Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

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 least 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.