A Long Crazy Burn

by Jeff Johnson

  It took a little of the majesty out of the moment, for some reason, but I agreed.

  “When can I go home?” he whined.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “You can’t ever go back to sleeping on the floor in the back of the pizza place. You’ll get busted.” I’d see if the new manager could set him up in one of the abandoned apartments upstairs.

  Dmitri nodded and drank.

  “Where are your keys?” I asked.

  “My jacket, I think. Maybe I didn’t lock the door. My pants—”

  I motioned for one of the Empire boys and told him to go through the pockets in the clothes under the dish machine. He came back a moment later with a single key and three dollars.

  “I tossed all that shit. This was it. Those two dudes are still way the fuck knocked out.”

  I gave Dmitri the three dollars and then took an even thousand out of the duffel bag and gave that to him, too. It was a week of living large at a place like the Bismarck.

  “Maybe Nigel can take you shopping in a few days,” I suggested. Dmitri looked instantly terrified.

  “No,” he said emphatically. “No. These clothes are fine.”

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not doing it,” I said. If I stayed out of jail, I probably would and I knew it. I needed new boots anyway.

  Delia came out of the kitchen with a stack of warm paper and set it down in front of me. All the Oleg crap and Dmitri’s original signatures had been replaced with Darby Holland LLC and blank slots with SIGN HERE tabs. I pushed it over to Dmitri.

  “Go over to the bar and start signing again, same as before,” I said. He got up and Delia followed.

  “Everyone,” I called out. “Over here. It’s time to blow this place.”

  Gomez, Flaco, Nigel, and Empire of Shit quickly clustered around the table, holding their drinks.

  “OK. Nigel, you’re in charge of getting rid of Oleg’s ride. I’d say long-term parking at the airport is good, but we’re in north Portland, so just down the street in front of a sketchy crack pad is fine.”

  “Check.”

  “Keys are in the big dude’s pocket. Just take the one to the car and leave the rest on him.”

  “On it.” Nigel disappeared through the kitchen doors.

  “Gomez, Flaco, just hang back for now. As soon as we’re gone, take Dmitri over to the Bismarck Motel and get him a room.” I gave Gomez fifteen hundred out of the money I had just taken out of Oleg’s wallet. “For you guys and your brother. Cool?”

  Gomez nodded and so did Flaco. They were going to hold me to the rent, too.

  “And Gomez, you got my little thing? For my collection?”

  Gomez looked briefly confused, then took a baggie out of his pocket and handed it to me. I stuffed it into my jacket.

  “OK. Empire. We have to get those dudes into your van and take them to the Bismarck Motel.” I held up my hand in case they protested and took out Oleg’s credit cards. “These should sweeten the pot. One for each of you. Charge until they stop.”

  Hank snatched them out of my hand with the blinding speed of a snapping turtle and passed them out. They collectively marveled at the massive change in their fortunes. I smiled at the trail of pure insanity they would leave if Dessel was ever interested enough to follow it.

  “Let’s do it.”

  I led the four of them back into the kitchen and instructed Hank to wedge the back door open and then open the back doors of the van. While he was doing that, the rest of us sized up the situation. Cheddar Box was going to be the real obstacle, so I decided to deal with Oleg first.

  “This is how this goes down,” I said. “We have to make this fast, in case someone pulls into the parking lot. You two, grab his arms. I’ll get his legs. Hank, you and what’s-his-name here get his belt on either side. We charge the van and just sort of toss him.”

  It worked better than I thought it would. With five people, Oleg wasn’t all that heavy. The hurl worked perfectly and everyone backed quickly into the restaurant except for Hank, who scrambled in and rolled Oleg to one side to make wide room for Conan.

  Hank then joined us in our group contemplation of Cheddar Box and gave me a quick thumbs-up. “Still breathing. Bonked his head pretty good.”

  “Good,” I replied. “So I guess we do the same thing with this guy, but let’s watch the head. No toss this time. Hank, you and this dude”—I pointed—“take the legs, one each, you two the arms. Lift like motherfuckers and when you get a little more than knee high, I’ll get under and lift with my back. I’m bigger than you guys, but not by much, and I also won’t be able to see. We get most of him in the back and then I’ll sort of roll free and we drag him the rest of the way. Don’t let him squash me.”

  Empire of Shit got to it and it didn’t look promising. They strained until they were red in the face and their veins were standing out. Cheddar Box was a cow-sized sack of dead weight. As soon as they got him high enough I crabbed under, settled my bent shoulders under Cheddar’s waist, and tried to rise.

  Pushing with every ounce of strength in my legs, we got him a little higher and I felt them slacking off a little to get their breath.

  “Gheeh!” I managed. They heaved as one and I took a staggering step forward.

  In that fashion, we made it all the way to the van. Hank and the guy on the arm opposite him clambered swiftly inside without losing too much lift and did their job from there, walking backward. When the bumper hit my head I made one Herculean push up and forward and gained us a few inches before I rolled free. The two on his legs jumped in the van and the four of them dragged Cheddar Box in the rest of the way. I slammed the doors as soon as his size-twenty feet cleared.

  It was done. I rubbed my hands together. Cheddar Box and Oleg were rufied and in my possession.

  I went back in and closed the kitchen door, then went out to the front. Gomez and Flaco were drinking at the bar waiting for Dmitri, who was just finishing up. I walked over and stood next to Delia as he signed the last two pages.

  “There we go,” Delia said, tidying the stack. She looked at me with an unreadable expression. She forged my signature all the time and this was evidently no exception. I reached out and gently brushed the bridge of her pug nose.

  “Gotta run,” I said. “Take the cash for the moment?”

  “Sure. Tell Hank and the boys I’ll meet them at the Alibi for drinks at five.” She smiled. “Inside joke.”

  “Make a scene,” I said. She cocked her head, quizzical, a close warmness around her eyes.

  “Always.”

  I waved to everyone and walked back through the restaurant, into the kitchen, and out the back door. The rain was mild and it was cool, just hovering at the edge of another cold snap. I lit a cigarette and got in the van on the passenger side. Hank was at the wheel. He gave me a rather tight smile. The other three were passing around a joint in the back, squatting nervously around Cheddar Box, fearful of what would happen if he suddenly woke up in the close space.

  “Out to 82nd and Foster, the Bismarck Motel. I’ll show you where to park.”

  By the time we got to the motel, my elation with having scored a comatose Russian gangster and a snoring Mexican killing machine had crumbled all the way down into savage paranoia, and I had taken the already nervous Empire of Shit down with me.

  “What the fuck now!” Hank snapped. We were in the median turn lane in front of the Bismarck with the erratic blinker on. The Bismarck looked extra shitty, all things considered. The rest of the Empire boys were in a state of sweaty agitation, chain smoking and totally silent. The van sounded like it would stall at any moment.

  “Pull around back,” I instructed. Hank cursed under his breath as I dialed Mikey again. He hadn’t picked up so far.

  “Aw,” Mikey finally answered. Then he puked.

  “Mikey!” I screamed. “Move your fucking van! Now!”

  “Jesu—” He hung up. Hank gunned it into the parking lot, cutting off a station wagon. The driver laid on the horn.


  “No more screaming!” Hank Dildo screamed. Behind me came a chorus of “Holy fuck” and “What the—” I dropped my cigarette on the trash-cluttered floor and ground it out.

  “There,” I said, pointing.

  Mikey’s van was already backing out. It was far newer than the Empire ride and I cursed myself for not having borrowed it in the first place, but I’d wanted to hold Mikey and his resources in reserve. He’d come close to blowing his limited role as it was.

  Hank gunned it into the vacant slot and the engine died. He glared at me.

  “Shut it,” I said. “You guys are in way too fucking deep to start freaking out.”

  “Let’s just do this,” he said through his teeth.

  We waited until Mikey had parked. He got out of his van and slowly made his way over, eyes down. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before and radiated sour and pissed off. He got to my window and raised his face. I rolled the window down.

  “Go open the room door,” I said. I couldn’t keep the tension out of my voice.

  “I can’t leave the door open or the …” He trailed off when he caught sight of Oleg and Cheddar Box. “What the fuck?”

  “They’re alive,” I said. “Now open the fucking door and help us get them in there.”

  Mikey’s face hardened and he shook his head. He walked back around the corner and came back a minute later with his jacket on.

  “Let’s go,” he said shortly.

  Empire of Shit wanted their part over with as quickly as possible. They kicked open the back doors of the van and dragged Oleg out with no consideration for his well-being, stepping on him and clanging his head around. The Russian and Cheddar Box were side by side, so they stepped on the Mexican Conan a few times, too. Hank got him in a fireman’s carry with their help, and with strength born from desperation staggered toward the corner. I pointed at Eye Booger.

  “Keep watch.” He nodded and peered around the corner, gave Hank the thumbs-up. Mikey looked at Cheddar Box and then at me.

  “Dude is bigger than I am,” he said grimly. Mikey was about six foot two and hovered around two fifty. He was right.

  “Think you can carry him?”

  “Instead of just standing around here waiting to get arrested? Guess I’ll fucking try. Jesus Christ.”

  With the remaining two Empire guys’ help, we pushed and dragged Cheddar until his ankles were dangling out of the back of the van. Mikey grabbed them and yanked backward with his entire body. The back of Cheddar’s suit caught on something and there was a long tearing sound. Mikey heaved Cheddar over his shoulder and made a strangling sound. Hank appeared out of nowhere and scooped Cheddar’s giant legs onto his skinny shoulders, taking a chunk of the weight.

  “Move,” Mikey managed.

  With Hank in the lead they staggered to the corner and Eye Booger waved them on. They rounded the corner and I got out and gently closed the van doors.

  “We’ll wait here,” Eye Booger said, joining us. We were all panting for different reasons. An instant later Hank rounded the corner.

  “Bye,” he snapped at me. Empire of Shit were all in the van in seconds. The starter ground a few times and the engine caught, then the rusted, dented piece of shit shot out a plume of black smoke and they were gone.

  I lit a cigarette and stood in the rain for a minute, just breathing. The parking lot seemed like one of the quietest places I’d ever been right then. The air smelled and felt like more snow, the thin, wet Oregon kind, was on the way. The sky was a solid, flat gray. A lone crow was picking though some trash over by the dumpster. Reluctantly, I went around the corner and knocked on the door of the room at the end.

  Mikey opened it with a gust of electric heater air and let me past without a word. He locked the door behind us as I peered through the closed blinds. Nothing.

  Oleg and Cheddar were on the bed, flat on their backs, very neatly arranged for such a high-speed operation. Mikey sat down by Oleg’s feet and gave me a long, bad look.

  “What happened to these guys and why am I in a motel room with them?” He was more than angry. He was also scared, disappointed, hungover, and tired in the soul.

  I sat down on the only chair in the room. Mikey had gotten another couple of six-packs at some point and they were sitting on the dresser next to me. I opened one and sipped. Warm. I pointed at Oleg.

  “The suit there is the guy who hired the bomber that got us. Russian real estate developer. Big guy next to him is a bodyguard. We just rufied the fuck out of ’em and I’m mailing the Russian guy back where he came from in a transmission box. Big guy goes free.”

  Mikey turned and looked them over, then slowly turned back.

  “That …” He looked down at his big hands. When he spoke again his voice was very quiet. “That’s totally insane, Darby.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. Mikey rubbed his stubbly head. He still wouldn’t meet my eye.

  “I, uh, I guess I’ll help,” he continued, softly, “but … I’m sorry, man. I quit.”

  I sighed. It made me feel shitty on some level, but I knew it was coming, somehow. Life was a complex thing and circumstance was the screamer in the choir. Everyone believed they chose between the paths they took. It seemed like there was always more than one option. But unfortunately, all of those paths led into the unknown. Just like Mikey, I had been a little boy once. Through the dense haze of the chaos of the years, I could still feel the sun on his face. But in the end, we all walked a secret and lonesome road that lay beneath all of our dreams and superstitions, and circumstance kept us on it. Every single one of us was in the process of becoming more of what we already were. And for all of his love of things wild and hard—the passions Delia reveled in even when she slept, the animal racing mad inside of me, the secret world of a man who called himself Nigel—for all of Mike’s admiration and the covetousness of those things for himself, fate had not dealt him any cards from that deck. Made more truly by time and circumstance, Mikey was a pussy.

  “I can dig it,” I said. Mikey finally met my eye, smiled weakly.

  “So what now?”

  “I get the Russian in the box, take it where I’m taking it. I’ll need your van for about an hour. The big guy should be out for a day or so, but you stay with him for now. When I get back, you go home. Pay the room up for another day or two before you go. He can find his way out of here when he wakes up.”

  Mikey nodded and went back to staring at his hands.

  Together, we put Oleg in the transmission box. I used the blade on my multi-tool to cut an air hole in either end, just below the handles where no one would see them. Oleg didn’t quite fit, so we had to lever him onto his side and bend his knees. Before I put the lid on, I took the plastic bag Gomez had given me out of my pocket and shook the contents into my hand.

  The mummified mouse was gray and desiccated, contorted with whatever forces made it that way. Its lips were peeled back and its tiny teeth were showing. I knelt and put it into Oleg’s breast pocket, gently patted the pocket flat.

  Something cracked in Mikey when I did that. He seemed physically smaller as I put the lid on.

  “Help me with this,” I said quietly.

  Together, we carried the box out and put it in the back of Mikey’s van. He silently handed me the keys and then slowly walked back to the motel room. I got in and lit a cigarette. The engine started on the first try.

  The Mexicans had a white Mitsubishi box truck pulled up to the garage at the Armenian’s when I got there. I pulled into the lot and backed into a space between a Lexus and a Mercedes. When I got out, one of them wandered over to me carrying a clipboard, squinting in the light rain.

  “Boss not around,” he said. “You got your parts?”

  “Box is in back.”

  He nodded. “What’s the weight?”

  “I guess somewhere around two hundred, give or take.” I gave him an expression of bland indifference.

  “Vatos!” he yelled. I opened the back doo
rs and they slid the box out easily and carried it into the garage. There were five or six transmission boxes stacked in there already, along with some random smaller ones. An entire shipment was waiting. They set Oleg down on top of an identical transmission box and one of them began taping the lid while the other two got back to packing parts. The guy with the clipboard came back over to me.

  “You supposed to sign?”

  “Nah.”

  “Goes out at six a.m.” With that, he went back in and started helping the other two guys with what looked like a manifold. It was done.

  I got back in the van. I don’t know what I was expecting to feel right them, but looking into that garage through the windshield, the very first thing that came to mind after a solid minute of blankness was curiously uplifting.

  I was hungry.

  My phone rang on the drive back to the motel. I hadn’t gotten so much as a ticket so far, and now that I was in the final sprint into the clear zone, a little good behavior would be soothing, so I pulled into a gas station before answering. It was Delia.

  “Package is away,” I answered. “Sort of.”

  “I just got to the Alibi,” she said. I could hear chaos in the background and it made me smile. “Hank and the boys were already wasted when I got here. They spray painted their waiter outfits gold as soon as they got home. It’s a miracle they even made it.”

  “Mikey quit.”

  Delia sighed. “That was a long time coming. It was nice of you to hold him out of the main action, but I think it also depressed him a little. I like Mikey, always have, always will, but maybe he needs a smoother ride.”

  “Yeah. Heard from Nigel?”

  “The Prince of Hell is on his way here. I think he wants to buy the boys a couple rounds. Display some humanity, that kind of thing.”

  “Good idea.”

  “So the deed is filed. Congrats. Bank went good. You still have to stop by there in the next week or so, but no rush. And I met with my Taos hippie connection and cemented the deal, so me and Hank changed our Frisco plans. We’re going to New Mexico.”

  “Right on.”