Ryan Jahn - Low Life

This time he managed to wrap a fist around the rusted fire-escape ladder and pull it down. Rust flakes fell around and on him. The third rung from the bottom fell right off the rusted ladder and onto the ground. He brushed himself down and then climbed the ladder, glad he’d only lived on the second floor.

He pushed the dead ficus on his fire escape aside with a dull-polished, scuff-toed shoe and climbed in through the bathroom window, trying to be as quiet as possible in case someone was here. How strange – having to break into his own apartment, having to worry about someone else lurking here.

His stomach felt tight. His head throbbed.

The apartment was hollow, a husk, a cocoon from which the moth had emerged. You could hear the dull hum of silence like tinnitus in your ear. Simon walked through this, feeling a slight droop as the floorboards gave beneath his weight.

As soon as he walked into the living room he saw it. The Mason jar sat atop the coffee table, Francine swimming inside.

He walked to the coffee table and picked up the jar. When he did he noticed something else: the picture of Shackleford and Samantha he had stolen was missing.

He strapped Francine into the passenger’s seat and started the car. The black Cadillac was nowhere to be seen – when he’d walked back to the Saab in Pasadena, it had been gone. It bothered him that the guy had found him at that rat-hole motel in Hollywood. He knew he hadn’t been followed there. He thought he knew he hadn’t been followed there. But just lately he didn’t know he knew anything.

No – two plus two still equaled four, and four plus four still equaled eight, and eight plus eight sixteen.

Some things could be depended upon.

Simon put the car into gear.

He would drop Francine off at the house in Pasadena and then figure out what his next move would be. Right now he didn’t know what direction to turn in, what lead to follow. What he saw before him was a tangle, and no visible end piece with which to work.

He was on Virgil, heading toward Silver Lake Boulevard, when the black Cadillac swept out of a side street and started tailing him again.

That’s when he became certain his car had a transponder attached to it someplace. It should have been obvious to him this morning. It would have been if he were capable of thinking clearly. He needed to be able to think clearly. He needed to stop letting his emotions overwhelm him – the fear and the paranoia and the confusion. He needed to look at these events like a math problem. Instead he was letting each moment overwhelm him and acting on instinct and instinct wasn’t—

He needed to lose the guy in the Cadillac and then pull into a parking lot or something and find the transponder on his car. The guy was tracking him for someone. He wasn’t going to make a move; he would just continue to follow. And since Simon didn’t know why, he didn’t want it done. It didn’t matter so much this morning – he’d just been going to take a shower, and the guy knew where Shackleford’s house was already – but it would matter once he dropped off Francine and got to work on figuring this out. He didn’t want anybody following him then.

Instead of continuing on toward home – toward Pasadena – he swung right onto Beverly Boulevard, made another right onto Rampart, and tried to lose the guy by turning randomly on a series of side streets just north of MacArthur Park. Unfortunately the guy didn’t seem to care that Simon knew he was being followed – he tailed close – and with traffic Simon found it impossible to get enough distance between him and the Cadillac to lose it.

Fine, then, if this guy wanted him so badly, Simon would make himself available. He was tired of being followed.

He led the Cadillac into a blind alley off Figueroa and slammed down on the brakes, screeching to a stop. Then he swung the driver’s side door open and stepped outside.

‘What do you want with me?’ he said as he walked toward the Cadillac. ‘What is it? I’m here. I’m right here. What the fuck do you want!?’

The jockey in the driver’s seat looked left and then right, seemingly in a panic. It was hard to be sure, his eyes were impossible to see through the black lenses of his sunglasses, but his movements made it look to Simon like he was in a panic, squirming in his seat.

And then the guy put the Cadillac into reverse and screeched backwards down the alleyway. His left front fender banged against a brick wall and he lost a side-view mirror, and then he screeched into the street. A car horn blared. Brakes squealed. Metal crunched and the Cadillac spun in a half circle.

The car that hit it was a yellow Gremlin, and after a moment a heavy-set Hispanic woman stepped from it and started storming toward the jockey saying, ‘You stupid motherfucker. What the fuck do you think you’re fucking doing!? I’m gonna call my husband, he’s gonna kick your fucking—’

The jockey put the Cadillac into gear and it roared away.

‘Where the fuck do you think you’re—’

She threw her cell phone at the car and it bounced off the back window and then shattered against the asphalt.

‘Fuck!’ she said.

It was tucked under the right-front wheel well, a simple black box with a red light on one end. It blinked steadily. Simon threw it to the ground and then stepped into the car. He started the engine and was backing out of the alley when he realized that Francine was missing. The seatbelt was still snapped into place but there was no Mason jar there under the strap.

He stepped out of the car, looked around, and saw no one. The alleyway was empty.

The jar was sitting on the coffee table when he walked back into the apartment on Wilshire.

Instead of driving back to the house to drop off Francine he drove directly to the Pasadena College of the Arts. He had wasted enough of his day chasing Francine around and he wanted to get Kate Wilhelm’s address so he could pay her a visit. She knew something and he wanted to get it out of her. She knew something about his past and how it was connected with Jeremy Shackleford – something he couldn’t remember. And he was becoming more and more certain that everything revolved around that something. He couldn’t see it but he knew it was there the same way scientists knew of a planet they couldn’t see: by its gravitational effect on everything around it that they could see. Everything seemed to revolve around this invisible part of his past. His past and Jeremy Shackleford’s.

He walked through the parking lot, carrying Francine, and thinking about that. Something had happened last May and he couldn’t remember it. Kate knew what it was, and who he was. She had called him Simon and she knew he couldn’t remember last May. That had to be where he was connected with Shackleford, the point at which their paths had first crossed. Samantha had said that Jeremy’d had an accident last year. She didn’t say it had been in May but Simon now knew it had been. It had to have been.

He was digging through desk drawers, pulling out stacks of papers and flipping through them, looking for Kate’s information, when Howard Ullman knocked on the office door and then pushed his way in without waiting for a response.

‘I thought I heard you in here.’

‘Hi.’

‘Samantha’s been in a panic. She called four times to see if you’d come in to work. The cops have had her at the station all morning, asking her questions she doesn’t know the answers to. You missed your algebra class. What the hell is going on?’

‘I’m in the middle of something. Can this wait?’

‘You’re in the middle of something?’

‘Yes.’

‘A nervous breakdown perhaps?’

‘I can’t explain it.’

‘Does it involve Kate Wilhelm?’