Edge of the Pit

by Bill Thesken

  While I’m under the EM truck I can see under the cars all the way to my old building. Black shoes are moving through the lot towards me, and I can see one of the guys is looking under the cars, so I scoot next to the big back tire and curl up. I hear the EMT’s boots scuffle the rocky asphalt as they stop at their doors and make my move, slide quick onto the back bumper ledge, open one of the doors at the same moment they open theirs, and squeeze in quick as I can, close the door and roll under the gurney on the side. It’s the kind with wheels that slide right up into the back of the ambulance and I wait in its shadow as the engine fires to life. Sirens wail and the truck lurches forward, lumbers over a gutter, onto the street, bouncing my head off the gurney, and takes off. I’m on my way. Where to, I have no idea.

  I can tell this guy’s a good driver, he doesn’t stop or slow down, just wheels it from side to side, and it’s taking all my energy to keep from sliding out from under the gurney. I’ve got both my feet wedged into the back wheels and have a death grip on the undercarriage of the contraption.

  As we careened through the streets I considered my options. Number one I need to stay out of the clutches of the agency and especially pretty little nurses with needles. Not to mention the Eraser.

  Number two I need to gather intelligence quickly. Find out what happened. What in the hell happened. I don’t have a number three yet.

  The ambulance is slowing down. I peek out from the gurney and see the driver looking intently out the front of the windshield, looking for a place to park the truck. We’re here. It’s loud. There’s an orange glow and a popping and crackling sound. Something bad is happening. There’s more sirens all around, heading this way, people yelling, running, bullhorns.

  I slide out from my hiding spot and out the door. It’s chaos. There’s a building on fire, hoses everywhere and water covering the street. The ambulance is parked far enough away to stay out of the danger zone, but close enough to hear the crackling of the flames, feel some of the heat and the burnt air, thick with smoke and ash swirling around me. It’s a five story brick building fully engulfed in flames, flames jetting out of the windows, geysers of water from hoses raining down from every angle on the roof which collapses with a groan.

  A policeman nearby spots me, pegs me as a civilian in my suit and tie, and yells at me.

  “Are you injured?”

  I shake my head no and he waves me towards a crowd of people on the side behind a yellow tape an barricades. I walk a few feet into the crowd and then quietly to the back perimeter and watch from the edge. It’s comfortable here. I like it on the perimeter. I can see what’s going on all around me now, and no one notices me taking it all in. I’m a spectator, like everyone else. Just like everyone else.

  We’re nearer the city than we were at the hospital, the tallest buildings loom over us in the background, shutting half the sky, gray and black monoliths with mirrored windows.

  There’s ten fire engines, five ambulances, over thirty cop cars and hundreds of people watching the scene from the edges. Three helicopters are hovering nearby, probably filming the action for the evening news. I can see the station logo on two of the copters. I feel a sense of calm while watching the scene of destruction and mayhem from my vantage point.

  My ambulance drivers are just standing by their truck, talking with a policeman. They don’t look concerned, their body language doesn’t show anxiety, fear, anticipation. They don’t seem to have noticed that I was in their truck, and they’re not in a hurry to administer first aid to anyone. I watch the building engulfed in flames. There’s scaffolding on the side, some of the windows are missing, there’s a couple of large dumpsters next to the building, and there’s no landscaping. It’s a construction site. Someone probably threw a cigarette butt near some oil based paint and started the damn thing. The ambulance drivers are relaxed because no one is injured. All that crazy driving to get here just in case someone needed help, and now this.

  My eyes and senses take in everything around me. No one is watching me, monitoring me, looking at me with questions in their minds and eyes. I’m just a part of the crowd, anonymous and invisible.

  I move away from the scene and walk slowly and methodically away from the action, I see everything around me, every movement, every person, every vehicle and window. No alarms are going off in my head. I pull out the slim wallet from the inside coat pocket, there’s about a hundred in cash, some credit cards, and a driver’s license, no ID marking the Eraser with the Agency, but the home address on the driver’s license is the Agency’s headquarters. His name is Jerry Adam Smith. Sure it is pal. Sure it is.

  I pocket the cash, and kept walking with the wallet in my hand. No way was I going to throw it in a trash can or the mailbox, someone would find it too soon and be able to trace it to this location and check the video cameras and track my movements out of here so I stood next to a storm drain in the gutter, put the wallet inside my pants as though I was putting it in a pocket, then dropped it along my leg next to my shoe, looked around once to see if anyone was watching and kicked it in. Someone would find it someday, maybe it would end up on a river bank after a rainstorm, or wash out onto a beach, and hopefully by the time that happened this would all be settled.

  I walked towards some cabs sitting idly by a coffee shop, the drivers watching the action back at the fire and picked out the one I wanted. A Middle Eastern looking guy. They don’t talk. I got into the cab without a word and when he got in the driver’s seat and turned to me I told him three words.

  “Market and Vine.” The old part of the downtown area. He drove without a word, which is what I wanted. Cabbies like this are smart, they’ve been around. I looked at his ID on the dashboard. He looked Iraqi, and his name looked Iraqi. Al-Bayati. I wanted to talk to him, ask him about his story, how he got here, what does he do besides drive a cab, how many kids does he have. The usual. But it wasn’t the time or place. I kept my eyes forward watching where he was going, which route he was taking. He was good, not once did he look directly at me in the rear view mirror, but I could tell he was observing me in the corners of his eyes. He was wondering what my story was too. A guy dressed in a suit and tie with a military buzz cut getting in his cab and remaining silent must be giving him the jitters. Plus I just woke up from a coma, and looked like a walking corpse.

  “This is fine,” I called out to him and he pulled over by the corner of Market street. The fare meter read ten dollars and I handed him a ten and a five and got out without a word. A fifty percent tip. I knew that even if they had my picture on the evening news with a reward he wouldn’t say a thing. Guys like this minded their own business, they’d been through enough trouble where they were from and were never looking for more of it, they were trying to stay the hell away from it.

  As I walked I took off the jacket and the tie and rolled up my sleeves, it was getting hot, and I needed to jettison some clothes. There was a homeless man sitting in an alley next to a shopping cart full of his belongings and I laid the jacket and tie on top the cart and kept going.

  A few doors down I went into a second hand store and bought a tie dye tee shirt and a Dodgers baseball hat, and kept moving. Around the corner I went into another second hand store and bought some pants and running shoes. Then I found another homeless guy and gave him the rest of Erasers clothes.

  It seemed like the closer you got to the center of the city, the more homeless and second hand stores you found, and when you at the very epicenter of the city, they disappeared. It was as though the hub was reserved for the ultra-hip and rich, while the outskirts were ringed with despair, and hopelessness.

  I kept walking towards the city, I needed the exercise, needed to clear my brain. I still had a splitting headache and my side ached with broken ribs. I’d walk the pain away.

  The sun is setting and there’s a golden glow enveloping the skyline, while in the midst of the tall buildings, the shadows are deepening.

  I keep an apartment and a car in the city, in separate
buildings separated by a few city blocks. The apartment’s out of the question, too many people know about it, and they’ll have someone there, waiting, watching. The car however, is in a an obscure location and no one knows about it. Tucked into a public lot on the second floor of an office building. That’s my destination. The car has false floorboards and a few choice weapons and night vision gear.

  “Hey man, where you go’in’?” A voice rings out nearby. A gang of rough looking punks has taken up residence at a corner near a liquor store on my path. I think about heading to the other side of the street, but there’s another gang of punks over there too. It’s getting near night time and the rats are coming out of the sewers. The tall gangly one is looking at me and shouts again.

  “I sayeed, hey man where you go’in?”

  As though I didn’t hear him the first time.

  He steps in front of me, blocking my way. I can’t afford any trouble right now but it’s standing right in front of me.

  He’s a spindly mulatto, part white, part Latino and part black, while the gang he’s running with is mostly black with a couple of white guys thrown in for good measure. An equal opportunity gang. He’s either trying to prove something to the guy who’s running this pack, or he’s the guy running the pack trying to prove something to his troops. Either way he’s trying to prove something, and at that moment in time, I was it.

  From far away in the fading light I probably looked like a hippy or a big kid from the suburbs in a goofy tie dye shirt and running shoes. Someone harmless and easily pushed around.

  Now that I’m closer to him he can tell that I’m packing some weight, but it’s the opposite of fat and he can see the serious look in my eyes and it makes him hesitate, I can see that he wants to move away from me, get some space between us, but now that he’s started this whole thing he can’t back down too quickly or he’ll lose respect from the pack of hyenas.

  I’m just one guy, and they are many. He speaks lower now, as the others watch him from the side, talking just loud enough for me and him to hear it.

  “Say homey, you lost? You need directions or somethin’, I only charge five dollah.”

  All I want right now is to just get by him, but there is no way in hell that I’m gonna give this jive turkey five bucks to walk down a public street. My head hurts and my ribs ache and the last thing I need is to get into a fistfight with this pencil neck. I lift my shirt like I’m going to reach into my pocket for the money, lift it just enough to show him the handle of the gun, while I keep watching him.

  He laughed. “Hey, I got one of those too, check this out.” And he lifted his shirt to show me his gun. “We all got one.”

  He looks from the gun and back up at my face again and sees a seriousness that he didn’t expect when he called me out a few moments ago. I don’t give a damn if he and his pals have guns. He can tell by my eyes that I’ve actually used a gun before, and I’ll use this one on him and all his buddies right now if I have to. He squinted in the darkening light at me, looking at my eyes. “What are you man, part Indian?”

  I kept my eyes on him waiting for him to make a move and answered. “I’m part nothin’… man.”

  He nodded while he thought this over, then bit his lip and stepped back and motioned with an open hand for me to continue on my journey. I waited till the gang opened a lane wide enough for me to get through without having to push my way against them. When I was far enough away he called out to me again.

  “Alright, alright! You don’t say much, but you know the magic word, go in peace brothah!”

  The magic word around these parts is handgun.

  I decided to do something about my headache and stopped into a convenience store for some aspirin and a coffee, and while I’m paying for it I check out the date on the newspapers in the rack next to the cashier. There’s no mention of the star being kidnapped. I looked at the front page then flipped all the way to the fifth pages, nothing. The date on all the papers say the fourteenth. Now how in the hell can it be the fourteenth today if we’d escorted the star on the night of the thirteenth, and I’d been in coma as the good doctor had said, for ‘a couple of days’?

  I knew without a doubt that we’d escorted the star on the thirteenth because some of the other guys were worried that it was a bad luck day and I told them it was hogwash. “The thirteenth is a good a day as any,” I told them. “Probably better than any other since most people are afraid of it and you can get the jump on them.” Prophetic words.

  “Are these newspapers a day old?” I asked the guy behind the register.

  “If you mean by a day old are they today’s papers, yes. They brought them here this morning.”

  “Then today’s the fourteenth?”

  “All day and half the night,” he said with a grin.

  Wise guy. I paid for my aspirin and coffee and went back outside. It was darkening quick now, and the lights of the city were taking over the skyline.

  We’d made our move escorting the star right before midnight of the thirteenth, and now it was around six at night on the fourteenth. It had been eighteen hours since they hit us. I’d been awake for about two hours, and out like a light for sixteen hours. A lot can happen in sixteen hours.

  I kept on my walking journey to the city, the skyscrapers getting closer. I cut down a side alley between blocks, past a tattoo parlor and a pool hall and came out on Halo street, a heck of a name for a street with all the trouble lurking in the shadows.

  My car was parked on the second floor of the building across the street and I stayed in the darkness of the alley and watched for a while. The street was busy, lots of cars going each way, people on the sidewalks heading home or to work or out to eat, a few drunks staggering from bar to bar, the usual. It was crowded and I liked crowds. A police cruiser went slowly by and I melded into the brick wall.

  I saw a bunch of revelers exit a restaurant and getting ready to head across the street and I joined them, sticking close behind as they made their way across the road. Like I was part of their group, part of the fun. They were laughing and telling jokes while they walked and had obviously been drinking, probably all day by the looks of it. They were boisterous and loud. They didn’t notice me trailing them, and when we got to the other side of the street, they went one way, and I went the other.

  I like this particular parking garage because it’s busy, there’s always a lot of cars going in and out, and it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. It’s on the edge of the red light district and one of many restaurant rows in the shadow of the city.

  I walked next to the overhang of the building blending into the side of it, maneuvering through the crowd, keeping my eyes ahead, not focused on any one particular thing, but everything. Looking for anything that stands out. Watching for the watchers.

  There’s a side entrance on the alley that not many people know about, and I go quickly through the door and start up the stairs. There’s a light out on the second floor landing and it’s dark. I wait for my eyes to get used to the darkness. This is the type of thing most civilians need to be aware of, a light out in a stairway could mean a mugger is waiting in the shadows to do some mugging and I go up the stairs cautiously. I have the gun in my hand and ready, and if there’s a mugger he’s gonna get the surprise of his life, but it’s clear, and when I get to the second floor landing, the light flickers on and then off again. A malfunction, that’s all.

  Car tires squeal as they maneuver up the circular corkscrew drive up through the vertical parking lot, and I see my little blue sedan parked in the middle of the lot. I stay in the shadow of the stairwell, thankful for the malfunctioning light and watch and wait.

  I stay there for the next twenty minutes or so, and watch as people come off the elevator and pick up their cars, or park their cars and get into the elevator. I watch their eyes and their body language. I use them like crickets in the night while on the perimeter. Normally if a person sees someone lurking in a car or in a corner or a shadow they’ll look that
way, and I watch to see if they are startled by anyone else on the second floor parking lot. I only use the car to stash equipment and I haven’t taken it out of the lot since I put here six months ago. No one knows about it. But still… Old habits die hard. I watch.

  A couple of guys in their mid-twenties with curly black hair and little beards get out of the elevator, talking and joking and then split up and walk around the cars, looking in each one of them, casing the place. They’re up to no good, that’s easy enough to see. Looking to boost a car and go for a joy ride, or just rifle through them looking for cash or anything else they can find. Most of the cars up here are late model cars, most of them have alarms, tough to jack. Mine is about the oldest one here. Unfortunately. They’ve just about finished their rounds, and it looks like they’ve focused on my car, and I really wish they would just go away. They’re talking about it over the top of my car while they have it surrounded. The shorter guy is on the driver’s side while his cohort is on the passenger side and they look like they’re still undecided. Maybe they’ll talk themselves out of it I’m thinking and I won’t have to hurt them. If they do decide to break into my car I’ll make sure they regret it.

  Suddenly, the shorter guy on the driver side pulls a slim Jim from his pants and slides it through the crack in the door and unlocks it and pulls on the handle. The sound of the deep thud and the shock wave compresses the meat on my face and arms as the car explodes in a ball of flame and I half scramble half dive into the stairwell to escape the shrapnel of metal and body parts that’s peppering the walls with sickening splatters. The echo of the blast reverberates in the concrete structure back and forth against the walls ringing in my eardrums, what’s left of them.

  Someone booby trapped my car that no one was supposed to know about. They’ll find out soon enough that it wasn’t me they got, I don’t have curly black hair.

  The seismic action sets off a hundred car alarms on every floor of the parking facility. I run down the stairway with a pack of other people frantically escaping, and exit the alley door calmly and don’t look back. I blend into the crowd that’s forming nearby and count my blessings. Those bastard car thieves just saved my life.