17 Resentment Court: Chapter Three
Read Chapter One here and chapter two here.
17 Resentment Court, David Stoesz’s new crime novel, zips and zings through the alleys, restaurants, and corporate offices of the rainy Northwest metropolis of Plankton — with a few murders along the way. Per a canine compact between the Shocker’s Blue Dog and Mouse House Books’ CEO Mosley, the Shocker Review will be serially publishing the first three chapters. Longtime editor and former Elliott Bay Books bookseller Diane Sepanski calls 17 Resentment Court “a dementedly funny noir.” Mosley calls it “a tremendous achievement, a feather in my fur.” You can buy it in paper or ebook. Enjoy!
3. Some complaints and a burglary
I wrote the top four things I hated about Plankton on an index card and pinned it to the wall.
1. Everyone’s faces
2. Everyone’s clothes
3. My neighbors
Once when I was out in the courtyard with a vodka lemonade and a cigarette, I was informed by a lady still in her office clothes that it was a nosmoking area. I told her I’d just finish this one. She didn’t move. She said it was a no-smoking-anytime area. I told her it would be pretty funny if something happened to her dog. She covered her mouth with her hands and rushed off. Some people have no sense of humor.
4. Frank Boise
That asshole. What was supposed to have happened at Yick Fung Overlook? My conversation with Helen Cranberry told me nothing. I decided to break into his office. He was practically inviting me in with that Zion’s Gate system. The way it works is that pairs of magnets go on all your windows and doors, and if anything opens, the magnets are separated and the circuit is broken and the alarm goes off. Any decent burglar can find a way to go through the window without opening it.
Not that I’m a burglar. Sure, I used to do the kind of crazy stuff all kids do. Drinking, throwing rocks, the occasional break-in. And that did eventually lead to being part of what you might technically call a “burglary ring.” But that’s a misleading term.
Boise’s office was on the second floor, with a window that faced an alley. The building is made with historically important lumpy bricks. Walking through a park one day, I saw an old water tower with the same kind of lumpy bricks. With a little practice, I could climb it to about the height of Boise’s window in thirty seconds. It didn’t even hurt my foot that much.
“Excuse me!” A voice from below. An upturned face under a black cap. Security guy. “You can’t be up there!”
“OK, I guess I’ll just drop my ass into your face then. How would that be? Would that be pretty neat?”
He stepped back sharply and put his hand on his belt.
“No, no, don’t call for backup, Der Kommissar. I’m coming down. Just messing with you. No harm, eh?”
I offered to shake his hand to show that everything was cool, but no go. Another cold fish.
I got a bike at a thrift store and some bike crap to help me blend in. Helmet, reflective vest, stretchy pants with a cradle for your balls. Plankton is all about exercise clothes. They want to be ready to take off running in the opposite direction in case you try to talk to them.
The bike stuff was my first outfit for the Boise job. For my second one, I’d dress like one of the men who fill the bars in Trapper’s Yard: jeans, a T-shirt, ball cap. In the thrift-store changing room, I looked like anyone or no one.
The night of the job, I put on my bike suit and packed the other clothes in a messenger bag, along with a glass cutter, a crowbar, thin cotton gloves, and a halogen penlight. The glass cutter was Japanese, with a pistol grip and eight cams in the axle bore of the cutting wheel. I was going to hate to lose it to the trash when I was done with it. I also had a small blanket to put over the windowpane. If you do it right, the blanket falls in with the glass and muffles the sound.
I learned that trick doing jobs with my friends. We started breaking into places as a way to stay out of trouble after we accidentally burned the school down one night. It wasn’t our fault. Banh had brought his idiot cousin along, and he started a fire in a garbage can. The first actual job we did was an electronics store. It was easy. It had the same kind of security system as the school. We loaded my dad’s station wagon and were gone in five minutes. We made a list of other places that had that system and hit them all.
I biked to Trapper’s Yard and locked up in front of a bookstore three blocks from Boise’s office. It was crowded with other bikes. Biking to a reading is a wild night for a Planktonite.
I headed for the back door of a bar called Brad’s Blazer that I’d scouted out the day before. It was propped open for ventilation. In the men’s room, I put on the jeans and T-shirt over my spandex, swapped my helmet for the ball cap, and changed into sneakers. The messenger bag was the only thing
I now shared with the bicyclist look, so I turned it inside out. In place of a bike dork stood a forgettable white man. White enough anyway, if I angled the brim of my cap over my face.
I left Brad’s Blazer having been seen only by a man swaying in front of a urinal. Three blocks later I stood at the mouth of Boise’s alley on a side street off the main strip. A plastic bag in a tree had filled with rain. The shadow of a leaf inside the bag sloshed back and forth on the sidewalk.
I unlocked the wheels of a dumpster and pushed my back against it until it was under Boise’s window, then walked around the block to make sure the racket hadn’t attracted attention. I got on top of the dumpster and started climbing. Never hurry, never rest was one of the principles of burglary I wrote down for the benefit of the other Riders. That’s what my friends and I called ourselves. It started as a drunken joke and stuck. It was short for “The Really Invincible Riders.”
Boise’s brick wall was even lumpier than the water tower in the park. Total time to the window was about twenty seconds. I had to cut the pane with one hand. I needed the other to hold onto the ledge, so I couldn’t do the trick with the blanket. I scored out the pane and pushed with the back of my hand.
Traffic noise from the strip washed away the tinkle of the glass. I used my bag to cover the razor edge left in the window frame and threw my bad leg into Boise’s office.
It’s not that I thought I was better than the other Riders when I suggested a few principles of burglary I thought we could agree on. But that’s how they took it. “Tell us more, Professor Pope!”
Assholes.
I put on the cotton gloves, pushed the power button on Boise’s computer, and applied my crowbar to his filing cabinet under the watchful eye of a little golden man on a trophy. Q, R, S . . . Smith, Pope. My file held a single sheet of Zion’s Gate stationery. I read it with the penlight in my mouth:
Pope Smith
Skinny as a stork
Dumb as a rock
Leaps for cash
A gazelle!
A bum on a baloney sandwich!
Under that was the date of my job interview and the initials FB. I put it back and flipped through the rest of the files. Nothing but legalese tales of divorce and surveillance. I turned back to the computer. It wanted a password. I turned it off. I scooped a handful of his excellent pens into my messenger bag.
I saw something. Something bad. I was being watched. Not the man on the trophy. A red dot in a plastic casing mounted in the shadow between two bookcases. It blinked when I moved. So Boise knew Zion’s Gate was shit and had a second system. About three minutes had passed since my entry. I sprinted to the window, dangled from the ledge, and dropped to the dumpster.
Ten more seconds to exit the alley and round the corner to the main drag, where I fell in behind a pack of guys dressed like me. Five steps in, flashing lights hit the back of my neck. I zigzagged through the crowd to the second bar I’d scouted out, the Big Ol’ Rooster.
I sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and averted my bloody eyeball from the bartender. There was a soccer match on TV. A team in mustard and a team in black and red. I got up, put a ten under my glass, and hit the men’s room stall. I thought of the time I fucked the married woman in a stall while she braced herself on the handicap railing. The memory was laced with razor. I stripped to my bicycle costume, changed my shoes, and put the helmet back on. I stuffed the clothes I didn’t need anymore into my messenger bag, which was now turned right-side-in again. Outside the Big Ol’ Rooster, my bicycle shoes sounded like high heels on the pavement.
Back home, I made toast and ate it with the lights out.
17 Resentment Court is available in physical and digital editions.
