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

I got up from my computer and went outside. Of course my body wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. When I got to Firestone, I extended my arm—I needed to see my hand reaching in front of me—and opened the door. Once inside, I swiped my ID, but a red light and beep emitted from the turnstile.

“Can I help you?” the security guard asked.

“I’m a professor,” I said, showing him my ID.

“Lemme try that,” he said, taking my card from me and swiping it again. Again the beep and red light.

He began to type my campus ID into his computer, but I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Thanks anyway.” I took the ID from him and left the building.

I ran home. Everyone around me was moving. The leaves flickered as they should have. It was all almost perfect, and yet none of it was right. Everything was fractionally off. It was an insult, or a blessing, or maybe it was precisely right and I was fractionally off?

I went back into the map and examined my body. What had happened to me? I felt many things, and didn’t know what I felt. I felt personally sad for a stranger, and sad for myself in a distanced way, as if through the eyes of a stranger. My brain would not allow me to be both the person looking and being looked at. I wanted to reach out.

I thought: I should take the pills in the medicine cabinet. I should drink a bottle of vodka, and go outside, just as I had in the map. I should lay myself down in the grass, face to the side, and wait. Let them find me. It will make everyone happy.

I thought: I should fake my suicide, just as I had in the map. I should leave open a bottle of pills in the house, beside my laptop opened to the image of myself dead in the yard. I should pour a bottle of vodka down the drain, and leave my wife a voicemail. And then I should go out into the world—to Venice, to Eastern Europe, to my father’s childhood home. And when the vehicle approaches, I should run for my life.

I thought: I should fall asleep, as I had in the map. I should think about my life later. When I was a boy, my father used to say the only way to get rid of a pestering fly is to close your eyes and count to ten. But when you close your eyes, you also disappear.

Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, “Nothing weird this time. Promise me.”

Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

“Define weird.”

He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, four a.m., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams, and coconut palms. The have-nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Chevy with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn’t Guy’s idea of good business practice.

“The soul train must have a station around here,” Jumpy said.

“You’re jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it’s over, I walk.”

“I don’t like dreadlocks,” Jumpy said.

“It’s a hairstyle is all,” Guy told him. “A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you.”

“I never did like dreadlocks. It’s a gut reaction.”

“Okay, so you don’t like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn’t going to keep us from doing our business, right?”

“It looks dirty,” Jumpy said. “Unkempt.”

“Yeah, well, then let’s forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here.”

“You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?”

“Nothing weird, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

Jumpy was 6'4", skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam’s apple. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he’d shipped out as a Marine for two hitches, then a lone-wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he’d been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn’t ask, Jumpy didn’t say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.

Jumpy didn’t pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound bodybuilders who only wore loose clothes. Tight shirts were for showboat assholes.

Jumpy didn’t have to flaunt. There was a halo around him nobody could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a barroom edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out a spew of sawdust.

Trouble was, in Jumpy’s line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy’s throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He’d written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh-and-blood action, no, that wasn’t his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.

“So we cool on this?” Guy said. “Do your deal and walk. No crazy-ass banter, no stare-downs. Right?”

Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.

“I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough.”

Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was all Guy was getting.

They got out and Guy tried to match Jumpy’s casual saunter over to the Olds.

The two gangstas insisted on patting Guy down, then after a moment’s indecision, they did a hurry-up job frisking Jumpy and stepped away like they’d burned their hands. The tall one went around to the trunk of the Olds and popped the lid.

Guy stayed a couple of steps behind Jumpy while the tall dude, wearing a black T-top and baggy shorts, showed off the Squad. His dreadlock buddy stood by the driver’s door watching. His right hand fiddling around his shirttail, ready to quick-draw if things went bad.

Dreadlock One was extolling the merits of the Squad Automatic Weapon, otherwise known as SAW. Eight hundred–meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred–round magazine. Talking straight English with a little Bahamian singsong, none of the hip-hop, we-badass bullshit.

When Dreadlock One paused, Guy said, “You want to hold it, Jumpy? Inspect it?”

Jumpy was silent.

“One of you should check that shit, man, we don’t want no pissing and moaning later on.”