Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

All Joe had to do now was ditch the Porsche, then get Kitty and maybe they could get shut of this old Life. Go to Galveston, lay low until it was safe to return for the diamond; escape the cooker, crooks, and cops, who had nothing on Joe now if court was adjourned.

But he had to make sure, see for himself. He turned up Divisadero toward Twin Peaks. You’re almost home, you’re almost home , the tires whispered on the fogdamp asphalt... Oh no, Rooski boy. Was it me laid you low? Me? raved his heart. With an effort he steeled himself. It was self-defense, pure and simple. More: it was euthanasia. Better to die a man in the streets than an animal behind walls.

He turned onto a side street and parked in its culdesac over the streetcar tunnel. He walked to the railing overlooking the tracks and leaned against a streetlamp that looked, in the swirling mist, like a giant dandelion atop a wrought iron stem. The N Judah car burst out between his legs, rattle-trapping down the cutbacks through the steep backyards, jiggling in its yellow windows like corn in a popper newspapers, crossed legs, a woman applying lipstick. Scanning the gray density of buildings, Joe spotted the house on Treat Street by the police lights. They pulsed in the fog like red amoebas.

He was just in time to see the morgue attendants lug out the stretcher. Coming down the front steps, they lifted it perpendicularly, raising the corpse, and Joe thought he saw Rooski’s face splattered once, twice, three times with spinning red...

Then, with a suddenness snatching a cry from Joe’s throat, the circular chill of steel at his neck, the familiar cold, clipped voice:

“I knew I’d find you close. A rat’s never far from its hole. You found him first, saved your ass by setting his up for me to blast. You made him hold court in the streets. You better pray you wont have to pick a jury on a prison yard. Because you’re going down for the car. You’re penitentiary bound... motherfucker.”

The Sunset

Jimmy Rehab’s showing a nine up against my dual eights. The high count is my green light to buck tourist strategy so I split for a hard eighteen-fifteen then stand. Jimmy’s ace in the hole gives him a soft twenty which costs me another six thousand milligrams of tetracycline.

Fifteen blocks from here, young mothers push strollers through Golden Gate Park and the electro-poets sip six-dollar coffees at sidewalk tables along Irving. Keep walking west and the bright afternoon grows indecisive at 19th Ave. You hit 25th and take off your shades but can’t tell the difference, the light bright enough to see by without throwing any shadows. Come 43rd, you haven’t seen another soul for ten blocks and the stores are either empty or closed. The colors vanish along with the shadows, the current drains from the sunlight.

The Outer Sunset, another ghost town trailing another gold rush, the postwar housing boom following the first feeding frenzy a century prior and the dot com locusts forty years later, this is where Jimmy and I play blackjack by the light of a camping lantern, where I’ll play two and a half million hands before I see sunlight again.

I’m here because of the Numbers, because this is the one place some very bad people won’t know to find me. I’m here because I made a wager and I make good on my bets. I’m here because I keep my word.

Skinner Jones said that would be the death of me and he was half right.

We did a jewelry store together a couple years back. No fireworks, all business. After the dust had settled, the adjusters left the owner with a firm handshake and a fat check. Skinner moved the product, cleaned the cash and handed over my cut. Next day, I’m using the restroom at the doughnut place on Polk. One second I’m holding two bearclaws in a paper bag between my teeth while I take a leak, next thing I’ve got Smoke and Mirrors on either side of me.

“Johnny Pharaoh.”

“Yo. Johnny.”

I was shaking off the drops when Smoke slapped the bracelet on my right wrist and gave me to the count of one to pack everything up before he cuffed my left. He pat me down way too familiar-like while Mirrors read from his Miranda card. His fingers followed the words as he sounded them out, like he was asking directions with a phrase book.

I was drooling on the doughnut bag in my teeth when Mirrors said, “Do you understand these rights as they’ve been read to you?”

Yeah.

“Out loud, shithead.” Smoke tapped the back of my skull so I dropped breakfast into the hot pool at my feet. Greasy white bag floating with the cigarette butts and that blue chemical puck.

“Not sure I did. Could you run ’em by me one more time?”

Smoke and Mirrors. Bad Cop, Worse Cop. Eleven hours under the light, cuffed to a chair on the business end of their bad day.

“Are those batteries fresh?” I thought the red light on the camera blinked a coupla times.

“Not sure.”

“Could be. Or not.”

If that camera went dark, I was gonna hit the floor hard, two or three times. All I had to say were two words, Skinner Jones , and I’d walk, but I didn’t. Taking a job means keeping your mouth shut. Getting stabbed in the back isn’t license to likewise shank a brother.

Keeping my word meant keeping quiet which meant doing a year inside, the most they could give me without Skinner.

Jimmy can’t shuffle so I do it for him.

“You gonna make me deal for you this time, too?”

He doesn’t answer. Jimmy Rehab’s silent treatment, day fifty-five.

“You lazy fuck.”

His stare is starting to unnerve me.

Jimmy’s got a four up and I’m looking at a hard sixteen so I stand. His hole-card is a ten followed by another four, so I push 2,500 more milligrams of tetracycline his way and pray I don’t get sick before I can win them back.

I bust three hands in a row and Jimmy doesn’t say a word, his expression doesn’t change.

I’ve lost thousands in a single sitting at some big tables and I’ve always had enough to cover my marker. Most of the time. I can quit any time I want, as long as it’s not while I’m playing. If you’re anything like me, you tell yourself you’ve got it under control, but you don’t.

One year later I walked through the gates, but my celebration was cut short the same day. Dear Cardholder didn’t place and Undisclosed Sum came strong out of the gate but finished dead last. Some old habits die hard and others not at all. That afternoon at the track dumped me twenty grand into Hoyle’s pocket. Hoyle knew I was good for it because I keep my word but Hoyle didn’t want to look weak. Skinner Jones and his brokering skills were the only things keeping me above the dirt. His driver had been kicked back on a parole violation so Skinner offered me a job.

“Guy blows an early release ’cause he bought his piss from Keith Richards,” he said. “He’s safer in Folsom.”

“I hear that.”

Neither one of us said anything for a moment.

“Wasn’t me.” Skinner slid the car keys toward me.

“Wasn’t you, what?”

“The jewelry store. Wasn’t me who gave you up.”

So there was my chance, served up like a fancy umbrella drink. Call him on it or let it go.

“Forget about it.”

“Far as this job goes, you wait and you drive.” Skinner let it go faster than I had, went back to talking the job. “Shit hits the fan, Plan Q is still in locked and loaded. We’re in, we’re out, we hurt nobody and you’re off the hook.”

“And I won’t see a penny of it.”

“You won’t have pennies over your eyes, either.”

True, indeed. His ex-driver’s fuck-up and my own were conjoined like circus sideshow babies, two and the same.