by Jack Heath
When it’s a short ride, I always take a seat near the front so I don’t have to walk past as many people who might remember me later. When it’s a long ride, I take a seat near the back to reduce the number of people who can casually stare at me while I’m sitting down. But today there are only two free seats, and one of them is next to a woman so fat that there isn’t much of the seat left empty anyway. The other is near the back, and I take it.
‘Howdy,’ says the man I’m sitting next to. Shaved head, short beard. Tracksuit.
‘Howdy,’ I say without making eye contact. There’s something sticky under my shoes, like a recently evaporated puddle of Coke. Looking down, I see a line of ants looping through the stain, scraping it up with their pincers. It occurs to me that their nest must be miles and miles away, and they’ll probably never see it again. That is, unless they climbed on at the depot, in which case they might eventually climb off again when the bus is parked there and not even realise they’d moved.
‘Real hot for fall,’ says the guy.
In the same library book that taught me about Theia and how the moon was made, I read that Earth travels two hundred million miles around the sun between fall and spring. Some people die without ever having left their hometown, and yet they could be ninety million miles from where they were born.
We’re all just ants, riding a bus on a highway too long to comprehend.
‘Yes, sir,’ I say. ‘That it is.’
•
I ride the bus past a row of bars before getting off at a stop near a convenience store. A long-lashed woman in fishnet stockings is leaning against a nearby streetlight pole, sucking a cigarette. She smiles at me, and says, ‘Hey, baby. Want to have a little fun?’
Real sex workers pay no mind to poor people. ‘No thanks, officer,’ I say.
The fake hooker glances around to see if anyone heard. By the time she looks back, I’m already gone.
Houston has real streetwalkers on Hillcroft Avenue and the 610 South Loop, but here all the women are cops. The nearest strip club is actually a brothel, and the police don’t have enough evidence to raid it, so they plant undercover operatives around it to catch the dumber clients. They make enough arrests to fill their quotas, leaving the brothel with enough customers to stay in business. Everybody wins.
The humming neon reads The Noir, which stands for Nightclub of Ill Repute. The curtains, red and velvety, are all drawn. A statue is poised out front—a naked woman bending down to pick some flowers, legs straight, ass out. A fountain bubbles around her ankles.
Two burly doormen look me up and down as I approach. Each one is a head taller and thirty pounds heavier than me. A feast.
‘Cover,’ one grunts. ‘Three dollars.’
I hand over three of Johnson’s crumpled bills and they stand aside.
Like its name, the Noir is dark. The maroon carpet is thin underfoot. I hover in the antechamber until the fake pot plants and fleshy posters come into focus, and then I step through into the gloom of the main chamber.
It’s early, so the stage is empty. The pole gleams in a spotlight someone left on. But the strippers are here, writhing weightlessly around the armchairs as if underwater. The men, little more than silhouettes, are perfectly still but for the reptilian eyes which follow nipples and ass cracks around the room.
I avert my gaze. Too much skin. It’s like a meat market in here. My palms are itchy.
Part of me is jealous of these women. If I could earn two hundred bucks an hour by taking my clothes off and letting strangers invade my personal space, I would. Assuming I could do it without accidentally tearing anybody’s throat out. But Texas doesn’t take kindly to loose women. These girls probably tried every other profession before this one. Like me, they’re here because they have nowhere else to go.
The liqueurs glitter like a waterfall behind the bar. A young white woman—clothed—with a vineyard of tattoos up her arms is standing behind it, fiddling with her cell phone. She looks up as I approach, and flashes a practised grin. It’s probably typical for nervous patrons to drink before they approach the dancers.
‘What can I get you?’
‘Nothing just yet,’ I say. ‘I’m here for a meeting with Charlie.’
‘Charlie who?’
‘Charlie Warner.’
The smile evaporates. ‘Sorry,’ the bartender says. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’
I wanted to fool her into thinking Warner sent for me. Evidently I failed. I don’t want to get anyone else involved—Luzhin has been chasing Warner for his entire career, so I don’t want him to hear that I was at the Noir—but I don’t have much choice. ‘Your boss probably does,’ I say. ‘Maybe you could get him?’
She looks at my tattered shirt and my bandaged arm.
‘It’ll only take a minute,’ I add.
The woman reaches underneath the bar and I tense up, in case she’s going for a gun. But her hand comes back empty, and a second later, a door opens behind her.
A narrow-shouldered man with thinning hair comes through, looks at me, and says, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ He says sir very doubtfully.
‘I’m here to see Charlie.’
‘Which Charlie?’
‘Charlie Warner. It won’t take long.’
The boss looks at the bartender before turning back to me. ‘Not here right now, I’m afraid.’
‘I can wait.’ I sit down on a bar stool. ‘You’re open all night, right?’
‘Maybe I can pass on a message for you.’
‘Maybe you can. Tell Charlie that one of the…uh, retailers has given notice, and might have been acquired by a competitor.’ In other words, a rival drug lord has taken one of your dealers.
‘Which retailer?’
‘I only know the trading name, I’m afraid,’ I say. ‘John Johnson.’
‘And what did you say your name was?’
‘Timothy Blake.’
The manager touches the bartender on the upper arm. ‘Get Mr Blake a drink,’ he tells her. ‘I’ll be right back.’
He disappears back the way he came, and the bartender says, ‘So. Now what can I get you?’
Deciding to make the most of the free drink, I order the most expensive cocktail on the menu. The bartender chops some strawberries and tosses them into a glass with a scoop of ice-cream. She drizzles in some mango schnapps, pineapple juice and Midori. Then she sticks two sparklers into the top and ignites them with a cigarette lighter before sliding the glass over to me.
I stare at the sizzling tower of brightly coloured sugar for a moment before plucking a bendy straw from a dispenser and taking a sip. It’s too cold and too sweet to be enjoyable.
‘Is it your birthday, sweetie?’
I turn around to see a stripper leaning against the bar. She’s black and thin, her painted nails tugging at the shoulder strap of her bra.
‘How about a private dance?’ she says. ‘Thigh meat.’
My heart is pounding. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘My treat,’ she says again, with a wink. ‘For the birthday boy.’
I must be losing my mind. She’s trying to turn a free lap dance into an expensive fuck. It’s more likely to become a bloodbath.
‘No thanks,’ I say.
‘You sure?’ She slides an arm around my shoulders and leans in for a sip of my drink. Her tongue probes the tip of the straw before it disappears between her lips. The veins are pulsing in her neck, inches from my teeth.
‘Alabama,’ the boss says from the doorway.
The stripper looks up at him.
‘Take a hike. Mr Blake’s leaving.’
‘I am?’ I say.
‘You are,’ he says, and then the world vanishes as a cloth bag swallows my head.
It takes only a fragment of a second for me to react, but it’s a fragment of a second too long. One of the big doormen has already grabbed my forearms and is holding them behind my back. I try to kick him in the shins, but he dodges easily, and then there’s a click
and something hard presses against my jaw.
‘Stay still or you get a hole in the head,’ the boss says.
I stop struggling. I think of all the dancers, and the men. They must be seeing this, but they won’t intervene.
‘We don’t mean you any harm,’ the boss continues. ‘But if you want a meeting with Warner, this is how you get it.’
The doorman pushes me out of the room, not the way I came in. We move through a cold area with something humming—a fridge, I guess, in a kitchen. Someone pats me down, searching my legs and arms and crotch for weapons. They reach up under my shirt, looking for a microphone. The whole search takes less than thirty seconds, and then we barge through what sounds like a fire door into the alley behind the club.
I can hear a car engine idling. Doors unlock and open. A palm holds my head down as I’m pushed onto the creaking leather of the back seat, and then the door is closed behind me. A seatbelt zips across my chest. Plastic cuffs are tightened around my wrists.
My captors say nothing, so neither do I. My breaths are hot against the cloth bag. Every instinct screams to get it off get it off get it off, but I fight the urge to struggle and, instead, start memorising the movements of the car as it grumbles away from the kerb.
We turn right at the end of the alley. Then five minutes of stopping and starting in traffic before we turn left somewhere else. Onto a highway, I’m guessing, since the car rises a bit and then spends twenty minutes going fast and straight. I can sometimes hear trucks roaring past.
We turn right onto a loop, and then stop and start and turn a few more times. Right. Left. Left. The car slows down incrementally and then stops, brakes hissing.
The other occupants of the car don’t move, but someone opens my door from the outside and unbuckles my seatbelt.
‘Get out,’ someone says. A new voice. Rugged, male.
Still blind, I fumble halfway out of the car before someone pulls me the rest of the way. I’m shoved across some blacktop, some cement, some tiles and finally carpet before the bag is pulled off my head. I suck in an enormous gulp of air, blinking as my eyes adjust to the sudden brightness.
I’m in a doctor’s waiting room.
At least, it looks like one. I see old magazines. A reception desk, unoccupied. A fish tank in which a neon tetra chases its own tail incorrigibly. A man in a suit looms beside the door I apparently just stumbled through. Another guy waits in front of the door at the other end of the room. Big, impassive, crew cuts—the two men aren’t twins, but they may as well be.
A backless sofa, the sort built for ten people, takes up the corner of the room. Neither man moves to stop me as I wander over to it and flop down.
Alongside the magazines on the coffee table, I notice a smattering of white dust, scraped into a narrow line. A short straw sits beside it.
‘That’s for you,’ the big man blocking the exit says.
‘No thanks,’ I say.
‘It’s not optional.’
They have checked that I’m not wearing a wire, but they want me to do something illegal. To prove I’m not a cop, or compromise me if I am.
It’s unlikely that they brought me all this way to poison me. I put the straw in my nostril and lean forwards. It’s surprisingly hard to line it up with the powder, having never done this before. When I sniff it up, half the cocaine stays on the table, but I get enough to sting the inside of my nose. That seems to be the only effect the drug has on me. I don’t feel any different.
The two men look at the remains of the line, and then they look at me expectantly. The expressions on their faces strike me as hilarious, and I feel a giggle bubbling up from my chest. I swallow it back down again.
‘Okay,’ one of them says. ‘You can come through now.’
I stand up. My dog bite has already stopped aching, and my toes are fidgeting inside my shoes. I watched John Johnson do coke a few times; based on what I saw, I probably have half an hour before I start imagining bugs crawling under my skin. Then again, maybe that’s a symptom of long-term use.
The man near the exit stays where he is. The other man opens his door and steps inside. I follow him in.
I know the FBI has someone in Charlie Warner’s inner circle. That person is likely to be fit, because undercover cops have to be, but thin, because it’s a stressful job. They will have piercings, because those are less permanent than tattoos, and nothing says cop like an inkless, unpierced criminal. They’ll look bored, because that’s the exact opposite of nervous.
There are four people in the room. Three of them are pudgy, tattooed and very interested in me. Not bored. Not cops. The last one is a middle-aged woman with perfect teeth. Her arms, curved with the muscles you get from a rowing machine, stretch out from a sleeveless blouse made of red satin. Her legs are holstered in a pair of white jeans, which stretch down to a pair of cowboy boots with not much sign of wear.
‘I’m Charlie,’ she says. ‘And just who might you be?’
CHAPTER 19
My maker has never used me. My buyer will not use me. When you use me, you will not see me, smell me or hear me. What am I?
‘Timothy Blake,’ I say. ‘Thanks for, you know, taking the time to see me.’ I sniff, and lick my teeth. The coke is kicking in.
The room is more like a library than an office. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, stacked with hardbacks, are deadening the air. Warner’s voice sounds much closer than she is.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says dryly. ‘How much more time you get depends a lot on the next few words that come out of your mouth.’
‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘My roommate is one of your dealers. Two days ago he got picked up by somebody, and I haven’t seen him since.’ After a pause, I tell her my address, since I don’t know John Johnson’s real name.
‘Uh-huh. And what do you expect me to do about this?’
‘Nothing. I just thought, since his abductors were probably rivals of yours, you might be interested in knowing what they looked like and what car they drove before I mention it to the cops.’
She leans back in her chair, which tilts without so much as a squeak. ‘I don’t have any real rivals. Whoever picked up your friend, they’re no threat.’
‘Not a threat. An opportunity.’
I’m getting a sense of the hierarchy in the room. The three other people look at Warner whenever she’s talking, and they keep glancing at her when it’s my turn, to see how she reacts. But two of them occasionally glance at the other one—a bearded, glasses-wearing guy who’s built like a wrestler. He must be Warner’s second-in-command.
‘I know you have a trial coming up,’ I say. ‘The FBI’s making a case against you.’
She doesn’t look worried. ‘Something tells me their witnesses aren’t going to testify.’
‘You have people inside the FBI, I get it,’ I say. I can’t stop myself from talking faster and faster. ‘Probably the DoJ too, federal marshals, whatever. But I heard some pricey security firm has got involved. All the state’s witnesses are gonna be surrounded by high-end bodyguards from out of town. People you don’t know and can’t buy.’
Her expression is hard to read. ‘Where’d you hear that?’
I can’t tell her that I saw the security van turn up at the FBI field office. ‘My roommate told me before he left. So it seems like what you need is a patsy.’
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I get it. You give me enough info to track down this rival distributor, and I frame them for everything I’m charged with. Clever. And I imagine you’ll want something in return?’
‘I’m trying to find somebody,’ I say. ‘A guy named Philip Hall.’
Her face shows no recognition. Any remaining suspicions I have of her involvement with the kidnappings trickle away.
I wonder what Luzhin would do if he were here. Warner has used her wealth to stay out of his reach for years. She had his friend murdered. Would he try to kill her, knowing he would die too?
‘He buys drugs,’ I continue. ‘He gambles
. I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction.’
‘I see.’
Her henchmen watch her. She doesn’t look at them.
‘Why you want to find this Philip Hall?’
‘He owes me thirty-five thousand dollars,’ I say. ‘But he’s also a wanted man. There isn’t much chance of getting paid back unless I find him before the cops do.’
‘What’s he wanted for?’
‘Kidnapping.’
‘Uh-huh. How are you going to make him pay?’
‘That’s between me and him.’
‘Wrong.’ Warner takes a cigarette from her desk and twirls it between her fingers. ‘If I help you find him, it’s between you, him and me.’
A crime boss with a conscience? ‘If you have ethical concerns—’
She laughs. After a fraction of a second, so do her employees.
‘If his body shows up,’ she says, ‘and word gets out that my boys were looking for him…’ She puts the cigarette back in the drawer, unlit. ‘You see my problem?’
‘He’ll come to no harm,’ I say. ‘I was going to take the money without him knowing.’
‘A thief, huh?’
‘No. It’s my money.’
‘Right,’ Warner says. ‘Well, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to track him down.’
‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to track down the guys who took my roommate, either. I just want to share information.’
She takes out the cigarette again. Sees me looking. ‘I’m trying to quit,’ she says. ‘Some folks tell you to throw every pack in the trash, put them down the garbage disposal, whatever. But then you’re not kicking the habit—you’re running from it.’ She returns the cigarette to the desk. ‘Me, I’m practising having it in my hand without putting it in my mouth.’
I say nothing.
‘What do you do for a living, Mr Blake?’ she asks.
‘I sell card numbers,’ I say.
‘If you’re looking for a raise, I have a vacancy in retail.’
Drug dealing is dangerous work. ‘After what happened to your last guy? Thanks, but no thanks.’
