Once clean, I sealed the cuts with Krazy Glue then wrapped his leg with gauze. Jimmy asked for a hospital again and I said no, that we’d stay out of sight and wait for Skinner.
I cleaned my hands and listened to the police frequencies. Nobody in custody, my car last seen on Van Ness.
“Skinner take anything with him when he split?”
“Big-ass gym bag. Fucker was full, too. Way overdue for pickup,” Jimmy said.
“Lotta handjobs.”
“And then some. The place is a collection point.”
The score was a massage parlor in the Tenderloin. Normally not the most lucrative hit, but I trusted Skinner had his reasons and I was right.
“So they count it and bag it before they kick it up the ladder,” I said. “That’s gotta be cash from a half dozen handtowel lube shops.”
“At least. After they cut a slice for the cops, the bagmen disappear the rest.”
“I don’t suppose you know which cops they’re friendly with.” I tore off a strip of surgical tape with my teeth and sealed his bandages.
“Same ones we all are.”
My insides turned to lead. Skinner Jones had pulled a one-eighty on his own plan midway through a job, the job itself both a good score and a calculated burn aimed at the city’s two most rancid cops and their double-barreled hard-on for yours truly.
“Skinner didn’t fill you in?” Jimmy said.
“He told me nothing.”
“Lemme guess. ‘No fireworks, all business.’”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“You bein’ in the dark with Skinner. I don’t like it.”
“I like it less.”
“How come you know about this place?” Jimmy opened a can of warm PBR. The four-by-four stack of cases between the chairs could double as a card table.
“Belongs to Skinner.”
Jimmy took a long pull from his beer, kept his glare fixed on me.
“Chill, Rehab. Anyone tries following the paper trail, they’ll starve to death before Skinner’s name turns up.” I resumed tossing through the medical supplies. “He called this Plan Q, his last resort if anything went thermonuclear, shit-fan wrong. He could wait out the heat, right under their noses. First time I’ve actually been here. Wasn’t sure I’d memorized the right street number until I walked inside.”
“Who else knows about it?”
“Nobody.”
“You positive?”
“Of course.”
“How’s that?”
“I gave Skinner my word, Jimmy. You oughtta know me by now.”
“I need a shower.” Jimmy crushed the can and reached for another. “Wouldn’t mind uncovering one of the windows. Place feels cramped.”
“Nobody knows this place is occupied. Utilities are cut. We stay inside, keep the windows boarded and doors locked water tight. The full Houdini.”
“What if I need some fresh air?”
“We stay inside.”
“Because?”
“Because that’s the plan.” I found a bottle of black market tetracycline amidst the painkillers, aspirin and antihistamines. “Start taking these. Whatever it says on the label.”
“I’ll be fine,” Jimmy said.
“Think about where you got those cuts and whether or not a little rubbing alcohol was enough to clean them.”
“I don’t like pills.”
“You don’t like pills.”
“Can’t swallow ’em. Unnatural.”
I wasn’t going to ask about his name.
“Learn to make it natural, partner, because I’ll gut you in your sleep before I take you to a hospital.”
We played Texas Hold’em all afternoon and ate beef stew fired over a camping stove. We kept playing cards into the night. Jimmy killed a case of PBR and I took his every last chip but Skinner never showed.
“Skinner’s in the wind.” Jimmy moved slowly onto the cot, lifting his leg as though it were made of glass. “I’m outta here tomorrow.” He put on a set of headphones and closed his eyes.
Skinner Jones was holding my twenty grand for Hoyle. Alive or dead, anyone found Skinner would tie him to the job and then to me. Smoke and Mirrors would mount his head on their precinct wall and muscle every snitch in the city for the word on Johnny Pharaoh, every day, for the next hundred years unless Hoyle’s Numbers found me first.
Nobody met Hoyle. Hoyle was a disembodied name, three degrees removed from the game but still playing the board from a distance. You did business with a guy who worked for a guy who worked for some people. Eventually, the chain of command stopped with Hoyle but nobody made it that far.
Anybody got too close or defaulted on a debt, Hoyle said to handle them by the numbers, as in normal procedure. This often required duct tape. Maybe a trunk or perhaps a body of water. It always demanded discretion and, above all, silence. Hoyle’s figure of speech became a running joke among the ranks, who each in turn met with the guy’s disapproval for one reason or another. When the last man breathing had forgotten the joke, the joke became rumor, then legend: The Numbers, Thing One and Thing Two. They could reckon the layout of a darkened room from the echo of a dripping tap. Thing One could freeze locks with his breath, Thing Two could walk through glass, and they could measure your sleeping heartbeat with their ears against your door.
A spider clung to the dry lip of the kitchen faucet, a drop of black oil suspended from eight bent, black needles, its red belly mark like a symbol from a church window. In a blink, it vanished up the pipe. I stuffed a wad of newspaper into the opening and tamped it tight with my thumb.
I didn’t sleep. Every itch or stray thread brushing against me in the trapped air of the crumbling house became a drop of black widow oil, poised to plant her cocoon below my skin. Her dark little beads would hatch inside my blood while I waited for Skinner Jones, while I hid from Smoke and Mirrors, Hoyle and the Numbers.
“We can’t do shit here.” Jimmy coughed, leaned over and hawked into a garbage pail. Two days of poker, canned food, police scanner static, network news and no Skinner Jones. I was restless and Jimmy was sick.
“Too bad. We’re gonna stay.”
“I need a hospital.”
“They’re watching the hospitals.”
“They?”
“They.”
Jimmy argued until a coughing fit seized him and he covered his face with a T-shirt.
“Christ. A few minutes of fresh air, for fuck’s sake. There’s a coffee place on Ninth, across from the Muni stop. Lemme run out, grab us a couple lattes, maybe some deli sandwiches. On me.”
I knew the place. Soon as Jimmy mentioned it, I could almost hear the rumble of the train down Judah and picture the burst of greenery in the park, the shape of crashing waves.
“How long you think we could last in here?” Jimmy said.
“A long time.”
“How long?”
“We’d die of boredom before we ran out of food. I’d probably kill you before that happened.”
“Come on. Guess. I say six months.”
“Both of us.”
“Yeah. If we had to.”
I surveyed the house, its fallout shelter food and black market drugs, the liquor supply, the plywood window sheets blocking out the sun and trapping in the bad air.
“Sounds about right.”
“Like doing time, though.” Jimmy shuffled the deck and flaunted his one-handed cut, the only card sleight he knew.
“Then I guess you’ve never done time.”
His fingers slipped and the cards hit the table.
“Maybe I should deal.”
“Maybe we should up the stakes.” He gave me his idea of a bad-ass stare.
“To what?”
“Time.”
I shoulda seen this coming.
“We’ve got a hundred and eighty days each.” Jimmy reassembled the deck. “Five-day ante, two-day raise, ten-day limit.”