Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

I knelt down beside him and put my arm around his thin shoulders. He leaned his head against me and wept. He smelled sour. Tears dripped from his chin, jewels of blood from his elbow. I let him cry for a minute or so to get it out of his system, then squeezed his shoulder.

“I am going to make sure you get out into the country, Oz,” I said. “Don’t worry about that anymore.”

It had occurred to me how much I owed the kid. He was the one who had put me on the trail of the necklace in the first place, and the necklace was going to make me rich. Not rich like Howard Hughes or Christina Onassis or any of the other sick superrich for whom money was a painful poison, but rich like a guy in the fairy tale who steals the ogre’s treasure and exits the story whistling, bag slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back on his head, disappearing down a country lane.

More than that, in the hollowness of late nighttime, I felt a kinship with him in his sorrow, as if he were my son or brother. He had lost his mother, who I was quite sure would never return. I had lost my daughter, whom I probably would never see again. Oz and I were sandwiched together in the darkness between two devastations.

Reggie and I would be leaving Venice the next day. Or maybe the day after. I might try one more time. Before leaving, I would hook Ozone up with some kind of social-services agency and find him a place to stay, maybe some vocational training. Something better than sleeping in alleys.

“Come on, stop crying,” I said. “Why don’t you come over and sleep on our couch tonight? We need to put some antiseptic on those cuts so they don’t get infected. What did you cut yourself with, anyway?”

He reached under the sleeping bag and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. I took it from him and slipped it in my shirt pocket, then helped him up.

“Bring your shirt and boots. We’ll wash your clothes tomorrow after you take a bath and get cleaned up.”

Following Oz out of the dim room, I tripped on some of his junk, kicking a pile of magazines so that they splayed across the floor. One of them caught my eye. It was the copy of Riviera with Evelyn’s bejeweled picture that the boy had shown me on the boardwalk. I wondered if he had two copies or if he’d forgotten that Baba had returned it to him. I started to ask him as we walked back over to the flophouse, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to challenge another of his delusions, if that’s what it was. He was upset enough already.

Though he should have been dead to the world, Budge must have heard us go into the downstairs bathroom. I was putting Bactine on Ozone’s arm when the former lineman’s bulk loomed in the doorway.

“Don’t let him see!” Ozone said, turning away.

But he had already seen.

“Oh, motherfucker!” Budge said, turning away from us and smashing his fist into the wall, punching through the plaster and lath, something I’d never seen anyone do before.

Any fool with a few drinks in him can put his fist through a piece of drywall without damaging his hand, unless he hits a stud. Most of my friends’ homes when I was growing up had a hole or two in the kitchen or living room drywall, testament to some memorable domestic disturbance, as when a drunken father objected to his wife’s shrill 2 a.m. accusations. But plaster and lath is more like concrete than half-inch drywall. My man Budge had a big punch.

“Knock it off, Budge,” I said. “Look what you did to your hand.”

He held his fist up in front of his face and looked at the blood seeping through the white plaster dust.

“Who gives a shit?” he said.

“Sharpnick will when she sees that hole in the wall.”

“Why should she? They’re gonna tear it down anyway.”

“Just behave yourself.”

After Oz’s cuts were disinfected and bandaged, I sent him to the living room to lie down on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Budge,” he said softly as he went down the hall. But Budge wouldn’t look at him.

“Let me see your hand,” I said, pulling the big goof into the bathroom. He had gashed his knuckles badly, grinding old paint and plaster into them.

“I told that little son of a bitch if he ever did that again, I was gonna kick his ass,” he said and hiccupped and began to cry.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Not you, too. Sit down on the toilet and let me see if I can do something with your hand so you don’t get gangrene.”

When Budge was patched up and back in bed, I checked the other downstairs rooms. Candyman was snoring in his berth with an anonymous companion of sizable proportions. Pete’s room was empty, the hospital corners on his bunk undisturbed. I wondered what the ex-sailor was up to at two-thirty in the morning.

Upstairs, Reggie’s room was empty, too. Probably gone to Chavi’s to celebrate the score with a blow job after stashing the rental car.

I drifted off, thinking about the next day. The first thing I would do was take the necklace and coins to Fahid. Then we’d return the car and get the five-hundred-dollar deposit back. Then call someone about Oz. Then…

I slipped over the edge of consciousness, dropping down into a deep, cool sleep.

“Wake up!”

I heard the voice from my vague location far down in the depths of unconsciousness. As I breast-stroked toward the surface, it repeated itself.

“Wake up!” It was cheerful.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Namo leaning over me, grinning, showing the black gaps beside his top incisors. He had a snubnose chrome six-shooter in his hand. He was pointing it at me. My gun was in the glove compartment of the rental car, parked beneath some ragged palm tree on a side street somewhere in south Venice Beach. Namo’s little green eyes were sparkling with happiness. He was looking at me the way a sadistic kid looks at a cat he has just trapped, relishing what he will do to it.

Judging by the light pouring in the window, it was midmorning, around nine or nine-thirty. I had been asleep for about six hours. Baba was sitting in the armchair by the window, his ample ass more than filling the space between the splayed arms. He was wearing the blue suit I had seen in his closet, dressed for an appraisal.

“If you return the necklace now, without any difficulty, I give you my word that the police will not be involved and you will not be harmed,” he said in his measured guru voice. Despite the sonorous tone, he looked scared. His face looked thinner than it had been, flesh worn away by worry in the hours since I had last seen him.

“Necklace? What are you talking-”

Namo jabbed the barrel of the gun in my face, striking my cheekbone with an explosive bolt of pain. Instinctively, I started to come up out of the bed but he cocked the hammer and I lay back down.

“Stop it!” Baba said. “There is no need for that. Not yet. I believe Mr. Rivers will be reasonable when he knows the facts.”

“How did you know where to find me?” I said, rubbing my cheek.

“Our nautical friend put me wise.”

“Pete?”

“Yes,” Baba said. “He has been keeping me informed of your activities. When he told me last Saturday that you and your associate had been to the desert on some kind of criminal enterprise at the same time that a pair of thieves attempted to steal the necklace, I instructed him to keep what he might call ‘a weather eye’ on you.”

“I’m in it with ‘em, you asshole!” Pete said, bouncing into the room through the hall door. “You think you are pretty fucking smart, but there’s a lot you don’t know. I’m the one that found-”

“Be quiet,” Baba said, cutting Pete off. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Pete clapped his mouth shut and Baba turned back to me. “I congratulate you on your skill and perseverance. You very nearly got the necklace in the desert, despite my precautions. But you also very nearly came to grief. It was bold of you to quickly regroup and steal it last night from that idiot lawyer’s office. Concentration of that order is a yogic virtue. But then I believe you have studied yoga, haven’t you?”