Snitch World (14 page)

“How civilized.” She lifted her briefcase/purse and hung it under the bar, directly in front of her knees. “Perfect.” She frowned. “What’s this?”

Klinger laid his hand on her forearm.

Marci looked at him.

Klinger could have told her that, if she asked, Bruce
would give her eight inches of duct tape with which to adhere her pistol or knife or eight-ball bindle to the under-side of the bar, just in case the cops showed up and frisked everybody in the joint. But he merely shook his head.

“Guy said he’d be back,” the old man quietly told his sports section.

Klinger gently guided Marci’s arm until its hand was above the bar. “Your drink is getting cold.”

Marci tried her drink. “Mmm. Good.” She tried it again, then put it down. “How can you drink at this hour?”

Klinger drained his own mug. “What hour?” He set the empty on the bar. Bruce pointed. It was an interrogative gesture.

“Finish mine,” Marci said, before Klinger could react.

Klinger shrugged.

“Nudge?” Bruce asked him.

“Bruce,” Klinger declared, “you’re a lot more sensitive than your costume would suggest.”

Bruce topped off Marci’s toddy with whiskey and returned the bottle to its shelf under the back bar. “Like you know from sensitive.”

“Where’s this breakfast place?” Marci asked, as Klinger downed half the repurposed toddy.

Klinger paused to swallow, then downed the second half. “Pine and Hyde.” He placed the second empty on the bar next to the first. “I was there just …” He frowned. “Yesterday? It doesn’t seem possible.”

Marci, repossessing her purse, looked up. “Where?”

Klinger repeated the coordinates.

Marci pulled a collapsed umbrella from the purse and smiled. “What a coincidence.”

“Yes?” Klinger asked without interest.

“Phillip,” Marci said, “is in St. Francis Memorial.”

Klinger hesitated. “The phone guy?”

Marci nodded.

Klinger frowned. “He’s in St. Francis?”

“Right there on the same corner,” she nodded. “It’s the whole block.”

Klinger pointed at her purse. “Is that what that call was about?”

“It came up.”

So Frankie Geeze is dead.

“I’ve got his room number.” Marci evinced an enthusiastic smile. “He’ll be so pleased to get his phone back.”

“Yeah.” Klinger looked at the folded
Chronicle
. “Want your paper?” he asked the old man.

Ostensibly absorbed in the sports section, the old man grunted.

“I guess that’s a negative,” Klinger said.

“Did you check the Lotto?” the bartender asked.

“You play that shit?”

“Every day,” Bruce said. “Give it here.”

Klinger handed Bruce the paper. “What’s he doing in the hospital?”

“No idea,” Marci said. “But we’re going to find out.”

Klinger stared at her. “We?”

“Sure,” She pushed a button on the umbrella and its handle trebled in length. “Why not?”

“Well,” Klinger suggested, “how about I don’t even know the guy.”

“But you found his phone,” Marci reasoned. She pushed another button and the handle blossomed in front of her. “A guy like Phillip?” She shouldered her purse. “His phone is his life. He’s got everything in there. And what he doesn’t have in there?”

Klinger waited glumly.

“It’s in the cloud, and his phone can access the cloud.”

“The cloud …”

Marci pointed straight up.

Klinger lifted his eyes halfway to the ceiling before he thought to discover a gleam of hope. “Even if it’s dead?”

Marci looked at him. “That’s right. I’d forgotten.” She shot a cuff and looked at her watch. “We need a charger. Better yet, we need a battery. Better yet—both. Hold this.” She offered Klinger the umbrella.

If I’d gone ahead and fucked her, Klinger was thinking, we might not be having this conversation. He took the umbrella. I take that back, oh yes we would.

Marci produced her own phone and began to tap its screen. “Okay …” she said to herself. “What’s …” She drew Phillip’s phone from her purse, studied its case, turned it in the light to discern its model number. “Okay …” She returned the dead phone to her purse and tapped her screen. “There’s a phone store at … No … How about …” She nodded. “Proximity … Hang on … I know there’s an app for this …”

“It’s called the brain,” Klinger submitted.

“Van Ness and Clay,” Marci nodded and smiled. “Okay. That’s pretty close.” She tapped the screen. “They open at eleven.”

“Van Ness and Clay?” Klinger almost whined. “That’s, like, twelve blocks from here.”

“Thirteen,” said the old man, looking up from his paper. “Really?” Bruce said to the cash register. “I’d have said eleven.”

“Whatever,” Klinger said testily. “It’s pissing down rain, and I’m already wringing wet.”

“We’ll take a cab.” Marci tapped her phone a couple of times and held it to her ear.

“Listen,” Klinger told her. “I’d like to get by the Goodwill for a change of clothes.”

“And it’s where?” Marci asked over the phone.

“The big one’s at Van Ness and Mission,” Klinger told her.

“That’s South Van Ness,” the old man said to his newspaper.

“He’s right,” Bruce said to his cash register.

“You heard them,” Klinger said.

“Will it take long?” Marci asked.

“Fifteen minutes,” Klinger assured her.

“Yes, we’re at Ellis at Hyde, please,” Marci told her phone, adding, after a pause, “Clay and Van Ness, waiting, then Mission and South Van Ness, waiting, then to St. Francis Memorial, at Hyde and Pine.” She turned off the phone.

“They’re on the way,” she said brightly.

Klinger and Marci exited the Hawse Hole, on Hyde just below Ellis, at ten-thirty in the a.m.

Marci peered beneath the catenary of her umbrella’s rim and through the smoking rain at the name above the bar’s entrance. “How come everybody calls it the Horse Hole, when it’s spelled h-a-w-s-e? Is that a gay thing?”

“Very likely.” Klinger had no more set foot on a boat than he’d wondered about the name of the bar.

Marci donned a pair of shades whose blind spot had been co-opted by their designer’s faux gold initials. “I expect to devote time to alternate cultures after I cash out and take early retirement.”

Klinger only stared at her.

“Get under here,” she said. “You’ll catch your death.” Klinger had never heard the word hypothermia, but it was true that he was flirting with it.

“Here’s our cab.”

A taxi painted entirely green, with an overlay of advertising, glided silently to the curb.

“How’d you do that?” Klinger thought to inquire, as he opened the back door.

She ignored the question. “You first.” She followed Klinger into the back seat, folded the umbrella and gave it a shake over the gutter before she closed the door. “Van Ness and Clay,” she told the driver. “A phone store.”

With a glance at his side-view mirror, the driver made as if to pull back into traffic, but a klaxon, violent and
unyielding, persuaded him otherwise. To the extent that he swerved back to the right and managed to stop before he piled into a Mercedes parked in front of the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel, he appeared to be an excellent driver.

“Son of a bitch,” the cabbie declared in an objective tone. He grabbed a crucifix, which dangled from a rosary wrapped around the stalk of the rear-view mirror, and touched it to his lips.

Klinger and Marci, as yet unbelted, found themselves piled against the respective seat backs in front of them.

“Buckle up,” the cabbie admonished.

A wall of malarial yellow eclipsed the light in the driver’s side windows, and a wave of rainwater lifted up between the two vehicles, drenching the glass.

The cabbie checked his rear-view mirror and tried again.

This time they made it.

Marci started over. “Van Ness and Clay. A phone store.” “Got it the first time,” the cabbie told his rear-view mirror.

“Speaking as someone who has nearly been impaled by her own umbrella,” Marci replied politely, “it’s nice to be dealing with a professional.”

“Them Hummers,” the cabbie said to his windshield, “are an affliction, a scourge, a bane, and expensive.”

“Indeed,” Marci agreed. “Comfortable, too. Heated seats. Individual thermostats. Plus, they make me feel safe. When I’m on the inside of one of them, I mean,” she clarified, “I feel safe.”

“This baby here,” the cabbie said, patting the dashboard, “runs on pure corn.”

“Corn,” Klinger repeated.

“Yeah,” the cabbie assured the mirror. “Like the news.”

“Would that be …” Marci asked tentatively, “genetically modified corn?”

The cabbie had a gold tooth, and now it twinkled in the mirror. “Is there any other kind?”

Marci looked out her window, and chewed her lip. “Good question.”

“Actually,” the cabbie said to his mirror, “the correct answer is, Not for long.”

Klinger, paying little attention to the conversation, was looking out his own window. It seemed that as many as a third of the storefronts on this stretch of Hyde Street were vacant. Some had signs—For Sale or Lease, All or Part, 100–2,000 Sq. Ft., Will Build To Suit—but many were boarded up and painted over with that universal gray, up to which color miscellaneous used buckets of paint will sum, when mixed together at the behest of harried landlords cited by a city that no longer has the tax base to deal with graffiti abatement on its own. Not that Klinger knew any of this. All he saw was rain-glistened desuetude.

“You know,” the taxi driver was saying, “I did a calculation.”

“In my line of work,” Marci said, as she watched her side of the world go by, “I do a lot of spreadsheets.”

“You’re an unusual woman,” the cabbie said to his mirror. “I can see that.”

Marci nodded vaguely.

“People talk about how many Hummers it would take to pave the planet,” the cabbie said.

“They do?” Marci frowned.

“Sure,” said the cabbie. “When you consider their footprint, you wouldn’t think it would calculate out to too damn very many of them. Am I right?”

“I don’t know,” said Marci. “What is their footprint?”

“Ninety-seven point four square feet,” the cabbie
promptly replied. “Not including winches, tow packages, cowcatchers and other extenuating devices and after-market add-ons.”

Marci looked at the rear-view mirror. “There are towns in California where it’s illegal to construct outbuildings that big.”

“You’re beginning to see the picture,” the cabbie assured the mirror.

“And the footprint of the planet?” Marci asked.

“Five hundred and ten million square kilometers.”

“Which—,” Marci began.

“Which needs to be converted into square feet,” the cabbie replied impatiently, an edge creeping into his voice.

“Take a right on Turk,” Marci interjected, an edge of firmness in her own voice.

The cabbie took a right from the middle lane and cut off another taxi attempting to take its own right. The other taxi was painted yellow, and its horn sounded, long and aggrieved.

“Fucker’s still burning fossil fuel,” the cabbie observed with contempt. “Fuck him.”

“And right on Van Ness,” Marci directed.

“Look,” the cabbie said without hesitation. “Didn’t you tell the dispatcher that you want me to wait?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Consider the following. That phone store you’re interested in is on the west side of Van Ness, and it’s maybe three doors down from the corner. You want me to drop you on the east side of the street, so you have to wait for the light to let you cross six lanes of Van Ness in the pissing-down rain?”

Marci didn’t even think about it. “No.”

“That’s right. So I should continue on to Franklin, turn north, pass over Clay to Washington, take a right on
Washington, right again on Van Ness, and wait in the bus zone out front of the telephone store, aimed southbound for our next stop, which,” he touched the side of his head, “is at South Van Ness and Mission Street.”

“Brilliant,” Marci had to agree.

“Hey,” the cabbie stipulated at his rear-view mirror, “I’m a professional.”

“Of that, I am reassured,” Marci declared.

Turk is one-way going west. The cabbie crushed an orange, as they say, then dove into the right lane on the other side of Van Ness. Two more horns sounded.

“You see?” Marci said to Klinger, as she gripped with both hands the back of the seat in front of her. “Some people have fun while they’re working.”

What persuades this woman, Klinger scowled at his own window, to presume to share these trivialities with me?

“Converting to square feet and dividing,” the cabbie said, casting a glance to his left as he ran the red light and took a right onto Franklin, “we get five hundred and sixty-three trillion.”

Marci looked at Klinger. Klinger wasn’t having any part of this conversation. Or monologue. Or whatever it was. “I’ll bite.” Marci turned back to the mirror. “Five hundred trillion what?”

“Hummers to pave the planet,” the cabbies said to the mirror. He pointed toward the floorboards. “This planet,” he added. “So there’s nowhere’s near enough.”

“Enough what?”

“Hummers.”

“Ohhh,” said Marci. “That does indeed seem like a vast deal of Hummers.” She elbowed Klinger. “Isn’t that a lot of Hummers, darling?”

Klinger moved even closer to his own door. These chatty humanoids were making rainy-day sociopathy easy
this morning. If it hadn’t been streaming with rain, just on the other side of this thickness of glass, he might have bolted into the traffic on Franklin Street.

“I need to get into the left lane as we go north,” the cabbie said, “or else we’ll wind up in the parking garage underneath Whole Foods watching housewives in SUVs flipping each other off.”

“We’re in a bigger hurry than that,” Marci assured him, “with a great deal more important things to attend to.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” The cabbie merged his vehicle all the way to the left lane. “Plus it’s an ugly side of humanity you don’t ordinarily like to admit is there to be witnessed, down there in that garage. They should have a three-headed dog guarding it.”

Sure enough, as they rose up the hill from Pine to California, a line of SUVs queuing to access the entrance to an underground parking garage blocked the right lane.