by Jeff Johnson
The bartender arrived with our drinks. He looked like he wanted to squeeze off something about being yelled at, but Suzanne gave him a withering glare and I blasted him with stone-cold killer when he looked at me for support, so he wisely stayed shut. It was probably our last round, though.
“So you,” Suzanne concluded, stabbing her finger at me, “best get your shit together.”
I shook my head. “I am. I will. Swear to God. But why the fuck does everyone keep telling me that?”
Suzanne snorted. “If that’s what Lobelia, or whatever her real name is, told you that provoked this pitiful display, please tell her that I think I’ll buy her lunch rather than step on her.” She sat back, finished for the moment. I picked up my shot.
“If it’s any consolation, everything you said made such perfect sense that now I’m truly, totally confused.” It was the wrong thing to have said. I knew it instantly.
“Why?” Now she had gone from angry to pissed. I set my glass down and raised my hands in surrender.
“OK. You’re hot. Smoking. You’re interesting. Extremely. And I’m sorry if … no, wait. I’m not sorry about anything. If you can live with the fact that I’m in a shitty position and I have to do some shitty but highly creative stuff that I may unfortunately, possibly enjoy because of the admittedly questionable nature of my character, then we’re right back to planning our trip to the coast, and I apologize for the rude interruption.”
Suzanne stewed for a moment, which I used to down my drink. But she was right about herself. She was a woman, not a girl. She picked up her shot glass and looked at me over the rim.
“You might just do after all,” she said evenly. Then she drank.
After that, we ate six blueberry chocolate crepes each. I invited her to stay the night. I was tired and it showed, so after we both brushed our teeth with my toothbrush, which I considered a situation that had to be remedied first thing in the morning, we went to bed, and rather than maul each other, we talked. She even let me smoke in bed.
“So where are you from?” I asked.
“San Diego,” Suzanne replied, stifling a yawn. She was lying on her side, relaxed, watching me. “I moved here to work for a law firm, but after a year or so my journalism degree finally started paying off. Travel stuff, mostly.” She’d told me something about that the other night. “What about you? You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m not really from anywhere,” I confessed. “Moved around a lot as a kid. My favorite place was Houston.”
“How come?” She seemed genuinely curious, but in a charming, whimsical way.
“I dug the rain, I guess. The food was good. Houston is mostly black, or at least I remember it that way, so the school food was geared toward them. No pizza or meatloaf. They would have freaked out and rioted. Greens, corn bread. About a billion kinds of ham. Catfish, which is cheap as clay down there. Peach cobbler. Shit like that.”
“Mnn.” For some reason it made her smile.
“Frogs, too.”
“They served frogs to schoolchildren?”
I looked at her like she was crazy. “No, dummy. There were lots of frogs in Houston. We didn’t eat them, we played with ’em. I had a pet frog under my house named Wyatt. Every little boy’s dream.”
“What kind of little boy were you?” She reached out and started playing with my hair. I thought about it. The wind shifted outside and the rain pattered on the window.
“Mostly OK,” I said eventually. “Big reader. I drew comics. Played basketball. Everything went to shit around ninth grade. I was on my own after that. It was hard and I somehow wound up having to take care of my older brother as soon as I had enough money to get a place. He ditched me after a while and things got worse before they got better. I had a mother and a little sister, but they stuck together and I just sort of lost them, I guess. More than twenty years ago, now. I went to Montana when I was sixteen and worked at a gas station in Billings. Had my first live-in girlfriend. Then I discovered the punk scene. It was small, but it led me to LA for a while, then Denver, which I sort of had to leave in a hurry. Then I moved here. Got a part-time job at a tattoo shop called Lucky Supreme, janitor and lookout for all the shady shit the owner was up to. I was tattooing on the third day. That was back in the good old days, when no one knew what they were doing.”
“The good old days,” she repeated softly. “You’re still too young to have good old days.”
“I know,” I agreed. “But you know how it is. I’ve had my share of fun, and believe it or not I still do. But generally, if I’m trying hard enough, yesterday was the good old days. Just like today will be tomorrow.”
Suzanne lightly smacked my forehead. “You’re so full of it. But I guess I agree.”
“Which leads us to tomorrow. You said you have a job interview?”
“Yeah.” She resumed playing with my hair, but slower, and she watched me with different eyes. “Travel Asia. Based out of Bangkok. English language, glossy, outdoor to food. I’m interviewing for an editor slash contributing writer slot.”
“Huh.” I sat up a little. “Does that mean you have to, like, move to Asia?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“Not anytime soon,” she said after the unreadable pause. “I don’t even know if I’ll get it, and if I do there’s still the question of what they’re offering, paywise. I can’t take a job for a trust fund kid, which is sometimes the case with these kinds of gigs. Right now, at this moment, I don’t even want to think about it.”
I relaxed again. Mostly.
“You said you had job-related shit, I think you called it?” Sleepy, seemingly uninterested.
I shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah. Meetings, mostly.”
“I see.”
“Yep.” I put my cigarette out and put the ashtray in the bed stand drawer. “Official corporate business. Putting in a bid. Complicated banking crap. It’s a long story.”
Suzanne purred and stretched, but had no comment.
“I’m free tomorrow night,” I said casually. “Maybe we can do something.” It was terrible and I knew it, but I was anticipating Dessel picking up my trail tomorrow and spending the evening doing something innocuous with Suzanne would confuse the fuck out of him, make him think he was wasting man hours.
“What were you thinking?”
“Let’s have dinner. Someplace nice. Test-drive a new dress for our trip. I have this whole fantasy thing going on. Nothing greasy, as amazing as that sounds. I just want to see you walk into a restaurant and know you’re there looking for me. Me. Total corn.”
She sighed, pleased. “We can do that. Black OK?”
“Oh yeah.”
She smiled and closed her eyes. I watched for a few minutes as she fell asleep and dreamed about whatever tall women dream. After a little more of that, I got up quietly and padded out into the dining room.
Suzanne’s purse was on the floor beside the chair she had been sitting in. It was small and looked like a Special Forces camera bag. I guiltily snapped it open and looked through it. Lip balm. Sunscreen. Keys, but none to a car, one to a PO box. Her wallet was a tiny black thing. I took it out and opened it, and there it was, the thing I had been looking for for two days.
Suzanne’s last name was Barnes. Suzanne Evelyn Barnes. She was thirty-one. Yesterday had been her birthday. I put everything away and went back to bed with one less thing to worry about.
I woke up at ten a.m. to an empty bed. I’d slept for nine hours. I pulled at my face for a minute and something crinkled next to me. It was a note from Suzanne.
“You don’t snore, but you did mutter a few times. Had to go get ready. I kissed you on the stomach, right below RUN, but you didn’t wake up. See you tonight, 8:30, Brasserie Montmart. I’ll make the reservation under Holland. Be good at your meetings. —S”
Not a bad way to start the day. I sat up. My ribs felt sore but sound. I felt reasonably solid again, and in the morning, right when I wake up, is when I’m usually at my most
happy and paradoxically also dangerously easy to piss off. I rolled my head and snapped my teeth a few times, then hopped out of bed and dropped.
Push-ups first thing is a good idea for everyone who can do them. It warms you up right away, and that warmth seeps into your core and acts as a thermal armor, which was great for a rainy place like Portland. After the first ten I felt last night’s cigarettes blow away. By twenty, something popped in the center of my back and my spine went from dog to cat. By thirty, my blood had all pumped through my liver and my kidneys and everything felt a little cleaner, if such a thing was possible, and by forty, I was hungry and thirsty and thinking about Suzanne’s ass. As I muscled my way through fifty, I had a clear vision of punching Oleg in the throat. At sixty I started to feel the burn, so I stopped. Energy of the best kind for later.
The coffee was already made, which had never happened before except when Delia spent the night, and then only when I was injured, and she usually put Gummy Bears in it. I poured myself a cup and lit a cigarette, then walked over to the sink and looked out the window. Rain, which was no surprise. I flicked my ash into the drain and noted there was no coffee cup in the sink. Suzanne had either washed hers and put it away, or she’d just made coffee for me on her way out. Rare news, either way.
I carried my coffee to the dining room table and sat down, picked up my cell phone, and dialed. Delia answered on the first ring.
“Done,” she said.
“All of it?”
“Yepper. I went by the bank and got all the forms for your business account and filled them out. You have to drop them off and show them your ID and pick out your check register. You already have your DBA, but the certificate got blown up, so they’re sending a new one to your place. I got the Armenian’s daughter a super-cool passionflower pendant at Gilt. Four bills, European, not bad. And I got the uniforms for Dildo and the rest of Empire secondhand. All four of them are the exact same size, 120 pounds and five foot seven. They agreed to your terms, I had to throw in a blow job for Dildo, and after they got liquored up they even agreed to the hair color of my choice, as long as it was temporary.” She sounded exceptionally pleased with herself.
“Excellent. What about the big fat check?”
“A tiny bit sticky. That cash was totally disgusting, by the way. But I got four money orders and then rolled it into a cashier’s check at my bank just now. So I made twelve hundred bucks this morning. I like the way you roll, dude. Always have.”
“You did have to suck dick,” I reminded her.
“I was going to anyway. Neener.”
I shook my head. “All right then. Meet me at noon … fuck. Let’s see. Dessel might be waiting for me right now. In fact, I’m sure he is. Tell you what. I’m going to drive over to Northwest Portland, say Burnside and 21st. There’s always a shit-ton of people milling around there. I’ll hop the eastbound Trimet bus just before noon. You get on in the Park blocks. Call Nigel and tell him to get on in Old Town, Mikey the first stop on the other side of the river. I’ll get off at 82nd and walk over to the Armenian’s from there. You guys scatter into cabs after that. Good?”
“We’ll be waiting.”
“Good. I’ll call the Armenian now and then I’ll call you in a couple hours when I’m about to board.”
“I’ll line ’em up.”
It was going to be good to see the dudes again. Maybe I’d even bring snacks. Meeting on the bus was a good idea on many levels. It was higher than most of the other traffic, and the four of us together would create an instant no man’s land, so we’d be alone, moving, and with a commanding view. I just hoped they didn’t still have my photo on the permanent eighty-six list they kept on the wall in the driver break room. I sighed at the possibility and lit my second cigarette of the day.
The Armenian. Now there was a puzzle I had no interest in solving. He’d briefly dated the hot, grumpy French woman who owned the chocolate shop around the corner from my house about a decade ago, maybe longer. From then on I’d kept running into him, until one night Nigel and I had crashed some kind of weird Gypsy party at the Greek Cusina and I’d run into the Armenian again. Everyone there had treated him like Don Corleone, which made me consider the wisdom of getting pathetically wasted with him, but I’m an eternal advocate of throwing caution to the wind, and that night had been no exception.
From then on we were friends, of a sort. He was twenty years older than me, so there was that, but he was also an impossibly secretive guy, and much like Nigel, when you had too many secrets to keep track of, they fell out at random in the oddest way. The Armenian positively hemorrhaged secrets on an embarrassing level.
He had three kids, he said, though I’d met seven so far. He claimed he was from London, but then again he’d been in a semi-public uproar a few years ago when US customs had stopped him for being born in Iran. He had an automotive shop, but the one time I’d taken my BMW there, he’d rented me a newer Mercedes for three weeks and then returned my car unfixed, no questions please. And that was barely scratching the surface.
The three guys who worked for him were shadier than he was, if that was even possible. They were Chinese, and I could swear that the Armenian spoke to them in their own dialect. The most valuable data I had on the table at the moment actually came from them. One day, when I’d been at their shop to go out to lunch with the Armenian—which usually meant becoming a component part in one of his plans, the rewards of which varied from a pack of cigarettes to the use of a convertible for the weekend—I’d engaged the Chinese guys in casual conversation while they were inspecting the engine of a new Lexus. The transmission was “broken,” and that was all that mattered.
When the Armenian and I got back from lunch, they had the transmission out and it was sitting in a big, sturdy box. I’d asked the Armenian about it.
“Ah Darby, yes.” He began everything that way. “The transmission of this vehicle is very, very expensive. But to ship it is very cheap. Here, maybe four thousand to rebuild, minimum, three weeks time, minimum. Minimum! But I have friends at pier six. To mail this to Russia is nothing, and hey.” He’d shrugged. “They work for pennies. Pennies! The Russians put a trash can into space, Darby. Those engineers are happy to work on a transmission. For them, it is a child’s game.”
On the drive over to northwest Portland, I couldn’t tell if I was being followed or not. Any crime novel would give you the impression that a three-car, radio-coordinated tail was impossible to bust, and I wouldn’t put it past Dessel, so I wasn’t taking any chances. I called the Armenian from the road. He hated telephones unless he was trying to impress someone by keeping them waiting in his office, so the call would likely take the duration of the first stoplight.
“This is George.” He called himself George. The name on his driver’s license, which I’d caught a glimpse of once, said something unpronounceable, and it didn’t begin with the letter G.
“I have that present for your daughter,” I said. I hadn’t spoken to him in almost three months, so he would have forgotten by now if he’d asked me for such a thing.
“My friend, thank you,” he said smoothly, exceptionally warm. “Please come.” He hung up.
More good news. The warmth meant he was up to something as usual, and would be up for a trade. Interesting. It was raining a little harder than when I’d left, which made for good cover once I was on foot, but I was going to get wet later, no doubt about it. I turned on the radio and listened to the rambling jazz station while I rambled myself, for all the world an aimless guy with no job, bored out of his mind.
Midway through cigarette number four and just past Old Town and headed east, I spotted Dessel and Pressman four cars back. They were good, which was obviously bad. The car was an instantly forgettable grayish Pontiac of indeterminate age. Both of them were wearing anonymous baseball caps, Pressman prescription glasses, Dessel looking down, but I could still see the line of Dessel’s jaw. The thing that tipped me off was that they were pigs. The dashboard was cluttered wit
h wrappers and empty cigarette packs, which meant they’d been in there all morning, which in turn meant they’d picked me up within a block of my house.
I ignored my rearview from then on, but I tried not to be conspicuous about it, which was harder than it sounds. Breaking the law right then actually seemed like a good idea, so I made a wide, meandering turn onto 19th without signaling. When I hit the first stop sign, I risked a peek in the rearview. They were already parked about halfway down the block. A red Miata with a blonde power yuppie woman behind the wheel came to a stop behind me. It may or may not have been the same woman getting into a red car at the Starbucks by my house. I’d had a stray nasty thought about her. Either way, it was time to hoof it.
I parked on 20th and Couch and got out, stretched, scratched the top of my head, lit a smoke. Then I started walking up to 21st.
When I’d first moved to Portland two decades ago, I’d loved the area when I found it. Old Victorian houses mixed in with Gothic apartment buildings, wig shops and hippie cafes, weirdo boutiques and even a lone skateboard shop. Gentrification had hit it slowly, but a certain percentage of the original element had held on and still rotted away in reasonable peace, so it had kept much of its character. A rainy day stroll through the area wasn’t entirely out of keeping for a Portlander.
