take?
“When did they put those up?” she asked, trying her best to look bored.
“After they came asking about you.”
“Did you take them down?”
“Hell yeah, I took ’em down, but they had some bum put ’em back up the next day.”
“Let me see your phone,” said Emily.
He handed her his phone and she dialed the number. The call went straight to voice mail. A Russian-sounding woman’s voice said: “Thank you for calling the Emily Rosario Family Rescue Counsel. Please leave a detailed message and a telephone number where you may be reached. If your information leads to the reunification of the Rosario family, you will win your reward. No questions asked. Thank you.” Emily hung up.
The kid came back downstairs and handed Emily a paper bindle filled with a quarter ounce of weed. She sniffed at it.
“Damn, y’all ain’t got no bags?” she said.
“We out,” said the kid.
She didn’t open the bindle. It felt solid in her hand. She handed Pros a hundred-dollar bill and he checked it against the entryway light.
“All right then,” she said. She picked up her two bags.
“Careful, shorty,” said Pros. He opened the metal gate, scanned the block, and made way for her.
Sixth Street was crowded with people buying and selling crack and pills. Everyone owed someone. Everyone was bored. A few people were smiling. A ghostly-looking white guy with hollowed-out cheeks walked by with a chair on top of his head. Two black guys passed after that, one of them hurrying the other, saying, “Come on, man, come on.”
Emily walked on the far side of the street and looked down the Minna Street alley, toward the Auburn Hotel. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, but she knew better than to stop. The front door was not an option. She hid behind her sunglasses and hat and scanned the faces of everyone who walked by her. Everyone was a potential enemy. Everyone had gray faces and looked angry. Nobody spoke to her. The gun in her pocket made her feel something s
he had never felt before—not safe, necessarily, but she felt bigger.
She went to the Kingsley Hotel, where a black guy was manning the desk, which was nothing more than a box protected by a cage of thick metal, like a fence. There was a little slot to talk through and Emily stepped up to it, scanning the sign-in sheet on the desk. Somebody had visited a man named Lawrence Pope in room 402.
“I’m here to see Mr. Pope, four-oh-two,” she said.
“ID,” said the man at the desk.
Emily pulled out a twenty, slipped it through the slot, and told the man she had lost her ID.
He looked at the money and nodded his head toward the stairs.
The hotel was quiet except for the sound of competing televisions. It smelled like ammonia, sweat, and cigarettes. There were smudges of white rice stuck in the carpet and grime marks on the walls. Everything was dirty. Emily took the stairs two at a time. A sign on the door to the roof said, NO WALKING. ALARM! She ignored it and pushed the door open.
Outside the air was cool and windy. The fog was orange in the sky. There wasn’t anybody out there. She crossed the tar-papered roof and headed toward the Auburn. She felt dread and fear, but she also felt comfort to be back in the Tenderloin; she knew how to move through this place, she knew the currents and eddies.
The two roofs were nearly the same height. She hopped down to the Auburn and headed to the roof door, which was unlocked. She opened it slowly. Her stomach felt scared. She felt scared all over. She wondered if she should have accepted Jules Gunn’s invitation to stay with her. The bags were so heavy. She wished she could hold the gun in her hand instead of in her pocket. The stairs were dark, the building hummed.
She could hear a man yelling about the unfairness of something. He had a raspy voice, and he sounded drunk. The third floor was filled with noises and smells. She walked as quietly as she could toward her room. The rug, which she had never really noticed before, was burgundy. Near the end of the hallway she came to her door. She went toward it, trying her best to sense any danger. She walked like a hunter, rolling her heel to the ball of her foot and lifting up gently.
A door of a different room snapped open and a man she didn’t know staggered out of the room and headed toward her. He looked Arab. Like a druggy Arab. She tensed up, but he ignored her and went to the stairs.
She put her ear to her door and listened. She couldn’t hear anything. What if Pierre was sitting in there? What could she say to him? Look, man, I’m rich, pack your bags, people are after me. She didn’t want him to come with her, though. She was through with him. But she wanted to warn him.
She stepped past her door to the next one down and knocked gently. A man named Isaac lived there. He yelled out, asking who it was. Emily winced and looked behind her. She knocked again, louder.
The door opened a crack and Isaac peered out at her. “Pierre’s been looking for you,” he said.
“Can I come in?”
“You got any dope?”
“Come on, man,” she whispered.
He pulled the door open a little wider and stuck his head out to see if she was alone. He was a big white man with thin greasy hair and thick glasses. His room was filled with scraps of things, metal and furniture and taken-apart televisions. He collected things. It made a small room smaller. She had to squeeze past him to get in. The room smelled like rust. The sheets needed to be washed.
“You leaving?” he asked, looking at her two bags.
“Coming back.”
“Pierre’s looking for you.”
“Where is he?”
“Haven’t seen him,” he said. “You got any dope?”
“No.”
“You got your hair cut,” he said, looking at the sides under her hat.
“Yeah.”
“All fashionable.” He had a southern accent, even though he was from Fresno. “Can I borrow some money?” he asked. She looked at him. Did he know? He didn’t, but he could smell it.
“I’ll loan you a twenty in a minute,” she said. “I gotta go out your window.”
“Lost your keys?”
She moved to the window.
“That cop down there been coming by, too,” he said, stepping behind her and pointing out the window and down into the alley.
Emily looked where he was pointing. There was a silver car parked in the alley, across the street from the front door of their building. She couldn’t see inside the car, just the roof and the hood. It didn’t look like a cop’s car.
“Why’s he a cop?” she asked.
“’Cause he’s a white guy, keeps coming by and knocking.”
“How long’s he been there?”
“Last couple of days. I thought he was Pierre’s parole agent, but then he asks me one time if I seen you.” Isaac smiled; his teeth were brown and gapped.
She stared down at the car wondering who it was.
“Why don’t you leave them bags here,” said Isaac, pointing down at the floor. “Go round, unlock your place, come back and grab ’em?” He flashed the same smile, looked from the bag to her eyes and back again.
“You wanna borrow a twenty?” she asked, ringing a tone that suggested the twenty may be at risk. He snorted and turned away.
She squeezed out the window onto a little grated fire escape and pulled the bags out after her. It was aerobic; sweat appeared on her forehead and under her shirt.
Her window was just a few steps from Isaac’s; she went to it slowly and looked in. Nobody was in there, but Pierre’s collection of videos was scattered on the floor.
She looked down at the silver car, which was directly under her and across the alley, and then she pushed her fingers under the unlocked window and pulled up; it opened noisily.
“It’s open,” she whispered back toward Isaac.
“You got the twenty?” he said, his head and body sticking out of the window.
“Hold on,” she said. “Go back in your room.”
She climbed into her room. The videos had been knocked off their shelf and onto the ground. Pierre was a neat freak. The military made him that way. He would never leave his videos on the ground. She sniffed at the air. She could smell a trace of Pierre and a trace of cologne. It felt wrong in there. She went to the door and made sure it was locked, and then walked to the window and checked on the car.
Where could she hide the money? Their room was so bare it would stick out anywhere. She looked up at the ceiling. It had a push-away dropped ceiling like an office. They had stashed drugs up there before. Would it hold the weight of the bags? She grabbed a chair and got onto it, but she couldn’t reach the tiles.
She got back down. If she could just get rid of the damn bags—that was all she wanted, just to be free of the bags for a minute. Isaac was calling for her. She went to the window. “Shut the fuck up,” she hissed.
She went into her pants pockets and found a twenty and pushed herself back out the window, looked down at the silver car, and scooted over to him.
He was hunched down near the window with his face all bunched up. “I gotta leave in a minute,” he said, like an apology.
“Here,” she said, holding out the twenty. “Now shut up. And don’t tell nobody you saw me.”
“What about Pierre?” he asked.
“You can tell him. Tell him I’m trying to find him.”
“Well, you could come back out through here when you leave,” he said, gesturing toward his room. “Just lock it from behind.”
She scanned the room. Isaac backed away from the window and pulled on his jacket. “I’ll be back later,” he said, and he left.
An idea occurred to her. She went back into her room and opened the two bags of money. She took the dummy bag, hid it under her bed, and set the mattress back down over it and did a kind of mental chant to stamp it in her head: dummy bag, dummy bag, dummy bag. She put on a black jacket from her closet and transferred the gun and weed into the jacket. She grabbed the bag with the real money, checked the silver car, and went back
out the window and into Isaac’s room.
Isaac was gone. She could reach the ceiling in here. She looked around his cramped room and found a chair covered in clothes. She rearranged the clothes and labored to bring the chair to a desk. After moving the collection of books and magazines from the desk, and setting them on the ground, she put the chair on the desk. She climbed up onto it and pushed the ceiling panel away. She got back down and opened the bag and took one of the bundles of hundreds and put it in her back pants pocket, then zipped the bag closed. The bag was heavy, but she pulled it to the ceiling and pushed it up into the darkness. It held. She replaced the ceiling panel, got back down, replaced the books and magazines, and examined everything. She moved the chair back where it had been and covered it with the clothes. Boo-ya.
The roof was the only place Emily felt safe. She sat up there, on the edge overlooking Minna, and watched for Pierre. She watched the car in the alley. The sun had set. Fog was pushing in. Traffic noise was blowing all around. She smoked her weed and organized her thoughts.
They were looking for her. They were not going to stop looking, and even if it felt better to be on Sixth Street, it wasn’t safe. She played with the idea of leaving with Pierre, but nothing about it felt right. He had laid his hands on her. The idea of leaving alone felt even worse, though. She felt an intense physical wave of loneliness. She didn’t know where she could go. San Francisco was the only place she knew, and even if all of her friends here were junkies, they were still her friends. California felt like its own country, and leaving it felt like volunteering to be homeless. She thought of Jules Gunn, and a wave of shyness passed through her.
A red light flashed below her. It was the brake light from the silver car. It lit up once and then went off. All right, fuck face, she thought, you wanna come to my block and try and stalk me? Then we gonna see what’s up with your ass.
“Hey, Muhammad, let me borrow that phone real quick,” said Emily.
The store clerk, Muhammad, looked at her and then behind her at everyone else in the store. “This ain’t a phone booth,” he said.
“Damn, cousin, let me use it, a girl’s in trouble, I gotta call nine-one-one,” said Emily, puffing her chest out.
The White Van Page 13
