Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

Then I saw someone step onto the bridge at the far end and start toward me. I was a good quarter-mile away and at first I couldn’t tell if it was him. When the figure was nearly halfway across, I realized it wasn’t the rich man. It was the personal assistant. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited, looking up at the Heights, then down toward the flats, uncertain which way I would come.

What the hell was this all about? There was only one way to find out. I walked out to meet her.

I wasn’t wearing the gray suit, but she recognized me anyway.

“You were at the house this morning,” she said in that accent I decided was, indeed, French Canadian. Her hair hung to her ass and rippled like a velvet curtain. She wore an airy summer dress. The high hem lifted on the breeze, show­ing off her legs all the way to mid-thigh. Killer legs. Against this, Kid hadn’t stood a chance.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Who cares, as long as I have your money.” Her lips were thick and red around teeth white as sugar. I smelled her deli­cate perfume, the same scent that had washed over me that morning. It seemed to overpower the scent of the river.

“Show me,” I said.

“Where are my panties?”

I reached into my pocket and dangled them in front of her. “Where’s my money?”

From the purse she carried over her shoulder, she pulled a thick manila envelope. “The panties,” she said.

“The envelope first.”

She thought about it a moment, then handed it over. I looked inside. Four bundles of hundreds bound with rubber bands.

“Want to count it?” she said.

All I wanted was for the transaction to be over with and to be rid of this business. “I’ll trust you,” I said.

She took the panties and threw them over the bridge rail­ing. I watched them drop, catch the breeze, and cut toward the middle of the river, swift as a little black bat.

“Gone forever.” She smiled.

“You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”

“They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.

I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.

I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.

“I’ll take the money.”

He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.

“I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.

His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”

I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus that swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.

The bus passed, and he came after me on foot, a black figure against the explosion of light from the bridge. I ran, making my way along the streets that topped the Heights. I cut into an alley, across another street, then into another alley.

Suddenly, inexplicably, my legs gave out. They just went limp. I sprawled in the gravel behind an old garage. A streetlamp not far away shed enough light that I could easily be seen. I managed to crawl into the shadow between two garbage cans, where I lay listening. I heard the slap of shoes hard and fast pass the alley entrance and keep going. Then everything got quiet.

My shirt was soaked with blood. My legs were useless. I’d hoped to make it to the river, but that wasn’t going to happen. The end was going to come in a bed of weeds in a nameless alley. Nothing I could do about that.

But about the man and the woman who’d killed Kid, there was still something I could do.

I pulled the pair of panties from my pocket, the pair she’d given Kid and whose twin I’d found that afternoon at Marshall Field’s and bought with money made by selling my own blood. I drew out my pen and notepad and wrote a brief explanation, hoping whoever found me would notify the police.

I was near the river, though I would never sit on its banks again. I closed my eyes. For a while, all I smelled was the garbage in the bins. Then I smelled the river. When I opened my eyes, there was Kid, grinning on the other side. Like he understood. Like he forgave me. I started toward him. The water, cold and black, crept up my legs. The current tugged at my body. In a few moments, it carried me away.

You know how these things get started, Robbie. You see her for the first time. Your heart skips and your fingers buzz. Can’t take your eyes off her. And when you look at her she knows. No way to hide it. So you don’t look. Use all your strength to not look. But she still knows. And anybody else around does too.”

“I’ve had that feeling, Vic,” I said.

We walked down the Embarcadero where the cruise ships come and go. It was what passes for winter here in San Diego, cool and crisp, and there was a hard clarity to the sunlight. Once a week I met Vic at Higher Grounds coffee and we’d get expensive drinks and walk around the city. He was a huge guy, a former professional wrestler. Vic Primeval was his show name until they took his WWF license away for getting too physical in his matches. He hurt some people. I spend a few minutes a week with Vic because he thinks he owes me his life. And because he’s alone in the world and possibly insane.

“Anyway,” said Vic, “her name is Farrel White and I want you to meet her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m proud to have you as a friend. You’re pretty much all I got in that department.”

“Are you showing us off, Vic? Our freak show past?”

He blushed. “No. But you do make me look good.”

Vic was bouncing at Skin, an exotic dance club—strippers, weak drinks, no cover with military ID. “I don’t love that place,” I said.

“Robbie, what don’t you like about pretty women dancing almost naked?”

“The creeps who go there.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky. You’re lucky with the ladies.”

“What do you know about my luck with ladies, Vic?”

“Come on, man. You’ve got luck. Whole world knows that.”

More luck than I deserve, but is it good or bad? For instance, seven years ago Vic threw me out the window of the sixth floor of a hotel he’d set on fire—the Las Palmas in downtown San Diego. I was trying to save some lives and Vic was distraught at having had his World Wrestling Federation license revoked. This incident could be reasonably called bad luck.

You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semi-famous—The Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.

“Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”