by Sean Dexter
“Who set you up?” I asked.
“I don't know who.”
I snickered. Who wouldn't want to get rid of Mad Dog? Everybody wants to get rid of the rock man. Cops. Other dealers. Scammers. Bangers. Rockheads looking for free rock. Straights.
“Did he have any face-to-face enemies?”
“One he talked about. Some chump he fucked from South Bay, San Jose maybe. Mad Dog got him busted because he owed the chump money and didn't want to pay him.”
“He framed the guy?”
“Yeah. The guy got San Bruno time, not hard time, but he was gone six, seven months. That's something.”
I called bullshit on that. “Misdemeanor time anybody can do standing on their heads. Snitching on anything less than felony time is stupid.”
Mario glowered, a habit he probably didn't know he had. “The dude was s'pose to do long time, be a three time loser and never get parole, but the DA dropped it down in plea bargaining, 'cause the jail's too full with three-time losers.”
“So Mad Dog's snitch didn't hold.”
“Man, it snapped.”
“What was the chump's name?”
“Mad Dog called him the Spaniard. He wasn't Spanish, just another Mexican that got some money, so now he called himself Spanish, not Mexican. Don't know his name. One tough dude, I heard. Mad Dog was scared of him.”
“What did he look like?”
“Mean.” Mario was glum. “I never seen him.”
“Where does Cheryse come into it?”
I saw how they looked at each other, and I saw hopeless love that was doomed from the start.
She spoke up. “Yo te quiero mucho,” she told him.
I swallowed hard. “La mona, aunque se vista de seda,” I quoted. I broke off seeing Mario's face in obvious pain. “Where'd you two lovebirds meet?”
“We was in Juvie together. Then I seen him a prisoner over at Mad Dog's.”
Surprised, I looked at Cheryse again. “Why were you there?”
Mario talked for her. “Mad Dog made women have sex with him to score rock. He never gave no free drugs. Her pimp wanted some rock, so him and Mad Dog made Cheryse have sex with me, and they watch us. She help me 'scape once, but I still got caught and had to go back.”
“How did you help him escape?”
She was proud of herself. “Broke a window.”
According to her, Mario was held captive by Mad Dog, allowed a single meal a day, and had to sleep in a room whose windows were boarded up and whose door was often nailed shut.
“How long were you a prisoner? Three months, right?”
He nodded. “If I 'scaped again, Mad Dog said he knew where my mother lived. Where could I go? I don't try no more.”
“Your mom and the cops say you sold crack,” I said to the boy.
“He sold crack so his mom can keep her house and not be homeless.”
“I liked the dough,” he admitted. “But if I don't sell rock, I don't get food.”
They waited for me to answer.
I caught on. I was an adult, a grown-up, and the children were waiting for me to answer them. We all knew they wouldn't listen to me and my words. They knew an adult's answer was no solution to their problems. They knew adult answers involved too much up-front pain, and they were children who still believed good things can come true, if you just wish it hard enough. If you close your eyes real tight and click your heels three times and say, “There's no place like home,” you could go home again. But childhood is a jockey who rides on a paper horse. Nobody rides the paper horse for long; there's too much rain.
We locked eyes, Mario and me. I wanted him to turn himself in to the police. I recognized the look in his eyes, and I knew from all my experiences on the street he never would. He was doomed and both of us knew it. I wondered if Cheryse knew it, but then she was a fourteen year old hooker, and she was more doomed than he was.
“What do you want, Mario?” I asked. I talked like a big brother, not a father. “No bullshit. No preaching, no sermons. What do you want?”
He looked at Cheryse, and she looked back. He licked his dry lips and looked at me. “Me and Cheryse go to Mexico, my family's village. In Mexico I don't live like this.”
“You're fourteen years old.”
“In Mexico I'm fourteen years old. In San Francisco I'm gone be tried as an adult for nothing I did.”
“Don't you worry about those Vivisection shooters here?”
“They don't live here now,” he said. “The cops want them so bad, they cleared out and won't come back.”
“That means this place is up for grabs,” I told him. “Soon somebody is going to want this turf, and there will be gunfire and the air will be filled with stray bullets and innocent people will die.”
“We can leave now,” he said. “Got nothing holding us.”
“You can stay and get your name cleared.”
He scoffed at that nonsense. “I can't defend myself here. If I win, I still go to jail forever. In Mexico we get a new start.”
“You need cash to blow town. So who you gonna call?”
“We gonna be all right.”
“Right.” I thought of the American Dream: a fresh start in a new land. “If you went to Mexico, you can never come back to the states.”
“I never want to come back here.”
“You can never come back!”
He truly understood this time. “Por tola vida!”
I agreed. “Until the end of time.”
He gave me a kid's goofy grin. “Going this way I don't got to sneak across the border in the dead of night.”
“Are you going to steal a car to get to Mexico?”
He did not look at me.
“You'll have cops every step of the way.”
“I die if I stay here.”
The night outside our window erupted with the sound of gunfire, random shots fired into the darkness. Automatic weapons fire shattered the window and punctured the walls and the ceiling. A second swarm of bullets burst through the windows and chewed up the ceiling and the walls, and plaster chips fell like hailstones on us.
Cheryse grabbed up the stun gun. She touched my arm and jolted me. The touch lasted forever, only a fraction of a minute, and I thought I was having a heart attack. I bellowed and screamed, and as I fell to the floor, echoes ricocheted throughout the cavernous hall.
Cheryse Geneva zapped me again. While I lay writhing, Mario Rosales and Cheryse then grabbed what they could--including my two hundred dollars--and took off running. They could have killed me easily enough, but they didn't. Nowadays that makes them the good guys.
When I could stand, I climbed to my feet. I went to the window. I thought I saw the two running from the building toward the far shadows behind the other tower. They disappeared into Vivisection Valley. Romeo and Juliet on the run. I wished them good luck. I knew they had none coming.
I searched their love nest and found they had left most of their belongings behind them, along with several piles of garbage. Those belongings included all her trick outfits and a sawed-off .12 gauge Remington 870 shotgun.
I wrapped the shotgun in a whore's chemise, careful not to smudge any fingerprints. I couldn't leave the shotgun here. It would be gone before I reached my car.
*****
Two days later at Molly's Donuts I read in The San Francisco Examiner that a teenager was shot and killed by a San Diego police officer during a struggle as the officer attempted to arrest him and a teenage girl for allegedly stealing a car.
The two teenagers, both fourteen, were stopped at 3:30 a.m. when the officer noticed them driving with a busted taillight. The officer's computer reported the car had been stolen. While he tried to handcuff the driver, the girl attacked the officer with a stun gun.
During the struggle, the officer's gun discharged once, striking the boy in the head. The boy was taken to San Diego Medical Center and pronounced dead on arrival. The girl was booked at the San Diego Juvenile Hall for auto theft. The S
an Diego police did not identify the youths or the officer to the newspaper.
Fred Zackel was discovered by the award winning novelist Ross Macdonald at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1975. MacDonald became a mentor and was influential in the direction of Zackel's fiction writing. Zackel published his first novel Cocaine and Blue Eyes in 1978 and Macdonald wrote at the time, “Fred Zackel's first novel reminds me of the young Dashiell Hammett's work, not because it is an imitation, but because it is not. It is a powerful and original book made from the lives and language of the people who live in San Francisco today.” It was followed by Cinderella After Midnight. Both novels feature his San Francisco private detective, Michael Brennen. In 1983 the TV movie “Cocaine & Blue Eyes” was aired on NBC. A third private eye novel, Tough Town Cold City, came out in 2010. These and other writings can be found on Amazon. Zackel teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Here, last, but I hope not least, is a story of my own featuring Noah Milano, the son of a notorious gangster, always trying to find redemption as a security specialist/investigator. I hope you will enjoy this story enough to seek out my other work.
Hired From the Grave
A Noah Milano short story
by
Jochem Vandersteen
ONE
I’d answered Mark Beck’s phone call four hours ago. He’d told me he wanted to hire me; details would follow when I met him at his Burbank apartment. I’d just arrived there.
I’d rung the bell several times, but there'd been no answer. I took a look inside but saw no movement. I took my cell phone and called his home phone. No answer.
I had a feeling something was wrong. Why make an appointment with me and not show up? I decided to have a look inside. If this guy was in trouble, maybe I could help.
My mentor, Kane, had taught me how to pick a lock. I’d gotten pretty good at it too. That was one of the things being the son of L.A.’s biggest crime boss got you to excel in; criminal activities. It took me under five minutes to get in.
I entered the apartment. I could hear noises that sounded like someone was having sex. More than one person, really. I walked in and found the sound was coming from the TV where a porn flick was playing.
The man watching it wasn’t able to follow the plot anymore, though. Hanging from the ceiling fan was a dead body, a rope around the neck.
“What the hell?” I exclaimed. I called the cops.
I knew the first detective to show up. Brian McCall had been after my dad for years.
“And exactly how did you get in?” he asked me.
“I don’t think we should focus on that,” I said.
“You fucking picked the lock, didn’t you? That’s burglary. That could cost you your license.”
“I didn’t know you were in the Burglary Unit or in the PI Review board,” I said.
McCall sighed. “Don’t need the extra paperwork, anyway.” He motioned to the coroner’s investigator that was examining the dead body.
The CI, a reed-thin guy with glasses and a goatee came over.
“What’s the verdict?” McCall asked him.
“Looks like a case of auto-erotic asphyxiation to me.”
McCall nodded. “I agree. Pack him up to the morgue. Sounds like there won’t be much to investigate on this one.”
“Isn’t that a bit fast?” I asked.
“Don’t get involved, Milano,” McCall said.
“I’m just thinking that there’s always a possibility this was staged. I mean, why agree to meet with me and go and do something like that in the meantime?”
McCall shrugged. “Hey, I’m not a shrink. I think it’s totally crazy to whack off while you hang yourself in the first place. What do I know about when people get the urge?”
It didn’t sound like he had a lot of respect for the dead.
“Get out of here, Milano. If you make any trouble about it I’ll run you in for breaking and entering.”
There didn’t seem to be much I could do about it, so I left.
TWO
It kept bothering me. I was wondering why Mark Beck wanted to hire me. I had trouble accepting the fact his death wasn’t related to that. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence.
After debating whether I should take on an unpaid job like this and arguing I didn’t have any paying jobs at the moment anyway, I decided to investigate Beck’s death. Three days had passed since he’d been found spinning like a piñata, I needed to get started before the trail got any colder.
I started out with doing a background check on Beck. I found out he had a good credit history, no criminal record, low web activity and was making a living as a waiter in a Hollywood diner.
I decided to have a talk with his colleagues and went to the diner.
The diner was a nostalgic looking place, right out of a fifties movie. Lots of neon, red and white interior, posters of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe on the wall. I sat down and ordered a coffee from the waitress, a young, Asian girl with a ring through her eyebrow. I always cringe when I see those.
When she arrived with the coffee I asked her if she knew Beck.
“Yes, I did. So sorry about his death. And such a painful way to go. Why do you ask?”
I decided to play it straight and told her.
“Wow, a PI? Cool,” she said.
“Not often,” I told her. “Anyway, I prefer the title security specialist. Do you have any idea why he would feel the need to hire me?”
She shrugged. “Not really. He wasn’t married or anything, so he wouldn’t want you to find out if his wife was cheating on him or something like that.”
“Any special person in his life?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nope, he almost seemed celibate. But you should talk to Kitty if you want to know more about him. She was closer to him than I was.”
“I’d like that. Is she working today?”
“She starts her shift in thirty minutes. Maybe you’d like something to eat while you wait?”
“Sure,” I said and ordered a burger. It was a pretty good one, not too fat and with enough lettuce and pickles to make it a solid buy.
Jenny walked over to me, flanked by a black girl with short hair and nice smile. Jenny introduced her as Kitty.
I shook her hand.
“You want to know a little more about Mark Beck?” she asked.
I nodded. I explained the situation to her. “Jenny told me you knew Mark pretty well.”
“Yeah, I guess. We liked the same kind of music, huge fans of Rhianna, both of us. Talking about that started our friendship, making us more than just colleagues.”
“You hit it off in a romantic sense?” I ventured.
She laughed. “Not a chance in hell. Mark’s gay.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
“Yeah, he was kinda in the closet about it, but he dug boys, not girls. Even his parents didn’t know about it, but he really was gay.”
“He confided in you about that?”
“Yeah, I told him everything about the losers I dated and he told me about the losers he dated. Neither one of us was lucky in love.”
“Sorry to hear about that.”
“Yeah, life can suck. I got laid more often than he did, though. Gay as he might be, the fact he kept his sexual preferences a secret to most people didn’t make it easy for him to have much of a love life.”
“Did he ever mention any names?”
“Nope, sorry. It was just like Loser with Moustache, or Loser Working at Car Dealership. Like that.”
“Can you take a guess why he might’ve wanted to hire me?”
She thought about that. “Maybe. He sometimes talked about wanting to track down his biological father.”
“Was he adopted?”
“Not exactly. Apparently his mommy birthed him as a souvenir from a one-night stand.”
“Do you know where his mother lives?”
“I know where she works. She owns a bakery.”
&
nbsp; THREE
On my way to the bakery I thought about what Kitty had told me. It convinced me even more Mark’s death wasn’t an accident. The porn that was playing on his TV was heterosexually oriented porn. Didn’t seem like something a gay man would put on.
The bakery was a small one. I entered.
There was a stout woman behind the counter. She had a bad perm and too much makeup on. We were the only people in the store.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Noah Milano. Might you by any chance be Mark Beck’s mother?”
“I am,” she said.
“My condolences,” I said.
“Did you know my son?” she asked.
“Not very well,” I said and explained how I’d come to know him.
“Why would my son want to hire a private eye?”
“It might be because he wanted to locate his father.”
“I have a hard time believing that. He already knows his father, he might not be the biological one but my Burt is the one who raised him.”
“I’m sure he did a fine job of it too, but I think I can understand his reasons a bit if he wanted to.”
“Get out,” a voice from behind the woman said. It was a tall, bald man with a goatee. “She’s suffered enough. Leave her alone.”
“Burt? I’m just trying to understand why your son wanted to hire me.”
“That’s not relevant anymore, is it?” the man I supposed was Burt said. He held up a kitchen knife. “Get the hell out.”
I went through my options. I could pull the 9mm Glock holstered at the small of my back. I could jump over the counter, disarm Burt and shove the knife up his ass. I could also leave these people alone with their grief and anger. The last option seemed to be the right thing to do.
FOUR
Minnie opened the door to her apartment and gave me a hug. She was wearing a Garfield T-shirt and socks. I couldn’t help noticing how well-tanned her legs were. We never went beyond a platonic friendship, but I was never blind to her beauty. She’d been my best friend since I saved her from the kindergarten bullies.
