San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  “Good. I hope he broke his damn neck.”

  Greta looked dispassionately at the motionless body lying on top of the rusted metal at the bottom of the elevator shaft, about three feet below the first floor of the warehouse. Blood trickled from his mouth. When he didn’t move, she climbed down and reached into his pocket, pulling out the folding money he’d been showing off. He wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

  Greta shoved the money into her own pocket, climbed out of the shaft, and took Hank’s arm. They ran through the warehouse, back to where Jake and Elva were still sleeping it off next to the gray ashes of the fire. Greta scooped up the bag of doughnuts and zipped them inside the brown nylon bag. No sense letting food go to waste.

  “Where we going now?” Hank asked.

  She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed for the street. “Invisible time.”

  PART IV

  DESOLATION ANGELS

  STRET COURT

  BY SETH MORGAN

  Outer Mission

  (Originally published in 1990)

  The state of war with the Wah Ching mandated that the Sing brothers stay constantly on the move. To find them, Joe loitered in Chinatown Park, searching out one of their minions for instructions. There, dozing behind his pulleddown porkpie hat beneath the checker pavilion’s snapping pennants, the wizened pigtailed dopepeddler known only as Firecracker.

  “Barkersan!” Firecracker cackled once Joe roused him from his stupor. Bright beady eyes laughed from a face like a desiccated apricot. “Doggone no see, long time.”

  Hastily Joe asked where Joe and Archie Sing were to be found. Firecracker knew the Barker was trusted by the brothers and issued a convoluted set of directions. Thanking him, Joe halfturned to leave, then stopped, flinging back his head and puffing his cheeks disconsolately. Releasing his breath with a curse, he turned back.

  “Front me a dime of your gunpowder, Firecracker.”

  Surprise further wrinkled Firecracker’s face. He’d never known Barkersan to use coke. But his next knowing cackle guessed Joe had a good reason for wanting it now. With a motion subtle and fluid as the T’ai Chi performed by nearby youths in martial pajamas, Firecracker swept off his porkpie hat, plucked a plastic pane of white powder from its band, and palmed Joe a quarter gram.

  * * *

  The vast import warehouse near the piers at the foot of Telegraph Hill was owned by one of the brothers’ innumerable relatives. A loft that could be reached only through labyrinthine secret passages was on their rotation of hideouts.

  “Heard you booked Rooski out of the Troll’s just before the cops nailed him,” said Joe Sing, the elder of the two almost identical Chinese brothers seated on futons facing Joe in the tan speckled light of bamboo blinds. Their tight facial skin was a luminous saffron not unlike the multitude of ceramic Buddhas sold below.

  Joe sat crosslegged, facing them. “News travels.”

  “Where you got him?” Archie asked.

  “Stashed at a chick’s crib in the Tenderloin. She’s out running credit cards, he’s on a nod.”

  “You figured what to do with him?” Joe Sing asked.

  “Book his skinny red ass as far out of Dodge as I can.” Joe tipped his head. “You know the Fat Man’s porno movie palace on Jones?”

  “Yeah, only I thought it shut down with the rest. You know, home videos, new blue laws.”

  “The Kama Sutra’s about the last. The Fat Man only keeps it open for the betting bank he runs out of its basement. I’m gonna rip it.”

  The elder Sing’s obsidian stare narrowed; the Barker wasn’t known for daring capers. “You taking down the Fat Man?”

  Joe nodded. “Had the idea for months.”

  “Dangerous dude to fuck with,” Archie observed.

  “Not as dangerous as the cops if they get their hands on Rooski. I’m dogmeat then.”

  It was Joe Sing’s turn to nod. “What are your drawings?”

  The brothers listened with implacable half smiles as Joe outlined his plan. From below arose the sound of the engines and crashing gears of delivery trucks picking up orders. A large ceiling fan stirred the smells of sandalwood and cane, sawdust and varnish, and from somewhere frying fish.

  “Right on Front Street,” Joe summed up. “Blast in big as Dallas, have Rooski cover the patrons while I throw down on whatever motherfuckers are in the basement.”

  Joe Sing’s brow arched lazily, like a cat stretching. “You’re using Rooski?”

  “Got to. Cant do it solo. And I need more firepower. I cant use this …” Joe withdrew the Browning from the back of his pants. “Rooski’s been dropping things lately and I cant risk the cops tracing this through the Troll to us.”

  Joe Sing’s eyes vanished when he laughed. “We thought you might bring along the Troll’s piece to barter … You must have heard about … lunch at the Golden Boar yesterday.”

  Joe grinned crookedly. He’d counted on the Sing brothers giving him the ordnance used in the restaurant massacre. It was a switch they’d pulled a year earlier. The Sings had knocked off a Republican campaign office fat with cash contributions. The next day Joe and another addict used the same guns and disguises to jack an abortion clinic overstocked with painkillers. Both were alibied for the hour of the others’ crime, flummoxing the cops.

  Joe dry fired and shot the sliding bolt with a clang, then handed the automatic across. Archie Sing took it behind a screen and emerged with a slideaction, pistolgripped Mossberg Bullpup and a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard, a .38 favored by criminals for its trigger shroud, which prevented snagging on belts and clothing at critical moments.

  “Just ditch em close to the scene.” Joe Sing’s eyes disappeared again.

  Archie also handed Joe a paper sack. Peering in, Joe chuckled. He pulled out two rubber masks, the kind that pull down to cover the entire head. One was Ronald Reagan, complete with textured pompadour; the other Donald Duck, blue tasseled cap and all. At the sack’s bottom were other essentials: plastic wrist restraints, surgical gloves and tape, extra shotgun shells, wire cutters.

  “I owe you guys one,” Joe said.

  “No,” Joe Sing said. “We owe you.”

  Joe gathered his booty and rose. “You guys figure you can find a party or something to go to around six or seven tonight?”

  The Sing brothers nodded in unison.

  “Playing against the Fat Man’s a dangerous game,” Joe Sing warned one last time, “and teaming with Rooski only lengthens the odds.”

  “Aint no long shot, it’s my only shot,” Joe said with a peculiar laugh. He halted halfway through the beaded curtain, smiling slyly. He reached in the paper sack and lifted out the Reagan mask like a Medusa head.

  “But I’m bettin I can win just this one for the Gipper.”

  * * *

  If Nadine Ackley had her druthers, she would have used surgical gloves to collect their money and issue tickets to the Kama Sutra’s patrons. No telling where the hands slipping the bills through the cutout glass halfmoon had been. Better yet, Nadine would have preferred the ticket kiosk was fitted like a NASA lunar unit for collecting moon rocks, with robotic arms. That way she wouldn’t have to worry about their icky breath either. Breath from strangely breathless mouths which also seemed always, well … wet. Her ticket booth was a shark cage, and her leaking innocence, the blood drawing the solicitors, slobberers, outright flashers, and—though it hadn’t happened yet, she was certain any night—rapists.

  This nippy evening a copy of People magazine lay open on her lap. With her customary seamless blend of outrage and astonishment, she read between ticket sales the perky paeans to people who feasted at the same groaning boards of life where she starved. From time to time she inadvertently touched the photographs as though feeling for the substance behind the designer sportswear, capped teeth, and flashbulb eyes.

  She was feeling up Sylvester Stallone and scowling at the tart towering at his side and thinking as long as Rocky was going to wear elevator shoes, he should at le
ast make sure they made him taller than his bimbos, when there came two taps on her glass. It was growing dark, and her vision was impaired by her own reflection in the glass, and at first she thought someone was furiously squeezing a tube of Finesse Creme Rinse at her, like the kind she used at home. That’s what the chubby pink tube and stuff splatting the glass looked like. Only when the tube accordioned back into itself like a giant clam’s head did she shriek and grab for the Mace. By then the “perp,” as she’d heard TV police call them, was long gone around the corner of Jones to Turk. She replaced the Mace with a jug of 409 and roll of paper towels she kept for just such emergencies. Only she couldn’t reach the drippy smear through the small halfmoon aperture. And it was so wet, so … alive.

  “Tu-two, please.” A pale freckled hand slipped through a ten.

  “Help me clean up that n you can go in for free,” Nadine pleaded, pushing back the ten along with the 409 and a wad of paper towels.

  “Help her,” said the second man. He stood with his back to the street wearing one of those dimestore rain ponchos. He clutched a big paper sack beneath his arm. Probably obscene ointment and such, Nadine didn’t care. All depravity paled next to the secretion crusting her window like a squished jellyfish.

  “You’re so kind, sir,” wheedled Nadine, “but you’re only spreading it.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” The hand fleeced with pale red hair redid the job somewhat better, although with some difficulty since its owner kept his other hand hiding his face. Nadine didn’t wonder why, only why he bothered with her window smeared with that opaque … shudder.

  “Thank you,” she said primly and let Joe and Rooski into the Kama Sutra for services rendered.

  * * *

  “Ha … Ha … Ha,” Fabulous Frank honked sarcastically when he saw Ronald Reagan clomping down the concrete steps to the basement office; he hummed a few bars of “Hail to the Chief”: “Dum dum dee dum dum …”

  The bookie was playing gin with Quick Cicero on the metal desk. Quick didn’t seem to get the joke. His snaky pale eyes slitted; his lip shivered and curled.

  “What’s the matter? It’s just Lou playin one of his practical jokes.” Lou was the bartender down at the Silk’n’Spurs on Geary, Frank’s favorite watering hole. “For a guy named Quick, sometimes you aint … Hey, Ronnie! What’s in the paper sack? Rubber turds? Ha!”

  El Fabuloso was still laughing, discarding the deuce of hearts, when the muzzle rose from beneath the poncho.

  “Both of you pootbutts. On the floor.” Rather than muffle Joe’s voice, the latex mask acted like a diaphragm to amplify and resonate it. When the expug made a move for the open drop safe, the Gipper’s likeness loudly vibrated: “NOW! Out here, side by side. Face down! And nothing sexy, I’ll dust ya, I swear you’ll die …”

  Fabulous Frank had too often heard the selfhypnotic cadences of men desperate enough to kill to lose any time hugging the concrete. Yet Quick lay down slowly and carefully beside him as if worried about his goddam drycleaning bill. Trying to stall. Now where’s the percentage in that? The gambler in Frank was real curious. He felt something plastic looping and cinching his wrists. Those nifty new disposable cuffs the cops had started using. Seemed every new wrinkle the cops came up with, the crooks turned around and used on registered Republicans like Francis Stutz.

  Joe sprang to the open safe. He set the Bullpup on the desk and scooped out several buff envelopes stuffed with cash and betting slips. He didn’t have to open them, he could feel they contained only a few hundred. That’s why the safe was open, the runners hadn’t come in yet.

  Oh shit, Rooski, howled Joe’s heart as his hand searched the safe’s bottom—hardly enough cash to get you to Oakland … Hold the phone, what’s this?

  Joe withdrew a velvet pouch. He used his teeth to untie its drawstrings and shook out what resembled a big compass with a blue stone hinge. Joe held it up close to the mask’s eye slit, regretting that the Gipper had always to grin, narrowing them. Christ! The hinge stone was a blue diamond bigger than Joe’s left nut! Could it save Rooski? … No, too hot to hock, raced Joe’s mind. Too big to fence. It would have to be hidden for a long time. But there wasn’t any time, not with Tarzon breathing down their necks. Time for Joe to defend himself from Rooski was running out where Front Street deadended in a basement on Jones.

  “Take the Moon n you’re dead n stinkin, punk,” Quick Cicero spit.

  Ronald Reagan leaped across tromboning a round in the gun and jammed the muzzle in Quick’s ear. Fabulous Frank waited for the roar, squeezed his eyes tight so flying skull shard wouldn’t poke one out.

  Suddenly, commotion above; Ronnie looked at the ceiling, cursed. With wrist flourishes worthy of a rodeo roper Ronnie whipped surgical tape three times around their heads and across their mouths. Then he stuffed the cash envelopes in the paper sack, replaced the diamond necklace in its velvet pouch, stuffing this inside his clothing, and snatched the Bullpup off the desk again.

  The next thing heard by Fabulous Frank, Dean of the Daily Double, was the gallop of boots up the concrete steps. The lights went out, the upstairs bolt was shot, and he and Quick Cicero were left in the dark trussed up like Christmas turkeys.

  * * *

  The scene upstairs did what the White House never could, aged Ronald Reagan eight years. He told Donald Duck to just wait for him at the top of the basement stairs situated right inside the entrance. Station himself in the back by the projection booth and make sure none of the audience got wise—and wait. Nothing too out of place about a jackoff in a Donald Duck suit in this theater. When Joe finished robbing the basement bank, they could slip out unnoticed.

  But nooo, not this Donald Duck. The lights were up, the movie still running—looked like the Statue of Liberty blowing a freight train. And beneath the screen it looked as if Donald had organized a summary round pound. Waving the Bodyguard, he had all eleven moviegoers ranked buck-naked before the first row of seats, clothing piled at their feet like guys at an Army physical. Except half these guys had hardons in various stages of tumescence. Nervously they shifted from foot to foot, one eye on the guntoting duck, the other fastened to the Bearded Clam That Ate San Pedro, which was being squeezed down by dirty fingernails the size of steamshovels onto a flesh-toned Washington Monument.

  Ronald Reagan ran down the aisle crying, “What is this, a circle jerk?”

  Some porno buff al buffo was just destined to ask: “Who are these masked men?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” screamed Ronald. The comic saluted. “Yo, boss.”

  “Dont get mad,” begged Donald. “The projectionist opened the door and asked what I was doin in this …” Rooski touched his duckbill.

  “Pack that meat in, you cumsuckin bitch!” kibitzed the comic. It was hard not admiring her enthusiasm as, vigorously posting up and down on the monument, she began blowing a shiny black submarine, glans to gonads. The comic was flogging up a big one. Ronald had to slap the Miracle Fibre feathers on the back of Donald’s head to retrieve his attention.

  “Thu—that’s it. Before I could get out the gun, he slammed the projection booth door and locked it. I knew we was made so I did this …” Donald swung the two-inch barrel at his prisoners.

  “Dont point that thing at me!” one yelled.

  “Sorry,” Donald mumbled, dropping his bead obligingly.

  “Squish … SLURP … squish,” went the onscreen orifices.

  “Phone! Is there a goddam phone in the booth?” cried Ronald.

  “I forgot to check. I was just waitin on you to help me clean out these guys.”

  Ronald snatched the .38 from Donald and slapped the shotgun in his hands. He shouted at him to cover these perverts and ran back up the aisle. Behind him the Clam That Ate San Pedro was going whole hog, wedging the black sub up its companion valve. The screen filled with two pistons chugging in tandem into twin cylinders someone had the practical sense of humor to disguise as human genitalia.

  Joe banged on the projection booth door with
the Smithy butt and hollered, “Open up or I’ll blow the lock off!”

  “I’m comin, OH GOD I’M COMIN!” the soundtrack answered.

  Christ, and that emetic soft rock endemic to department stores and airport lounges. That shlock street characters called shoplifting music. Bad enough alone, but accompanied by the stagey grunting, arty ooomphing, and all the other phony phonetics these method players had read some smutty where and were faithfully reproducing for the silver screen—Joe was grateful that the mask was so faithful to the Gipper’s physiogomy as to reproduce his partial deafness by stopping the ears with latex.

  He decided to skip shooting the doorknob. Probably only worked on TV. Just his luck, it’d ricochet and blow off his foot. He checked for telephone wires. None. Probably just an intercom to the basement.

  BOOM! The shotgun blast from below stopped Joe’s heart two beats. He stared aghast at the silver screen, where the two Titan missiles had withdrawn their warheads from the Great Divide and were supposed to be geysering like twin Old Faithfuls to the strains of the “Star Spangled Banner” according to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass—there instead gaped an enormous ragged hole ringed with smoke.

  Rooski had gotten too far into the spirit of the thing and discharged at the same climactic moment.

  His neglected fold bolted up the opposite aisle.

  Up the ruptured screen rose the pathetic wail: “Jo-WHOA!”

  No time to stop the runaway audience. And the zip damn fool just used his real name. Luckily it matched that of the mask’s last user. In this instant Joe acknowledged to himself what perhaps he’d known all along he had to do. Had to do before Rooski did the same to him. It’ll hurt me more than you, ran the old nursery con through his head.

  He rushed down the aisle, grabbed Rooski, and hustled him out the fire exit giving onto an alley. There, in an abandoned Pontiac, he ditched the masks, the robbery gear, the Smithy. He wasn’t breaking faith with the Sings by keeping the Bullpup. It was enough that it was seen.

  In any event, it would be found with Rooski at the end.