David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“No shit?”

The little Nokia luminesced in Leo’s hand. We’ll meet you dwntwn. Come now was the message on the screen. “Take a right here, Leila,” said Leo. They were on Front Avenue, beneath the bridges. The phone started to issue driving directions, which Leo relayed to Leila. They drove toward the heart of the city.

When they were on Sixteenth, driving south, the phone told them Get Gas Here. Leila had just enough time to turn left into the Radio Cab garage, a brick two-story, inside of which was a gas station that not many people knew was open to the public.

“Ten dollars regular. Cash,” said Leila, to the pump jockey, a hipster with a waxed mustache.

“Do we really need gas?” Leo asked Leila, leaning forward.

“What’s going on?” said Mark.

“Not really,” said Leila, “but look,” and she pointed through the windshield to the car in front of them, at the other pump. A deep green Toyota Corolla, ten years old, a bike rack on the roof.

A doppel-car. And looking through the back windshield, Leo could see three people in it. A woman driving, a man in the passenger seat, a man in the backseat leaning forward.

“What’s going on?” said Mark again.

The pump ahead of them finished with a thunk, and the mustachioed pump jockey retracted pump’s nozzle, spun the gas cap, and took two bills from the driver. The car eased out the Kearney Street exit.

Wait three minutes. Then proceed eleventh couch instructed the phone.

“What’s the eleventh couch?” Leila asked Leo.

“That means Eleventh and Couch Streets. We pronounce it ‘Cooch’ here, for the street. I don’t know why.”

She was smiling at the word. God, she has a nice smile, thought Leo.

They crept out of Radio Cab.

“Are you guys taking me somewhere? I mean, other than my hotel?” Mark was getting nervous. Now Leo was glad to be in the back, directly behind him.

“I just want you to meet someone,” said Leila.

Leo thought he saw Mark glance at the door handle. He slid across the backseat to be able look his old friend in the eye.

“You have to quit working for the people you’re working for, Mark,” he said.

“What?” Mark tried to sound annoyed, but not before some little breath betrayed that he knew what Leo meant. He recovered quickly, though, and said, “You suggesting I take career advice from you?”

The real meaning hid in the few extra grams of weight Mark had put on the word you . He was calling Leo a failure; he was saying that Leo had made a hash of a luck-filled life.

Maybe he had. But in the moment, Leo’s grasp on life was better than Mark’s, and both men knew it. “Come on, Mark. You don’t even want to climb to the top of that heap. You wouldn’t like anyone up there.”

“What do you know about it?” said Mark.

“Are you asking me what right I have to tell you what to do, or are you asking how much I know about the evil shit that your employers are perpetrating?” Then he looked at the phone again and said, “It says we’re being followed.”

“Fuck off,” said Mark.

“I’m serious,” said Leo.

Leila sped up again. “But the thing at the gas station. That was to shake whoever, right?”

“Maybe it didn’t work,” he said. “Take a left on Ninth.”

“Left on Ninth,” she repeated.

“Okay, how about What do you know about it meaning how much do you know about the evil shit that my employers are perpetrating?”

“Not right now, Mark,” said Leo. “Look behind us. Who’s following us?”

Mark at first gave him a scrunchy, what the fuck? look. But Leo ignored it. “Seriously, Mark. This matters to you too.”

Mark scanned the street behind them.

“And a right on Couch,” said Leo.

“A right on Cooch,” repeated Leila, smiling again at the word.

“Any suspicious vehicles back there, Mark?” he asked.

“Negative. No suspicious vehicles,” said Mark. “Or they’re all suspicious. There’s a maroon Subaru and a Jeep Wagoneer that have both been there for the last two or three turns.”

Leo held the Nokia delicately, like a divining rod. He figured they were probably being directed to Burnside, from where they could access a knot of highway options. I-5 in two directions was five blocks away. Or a straight shot down Burnside and then cut to I-84. The phone luminesced again.

“Left here. Left here,” Leo said.

That left put them into crawling traffic. Greenpeace canvassers and smoothie carts clogged the sidewalks.

“Okay, and now a left into here,” Leo said. “Mark, you spotted him?”

“The Subaru is a lady with an Akita,” said Mark. “I don’t think it’s her.”

“What is this place?” said Leila.

“It’s the parking garage for Powell’s. The bookstore.” Leo hadn’t tried to use this garage in years. It had a too-tight corkscrew ramp and stingy spaces. Leila slowed to interact with the guy in the pay booth, but the crossbar lifted in front of her before she could roll down her window.

“Go,” said Leo, without prompting from the phone. “You kinda gotta gun it to get up this ramp.”

Leila gunned it up the ramp.

“Okay, it’s the Wagoneer,” said Mark. “But the bar didn’t go up for him.”

Just when they’d reached the top of the first full screw, the phone said to stop the car and engage the handbrake.

“Stop the car,” said Leo. “Engage the handbrake. It says to get out here.”

They all three moved swiftly from the car to a metal door in the concrete wall of the garage. They heard the Wagoneer begin its roar up the ramp. But when its big chrome nose edged around the central pillar and encountered the rear of Leila’s Toyota it stopped short, then they heard the ratcheting sound of a handbrake being levered. The Wagoneer was blocked on the ramp, at a severe incline, the kind of incline seen in disaster movies and presumably no longer allowed for parking-garage ramps. The driver was talking on a cell phone, but talking into it like a walkie-talkie. Then he released the handbrake and started to reverse the huge vehicle down the ramp. He had to do it in herky little jerks.

Leila had the Nokia now. “It just says Go through door, ” she said. But the door before them had no handle or lever, it was some sort of fire door, and it was flush to the wall it breached. But then Leo noticed that there was a paperback book wedged into the top corner of the frame. He tried to get his fingers into the crack around the door but couldn’t. He spotted a pen in Mark’s breast pocket. “You mind?” he said, snatching it swiftly. “Hey” was all Mark managed before Leo had jammed the clearly expensive pen into the crack of the door and used it as a tiny lever. Leila got a few fingers behind the door and then Leo could too. The door opened. The wedged book fell from the top corner: An old Mad magazine paperback: “Spy Versus Spy.”

They were somewhere inside the huge bookstore. “Where are we?” asked Leila.

“We’re in the Red Room,” said Leo. “Travel guides, atlases, other religions. Coffee-table erotica over there.”

“You work here or something?” asked Leila.

“No. But I wanted to. I cased it for weeks before my interview.”

“They didn’t want you?” said Mark. He sounded perturbed on Leo’s behalf. “But you know all about books. You owned a fucking bookstore.”

“Ran it into the ground, as I believe you’ll recall,” said Leo. “What do we do now?” Leo asked Leila.

She consulted the phone, but it must have been mute on the point. “I don’t know,” she said. “Browse?”

“Where are the magazines?” asked Mark.

“Follow me,” said Leo, and he led them through the huge and busy store to the bright corner room with its racks and racks of magazines. When Mark made for the magazines, Leila conferred with Leo.