Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

A good plan leaves nothing to chance, but a professional knows chance is a long-haul player. Drink enough, gamble enough, sleep around, skydive, hitchhike, or play the lottery and your luck won’t run out, but it will change. Skinner and I had been at it for a long time and our luck changed.

Come 10:21 a.m. the next day, I was gunning through red lights down O’Farrell with my back windshield in pieces, my ears ringing and Jimmy Rehab riding shotgun with glass in his hair and blood on his pants. I turned up the police scanner and kept to the speed limit once I was off Lincoln.

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.”