Jack Wakes Up (32 page)

jolts him further awake, enough to be mad as he walks out into the hall, tying the robe closed around him.

In the living room, he can hear pounding on the door, a harder knock than knocking, and someone calling his name. “Fuck!” he yells, getting close to the door.

The noises stop.

Jack looks through the peephole and doesn’t see anyone. He’s expecting the police, rows of cameras, newspaper reporters, and, at this point, he’s capable of imagining them hiding on either side of the door, in the bushes. “Who is it?”

“It is us,” Niki says, the voice unmistakable.

“Shit.” Jack opens the door and sees three motorcycles parked in his driveway, one with a big red sidecar, and the four Czechs standing along the sides of his front stairs. They’re all smiling, wearing leather pants and tight leather jackets. They look like something out of the future, versions of bikers descended from outer space or Eastern Europe, helmets on the back of their bikes and wide smiles on their faces. If they’re not coked out now, they will be, and that’s all part of the futurism of it, Jack guesses.

“Jack,” Vlade says, grabbing him into a tight one-armed hug. He’s got his other arm in a sling close to his body and it gets in the way when they hug, makes Vlade call out in pain but he pulls Jack closer, laughing and saying his name.

Al laughs. “Nice robe.”

Jack looks down and sees that he’s got the robe open in the front. He’s tied one of the ends of the belt into a knot without having done anything to join it with the other. He’s wearing just boxers and nothing else, greeting the neighborhood in his stripes and paisleys. He laughs, pulls the sides of the robe closed and properly ties the belt.

“Guys. What’s up?” Jack rubs the sleep out of his eyes, trying to get his body and mind both to start.

“Look at these bikes!” Vlade says. “Look at these!”

Jack looks. At the end of his driveway are two Ducati and a Harley Davidson with a sidecar—some nice-looking machinery.

“Damn,” he says, starting out onto the steps before realizing he’s not wearing shoes. “Those are fine.”

“Yes they are, Jack Palms,” David says. “Yes they are.”

“Nice,” Jack says.

Niki claps a hand onto his shoulder. “We just came to say goodbye,” he says. “And see if you want to come.”

“Come?” Jack says.

“Come along for the ride,” Vlade says. “The open road.”

“We will take you to where we got our bikes,” Al says. “You can pick. This fucking trip is going to be awesome, my man.”

Jack laughs. He comes farther outside the house, sees the morning sun glorious on the streets, the bikes shimmering in their newness. The leather seats look big and comfortable, the Ducati sleek and fast. Each of the bikes has compartments along its sides, hard ones on the Ducati and saddle bags on the Harley, more than enough room to put your essentials: a few clothes and who knows what else. A toothbrush?

“The Ducati for you?” Vlade says, practically singing. “We will buy…”

Jack thinks of the money in the leather bag on his couch, enough to make a trip across the country, pay off the bills on his kitchen table, and then some. He thinks about the big house behind him, its empty rooms, his morning runs and the taste of the cereal and the milk, the fact that it’s not as good as the cigarettes. He thinks of his solitary afternoons in the gym listening to the music he doesn’t like, and the nights with no one else in his bed. He thinks about the San Francisco tabloids and the people who still recognize him when he goes out, admittedly not as bad an experience over the past few days as he’d have thought, but still. That and the fact that one of these days, not today and maybe not the next, but one day soon, Mills Hopkins will call 273

and Jack will have to go downtown to talk about something, testify, sit in a small room and discuss all that’s happened, that he’ll be lucky if he gets out when it’s over.

And he looks at the bikes in the sun, new and gleaming and fast-looking, very fast looking, and the Czechs in their futuristic riding outfits, all four of them smiling.

Then Jack feels himself start to smile too.

“Well…” he says. And his thoughts run to what he should start packing first.

Photo by Jarda Brych

SETH HARWOOD grew up in the Boston area, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2002 and currently lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife Joelle and their dog. He teaches writing and literature at City College of San Francisco and Chabot College. In July 2006, Seth started podcast-ing Jack Wakes Up, the internet’s first podcast-only crime novel. It didn’t take long for the novel to catch on and become a web sensation. Nineteen episodes and almost five months later, Jack Wakes Up was complete; the Jack Palms Crime Series was born. Seth’s other jobs have included commodities floor trading clerk, bartender, copy-editor for Avon Products, rare book cataloguer, librar-ian, high school English teacher, and freelance journalist. His stories have been published in over a dozen literary journals including Post Road, Ecotone, Inkwell, and Sojourn, as well as online at Storyglossia, Thrilling Detective and zeek.net. Portions of this book appeared in Storyglossia and Spinetingler Magazine.

For more information, visit sethharwood.com