“Are those batteries fresh?” I thought the red light on the camera blinked a coupla times.
“Not sure.”
“Could be. Or not.”
If that camera went dark, I was gonna hit the floor hard, two or three times. All I had to say were two words, Skinner Jones, and I’d walk, but I didn’t. Taking a job means keeping your mouth shut. Getting stabbed in the back isn’t license to likewise shank a brother.
Keeping my word meant keeping quiet which meant doing a year inside, the most they could give me without Skinner.
Jimmy can’t shuffle so I do it for him.
“You gonna make me deal for you this time, too?”
He doesn’t answer. Jimmy Rehab’s silent treatment, day fifty-five.
“You lazy fuck.”
His stare is starting to unnerve me.
Jimmy’s got a four up and I’m looking at a hard sixteen so I stand. His hole-card is a ten followed by another four, so I push 2,500 more milligrams of tetracycline his way and pray I don’t get sick before I can win them back.
I bust three hands in a row and Jimmy doesn’t say a word, his expression doesn’t change.
I’ve lost thousands in a single sitting at some big tables and I’ve always had enough to cover my marker. Most of the time. I can quit any time I want, as long as it’s not while I’m playing. If you’re anything like me, you tell yourself you’ve got it under control, but you don’t.
One year later I walked through the gates, but my celebration was cut short the same day. Dear Cardholder didn’t place and Undisclosed Sum came strong out of the gate but finished dead last. Some old habits die hard and others not at all. That afternoon at the track dumped me twenty grand into Hoyle’s pocket. Hoyle knew I was good for it because I keep my word but Hoyle didn’t want to look weak. Skinner Jones and his brokering skills were the only things keeping me above the dirt. His driver had been kicked back on a parole violation so Skinner offered me a job.
“Guy blows an early release ’cause he bought his piss from Keith Richards,” he said. “He’s safer in Folsom.”
“I hear that.”
Neither one of us said anything for a moment.
“Wasn’t me.” Skinner slid the car keys toward me.
“Wasn’t you, what?”
“The jewelry store. Wasn’t me who gave you up.”
So there was my chance, served up like a fancy umbrella drink. Call him on it or let it go.
“Forget about it.”
“Far as this job goes, you wait and you drive.” Skinner let it go faster than I had, went back to talking the job. “Shit hits the fan, Plan Q is still in locked and loaded. We’re in, we’re out, we hurt nobody and you’re off the hook.”
“And I won’t see a penny of it.”
“You won’t have pennies over your eyes, either.”
True, indeed. His ex-driver’s fuck-up and my own were conjoined like circus sideshow babies, two and the same.
A good plan leaves nothing to chance, but a professional knows chance is a long-haul player. Drink enough, gamble enough, sleep around, skydive, hitchhike, or play the lottery and your luck won’t run out, but it will change. Skinner and I had been at it for a long time and our luck changed.
Come 10:21 a.m. the next day, I was gunning through red lights down O’Farrell with my back windshield in pieces, my ears ringing and Jimmy Rehab riding shotgun with glass in his hair and blood on his pants. I turned up the police scanner and kept to the speed limit once I was off Lincoln.
The cityscape levels out the same time I stop seeing people, around 14th and Judah. Clapboard craftsman shacks swap rot with crumbling Victorians sandblasted by ocean wind and salt, their bright candy colors dulled to the shade of the surrounding fog. Judah’s dead-end disappears along with the horizon, a blur of neither ocean nor sky. Even on a clear day it’s like looking at a faded photograph, a plateau of muted roof lines tethered by utility cables at the edge of the world.
Plan Q: a two-bedroom Spanish bungalow on the outside, pure Boy Scout bomb shelter on the inside. Chemical toilet in the bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling warehouse shelving throughout the master bedroom and living room. Bottled water, canned food, foil pouches of freeze-dried field rations with Russian or German labels, two footlockers marked with red crosses, a portable television and a propane-run generator with an exhaust hose that disappeared through a hole in the back door. A briefcase of clay chips with four new card decks and enough liquor to drown the cabin fever. Skinner had shut off the utilities, boarded up the windows and in every respect ensured that a man could wait a long time inside the place. The punch line to it all was the kitchen cabinets labeled Ralph & George, every inch packed with tins of smoked oysters, sardines, albacore tuna and Alaskan salmon.
Skinner had a big soft spot for his cats, but they gave me the creeps. The half-Siamese named George had eyes the color of a gas flame and this unwavering, blinkless blue stare, like he could bend metal with his mind. My watch stopped if I pet him too long and I think he tripped my car alarm a couple times, knocked out the street lights when he saw me coming. The other one, Ralph, was a leaden stump of orange fur. I never saw Ralph move from his spot on Skinner’s balcony, not once, but I never saw the same pile of feathers beside him either.
Skinner Jones, secretly sentimental bastard, had planned on spoiling them when the apocalypse came while he lived on protein bars and dried noodles.
“I’m hit.” Jimmy sat slumped in a folding chair. His right leg had gone dark and a wet flap of his jeans hung from his bloody thigh.
“You drip anything outside?”
“Fuck you. I’m gonna bleed to death, you don’t get me to a hospital.”
“You’ll bleed to death if you don’t relax.” I rummaged through the medical trunks, found rubbing alcohol, bandages and everything from basic first aid to field surgery gear and bootleg pharmaceuticals. “Get your jeans off so I can take a look.”
“I’m not letting your wannabe-doctor ass play operation on me.” Jimmy stood, favoring his good leg. “Where the car keys?”
“By the door.”
The dumbshit turned to look. I yanked the cap from a bottle of rubbing alcohol and splashed his wound, but good. Jimmy said mother, clenched his teeth and dropped back to his chair.
“If you were hurt serious, you’da bled all over my car.”
“It is serious. Fucker shot me.”
“Maybe. Looks like a movie bullet to me.” Starting with the rip in his thigh, I sliced his jeans open while he called me a choice name or two. “Best you not struggle while my knife’s this close to your nutsack.”
“The fuck’s a movie bullet?”
“One of those statistically mythical rounds, the kind that only hit your shoulder.”
“That’s my leg.”
“Or the leg.” I doused the wound with more alcohol and Jimmy twitched, then clamped himself still. “They never hit an artery and they never mushroom or fragment. The kind of shit that only happens to heroes in movies while people in real life drop dead.”
“Or a guy drops dead ’cause the quack sewing ’im up decides to make a clever speech while his fucking blood pours down the drain.”
Nothing but a few slices in his skin and a wedge of glass that dropped out of his jeans. I decided against going gently with him, poking at his leg with a pair of needle-nosed pliers as I looked for errant shards.
“The guy fired at us from behind, genius. You cut yourself on some glass. Any ideas?”
“Your windshield.”
“This is from a mirror. You hit something when they chased you out of there.”
“I don’t remember. That sawed-off came out and I just ran. Crashed through all kinds of shit.”