Chicago Noir [Anthology]

Tears gone as suddenly as they came, he now smiled an unfriendly smile. A menacing smile. The unhinged smile of a dangerous buzz. Something about it made Kimball hot under his skin. This was an outrage. He had the gun now, after all, and Gerry was still threatening him. And threatening him with what exactly? This is why he preferred machines to people. Machines perform exactly as you expect them to. There’s nothing ironic about a machine. When a machine acts erratically, you find the broken link in the chain and when you fix it, the machine does just as it’s supposed to. If you wave a gun in a person’s face you never know what’s going to happen. If you wave a gun in a person’s face and you’re still more scared of him than he is of you, how do you fix that?

Kimball pointed the gun at the ceiling, just to remind Gerry it was there. “You don’t know me,” Kimball said. “How do you know me?”

“What? For years I know you. You keep my TV safe. In your shop. We are friends.”

Kimball still wondered how their relationship had become inverted. He had the gun in his hand, but he still didn'’t have control. Genuine continued to threaten him. Continued to blather on. Meanwhile, the Zero-Zero progressed into its final minutes and he was missing it.

Genuine Gerry? Ungrateful Gerry, they should call him. Here he was, robbing the one fellow in the neighborhood who had been kindest to him. Kimball had never been afraid to answer his door, hadn'’t become cynical about helping his neighbors, and for that he gets an addict blasting away in his shop, keeping him away from the scanner, insulting him at all hours, the waning hours of the most important day in Kimball’s otherwise uneventful life.

“I fixed your TV,” Kimball said.

“What?”

“Twice. It was broken. I fixed it.” Kimball poked the gun at the new antenna and knob, which were clearly poached from another make and model.

“I did not know,” said Genuine, but the news seemed to please him. “This what I mean. You are nice guy. I know you. Now, you give me money. I leave you alone.”

—He’'s in custody. We have him in custody behind the Office Depot. He’'s got blue jeans and a green shirt. First name of Jimmy.

—Ten-four.

Cops and robbers, Kimball thought. On the street, the gun represents authority and power, but only when possessed by the willing. In a gangbanger’s hands, or a cop’s, a gun has influence because bangers and cops are expected to use it. A cop is supposed to exercise restrain't, of course, but a suspect will give himself up because he knows the policeman is empowered by the law to shoot him. Genuine Gerry surrendered his gun because he realized Kimball was not. If there are two people, neither of whom is willing to use the gun, then the gun is as impotent as cooked spaghetti. And so is the man holding it. A cop doesn'’t have power in a roomful of cops. A cop has power over suspects. Over civilians. For you to have power, someone else must be weaker than you. And a man alone is by definition powerless.

“You don’t know me,” Kimball said, and then he did something unexpected, which was, of course, the only point of it.

He fired the gun.

Genuine Gerry yelped and fell forward onto the floor, his legs up in the air like a baby’s. He was swearing. “You shot me! You shot me! You shot me!”

Kimball watched the blood ooze from under Genuine’s hands, which were pressed tight, one on top of the other, against his thigh. Kimball knew from the scanner that if the bullet hit the right spot in the leg it could be a bad bleeder, and he watched evidence of that fact form an amoeba-shaped red pool across the pain'ted concrete under Genuine Gerry’s body.

“Call the police! Call the ambulance! You fecking dago!”

Kimball walked to the shelf and turned up the radio.

— [Unintelligible] domestic. The neighbor just got home and said she heard a door slam inside the apartment. Ex-husband has physically abused her before.

—Ten-four.

—Let me know what you have when you get there.

“Call the ambulance! I’m dying!”

Kimball looked at an old classroom clock on the wall. It was 11:45. “Fifteen minutes.”

“What?”

“I can’t call 911 for another fifteen minutes.”

“Call them now! I am dying!” The skin on Genuine Gerry’s face had stretched itself tight across his skull. There was blood on his jeans and his hair. When he tried to close his bulging eyes, his eyelids didn'’t meet.

“Fifteen minutes, Gerry.”

From the floor Genuine wailed in five-second bursts and cursed Kimball in Tajik or whatever. Kimball turned up the scanner’s volume knob another quarter-inch and as he waited for the day to expire, he reminded himself to call Jen in the morning, as promised, after he had given his statement to the police. This had been a night of revelations.

He might even ask Jen to dinner.

ARCADIA

BY TODD DILLS

Chicago & Noble

I work the desk at the old folks’ house, though I also live there. People come in, drug dealers, little high school gangbangers trying to score an initiation sale at the place. They figure a captive audience is all they need. I tell Benjamin, the 300-pound security guard, to toss them out on their knees. He’'s always happy to oblige. There are junkies in this place who haven'’t had a drop of their particular sauce in years, yet they never leave. They need the gatekeeper. They need me.

That’s how I met Tristam, years ago; he turned out differently than many of the little entrepreneurs, though. After some college at the UIC—that’s C Chicago-go, this shithole of a town—he flunked out, addicted to the city’s second letter. He dropped by and was so skinny and haggard I didn'’t recognize him at first.

“Goddammit, boy, you look like shit,” I said. “Plastic getting to you?”

We went on, as was our style in the days of old, about the plasticizing of the world around us. Plastic car rims, bumpers, plastic cigarette holders, plastic handles on doors to places like churches, plastic communion wafers (taking the symbolic one level higher) slated for reuse. Suck and spit, back into the offering plate. Then we struck a deal. Included in my diseased old man’s daily dose was a single helping of the vanguard Ajexo painkiller. The combination of a Valium-like synthetic with just the slightest twinge of morphine-derivative punch, these pills were then mythic among the junkie set, regarded as a sort of withdrawal cure-all. I didn'’t take them, no way, since I was long off the hard shit and they’d have been the road back to death for me. Besides, pain I could live with.

In the spirit of God’s good grace, I handed them over to the boy. He needed help.

But Tristam didn'’t keep his half of the deaclass="underline" staying off the primary jolt. Time goes by and contracts lose their potency. Occasionally I'’d start when on the bus on the way to a checkup, a prescription refill, and realize with the full weight of a catastrophe that the boy had gotten off at the park again to see the man who went by Valentino, recognizable by his perpetual attire: bright-red athletic jumpsuit, sneakers, and a fedora over his pristine afro. The pusher-pimp was known over the blocks for hard shit.

One particularly momentous day, I felt like a martyr, like I wanted to be Joan of Arc or some righteous-ass Palestinian or Iraqi. Tristam and I rode the bus east on Chicago truly without an idea of what would happen. What we wanted was routine, of course, however chaotic our lives might be; we could strive. It was all I could do to resist the urge to burn the whole fucking place down, myself with it. For me, the days start nervous.

I keyed my pilot to search the data bank for the right fit; I call it “pilot”, but really it’s custom, fabricated from the body of an old cell phone. It could get me into any city database long as I had the code. Old girl Jenna Simonsen of the Logan Square halfway house gave it to me in exchange for certain connections that only I can provide. At twenty-seven minutes past the hour, I ran a background check on myself, Mr. John Arcadia, to find I'’d escaped from prison for the third time, but way back in 1987. More interestingly, I trashed the greenhouse of a neighbor in Waukegan, ended up in the hospital and with a charge of indecent exposure on top of other vandalism counts, a two-inch gash traveling the length of my buttocks. I got busted with marijuana two years later, and the cops put me in a boarding home with no hope of escape, which is to say without a goddamned chance, much less twelve jurors and a judge.