The Shaft (17 page)

    He awoke with his most recent erection easing out of her, slowly, slowly. She was still on top of him like a blanket, lightly dozing.

    The tape was off again. Might as well give it up.

    'Hear that?'

    'Mm.' Her eyes opened, slim fissures. 'Hear what?'

    'Sound.' It was back, capering just beyond the limits of his perception, but the building was much quieter this time. He tried to approximate it for her and fumbled; the noise he made stank of Hallowe'en haunted house records.
Weeeooo
. That wasn't it. The signature of what Cruz had come to think of as Kenilworth's pet ghost was subder. Not a puking wino groan, but the type of noise someone might make when stroked or petted, with a weak downward curl at the end, a shift of timbre that carried just a hint of cemetery corruption, of lives and opportunities irreclaimably missed, of woe and regret that came of losing one's way in the darkness. Or having lost everything.

    'I don't hear anything except that fucking samba music.' She rolled off and lost him. 'Oops. Sorry.'

    Cruz's vague fix on the sound had been lost. Now all he could hear was the calliope beat of dust-brown danceteria music, muffled by doors and walls. A bit of clanging and dripping going on in the airshaft. Thumping footsteps above and below. Latino singing, all in one unvarying key, wailing, abrasive enough to blot out the more fragile texture of the ghost noise.

    Somewhere in the building, the old anti-Semite would be in auto-bitch mode on his favorite racist topic. He did not need an audience. Perhaps he spoke to the ghost.

    Jamaica got up with the idea of opening the Chivas, untouched so far. While she peeled and uncorked, Cruz asked about her name.

    'When one pulls down a living with one's pussy,' she said, mock-lectorial, 'it helps to have a lot of pseudonyms. I used to be Cyndi - yeah, with an
i
. Short for Cynder, which was short for burnout. Today I'm Jamaica, which is for away. I'd like to be far away. Someday I will be. I'd call that an improvement, wouldn't you?'

    This was not the first time she had told this story. She swigged directly from the bottle and passed it to Cruz. He took a fair knock, swallowed and let it burn all the way to his balls.

    She dipped a finger into the bottle and massaged between her legs, repeating several times, allowing the sensitive clitoral tissue to absorb the alcohol directly. Using cocaine was headier but more hazardous. Cruz knew people had applied it to their genitals to retard orgasm, but it was too easy for it to get into the urethra or vagina; from there it was sucked pellmell into the bloodstream. Instant overdose. Rosie had told him about witnessing such a blowout live. The only thing pretty about it was the robust skin tones the mortician applied to the corpses before they were planted.

    She drew his tumid cock between her lips and stroked it with her tongue. He was rubbed raw; the residual whiskey in her mouth stung. The irritation quickly subsided into a prickly buzz, making his dick feel more or less the way his arm did when it fell asleep. The pain peaked out and evaporated while he fought to collect a surprised breath. Jamaica was astonishing. He felt mated, well and truly.

    Screams, outside, in the corridor. The Velasquez mamacita yelling for her brat. Responsible parents would have bedded the little bastard by this hour.

    Mars wasn't even an upper limit. Together they could fuck beyond mortality. He chopped a few lines to insure they stayed at this high ebb. The stuff on the mirror did its vanishing act and they climbed back aboard each other and rode, using spit and beer when matters need lubricity. Her heat baked him, and for the first time since arriving in Oakwood, Cruz forgot about the omnipresent snow.

    Outside, past the condensation fogging the windows, flakes as big as the palm of Cruz's hand began to meander down from the sky to bury the city anew.

    They traced cartoons on the panes. A serpent. A heart. FUCK YOU in reverse, a message to the outside world. He almost heard the ghost again, crooning softly, pining for god knew what.

    'Cops,' Jamaica said, not kidding.

    Her eyes were unblinldngly targeted through one of the clear smears forming the snake head on the bedside window.

    Three Oakwood cruisers blocked Kentmore near the eastern entrance to the building. Cruz checked the other window. Red and blue flashbar light bounced up and down Garrison as a fourth car nosed closer through the snowfall.

    Cruz's brain hastily registered two hundred new definitions of the word panic.

    Buck naked with a hard-on, he sat up here on the third floor, no back door, with better than four pounds of cocaine, an unregistered handgun and a page beeper tied to one of the biggest drug dealers in the area. Now was not a time to stand a pat hand, bluffing.

    'Shit!' Cruz snarled the word between clenched teeth, using the force of his abrupt anger to propel him into motion.

    'Seven uniforms, total.' Jamaica had seen action like this before and was unrattled, calm and alert. 'Four just came in the downstairs door.'

    Cruz heard, or thought he heard them clomping up the steps, talking.
Shit!
'Number Five just decided to mosey on in. Looks cold out there.' She re-rubbed her spyhole.

    'Do they have their guns out?'

    'No. Wait. Can't see.'

    
Shit, shit, shit!

    Tonight's script did not read fade into the wall and whistle innocence. Deflecting the enforcers of law had always been Rosie's lookout. Cruz and his cronies rarely got speaking parts. They enjoyed lines, but no words, if you can get behind that. Now Cruz the understudy had to perform under pressure. It was bad and by surprise. Maybe it was some sort of test Bauhaus had cooked up for him. Maybe Jamaica had been prepped to see the police cars. Maybe…

    Maybe you'll have mucho federal time to sit like a fucking Greek statue and passionately review your life options for decades unless you kick your bare butt into overdrive and fucking DO, he thought. Use that clear sensorium or none of it is worth gull shit.

    Ninety thousand dollars in refined cocaine smiled at him from the dresser drawer. Screw 'street value.' That crap was just to make drug busts sound more impressive on the six o'clock news. Ugly pictures piled up in Cruz's head and he knew the one place he did not ever want to be was on local television.

    Trying to flush more than a kilo might hurl his ass to the tornado. What about the plastic, the tape? Could that much blow clog the pipes. Should he really trust Fergus' Cro-Magnon plumbing to keep him innocent?

    He whip-cracked a Hefty bag and swept in mirrors, foil, matches, candles, paraphernalia, dope and all. After half a heartbeat of nervy deliberation he tossed in the box containing the pistol, too. He spun the neck of the bag, tied a firm knot, then unfurled a second bag and repeated, making his own impromptu double-ply. It had to be watertight. If coke got wet you might as well try to peddle cooking lard.

    He popped a few rings when he tore back the shower curtain in the bathroom. In the black reflection afforded by the window to the airshaft, he could see his own sweating face. It was not a picture of innocence. He smacked the frame with the heel of his hand until the crookedly-mounted, rotting casement squeaked reluctantly upward. Three inches up, it skewed in its track and jammed. That was comic enough to stomp hard on the big red button in Cruz's brain. He began to bash that fucker solidly with one fist, pretending it was a cop's nose, and the greasy face of Fergus, and the throat of the yowling brat down the hall, and Emilio's entire body. Bash, bash, paint slivers jumped and bash the lower window wrenched full open and he piled the whole package - oh great god of coca leaves, let it be gently - through. Into the shaft. It made a faraway splash when it hit bottom. He hoped nothing pointed had waited down there, to jab a hole. He hit the window again. It slammed down squealing, tight as a vacuum can, with a bloody handprint on top of it.

    He wiped off the blood with toilet paper, hit the bowl on the first shot, and flushed.

    Husking air, arteries throbbing, he stepped out and drew the shower curtain slowly shut. Rosie was not around to compliment his initiative.

    Primo job. Now you get admitted to the inner circle. I present you with your own secret phone number.

    He had just enough time to towel his face before the police knocked on the outer door. Jamaica was wiggling back into her leather skirt.

    The officers, as it turned out, were conducting a door-to-door Q& A. A child, Mario Velasquez, had suffered some sort of accident and was missing. Had anyone seen or heard…

    Cruz's manner told them he knew the drill, that he had run similar laps too many times before. They heard the toilet, stubbornly running. It had flushed as soon as they had knocked.

    When they took a friendly peek, they recognized Jamaica. And when they peeked again, just as friendly, into her saddlebag, they discovered Cruz's belated birthday gift to her and busted them both.

    

    

    Once he saw cop cars girding the corner of Kentmore and Garrison, Jonathan guiltily reviewed the crimes of his entire existence. His door; his building. Badges all over, porcine eyes to scrutinize the new suspect in town. Bright reds and blues a luminous botulin on the snow. Their swagger a rude, officious dare:
Do something about us. You won't. You can't. Coward. Wimp. C'mon, NOTICE us - we love to ask questions
. The sight of uniforms had stiffened Jonathan's stomach muscles for as long as he could recall; since before kindergarten, the time he'd strolled over to McCoy's Market in Fort Worth for a Choc-O-Pop and gotten rounded up by the police.

    'You live here, kid?'

    Sour recollect and present reality collided face-to. He straggled for invisibility. His tongue thickened. Don't let the teacher catch you; don't let the class hammerheads see what you have; never, ever embarrass yourself before the girls. Feminine ridicule was worse than the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

    Jonathan's gaze rushed - guiltily - to the carton in his grasp. He tried to redefine contraband. Who in Hades knew what was legal in a place like Oakwood? He acknowledged the officer, eyes darting nervously. No points for cool.

    The shoulder emblems told Jonathan that Oakwood paid for its own law enforcement. The cop wore a thick nylon coat with a blue pile collar and fireman's buttons. Above the shield mount an embossed plate read STALLIS.

    Officer Stallis reminded Jonathan of a lizard. His nose was beaky and the flesh around his eyes reddened, as though blood vessels had tried to break dermis there, to aerate. The splits that accommodated the Lizard Cop's eyes looked stressed, tender; the eyes themselves, disinterested in alibis. They were the color of bank mud, the kind water moccasins burrow under for naps.

    'The hell is that.' The Lizard Cop's eyes indicated Jonathan's cardboard box. It might have been an inquiry.

    Jonathan's balls puckered. The box contained deli ham and swiss cheese for sandwiches. More smoked turkey loaf. A mess of Tangerine Dream movie soundtracks dubbed onto cassette at Bash's. Jonathan's jittery nerves reminded him that unauthorized tape duplication was AGAINST THE LAW. More index cards, white-out and office doodads appropriated from Rapid O'Graphics. STOLEN. Six novels from Bash's paperback shelf. CENSORED! Did Oakwood have blue laws? Were books, like alchohol, illegal here? Would they even care about
The Drive In
or Westlake 's
The Man With the Getaway Face
? Or the moon mug borrowed from Bash? His mind raced to catalog the other potentially incriminating cargo in his hands: A pair of insulated plastic coffee cups with regrettably stupid sayings on them. An aluminum dripulator. Two bags of coffee, courtesy Bash. Compass and X-Acto knife sets in padded draftsman's cases. LETHAL WEAPONS. Jonathan gave up. Absolutely nothing incriminating here even though his expression said box? What box?

    'Moving in.' He shrugged. It had come out muttered, undeclarative. It sounded made up on the spur of the moment. Now the Lizard Cop would say…

    'Funny time of night to be moving in.'

    Rat piss redneck pederast baked and glazed stormtrooper chancre go harass Officer Piggy 's sphincter with your big bad baton and mind your our fucking business turd-smoking coprophagic squirt of pus…

    'So you and I both are on the late shift. What can I say?' He saw more uniforms in the foyer of the Garrison entrance. One cop, bulked out by coat and gear, was questioning a white-haired older man in a bathrobe. Probably still pretty cold in the foyer. The cop didn't care, slowly jotting memoranda in a big flop-over leather ticket book. He looked like a bored waiter taking a small order. Jonathan realized now that most of the lights were on across Kenilworth 's northern face. He was getting his first glimpse of many of the other tenants. It looked as though everybody was being rousted. On black and brown and white visages he saw the fear that had just nestled frigidly between his heart and his right lung.

    He moved foot-to-foot, in a holding pattern. 'Can I go inside now? I'm… uh, I'm… uh, I'm freezing my tits off out here.' A sense of jolly familiarity never worked with the police. Try courtesy. 'Please?'

    Jonathan could not go in now, please.

    Not before he had surrendered to the Lizard Cop his full name and apartment number and valid ID and period of residence; how goddamn stupid, here he was just moving in. A hundred other bits. What was his relationship if any to the child Mario Velasquez, currently missing, presumed seriously injured or deceased. Why wasn't the Toyota truck registered in his name? Who was the rightful owner? What was the owner's name, address, home and work numbers and relationship if any to the child…

    Jonathan droned monosyllabic answers. The Lizard Cop scribbled, disliking Jonathan's attitude. Jonathan fantasized jamming a twelve gauge between the Lizard Cop's teeth and blowing his entry-level brains all over the snow. At least that would cut the glare from the flashbars. Neighbors were peeking through drapes now. Jonathan popped a sweat in spite of the near-zero temperature. He smelled coyote terror spiraling up from his own pits. His dick had tried to telescope into his sternum. The thing that abraded him most was being called a lad by the Lizard Cop, who topped 27 at most.