Dirty in Cashmere (3 page)

 

EIGHT

On Wednesday morning 2-Time, Heller, Rita, and myself were barricaded inside Eternal Gratitude. A banner inscribed with the winning phrase
VOTED BEST LIFE CLUB IN SAN FRANCISCO
was tacked to the wall above the cash register. 2-Time had forged the slogan. Eternal Gratitude had won nothing.

Rita was behind the counter, loading tabs into a bag. The club had recently expanded its services to include home deliveries. Since Rita and 2-Time had no car, deliveries were conducted by taxi, which added to Eternal Gratitude's overhead. To make matters worse, the landlord had called up and said he was raising the rent another four thousand bucks a month. Claiming other clubs had approached him and offered more money for the space. Church and Market was prime real estate.

Heller deadpanned at me. “Your cut from the job is four hundred bucks.”

“What the fuck.” I was flummoxed. “That's all?”

“Correct.”

“Four hundred?”

Heller's mouth looked like a knife wound. He opened it and no blood came out, but the words he said were just as ugly. “Yeah, four hundred. Why? Because you were wrong. You fucked up. The guy you spotted, the one with the money? He didn't have shit. He had nothing. Only fifteen hundred measly bucks. Your share is fair. Me and 2-Time are doing right by you.”

A stew of emotions boiled across my face. Heller was literate when it came to facial vocabulary. He saw my despair and self-doubt cooking at a high flame and decided to capitalize on it. “Don't sweat it. This was just a test run.”

“A test run? What do you mean?”

“You want to make money? It's not easy.”

“I never thought it was.”

“It could get tough.”

“I know that.”

“We have to do it again.” Heller honeyed his voice until it was sweet and inviting with the merest hint of malevolence. “Me and 2-Time did our part. Now you've got to do yours. Better.”

2-Time added his opinion to Heller's opinion. This was his chance to shine. “He's onto something, Ricky. You might have some talent, but you need to refine your chops. More practice and shit. You're not slick yet.”

“I'm not?” My scar turned deep red from embarrassment.

“No, you're not,” Heller butted in. “You failed. I'll bet you've heard that before. A kid like you.”

“You don't know me.”

“I know what it's like having no money. But there's a way to get some more.”

“All right, all right.” I glared at Heller. The punk was boondoggling me. The thing of it was, I was in a bind. I needed cash fast. “I'll make another prediction later today.”

Heller absently fingered his cigarette burn. “Hallelujah.”

Late that afternoon I sat on top of Bernal Hill. The sky was laced with black contrails. Below me, the city was spread out in a grid to Diamond Heights. Off to my left was St. Luke's Hospital in the Mission. Further off was Mount Sutro. To my right was China Basin and the Bay Bridge.

No matter how I concentrated, I couldn't predict my own future. Something stopped me. It wasn't forgetfulness. A piece of my mind was missing in action. Someday, I'd ask the bullet where it had gone.

A sudden noise exploded in the nearby oleander bushes—a coyote shot out from the undergrowth and thrashed downhill. I got to my feet, shook the dirt from my pants, and followed the coyote down the hillside to Mission Street.

I was tired when I got to my house. I took a tab of Life and snuggled on the kitchen floor. I fell asleep and dreamed my old dog Butch got run over by a car.

Butch was splattered in the street, right on the yellow dividing line. I went to look at him. The neighbors were there. One of them said: “We need to put Butch out of his misery.”

The man went away and came back with a shotgun. He stood over the wounded mutt and pointed the gun. He fired once. The impact lifted Butch an inch off the ground.

I woke up from the nightmare with a jolt. I didn't go back to sleep. The rest of the afternoon sneaked away like a thief.

 

NINE

At Eternal Gratitude a spate of rare sunshine anointed the skylights, suffusing the club's interior with uncommon brightness. Rita dumped a jar of tablets onto the counter. Today was inventory day. The tabs needed counting. The triple-beam weight scales needed polishing. The chill out room up front needed airing—a customer had complained it was moldy.

Performing her chores, Rita replayed the movie she'd seen that morning. The movie starring 2-Time, Heller, and me. How her husband and Heller had cheated me. Telling me there was no real payoff from the robbery.

But the truth was, with the landlord's recent demand for higher rent, Eternal Gratitude's destiny was bleak. An extra four thousand a month? There was no damn way they could afford the hike without augmenting their income.

The rent problem was insignificant compared to the rumor she'd heard earlier. The word on the street was that too much Life was flooding the city. Prices were sinking. This meant purgatory for Eternal Gratitude.

I was their only hope. If I made a couple of slick predictions—abracadabra and all that shit—the rent would get paid. Then again, maybe it was a pipe dream. Me and the future.

“Rita!” 2-Time boomed from the cellar, aborting her reverie. “Five bags of tabs are missing. Do you know where they are? I can't remember.”

That was the problem with Life—the vaccine's short term memory loss factor was high. 2-Time remembered what he did five years ago better than what he did yesterday. Life also gave him the shakes, similar to early onset Parkinson's disease.

2-Time emerged from the basement, toting a garbage bag of tabs. He heaved the sack on the counter, stopped to glance at his wife. The blankness on Rita's face disturbed him. She was standing by the cash register, spacing out. In 2-Time's opinion, Rita spaced out too often.

He was vexed. “Where the fuck is Bellamy?”

2-Time thought about his twenty grand. Soon, there would be more money. A magic mountain of cash.

 

TEN

The telephone had been ringing nonstop for ten minutes. Heller paid no attention to it. He was in bed with Mitzi. Taking it easy. Yet he was depressed. The next job he and 2-Time had up their sleeves was a doozy. It was a big target, five times larger than the last one. That meant the heist was five times riskier. Somebody might get killed.

My first prediction had been successful. That made Heller nervous. Maybe it had been a fluke. Beginner's luck. Who knew? And I bugged him. Why should a nineteen-year-old kid know the future? It wasn't fair. Heller had no such power. It made him sad.

All the months he'd spent backing Rita and 2-Time's venture at Eternal Gratitude was even more depressing to him. It'd been precious investment capital down the drain.

Brooding, he looked out the window. A raven flitted over the telephone lines, black wings glinting opalescent white against the tarred rooftops. He looked at Mitzi. It wasn't hard to do when she had no clothes on. With her heart-shaped ass, toned legs, and flat stomach, Mitzi was a hot number. A surefire guarantee their marriage wouldn't last. How could it? He was fifteen years older than her.

To complicate everything, the cigarette burn on his face wasn't healing. He'd gone last night to the emergency room at General Hospital. The doctor on duty prescribed antibiotics. Heller was avoiding mirrors.

Mitzi crawled over to him, looped her arms around his unshaven neck. “We're rich, daddy.”

He hated it when she called him daddy. What was he, some kind of fucking geriatric? He was only thirty-eight, for Christ's sake.

Mitzi beamed at him with slightly crossed eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

Heller's other concern was 2-Time. He was fed up with him. Rita, he could take in small doses. Whatever her faults, which were myriad, at least she didn't do angel dust. That was one small, but significant blessing. Most important was 2-Time's money. Heller still intended to help himself to it.

“Honey, I'm talking to you.”

“Sorry.” He was jarred from his funk. “I was meditating.”

“On what?”

“Bellamy.”

“He's really handsome.”

“You think?” It was the last thing Heller wanted to hear. “He never blinks. He drags his leg when he walks.”

“Shit, you're jealous.”

Heller shifted onto his side, the better to scowl at Mitzi. She was getting on his nerves. He remembered how she flirted with Bellamy. It was something he ought to forget.

The telephone was still ringing. Heller lifted his heavy flanks out of bed, tied a sheet around his hips, plodded across the carpeted bedroom floor, crushing the stolen money underfoot. He waddled into the living room, grabbed the landline. “Yeah?”

“Rance?”

“What do you want, 2-Time?”

“Where is Bellamy?”

“How the hell do I know?”

“I'm worried about him. That hapless kid is walking around all by himself. What if we lose him? There goes the money.”

“Relax.”

“I can't, man. This shit is getting to me.”

“Just try, okay?”

Heller hung up. He was amused. 2-Time should've known from the instant he met Bellamy, that things would get chaotic.

Mitzi tiptoed over to him, draped her arms around his neck, dug her newly painted orange fingernails into his back hair. “Who was that?”

“Nobody, baby.” He purred like a kitten under her touch and prudently chose to remain vague. No ill-tempered comment would spring from his lips. “Just some fucking loser with the wrong number.”

 

ELEVEN

“Don't you have any friends?”

I looked up, startled. Spike was at the hedge that divided my backyard from hers. She was styling a green nylon bomber jacket over a camisole, white stockings, and Doc Martens. Mascara was smudged around her bloodshot eyes. Her red bangs were stiff with gel, knife-like against her scalp.

Friendship was a sore point. Nobody came to see me when I was in the hospital. My friends avoided me. No one wanted to get close to death, in fear it might rub off on them, that they might be next.

“I'm an oracle. I don't have friends.”

I'd been sitting in the overgrown grass behind the cottage for an hour, trying to figure out what to do. 2-Time and Heller wanted me to make another foretelling. I had qualms about that.

The events that were now taking place had nothing to do with what I was like before I was shot. But I'd nearly died. And after you've been on the verge of death, living is different. Colors were brighter. Emotions were sharper. Almost unbearable.

Around dinnertime I shambled into Eternal Gratitude. I had on a natty white T-shirt and my favorite jeans. My hair was tufted. Pulling my sick leg like it was a ship's anchor, I yipped: “What's on, people!”

Rita was wedged behind the cash register. She graced me with a relieved smile. A smile that said sales had been nil that day. “The boys were worried about you. They thought you weren't going to show up.”

Heller and 2-Time were positioned by the counter. Heller was sour. The first course of antibiotics had failed. Now he'd have to go back to the hospital. He leered at me.

“You ready to make that new prediction, kiddo?”

“No, I'm not.”

I had inconveniently dropped an atom bomb. The emotional temperature in the room plunged ten degrees. For a moment, nobody said a thing. Heller spoke first, in delicate, polite sarcasm, frosted with a hostile smile.

“Come again?”

“I'm not doing it. Last time wasn't enough money.”

“That's horse shit,” 2-Time jumped in, riveting his bleary eyes on me. “We've already been through this malarkey. You got a fair share from the last job. If you want more paper, you've got to earn it. So far, you haven't. It's all your fault.”

“2-Time's right,” Heller needled me. “What we saw from you, that was amateur. Maybe you're just a hoax.”

No tired ass old man was going to call me a hoax. And all the talking made the bullet twist inside my skull. It was like having an elephant step on my face. I paled and trembled. My sore leg palsied. The ringing in my ears went sonic.

The bullet counseled me, advising me not to sass 2-Time and Heller, no matter how disrespectful the fools were acting. It's all about the cash, the bullet said. Don't forget that.

I took a deep breath and exhaled. I felt my blood pressure drop. I had a swipe at the sweat on my brow and touched the scar. I looked at Heller, and didn't like what I saw. I hid my distaste behind a soft rumble.

“I'm no hoax. You hear?”

Sensing a compromise, Heller took advantage of it. He put his hands flat on the counter and grinned at me the same way piranhas smile when they see something good to eat.

“Show me.”

I was at a dividing line. If I crossed that line several things would occur. One: I'd forget who I had been. Two: I'd turn into someone I didn't know. But since all of that was in motion—ever since I was shot—I opted for the unknown.

I had a twinge of foreboding, shrugged it off. I stuck a finger in my ear, wiggled it. The pain in my head receded into my nervous system. The relief was so great, I wanted to weep. Damn that bullet.

“Okay, I will. Let's do it now.”

The tourist shop, aptly named Global Journeys, was a hundred yards west of Van Ness on Market. It had a chalkboard sign in the window advertising discount vacations to contamination-free countries in South America. Heller, 2-Time, and I had been watching the place for twenty minutes.

2-Time bitched at Heller. “Now what do we do?”

“Nothing. We wait.”

“How come?”

“Because that's how it is, dumb ass.”

In Heller's view, 2-Time asked too many questions. He was an interrogative machine. Annoying and useless. Heller snuck a glance at me. I slouched against a mailbox, the wind torturing my matted hair.

A stout, black-haired man in a brown Zegna suit and tasseled loafers, carrying two leather briefcases, approached the travel agency, opened the door, and went inside.

Heller motioned with his double chin. “That's the cat.”

Five minutes later our quarry reemerged from the agency, bearing the same briefcases. Unaware that anyone was watching him, the bagman gamboled toward Van Ness, the cases slapping against his chubby legs.

Heller was shrill with excitement. “Ricky? Make the prediction. Does that dude have money?”

“Yup.”

“How much?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I predict events. I'm not a fucking accountant.”

Heller was savagely disappointed. He thought my skills had a low ceiling.

“Okay, okay, but he's got a shit load of money, right?”

“Yeah.”

That was all Heller needed to hear. Bonanza. Everyone knew a courier for the Honduran vaccine cartel always carried hundreds of thousands. But one thing disturbed him. Yours truly. My talents had limits. I was not television material, nor ready for Vegas.

“2-Time? Let's vamoose. You and me need to talk about this job.”

Heller turned to say he was done with my services, but I was already out of earshot. I didn't want to know what he and 2-Time were going to do. It would be a travesty, and there was a limit to what I could stand. I moved toward Van Ness, to get away from them.