Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

“I’ll be fine,” Jimmy said.

“Think about where you got those cuts and whether or not a little rubbing alcohol was enough to clean them.”

“I don’t like pills.”

“You don’t like pills.”

“Can’t swallow ’em. Unnatural.”

I wasn’t going to ask about his name.

“Learn to make it natural, partner, because I’ll gut you in your sleep before I take you to a hospital.”

We played Texas Hold’em all afternoon and ate beef stew fired over a camping stove. We kept playing cards into the night. Jimmy killed a case of PBR and I took his every last chip but Skinner never showed.

“Skinner’s in the wind.” Jimmy moved slowly onto the cot, lifting his leg as though it were made of glass. “I’m outta here tomorrow.” He put on a set of headphones and closed his eyes.

Skinner Jones was holding my twenty grand for Hoyle. Alive or dead, anyone found Skinner would tie him to the job and then to me. Smoke and Mirrors would mount his head on their precinct wall and muscle every snitch in the city for the word on Johnny Pharaoh, every day, for the next hundred years unless Hoyle’s Numbers found me first.

Nobody met Hoyle. Hoyle was a disembodied name, three degrees removed from the game but still playing the board from a distance. You did business with a guy who worked for a guy who worked for some people. Eventually, the chain of command stopped with Hoyle but nobody made it that far.

Anybody got too close or defaulted on a debt, Hoyle said to handle them by the numbers, as in normal procedure. This often required duct tape. Maybe a trunk or perhaps a body of water. It always demanded discretion and, above all, silence. Hoyle’s figure of speech became a running joke among the ranks, who each in turn met with the guy’s disapproval for one reason or another. When the last man breathing had forgotten the joke, the joke became rumor, then legend: The Numbers, Thing One and Thing Two. They could reckon the layout of a darkened room from the echo of a dripping tap. Thing One could freeze locks with his breath, Thing Two could walk through glass, and they could measure your sleeping heartbeat with their ears against your door.

A spider clung to the dry lip of the kitchen faucet, a drop of black oil suspended from eight bent, black needles, its red belly mark like a symbol from a church window. In a blink, it vanished up the pipe. I stuffed a wad of newspaper into the opening and tamped it tight with my thumb.

I didn’t sleep. Every itch or stray thread brushing against me in the trapped air of the crumbling house became a drop of black widow oil, poised to plant her cocoon below my skin. Her dark little beads would hatch inside my blood while I waited for Skinner Jones, while I hid from Smoke and Mirrors, Hoyle and the Numbers.

“We can’t do shit here.” Jimmy coughed, leaned over and hawked into a garbage pail. Two days of poker, canned food, police scanner static, network news and no Skinner Jones. I was restless and Jimmy was sick.

“Too bad. We’re gonna stay.”

“I need a hospital.”

“They’re watching the hospitals.”

“They?”

“They.”

Jimmy argued until a coughing fit seized him and he covered his face with a T-shirt.

“Christ. A few minutes of fresh air, for fuck’s sake. There’s a coffee place on Ninth, across from the Muni stop. Lemme run out, grab us a couple lattes, maybe some deli sandwiches. On me.”

I knew the place. Soon as Jimmy mentioned it, I could almost hear the rumble of the train down Judah and picture the burst of greenery in the park, the shape of crashing waves.

“How long you think we could last in here?” Jimmy said.

“A long time.”

“How long?”

“We’d die of boredom before we ran out of food. I’d probably kill you before that happened.”

“Come on. Guess. I say six months.”

“Both of us.”

“Yeah. If we had to.”

I surveyed the house, its fallout shelter food and black market drugs, the liquor supply, the plywood window sheets blocking out the sun and trapping in the bad air.

“Sounds about right.”

“Like doing time, though.” Jimmy shuffled the deck and flaunted his one-handed cut, the only card sleight he knew.

“Then I guess you’ve never done time.”

His fingers slipped and the cards hit the table.

“Maybe I should deal.”

“Maybe we should up the stakes.” He gave me his idea of a bad-ass stare.

“To what?”

“Time.”

I shoulda seen this coming.

“We’ve got a hundred and eighty days each.” Jimmy reassembled the deck. “Five-day ante, two-day raise, ten-day limit.”

“Won’t work.”

“Why not?” He shuffled.

“Suppose I win your whole six months. That mean you walk out of here?”

“Good point.” He shuffled a second time. “How ’bout we play for days outside? Each day we lose is a day we stay locked in here.”

“But I want to stay locked in here.”

“So you can’t lose.”

Fuck-up though he was, I got why people hired him.

“I’ve seen you play, remember.”

“Like I said, you can’t lose.” Jimmy shuffled the deck a third time and set it between us.

“Texas Hold’em.”

“Draw for the high card.”

“Don’t bother.” I cut the deck and said, “Deal.”

Jimmy had been working on his game. He used to be pure shark food. He’d play loose, never check, and he’d see every bet, big or small, to keep chasing some lone longshot card for that mythical winning hand. He was playing tighter now. He checked and folded more frequently, calculating my best possible hand instead of his own.

He might take longer to get eaten, but he was still shark food. He went to sleep three weeks poorer, and the next afternoon he was down a whole month and a half when the news ran a story about another Golden Gate suicide.

“Wonder what makes this guy’s high dive worth the airtime.” Jimmy checked his cards and tossed a five-day chip onto his two-day ante.

Good question. Unhappy civilians outnumbered the pigeons. Jumpers hit the bay like clockwork.

“... won’t release the identity of the man found floating...”

I met his five and raised him ten. Jimmy folded and I scooped away another week of his life outside.

“... may be linked to several high-profile robberies throughout the Bay Area...”

My vaporous suspicion condensed to certainty.

“Skinner Jones.”

“How do you know?”

“One of those things.” I stared at my chips, the stack of Jimmy’s days together with mine.

“Least we know what happened to the man. You still wanna stay here?”

“Not now, Jimmy.”

“Skinner Jones couldn’t take the heat, sounds to me like. Let’s get out.”

“Watch your mouth, Rehab.”

He hadn’t heard me. He’d stuffed the balled-up shirt to his face to stifle another coughing jag, spat a heavy glob into the garbage pail, then, without warning, shoved his remaining chips into the pot.

“The fuck?”

“All or nothing,” he said.

“Jimmy.”

“Your homeboy’s a floater. And if it wasn’t an accident then they know where to find us.”

“They?”

“Pharaoh, or whoever took out Skinner Jones.”

“Just because you’d start singing at the first whiff of immunity—”

Jimmy hit the television with his fist. The bottle-blonde anchorwoman shattered into pixels and noise.

“You think that was a botched plea bargain? Jesus.”

The anchorwoman reappeared. She flashed a smile insured for millions, moved the blank papers around on her desk and nodded at the weatherman.

“All or nothing,” he said again. “You lose, I walk. You win, we both stay until provisions run out.”