by Jeff Johnson
Also by Jeff Johnson
Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink (2009)
Everything Under the Moon: A Novel (2016)
Knottspeed: A Love Story (2017)
Lucky Supreme: A Novel of Many Crimes (2017)
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Johnson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Gigi Little
Cover photo credit Jeff Johnson and Morguefile
Leg art created by Sylvia Mann
Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-860-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-861-3
Printed in the United States of America
The phone rang just after three a.m.
Nothing good ever happens after three a.m. The screeching, static ending of a movie you couldn’t stay awake through. Crappy Chinese takeout, eaten by the light from the open refrigerator while standing in the kitchen in your underwear. Sex maybe, but the sloppy, big-booze variety. Furnace fires. No one calls with the winning lottery numbers at three-oh-five a.m.
The ringing stopped, then started again. I was kicked back at my desk in the back room of the Lucky Supreme, nursing lukewarm scotch from a paper cup and tinkering with one of my tattoo machines. It was a shader, made by a guy up in Washington named Paco Rollins. I ran the stroke long and mushy, so it had rattled itself to shit again. I didn’t enjoy dinking around with machines anymore, so I was still there mostly because I didn’t want to drive home. My sketchbook was out and I was halfway through a tortoise with a hat of some kind, but I didn’t want to work on that, either. Portland winter was in full swing, sleet mixed with snow on a thin crust of dirty ice. The steering wheel on my old BMW wagon would be so cold that the bones in my hands would ache just touching it, and after a twelve-hour shift they ached already. The car seat would freeze my ass on contact. I was partway through a seasonal mope and I knew it. Whoever was calling was only going to make it worse.
Ring.
It was still warm in the tattoo shop, even though I’d turned the little electric wall heaters off an hour before, when I put up the CLOSED sign in the window and turned off the front lights. It hadn’t been a bad day for a Tuesday in February. I let my night-shift artist, Nigel, go home at midnight when it finally slowed down, so he could grab a few drinks with his new girlfriend before the bars closed. He had much going on in the way of skeeby on the side, and it was wise to give him time to pursue his activities away from the shop. My late-night drinking companion was once again the Lucky Supreme. It had been time for me to enter another period of tortuous woman-related activity for weeks, but I’d been putting it off, just like I was putting off the drive home. Everything had burnout written all over it. Maybe I’d decided, deep down inside, where thoughts grew up and then shuffled into hiding, that indecision was my only practical defense.
I studied the machine into the fourth ring. It was brass, and at some point I’d engraved WILL FIGHT EVIL FOR FOOD down the side in curling script. Every artist’s motto, whether they know it or not. It still needed a new rear spring and I’d have to cut one, but that, too, would be a pain in the ass. I set it down on the desk and picked up my scotch at the fifth ring.
In the last two months, I’d spent too many evenings sitting in that chair worrying about things I couldn’t do one damn thing about. Or wouldn’t. A few months before, I’d had a bad run-in with the feds and a worse one with a rich psychotic scumbag that the very same feds had under their microscope. My landlord was having mental health issues, following a decline that had begun more than twenty years ago. Dmitri was a study of ruination in too many ways for anyone’s comfort. As a person, he was a disgusting bummer of a human being. As a landlord, terrifying. The tenants fixed everything and said nothing. To even hint that there might have been a leak in the past, let alone the present, was to insult him, his sainted father, his entire family tree, and also by extension his ethnic heritage, which was unclear. Yesterday an insurance inspector had made a surprise visit and canceled my lame policy, citing the wall heaters, which were dangerously ancient. Now I needed an electrician to come in and upgrade everything so I could re-up the policy.
The ringing stopped. I looked at the phone and waited. It started again.
The back room was lined with shelves of art books. I stared at the collection directly across from me and then I squinted. A faint blue light was blinking over them, gently strobing in through the windows in the front of the shop and washing through the doorway to the back.
Portland’s Old Town had seen a renovation boom in the last year, but it struck me as unlikely that anyone could be working that late on a cold Tuesday night except the most desperate whores, the B-string skag hawkers, and me. I sighed. Ring. The construction in the neighborhood had been a drag on business. The bar next door, the Rooster Rocket, was down more than 30 percent, and that was a harbinger. I relied on bar totals as a forecasting tool. That and the weather, which was also shitty. The Rocket was owned by Gomez, the most enterprising Chicano in Old Town, and the business slump had hit him hard, mentally and spiritually. Flaco, Gomez’s brother or uncle or ancient cousin, had a taco operation in the old theater vestibule in front of the bar, and it was thriving. No one thought that was a good sign. And now some city crew had fired up something at three in the morning. My car was probably blocked in. I was just about to heave my boots off the desk and go check it out when I couldn’t stand the ringing anymore.
“Lucky Supreme, how may I direct your call?”
The line was static, lashed with wind.
“Get out of there, white boy.” It was little more than a gush of whisper. There was a click and the line went dead.
I took the phone away from my ear and looked up at the wall of books across from me. The blue light was still splashing over it, but it had been joined by dialing winks of red. Something huge was erupting on Sixth Street.
I walked through the shop to the front door and cautiously peered out the window, keeping well back in the darkness. The local police and I had a very specific arrangement, the very same one I’d recently cultivated with the feds—they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them, so we tried to stay away from each other. We were all very careful to stick to the program, too. So if they were out rounding up the nightlife as part of the new clean-up program, it would be in keeping with our arrangement for me to stay inside.
The block had been cordoned off at both ends. There were at least ten police cars I could see, plus three fire engines. And I was right in the middle of it. My car was parked down the street, past the north blockade. It was hard to tell from my vantage point if I was officially stranded, so I grimly decided to go fuck with them.
I unlocked both of the deadbolts on the reinforced door and stuck my head out. The reaction was instant.
“Someone’s coming out!” a cop screamed.
“Get out of there!” a fireman yelled. He waved
his arms to get my attention. “Move it!”
The words on the side of the engine closest to the fireman came into focus: BOMB SQUAD.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered.
A young cop sprinted down the sidewalk toward me, skittering a little through the slush. It looked like he might be going for a tackle, so I raised my hands above my head and stepped out.
“Run, you fucking idiot!” He slid into me and almost yanked my arm out of the socket. The kid had a power lifter’s build and was either fresh into his shift or adrenalized by terror. The door to the Lucky Supreme closed on the spring arm as the monster towed me at a flat-out run down the sidewalk to the corner, almost carrying me as I scrambled to keep up.
“Get in that fucking car.” He was panting as he opened the back door to the chicken coop of the nearest cruiser. All the other officers that had been milling around when I looked out less than thirty seconds before were crouched behind the nearest fire engine, the big one that read BOMB SQUAD.
“Fuck you.” I yanked my arm out of his meaty hand and pointed. “The bomb dudes are hiding behind a fucking fire truck, dumbass.”
“Get down!” one of the firemen yelled.
I stiff-armed the big cop in the direction of the fire engine. He stumbled a little and his hand went to his sidearm, fumbling at one of the fashionable tasers they’d been pronging old ladies and hobos with for the last year. One of the firemen grabbed the back of the kid’s jacket and pulled him down. I skirted the cop car and crouched at the edge of the group hiding behind the truck. The sleet was soaking my hair and the back of my T-shirt. My jeans were already plastered to my legs. I started to shiver.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked everyone in general. There were at least twelve cops and as many firemen behind the fire engine.
“You were alone in there, right?” one of the firemen asked. He was the one who had pulled the cop off me.
“Yes, yes! Now, what the fuck is going on?”
He gave me a hard stare, then peeled back the sleeve of his big rubber jacket and checked his watch.
“We’ll know in just about—”
That’s when the bomb went off.
Agents Pressman and Dessel looked at me like the loving parents of a two-headed baby chicken. Mutually fond of my embarrassing, almost certainly brief existence, and proprietarily gloating at their proximity to the conclusion. Both of them would have given the last week of their lives to see me rotting in a prison cell for eternity, or at the very least reupholstering hot rods in Argentina. In our brief association, I’d destroyed a case they were building that would have made headline news. I’d gloated about it, too, and that was wrong. I know that now.
“You dudes get my Christmas card?”
Pressman was the older of the two, a homely guy with a pockmarked face and a beer gut he was ripening properly. He gave me a disgusted, girthy grunt. Dessel looked like a boy’s underwear model on a coke binge. He beamed joyously, like he had indeed received the card and put it on his refrigerator next to the unicorn. They were both wearing shitty suits from a discount department store. It was their version of a uniform.
“Quite an explosion,” Dessel said casually, almost like he was congratulating me. I’d just been ushered in via squad car, and the interview was officially off to a creepy start. It was an ominous sign that I’d skipped Police Central and been taken straight to the Federal Building. Even the cop who brought me in was spooked.
Dessel patted his pockets and came up with a bent generic cigarette. Pressman opened the window behind him. It was a no-smoking building.
I’d learned (from eavesdropping on the squad car radio) that the bomb had gone off in the Lucky Supreme’s restroom. There was a low whump and the windows blew out, blowing glass and sheetrock out in a ring that spanned two city blocks. The roof of the building flapped up a few feet, rippling like a cotton sheet in the wind, and then came crashing down, warped but still there. Most miraculously of all, the toilet at the epicenter of the blast remained whole and sailed like a cannonball all the way through the bar next door, where it lodged in the far wall. White fire ripped through everything.
The little convenience store next to the Lucky went up like a gas refinery. All those plastic packages of greasy snacks, I guess. Thick black smoke gushed from the shattered windows of the bar. The Lucky Supreme had been alive with flames, a real ring-of-hell inferno.
I’d watched in mute horror as the fire department snapped into action, obviously ready in advance. As soon as the glass and plaster stopped falling, they were pumping several thousand gallons of water a minute into the roiling blaze. The heat almost dried my clothes from a block away. After ten minutes the fire had died down, but they kept spraying, really hosing the place down to ensure the most thorough possible destruction.
“Yeah, dudes,” I told the feds. “It was like something out of a movie.”
I’d been shuffled into the back of a cop car after that. Pressman and Dessel were waiting for me when we got to the Federal Building, a place I’d been spending way too much time in over the past few months. The two of them never seemed to sleep. So it was four a.m. and I was back in the interview room, but this time I had a gray blanket draped over me, I didn’t have any cigarettes, and I was unemployed. My transformation into a street zero had been lightning-fast.
“So tell us,” Dessel said with a tiny smile. “Everything. Especially the lies. Let’s start with those wonderful lies you tell.”
“Give me that fucking cigarette,” I said quietly. Dessel handed it over and I put it in my mouth.
“Light,” I prompted.
He leaned out and fired it with a dime-store lighter. I took a double deep drag and blew two lungs of generic smoke in his general direction.
“It started with lights on the street. I was working late fixing some broken equipment. When I went out to see what the hell was going on some cop dragged me down the block. Whole place was already cordoned off.” I poked the cigarette at Dessel’s smile. “They knew. Some fucker tipped those guys off.”
“Interesting.” Dessel leaned back in his chair. Pressman stared at me. That was his job. “So tell us more. I understand from the lead officer that there’s been … oh, let’s just say it was getting time for you to move your little circus. And we know it’s possible you might want to. Plus, you sort of …” He sucked at his teeth. “You made some people really angry recently, and they might … oh, I don’t know, maybe feel like blowing all your shit up … There’s that. I’m just fishing here, trying to get a bead on the situation.”
Agent Dessel was talking about Nicky Dong-ju, the crazy gangster I’d killed a few months ago and rolled into the river. He’d set me up in an incredibly complicated way to get his hands on some of the Lucky’s old art, which had been used more than fifty years before in a smuggling operation run by a dead con man named Roland Norton. Nicky had been relentless, and in the end I had no choice. I would have nightmares for the rest of my life about the last minute of his life. They were still looking for him, and they suspected I was involved in his disappearance. It was the reason I’d spent so much time telling lies in the interrogation room.
“Think about this, Dessel.” I took another drag and flicked some ash on the floor. “My insurance got canceled yesterday. What does that tell you?”
He shrugged, but I could tell it made him happy.
“Christ.” I dropped the cigarette on the floor and ground it under my heel. “You two cretins think I know who planted that bomb? Believe me, if I did I’d be sitting in county facing murder one. Call me a cab.”
“I love these little meetings,” Dessel said thoughtfully. He stroked his chin, at the soft little stubble there. Pressman grunted like he was on the toilet after a tour of the downtown burrito scene.
“Cab,” I prompted.
“Pay phones are in the lobby. Let us know when you get a new cell phone.” Dessel winked. “Don’t leave town, but do leave that blanket. Can’t have a bum in a welfare
getup walking around Federal. Makes us look like regular cops.”
I was glad my house wasn’t on fire. It was an old yellow clapboard two-story pile with Tudor frills that had been divided into a duplex decades ago. I had the ground floor and the basement. The first thing I noticed when the cab pulled up was that the lights were on. All of them. I paid the driver and stood in the freezing rain and studied the place as the car pulled away. Someone had just blown up my life and now someone was in my house. I went over to the steps and rooted around in the semi-frozen dirt under the skeleton of the rhododendron until I came up with a hank of wire I’d hidden there a few months before. A fat braid of wire with a knob of concrete at one end and no conceivable previous felony on it. I pulled the muddy thing loose and hefted it. Half whipper, half sap. Normally I carried a metal ball bearing, but the whole explosion thing had caught me by surprise. The last one probably melted into the sooty remains of the jacket I should have been wearing.
I opened the door and Delia flew into me, her head smacking into my chest. I dropped the wire and held her as she sobbed. I could feel her heart hammering through her bony chest like a hummingbird’s. We just stood like that for a minute.
Delia had worked for me for close to four years. She had a spare key to my place, so she could take care of my two cats when I was out of town or being detained by the police. Standing there with my arms wrapped around her, I realized for the first time that she’d lost it all, too. All of her art, her equipment, her job. Pretty much everything.
“I thought you might be dead, you fucktard,” she sobbed. “I’d have to take care of your cats, like, forever.”
“Nah.” I rubbed her back. She also had a speech condition I thought of as robomouth. Her short hair smelled like lavender and cigarettes and puke. “I was just getting interrogated.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” She pushed me away and wrinkled her tiny pug nose. “You’re all freezing wet and icky, dude.”
“My phone was a casualty.”
