“Won’t work.”
“Why not?” He shuffled.
“Suppose I win your whole six months. That mean you walk out of here?”
“Good point.” He shuffled a second time. “How ’bout we play for days outside? Each day we lose is a day we stay locked in here.”
“But I want to stay locked in here.”
“So you can’t lose.”
Fuck-up though he was, I got why people hired him.
“I’ve seen you play, remember.”
“Like I said, you can’t lose.” Jimmy shuffled the deck a third time and set it between us.
“Texas Hold’em.”
“Draw for the high card.”
“Don’t bother.” I cut the deck and said, “Deal.”
Jimmy had been working on his game. He used to be pure shark food. He’d play loose, never check, and he’d see every bet, big or small, to keep chasing some lone longshot card for that mythical winning hand. He was playing tighter now. He checked and folded more frequently, calculating my best possible hand instead of his own.
He might take longer to get eaten, but he was still shark food. He went to sleep three weeks poorer, and the next afternoon he was down a whole month and a half when the news ran a story about another Golden Gate suicide.
“Wonder what makes this guy’s high dive worth the airtime.” Jimmy checked his cards and tossed a five-day chip onto his two-day ante.
Good question. Unhappy civilians outnumbered the pigeons. Jumpers hit the bay like clockwork.
“... won’t release the identity of the man found floating...”
I met his five and raised him ten. Jimmy folded and I scooped away another week of his life outside.
“... may be linked to several high-profile robberies throughout the Bay Area...”
My vaporous suspicion condensed to certainty.
“Skinner Jones.”
“How do you know?”
“One of those things.” I stared at my chips, the stack of Jimmy’s days together with mine.
“Least we know what happened to the man. You still wanna stay here?”
“Not now, Jimmy.”
“Skinner Jones couldn’t take the heat, sounds to me like. Let’s get out.”
“Watch your mouth, Rehab.”
He hadn’t heard me. He’d stuffed the balled-up shirt to his face to stifle another coughing jag, spat a heavy glob into the garbage pail, then, without warning, shoved his remaining chips into the pot.
“The fuck?”
“All or nothing,” he said.
“Jimmy.”
“Your homeboy’s a floater. And if it wasn’t an accident then they know where to find us.”
“They?”
“Pharaoh, or whoever took out Skinner Jones.”
“Just because you’d start singing at the first whiff of immunity—”
Jimmy hit the television with his fist. The bottle-blonde anchorwoman shattered into pixels and noise.
“You think that was a botched plea bargain? Jesus.”
The anchorwoman reappeared. She flashed a smile insured for millions, moved the blank papers around on her desk and nodded at the weatherman.
“All or nothing,” he said again. “You lose, I walk. You win, we both stay until provisions run out.”
I couldn’t figure what angle he was playing. Jimmy didn’t know angles. Jimmy did the shit work for the guys who did. So, my angle was win the game and stick to the wager. Jimmy gets drunk, mopes for a day, crawls to the table to win it all back. When I have a plan and decide it’s safe to leave, Jimmy’s luck will improve.
“Sounds like a bet,” I said.
I shuffled. Jimmy cut. I dealt two hands then the flop: ace of spades, ace of clubs and the eight of clubs. The game was Sudden Death Hold’em and we could discard and draw in lieu of each betting round. By the final draw, the six of clubs and the eight of spades were face up with the others.
I called. Jimmy showed. He held a pair of clubs, the king and the two. The odds of drawing a flush in a typical game are five hundred to one. The odds against a king high flush are greater still, and if you’re Jimmy Rehab, you start writing zeros until your arms falls off. His game had indeed improved but he was still Jimmy Rehab, shark food.
“Get used to battlefield meals.” I dropped my eight of diamonds onto the flop for a full house. “You try sneaking out tonight and I’ll gut you.”
Jimmy was pale. He stood, cracked open a beer and limped toward the bunk room.
“I’ll win it all back tomorrow,” he said. That calm of his, again.
First thing, I made coffee, thirty-weight black. Jimmy hadn’t moved. I heard the deafening headphone hiss from his CD player eight feet away. Seven hours since he’d crashed and his eardrums were in shreds. I pulled the headphones away and like the spider darting up the dormant faucet, the smell hit my nose, rebounded off my brain and crash landed in my stomach. I’m supposed to say Jimmy, hey man, wake up, but I don’t bother. His lids were slack beneath my thumb, the thin skin pliant as an empty rubber glove and his eyes had gone to frost.
I hooked my knife at the cuff of his left leg and sheared his jeans, ankle to thigh. The bandages beneath were damp with something thick and yellow. The veins in his leg had darkened with the trail of infection that had run rampant for the last three days. I dug the antibiotics from the pocket of his coat, the bottle unopened and every capsule accounted for.
I dragged Jimmy to the bathroom, cradled his neck over the toilet and emptied out his blood with a knife stroke. It sounded like the time my father dumped his aquarium but lasted longer. I dropped the carcass into the bathtub and set to tearing Skinner’s place apart for the next hour, searching for tools, empty paint cans, anything.
I drew a line above Jimmy’s eyebrows and cut around his skull with a hacksaw and pulled at the top of his head until it broke suction with a loud wheezing kiss. His brain held fast to his spine until I dug into both sides with a set of screwdrivers.
“You’ve never used this thing in your life. Give it up.”
It shot loose, bouncing off the shower tile and slipping down to the drain like a lump of gray soap.
Happy Bastille Day, Jimmy.
The guts and brains Jimmy never displayed in his life lay submerged in seven different gut-buckets of paint thinner, rubbing alcohol, or vodka and sealed with duct tape.
Skinner was dead, Ralph and George weren’t going to show up. The six hundred cans of gourmet meat were mine, the two hundred fifty pounds of cat litter were Jimmy’s. I folded his arms funeral-style, rolled him into a sheet, and returned him to the bathtub, buried in Tidy Cats.
A week passed. I monitored the police and fire frequencies, that godless ocean of misery and chaos beyond the glittery tidepool of evening news. I heard dispatches to investigate suspicious odors but never for this neighborhood. Somebody was always decomposing somewhere else. Thing was, I knew those other addresses, each one. I knew the dead guys and they knew me, but they hadn’t known where I’d end up. My word kept me alive while the Numbers kept looking.
I ate canned salmon and drank warm beer. Outside, civilians drank at the Blackthorn, ate pizza by the slice and rode the N Judah through the fog. I breathed bad air and played solitaire and single-deck blackjack, betting painkillers, germ killers, matchsticks, money or cigarettes. I wagered on the closing of the Nasdaq, the next day’s weather and sports scores. I lost twenty-five tins of smoked oysters and six candy bars to the house when Foreign Object came in dead last, so I quit the ponies altogether. The civilians on Irving fell in and out of love, in and out of bars, hailed cabs and racked up parking tickets, while I mastered the dart board. I dug damp litter from the bathtub with a gardening trowel and dumped fresh litter in its place. After four fifty-pound bags, it stayed dry.