Confessions of a Pulp Fiction Writer

Cage RIder, An Excerpt from a Novel in Progress

2011-08-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Cage Rider

By William E. Wallace

(Excerpted from a novel in progress)

Tommy Souza woke up at exactly 6:15 a.m. and stared up at the ceiling, hands folded behind his head, just as he had every day for the last twelve years. But this time, when 6:30 rolled around there was no loud buzzer that said the cops were opening up the main line so the inmates could go down to morning chow.

Souza found himself straining to hear the damned thing. Then he remembered that the buzzer was at California State Prison, Soledad. He was lying in a bed in a flop-house in Richmond, California, nearly two hundred miles north of there. He’d left Soledad Friday afternoon on the big gray C-DOC bus, carrying a cardboard suitcase with one change of clothes and $132.57 in gedunk money he had squirreled away.

That was the first time it hit him that he really was out of the state pen. His counselor in the joint found the flop he’d checked into and he had a job interview lined up Monday morning and a meet-and-greet with his parole agent later that afternoon. His entire weekend was free; all he had to do was get through it without fucking up.

That would be a good trick, if he could manage it.

He’d known cons that couldn’t make it through the first eighty hours out of prison without getting into trouble again. Inside the joint, the inmates called them “institutional men” because they didn’t seem to be able to flourish anyplace outside prison walls. Souza didn’t intend to be one of them. Getting into trouble again right after getting sprung was for suckers and half-wits. He was neither. He had seen enough of the California penal system to last him the rest of his life.

Since he didn’t have to get up and follow the other cons to the mess hall for breakfast, Souza laid in the sack until just after eight, trying to figure out what it felt like to be free. He decided he liked it. Then his stomach growled. He yawned, tossed back the skimpy blanket and tissue-thin sheet, swung his legs over the side of the bed and lit a Marlboro.

The flop-house might not have a warning buzzer, a mess hall or guards, and Souza’s status might have changed from state prison inmate to parolee, but somehow that didn’t make him any less hungry when he first got up. He rose, shaved and took a long, hot shower without worrying about bending over to pick up the soap for the first time in twelve years. Then he got dressed for breakfast.

The diner was only a half-block from Souza’s hotel. He took a stool at the counter and ordered coffee and an English muffin from the little Latina-looking waitress who was standing behind it. The black plastic tag on her blouse said her name was Edna Johnson. So much for appearances, Souza thought.

“Excuse me, Edna,” he said. “I notice that you folks don’t have a clock. What time is it?”

She looked at her wristwatch and heaved a dejected sigh. “Late. That’s what time it is,” she said. “It’s a quarter after ten. My relief was supposed to be here 15 minutes ago. Ah—here she comes now,” she added, brightening considerably.

Souza followed her gaze and saw a tall, middle-aged brunette in sunglasses come through the door.

“Shit, Edna!” the brunette said as she reached the counter. “Sorry for holding you up like this. I just got into my car and put the keys into the ignition this morning when the landlord ran up and told me the mailman left a package for me with him yesterday. I closed the door when I got out of the car to get the package and I locked my keys in the damned thing.”

She took off her sunglasses and Souza couldn’t help but notice that her eyes were almost the color of brand new pennies. To Souza, they seemed strange but oddly attractive. He hadn’t seen a woman for twelve years, except on TV. It’s like the Chinese say: “Hunger is the best seasoning.”

“I’ll bet the damned thing has been stolen by the time I get off shift,” the brunette said. “I only live about a mile from the Iron Triangle!”

Souza had only passed through Richmond three times before and he had no idea what the Iron Triangle was or where it was located. His knowledge of the city was based entirely on the brief walk he had taken around the hotel after he’d checked in the previous night.

“How far away is that?” he asked on impulse. He figured if nothing else, this could give him a chance to learn a little something about the city.

The brunette looked at him as if she was wondering what planet he had dropped in from. To her knowledge, she had never seen him before and she had no idea who he was, other than some guy sitting in the diner, reasonably sober, who might or might not be hitting on her.

“Why?” she asked sensibly.

Souza shrugged. “I can go and get your car and bring it back,” he said. “Then you won’t have to worry about it getting whacked.”

The brunette stared at him. “Whacked?” she said. She had never heard the term being used to describe anything but “drunk,” or “crazy,” except when it meant both.

“Ripped off,” Souza corrected himself. Even after twelve years off the streets he found it too easy to slip into the language of his former profession.

She considered the offer. “Well, I probably should just call Triple A,” she said, uncertainly.

“You a member?”

“No,” she said, frowning. “Do you have to be a member to get Triple A service? I thought you could just call them and pay them to open your car’s door.

Souza shrugged. “I’m offering to help you for nothing,” he said.

She thought about it. It was clear she was tempted but she seemed to need a little prodding to make up her mind.

“I wouldn’t leave your car sitting out there on the street too long with the keys hanging out of the ignition,” he said, sipping at his coffee. “Even the dumbest crackhead can break a window and drive away a car like that.”

She bit her lower lip as she thought. Souza liked the shape of her lips. He would have enjoyed nibbling on them himself. She was in her late thirties or early forties but trim and good-looking. And those copper-colored eyes knocked him out. He’d never seen anything like them.

“Okay,” she said finally, acting more on impulse than from any sort of logic. She fished around in her purse for a moment, then looked up at him with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement. “Oh, that was stupid of me,” she said.

“What?”

She laughed. “I was going to give you my keys so you could get in and start it! Of course, I don’t have them in my purse because they are still in the car.”

Souza smiled. He liked the sound of her laughter, too.

Coolie Sutton had been watching the pale blue Cavalier on the corner since that white chick from the apartment house across the street with the weird-looking eyes had started to leave in it that morning, then ended up running to catch the bus. Nobody rides the damn bus when they got a set of wheels, he thought to himself. When she was gone, he rolled himself a spliff. He lit the joint then held the smoke deep in his lungs while he looked at the car through the slat blinds in the Section Eight house he shared with his old lady, LaTonya.

He smoked two more joints while he studied the car and figured the angles. He hadn’t crossed over to glance in and see whether she had left her keys locked inside, but he didn’t really need to. He’d guessed that was what happened because when she got out of the car and shut its door to talk to the guy who managed the apartments, she couldn’t get back in.

“Stupid ass ho,” he muttered contemptuously.

Coolie could use a car, himself, even though his license had been revoked nearly two years earlier for DUI. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a job, so he didn’t have the money to buy one. What kept him from just getting in the Cavalier and driving it away was the same thing that kept him from employment: his basic laziness. He lived across the street from the chick who owned the Chevy, so he couldn’t just park the damned thing on the street. He might consider her a stupid whore—just as he did every other woman on the planet—but he didn’t think she was dumb enough not to recognize her own car when she came back from wherever she had gone that morning.

That meant Coolie would have to take the car down to the Triangle and see his partner, Rufus, to line up a buyer for the damned thing or to swap it for another set of wheels. Coolie usually got pocket money through strong-arm robbery, so anything that required more concentration and effort than running a block or two after grabbing a handbag or tapping some poor bastard on the head and taking his wallet looked a lot like a regular job to him. Regular jobs were for squares, not gangstas.

He took a final drag off the doobie and was just stepping out the door when he saw a white dude with a mustache like the cops wear walking down the street, looking at a little piece of paper he was holding in one hand. When the man with the ‘stache spotted the blue Chevy, he speeded up, slowing again only to check the back license plate against whatever was written on the paper.

Furtiveness was second nature to Coolie, so he held back, waiting to see what the stranger would do. To his surprise, the man moved to the passenger side of the Cavalier and bent down to look in, then straightened up and pulled out a wire coat hanger he had tucked under his belt in the back of his trousers. He fiddled with the hanger for a minute, untwisting the loop at the top and expertly bending it into a hook. Then he used it to fish inside the window on the passenger door, snagging the door lock and releasing it with a quick pull.

A moment later the man with the mustache was inside the Cavalier, revving the engine and hanging a U-turn in the middle of the street to drive away.

Coolie went back into his apartment and rolled another spliff. As he fired it up, he pondered the fact that a total stranger had just broken into and drove off the car he had been planning to steal himself. It made Coolie almost as angry as if the Cavalier belonged to him and not the woman with the weird eyes who lived across the street.

“Thieving motherfucker,” he said of the man with the mustache. “Stole my motherfucking ride right out from in front of me.”

Coolie’s anger at the theft was partly due to disappointment at missing his opportunity, which was irrational, considering that, during the 45 minutes he had spent smoking dope and thinking about stealing the car, he could have broken into the damned thing and driven it halfway to Sacramento. But he was also outraged that the poacher had entered his ghetto neighborhood to bag the car, walking up to it as boldly as a Jehovah’s Witness peddling “Watchtower” and breaking into it without even looking up or down the street to see whether a cop was watching. The bastard had a set of cast-iron balls and the way he broke in was really slick. Coolie wished he knew how he had done it. If Coolie could get into cars that easily, he would be tempted to give up his gig as a mugger.

The toilet flushed in the next room. LaTonya, who’d been out turning tricks until nearly three a.m., had finally got out of bed. She stood naked in the doorway behind him, scratching her side and yawning.

“What’s up, Daddy?” she said. She could tell he was in a bad mood, but as a matter of fact, he usually was.

Coolie sat down on the couch and rolled another joint. “Some motherfucking white guy just stole the car across the street,” he said, lighting up and drawing a big lungful of smoke.

LaTonya took the joint out of his hand and took a drag.

“So what?” she said in a squeaky voice as she struggled to hold the smoke in. “It’s not like it was yours, is it?”

“He just got a lot of fucking nerve, coming down to the ‘Hood to do his crime,” Coolie replied. “’Sides, I was planning to grab that car myself.”

LaTonya exhaled. “So, what you gonna do about it?” she asked. She was pretty sure she already knew what the answer was. Her boyfriend had the same solution to every problem he faced.

Coolie didn’t disappoint her. “I ever see that peckerwood again,” he said, “I’m going to kill his skinny white ass.”

When Souza walked back into the diner, the brunette was serving breakfast to a couple in one of the booths. He took the same seat he’d been in before and turned over the clean mug there, waiting to drop her keys on the counter until she brought over the coffee pot to fill it. “I parked it in the lot behind the restaurant,” he said.

“Wow,” she said with both surprise and relief playing across her face. It had occurred to her after he left that she had told a complete stranger exactly where he could find her car with the keys locked inside. For all she knew, he could have taken it himself.

“That was fast!” she added, giving him a smile and looking at him closely for the first time. He was sort of cute in a ratty way: his clothes were shabby but he had puppy dog brown eyes, dark, wavy hair and a mustache that drooped slightly over the ends of his mouth. “You were gone only a little more than a half hour. How’d you get inside it?”

“I used one of the coat hangers from my room,” he said, sipping coffee. “Sort of ruined the hanger, but I didn’t have a coat to put on it, anyhow. As for how long I was gone, you only live about a mile and a half from here so I followed the directions you gave me and just walked. I like to walk. I haven’t had much opportunity to do it lately. You’re so close that I’m surprised you drive back and forth, actually.”

She gave him a rueful smile. “You don’t know Richmond do you, Mr., uh . . .”

He smiled back and held out his hand. “My name’s Tommy Souza,” he said. “And you are . . .?”

“Jeanette Helmso,” she said, taking his hand in a friendly way. “Everybody calls me Netty, though.”

Her hand was cool and soft in his. He released it reluctantly.

“Well, Netty, you are right about me not knowing Richmond,” Souza said, picking up his mug. “Last night was the first I ever spent here. I think I drove through a couple times in the past, but that’s about the size of it. The last time must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago.”

“Most people don’t walk here, not in this part of town, anyway,” she said. “Walking around here is a good way to get robbed or raped or something.”

Souza grinned. “Well, I don’t have anything worth stealing and I don’t think anybody’d be interested in raping somebody with a face like mine,” he said. “Lot of crime here, huh?”

She nodded. “We have one of the highest murder rates in the nation,” she said. “It can be a pretty violent place.”

“Why do you stay, then?” Souza asked.

She shrugged. “I spent my whole life in Richmond,” she said. “I was born here. Graduated from Richmond High in 1989. I guess it’s just stubbornness: I feel like I can’t let thugs chase me out of my own hometown. So where are you from originally?”

“Around,” Souza said. “Colorado, Utah, Idaho. My dad was a construction stiff. But I used to work about 40 miles south of here in Hayward more than a decade ago.”

“What brings you to Richmond?”

It was Souza’s turn to shrug. “This is where they sent me,” he said. He didn’t feel like adding that “they” were the folks at the California Department of Corrections. “I have a job interview here Monday morning. I’ll see how things work out from there.”

“Well, welcome to Richmond, Tommy,” she said. “The coffee’s on me. And next time you come in and I’m working, I’m picking up the tab for your meal.”

Souza decided to press his luck. “I’d be much obliged. When do you normally work?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t being too obvious.

“Saturdays and Sundays, I’m the ten ‘til seven girl,” she said with a smile. “Monday through Wednesday, I work swings, three p.m. until twelve.”

“I live just down the block and I’m used to three squares a day,” Souza said, grinning. “You’ll probably be seeing me in here so often you get sick of me.”

She laughed. “I doubt it,” she said.

Souza hoped she was right.

The Judas Hunter, Chapter One

2011-08-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Judas Hunter

Chapter One of Twenty-three

(An excerpt from the novel)

Daniel Kelly slouched against the glass wall of the phone booth, cocking his head sideways to hold the handset to his ear while he rifled his pockets for change. He dropped two quarters into the pay phone’s slot, waited for the dial tone and punched in ten numbers. The mechanical voice told him how much money to deposit and he let coins rattle into the slot while he watched the tall blond man on the other side of the gas station put fuel into the rust-spotted 1947 GMC pickup. The phone rang twice before somebody picked up at the other end.

“What’s up?” asked a male voice.

“It’s me,” Kelly said quietly. “We’re almost there – maybe another half hour of driving. I’m going to put the shipment into the cabin and dump the rest of the stuff up in the back, just like we discussed. Are you taking care of that other thing?”

“Yes,” said the male voice. “I’m still looking for somebody who can find out what we need to know to wrap it up. It’s just a matter of timing.”

Kelly watched the tall blond man as he finished filling the truck’s tank, hung the gas hose back on the pump and reached into his jeans for his billfold. “Just don’t let the timing get away from you,” Kelly said. “We have to tie up these loose ends as soon as possible – the feds aren’t going to screw around forever. Look, I gotta split. We’re just about ready to leave. I’ll call you later.”

He put the phone back on the hook and absent-mindedly fished in the coin return before stepping out of the booth and moving toward the blond man.

“We ready to go?” he asked.

The blonde man nodded. “Yeah. She took about seven gallons. You’re gonna need oil by the time we get back, though.”

Kelly grinned. “Hell, we probably burned a quart just starting this old son-of-a-bitch,” he said, patting the truck’s fender. “Go ahead and pay the man. Let’s motivate. I wanna get done before it starts getting dark.”

The primer-spotted Jimmy hooked east off Highway One onto Salmon Creek Road about a mile and a half north of Bodega Bay. Moving toward the tiny resort town of Occidental, it made a sudden, unsignaled turn onto an unpaved private drive running parallel to Finley Creek, spinning its wheels momentarily in soft, henna-colored dust before continuing north.

Kelly slumped over the steering wheel, his lips pursed in a silent whistle, shifting his upper body from side to side as if the motion helped guide the truck up the twisting grade toward Sheep Ridge. As he drove, he glanced thoughtfully at the blond man sitting beside him.

The passenger stared at the road ahead bleakly, his face set in an expression that was about three degrees south of hopeless. Occasionally he took a long pull from the half-quart beer can cradled between his thighs and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand.

Kelly was a comic-book caveman, short, dark and heavy-set. Years of manhandling free-weights in prison recreation rooms had given his upper body so much bulk that even while relaxing, the muscles of his chest, arms and shoulders bunched under his Harley-Davidson T-shirt, stretching the fabric taut. His head appeared small in relationship to his overdeveloped body, with a bony brow and long sloping forehead that disappeared under a thick thatch of greasy black hair.

His passenger, on the other hand, was a caricature of a hippie straight out of a Sixties-era underground comic book. Tall, thin and lanky in his faded jeans and Willie Nelson T-shirt, he had shoulder-length hair pulled into a stringy pony tail and a patchy blond beard covering most of his baby face. The crowning touch was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses glinting dully against the dark tan of his face. He could have blended into the crowd at any Grateful Dead concert in the country.

Kelly smiled slightly and reached over to pat the blond man reassuringly on the thigh. "Chill, man," he said. "There's nothing to worry about. In a little while we'll be at the cabin and then everything will be cool. You'll see."

The blond man shuddered and took another swig of beer. "Yeah, sure," he said. “I’m just edgy, that’s all. No big deal.”

As the truck continued to climb up the dirt drive, both men lapsed into silence.

The sun had dropped down onto the flat gray surface of the Pacific about a half-hour earlier and the late afternoon shadows were now lengthening into dusk. Despite the gathering darkness, Kelly waited until he was well off the county road before he switched on his headlights.

The private driveway led to a small redwood shingle summer house nearly a mile off the paved road. Reflective tape letters on the signpost in front spelled "Hendrickson," and the pickup’s sealed beams flashed against them momentarily as it stopped.

Kelly turned off the ignition and sat silently, listening. The only sound was the distant sigh of wind brushing the redwood-studded hills and the metallic click as the engine cooled. Satisfied, he turned to the blond man and said, “As the cable guy would say, ‘let’s get ‘er done.’ ”

The two men unfastened the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck’s bed and folded it back to reveal four large wooden crates, each stenciled with the words "Cobray."

With some effort, they manhandled the heavy containers into the summer house, stacking them neatly in the northwest corner of the cabin. After the boxes were stowed, Kelly took a second canvas tarp neatly folded in the back of the truck and carefully draped it over them so none were visible. When he was satisfied, that the boxes were completely out of sight, both men climbed back into the truck and the Kelly guided it onto a rough fire trail behind the house that ran through one hundred yards of tangled coyote bush, bay trees and redwood. The road ended abruptly in a small clearing where a platform made of splitting planks stretched over what could easily be seen was a hole in the ground. A piece of peeling plywood nailed to a nearby tree bore a crude drawing of a skull and crossbones and the words, “DANGER: DRY WELL."

Kelly cut the engine. "This is it," he said, climbing out.

Clouds of dry red dust hung in the air as they maneuvered the wooden platform off the mouth of the well. The pit yawned blackly before them, six feet across.

The blond man peered into the hole skeptically. "I don't know," he said shaking his head. "Is it deep enough? Looks kind of shallow to me."

Kelly dropped a small stone into the pit and it clunked hollowly somewhere in the shadows. “It's about ten feet and that's plenty deep enough," he said. “In a few minutes these jokers will be a puzzle for some archeologist to figure out a thousand years in the future. Let's do it.”

They lowered the pickup’s tailgate and loosened the ropes holding down the tarp. Lined up neatly underneath were three man-sized forms wrapped in sheets of black plastic, each bound carefully with short lengths of clothesline cord and gray duck tape.

Kelly pulled one of them to the rear of the truck, tugged it partially upright and slung it over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. The contents of the bag had started to stiffen during the two-hour drive to the cabin.

He grunted with the effort. “Dead weight,” he leered as he hefted the bag. “Very dead. Grab one of the others."

The blond man shivered and wrestled a bag onto the ground. "This is flat-ass creepy, man,” he said as he dragged it toward the well. “Reminds me of ‘Desert Storm,’ ‘cept our pouches were made in a factory, not in a garage.”

When all three bags were underground, the two men stood together, staring into the hole in silence.

The blond man shivered again, "Rest in peace," he said quietly.

Kelly eyed him carefully. "Thirsty work,” he said, turning back toward the pickup. "You want another brew?"

Lost in thought, the blond man peered into the well and nodded without speaking.

Kelly found the cardboard six-pack on the floor of the truck. As he picked it up, he reached beneath the seat on the driver's side and pulled out a box-shaped weapon made of blue-black steel with cone-shaped tube that was nearly a foot long attached to its front. It was a 9-millimeter MC-11 machine pistol with a silencer, a full 32-shot magazine and a cocked bolt. Silently flipping off the pistol's safety, he set the fire-rate selector on semi and smiled.

With the weapon at his side, he turned back to the well.

The blond man turned toward Kelly when he was about ten feet away. The first time he saw the gun was when Kelly pulled the trigger. He opened his mouth but was unable to speak before the weapon jerked with a dry cough.

At such close range, the slug went through the tall blond man’s belly like a spoon through tapioca, stitching a neat hole a little more than one-third inch across in the front of his T-shirt and a bigger, more ragged one in its back. With the flat whir of an angry mechanical bee, the bullet buried itself in a redwood tree 50 feet away on the other side of the clearing.

The impact threw the blond man backwards against the far wall of the well. His body twisted as he hit. In a reflexive movement, he threw his arms out, grabbing the edge of the hole with a grunt and straining to keep himself from sliding the rest of the way in.

Without haste, Kelly used the short sling hanging from the front of the weapon to steady it, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger again.

The second bullet drilled a hole in the right side of the blond man's forehead just above his gold-rimmed glasses. He seemed frozen for a moment as a thick ribbon of red trickled down his nose into his beard. With a mild look of reproof on his face, he disappeared underground.

Kelly locked the bolt and stuffed the gun into the waistband of his jeans. Popping open a can of beer from the six-pack, he guzzled half of it quickly and poured the rest into the well, dropping the can after it.

"Rest in peace, brother," he said, quietly. "Rest in peace."

The Jade Kotsutsubo, an excerpt from a novel in progress

2011-08-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

The Jade Kotsutsubo

By William E. Wallace

Chapter One

Jake Connors parked the Zephyr with the front wheels locked against the curb to keep it from rolling all the way down the Oakland Hills into San Francisco Bay. He parked his wad of well-chewed Beeman’s on the backside of the Lincoln’s rear-view mirror and stepped out to see what kind of a view a war profiteer could buy.

He had to admit it was impressive. If Randy Sykes looked out the window, a clear day would afford him a view of roughly 137 square blocks of residential real estate he had picked up for a song during the war and then developed into single-family homes with the assistance of the Federal Housing Administration. GIs were raising families in Sykes Homes from El Cerrito to San Leandro, and Sykes’ real estate holdings alone had made him one of the richest men on the West Coast.

The vista took in the shipyards in Richmond and San Francisco where Sykes had been a subcontractor to Henry J. Kaiser at the beginning of the war. It swept all the way down to the Regal Automobile Works in East Oakland, a plant he had originally cranked up to punch body panels for Jeeps and half-tracks. After the war, it had been retooled to manufacture the Regal Sedan, a limited edition four-door in the same price range as a high-end Cadillac.

Connors knocked on the millionaire’s front door and listened as the sound disappeared into the building’s vast interior. Sykes’ mansion, which seemed to crawl down the face of one of steepest slopes in the Oakland Hills, had been finished about three weeks after VJ day. Rumor had it the house had cost several million to construct. Randolph Sykes had made a fortune slapping together the kind of inexpensive housing an ex-soldier could purchase on the G.I. Bill, but he hadn’t cut any corners on his own place.

He listened for some response. A minute passed, then another. Finally he heard the mechanical rasp of the latch inside and a long, low squeal that reminded him of the beginning of the radio show, “Inner Sanctum,” as the door swung slowly open just wide enough to allow someone to look out.

“Yes?” said the fellow standing behind it, blinking at Connors uncertainly through the crack. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and his skin was almost the color of a mackerel’s belly, a sure sign that he spent little time outdoors.

The man behind the door was apparently some sort of Sykes family retainer, a butler, possibly, or maybe just some garden variety serf. Connors handed one of his business cards through the crack and the serf inside received it distastefully, handling it with the tips of his fingers as if it might be crawling with germs.

The card said:

Jacob Connors

California Licensed Investigator

Confidential Inquiries

Specialist in background checks, missing persons and divorce proceedings

References available from law enforcement agencies and attorneys

At the bottom was the address and telephone number for Jake’s office in downtown Oakland.

The serf read the card carefully. As a trained investigator with law enforcement experience, Connors deduced that the man was well educated because he barely moved his lips. When he finished, the serf looked at Connors almost as carefully as he had studied his calling card.

“And you are Mr. Connors, I take it,” he said, his tone making it into a question. He peered at the private investigator skeptically as if he suspected that he might have found the card lying on the street just a few steps away from Sykes’ door.

“Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,” Connors replied. “I’m here to see Mr. Sykes. He sent for me.”

“Please wait,” the serf said. “I will tell him you have arrived.”

He swung the door closed and Connors momentarily considered using his size ten shoe to block it. But when the massive oak and cast-iron fixture came to rest in the doorframe with a thunderous boom, he was glad he hadn’t: it wouldn’t be easy to drive the Zephyr back to his office in the Cathedral Building downtown with only one foot.

Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and waited for the serf to return.

It took him less than five minutes, and when he did he swung the door open, stepped back and bent slightly at the waist to invite Connors inside. The ceiling of the foyer was at least twenty feet high and the entryway seemed to be more than sixty feet across, but the room was surprisingly shallow; if he took three long steps, Connors could have put his hands on the opposite wall.

“Odd proportions,” he said to the serf, nodding at the entry as he took off his hat.

The serf nodded. “A concession to the force of gravity,” he replied. “This building was constructed to cling to the side of a steep cliff, held in place with steel girders that have been drilled into bedrock. It consists of six stories, all made from steel-reinforced concrete, hanging from steel I-beams. Mr. Sykes’ engineers calculated that the rooms should be rather shallow or the building’s weight would end up pulling it down the hillside into the canyon below.”

Connors had once entered a bunker on a cliff on Guadalcanal after a Marine fire-suppression team burned out the gunnery crew with jellied gas. It had a similar construction to Sykes’ mansion, although the inside of Sykes’ cozy little den didn’t smell like cooked Jap. “Ah,” the investigator said. “That’s why it looks sort of like a lava flow, then.”

“Precisely,” the serf replied. “As I said, a concession to gravity. Forces of nature are among the few things on this planet to which Mr. Sykes is willing to bow.”

“My name is Cortez, incidentally,” he added as he gestured for Connors to follow him down a staircase to the left of the foyer. “I perform a variety of functions for Mr. Sykes. You could call me a valet of sorts.”

Cortez’ manner was stiff enough for him to be a gentleman’s gentleman. “Sort of like Jeeves, eh?” Connors said with a slight smile.

Cortez raised an eyebrow. He didn’t seem pleased by the comparison. “Nothing of the kind,” he said. “Jeeves found it necessary to do most of Mr. Wooster’s thinking for him. I wouldn’t presume to second-guess Mr. Sykes. He is probably one of the brightest men on the planet.”

Sykes’ “valet of sorts” led the investigator down the stairway, then down another that doubled back from it.

The interior was interesting to Connors: in almost every room they passed through, Sykes had some Asian treasure on prominent display. Jake, who had grown up in Hawaii and joined the U.S. Marines after Pearl, spotted items that looked similar to ones he had seen in museums in Honolulu, including antique lacquered chests, beautifully forged Japanese and Chinese swords, numerous pieces of fine crockery and a variety of intricately carved semiprecious stones. The mansion itself was designed to show the art off splendidly: though the building was massive and built largely of concrete reinforced in some manner that Sykes had patented as a trade secret, each room had a low ceiling and a flooring that, while made of some blond wood, made Connors think of tatami matting. The huge windows, most of them overseeing stunning views of San Francisco Bay, were framed with massive pieces of dark oak, and the artworks themselves were arranged in little arcades that reminded Connors of the tokonama in the family room of his godmother, Ruta Sakaramitsu, who had come to Hawaii to work in the fields as a cane cutter but ended up owning one of the most popular nightclubs and restaurants in Waikiki, Mama Koro’s.

Connors felt like he was getting a complete interior tour of the house and would eventually find himself all the way down the hillside, stepping out a downstairs door into what was known as the Rockridge neighborhood of North Oakland. He was glad to have a guide leading him on but he wasn’t looking forward to the return trip up all those stairs.

After about five minutes they reached the millionaire industrialist’s study, the one room in the building that seemed to jut precariously out a substantial distance into space above the Oakland hills. Its construction seemed patterned in part on the traditional Bay Window, though on a mammoth scale: Set into the gray cement there were three angled panels, each filled with plate glass from floor to ceiling and offering a breathtaking view of a different portion of the San Francisco Bay Area.

To the east, Point Richmond, Belvedere, Tiburon and a portion of Sausalito could be seen, along with the tanker facilities that lay along the Richmond shoreline. Directly opposite, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais and the Marin Headlines were visible. And to the West, an observer could see San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena, as well as a strip of the San Francisco shoreline that extended almost all the way to San Mateo.

Connors wasn’t easily impressed, but Sykes’ view overcame his usual reserve. “Wow!” he said in a hushed voice as he walked to the windows, checking the vista from each one and completely ignoring the man behind the library table at the room’s near end who had summoned him in the first place. “That’s a view for the ages!”

Sykes joined Connors at the panel that overlooked San Francisco and the shoreline to its south. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, looking out himself with a broad grin. “I may be wrong, but I think it is the best San Francisco panorama in the entire East Bay.”

Connors turned to respond and took Sykes in with a quick but thorough glance. The industrialist was average in height and weight, and appeared to be in his late fifties, with light-colored hair brushed straight back from his forehead in a fashion that made him look a little like a blond version of the composer, George Gershwin. He was dressed in a corduroy suit with suede patches on the elbows like an English professor at Stanford, one of the few Bay Area landmarks not visible from his windows. He also wore a pair of brogans that appeared to have been selected for comfort, not style.

“I’d say it’s one of the best views of San Francisco, period, Mr. Sykes,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Jake Connors. Glad to meet you in person this time.”

The industrialist’s return grip was firm and dry, and his shake was vigorous, like that of a man who is used to dealing with all sorts of people and works to make a favorable impression on them from the first time he meets them.

“A pleasure, Mr. Connors,” he said. “Why don’t you come over here and sit down on this divan. I have a job I would like you to perform for me, but I want to satisfy myself that you are the best person for it beforehand, if don’t mind answering a few questions for me.”

Connors allowed himself to be led.

“So what can I do for you?” he said as he took a seat.

Sykes pulled out a little notebook. “You mentioned meeting me in person this time,” he said. “I’ve hired you before, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” Connors said. “You brought me in two years ago to find reds among the people who were trying to organize a union at your East Oakland plant. I took the job after an interview with one of your agents and didn’t actually talk with you in person. To make a long story short, there weren’t any communists. You fired me because I didn’t find any and hired Western Research Foundation to finish the job.”

The tone of his voice and the expression on his face made it clear that Sykes had made a mistake that raised serious questions about his probity.

“Did we fire you or simply dismiss you because you had finished the work we assigned?” Sykes asked.

Connors frowned. “Aren’t they the same thing?” he said. “To me, I was fired.”

Sykes nodded, looking serious. “Did we contest your fee?” he asked.

“No,” Connors said. “You paid it. In fact, you paid me a bit more than I had coming. I had to write a small check to return the difference.”

“Ah,” Sykes said. He riffled through the pages of his notebook. “Did we cash your check?”

Connors was beginning to wonder what this was all about. “No, you never did, in fact,” he said. “It was sent back.”

Sykes made a note in his book without looking up. “I see,” he said.

“Do you happen to know what Western Research found out?” he asked when he finished writing and looked up at Connors.

The investigator suppressed an urge to sigh. Sykes obviously was taking this conversation somewhere and he was going to have to hang on until he found out what it was. “I heard they determined that the entire union was full of commies,” he said. “The whole Third International was hiding out in that local.”

Sykes closed his eyes and smiled. “Why did Western Research detect them when you couldn’t?” he asked.

Connors let air out of his lungs in what could have been a sigh or simply an indicator of annoyance. “They found them because they bribed people to sign affidavits that their colleagues were communists,” he said. “The affidavits were false. The signers perjured themselves. For money. I know because I have interviewed several of them, myself. There weren’t any communists, just pissed off workers.”

“Could you have done that? Found non-existent communists, I mean.”

“Probably,” Connors said. “If I had known that was all you wanted.”

“So, why didn’t you?”

Connors didn’t waste any time responding. “Mr. Sykes, I usually work for lawyers doing criminal defense work,” he said. “They want to know how guilty their clients actually are before they buy into their stories and try to use them in court. There’s practically nothing an attorney hates more than pursuing a defense and having it fall apart because their witnesses can’t stand up to cross examination.”

“Before I worked for defense attorneys, I was with the DA’s office in Honolulu,” he continued. “Prosecutors don’t like having their witnesses fall apart any more than their colleagues on the other side do. Knowing the truth makes life simpler for both sides because it tells you ahead of time just exactly how much you are going to have to twist the truth.”

He paused momentarily to gather his thoughts.

“Now I could have gone out and found people to say your union activists were communists but they wouldn’t have been telling the truth. When I took on your assignment, I thought you wanted to know the truth. If I had known you just were looking for bullshit, I would have gone down to the stockyard and loaded up a truckful of it.”

Sykes pondered this. “Have I hired you for anything since then?”

Connors shook his head in the negative.

“But you’ve worked, right?” Sykes asked. “I mean, I didn’t have you blackballed because you didn’t identify the communists in that local union, did I?”

Connors shook his head again. He knew that Sykes had checked him out before calling him for this appointment. “I just finished one job,” he said. “I have an appointment to meet somebody at my office this afternoon who wants to retain me. I can’t complain about how much work I’m getting. I’m doing just fine.”

Sykes looked in his notebook. “Have you picked up an assignment from Art Francis?” he asked.

Francis was a big building contractor.

“Yeah,” Connors said, surprised that Sykes knew. “He needed me to do surveillance on a housing development he was doing in East Oakland. The contractor was reporting large scale thefts from the jobsites. It turned out that the contractor’s son and brother-in-law were stealing stuff off the job, selling it and splitting the proceeds with the contractor. It was an insurance scam.”

Sykes nodded, knowingly. “How about Howard Weininger?” he asked.

Connors blinked. The Weininger investigation had been hush-hush, a family matter involving Weininger’s son-in-law: no cops, no newspaper items. It had been resolved without litigation or an arrest. He had no idea how Sykes had got wind of it.

“I’d rather not say,” Connors told the industrialist. “A lot of my work is confidential. The Francis case ended up going to court, so it’s a matter of public record. Other cases I have worked on aren’t.”

Sykes tapped his cheek with a finger. He was smiling and Connors couldn’t figure out why. “Well, if it is a matter of public record, how did the Francis case turn out?” he asked.

Connors was beginning to feel uneasy about the course of the interview.

“The contractor, his son and his brother all went to state prison,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “The Alameda County D.A., George Cooper, built most of his prosecution on my investigation – evidence I turned up, documents I tracked down, witnesses I located. He used a lot of photographs I took, and some magnetic wire recordings. Why?”

Sykes seemed amused. “It was a sensitive case, wasn’t it?” he asked. “I know it was because Mr. Cooper and I talked about it at length. I’m one of the people who convinced him to stand for the office, and I support his efforts. I also know that you found that Howard Weininger’s son-in-law had another wife before he married Weininger’s daughter – and that they were still legally married when he and Carrie Weininger tied the knot. He had never bothered to divorce his first spouse. As a result of your investigation, Carrie’s marriage was annulled and Weininger was able to escape a costly financial settlement.”

Connors cleared his throat.

“Mr. Sykes,” he said, “I am enjoying this game of twenty questions but it’s obvious you know about these investigations already, so I don’t know why you are wasting your very valuable time – and my considerably less valuable time – asking me about them. Is there some sort of reason for this quiz?”

If anything, Sykes’ smile grew broader. Connors’ insolent tone didn’t seem to bother him at all. “You have some spirit, Mr. Connors,” he said. “How do you think Weininger and Francis came to hire you?”

Jake was taken aback by the question. He never gave much thought to how his clients found him.

“I suppose they saw my ad in the phone book,” he said, stammering slightly in his surprise.

Sykes’ amused expression was now an open grin.

“Two of the wealthiest men in Northern California just happened to come across your four-column-inch ad in the Yellow Pages and decided to hire you, out of the listings of some 400 private investigators in the San Francisco Bay Area,” he said in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. “No doubt they were drawn in by your promise of a ‘fast, discreet investigation.’”

Connors stared, uncertain what point the millionaire was trying to make.

Sykes took Connors by the arm and led him to a large leather arm chair at the opposite side of the room. Once the detective was seated, Sykes pulled a chair over from the library table and placed it in front of him. Sitting down, the millionaire said, “Mr. Connors, I recommended you for both of those jobs because you actually provided me with good service in that investigation you conducted for me.”

“I hired Western Research because they provided me with expedient service. Expedient service and good service are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, they are often not even remotely similar.”

He tapped the back of Connors’ hand with a forefinger. “I needed to get rid of five men in my body parts fabrication plant in East Oakland because they were leading a unionization campaign,” he said. “When I hired you, I was hoping you would rather quickly ascertain that they were communists. But, in fact, you proved just the opposite – the men that I suspected turned out to simply be union stalwarts and would-be saviors of the underdog. Under normal circumstances, I might have lauded their effort to win better wages and working conditions for their fellow employees. But the circumstances were not normal, not then and not in my own plant. That was useful information but it wasn’t the information I needed at the time, do you understand?”

Connors nodded.

“My sponsors in the federal government were pressuring me to get rid of communists, but not to dismiss workers who were simply trade unionists,” Sykes continued. “They were Democrats and Democrats like trade unionists. So I looked for an information broker that was a great deal less scrupulous than you had been to provide me with information I could use to discharge those workers without drawing the ire of my political sponsors.”

Connors got the picture. “So you hired crooks to dirty up the reputation of your unionization leaders,” he said. “Mox nix to me, Mr. Sykes. I don’t have any politics but the truth. About communists and union bosses I could give a shit.”

Sykes inclined his head. “Just so,” he said. “But I appreciate your honesty and adherence to fact. Otherwise, I would never have recommended you to my two colleagues and friends, Mr. Weininger and Mr. Francis. You see, Mr. Connors, I also have an appreciation for the facts. And I need some specific facts in a great hurry. That means I am in a situation where I need good service that is also expedient service, and I think you are the ideal candidate to provide me with both.”

Connors was confused again. “Excuse me for asking this, but are you saying that you want me to do an investigation for you in which what you actually want is the truth, not some poppycock you can use to get rid of workers you don’t like?” he said.

Sykes, still smiling, inclined his head again.

“What if the information I bring you is something you find disagreeable?” the investigator asked.

“In that case, Mr. Connors, I will not only be eternally grateful, but will also pay you a bonus on top of whatever fee we agree to,” Sykes said. “If your inquiry turns out as I expect it will, the result will be information that clears the way for another step in my career. And if you turn up something detrimental, it is better to know about it now, at the very beginning, than later when things have progressed too far to be resolved without a great deal of adverse publicity.”

Connors thought about it. “So what, exactly, is it that you want me to investigate?” he said finally.

Sykes grinned. “No less than the President of the United States has me under consideration as a candidate for an important government post,” he said. “I am undergoing a security investigation by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the people from that agency I have talked to so far have not impressed me. They seem to be simple policemen, more skilled at finding bank robbers and kidnappers than conducting a complicated investigation of an individual who is engaged in business activities the scope of which the average federal agent has no chance of understanding. I suspect they will find nothing, but if they accidentally stumble on some information that is detrimental to my interests – say something planted by one of my business rivals – I want to be able to counter it. In order to do that expeditiously, I need to know what they are likely to turn up even before they do. Do you understand what I mean?”

Jake nodded. “I think so,” he said. “You want me to go out and look for the kinds of negative things your enemies would steer the feds toward. I suppose you could call it preemptory intelligence. That way you can figure out ahead of time what you intend to say when this stuff comes up during, say, a hearing before HUAC or its Senate counterpart.”

The industrialist smiled, eyes half closed. “Very perceptive, Mr. Connors,” he said. “I knew you were the proper person for this particular job. In short, I want you to investigate me, thoroughly and exhaustively, before the nomination is official. I want you to dig up every bit of dirt you can on me, to find out whether I can stand up to the federal scrutiny that will be required for me to take the position.”

“In short, Mr. Connors, I am hiring you for a very special investigation – I want you to find out what a rotten bastard I actually am.”

She Works Hard for the Money, an excerpt from "Bottom Street," a novel in progress

2011-06-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

When Johanna got back to her apartment after a hard night of turning tricks for her pimp boyfriend, Jimmie Culpepper, the rotten sonofabitch usually was there waiting for her. He would immediately start running down shit that seemed to be mostly the product of his incredible egotism coupled with insecurity about his own sexuality.

“I seen you this evening bullshittin’ with that he-she, Kitty Corners,” he said sullenly, on this particular occasion. “I told you to stay the fuck away from that tranny, but you go ahead on and hang with him anyway. You know he got a boyfriend in the vice squad. Nobody spoze to know about it, but everybody on the street know anyway.”

Johanna sighed, knowing immediately that Jimmy was going to work himself into a state where he couldn’t be satisfied without beating the hell out of her. She wasn’t sure she could do anything to stop him. Hours of sucking cock had left her weary, her jaws aching and her neck muscles stiff and sore. Oral sex—the primary stock in trade of the San Francisco streetwalker—had become the bane of her life. Getting the pasty-faced and hypertensive Michelin men who drove their Expeditions and Highlanders in from Walnut Creek to come in her mouth seemed more difficult every day, and Johanna couldn’t tell whether it was because she didn't really enjoy sucking them to climax or that they were too edgy and obese to get off.

Whichever was irrelevant. She was burned out on the life and needed to get off the street, something that she mentioned to Culpepper roughly six times a week, but without any meaningful reaction. In fact, the more she talked about her unhappiness, the more Culpepper ragged on her performance and earnings. When he started running down his shit, he made her feel so weary she could just lie down on the floor, curl up and go to sleep from a hideous weariness that seemed to creep into her very soul.

“Well, I like Kitty,” Johanna said, irritated that the first words out of his mouth that night were his chickenshit criticism. “In fact, I like her better than most of the other girls working the street. I enjoy talking to her. She’s pleasant and polite and even reads a book occasionally. I don’t care who she’s sleeping with. God knows, I spend my day fucking people I don’t even know, so I can’t criticize her for balling a cop or anybody else.”

She had never been able to really talk with Jimmie, not even from their earliest days together when she thought she loved him. He was too ignorant and ghetto to reason with. Everything she said to him he took as a challenge to his manhood.

His feelings toward her were clearly equivocal: Jimmy saw her as two tits, a hole and a heartbeat, good only for sex and a ready source of money. It would never occur to him that Johanna was an intelligent woman with aspirations to do something beyond spending the rest of her life giving blowjobs to strangers from the suburbs that drove through the ‘Loin in their SUVs looking for cheap commercial sex.

And lately he had been fixated on Kitty Corners, a pre-op transsexual who was not only amazingly pretty, but also intelligent and well-spoken. Johanna was convinced that part of what Jimmie couldn’t stand about Kitty was the fact that she was smarter than he was. Way smarter.

“Kitty's boyfriend is a cop in the vice squad, dumbass,” Jimmy said, annoyed by her defiance. “He busts hookers like you. When they doing pillow talk together, I bet Kitty’s telling him everything that goes down on the street. You goin’ to end up getting your ass arrested if you keep hanging around with Kitty.”

“Well, that would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?” she said hotly, folding her arms under her breasts. “Then you’d have to go out and get a job instead of taking money from me.”

“Don’t start giving me no lip, woman,” Jimmy said, an edge to his voice. “I’m telling you to steer clear of that whore.”

“Well I’m telling you to fuck off,” Johanna said, feeling heat in her face as her anger grew. She felt uncharacteristically antagonistic, even though she realized she was dangerously close to crossing Culpepper’s red line. “She’s just another woman to me. I'll talk to her if I feel like it.”

“He’s not a woman,” he said, raising his voice and stressing the male pronoun. “He isn’t a she. He’s a fucking man in a dress, dumbass. ‘She’ got a cock and balls!”

“So what?” Johanna said, sticking her chin out angrily. “So do you, and nobody would mistake you for a man!”

As soon as she said it, Johanna knew she had gone too far. She started to unfold her arms and raise them to protect her face, but it was too late. Culpepper, though hardly the “Rabbit” of his youth, was still snake quick. In a rage, he hit her with a right hand that drove her back into the wall hard enough to knock the picture of her mother onto the floor, breaking the glass that covered it.

When she toppled forward, he followed with another right hand that dropped her onto the coffee table and then leaned against the wall over her, kicking her repeatedly in the side and stomach.

“You motherfucking bitch,” he gasped, spraying her with spittle when he finally ran out of steam. “You best learn to keep your mouth shut.”

She cringed on the floor, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around the broken coffee table, sobbing uncontrollably, while he rifled her purse looking for her daily take. Holding up the bundle of bills, he glared at her.

“And you best bring back more than this tomorrow, cunt, or I going to give you some more of what you just got, you hear?” he said, still trembling with rage, a large drop of saliva hanging from his chin. Turning, he staggered out of the apartment, his legs still numb from the adrenaline rush he got from beating her, slamming the door on the way out so violently behind him that it sprang back part way open again.

She laid there for a while, sobbing, then pulled herself together, got up and began clearing up the mess Culpepper had made while kicking her ass. She could feel that some of her teeth were loose and the inside of her mouth was sticky and salty with blood.

“Big fucking man,” she said venomously. “Tough guy! You really are a hard-assed mother fucker, beating up on a woman, you prick.” She stopped and listened for a minute, thinking that she heard a sound in the hallway outside. Crossing the room quickly she locked the door and put the chain on. With the door secure, she resumed her tirade.

“You can really throw a punch, can’t you, you chickenshit bastard?” she muttered, removing the broken glass from the picture and hanging it back up on the wall. She cocked her head as she looked at it, then gently straightened it to line up with the back of the sofa. The act seemed to deplete what spirit she had left and she sagged onto the couch, her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably for a good five minutes.

When she ran out of grief, she got up and limped to the bathroom to throw cold water on her face. Leaning against the sink she looked at her ravaged features in the mirror. There was a dark bruise under her left eye that would be a nasty shiner by midnight. Her lip was split on the same side of her mouth and a small scab was already forming from the blood clotted at its bottom.

“Oh, you’re gonna do well tomorrow, girl,” she told herself bitterly. “By the time that mouth finishes swelling up and turning black and blue, ain’t nobody going to want to pay you for the privilege of having the nasty thing wrapped around his precious cock. You’ll be lucky if a John even slows down to give you a look, let alone wants to party. So big tough old Mister Jimmy is just going to beat the fuck out of you again.”

She straightened up and walked back into the kitchen for the waste basket. On the way she took the bottle of Jack Daniels out of the cabinet where the dishes were stored, poured a healthy glassful and carried it back out to the remains of the coffee table. In between dropping chunks of glass into the plastic container, she sipped the whisky.

She had decided long ago that she had to get out from under Culpepper before he killed her. The question was, how to do it? She couldn’t just walk away from the miserable motherfucker; he would track her down and kill her. She had decided that the most important thing in his world was to be able to control her like some personal slave. If she left him, she would take away the one thing in his life he could lord it over. He would never accept that.

So she had to remove Culpepper from her life; she couldn’t just remove herself from his.

She dropped a chunk of glass into the wastebasket with a crunch and took another hit of the whiskey.

The easiest way out would be to kill the son-of-a-bitch but she was an intelligent woman and knew that if Culpepper was to turn up with a bullet in his brain, she would be the first person the cops would suspect of murdering him. Who else would care enough to kill a failed purse snatcher turned unsuccessful whore-monger but the one woman who was weak-willed enough to be his whore?

No. Murder was out. She had to find some way for Culpepper to kill himself.

She took another sip of Jack and thought about it, considering his weaknesses and strengths. There had to be some way to put him on a collision course with death, engineered so that he would walk directly into the reaper’s arms without implicating her. What did he want more than anything else on earth?

Simple answer: respect. He wanted to be seen as somebody who saw an opportunity and took it. A big man. A wheeler-dealer. Somebody with a set of cast iron balls. What the Jews called a "macher."

Secondary answer: money. Any scheme that had a big enough payoff at the end would excite him in an almost sexual way. And if there was a way he could both gain a large sum of money while simultaneously appearing to be a man of destiny who grabbed opportunity by the short hairs, he would be unable to resist it. He would walk right up the stairs of a gallows without so much as blinking an eye.

A tiny smile curled the corners of her ruined mouth, then grew into a grin that stretched across the bruised wreckage of her face.

That gallows thing had given her an idea. She sipped whiskey and pondered the possibilities. By the time the glass was empty, she had come up with a plan: all she had to do was bait the trap properly. If she succeeded, Culpepper would be gone forever and at the still relatively young age of thirty-two, she could actually start living her own life.

Casting Call, an exerpt from a novel in progress

2011-06-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Jack Morris looked up when Art Sullivan and the crew he had put together walked into the lounge of Citizens, the 24-hour coffee shop at the corner of 45^th and Clement.

Sully had brought Alec Lemnos, the halfwit who once got himself stuck in a bus door. Morris rolled his eyes. Lemnos was so dumb people occasionally had to remind him to breathe. Morris couldn’t remember a crime Lemnos committed that hadn’t ended with him getting arrested. His only advantage as a criminal was he always got cut loose because judges found him incompetent to assist in his own defense.

With Lemnos was Waldo Reminger, the guy the hookers on lower Jones had dubbed “The World’s Creepiest Man.” It was said that even Alice Bowman, the trailer trash crack whore people called “White Fang” because of her missing front teeth, had once told Reminger to take a hike.

Morris wondered what it was like to be rejected by butt-ugly streetwalkers, even when you had a bunch of cash in your pocket. Must be hard on the self-esteem, he thought. Reminger was the only man he could think of who had been eighty-sixed from Moonlight Ranch. Twice; six years apart.

“Hey, Jack,” Sully said, sliding into the booth beside Morris. “What’s shakin’?”

It was typical Sully: walk into a casting call with a pair of stiffs and open with a line so lame it could fill an entire ward at a Shriner’s Hospital. Morris decided to play along; if he was lame enough in return, maybe Sully would leave and take his Munchkins with him.

“Nothing but the leaves in the trees,” Morris replied, taking a sip from the bottle of PBR on the table in front of him. That response was paraplegic, he thought to himself as he put the bottle down. If that doesn’t chase this loser and his buddies, nothing will.

But Sully just looked at him and licked his lips expectantly. Morris realized that Sully was waiting him to follow up with, “What are you boys drinking?”

Ordinarily, that was the procedure in a casting call. A guy wants to put together a crew to pull off some sort of crime, he asks somebody with contacts to hook him up with some prospects at a mutually agreeable site. And then the guy looking for help sets up the first round, maybe more if the prospects look particularly good; if they’re sensational, he might even buy dinner for everyone.

Fuck that shit, Morris thought, pointedly taking another sip of beer and nodding the neck of the bottle toward Sully, as if trying to demonstrate how rude he could be.

Sully’s expression melted from anticipation to barely concealed irritation as he realized that if he didn’t personally provide liquid refreshment for the two knuckleheads sitting across the booth from him, they would go thirsty. Eventually, he decided on the latter, reasoning that if Morris was going to breach low-life protocol, so would he. He waved the cocktail waitress Angie over and asked for a rum and Coke.

“If you boys want something, you better order up,” he said, looking at Lemnos and Reminger innocently.

“Naw, I’m good,” Lemnos said, oblivious to the fact that two people had now failed to stand him to a drink. Anyone else might have thought about changing the brand of their deodorant, but not Lemnos. He hadn’t thought about anything for years; maybe not ever.

Reminger looked disappointed but he didn’t say anything, just shook his head. He was probably feeling too horny to be offended.

Morris decided to cut the bullshit. “Art, can I talk to you, privately?” he asked Sully, gesturing toward the alcove next to the jukebox.

“Sure, Jack,” Sullivan said, scooting out of the booth to make way for Morris.

When they were well away from the booth, Morris turned to him and pinned him to the wall with a forefinger on his sternum. “Excuse me, dickhead,” he said in a low but irritated voice. “Is this the best backup you could find? A fucking pervert and a moron? I said I was looking for a crew, not refugees from the Q Ward at Napa.”

Sullivan allowed Jack to see a thin smile. “You’re lucky I could come up with these two dipshits,” he said, glancing at his companions. Both were looking at Jack and Art curiously, as if they were wondering why they hadn’t been invited to join the conference. “In case you don’t read the papers, asshole, there’s been a crackdown on the usual suspects in the Tenderloin.”

Morris had been out of touch for a while, courtesy of a visit to Vacaville as a guest of the state. He should have been sent to Soledad, but he’d managed to spend most of his 24-month sentence at the Northern Intake Center next door to the state hospital for prison inmates in Vacaville. For a year he had messed with the heads of twelve corrections department headshrinkers, convincing them he was a psycho.

But the staff split 5-4-3 on his exact diagnosis and couldn’t agree on a course of treatment. By the time he left, at least two of the psychiatrists were already planning to write books about his case and each was planning to identify him as a classic example of a completely different mental illness.

Unfortunately, the papers of choice in Vacaville are the worthless home-town Reporter or the Sacramento Bee, which is nominally better, but focuses on news of the state capitol and nearby communities. Morris hadn't seen a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle for months.

“So what? Crackdowns on crime in San Francisco are a nickel a dozen,” Morris said. “There’s a new one announced every election year. How does that keep you from finding some quality people for a crew?”

“The really ace operators are victims of the new D.A.,” Sullivan replied. “He wants felony scalps and he told Tardy’s holdovers that they could either come up with them in a hurry or expect a pink slip with their next paycheck.”

Leland Tardy had been the prosecutor in San Francisco for donkey’s years. Morris had always liked him: the guy, a coke-freak and pothead, was usually stoned each day even before he left for his three-martini lunch with Superior Court Presiding Judge Sheldon Simmons, and he was too paranoid about being shown up by someone on his staff to hire anything but dumb ass-kissers as lieutenants.

Consequently, San Francisco had the lowest conviction rate in the state of California and less than five percent of the people who actually were found guilty of felonies there ever ended up in state prison.

Jack Morris was one of those five-percenters but he didn’t hold a grudge against the D.A.. He had been sent to the joint only once in San Francisco, even though he had been arrested there 47 times in the space of ten years. He figured a two-year jolt was only fair, considering all the times he had walked.

In any case, every crook in California knew the score: San Francisco judges and juries hated only one thing more than having criminals run free, and that was putting them behind bars. The consensus of state prosecutors, police, sheriff's departments and even some criminal defense bar organizations was, San Francisco had the worst D.A. in the state.

The paper's primary newspaper had said as much eighteen months ago after comparing Tardy to the prosecutors in 57 other counties. The staffer who wrote the paper's editorials dubbed the D.A., “Perennial” Lee Tardy, saying “he is always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to fighting crime.”

“So what happened to Tardy?” Jack asked.

Art shook his head. “He lost a step,” he said. “Actually, he lost more than a step. He lost an entire fucking staircase. Some kid named Robert Gentry, a senior deputy D.A. out of San Mateo County, decided to run against him last time. He was the first real candidate Tardy faced in six elections. Gentry was way smarter than those other fools, though: he lined up all the Democratic Party clubs in the city behind him on the QT. Had the black churches in the Bay View eating out of his greasy palm. And he got the Downtown Improvement League to put together one of those phony committees to send out hit pieces to every voter in town.”

The Downtown Improvement League was a cabal of corporate wheeler-dealers that considered San Francisco personal property, much as they might a yacht tied up at the marina, or a private plane hangared at SFO. It totally dominated politics in San Francisco like a stilettoed madam with a cat-o-nine and an electro-stimulation rig. Carefully concealed behind the scenes, the League had cracked the whip in city politics since the administration of George Christopher.

“Gentry also dredged up all the shit about that chick Tardy hired as his office manager,” he said, shrugging as if to suggest that the prosecutor might as well have stepped in front of an 18-wheeler in the middle of Highway 101.

“You mean the lap dancer at Harry Twitchell’s sex club who couldn’t type or take dictation but was paid more than $100 K a year?” Morris asked.

“The very same,” Sully said. “The one that gave Tardy blowjobs every day when he got back from lunch with the judge. It made the papers and that was all she wrote. Old Lee ended up with so few supporters he couldn’t have put together a decent poker party.”

Jack went back to the original subject. “So, okay,” he said. “I understand that the heat is on. But how much heat? It’s San Francisco, for Christ's sake. Half the cops are on the pad and the rest can’t spell their own names without fucking them up. I still can’t understand why you couldn’t line up a couple of A-list operators. Why'd you bring these two schlemiels with you? Both are totally useless; what am I supposed to do with them, drop them in the roadway like cinderblocks to divert traffic when the cops are chasing us?”

Sullivan looked amused. “Well, who in hell would you rather work with, hotshot?” he said, his tone mocking. “Cleary? He’d be a really good choice but he’s doing twenty-five to life at San Quentin for armed robbery, his second strike.”

“Malloy? He drew an 18-month jolt in the county cooler for beating up his ex-wife the last time he got out of Folsom,” Sully said. “Rodriguez? He was in Soledad for two weeks last month before some chickenshit Sudeño wannabe shanked him over a pack of cigarettes. R.I.P. Armando Rodriguez.”

Sully looked around Citizens melodramatically, as if he half expected to spot Christopher Walken or Brittney Spears sitting at one of the tables.

“Funny, but I don’t see any of the top operators in here,” he said when he looked back at Morris. “I don’t see any of the second rank, either. Or the third. Jack, you're gonna be taking sloppy seconds no matter who walks in here holding my hand. At least these two guys are out of stir and still drawing breath.”

Morris was beginning to get a headache. He closed his eyes and gave his temples a little rubdown with his knuckles. He reopened them after taking a deep breath and hissing it out noisily, like a kid trying to gin himself up to cut class in the middle of the school day.

“So what you’re saying is, you vouch for these two lettuce heads, right?” he asked finally.

Sully grinned. “If I wasn’t ready to do the job myself, I wouldn’t be fobbing these two guys off on you,” he said, taking in Alec and Waldo with a wave of his hand.

“I take it that means that you’re in, too,” Morris said, making it more statement than question.

Sullivan nodded.

“Hey, Jack,” Sully said suddenly, with a note of desperation in his voice and something like a plea for tolerance in his smile.

“Even a dipshit needs work, right? How else is the sorry sonofabitch going to learn how to stop being a dipshit?”

Soledad, an exerpt from Bottom Street, a novel in progress

2011-05-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

To the casual observer, the main lobby of Soledad Prison looked a little like the security area in a large international airport but with one major difference: the people who passed through it were going to be waiting a lot longer for their departure.

The sign on the wall said:

VISITORS:

1) SURRENDER YOUR IDENTIFICATION TO THE SUPERVISOR IN THE OFFICE ON THE PLATFORM TO YOUR RIGHT.

2) OPEN ANY SATCHELS, BRIEFCASES OR OTHER CARRYALLS AND PLACE THEM ON THE CONVEYOR BELT.

3) TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND BELT AND PUT THEM INTO INTO A TUB ALONG WITH THE CONTENTS OF YOUR POCKETS. PLACE THE TUB ON THE CONVEYOR BELT.

4) PLACE ANY JACKETS, COATS, RAINCOATS OR UMBRELLAS INTO A SEPARATE TUB AND PLACE IT ON THE CONVEYOR BELT.

5) WHEN THE GUARD TELLS YOU TO ADVANCE, PASS THROUGH THE METAL DETECTOR INTO THE PHYSICAL SEARCH AREA AND WAIT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Simon Gallifoy took his California driver’s license out of his wallet and slipped it to the guard on the platform through the slot in the bullet-proof plastic window in his cubicle. He followed it with the plastic laminated S.F.P.D. press card that identified him as a staff writer for the San Francisco Sentinel.

The guard looked sort of like a white-haired version of Sam Elliott, the actor who played The Stranger in “The Big Lebowski,” right down to the bushy eyebrows, walrus mustache and loose folds of skin under his sharply chisled chin. But Sam Elliott didn’t have the guardbuzz cut that showed little pale round scars all over his head, or a long purple line of scar tissue that started next to his Adam’s apple and ran up the left side of his face to his temple.

Gallifoy wondered how the guard got the scars but he suppressed his urge to ask. He followed the rest of the instructions on the wall and passed through the metal detector.

A second guard with a blond buzz cut and a paunch looked over the personal effects Gallifoy had placed in the gray plastic bus tray, turning the shoes upside down over above the tub and shaking them to make sure there were no guns, ammunition, power tools or explosives inside he might use to help a convict escape. A third guard with watery blue eyes kept them glued to the X-ray machine the tub had passed through, just in case the one inspecting Gallifoy’s belongings missed something important. Apparently satisfied, the blonde dropped the shoes into the tray and handed it to Gallifoy.

“Take a seat over there,” he said, gesturing to a line of uncomfortable looking plastic-seated chairs that were bolted to the floor on the left side of the room.

The writer wondered about that. Who would try to steal chairs in the waiting room of a state prison?

Gallifoy was retying his shoes when the guard on the platform turned on the intercom.

“Gallifoy?” he asked.

Gallifoy looked up. “Yes?” he answered uncertainly.

The guard on the platform, who appeared to be in charge, looked at him carefully, as if memorizing his features.

“Inmate L’Hurieux is still out-processing,” he said after a long pause. “It will be a few minutes more before he’s ready to leave.”

He had a deep baritone voice with a drawl as thick as blackstrap molasses that even sounded a little like Sam Elliott. Gallifoy shivered involuntarily. All three guards looked like they would fit right in at a depression-era Mississippi cross-lighting or lynching.

“Thanks,” he said, settling back and looking around. He was glad he wasn’t going to have to spend much time with this group of yahoos.

Closed-circuit cameras mounted in the corner of the room swept back and forth mechanically for the benefit of backup watchers located elsewhere in the prison. There was little for them to see; at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, Gallifoy was the only person other than the guards in the lobby.

The room’s walls were free of any decorations except for the sign telling visitors the security protocol. The lights on the ceiling and at the tops of the walls were in recesses, covered by metal grid work, ostensibly to prevent someone from hiding a bazooka or machine gun in them to use in a breakout.

The interior of the lobby had been painted a pale government green that was rendered even more repellent by the harsh overhead fluorescent lighting. The plastic chairs bolted to the floor, of course, were pastel shades of red and blue that clashed hideously with the interior paint.

Gallifoy had been told that all the furniture in California prisons was made by prisoners, so he assumed some inmate had fabricated the ugly and uncomfortable bank of chairs he was sitting in. He wondered if there was a central paint shop in each penitentiary where prisoners learned how to mix that disgusting shade of green.

“Gallifoy?”

Simon looked up. It was the guard with the mustache again.

“Yes?” Gallifoy said hesitantly.

“Are you the Simon Gallifoy that wrote an article for The Nation about six months ago?”

Gallifoy’s mouth suddenly felt dry. “Uh, could be,” he said. “What was it about?”

The guard with the mustache smiled.

“It said California was on its way to becoming a police state,” he said. “You talked about how much the cost of law enforcement and courts had increased since the 1980s. You said the guard union had become one of the most powerful organizations in the state.”

Gallifoy squirmed. “Yes,” he said. “I wrote that article. Why?”

“I just wanted to say it was a pretty good piece,” the guard with the mustache said. “But you had the amount of money the Correctional Peace Officers Association spent lobbying the state legislature last year wrong. It was only $822,978.50, not a million.”

Gallifoy blinked.

“Oh, thanks!” he said. “I will see if I can get them to run a correction.”

The guard winked at him. “You do that,” he said.

Gallifoy was silent for a moment and then his curiosity got the better of him.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you read The Nation regularly?”

The guard with the mustache nodded without looking up.

“I have an on-line subscription,” he said. “It’s cheaper than the print edition and you don’t end up with a bunch of paper to recycle. I don't read it as regularly as Etne, but pretty often.”

Gallifoy swallowed; so much for his ability to read people’s personalities based on their physical appearance.

A buzzer someplace on the other side of the X-ray machine startled Gallifoy. An electric motor moved hidden machinery with a series of metallic clanks, presumably opening a door inside the prison. Despite the noise, Gallifoy could see no sign of what was going on: the passageway itself was like an armored airlock, with independently operated doors at each end.

No sooner had the noise in the entry corridor faded than Gallifoy heard a loud buzz as the massive locks on the near door slid clear.

“Man coming out,” someone inside the prison warned over intercom speakers that were concealed behind cast iron grilles in the walls.

Pontius Pontellus L’Hurieux stepped through the gate, dressed in an inexpensive gray suit, a tieless white shirt and a pair of black loafers. He carried a thin black leather belt looped tightly in his right hand and a flimsy plastic suitcase in his left. He wasn't as light-skinned as Gallifoy had expected. Those old half-tones in the newspaper had been misleading and the original prints were missing from the morgue.

Gallifoy wasn’t sure exactly what he had been expecting. His image of L’Hurieux was drawn from those news shots taken at the time of his trial and from faded black and white pictures on the wall of Kincaid’s Gym on Jones Street in San Francisco.

The L’Hurieux in those photos was much younger, dressed in black nylon trunks and Everlast shoes, his hands taped, left foot slightly forward, left hand held in a loose fist, chest high, his right cocked back at the same level. It was the pose a kid named Cassius Clay had been snapped in back in 1954 when he was taking boxing lessons in Louisville, Kentucky. Ten years later, that kid whipped a fierce ex-convict named Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship of the world. The kid changed his name to Muhammad Ali and soon after, every up-and-coming black boxer in the U.S. that fought with an orthodox stance was photographed in the same pose.

The L’Hurieux in the lobby of Soledad was 21 years older than the 19-year-old glaring out challengingly from the wall at Kincaid’s. There was a sprinkling of gray in his short black hair and there were a lot more lines in his face. His body, however, looked even more formidable than the physique of the kid in the picture: his shoulders looked heavier and broader and his waist, surprisingly, narrower.

The guard with the mustache had come down from the platform. He shook hands with L’Hurieux solemnly.

“Punch, you take care of yourself out there, okay?” he said.

The blond guard grinned and gave L’Hurieux a gentle punch in the shoulder. “Yeah, old man,” he said. “We don’t want to see you back here again unless you come by just to visit.”

L’Hurieux shook hands with all three guards, smiling with quiet pleasure. When he was done he threaded his belt through the loops around his waist and picked up his suitcase.

Gallifoy stepped forward.

“Punch?” he said. “I’m Simon Gallifoy? The writer from the Sentinel? I’m here to give you a ride back to San Francisco.”

L’Hurieux smiled and shook the journalist’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gallifoy,” he said without bothering to take a last look around the lobby. “Let’s be on our way."

They walked the 100 yards or so to the car in silence. Gallifoy triggered the door looks with the remote and popped the trunk so L’Hurieux could stow his case there. From the way he tossed it in, Gallifoy realized it couldn’t have much in it.

Punch buckled up. He stretched with his eyes closed and took a deep breath, letting it out in a sigh.

“Man, been a long time since I smelled that new car smell,” he said finally. “It surely does smell fine.”

“What kind of car is this, anyway?” he added, studying the interior appraisingly.

“Chevy Cavalier,” Gallifoy said, putting the car in gear and rolling down the eucalyptus-lined drive to Highway 101. “It's hardly new. It's a cheap piece of shit, actually. The Sentinel let me use it. I don’t own a car myself.”

Punch looked at him with interest.

“Really? How you get around the city?” he asked.

Gallifoy shrugged, peering south to gauge the traffic, then goosing the gas pedal as he guided the Chevy out onto the freeway and pointed it north.

“I walk a lot,” he replied. “Take Muni. Sometimes I do a cab if I’m in a hurry.”

Punch settled back and looked out the window. It was mostly farms between the prison and Salinas – flat, brown fields that were just starting to crack with the green of new crops in the spring.

“Most of the time I lived in the ‘Loin I never had no car,” L’Hurieux said. “I never really needed one, I expect. Took the bus, mostly, myself; couldn’t afford no cabs.”

He patted the Chevy’s dashboard.

“So this seems like a pretty nice ride to me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for you, Mr. Gallifoy, I expect I’d be on one of them gray C-DOC buses.”

CDOC was the acronym for the California Department of Corrections. Punch pronounced it “C-Dock,” like a place to tie up a boat. It was the way old cons and guards said it. Only the suits in Sacramento called it the Department of Corrections. Most of them just used the initials, Cee-Dee-Cee.

On impulse, Gallifoy asked L’Hurieux if he would like to drive.

The ex-boxer’s eyes were flat. He moved his head from left to right twice in the negative, slowly but definitively.

“No, sir,” he said, straightening up in the seat. “Thanks but no thanks. I got no driver’s license, anyways.”

Gallifoy shrugged.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “I expect you’ll be getting one pretty soon after you get settled again in the city.”

L’Hurieux looked out the window and shook his head again, even more slowly this time, but with even greater assurance.

“I swore off driving about eleven years ago,” he said. “If I hadn’t had a license, I wouldn’t have ended up in Soledad. The idea of being behind the wheel of a car gives me cold sweats. I got one of those, what-you-call-it’s about driving.”

Gallifoy looked over at him.

“You mean a phobia?”

“More like an aversion,” L’Hurieux said, pronouncing each syllable carefully with a slight smile, as if it was nice to use one of the words he had learned during all those hours he had spent in the prison’s law library.

“So, tell me Mr. Gallifoy . . .”

Gallifoy interrupted him.

“Call me Simon, Punch,” he said.

Punch smiled again, tolerantly, this time.

“So, tell me, Mr. Gallifoy,” he said, “what exactly can I do for you?”

Gallifoy glanced at him then turned his eyes back to the road.

“I told you in my last letter, Punch,” he said. “I want to write about your case for the paper, for the column I do. That’s all. I figured giving you a lift back to San Francisco would give me a chance to ask you a few more questions, size you up. Give me some of the color I need for my column.”

Punch looked out the window.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” the ex-fighter said after a few moments of silence. “I wrote you, what? Like 18 letters over the last year since you first got in touch with me. You wrote me 15 letters with questions in them and I answered them the best I knew how. I figure you must know just about everything there is to know about me by now.”

Gallifoy nodded.

“I have all the basic information, but I still need a hook for my first story,” he said. “I need an angle that will suck people in and get them wanting to know more about you.”

Punch looked at him.

“Can’t you just tell the story?” he asked.

Gallifoy smiled, shaking his head.

“Starting with you being born?” he asked. “Twelve years of public school? Two years of Army? Eighteen amateur fights, a 15-and-3 record, 12 wins by knockouts? Nineteen pro bouts, 17-and-1, 16 by knockout? Your arrest for armed robbery and murder? Your conviction? Your eight years in the joint?”

He looked at Punch.

“There’s just too much there to throw at people,” he said. “It would read like an encyclopedia profile. People wouldn’t last past the first paragraph. I need something that will grab people and hold onto them. An attention-getter. That’s what I was hoping would come out of the next three hours on the road.”

L’Hurieux sighed.

“Man, I guess being a writer is harder than I thought,” he said. “I just thought you let the words come flowing out and they made a story. Not that I ever wrote a damn thing myself.”

“Well, how you want to do this?” He seemed willing, if not enthusiastic.

“Well, let’s start with the boxing career,” Gallifoy said. “See if I can’t get some fresh insight from that. Maybe it will inspire me. With your record, both as a pro and an amateur, I don’t understand why you didn’t work your way into some sort of a title bout.”

Punch eased back into the seat.

“Man, I haven’t had anybody ask me about that stuff for years,” he said. “That’s a damn good question, I guess."

He thought about it for a while before he answered.

“I think it was really bad economics,” he said, finally. “That and my size. The two are related in a way. The top fighting weight I had was 195, just a light heavy. I tried to bulk up from time to time but when I did, I lost speed and endurance. Carrying too much unnatural weight.”

“The big money always been for the cats in the heavyweight division. People would rather watch big men with a lot of knock-out power than somebody lighter and faster. A lot of the heavies, they slower than hell when it comes right down to it. But they connect, they put a man on the mat.”

He spread his hands.

“They just wasn’t any guys that was legit light heavy contenders out here on this coast,” he said. “I couldn’t line up quality fights because they wasn’t any to be had.”

Gallifoy was surprised at the complexity of the answer. L’Hurieux might not have much education, but he was clearly intelligent and thoughtful.

“What did you mean about the economics being wrong?” the writer asked.

Punch frowned.

“When I was peakin’ out,” he said, “it was a bad time for the light heavy division. There wasn’t enough black people supporting the division. The only folks with money that was willing to spend it on fights didn’t want to watch two undersized black men beatin’ on each other.”

It was Gallifoy's turn to frown.

“I remember seeing lots of black people in the audience in videos of those old fights in the late 1980s,” he said.

Punch shook his head.

“Them folks were there for the top of the card, not the prelims,” he said. “Easy to get black high-rollers to turn out for Evander or Tyson. Not so easy to get them to turn out for a light heavy. Think back then – who do you remember that was a light heavyweight?”

Gallifoy shrugged. He wasn’t a boxing expert, but he had down some research when he was first getting into L’Hurieux’s story.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard. Maybe Mike Spinks . . . He trailed off. There were others, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember their names.

L’Hurieux smiled.

“You just proved my point,” he said. “Leonard wasn't a light heavy. He fought in a lot of weight classes, but he wasn't natural in that one. Hearns and them other guys, they didn’t get a patch on the publicity that the big boys got, and they was only a few of them that was sharp enough to catch the public eye.”

“The people who had the money were white folks,” L’Hurieux said. “They always been the people who spent money on boxing tickets and pay-per-view. If they were going to spend money on a light heavy fight, they wanted to see some undersized white guy beatin’ the fuck out of an undersized black man or some undersized brown guy.”

Gallifoy looked confused. “That sounds more like a matter of racism than of economics,” he said slowly.

Punch smiled but there wasn’t a lot of humor in it.

“Man, in this country, economics and racism always been two sides of the same coin. The South got strong picking cotton for the mills in the North. They used slaves to do it, dig? Everybody got rich off that bop except for the slaves.”

They drove in silence for a while, with L’Hurieux looking out the window at the passing farmland. Eventually he turned and looked at Gallifoy curiously.

“You not from around here are you Mr. Gallifoy?” he asked.

Gallifoy frowned. “What makes you say that?”

L’Hurieux shrugged. “You don’t talk American,” he said bluntly. “You talk . . . politer, somehow. Your voice got better manners than most, kind of quiet and considerate.”

Gallifoy laughed, tumbling to what he meant.

“My accent, you mean,” he said. “I’m from England. London, actually.”

L’Hurieux shook his head, smiling gently.

“I never met anybody from England before,” he said. “Is everybody there as polite-sounding as you?”

“Not really,” Gallifoy said. “Some are downright rude.”

In point of fact, a lot of people thought Gallifoy was fairly rude. And those were generally the people with kinder opinions of his character.

L’Hurieux sighed.

“That’s a damn shame,” he said, looking out the window again. “It’s purely a pleasure to listen to someone with as polite a voice as yours. Now where was we?”

They were passing a field in which workers were weeding a new crop and L’Hurieux perked up at the sight.

“Those lucky bastards,” he said watching them intently.

Gallifoy glanced at the band that spurred Punch’s comment. To him, it looked like they were working hard, close to the ground. He didn’t see what made them so lucky.

“Seems like a hard life to me,” he said.

L’Hurieux kept watching until the workers passed out of sight.

“The last five years I worked on the ag detail at Soledad,” he said, turning back to face the highway.

“We were basically working for canteen money, just enough to buy cigarettes for the fellas that smoked, so we weren’t even making as much as those poor old boys for doing the same shitty work: chopping and weeding crops, picking in season. Trying to keep from getting sunstroke and holding our piss and mud until the straw boss said we could go relieve ourselves, one at a time, in the little plastic shitter that they rolled out there on a trailer into the field where we were working.”

“But them Mexicans we just passed have one thing none of us convicts ever had.”

“What’s that?” Gallifoy asked.

“When they finish up at the end of the day, they can go down to the local cantina and have a beer,” Punch said. “They get to go home to a meal of beans and rice and tortillas, and to sleep in their own beds.”

He turned to Gallifoy.

“We got to get back on a bus that hauled us back to a concrete box, eat fat and gristle and watery mashed potatoes and sleep with one eye open in a place where everybody was trying to get over on you,” he said.

“Man, there were times in the last eight years I would have given my left nut to be one of those Mexicans,” he said with a smile. He turned and grinned at Gallifoy. “Well, maybe not really my left nut, if you know what I mean.”

Gallifoy smiled. “I imagine it’s pretty tough inside,” he said. “I have to imagine it, since I’ve never been locked up.”

L’Hurieux sat back and looked out the window. “You don’t know the half of it, man,” he said. “I would lay awake at night and wonder if I was going to make it.”

“You pulled a twelve year sentence for armed robbery,” Gallifoy said. It was one of the questions that he had wanted to ask L'Hurieux during the trip. He was surprised the convict had opened the subject up himself.

“No priors whatsoever," he said, pressing the point. "You were eligible for parole two years ago. But you served ten years altogether. Why didn’t you go for parole? Why did you stay inside for another two years?”

Punch grinned.

“Hell, I was ready to do the whole twelve,” he said. “You get paroled, you got some hard-assed agent watching your butt. Every cop with an attitude is looking to violate you back into the joint.”

He raised his shoulders slightly.

“I figured I’d do the whole jolt,” he said. “Get it over with. Come out the gate with no strings attached.”

Gallifoy looked confused.

“What made you change your mind then?”

Punch chuckled.

“Some guy named Simon Gallifoy,” he said as he watched a flock of ravens circle over a fallow field. “When you got me hooked up with Mr. Weider, the lawyer, and that detective fella of his, Mr. Colombatto, I started thinking maybe I wasn’t crazy to think I get my case reopened.”

“I decided I been sittin’ inside and stewing long enough,” he said, raising his shoulders again. “It was time to get out and clear my name.”

“In other words, you were ready for another fight,” Gallifoy said with a grin.

Punch looked at him with surprise. "Well, yeah," he said. "That's about right, I guess."

“Bingo," Gallifoy said. "That’s my fucking angle!”

The next two hours went quickly. L’Hurieux relived the events that had put him in prison and Gallifoy quizzed him about his trial, the witnesses that appeared and other details of the prosecution. They went over L’Hurieux’s life inside Soledad – what he had done to cope with hard time, the hours he had spent in the prison library and the correspondence courses he had taken.

When they turned off onto 280 through the Bayview and Potrero Hill, both were surprised at how much distance they had covered, both in miles and years. By the time they reached the Tenderloin, L’Hurieux was becoming excited at being back home again after ten long years.

“Thanks for the ride, Mr. Gallifoy,” he said as he got out of the car at the Statler Central Hotel and pulled his plastic suitcase out of Gallifoy’s trunk.

“Thank you, Punch,” Gallifoy said. “When do you check in with your parole officer?”

“I’m spoze to see him Tuesday, but I’m going in first thing in the morning Monday,” L’Hurieux said.

“Well, good luck,” Gallifoy said. “You have my office number and my mobile, Punch. You need anything, give me a call, okay?”

Punch shook hands with the columnist solemnly.

“Yessir,” he said. “I sure will. Thanks again for giving me that lift home.”

Gallifoy grinned. “No problem, man. Take care.”

Nicky’s Deal IV

2011-03-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

By the time Peter Boscovich ran into Ray Campos and LaVonne Walker at the Blue Door two days later, Nick was only a fading memory on Bottom Street. Word in the ‘Loin had it that he was in Canada, or Los Angeles, or hiding out someplace in Baja. Bosco had been looking high and low, but Nicholas Dolman, former truck driver, federal prison inmate and newly minted fugitive, had seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.

Bosco slid into the booth next to Campos. “Hello, boys,” he said with a slight smile. “Hear anything from your close personal friend, Nick Dolman?”

LaVonne shook his head, while Ray just looked at Bosco glumly.

“What’s the problem?” Bosco asked him.

Campos sputtered. “That motherfucking Dolman!” he muttered, his face dark with anger.

Bosco gestured to Hank Cutter and made a little circular motion taking in Walker, Campos and himself. “Can you give us a round, here, Hank?” he called before turning back to Ray. “Okay, what happened?” he said.

Campos didn’t seem capable of speaking, he was so furious.

“The fucker’s an idiot,” LaVonne said, looking no happier than Campos, but a good deal less agitated. “He fucked both of us on that tool trailer deal.”

“Well, that’s certainly not much of a surprise,” Bosco said, working to suppress an I-told-you-so smile. “How, exactly?”

“We did just what the sonofabitch said,” Campos sputtered. “He cut the lock off the gate and we brought the tractor right in. He hooked it to the trailer and everything, and we wheeled it out of the yard. Went North on 680 and turned onto Highway 24 at Walnut Creek. It all went exactly like he said.”

Bosco looked at him curiously. “So, what happened?” he said. “How did he fuck you guys?”

Walker grinned in a way that Bosco had never seen him do before; it was more of a grimace, really. “We got the fucker back to San Francisco,” he said. “Nick didn’t have money for the bridge so I had to pay the toll.”

Bosco laughed. “Is that it?” he said. “I thought you said he fucked you. Stiffing you on bridge toll is just SOP for Nick.”

“There wasn’t nothing in there,” Campos blurted in a tone of voice that made it clear he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “It was completely empty.”

“There was nothing in where?” Bosco said impatiently. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The trailer was empty,” Walker said. “It was supposed to be full of all these groovy tools and shit, but there was nothing inside when we cut off the lock and opened it up. We stole a fucking empty trailer, man.”

Bosco just stared at him with his mouth open.

“Yeah,” Campos said bitterly. “Nick talked us into crewing with him on this big job, but the asshole didn’t know what he was doing. We stole a trailer that didn’t have anything inside. We did a job for nothing. We didn’t make a damned cent off of it.”

“What happened to the tools?” Bosco said, still having trouble understanding what had happened.

“I guess the guys on the job took ‘em out,” Ray said, shaking his head. “I don’t know, man. It looked like the work was just about done to me when we got there. They wasn’t no tractors or nothing around. Just these little condo deals they’d built. Hell, they even had trees in front of them and grass in the little yards.”

Cutter brought a tray with two Budweisers and a shot of Jim Beam rye, neat. Bosco put a Ben Franklin on the tray. “We’ll work on that fifty for a while, Hank,” he said. “My boys here need some cheering up. Just keep ‘em coming and let me know when you need more.”

Bosco looked at Campos. “What did Nick say when you found out the trailer was empty?” he asked.

Ray raised his shoulders. “A lot of blah-blah-blah,” he replied. “He just ran his mouth, like he always does. What the fuck could he say? Besides, we were kind of in a hurry to ditch the damn thing and get the hell away from there.”

He sighed. “He said we’d talk it over the next day,” he continued. “But then the feds came by asking me if I knew where they could find him. I called him to tell him the feds were looking for him and that was the last I heard of the motherfucker.”

LaVonne took a pull off his fresh beer. His eyes were bleak. “I don’t know when we gonna be able to pay you back, Bosco,” he said. “I guess we lucky we only ended up paying the bridge toll on this stupid fucking job.”

Bosco shrugged. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m just glad Dolman’s gone, to be honest.”

“Why’s that?” Campos said. “I wish the motherfucker was right here so I could cut his throat.”

Bosco grinned. “Look, the only reason you two guys aren’t being sweated by the FBI right now is because Nick split,” he said. “If he was still in town, the feebs would have already grabbed him. They probably wouldn’t just have you two bozos in the cooler; they probably would have picked up Eli and I by now, too.”

“You think Nick would give you up, man?” Walker asked, his expression making it clear he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “He may be a fuckup, Bosco, but he’s not a rat.”

Bosco’s grin was gone. “Oh, he’d rat all right,” he said. “The fucker is just dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to talk his way out of a federal beef. Once the feebs got him started, they’d need two stenographers working 24-7 to get down everything he said. He’d give up you guys on the tool trailer deal just for starters and then he’d give up Eli and I on the Mandragola scam. To be honest, I’ve been looking for him for the last two days to make sure the feds didn’t find him.”

He pulled back his sport coat, revealing the butt of a blue-steel automatic shoved into his waistband, then let the coat fall shut again, concealing the weapon.

“Shit, man, you serious?” LaVonne said, licking his lips, his eyes wide with concern. “I never seen you packing before. That fucking scares me.”

Campos gave LaVonne a sharp look. “Man up, partner,” he said. “I agree with Bosco. Nick would give us up in a minute.” He turned to Bosco. “You were right about Nick—we never should have trusted the bastard. But you’re going to have to wait your turn if that shithead turns up in San Francisco again, because I’ll cut his throat myself if I see him first.”

Bosco lifted his glass. “I don’t think we have to worry about it,” he said. “I warned Nick that if he fucked up on this thing, he’d have to watch out for Eli and I as well as the cops. He doesn’t want to run into you two, guys, either.”

“I’ll bet we’ve seen the last of Nicky Dolman,” he said, taking a sip and rolling the whisky around in his mouth before swallowing it. “At least, I hope so.”

The End

Nicky’s Deal III

2011-03-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

Like every other FBI agent who had spent more than a couple of years in the San Francisco office, Freddie St. Claire was convinced that Inspector David Ballenger was bent. He’d heard the stories about the dope raids Ballenger led in which dealers were tipped beforehand, or half the evidence or drug money disappeared.

Despite those stories, St. Claire maintained a friendly and professional relationship with the San Francisco detective. The reason: Ballenger occasionally picked up information about thefts from interstate commerce that St. Claire found extraordinarily helpful. The fact is, St. Claire would have dealt with Beelzebub himself to make a felony pinch under 18 USC Sec. 659. That’s why he was meeting Ballenger at the Night Cap, a dive bar a few blocks north of the Phil Burton Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue.

“Dave, thanks for the tip-off on that Dolman schmuck,” Freddie said as he slipped into a booth opposite the San Francisco cop. “It was gold, pure gold.”

While Ballenger listened, St. Claire told him somebody had stole the front end of a semi the day before yesterday and used it to tow a tool trailer away from a construction site in Contra Costa County last night. Ballenger smiled slightly. He had tipped the feds that Nick Dolman was looking for a tractor rig a couple of days earlier, based on information he got from Ace Jeter. He’d followed his initial report about Dolman with Jeter’s warning that Nick hadn’t been able to raise the money to hire a rig, so he was probably going to steal one.

His second call to St. Claire had been the morning of the day the semi had been stolen. It turned out to be very timely.

“If I hadn’t been the one who got your original tip,” Freddie said, tapping the side of his head with a forefinger, “we probably would have missed the connection. Fortunately, I wasn’t swamped with other bullshit when you called me.”

Ballenger’s intelligence was followed by some dumb luck: the feds had obtained good security camera video of the break-in at the construction site in Contra Costa County. In the video, the three people who opened the gate, backed a bobtail up to the trailer and pulled it out of the yard were clearly visible, wearing over-the-head masks which were supposed to conceal their identities. At least, that was the plan.

However, the disguises that were supposed to keep Dolman and his crew from being recognized were a major fail, St. Claire said. The masks, heavy-duty vinyl jobs, were made by an outfit named César and agents were able to identify them on-line. A check with the manufacturer showed there were only four shops in the Bay Area that sold them and only one of them was in San Francisco.

When the field guys showed the clerk at the San Francisco store Dolman’s Bureau of Prisons mug shot, the clerk positively identified him as the man who bought the store’s last three César masks—a Hilary Clinton and one each of Laura and George Bush. All were identical to the ones the thieves were wearing in the security video.

Toss that one into the bin marked “Stupid Criminal Tricks:” The masks led the bureau immediately back to a known felon with prior arrests for truck theft.

“So,” St. Claire said, ticking the points off on his fingers: “We had the tip from you that Dolman was planning a job he needed a tractor rig for. We had the theft of the rig in San Francisco. We had the fact that a rig like it had been used to steal a tool trailer in Contra Costa County and we knew that the bad guys who ripped off the trailer wore specific masks during the heist. Finally, we knew Dolman had bought three identical masks in San Francisco the morning of the day the trailer was hijacked.”

The topping on the cake was once again the work of Ballenger. In the same conversation that the inspector’s snitch told him Dolman was going to steal the tractor rig, he said he would probably dump both the trailer and the bobtail in Hunters Point. Ballenger passed both pieces of information along to St. Claire. And, in fact, Hunters Point was precisely where the FBI field team found both the tractor and trailer after only two hours of searching.

“So,” Ballenger said, “you pick up Dolman yet?”

St. Claire smiled, but it was a loser’s bluff. “No, but he’s as good as in cuffs,” the agent said. “We got teams out looking for him right now. We’ll have him in custody before last call at the Night Cap.”

Ballenger smiled back, but it was the smile of a cop who has seen the FBI fuck up more collars than the Arrow Shirt Company sewing team in Shanghai. Ballenger personally knew dozens of cases where the FBI had the name and address of a crook who somehow managed to disappear hours before the feds arrived. The bureau had a lot of manpower and some of its agents actually knew what they were doing; but Ballenger had long joked that the average FBI agent couldn’t find his way out of a pay toilet unless he had a memo from the director.

The FBI had what is called a “known associates” list: an up-to-date roster of everybody who knew Dolman, including their names, CI&I numbers and home addresses. All St. Clair’s people had to do was work their way down that list and brace the people whose names were on it; it was a paint-by-numbers collar that even the dumbest FBI agent could make. From the bureau’s perspective, unless he left town, the feds would find Nicky Dolman before first light.

But Ballenger knew that crooks had their own communications network and when a cop brushes against it, criminals all over the web soon know what he is up to. As he sipped the Martini the waitress had brought him, he guessed Dolman was probably already on his way out of the FBI’s grasp.

In fact, at the very moment St. Claire was talking to Ballenger, Nick Dolman was getting a call from Ray Campos that the feebs were looking for him on Bottom Street. Campos had it first-hand: a couple of feds had just knocked on his door to ask him if he knew where Dolman was keeping himself.

“What did they want?” Nick asked, his sphincter tightening.

“How the fuck would I know, asshole?” Campos said. “They were fucking FBI agents, not my buddies. They didn’t exactly fill me in. I was just happy they didn’t have a fucking warrant to search my place.”

“Shit,” Nick said, his throat dry. “I wonder how they knew you knew me?”

“They didn’t tell me that either, dickhead,” Campos said. “They just fucking knew, that’s all. They came right to my apartment. Hell, I don’t even have a fucking phone in the place. I have no idea how the bastards knew where I was.”

So leaving town was precisely what Nicholas T. Dolman planned to do the minute he hung up on Ray Campos. As dumb as Nicky was, he was shrewd enough to realize that the feds were looking for him because of the trailer heist. Despite his careful planning the FBI knew he was involved. And he could still remember Bosco’s warning days earlier in Lucy’s:

“If you guys fuck up, you better watch your back, because Eli and I aren’t going to end up in your shit, dig?”

Nick intended to take Bosco’s advice and watch his back; and he figured the best place to do it was somewhere as far away from Bottom Street as he could get.

Leaving town was precisely what Nick Dolman had in mind.

At almost the same moment the FBI knocked on Ray Campos’ door, Bosco was finding out indirectly that Nicky’s tool trailer scam had gone sour: he was sitting in the Blue Door when two FBI agents came in and asked Hank Cutter if a Nicholas Dolman had been in the joint recently.

The feds spent about ten minutes questioning Cutter about Dolman, where he lived, who he hung out with and where he worked. Cutter, of course, was cool: he appeared to be cooperating, but everything he said was doubletalk that had no actual content. If a bartender in a joint that caters to criminals was to start running his mouth to the cops, the crooks would stop going there; that would be the kiss of death for the Blue Door because nobody but crooks and the occasional lost tourist asking for directions ever set foot in the place.

Despite this, Bosco was listening to the entire session. Even though Cutter was artfully telling them nothing, Bosco knew from the questions the feds were asking that they weren’t checking up on Dolman because he had been tapped for a job in the White House. The agents reeked of major felony bust. The smell was almost as strong as a butcher shop dumpster that hasn’t been emptied for a month.

As soon as the two agents left their business cards on the bar and made their way out, Bosco went into the men’s toilet to call Eli on his cell.

“Your pal, Dolman, is in the shit, man,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” Eli replied. “What happened?”

“Two federal cops were just in the Door asking about him,” Bosco said. “I don’t think it was a social call, either. I think he pulled that tool trailer job he talked LaVonne and Ray into, and he fucked it all up, just like I figured he would.”

“How close were the feds to catching up to him?” Eli asked.

Bosco shrugged. “I dunno. He hasn’t been in the Door for more than a week now. He’s been avoiding me since we had our little heart-to-heart about his moonlighting. If they’re asking about him at the Door, they’re working off old leads, although obviously somebody told them he hangs out there from time to time. That means we have a rat in Bottom Street.”

“Fuck,” Eli said quietly. “Are you there now?”

“Yeah,” Bosco said. “I called you as soon as I found out they were looking for him.”

“That fucking idiot,” Eli said.

“I told you he was too stupid to get out of his own way, but you brought him in, anyway,” Bosco said, needling Eli. “You love all these dumb fucks that have their heads up their asses so far they shit ear wax.”

“ ‘I think he’s funny,’ you said when I asked you why you kept the numb nuts around,” Bosco added, quoting Eli in a nasal, high-pitched voice that was intended to irritate him even more. “I guarantee you that if the feds catch up to Dolman, you won’t find him so damned amusing because we’re all going to end up in the toilet with him.”

“I get the point, Peter,” Eli said coldly, using Bosco’s full first name to show he didn’t appreciate being lectured or having his chain pulled. “We have to make sure they don’t catch up to him then, don’t we? Can you find the motherfucker?”

“I did before,” Bosco said. “He won’t go back to Lucy’s though. He knows that I would look for him there. I’ll have to ask around, see if any of the guys know where he is.”

“Do it,” Eli said. “We have to get the stupid bastard out of the picture for a while.”

Bosco’s smile lacked even a trace of humor: “If I find him, he’s going to be out of the picture permanently.”

(Continued in Nicky's Deal III)

Nicky’s Deal II

2011-03-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

Ace Jeter, the pimp who ran two crack whores up on Jones Street, struggled to keep from yawning in Nick Dolman’s face while Nick whined about how he had wasted four weeks trying to raise the cash to rent the tractor rig he needed for his tool trailer caper.

“I even tried to borrow some money from that Chinaman in Oakland,” Dolman was saying over coffee in the American Café on Bottom. “You know: Chan, the guy who fences that office shit? I figured his outfit would be a good place to fence this stuff I’m planning to steal. But you know what the fucker told me?”

Ace didn’t know and didn’t much care, either. He raised his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug, not because he gave a damn but just to show he was listening.

“No, what’d he say, Nick?” Jeter said, struggling to summon up some interest.

“ ‘I don’t sink so,’ ” Nick said in a sing-song voice, squinching up his eyes to make a face he probably thought looked oriental. “Fucking slope-head. Nobody wants to give a poor white man a break these days.”

Jeter, who was black, didn’t respond. He knew that Nick had “issues” with just about everybody in the world who was a different race, gender, sexual orientation or religion from him. Nick’s biggest “issue,” so far as Jeter was concerned, was that he was a racist fuck-up who probably didn’t have a single real friend in the city and county of San Francisco. Jeter couldn’t figure out why Eli Jones even allowed the sorry son-of-a-bitch to hang around. The only reason most of the Bottom Street guys put up with Nick was because Jones seemed to actually like him. That baffled Jeter, who considered Dolman to be a lying sack of shit.

His comment about Titus Chan was a good example: Jeter had met Titus on one or two occasions and Chan didn’t have any kind of an accent at all, let alone one of those sing-song jobs Nick had mimicked while supposedly quoting him. Chan talked like somebody from the Midwest who had gone to college; that was probably because he was born and raised in Chicago, the son of a Methodist minister, and graduated from the city’s university with a major in English and a minor in business administration.

“Yeah, it’s a tough world for a po’ white boy,” Jeter said drily, putting the emphasis on “white.” “So what you going to do?”

Dolman looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean, what am I going to do?” he said, as if he thought Jeter was trying to trick him into saying something embarrassing.

Jeter sighed. Not only was Dolman a liar, but he was also dumber than the evening lineup on Fox News.

“Well, man, you need the motherfucking truck, but nobody’s spottin’ you the motherfucking money, dig?” he said. “So what you gonna do?”

Nick snorted. “I’ll probably end up stealing the damned thing, that’s what,” he said, although the idea didn’t hold much appeal: he had just finished one jolt in the federal slam for stealing a truck and he hoped to avoid a return engagement; still, he couldn’t think of any other way to get what he needed for the job. And he wanted to do this job real bad.

Jeter smiled. “How you going to get rid of the son-of-a-bitch once you done with it?”

Nick gave it some thought.

“I’ll probably just park it down at Hunters Point,” he answered finally. “The kids down in the projects there will strip it right to the frame in a few hours.”

“Good plan,” Ace said. “Now you using your head, man. Well, Nick, I gotta split. Gotta go make sure my girls are working, not just standing on the corner smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit.”

He left Nick nursing his various grudges against the world and made a bee-line for the only working pay telephone within six blocks of Bottom Street. He needed to make a call to his close friend, San Francisco Police Inspector David P. Ballenger. Jeter had been looking for a way to fuck Dolman ever since he met the guy and he figured Nicky had just given him the information he needed to do the job.

When he got up, Jeter left a five on the table to cover his coffee and leave a tip. Nick pocketed Jeter’s Lincoln, counted out exactly enough pocket change to cover the tab, gulped the last of his ice-cold coffee and practically ran out of the café.

Talking with Ace had made him antsy to get on with the job, as if he had suddenly realized that while he had been piddling around trying to line up a truck legitimately, the construction crew building those townhouses near Concord was finishing work on the project. If he didn’t go for that tool trailer soon, he was going to let the opportunity to run his own game get away from him. He decided he needed to bag a bobtail ASAP as quickly as possible and he figured the best place to find one was on Barneveldt, down in the old warehouse district south of Army, the street the yuppies at city hall had renamed for Cesar Chavez.

Dolman had once been a line truck driver working point-to-point freight runs for big outfits like P.I.E. and Consolidated. He’d carried a card in the Teamsters, earned scale, enjoyed paid holidays and days off, and had a shot at eventual retirement courtesy of the union’s big pension fund. But like most serious crooks, Nick was too lazy and shiftless to actually work for a living; being a thief was a lot more to his liking.

Not that his years as a union workingman had been totally wasted: Dolman had learned how to steal trucks during his Teamster days. In fact, he had clocked more hours whacking shipments from 18-wheelers than he had driving the damned things; half of the cargo he had stolen had been drive-away jobs where he backed a tractor up to a trailer full of freight, hitched up and wheeled it away.

He took the Third Street light rail to Chavez, got off and walked west toward the Mission District, keeping an eye peeled for a likely rig parked on one of the side streets. About three blocks from Bayshore, he saw what he was looking for: a big Cummins cab-over with no trailer, parked on the sidewalk in an area that appeared completely abandoned.

Nick was a little rusty so it took him three minutes with lock picks to open the passenger side door and another four working on the truck’s wiring before he had cold black smoke pouring out of the stacks while the diesel fired up. Driving a big rig away from a cold start in less than ten minutes is pretty good, but what really pleased Nick was that he managed to whack the truck without ever seeing another soul in the area.

He would have to stash the bobtail while he scammed some supplies and contacted LaVonne and Ray, but by tomorrow night, they would be ready to tow that tool trailer back to the city where they could find somebody to take the goodies inside off their hands.

“Piece of cake, just like I said,” Nick grinned to himself as he drove the truck back to the Tenderloin.

Ray was okay with the mask Nicky provided for him but LaVonne Walker wasn’t happy. He looked at the pullover vinyl hood with distaste. “How come I gotta wear this Hillary Clinton face?” he asked in a tone of voice that bordered on a whine.

“I told you, man,” Nicky said impatiently, “They got security cameras out there on this job site. We break in and haul that trailer off without a disguise, we’re going to have cops on our doorstep tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, I understood that part, dumbass,” LaVonne said hotly. “What I want to know is why I gotta wear a mask of a chick?”

The vein on Nick’s temple stood out like it was going to blow any minute. “I got the last three fucking masks they had in the costume shop, dipshit,” he said angrily. “All they had was that George Bush I gave Ray and this Laura Bush one I’m going to wear.”

“Well, I don’t want to wear no chick face,” LaVonne said, sulking. “That’s too fucking gay, man. People will think I’m a fucking faggot.”

“Give me the Clinton mask, LaVonne,” Ray said with a sigh. “I’ll wear the son-of-a-bitch. It don’t make no difference anyway, man. Nobody that knows us is going to see us wearing them.”

“Yeah,” Nick chimed in. “I take all three of the fuckers after the job and burn them. Nobody’s going to know you wore a mask at all, except the people who look at the security videos, and they aren’t going to know who you are. They’re just going to know you’re part of the crew that ripped off the tool trailer.”

LaVonne was somewhat mollified by Ray’s offer but not entirely. “I don’t see why any of us should have to wear one of these,” he sniffed, still upset. “Why couldn’t we just pull a nylon over our heads?”

Nick narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Because then the security people would know we were two white guys . . . and an African American,” he said, nearly using the word “nigger,” but stopping himself just in time to avoid pissing LaVonne off.

LaVonne looked at him with disgust. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That going to narrow down the field of suspects a whole bunch. Two white guys and a black man. Probably only be something like three, four million people in the Bay Area alone that going to fit that description.” He spat on the ground to show how little he thought of Nick’s reasoning.

“C’mon, give it,” Ray said, handing LaVonne the George Bush face. LaVonne turned over his Hillary mask with a final look of distaste and pulled the Bush hood over his head.

“Phew!” he said. “These motherfuckers stink, man!”

Nick pulled his Laura Bush face on. “Yeah, they do smell bad, don’t they?” he said. “Must be the damn plastic they’re made out of.”

Ray tried his Clinton mask on. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “If we put them on just before we open the gate and then take them off after we haul the trailer out of the damn yard, we’ll probably only have to wear them for about ten or fifteen minutes. I can handle that,”

“You look pretty hot for a Republican chick, Nick,” LaVonne said to Dolman, who was finding the stiff plastic of the Laura Bush mask more uncomfortable that he had expected. “I always thought you were a good-looking woman, even if your husband was a stone dumbass.”

Nick stripped off the mask, his face burning with embarrassment. “Yeah, well fuck you, George,” he sneered at LaVonne.

“Watch out, George,” Campos laughed inside the Clinton mask. “Laura going to cut you off tonight. No pussy for you!”

LaVonne laughed, pulling off the mask of the president. The last of his resentment seemed to have evaporated. “Okay, I guess this is alright,” he said. “So what time we doing this job tonight?”

Nick looked at his watch. “Let’s hook up at the American Café around eight,” he said. “It’ll be good and dark by then. We’ll take the bobtail over to the site, cut the chain on the gate and wheel that fucking trailer out. Let’s wait until we get it back over here to open her up and take out the tools. Then we can ditch the trailer over in Hunters Point. We park it on one of the streets down below those projects on Potrero Hill? Shit, the kids who live up there will strip both of them clean by morning.”

Campos was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Those things make you sweat man,” he said. “Let’s do this one fast, guys. I don’t want to wear that fucking mask any longer than I have to. To be honest, those things creep me out.”

(Continued in Nicky's Deal III)

Nicky's Deal I

2011-03-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

Nicky Dolman might have been stupider than a bedful of cracker crumbs but his lack of mental horsepower didn’t keep him from being ambitious. He wanted to call his own shots so when he cooked up the tool trailer job he pulled in Ray Campos and LaVonne Walker but didn’t say a word to Eli or Bosco, the actual leaders of the Bottom Street crew.

“It can’t miss,” Nick said as he bought Ray and LaVonne drinks at the Blue Door. “We just pull the bobtail up to this trailer, hook her up and wheel her out. Piece of fucking cake.”

“How do we get in where this trailer at?” LaVonne asked. He thought the basic plan had promise, but he was automatically skeptical of anything Dolman said. Nick Dolman couldn’t find his way out of a phone booth with a roadmap and a compass so if he was pitching a moneymaking scheme, LaVonne figured it was a good time to keep his hand on his billfold.

“LaVonne’s got a point, Nick,” Campos said. “You said this trailer full of power tools is behind a cyclone fence that’s chained and padlocked. How do we get inside?”

Nick sighed. He hated to let LaVonne and Ray in, but they were the only guys lower on the Bottom Street food chain than him. Even Bagwell, the college kid that scammed office equipment by pretending to be a repairman, got more props than Nick, Ray or LaVonne—and Bags wasn’t even part of the crew.

“Look guys,” he said patiently. “It’s a trailer full of construction tools: power saws, drills, what they use to build stuff. It’s inside a fence where they’ve been putting up all those new condos this side of Concord. The fence just has a chain locked on the gate. I got a bolt cutter that’ll get through it in a New York minute. We go in, hook the trailer up to the truck, then rock and roll.”

He spread his hands, palms up, to show how easy it would be. “That’s all there is to it,” he said confidently.

LaVonne was still skeptical. “Man, I don’t know,” he said. “What you think these tools are worth?”

Nick was ready for that one. He pulled out a newspaper ad for a discount tool outlet in Newark, south of Oakland, and stood up to point out various items to Ray and LaVonne.

“This is a cut-rate outfit that sells a lot of cheap gear,” he said. “But even they are charging like $50 for a good power drill, $65 for this saw here, and look at this compressor—they’re asking nearly two grand for it!”

“What the fuck’s a compressor?” LaVonne asked, furrowing his brow. “How you use something like that on a construction job?”

“How the hell would I know?” Nick asked angrily. “Do I look like a construction expert?”

“Hey, guys, let’s be nice,” Campos said soothingly. “What’s this thing here?” he added, pointing at one of the devices on the cluttered advertisement.

Nick sat back down with a grin. “One of them boxes you can roll around with drawers for putting tools in,” he said. “They want 250 bucks for the son-of-a-bitch. Man, I’m telling you guys, this is gonna be like taking off a bank, only without guards or dye-pack. We can probably sell all this shit to that Chinaman in Oakland, the guy who loaned Eli and Bosco all the stuff for that big office scam they ran.”

“Mr. Chan?” Campos said. “I’m not sure he fences this blue collar junk. I don’t remember anything but office stuff in that big warehouse of his.”

Nick shrugged to show indifference. “If he don’t want it, he can probably tell us where to unload it,” he said.

“It best be someplace where they don’t care how old stuff is,” LaVonne said sarcastically. “I hear Chan pay top dollar for the shit he buy but he want it like fresh off the showroom floor. This stuff you talking about going to be hella rasty and beat up, man: tools people been using on they jobs, with all kinda dings and scratches and dirt. Even if we can unload power tools onto Chan, he ain’t going to want no funky old bullshit that’s past its prime.”

Dumb fucking nigger, Nick thought. You think you’re so smart with all your questions and bullshit. He didn’t say it, though. He really needed a crew for this job, not just for practical reasons but because he wouldn’t be a real shot-caller unless there was somebody there to follow his orders. He couldn’t afford to alienate the only two crooks he had done any business with since he got out of the federal slammer. So instead of telling LaVonne to fuck himself, which would blow the whole deal, he decided to play it cagy.

“Hey, if you don’t like the job, that’s fine with me,” he said, raising his hands, palms out. “I’m sure I can line up some other guys who are interested in easy money.” He drained his beer and stood up to leave.

“Hey, now—wait a minute,” Ray said, giving Nick the stop sign. “Don’t be so hasty.” Turning to LaVonne he added: “Come on, man, we could use some dough. I already blew what we got from Eli and Bosco for breaking down that office after the start-up scam. I got rent due and I can’t sweet-talk my landlady again. I gotta score some cash pretty soon or she’ll throw my ass out on the street.”

LaVonne rolled his eyes in exasperation but Nick knew he would cave; Walker didn’t like Dolman but he was sitting here drinking his beer and tolerating his company. Nick could think of only one plausible reason: he was just as broke as Campos.

“Aight,” LaVonne said finally. “I’m in, but this seem like a fucked-up deal to me.” He nodded at Dolman. “I don’t think Professor Moriarty here thought this job through too well and I bet something going to come back and bite us in the ass down the road. But I’ll play—until the shit hit the fan. Then I’m out of here so fucking fast it make your head spin.”

Nick grinned triumphantly.

“So, when we going to bag this trailer?” Campos asked, taking a sip of beer.

Nick’s face clouded. “Uh, any time now,” he said.

“How about tomorrow?” LaVonne asked.

Nick shook his head. “No, we can’t do it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have to pick a time and then get back to you both and let you know what it is.”

“Hey, a few minutes ago you were about to look for some other partners because we were taking too long making up our minds,” Ray said with a sharp edge to his voice. “You were the one in a big hurry. Why can’t you pick a time right now?”

“Well,” Nick said, blushing, “I have a little problem that is keeping us from doing it right away.”

“What’s that?”

Nick swallowed hard. “The truck,” he said. “I haven’t found the bobtail we need to pull the trailer.”

Bosco ran into Ray and LaVonne in the Blue Door, drinking on a tab. He could tell they had both already managed to go through the money they had picked up in the Mandragola Ventures scam. It was the same every time a Bottom Street guy scored: he just didn’t seem to be able to get rid of the cash fast enough.

Bosco ordered a straight rye from Ronnie Pervez, the Door’s owner. Sipping it, he joined Campos and Walker at their table.

“You’ll never guess what I just saw,” he said as he sat down, grinning and shaking his head with an expression of amused exasperation.

“A UFO full of them little green guys?” LaVonne said. “Shit, I dunno. What?”

Bosco hooked a thumb toward the door. “On the other side of the street, there’s this Mexican-looking guy, maybe middle-eastern but I’m guessing Hispanic,” he said.

“Maybe he just has a good tan,” Campos said with a tight smile. His father and uncle were rapoñeros—pickpockets from Colombia who had come to the U.S. to ply their trade on the gringos at LAX. Both eventually were deported, but not before Ray's father had met and married a Mexican woman and sired little Ray. The woman, who was also an illegal, was deported 18 years later, but by then Raimundo Elizondo Campos—his U.S. citizenship a happy accident of birth—had already acquired a lengthy juvenile rap sheet and was doing a stint in the California Youth Authority.

Because of his background, Ray was a little sensitive to perceived slights against Latinos.

“Could be,” Bosco said, mulling it over. “He also could have been a Jewish brain surgeon moonlighting by doing yard work. The fact is, where he came from isn’t really part of this story. You want to hear it?”

Ray lifted his beer bottle in a gesture for Bosco to continue.

“Anyway, he’s got this leaf blower and it’s all cranked up, you see?” Bosco said. “He’s blowing all the leaves from the far side of the street over to this side.”

Campos shrugged. “Probably hired by Connaughey over at the funeral home,” he said. “That guy’s a fucking neat freak.”

Bosco held up his hand to indicate he wasn’t done. “Over on this side of the street there’s another Mexican-looking guy with a leaf blower,” he said. “And he’s blowing all the leaves from his side over to the other side.”

LaVonne looked puzzled. “These motherfuckers blowing leaves onto each other or what?” he asked, struggling to visualize the scene.

Bosco shook his head. “No,” he said. “One is up at the far corner, by Jones, and one is down near Leavenworth, at the other end. But they’re working their way toward each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen when they do meet up in the middle.”

Ray chuckled. “I’m glad you told me that story and not that sick fuck Dolman,” he said. “He’d spend the rest of the day yammering about dumb Mexicans.”

LaVonne laughed. “Not while you around, Ray,” he said. “He never talk shit about a group of people while any of them nearby.”

Campos looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“What he means is you’re a Latino, so Nick won’t run Mexicans down as long as you can hear him,” Bosco said. “Nick never pisses on a particular type of person so long as a member of that specific group is nearby. You remember when he was going on and on about the hot air blower the other night?”

Ray nodded.

“It was rag-head this and sand-monkey that,” Bosco said. “But whenever Ronnie over there walked by, he stopped running his mouth.”

"What's your point?" Ray asked.

Bosco shrugged. "Ronnie is Persian," he said. "Nick isn't going to talk shit about Iranians someplace where one might hear him—particularly not one who can refuse to let the cheap bastard run a tab."

Ray considered this. “I guess I never noticed that before,” he said slowly as he mulled it over. “Now that you mention it, he’s always ranting about niggers when we’re alone together, but not when LaVonne or Eli or Bags is around. And I can’t remember him ever saying anything bad about Latinos when I was with him.”

LaVonne laughed again, clearly enjoying Ray’s reaction to this revelation. “Yeah, but you leave to take a shit, man, and he’s all over spics and wetbacks and motherfucking chili chokers,” he said. “I know. I been there when it happen.”

“Why’s he do that?” Ray asked with a puzzled look on his face.

“Dolman is a person of color himself,” LaVonne said with a smile. “His color’s yellow. He got a big-ass stripe of it from the back of his head to the crack of his ass.”

Bosco shook his head. “I don’t think he does it ‘cause he’s chickenshit,” he said. “I think he does it because he’s shrewd. He doesn’t want to piss anybody off that he might be able to get something from. If he’s nice to you, buys you a drink or something? That’s ‘cause he wants something from you.”

Ray and LaVonne looked at each other. LaVonne grinned broadly as a light bulb finally went off in Ray’s head.

“That must have been the reason he bought us all those drinks the other day,” Ray said. “He wanted us to work with him on that tool trailer deal.”

Bosco frowned. “What tool trailer deal?” he asked.

“We wasn’t supposed to say nothing to you or Eli about it,” LaVonne said. “Nick found this construction job where they got a trailer full of construction shit he gonna light finger. He cut Ray ‘n’ me in on his scam. I think he was gettin’ off on having his own crew for a job.”

“What do you mean construction shit? You mean like tractors and all that bop?” Bosco asked.

“Naw,” Ray said. “This is all small stuff. Drills, and electric saws and things that you can store inside a trailer on a construction site.”

Bosco considered this. “What exactly does Nick have in mind?”

“He’s going to try and find one of those front ends from a trailer-tractor rig,” Campos said. “He wants to cut the chain on the gate, drive the truck inside, hook up to the trailer and haul it away. He’ll stash the trailer someplace safe, go through all the shit inside and fence the goods.”

The scheme would only sound like it had possibilities to a knucklehead like Dolman, Bosco thought. Where in hell could you temporarily stash a trailer full of construction tools without having somebody report it? Where would you get rid of the damned trailer after you cleaned out anything valuable inside? And who would buy that kind of stuff? There were all kinds of hot goods dealers in San Francisco but Bosco didn’t know any that specialized in small pieces of construction equipment. You’d probably have to cart the swag all over town, going from one pawn shop to another to unload it.

Nick’s scheme has more holes in it than a cheese grater, Bosco thought.

“So are you guys in on this deal?” Bosco asked.

LaVonne sighed. “Man, we know Nick is a moron, but we both need work,” he said. “You and Eli don’t have anything for us and we got to do something. Only I got a bad feeling about this deal. It smells like it going to blow up in our face.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “Nick could fuck up a wet dream. If he’s setting this up, there’s bound to be a hole in it big enough to stash this trailer he wants to steal. What do you think, Bosco? Should we tell Nick to pack sand or what?”

Bosco shrugged. “You’re both big boys now, you have to figure this one out for yourself,” he said. “It will probably be a couple of months before Eli and I run another number, so you’re right about us not having any work for you right now. I could loan you both some cash, but I have to hoard part of the take from Mandragola as start-up for our next scam, so it probably wouldn’t be that much.”

He smiled. “Besides, the way you two assholes spend money, it wouldn’t go very far anyway.”

“I think I’m going to go with Nick on this deal then,” said LaVonne. "I hate to do it, but money talks and bullshit walks. And I ain’t walkin’ bro."

“Yeah, me too,” said Ray. “If it ends up being FUBAR, that’s the breaks. I can’t go back to working the dip at Pier 39 and Hallidie Plaza. The cops all know me too well there and the merchants, too. First pocket I pick, I’m violated and going back to Corcoran. I still got parole conditions from that 211 that earned me a six-year stretch there.”

“Well, fuck,” Bosco said, lifting his glass in a weak salute. “I guess that’s it then. I hope it goes well for you guys and that you make a big score. I hope it all works out for the best.”

The more Bosco thought about it, the more it ticked him off. Nick was one of Eli’s hires and Bosco considered him a charity case. He was too dumb to use in a big con, even for a walk-on part. The only thing he was really worth a damn for was loading the truck when the game was over and they were breaking the scam down, like at Mandragola. And Bosco wasn’t even sure Nick was any good at cleaning up the site. Now he wondered if the dumb bastard had left a bunch of fingerprints on something or spread his own DNA all over the scene.

“What an asshole,” he muttered angrily as he nursed his Jim Beam Rye.

The best that could come of Nick’s scheme was a bunch of second-hand boodle that nobody would take off the stupid bastard’s hands. There probably wasn’t going to be much profit, even if he had good luck moving the swag, but that was a relatively minor downside. The real problem was that the scheme could end up getting Nick and his partners arrested: they had to find some way to ditch the trailer they stole; the vehicle they used to haul it away could be traced. The cops would eventually track them down and each guy from the crew who got grabbed was a potential rat. That meant Bosco and Eli got exposure from Nick’s caper, even though neither had anything to do with it.

“Stupid fucking asshole,” he said, angrier than before.

This was all Eli’s fault. All the dumb fucks they worked with had been recruited by Eli: Dolman, Campos, Walker and that dipshit Carnahan who got grabbed by the cops sticking up an Arab liquor store and was doing 25-to-life on his third strike. None of them were worth the powder to blow them to hell.

The brainy people—like Bagwell if he’d ever take the bait and join the crew, and Carole Peterson, the chick that had done such a beautiful job in the psychic number they had run two years back, were Bosco’s hires. He sighed. Too bad Carole got married and moved out to Walnut Creek. She'd been smart and really quick on her feet. She probably had two kids, a Volvo station wagon and 80 pounds of extra flab by now. Even so, she could still out hustle Dolman, who had the IQ of a jar of oysters.

Bosco had once raised the issue with Eli but got no satisfaction.

"Dolman is an idiot," he'd said. "Why do you keep that dipshit in the crew?"

Eli just gave him that smirk that irritated people and used his forefinger to pet his little soul patch. "I know he's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen, but the guy is funny," he said.

"I got an aunt that's funny like Nicky Dolman," Bosco replied with disgust. "She's up in the Q ward at Napa because she jammed a pair of scissors through my uncle's left eye. Someday Nick is going to fuck us all, wait and see."

Bosco drained his glass and ordered a second. It looked like that someday was now. He was going to have to have a heart-to-heart with Nicky Dolman, and really soon.

Soon ended up being a little after 3 p.m. the next day. Nick hadn’t been around Bottom Street since LaVonne and Ray bought into his trailer heist so Bosco went looking for him. With a word here and there, he learned Dolman had been hanging out at Lucy’s, a dive a couple of blocks from the Hall of Justice. That made sense, Bosco reasoned: the son-of-a-bitch spent so much time in the county lock-up he probably hated to wander far from his home away from home.

Nick was just starting his second beer and looking at the funnies in the afternoon paper when Bosco walked through the door, crossed the room and spun a chair around to sit down across from him with his arms on its back.

“Nick,” he said quietly. “You’d be amazed at the shit you hear sometimes. Somebody told me you were going solo on us.”

Dolman almost choked on his beer. “Who the fuck told you that bullshit,” he sputtered, wondering how Bosco knew where he was and how he had found out about the trailer deal.

“A little bird,” Bosco said with a humorless smile. “Is it true? You running your own game now?”

Dolman’s flushed with embarrassment. “No!” he said. “I just had a little job I stumbled onto that I wanted to do by myself, that’s all.”

“You planning to go solo regular, man?” Bosco demanded.

“No, honest,” Dolman said, shaking his head frantically.

“Because if that’s what you want, I can understand,” Bosco said, ignoring his response. “Sometimes a guy wants to spread his wings a little, be his own boss, you know?”

“No,” Nicky blurted before realizing he was giving the wrong answer. “I mean, yeah, I understand what you’re saying, Bosco,” he added, correcting himself.

Bosco stared at him. “A little free-lance piece, huh? I hear you got Ray and LaVonne in it with you, so you aren’t exactly doing it by ‘yourself,’ are you?” he added, using his fingers to make imaginary quotation marks in the air around the word “yourself.”

Nicky had the look of an animal in a spotlight. “Well, yeah,” he said, licking his lips. “They were between jobs. I didn’t figure you or Eli would care or I would have mentioned it to you.”

“Why would we be interested, Nick?” Bosco said. “I mean, you guys are all adults, right? You’re big enough to make decisions for yourself. You don’t need me and Eli hanging over you and telling you what to do, do you?”

“No,” Nick said, then didn’t like the way it sounded. “I mean, yeah, we’re grown-ups. But it isn’t like I was cutting you loose or anything.”

“I mean it’s really none of our business, is it Nick?” Bosco added.

“No. I mean yes,” Dolman said weakly. He was now completely confused about what question he was actually answering—or whether Bosco had asked a question he was supposed to answer in the first place. Sweat was beading on his forehead and he could feel it well up in his armpits and trickle down his sides.

He had never been afraid of Bosco or Eli before; they were just con men, not hard guys like that mob hit man he had met at the federal joint in Dublin. But there was something in Bosco’s manner today that reminded him of the hit man. Nicky was beginning to wish he had never thought about that tool trailer job.

“But it would be our business if you fucked it up so much that one or more of you assholes got busted, wouldn’t it?” Bosco said, lowering his voice so Dolman had to lean forward to hear what he was saying. “It would definitely be our business, because if any of you guys go inside, you become a threat to Eli and me.”

Nick said nothing. He was trembling so much that he looked like one of those dolls with the big heads they give away at the ballpark.

Bosco leaned forward himself and poked Dolman in the chest with his forefinger. “You go ahead and do this solo number, Nick,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “But if you guys fuck up, you better watch your back, because Eli and I aren’t going to end up in your shit, dig? Not now. Not ever.”

Without another word, Bosco stood, turned and walked out of the bar. Nick sat there for several minutes, still shaking. When he finally got up, he went directly to the bathroom, leaving a little puddle on the seat of his chair.

(Continued in Nicky's Deal II)

A Job for the Chinaman

2010-12-04T14:10:00.000-08:00

By Bill Wallace

When crimes get planned on Bottom Street, the planning usually takes place at the Blue Door. It isn’t because the bar is a spot that inspires some felonious muse; it just happens to be the place where the biggest crooks in the Tenderloin hang out.

On the night Noddy Bauman pitched the arson for Wayne Fong, the head of Asian organized crime in San Francisco, the tavern was a virtual hiring hall for thieves: no less than seven of the Tenderloin’s biggest crooks were there to consume alcoholic beverages and tell each other lies. Representing San Francisco’s sexual services sector were pimps Aloysius “Ace” Jeter and Jimmie “Rabbit” Culpepper, while Angel Goodwin and Kelly Martin were present on behalf of the city’s illicit drug industry.

The Bottom Street scammers in the crowd included Ray Campos, LaVonne Walker, Nick Dolman and Eli Jones; Only Peter Boskovitch and Phil Bagwell were missing.

Noddy, who acted as a hiring agent for some of the bigger lawbreakers in Northern California, had no sooner mentioned that Fong was looking for talent than Angel Goodwin started to complain.

“C’mon, man, it’s a fucking job,” Noddy said plaintively.

“Yeah? Who for?” Angel said. “It’s another job for the fucking Chinaman. I’ll bet it’s another fucking microchip warehouse takeover. Nobody makes shit off those—they’re like working at a square job. Wong takes the chips to his Vietnamese guy in Elk Grove and he hooks up with the other guy, that slopehead in San Gabriel. And everybody has to wait like, what? Six weeks for him to unload the shit? Screw that, man. Baby needs shoes right now, not six fucking weeks from now.”

Eli Jones, who had nurtured a low opinion of Angel for the eight years he had known him, figured that Goodwin had never actually done any work for the Chinatown gang boss. Eli pushed his way into the conversation, more to shut Angel up than because he wanted any piece of Fong’s action.

“So, what’s the gig, Noddy?” he asked.

“It’s a torch job, man. Firebuggin’. You got to burn down a house for the guy.”

Noddy didn’t explain why the house needed incineration. People who made a living by contracting out illegal services rarely give unnecessary details about the purpose of those services. Not surprisingly, those they hired rarely asked for those details. The less anybody knew about anybody else’s business, the better for everybody involved.

But anybody who read the local papers knew that Fong ran a whore house out in the avenues that had been hit by the feds a few weeks earlier. The raid was largely fronted by agents from ICE, because the basic beef was that all the women turning tricks were illegals from Korea, most of whom had been lured to the U.S. to work at supposedly straight jobs.

Eli frowned. “What the fuck do you know about arson, Noddy?” he said. “I never heard of you hiring anybody for fires.”

Noddy shrugged. “What a person need to know?” he said. “You go in, throw something in-flammatory on the flo’, drop a match and get the fuck out. The fire do all the heavy liftin’.”

Eli remained skeptical. “What’re you paying for this butt-simple torch job?”

Noddy grinned. “This cat, Fong, he payin’ five large for the fire, upfront,” he said. “He got insurance that going to cover, total loss. Get him out of a shitload of debts with money left over.”

In fact, Fong had offered Noddy ten grand for the job. He was willing to pay extra because his lawyer had been given a copy of the return from the search and the paperwork showed that the agents who raided the operation had failed to find the “trick book” that Fong’s business manager kept stashed behind a wall air intake for the central heating unit on site.

That book was poison: it held the names of a half-dozen state and federal office holders who regularly visited the place, including a state appeals court justice and a deputy U.S. attorney. Collecting the insurance on the cathouse was secondary; what Fong was really buying was a fire that would eat that trick book up before the feds came back and found it.

But Noddy low-balled the amount Fong would pay because he had already pocketed half of it. That guaranteed Bauman a clear profit regardless of what happened to the dipshit who actually torched the building.

When Noddy told Eli what the pay for the job was, Angel got the look of a kid on Christmas Eve. He dropped his earlier bitching about working for Fong, shifting gears so fast that everybody in the room got little carsick.

“Hey, I got this one, Noddy,” he said before anybody else could speak. “I done this kind of thing before. Piece of cake.”

Noddy eyed him. “So, you in, Angel?”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “All I need is somebody to muscle up a jerry can of gas. I can handle it.”

Eli turned his skepticism on Angel. “You done arson before, Angel?” he said, surprised.

Angel grinned. “Who you think burned down the gym at St. John’s Prep? Sure as fuck wasn’t Smoky the bear.”

LaVonne whistled. “Man, that was seven, eight years ago,” he said. “You must have been, what? Fourteen years old?”

Angel shrugged. “April 13, 2001,” he said. “It was Good Friday. I was 15. I was transferred to St. John’s a year earlier. Man, I always hated that fucking place.”

The mention of St. John’s seemed to wake up Mokie Travers, the slow-minded kid who worked at the American Café down the street and enjoyed hanging out with the guys at the Blue Muse. “Hey, Ang!” he said, his face showing surprise. “I didn’t know you went to Catholic School. I thought you was at Mission High, like Eli.”

Eli displayed that wise-ass smirk that pissed so many people off. “He was after he got thrown out of St. John’s,” he said.

Angel darted Eli a look that warned him to shut up.

LaVonne had a confused look on his face. “So did you get thrown out of Catholic School for burning down the gym?” he asked.

Angel shook his head. “Naw, they never figured out I was the one who did the gym.”

Eli cut in, ignoring another glare from Angel.

“Angel got tossed because he got caught shaking down kids for lunch money,” he said. “That got him his first trip to Youth Guidance Center. By the time he got back from juvie, the nuns figured out he had been doing it for more than a year. The kids who were getting ripped off ratted him out when he was at the center. They also found out he had been taking money from the collection box on the Sundays when he worked as an usher at St. John’s Chapel. That’s what got his ticket punched at St. John’s Prep.”

Mokie gave Angel a glance. “What’s a prep school, Ang?” he asked.

Before Angel could answer, Eli, whose quick mouth sometimes entered the room a couple of minutes ahead of his brain, cut in again.

“It’s supposed to prepare you for an institution of higher learning, like a college or something,” Eli said, his smirk bigger than ever. “But the only prep school Angel ever graduated from was YGC. When he finished up at juvenile hall, he was ready for Deuel Vocational Institution.”

The vein on the right side of Angel’s forehead was standing out enough to throw a shadow. “You got a big mouth, Eli,” Angel said hotly. “You seem to know a lot of shit. Maybe you want to tell them how I got to Deuel, you being such a smart motherfucker and all?”

Eli’s wiseass smile began to fade as he realized he might have gone too far by taunting a dangerous lunatic . “Hey, no need to get all mental, Ang,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to piss you off.”

There was silence for a moment. Mokie broke it.

“Well, how did you get to Deuel?” he asked, still struggling to understand why the sisters would boot a guy for stealing lunch money. He thought everybody did that.

Angel kept his eyes on Eli. There was a smile on his face now, but there wasn’t anything humorous about the set of his mouth.

“There was a guy named Walt Kipling used to needle me all the time at Mission,” Angie said. “He had a big mouth just like Eli, here. One day he was riding me about something while me and some other guys were sharing a fifth of Everclear. I threw that shit on him and set his ass on fire. Isn’t that right, Eli?”

Eli, who had been two years ahead of Goodwin at Mission, said nothing. His wiseass smile was completely gone. He had passed by Kipling in the street two months ago and Walt still had scars all over his face from that fire.

Angel turned back to Noddy. “So you can see that I’m completely checked out on burning shit,” he said. “Five grand sounds pretty fucking good to me. I’ll pay five hundred to somebody who’ll tote the gas. That’s a pretty easy payday for a little bit of labor.”

Noddy showed the gold incisor on the left side of his grin. “You got it, champ,” he said. “You going to come up with the toter or you want me to do it?”

Angel smiled. “I’ll use my buddy, Mokie,” he said, clapping Travers on the shoulder in a friendly way. “He can use the money, I’m sure.”

Short Timer, Part Three

2010-11-04T10:18:00.001-07:00

By Bill Wallace

(Continued from Part Two)

“If I were you, I’d take care of any business you need to handle before you die,” Dr. Johnson said as she put her hand on his.

“Sorry for being so blunt, but it is what it is,” Dr. Johnson said. “When they brought you in your skin and the whites of your eyes had a slightly yellow cast, a sign of jaundice caused by improper liver function. You also had extensive spider veining and puffy nipples, a condition called gynecomastia. Both can be associated with cirrhosis.

“So we ran a bunch of blood tests and a liver panel on you and the results were unmistakable: you had elevated AST and ALT and your bilirubin count was way up, 5-6 milligrams per deciliter. Your ALP levels were off the chart. All are symptoms of decreased liver function. We did an ultrasound and found enlargement of the spleen and shrinkage of the liver.”

Trask had no idea what all that alphabet soup was about, but he understood cirrhosis and improper liver function. His old man, who drank a quart of vodka a day, had died of cirrhosis before Trask joined the Marines. And he wasn’t so ignorant about medicine that he didn’t know what it meant when she said he was dying.

Noticing his silence, Johnson looked at Trask to see if he understood what she was saying. His blank but frightened look convinced her to wrap things up without additional detail.

“The long and short of it is, every test we ran, the results were worse,” she said. “Your liver biopsy showed advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, a relatively rare type of cancer, at least in this country. It’s invariably fatal. You’ve apparently had cirrhosis several years, probably before you lost your medical coverage. If you had seen your doctors at Kaiser more frequently, they might have been able to at least slow the deterioration of your liver. But that was then and this is now. As we sit here, your liver is practically gone.”

For the first time in his life he could remember, Trask was speechless. But it didn’t take him long to recover. “Can you do anything for me?” he asked in a shaky voice.

The young doctor inhaled before shaking her head slowly. “For a severely damaged liver, the only realistic option is a transplant,” she said. “But your cancer is too far advanced for that. To be brutally honest, when we got back all these results, we weren’t surprised you’d passed out on the street. What we couldn’t figure out was why you were still breathing.”

“What kind of time do I have left?” Trask asked.

The doctor shrugged. “I can’t tell you,” she answered. “You’re day-to-day. With end- stage liver disease, we use something called MELD to determine a patient’s chances of surviving longer than 90 days. If I were a betting woman, I would bet you don’t make it that long.”

Trask shook his head. “What a pisser,” he said. “Cirrhosis and liver cancer. And I don’t even drink that much. I can only remember getting really shitfaced a few times in my life.”

“How much alcohol do you usually consume?” the doctor asked.

“I dunno,” he said, thinking about it. “Maybe five, six drinks a night. That’s over the course of four or five hours of socializing. A lot of times I didn’t even feel like I was getting high.”

“Even four drinks a day can be ruinous to your liver, Mr. Trask,” she said, closing her eyes briefly to calculate. “Let me see: five or six drinks a day with an ounce of liquor in each one, seven days a week. That’s between fourteen and seventeen gallons of alcohol a year.”

“You missed your calling,” Trask said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re good enough with numbers to be an accountant,” he said with a smile. “But I get the point. I thought I was doing better than my old man who was a really heavy drinker, but you don’t have to drink a quart a day to kill yourself.”

“What happened to your father?” she asked.

Trask shrugged. “He died of cirrhosis when I was 19.”

She sighed. “Well, there it is,” she said. “You’re too healthy to stay in the hospital, I’m afraid. You have no obvious complications that seem likely to lead to immediate death; but you won’t live much longer. It could be hours before you have another collapse like the one that put you in here. The next time it happens it will probably be fatal. It could be days or weeks–maybe even months. I just don’t know. None of us do.”

Trask settled back. It was a hell of a piece of news to get right after your 67th birthday. “So, what do I do?” he asked.

The doctor leaned forward, her expression sad and earnest. “There’s no medication you can take for this,” she said. “There’s no cure. It would be stupid for us to even tell you to stop drinking, frankly. You are past the point of recovering or even substantially prolonging your life. The simple fact is, sooner or later, all of us are going to die. For you, it’s just going to be a whole lot sooner.”

She locked eyes with Trask, dropping any vestige of professional distance. “Mr. Trask –Frank – I’ll be really blunt,” she said, so quietly Trask could hear a patient coughing in a ward down the hall.“If I were you, I’d get my affairs in order and take care of any business you need to handle before you die,” she said as she put her hand on his. “I’d get the most out of every day you have left because the fact of the matter is it could be your last.”

(Continued)

Like this story? Want to know what happens? Contact me at wewallace@hotmail.com

Short Timer, Part Two

2010-11-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

(Continued from Part One)

“You are dying, Mr. Trask,” Dr. Johnson said, almost without hesitation.

He thought about that and the expression she had used: “death’s door.” He had probably heard that phrase a million times but never really paid any attention. Apparently death lived in a house. He had always thought of the skinny old motherfucker just wandering around aimlessly with his scythe over his shoulder, harvesting souls willy-nilly, sort of like the homeless guy with the straw hat he saw going through garbage bins near his hotel, or the people with the shopping carts full of tin cans and crap lined up at the foundry on Cypress Street.

His head was sore where he had banged it when he passed out. There was a little bandage just over his left eye that he could feel, but whatever was under it was tender when he touched it, so he only tried it once.

His stomach made a noise at him. He realized he was hungry as hell, which probably made sense since he hadn't had any nutrition but the garbage they seemed to be pumping into him through the tube for the last three days. The sensation surprised him. Trask usually ate only a meal a day, sometimes not that. He hadn’t had much of an appetite for a couple of years.

When the doctor showed up – three minutes early – Trask initially thought she was an orderly that had been sent in to change the bedpans or something. First of all, she was young, maybe all of 28 years old; second, she was black. Trask had never seen a black doctor who was a woman before. They had all been men. And every African American doctor he had ever met seemed to be at least 55. He had picked up the impression that medical schools wouldn’t give a black doctor a degree until his hair was gray and he had double chins.

“Mr. Trask?” the young woman asked as she pulled the clipboard from the foot of the bed.

Trask looked around the room. There were three other beds in the ward, all empty.

“I sure as hell hope so, ‘cause there isn’t anybody else in here,” he replied, pulling her chain.

“I’m Dr. Lois Johnson, Mr. Trask,” the young woman said, holding out her hand.

Trask shook it, wondering in which year of medical school doctors learn the hand-shaking tradition. To Trask, it made seeing a health professional a little like visiting a used car lot.

“You were brought in because you passed out on the street,” Johnson said. “Have you ever passed out like that before?”

Trask shook his head.

“Ever feel dizzy or disoriented?”

“Nope,” he said, then corrected himself. “Yeah, actually, I do. Sometimes when I wake up at night I feel dizzy when I stand up. My heart seems to beat fast then, too.”

“Do you have trouble sleeping at night?” Johnson asked, writing something on Trask’s chart.

Trask nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I wake up a lot to pee. I thought most old people did that.”

Johnson glanced at him without responding to the questioning tone of his answer. “Do you have abdominal pain? Stomach aches?”

Trask nodded again. “Sometimes,” he said.

“How often?”

Trask considered the question. “Maybe three, four times a week,” he replied. “I think it’s indigestion. I take antacids for it.”

“Do they help?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said. “Not really. Eventually it just stops. Or else I just stop noticing it.”

“When was the last time you saw a doctor?” Johnson said, studying Trask’s chart.

Trask thought about it for a moment. “I think it was about nine years ago,” he answered finally. “Maybe a year before the steel mill closed.”

The doctor stared at him. “You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Trask said. “Marine Corps. I took a round in the thigh at Khe Sanh in ‘68. They shipped me to an Army hospital in Japan to work on it, then to a Navy hospital in Hawaii. Took ‘em nearly eight months to get me fixed up, and by the time they did, my hitch was up and I mustered out.” He grinned at the memory. “The docs said the bullet had missed my female artery by about an inch,” he said. “I didn’t even know I had a female artery.”

“Femoral artery,” Johnson said.

“What?”

“Your femoral artery, not female,” Johnson repeated. “It’s a major blood vessel in your leg. If you’d been shot there, you probably would have bled to death in a few minutes without medical aid. You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Trask.”

Trask shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what the docs at Zama said,” he replied. “But I ended up with one leg that’s an inch shorter than the other as a result, so maybe I wasn’t that lucky after all. Could have saved a hell of a lot of money if I didn’t have to get one leg of every pair of pants I ever bought shortened up. But I also limp when I walk, which gets me a partial disability from the Veterans' Administration. I guess there’s an upside to every downside.”

“Whatever,” the doctor said impatiently. “The point I’m trying to make is, you’re a vet with a service-related health condition. Why aren’t you getting treatment from the VA or from Medicare, for that matter?”

Trask shrugged again. “I was on Kaiser ‘til the mill closed in 2002,” he said. “My doctor quit Kaiser about a year before that to move to Montana. They sent me a letter to sign up with a new doc, but I never got around to it. Then the mill shut down and I lost my medical, though I was able to get early retirement through the union.”

The doctor sighed. “Look, Mr. Trask, I’m really not interested in the history of your HMO memberships,” he said. “Why didn’t you go to the VA when you lost your Kaiser coverage? Why didn’t you sign up for Medicare when you became eligible two years ago?”

Trask frowned. He was beginning to wonder if this doctor was ever going to let him in on what had made him pass out on the street. “I figured I would sign up for Medicare when I started drawing social security,” he said. “I just turned 67, and I was planning to sign up this week. As for the VA, I didn’t go to them for medical treatment after the plant closed because I wasn’t sick.”

The doctor looked up from Trask’s chart. “Actually you were sick, Mr. Trask,” she said in what was probably her most affable bedside manner. “And you still are. You’re an advanced case of cirrhosis. End-stage liver disease.”

Trask laughed involuntarily. “Jesus, kid,” he said with a nervous grin. “You must have aced the unit on dealing with patients. You make me sound like something out of a medical journal. You make it sound like it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m dying.”

The young doctor didn’t blink. “You are, Mr. Trask,” she said, almost without hesitation.

(See Part Three)

Short Timer, Part One

2010-11-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

"I feel like home-made shit," Frank said.

Frank Trask would have been the last to admit he had a drinking problem. “I drink; I get drunk; I pass out—no problem,” he’d say.

Anyway, that was what he would have said until the day he passed out before he’d even had a drink. He’d walked out of the West Oakland hotel where he lived, turned right and took four steps before everything went black. He bounced off one of those big-ass parking meters you can use a credit card in and sprawled, face down, on the sidewalk.

Three days later he woke up in Highland, the Oakland hospital for indigents, illegals and the uninsured run by Alameda County. He could tell it was Highland because the staff had stenciled the name on everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor to keep the patients from walking out with it.

He didn’t know what he had done to put himself in the county hospital but he had been slated to celebrate his birthday Tuesday at Pete’s, his favorite bar, three of his buddies from the old steel mill. His pals were the people closest to him since his older sister Ethel had died three years ago.

Unfortunately, this was Wednesday, according to the headline news crawl on the idiot box that hung from the ceiling above his bed. He’d spent his 67th birthday passed out in a no-hoper hospital with a bunch of losers who didn’t know where their next meal – or next anything else – was supposed to come from.

Whatever had put him in the hospital had apparently affected his eyes, he thought as a single tear rolled down his unshaven cheek, leaving a glistening trail in the stubble like a tiny garden slug. He could have worked up a pretty good case of feeling sorry for himself if he had half a heat on, but getting his hands on an alcoholic beverage was pretty much out of the question.

Now THAT, he thought, was a drinking problem: not being able to get hold of one of the damned things. The idea cheered him up for some perverse reason.

He looked around, trying to figure out what had happened but drawing a complete blank. He was hungry as hell and had a bunch of crap plugged into his arm that might make him bleed to death if he messed around with it, including something that looked like a rubber tube with a needle stuck into a big blue vein on his arm and tied down with a piece of tape.

A nurse who looked like the big woman who once starred in that “Golden Girls” TV show bustled into the room and seemed surprised to see that Trask was awake.

“Well, welcome back,” she said, reviewing the various readings on the big machine next to his bed. “You’ve been out quite a while. How do you feel?”

Trask eyed her. He’d never had much use for the medical profession. “I feel like home-made shit,” he said sourly.

“Ah!” she said, glancing at him with a smile. “A Village Fugs fan. Tuli Kupferberg rocks.”

Trask looked at her name tag and saw it said "Kennedy" in white letters on black plastic. He was thinking of asking her if she was single and interested in acquiring a husband. He hadn't met a woman who knew either the Village Fugs or Kupferberg since 1967.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “Why am I in county?”

She gave him a long look. “I’d rather the doctor talked to you about that, Mr. Trask,” she said, reluctantly.

Trask blinked. “How many times a month does he drop in?” he said sarcastically.

She glanced at her watch and smiled. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Her tee-time isn’t until 5 p.m. today, so she should be by in about ten minutes.”

He thought about that. So his doc was a woman, too. He wondered if she was familiar with the Fugs.

She finished recording the information from the machine and took the thermometer out of his mouth, shook it, and checked the temperature.

“Looks like you’re somewhat semi-normal,” she said, giving him a severe look. “That’s a little like a miracle considering that when you came in here, you were at death’s door. Please listen to what the doctor tells you and follow her instructions. You may just live to see your next birthday.”

Trask laughed bitterly. “I wish I had seen the last one,” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing to spend your birthday on your back in a hospital.”

She put his chart back in the rack at the foot of the bed to leave. “I can think of worse ways to spend it,” she said mildly as she started for the door.

“Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”

She opened it and turned to give him a smile before she left, saying, “You could have spent it dead.”

(See Part Two)

Radar and the Rabbit

2010-10-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

By Bill Wallace

Some days you get the short end of the stick, on others, you get a chance to whack somebody with it. While on hooker patrol in the Mission, Kerry Sullivan had one of those days where you get a two-fer . . .

Normally, San Francisco Patrolman Kerry Sullivan would’ve been riding shotgun with his partner Jerry Damonico on the day he caught a runaway rabbit with his bare hands.

But the mayor had promised the people who lived near Cesar Chavez Street he would do something about speeders, which meant his partner was working solo radar duty in the “Two-car” on Chavez. Meanwhile, Sullivan was on foot patrol, hassling hookers at the corner of Capp and 25th streets.

When they were together the pair was busy all shift with robberies, burglaries, larcenies, dope busts, domestic violence calls and hot car beefs–meat and potatoes for cops in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Today, however, Jerry had a radar gun in his hand, tagging motorists who drove by at more than 35 miles an hour–as if anybody but a flaming moron would pass a parked black-and-white going faster than the posted speed.

Meanwhile, Sullivan was bothering prostitutes.

Kerry could imagine the Mission District D.J.s sarcastically spinning:

Write a whore a tag and
Put her in the bag;
No sense in jailin’ ‘em,
The lawyer’ll be bailin’ ‘em.
Quick as a snap and
They’re back down on Capp.

In disgust, he spat in the street, right in front of a 19-year-old crack whore who took it personally and gave him a vicious glare.

Suddenly the earpiece of Sullivan’s PIC radio hissed to life.

“Company D units, be aware, 211 in progress,” the dispatcher said. “Two-car reports strong-arm subject westbound on Cesar Chavez from Shotwell at this time.”

Sullivan snapped to attention. A “211” is the penal code section for a robbery and he was only a block or so away. The day suddenly seemed much brighter.

“Suspect tentatively identified as Jimmy Culpepper, black male adult, white hoodie sweatshirt with 49ers logo, now turning north onto Capp Street,” the dispatcher continued.

Sullivan grinned. The perp was heading his way!

Jimmy Culpepper, known on the street as “Rabbit,” was the fastest purse snatcher in San Francisco, maybe the entire U.S. He had been hanging in the breezeway between two apartment buildings, smoking a $5 rock, when he spotted the old lady walking out of one building, a handbag dangling from her shoulder.

Culpepper followed her about 100 feet, dragging his butt to keep pace as she used a cane to pick her way along the sidewalk to Chavez. When she turned toward Mission, Culpepper took off like his namesake. He spun the old lady like an old time DJ changing vinyl, peeling the purse from her shoulder at full tilt and leaving her sprawled behind him.

Unfortunately for Culpepper, Jerry Damonico was sitting in the two-car on Chavez, watching him. Damonico, as bored running radar on passing motorists as Sullivan was hassling whores, pointed the gun at the fleeing purse snatcher out of curiosity, hit “reset,” and ran the clock.

A heartbeat later, Damonico, still staring at the gauge in disbelief, called the robbery in. Such are the moments that fill the Guinness Book of World Records.

Within seconds of Damonico’s call, Sullivan spotted Culpepper headed toward him where Capp hooks back off Chavez. The Rabbit was in full sprint, arms tight and legs up, motoring down the street-sweep lane and moving inches to the right or left to narrowly miss hookers spilling off the sidewalk.

Sullivan, a former tackle at Bishop O’Dowd High School in the East Bay, was used to running down meat on the hoof. He gave chase, following Culpepper up a driveway and over a six-foot chain link fence.

Culpepper cleared thirty feet to the next property line in three steps and went over the redwood fence there almost without a pause.

Sullivan, adrenaline flowing, almost grabbed Culpepper’s ankle when he hit the next fence, an aluminum rail job overgrown with Algerian ivy.

The fourth fence, another chain-link special, was what put “Rabbit” in the stew. Winded, the purse-snatcher couldn’t quite make it over. He gasped and his back arched as a massive cramp seized his right leg. The pain made him yelp with agony and topple backward into the yard, where he sprawled on his back, gasping for air.

Maybe smoking a pack of Marlboro Lights a day isn’t a good idea for somebody who has to run for a living, he thought as he listened to his heart pound.

Sullivan, also winded, reached him in three steps. Weary from a chase more like running an obstacle course than a foot race, Sullivan pulled out his handcuffs, kicked Culpepper over onto his stomach and knelt on the small of his back as he cuffed him up.

“Rabbit, you’re under arrest,” Sullivan gasped. “You run again and, swear to God, I’ll shoot you!”

It wasn’t until Sullivan was called in by the station chief two days later that he realized what he had accomplished.

“What’s the problem, skipper?” he asked as he fidgeted before Captain Jack Rodriguez, the officer-in-charge at Mission Station. “Does Culpepper claim I used unnecessary force?”

Rodriguez shook his head. “Did you see the initial incident report on your collar?” he asked.

Sullivan shook his head.

“Well,” the captain said, “Your pal Damonico, was the one who originally called this one in. He used his radar gun to time Culpepper and clocked him at a radar-verified 29 miles per hour as he turned down Capp.

“In other words, Culpepper was running six miles an hour faster than the current world record in the 100 meters,” the captain added, looking up at Sullivan with a smile.

“So I’m not in trouble then?” Sullivan asked, unsure why the captain was telling him this.

“Hell, no!” the captain said. “We’re putting you in for a medal – for running down the fastest robbery suspect in department history!”

“And we’re not just charging Jimmy Culpepper with strong-arm robbery,” Rodriguez added, waiting for the news to sink in. “He was running four miles an hour faster than the limit posted on Capp. We’re also writing him a ticket for speeding!”

End

This flash short story is another excerpt from my crime-novel-in-progress, "Bottom Street."