Detected [2]
Of all the people in this world to get a whiff of my trail it had to be Freddie Fucking Lawrence. Jesus. Yes Jesus would’ve been much better. I could handle him popping in and telling me the jig was up. We’d have a drink, maybe some fish and loaves and he’d be on his merry way. But Freddie would be much more difficult, like a rabid hyena, better yet like my ex-wife, once he’d sunk his teeth in he wasn’t letting go. My next move was vital and it had to be chosen out of a plethora of pure guesswork. Am I being tailed? Bugged? Did someone dime on me or did Freddie go after me on a legitimate hunch? Have I unwittingly pissed someone off or am I just a pawn in a bigger game? Perhaps even more importantly, was Freddie a pawn, a proxy for some more insidious foe?
There are always so many potential narratives at the start of a case and it’s very important to narrow them down quickly if you want to make any headway. Even if you pick the wrong one at least you’ve got some notion of how to act. I’m not big on “old adages” but more is lost to indecision than wrong decision. Cicero was on the money there.
I took out my phone and called Tony’s, the kid answered.
“Tony’s House of Pizza, whaddaya want?”
“Hey Benjy it’s Buck, I need an extra-large with green and black olives, whole garlic cloves, double anchovy, and plenty of mayo.”
“Alright, 10 minutes. 15 tops.”
I hung up. Started to put the phone back in my pocket but then thought better of it. I brushed aside the miscellaneous papers on my desk, sat the phone squarely in the middle, picked up the brass bust of Bogie that I used as a paperweight and smashed that little snitch to bits. It was more an act of catharsis than pragmatism, but either way I felt good about it.
I spent 10 minutes chewing my fingernails before the pizza showed up. It was a new guy on delivery and when I answered the door I was met with a look that was a mixture of disgust and concern.
He was a burnout, just as stoned as any other twenty-seven-year-old delivery guy. He looked me up and down and asked doubtfully, “you order this?”
“No shit, what’s it to you?”
His face went slightly pale, “nothing man, nothing.”
I took the pizza from him. “Good.” I broke out a twenty and handed it to him. “Take a hike now bud, go smoke another fatty. On me.”
He took the money with a slow, bewildered sort of grasp and looked up at me. Smiling broadly, I slammed the door in his face. I sat the box down and opened it and the whole room was filled with an ungodly stink. The kid’s disgust hadn’t been misplaced. I mean the poor stooge thought I was actually going to eat this monstrosity. Little did he know these ingredients were a code: the more unappetizing the pizza, the more dire the situation.
I unfolded the right side of the box (the part where the cardboard is doubled over to add support) and pulled out a note written on a small scrap of yellow copy paper.
“The Other Place. Usual Time.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
I left the pizza on the desk, a punitive measure against the olfactory system of anyone who might come snooping around. Before leaving I turned the sign around on the door so that it read: Out to Lunch. Then I ripped the hands off the little clock that’s supposed to say when you’ll be back, pocketed them, and got the hell out of that rat trap.
The Olds started up with a reliable gout of black smoke. With plenty of time to kill what I really wanted to do was have a drink or a nap. Or both. But procrastination can always wait. Right now I had bushes to shake, spooks to rattle, events to catalyze.
I drove like an asshole, running three reds in a row, making haphazard turns, pulling U-y’s like I was in a demolition derby. If there was someone following me I wanted to give them the impression I was trying to lose them, make them think wherever I’m going is worth their while. I kept one eye in the rear-view but as far as I could tell no one was getting too friendly back there.
Calculated risks had to be taken. I got on a state road heading out to the county. Traffic thinned and I rolled the windows down, took in a little air and scenery. Ahead of me a spate of swollen cumulus amassed on a second horizon and the road seemed to disappear into the slim blue rectangle which it framed. It made me drowsy so I turned on the radio, found a classic rock station. It was bearable.
Some twenty miles out I exited and made my way to Carl’s, a junkyard turned chop shop posing as a junkyard. They were in the towing game too, hell of a racket. If you wanted to pose the argument that the line between legality and illegality is often a troublingly arbitrary one towing would be a good place to start. I turn off onto the gravel drive and as I roll up to the garage I spot Arnie under his makeshift awning (a tattered tarp strung up between the garage wall and a pair of rusted tether-ball poles). He looks like a toad squatted under some strange iteration of fungi: flabby, wrinkled, listless. He thumbed through this month’s Hustler with one hand and scooped a used wad of tobacco out of his lip with the other. As I exit the car I can hear the “thwop, thwop, thwop” as he packs the can up fresh. At his feet a grizzly pit bull opens one eye, looks at me, and readjusts himself so that he’s facing the other way.
“Hey there Buck.” He says it without looking up, his gaze affixed to the buxom blonde gagging on a large, white, hairless cock.
“Need a favor Arn.”
“Well I didn’t reckon you came out this far just to say howdy. What’s the bossman want?”
“Not the bossman, personal favor.”
He looked up, his eyes cocked in vexation. I winked, drew the billfold from my inside jacket pocket and liberated a few C’s. He nodded satisfactorily, then looked over at my car. His eyebrows knitted piteously.
“Y’know for about twice this I could just getcha a whole new car.” He spit and then stretched his lower lip out like an elastic band and inserted a fresh lump of Grizzly.
I tried my best to hide my disgust. “Might come to that, depends on how this goes. Your boys workin’ today?”
He shook his head, communicating an existential disappointment in his progeny. “They’re here but the useless fucks have already started drinkin’. Don’t know how much good they’ll be to ya. Wish I had the illegals, they’d fix ya up in a jif. But they’re all over the way in their little shanty-village. Some kind of beaner holiday.”
I smirked (at him not with him). “I think the boys will be able to handle this.”
“Alright well,” he cupped a hand to his mouth and tilted his head in the direction of the garage, “HEY SHITHEAD ONE AND SHIT HEAD TWO. I GOT A JOB FOR YOU ALL.”
We waited for a moment and the two brothers slumped forth from the garage, sleeveless, grease-stained, and each with a bud light in hand. They didn’t say anything, just waited for direction.
Arn looked at me expectantly. I turned to the boys. “I need a full sweep done of the ride. Trackers, bugs, signs of tampering, everything.”
One of them, Hank I think, looked up, burped, and surveyed the Olds. “How the fuck are we supposed to know what’s tampered and what’s shit?”
His brother chuckled. Arn shook his head.
“Use your best judgment. I’ve got faith in you kid.” This threw him. Nothing keeps a simpleton on his toes like sarcasm. “Anyway, if you find anything I want you to drive it out to the airport and leave it in long term parking. Otherwise I’ll be back for it. In the meantime one of you can drive me back while the other one gets to work. Oh and Arn,” I turned to the old man, “if anyone comes around asking-”
“Plates. Names. Descriptions. Etcetra.” He recited the words as if they caused him ennui.
“Right.” I smiled and looked back at the other two.
The other one, not-Hank, looked at me incredulously, “Buck, I ain’t bout to stop drinkin’ just so I can chauffeur your city slicker ass around. Get a goddamn Uber.”
I shrugged. “Forgot my phone.”
Hank reached into his overalls for his, “Fuck it, I’ll get him one.”
Arn shook his head and spit. “Sprung from my loins Buck. If my wife weren’t the saint she is I’d swear otherwise. Do yourself a favor, get your balls snipped. Best investment a man can make in this day and age with the whole world goin’ to hell.”
The boys rolled their eyes in mute protest of their father’s all too familiar proselytizing.
I nodded considerately, eyeing his sons, “Oh believe me Arn, I’ve given it some serious thought.”
The dog whined and pawed at the air, protesting some figment of his dream or perhaps our own unwelcome intrusion into it.
Marge drove me back to the city. She was a widow, overweight, grey-haired, and recently re-committed to evangelism. Wanting to “connect to the young people” she had chosen a ride-sharing application as her means of bringing salvation to the lost sheep of America’s back-country. Even after lying through my teeth about being “saved” she insisted on telling me her pitch: “You know Christianity is just like Uber, we’re all sharing the ride of life, but it’s Jesus that’s driving. You’ve just got to tell him where you want to go.”
Marge, the world-class buzzkill. How many drunken twenty-something’s had gotten in with her only to wish that they’d just sucked it up and driven themselves? Going 45 in a 60 it took the better part of an hour to get back and I’ll be totally honest, somewhere in that hour she converted me. I began praying. Praying for a coronary, her or me it really didn’t matter.
When she dropped me off downtown and both of us were still intact I lost faith again. Easy come, easy go I suppose. Anyways a new and essential objective now compelled me: alcohol. It was six blocks to Ray’s and I power-walked them like an aging suburbanite who just found out how much it costs to laser-treat cellulite. Down past the littered streets, the mill of the general populace lost in electronic cyber-bliss, I passed into the outskirts where an amalgam of pan-handlers, beggars, and buskers cohabitate — pushed out by the cops — each with their own tactics and niches: bucket-drums, violin, puppetry, signs professing bad luck and calling for empathy, and my personal favorite, silence. I’ve only got large denomination bills on me so I give nothing but instead take from it all a certain comfort. Their misfortunes are a stay against my own. I mean they’re fucking hacking it aren’t they? I study their faces and I see no self-pity, only grit.
The bar is all but empty and I nod to Ray and get my drink and belly up to a back booth and take a swig and hold the sweating glass against my forehead and try to summon forth the total powers of my feeble frontal lobe. Marge, if there was a God our heads would be twice the size and our tongues twice as slow.
I exhale and feel the gears begin to shift. I check my watch and it’s half past six, three hours and change. Time to slow down, recoup. I’m becoming more convinced that Freddie has gone rogue on this misadventure of his, but the fact that he showed his hand this early in the game nags at me. Even if he’s acting alone he’s trying to use me, hook me and cast out for a bigger fish.
I take another swig, have to combat the impulse to overthink things.
The door opens and this curvy redhead comes strutting in, the seams of her little black cocktail dress crying out for reinforcement like a group of teenage GI’s getting bush-fucked in nam, her hair a shower of napalm raining down, her eyes an Iroquois airstrike.
Ray growls at her, “You’re late.”
She puts a hand on her hip and looks at him coldly. “Look at me Ray, you see this?” She makes a circle with her hand, encompassing everything between her hips and forehead. “This is work. It’s an investment that makes your little bar a lot of money. So consider me punched in an hour and a half ago. I am in fact, quite early.”
Ray rolled his eyes, “Just go do the side-work alright Charlise?”
She walked behind the bar, ripped an apron off the rack and stormed into the kitchen, ass swaying back and forth all too seductively.
“Ray.” I call out hoarsely, trying to be discreet.
He comes over, looks at my half-empty drink, then at me. “What?”
“Sit down.” I cock my head towards the other side of the booth.
“I don’t have time to chit-chat Buck.”
I pull out a twenty and lay it on the other side of the table. He sits.
“Who the fuck is that?” I point to the kitchen.
Ray palms the twenty and looks at me dryly. “Don’t get any funny ideas Buck.”
“Ray I got all sorts of funny ideas about all sorts of things but right now I’m just asking you a question.”
He sighs. The man only has four or five years on me but he looks twice that. As far as I can tell he lives in a perpetual state of exasperation. He folds his arms, leans back, and looks at me over the top of his octagonal wire-rim glasses.
“She’s my wife’s cousin. Needed a job. I got stuck with her.”
“Alright, well seeing as I was in here last week and I would’ve remembered her-”
“Don’t be a fuckin’ perv.”
“Jesus alright Ray, all I’m asking is when did she come around looking for a job?”
Ray glared at me. “Buck you wanna come here and mope and drown your fucking sorrows that’s fine but you keep your dick in your fucking pants alright?”
He made to get up. I grabbed his arm and he looked like he was about to take a swing at me but I fished out another twenty, waved it, and put it down on the table. He shook off my hand, didn’t sit, but didn’t walk off either.
“Look Ray, you know me. Have I ever caused trouble in your place before?”
He looked at me for a moment, then shook his head stiffly.
“Right, so just answer my question and trust that I’ve got a reason for asking that doesn’t involve a hard-on.”
Ray looked me up and down and must’ve caught some glimpse of sincerity because his face softened slightly.
“Look her mom and my wife like to talk. Two days ago the woman starts crying on the phone about her daughter, she’s such a good girl, things never work out for her for some reason, yadda yadda yadda. My wife comes to me and tells me this sob story while I’m trying to watch the fucking game. I nod along, whatever, all of the sudden I’m agreeing to let this little bitch tend bar so she can have a ‘marketable skill set.’ Give me a fucking break.”
Someone comes through the door and Ray grabs up the twenty and hustles back to the bar. Charlise pops out before he can get there. She’s smiling like the Cheshire cat and her voice is an octave higher now as she flirts with a leather-clad, prison-tatted biker. I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, rub my eyes. If she were a plant, she would be the least subtle plant there ever was. But that in itself could be a brilliant move.
My paranoia feels like a fog, obscuring even the most familiar and ubiquitous aspects of the world. I’m supposed to be getting the dope so I have some facts to present later, a story to tell, but right now I’m running around like Hamlet, setting up useless productions and getting nowhere.
“Hey there big boy.” I look up at she’s practically on top of me, tits inches from my face.
“Can I get you a refill?” She smiles, winks.
I try to avoid direct eye contact. “Sure, make it a double.”
She reaches for the glass, bending over and brushing a hand over my forearm. I see the biker across the room, mesmerized by her ass.
She turns and walks back over to the bar. I don’t look. I won’t be hypnotized. Instead I heave myself up from the booth and beeline for the backdoor, making it out without a word of protest. I make tracks down the alley just as the streetlights are starting to come on. I look over my shoulder, no one. I think of Dillinger dead in the street over a piece of ass. Not me, I think, not today.
I stick to the alleys, not sure where I’m going. I’m alone save for the bums and the addicts. No one solicits me. They can sense desperation, even smell it maybe. I check my watch, three hours. I come out by the river and see the moon sitting just above it, huge and yellow. It calms me. I gaze out into the black veil of night and my eyes count a handful of solemn shards of light. Suddenly I’m reminded of a passage from a favorite book that resonated with me even as a child. It seems quite apropos:
All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies,
and whenever they catch you, they will kill you.
But first they must catch you…
