Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

Leaning over the counter, he probed the cash register. To his delight, a wad of twenties and fifties danced into view. He pocketed the cash and backpedaled out of the store into the ebb and flow of Market Street.

Columns of gold-colored sunshine haloed the roadbed at Seventh and Market. Panhandlers, speed freaks, and pickpockets milled at Carl’s Jr. Bike messengers dodged cars and delivery trucks. A Muni bus seething with passengers lumbered toward Van Ness Avenue. Whirlwinds of leaves and empty nickel bags flirted in the gutter.

The heat outside was nauseating. The pavement was hotter than a match head. Making Slatts dizzy and ready to puke. Which was how he liked things. The gun dangled from his hand, muzzle pointed at the sidewalk. His beard and costume were drenched in perspiration. A homeless wino decked out in a garbage-bag poncho hailed him from an insurance office doorway. “Yo, Santa, yo, yo. Can you help me, brother man?”

Slatts flicked a sideways glance at the bum and smelled trouble. His voice was colder than his mother’s pussy. “What the fuck do you want? I’m in a hurry.”

“My partner is sick.”

A white boy in an army jacket was slumped against the door frame. His tattered sneakers had holes in the soles. His cracked green eyes were intent on a faraway paradise. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Slatts frowned and hissed, “What the hell is wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” the wino said. “We were just sitting here and shit, and the pecker keeled over. Maybe he had a heart attack or something.”

“You call an ambulance?”

“Yeah, it’s on the way.”

Nobody was coming out of the pot club. Slatts sighed. That was a good sign. He’d hate to have to shoot someone right now. Dropping to his knees, he placed a finger on the unconscious man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He didn’t find it. Instead, an electrical charge zinged into his fingertip. He knew what it meant and jerked his hand away. Christ on a crutch. What a drag. The bastard had died on him. The electricity was his spirit, what was left of it. “It’s nothing,” he shrugged. “He’s just resting.”

“What should I do?”

“Keep waiting for the ambulance.”

“Is he sick?”

All the interrogatives vexed Slatts. Like he wasn’t tense enough already. “No, he isn’t. So relax, okay?”

He hardly got the words out of his mouth when a black-and-white police van oozed to the curb. Three husky officers in midnight-blue combat overalls jumped out. Their scuffed riot helmets gleamed in the torpid sunlight. Slatts couldn’t believe it. This was bad karma. The dope dealers had snitched on him. That wasn’t kosher. It was disgusting. The wimps couldn’t handle their own business. There was no honor among thieves.

Hefting the.357, he pressed the trigger. A lonely bullet flowered out of the revolver’s barrel and sped forward in slow motion, burying itself in the pot store’s window. The music of breaking glass rippled in the flat air. The cops scrambled for cover and returned the fire. A slug ricocheted off the pavement, catching Slatts in the wrist. The.357 went sailing into the bushes.

It was funny how things never worked out. Like he was falling through a mirror into a black hole. The cops dashed to the doorway, pushed aside the dead man, knocked Slatts onto his stomach, and handcuffed him in a pool of blood. An officer kneeled on the ex-con’s legs and brayed, “Merry Christmas, baby,” then shot him in the ear.

The blast loosened Slatts’s bowels. A jet of warm shit trickled down his thigh. A pillar of unsavory steam rose from the Santa Claus suit. The ground was painted red and pink with bits of his earlobe. The pigeons on the phone lines shrieked with indignation. A moody cloud passed over the sun.

The gods of crime were not smiling on Market Street that afternoon.

The Castro

Jude opened her hand and the panic of blind horses seized her. The washcloth was marked with a bloody knot of red in the shape of a gouged eye. She sat naked on the edge of the bathtub and tried not to hyperventilate. She pushed from her head the uneasy idea that her blood on a white washcloth was the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. She stared at the locked door across from her and counted to ten, and when the horses died away she took stock of her situation.

She was seventeen and it was a school night.

Her left arm was so bruised it looked like it belonged to someone else, the bruise running so deep she was sure she could smell it, as if the blood pooling in there had gone bad. Her legs were cold to the touch, her thighs rippled with goose bumps, and when she pulled her hands from her knees they left marks slow to fade. She wondered if it were true that fingerprints could be dusted from human skin, and made a mental note to look that up.

She had locked herself in this bathroom two minutes ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats, and by her estimation she could safely remain another four minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door to ask in a soft threatening voice if she were all right, and she couldn’t bear that. She needed to exit the bathroom without prompting.

Already it had taken her twenty-two seconds to pee, another thirty-six seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed, and it sickened her to realize she had been staring at the knot of blood for nearly a minute, trying to organize her thoughts into any linear progression that made sense. She had a sudden overwhelming sense that had there been a window in the room, she would be scrambling with torn fingers for the roof, regardless of the screaming black vertigo in her stomach that said she was tucked away in a corner apartment on the nineteenth floor of a downtown tower with windows that were sealed shut and a sleepy doorman out front, where no one would ever think to look for her.

Nonsense.

The voice in her head was her father’s, and she nearly glanced over her shoulder.

Animal urges, her father said.

Her father had often told her that some predators were comfortable only on familiar ground, and never strayed far from home. These were not the most skilled hunters, he said, but they were unpredictable, and dangerous as hell, because they hunted on impulse. Others followed the prey, shadowing the herd. But the smartest hunters roamed far from home, where the rabbits would not recognize them. He always laughed, telling her this. And he was right. It was more likely that she was still somewhere in the Castro, where she had been pretending to shop earlier in the day, because the man who waited for her on the other side of the bathroom door seemed the sort of predator who hunted near to home. And it didn’t matter. She had to first get outside, then worry about where she was.

The bathtub was long and wide as a coffin.

Jude fought off the childish urge to crawl into the tub and shut her eyes and tell herself that if she couldn’t see him, he would not see her. Her memory was splintered, so much so that she saw the landscape inside her head in the thousand and one reflections of a shattered mirror in the sun, and she had no idea how to sort the images, the sprawl of information. The first shall be last, she thought, and was briefly comforted to seize on something familiar, though she couldn’t remember if that line came from the Book of Matthew or Mark, or what it meant.

The sisters would not be proud if they saw her now, she thought.

Jude was in her senior year at Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school for girls that was so old the halls smelled of raw earth and, according to her father, boasted tuition fees that could only be described as obscene. Jude had once calculated that, taking into account her spotty attendance record and history of expulsions, her education to this point had cost her father in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars per day. She was forever restless and bored to the edge of psychosis by the curriculum, and she had a tendency to get into fights. Two years ago, in a dispute over a borrowed jacket, she had hit a Brazilian girl named Noel much harder than she meant to, damaging the other girl’s larynx. Only the fact that Noel threw the first punch had spared her father an expensive legal headache, but to be safe Jude had taught herself to be invisible ever after, to move through crowds of people without a ripple. She wished that a thousand people had noticed her today, but they hadn’t. Because she had been practicing. She had been a shadow, her hand slipping in and out of their pockets.