San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  The cityscape levels out the same time I stop seeing people, around 14th and Judah. Clapboard craftsman shacks swap rot with crumbling Victorians sandblasted by ocean wind and salt, their bright candy colors dulled to the shade of the surrounding fog. Judah’s dead-end disappears along with the horizon, a blur of neither ocean nor sky. Even on a clear day it’s like looking at a faded photograph, a plateau of muted roof lines tethered by utility cables at the edge of the world.

  Plan Q: a two-bedroom Spanish bungalow on the outside, pure Boy Scout bomb shelter on the inside. Chemical toilet in the bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling warehouse shelving throughout the master bedroom and living room. Bottled water, canned food, foil pouches of freeze-dried field rations with Russian or German labels, two footlockers marked with red crosses, a portable television and a propane-run generator with an exhaust hose that disappeared through a hole in the back door. A briefcase of clay chips with four new card decks and enough liquor to drown the cabin fever. Skinner had shut off the utilities, boarded up the windows and in every respect ensured that a man could wait a long time inside the place. The punch line to it all was the kitchen cabinets labeled Ralph & George, every inch packed with tins of smoked oysters, sardines, albacore tuna and Alaskan salmon.

  Skinner had a big soft spot for his cats, but they gave me the creeps. The half-Siamese named George had eyes the color of a gas flame and this unwavering, blinkless blue stare, like he could bend metal with his mind. My watch stopped if I pet him too long and I think he tripped my car alarm a couple times, knocked out the street lights when he saw me coming. The other one, Ralph, was a leaden stump of orange fur. I never saw Ralph move from his spot on Skinner’s balcony, not once, but I never saw the same pile of feathers beside him either.

  Skinner Jones, secretly sentimental bastard, had planned on spoiling them when the apocalypse came while he lived on protein bars and dried noodles.

  “I’m hit.” Jimmy sat slumped in a folding chair. His right leg had gone dark and a wet flap of his jeans hung from his bloody thigh.

  “You drip anything outside?”

  “Fuck you. I’m gonna bleed to death, you don’t get me to a hospital.”

  “You’ll bleed to death if you don’t relax.” I rummaged through the medical trunks, found rubbing alcohol, bandages and everything from basic first aid to field surgery gear and bootleg pharmaceuticals. “Get your jeans off so I can take a look.”

  “I’m not letting your wannabe-doctor ass play operation on me.” Jimmy stood, favoring his good leg. “Where the car keys?”

  “By the door.”

  The dumbshit turned to look. I yanked the cap from a bottle of rubbing alcohol and splashed his wound, but good. Jimmy said mother, clenched his teeth and dropped back to his chair.

  “If you were hurt serious, you’da bled all over my car.”

  “It is serious. Fucker shot me.”

  “Maybe. Looks like a movie bullet to me.” Starting with the rip in his thigh, I sliced his jeans open while he called me a choice name or two. “Best you not struggle while my knife’s this close to your nutsack.”

  “The fuck’s a movie bullet?”

  “One of those statistically mythical rounds, the kind that only hit your shoulder.”

  “That’s my leg.”

  “Or the leg.” I doused the wound with more alcohol and Jimmy twitched, then clamped himself still. “They never hit an artery and they never mushroom or fragment. The kind of shit that only happens to heroes in movies while people in real life drop dead.”

  “Or a guy drops dead ’cause the quack sewing ’im up decides to make a clever speech while his fucking blood pours down the drain.”

  Nothing but a few slices in his skin and a wedge of glass that dropped out of his jeans. I decided against going gently with him, poking at his leg with a pair of needle-nosed pliers as I looked for errant shards.

  “The guy fired at us from behind, genius. You cut yourself on some glass. Any ideas?”

  “Your windshield.”

  “This is from a mirror. You hit something when they chased you out of there.”

  “I don’t remember. That sawed-off came out and I just ran. Crashed through all kinds of shit.”

  Once clean, I sealed the cuts with Krazy Glue then wrapped his leg with gauze. Jimmy asked for a hospital again and I said no, that we’d stay out of sight and wait for Skinner.

  I cleaned my hands and listened to the police frequencies. Nobody in custody, my car last seen on Van Ness.

  “Skinner take anything with him when he split?”

  “Big-ass gym bag. Fucker was full, too. Way overdue for pickup,” Jimmy said.

  “Lotta handjobs.”

  “And then some. The place is a collection point.”

  The score was a massage parlor in the Tenderloin. Normally not the most lucrative hit, but I trusted Skinner had his reasons and I was right.

  “So they count it and bag it before they kick it up the ladder,” I said. “That’s gotta be cash from a half dozen handtowel lube shops.”

  “At least. After they cut a slice for the cops, the bagmen disappear the rest.”

  “I don’t suppose you know which cops they’re friendly with.” I tore off a strip of surgical tape with my teeth and sealed his bandages.

  “Same ones we all are.”

  My insides turned to lead. Skinner Jones had pulled a one-eighty on his own plan midway through a job, the job itself both a good score and a calculated burn aimed at the city’s two most rancid cops and their double-barreled hard-on for yours truly.

  “Skinner didn’t fill you in?” Jimmy said.

  “He told me nothing.”

  “Lemme guess. ‘No fireworks, all business.’”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “You bein’ in the dark with Skinner. I don’t like it.”

  “I like it less.”

  “How come you know about this place?” Jimmy opened a can of warm PBR. The four-by-four stack of cases between the chairs could double as a card table.

  “Belongs to Skinner.”

  Jimmy took a long pull from his beer, kept his glare fixed on me.

  “Chill, Rehab. Anyone tries following the paper trail, they’ll starve to death before Skinner’s name turns up.” I resumed tossing through the medical supplies. “He called this Plan Q, his last resort if anything went thermonuclear, shit-fan wrong. He could wait out the heat, right under their noses. First time I’ve actually been here. Wasn’t sure I’d memorized the right street number until I walked inside.”

  “Who else knows about it?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You positive?”

  “Of course.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I gave Skinner my word, Jimmy. You oughtta know me by now.”

  “I need a shower.” Jimmy crushed the can and reached for another. “Wouldn’t mind uncovering one of the windows. Place feels cramped.”

  “Nobody knows this place is occupied. Utilities are cut. We stay inside, keep the windows boarded and doors locked water tight. The full Houdini.”

  “What if I need some fresh air?”

  “We stay inside.”

  “Because?”

  “Because that’s the plan.” I found a bottle of black market tetracycline amidst the painkillers, aspirin and antihistamines. “Start taking these. Whatever it says on the label.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Jimmy said.

  “Think about where you got those cuts and whether or not a little rubbing alcohol was enough to clean them.”

  “I don’t like pills.”

  “You don’t like pills.”

  “Can’t swallow ’em. Unnatural.”

  I wasn’t going to ask about his name.

  “Learn to make it natural, partner, because I’ll gut you in your sleep before I take you to a hospital.”

  We played Texas Hold’em all afternoon and ate beef stew fired over a camping stove. We kept playing cards into the night. Jimmy
killed a case of PBR and I took his every last chip but Skinner never showed.

  “Skinner’s in the wind.” Jimmy moved slowly onto the cot, lifting his leg as though it were made of glass. “I’m outta here tomorrow.” He put on a set of headphones and closed his eyes.

  Skinner Jones was holding my twenty grand for Hoyle. Alive or dead, anyone found Skinner would tie him to the job and then to me. Smoke and Mirrors would mount his head on their precinct wall and muscle every snitch in the city for the word on Johnny Pharaoh, every day, for the next hundred years unless Hoyle’s Numbers found me first.

  Nobody met Hoyle. Hoyle was a disembodied name, three degrees removed from the game but still playing the board from a distance. You did business with a guy who worked for a guy who worked for some people. Eventually, the chain of command stopped with Hoyle but nobody made it that far.

  Anybody got too close or defaulted on a debt, Hoyle said to handle them by the numbers, as in normal procedure. This often required duct tape. Maybe a trunk or perhaps a body of water. It always demanded discretion and, above all, silence. Hoyle’s figure of speech became a running joke among the ranks, who each in turn met with the guy’s disapproval for one reason or another. When the last man breathing had forgotten the joke, the joke became rumor, then legend: The Numbers, Thing One and Thing Two. They could reckon the layout of a darkened room from the echo of a dripping tap. Thing One could freeze locks with his breath, Thing Two could walk through glass, and they could measure your sleeping heartbeat with their ears against your door.

  A spider clung to the dry lip of the kitchen faucet, a drop of black oil suspended from eight bent, black needles, its red belly mark like a symbol from a church window. In a blink, it vanished up the pipe. I stuffed a wad of newspaper into the opening and tamped it tight with my thumb.

  I didn’t sleep. Every itch or stray thread brushing against me in the trapped air of the crumbling house became a drop of black widow oil, poised to plant her cocoon below my skin. Her dark little beads would hatch inside my blood while I waited for Skinner Jones, while I hid from Smoke and Mirrors, Hoyle and the Numbers.

  * * *

  “We can’t do shit here.” Jimmy coughed, leaned over and hawked into a garbage pail. Two days of poker, canned food, police scanner static, network news and no Skinner Jones. I was restless and Jimmy was sick.

  “Too bad. We’re gonna stay.”

  “I need a hospital.”

  “They’re watching the hospitals.”

  “They?”

  “They.”

  Jimmy argued until a coughing fit seized him and he covered his face with a T-shirt.

  “Christ. A few minutes of fresh air, for fuck’s sake. There’s a coffee place on Ninth, across from the Muni stop. Lemme run out, grab us a couple lattes, maybe some deli sandwiches. On me.”

  I knew the place. Soon as Jimmy mentioned it, I could almost hear the rumble of the train down Judah and picture the burst of greenery in the park, the shape of crashing waves.

  “How long you think we could last in here?” Jimmy said.

  “A long time.”

  “How long?”

  “We’d die of boredom before we ran out of food. I’d probably kill you before that happened.”

  “Come on. Guess. I say six months.”

  “Both of us.”

  “Yeah. If we had to.”

  I surveyed the house, its fallout shelter food and black market drugs, the liquor supply, the plywood window sheets blocking out the sun and trapping in the bad air.

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Like doing time, though.” Jimmy shuffled the deck and flaunted his one-handed cut, the only card sleight he knew.

  “Then I guess you’ve never done time.”

  His fingers slipped and the cards hit the table.

  “Maybe I should deal.”

  “Maybe we should up the stakes.” He gave me his idea of a bad-ass stare.

  “To what?”

  “Time.”

  I shoulda seen this coming.

  “We’ve got a hundred and eighty days each.” Jimmy reassembled the deck. “Five-day ante, two-day raise, ten-day limit.”

  “Won’t work.”

  “Why not?” He shuffled.

  “Suppose I win your whole six months. That mean you walk out of here?”

  “Good point.” He shuffled a second time. “How ’bout we play for days outside? Each day we lose is a day we stay locked in here.”

  “But I want to stay locked in here.”

  “So you can’t lose.”

  Fuck-up though he was, I got why people hired him.

  “I’ve seen you play, remember.”

  “Like I said, you can’t lose.” Jimmy shuffled the deck a third time and set it between us.

  “Texas Hold’em.”

  “Draw for the high card.”

  “Don’t bother.” I cut the deck and said, “Deal.”

  Jimmy had been working on his game. He used to be pure shark food. He’d play loose, never check, and he’d see every bet, big or small, to keep chasing some lone longshot card for that mythical winning hand. He was playing tighter now. He checked and folded more frequently, calculating my best possible hand instead of his own.

  He might take longer to get eaten, but he was still shark food. He went to sleep three weeks poorer, and the next afternoon he was down a whole month and a half when the news ran a story about another Golden Gate suicide.

  “Wonder what makes this guy’s high dive worth the airtime.” Jimmy checked his cards and tossed a five-day chip onto his two-day ante.

  Good question. Unhappy civilians outnumbered the pigeons. Jumpers hit the bay like clockwork.

  “… won’t release the identity of the man found floating …”

  I met his five and raised him ten. Jimmy folded and I scooped away another week of his life outside.

  “… may be linked to several high-profile robberies throughout the Bay Area …”

  My vaporous suspicion condensed to certainty.

  “Skinner Jones.”

  “How do you know?”

  “One of those things.” I stared at my chips, the stack of Jimmy’s days together with mine.

  “Least we know what happened to the man. You still wanna stay here?”

  “Not now, Jimmy.”

  “Skinner Jones couldn’t take the heat, sounds to me like. Let’s get out.”

  “Watch your mouth, Rehab.”

  He hadn’t heard me. He’d stuffed the balled-up shirt to his face to stifle another coughing jag, spat a heavy glob into the garbage pail, then, without warning, shoved his remaining chips into the pot.

  “The fuck?”

  “All or nothing,” he said.

  “Jimmy.”

  “Your homeboy’s a floater. And if it wasn’t an accident then they know where to find us.”

  “They?”

  “Pharaoh, or whoever took out Skinner Jones.”

  “Just because you’d start singing at the first whiff of immunity—”

  Jimmy hit the television with his fist. The bottle-blonde anchorwoman shattered into pixels and noise.

  “You think that was a botched plea bargain? Jesus.”

  The anchorwoman reappeared. She flashed a smile insured for millions, moved the blank papers around on her desk and nodded at the weatherman.

  “All or nothing,” he said again. “You lose, I walk. You win, we both stay until provisions run out.”

  I couldn’t figure what angle he was playing. Jimmy didn’t know angles. Jimmy did the shit work for the guys who did. So, my angle was win the game and stick to the wager. Jimmy gets drunk, mopes for a day, crawls to the table to win it all back. When I have a plan and decide it’s safe to leave, Jimmy’s luck will improve.

  “Sounds like a bet,” I said.

  I shuffled. Jimmy cut. I dealt two hands then the flop: ace of spades, ace of clubs and the eight of clubs. The game was Sudden Death Hold’em and we could discard an
d draw in lieu of each betting round. By the final draw, the six of clubs and the eight of spades were face up with the others.

  I called. Jimmy showed. He held a pair of clubs, the king and the two. The odds of drawing a flush in a typical game are five hundred to one. The odds against a king high flush are greater still, and if you’re Jimmy Rehab, you start writing zeros until your arms falls off. His game had indeed improved but he was still Jimmy Rehab, shark food.

  “Get used to battlefield meals.” I dropped my eight of diamonds onto the flop for a full house. “You try sneaking out tonight and I’ll gut you.”

  Jimmy was pale. He stood, cracked open a beer and limped toward the bunk room.

  “I’ll win it all back tomorrow,” he said. That calm of his, again.

  ***

  First thing, I made coffee, thirty-weight black. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I heard the deafening headphone hiss from his CD player eight feet away. Seven hours since he’d crashed and his eardrums were in shreds. I pulled the headphones away and like the spider darting up the dormant faucet, the smell hit my nose, rebounded off my brain and crash landed in my stomach. I’m supposed to say Jimmy, hey man, wake up, but I don’t bother. His lids were slack beneath my thumb, the thin skin pliant as an empty rubber glove and his eyes had gone to frost.

  I hooked my knife at the cuff of his left leg and sheared his jeans, ankle to thigh. The bandages beneath were damp with something thick and yellow. The veins in his leg had darkened with the trail of infection that had run rampant for the last three days. I dug the antibiotics from the pocket of his coat, the bottle unopened and every capsule accounted for.

  I dragged Jimmy to the bathroom, cradled his neck over the toilet and emptied out his blood with a knife stroke. It sounded like the time my father dumped his aquarium but lasted longer. I dropped the carcass into the bathtub and set to tearing Skinner’s place apart for the next hour, searching for tools, empty paint cans, anything.

  I drew a line above Jimmy’s eyebrows and cut around his skull with a hacksaw and pulled at the top of his head until it broke suction with a loud wheezing kiss. His brain held fast to his spine until I dug into both sides with a set of screwdrivers.

  “You’ve never used this thing in your life. Give it up.”

  It shot loose, bouncing off the shower tile and slipping down to the drain like a lump of gray soap.