Jack Wakes Up (27 page)

Jack calls and leaves a message on Junius’s cell phone for him to call back when he gets out of the clink, and then not five minutes later, he calls back: “Yo, Jack! It’s J.”

“That was fast, man.” Jack’s still in the Czechs’ penthouse, drinking room service coffee now and standing close to the windows, looking out at the night skyline. “Nice work.”

“Shit, man. You’re the one did the work. Now tell me what’s next.”

Jack takes a sip of the hot coffee, liking the way it burns going down. It’s not scotch, but it’ll leave him one-hell-of-a-lot better off for what he’s getting into tonight, and keeps his two-year wagon intact. He rests his forehead against the glass. “We take The Coast,” Jack says.

“That’s what I wanted to hear.”

“We go into The Coast and say hello to Tony. My sergeant on the force needs a bust out of this shit bad, and I need to give him one: the new supplier. Bad as I want Tony, I’m going down there to piece this shit together for myself, and then we send in the cops.”

“I like the sound of that as long as I get to say what’s up to the man Tony, myself.”

“Freeman with you?”

“Yeah. He here. Where you want us to meet you at?”

Twenty minutes later, Jack pulls up next to Junius’s Mercedes on Minna, a small street parallel to Market, just one block south and not yet into SOMA. In the Fastback, Jack’s got Vlade next to him up front, and Niki in the back.

Junius rolls down his window. “Ow! Jack Palms. That’s one damn nice ride! ’67?”

“’66,” Jack tells him. “K-code.”

“Fuck! Hi-po! Those things are rare as shit. You just rose up about ten pegs in my book, son.”

“Thanks. This afternoon some of these fucks shot up my driver’s side. That’s another reason I’m here.” Jack tells Junius who Vlade is and they lean forward to see Freeman wedged into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes like a bull in a chute. He just nods at the two of them, holds up two fingers.

Jack guns the engine of the Mustang, and Junius howls. Then he holds up his hand. “One word, Jack?” he says, opening his door.

Jack looks back over at the Mercedes. “What?”

Junius stands up out of his car, motions to its rear end with his hand. “Let me just talk to you for a second.”

Vlade gives Jack a look like he should be careful, that maybe they’d be better off just driving away now, but Jack shakes him off. Vlade takes a gun out from below his seat and presses it against the door, pointing at Junius. Jack looks in back at Niki: he’s got his knees pressed up into the air in front of him and he’s sunk way back down in the seat. He nods once, pats the side of his jacket.

Jack looks back up the street in his rear-view, making sure no one’s coming down behind him, and sees it’s empty. At this hour of night, Market may be busy with cabs, but no one’s coming down the one-way side-streets; most of them don’t even run for more than a few blocks.

He gets out of the car and walks around the back to meet Junius at his Mercedes.

Junius waves him closer and walks around to his trunk. “What you need, man?” he says, opening the trunk. Jack sees an array of weapons—guns mostly, but some brass knuckles and 231

knives—that would make most any urban warlord giggle. There, in front of him, the weapons are all neatly laid out inside a foam-covered trunk-liner. He sees a few small automatics, a couple of assault rifles, an assortment of handguns, including a shiny silver Magnum with a barrel long enough to poke your victims’ eyes out.

“I’m all right, man,” Jack says, holding up his hands. He takes an inadvertent step back away from the trunk.

“No, man. Listen.” Junius says, “You might need some of this shit if things get tight in there.” Jack looks back at the Mustang: Vlade and Niki watch with their full attention.

“I’m OK.” Jack produces Maxine’s revolver from his pocket, drops it into the trunk.

“You sure?” Junius asks. “You heard what happened to the Colombian?”

“No.”

“Police found his ass in back of The Mirage, stuffed in one of the dumpsters. Motherfucker had holes in him, Jack. I mean plural.”

“Shit.” Jack spits onto the asphalt, rubs it out with the toe of his sneaker. A car starts down the street behind them, its light bright in Jack’s eyes. He holds up his arm to shield them from the light. “I’m all right, J.,” he says.

Junius grabs his arm. He regards Jack with complete seriousness as he presses the side of a gun against his chest and tells Jack to take it. Jack can feel the gun in his hand: it’s warm, like molded black metal made to fit your palm.

“This is the Glock, Jack.” As the oncoming car gets closer to where they are, it honks once.

Junius pats Jack across his collar. “You’ll be glad when you need that.”

The car honks again and Junius rushes at it, his hands raised, yelling at the driver to get out and fight or shut the fuck up.

Jack walks back around to his side of the Mustang and gets in. He hands the Glock off to Vlade and guns the engine. Vlade nods at the weapon. “This is good, Jack. A nice gun.”

With the driver of the third car sufficiently scared and quieted, Junius goes back to his Mercedes, closes the trunk, and slowly gets in.

“He gave you this?” Vlade says. “Does he think we do not have weapons?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “And I don’t care.”

As they drive to The Coast, Junius follows the Mustang lazily, as if he knows their path even better than Jack, dropping back and then coming up close to them at turns, fading off and drifting behind them for blocks on end. Jack smokes a single cigarette, taking his time to enjoy it. Vlade and Niki smoke too, hurrying through their cigarettes like normal smokers, and Jack watches them, monitoring his own inhales and exhales, watching the road, putting in a tape of some slow bass-heavy jazz to calm his nerves.

For all he knows, he’s the only one sober at this point in the night, the only one who’s not on coke or something else. Junius was drinking at The Mirage and probably with dinner, and it’s Jack’s guess from the smell around their car and coming out of the trunk, that he and Freeman smoked something potent after he got out of jail. With a gun he should feel safe, in Junius’s view, but Jack actually feels less safe with a loaded weapon. Long term, it just doesn’t make sense if he’s going to get out of this and go back to his life. He thinks of the bag in the trunk, the bills he’s had on his kitchen table for the past few months and how he’ll be able to pay them off now, get the bank and the mortgage straightened out, push the credit card bills off his back. Then he’ll get back into his routine of healthy living: running, weights, cereal for breakfast. At least that’s something to hope for.

But now that all seems dull, boring. Something far away.

They pull up outside The Coast and Jack sees Maxine’s VW Bug among the few in the lot.

He’s seen it a few times in front of her house, and she mentioned it when he dropped her off at home this morning—how that’s still part of the same day is more than he can imagine at this point. Thinking back to last night at The Mirage, the shooting feels like last night, but waking up in Sausalito with Maxine this morning feels like months ago. Somehow it seems like the whole arc of their relationship has happened since then.

Now he’s sure he’ll be awake to see it when the sun comes up in a few hours, and there’ll be something good to that. He says to Niki and Vlade, “Breakfast when this is over?”

“Yes,” Vlade says. “Fucking steak and eggs, mother-fucker.”

Jack laughs at Vlade’s accent around the familiar word that he must’ve picked up from Junius or someone along the way. “That’s right,” he says.

Jack pulls the Mustang around the corner to park on the side of the club, where the front doormen won’t see them coming. Judging by the number of cars, The Coast is close to empty at this hour, not long before closing. There are just two guys at the front door, and they didn’t look familiar to Jack as he checked them out driving by.

“You boys ready for this?” Jack asks. He gets out of the car and waits while Niki and Vlade get out on the other side.

“I am ready,” Niki says.

Vlade puts his chin to his chest, looks down at his body, his stomach mainly—a small-to-medium-sized protrusion around his middle—and then agrees.

Junius is slow to park his car, getting it into the spot just right, and then gets out, stands wearing a black fleece over his shirt. “Yo!” he says. “Let’s do this.” He goes around back to his trunk and takes out a black, stocky submachine gun with a big sight on top and something thick below the front barrel. He bounces it a few times in his hands, feeling the weight, and then slams the trunk closed. He looks at Jack. “H and K MP7, motherfucker. Let’s roll.”

Freeman steps out of the car stretching his arms and cracking his knuckles. He stretches one arm across his chest, then does the same on the other side. Then he hits his chest with his forearms. When he makes fists, his knuckles crack, and Jack can imagine him doing something awful to somebody’s head. He’s got on big, black warm-up pants and a top that goes with them, and Jack wishes he were wearing the same thing, something more comfortable than the jeans and button-up he’s had on all day.

Niki and Vlade have their guns out, look as if they need to be doing something. So Vlade drops the clip out of his weapon and checks to make sure it’s full. When he nods, Jack can see that he already knew this would be the case.

“Long night?”

Vlade and Niki agree quickly, Vlade putting one finger over his nostril and inhaling deeply, then putting both hands together on the side of his face, as if they were a pillow, and resting his cheek against them.

He laughs, pushes both eyes open with the first finger and thumb of each hand. “Let’s go.”

“Plan of attack?”

Junius and Freeman walk over to join Jack and the Czechs. “This place has a front and a back,” Junius says. “That’s all. Tony’s office in the back. That’s where he’ll be with his boys.

Whatever’s going on, they be doing it there.” He points around the opposite side of the club.

“Front is the part you already saw: the tables and stages, the bars. They got some private rooms in there, but those mostly just for hand jobs and shit.”

Vlade laughs, tilts his head two inches to the side to grudgingly admit that he knows what Junius means.

“So we will go in the front, you three go in the back?” Niki says, pointing to Jack, Junius, and Freeman.

“I’m not going in shooting, just so you all know,” Jack says. “I want to talk with this guy.

We find any hard evidence of him killing Ralph or Castroneves, something that can lead us to his supply, I call the cops, we bring the heat down on this place. That’s all they want.”

“Shit,” Junius says. “We can all say boo right now.” He looks around at the others. “I’m not saying I’d testify, but we know enough between us to say he killed both Ralph and Castroneves.”

“And had Michal killed,” Niki says.

“No,” Vlade says. “That was K.G.B.”

“I don’t know.” Jack kicks the ground. “Why’s that Russian with the sweater still hanging around? If he’s not hooked to those guys, what were they doing at The Mirage?”

Vlade shakes his head. He looks at his gun and then at Jack. “That is what we need to know.”

“Right.” Niki looks firm in his readiness to go in and get something done. “What about Maxine?”

Vlade puffs out his lower lip, shakes his head at Niki.

“No,” Jack says. “That’s all right.” He points at the club. “I think she’ll be inside. She said something about that guy being Tony’s new supplier. We’ll just have to find out.”

“Oh,” Niki says. “I am sorry.”

Junius cocks his gun and the parts engage, make a locking sound. “This your girl, Jack?”

“Was. Maybe.”

Junius squints, grimaces. He looks like he’s imagining one of his women ending up with Tony Vitelli. “Shit,” he says. “Come on, then. Let’s do this.”

Jack starts to walk around the back of the club with Junius and Freeman. Niki and Vlade say something in Czech and then start for the front door. As they go around the other side, Jack loses sight of them. The outside walls of The Coast are all black, tall—about two stories, though it’s all one high-ceilinged level inside—with a small parking lot stretched around the perimeter in the area the real estate allows. Where they are in SOMA, there are a couple of streetlights on the street and not much else: cars and taxis going past to get to or from the Bay Bridge, and just a 237

few people walking from the clubs to their cars. After the regular bars close, places like this stay open for “After Hours,” but it’s officially late, part of the night where you can already start to feel some of the pain you’re going to be feeling the next day.

Freeman looks like he’s had some sleep, though reading him is like reading a vending machine; he’s moving all right, fluid and without any hitches, but Jack can’t guess what the big man’s thinking. He’d guess Freeman caught a few hours of sleep somewhere in the night before Junius started calling to pick him up, but he can’t tell for sure.

Junius still wears his suit pants, but the tie is long gone. Jack still wishes he had on something more like the warm-up suit he wore back when he went to Ralph’s.

In his mind, he’s not all there; the day and the lack of sleep in the past few days is getting to him. But he tells himself that it’ll all be over soon, that if he takes care of this he’ll be able to sleep in his own bed instead of a small cell with bars for walls for the next few years. And that’s compelling. That and the thought of the bills piled up in the leather bag in his trunk. Jack leans his neck toward his shoulders and cracks it, pulls his arms back toward each other behind him, and feels a good crack in his back. There’s a release that comes from this, and if there was time, he’d spend a few minutes stretching out and trying to loosen up, get his blood flowing again. But Junius gets to the back door of The Coast and starts banging on it with the back of his fist.

“Stay in the moment,” Jack says, just to feel his lips moving over the words.

“Open the fuck up,” Junius says, and when one of Tony’s boys opens the door just slightly, Junius slams it against him with all his weight, pushing the guy back to the floor. Jack and Freeman follow into a dark corridor with a concrete floor and gray walls. Junius moves to the guy he just knocked down and holds his gun against the guy’s temple. He puts his finger over his lips. “Shhh,” he says.