Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (40 page)

Eli is the only guy I’ve ever been with more than a month, and here we are going on two years. I found him waiting tables in a noodle and sushi joint over on Race Street. Most of the waiters in the place were either drag queens or trannies, dressed up like geisha whores from some sort of post-apocalyptic Yakuza flick. He was wearing so much makeup, and I was so drunk on Sapporo Black Label and saki, I didn’t even realize he was every bit
gai-ko
as me. That first night, back at Eli’s old apartment not far from the noodle shop, we screwed like goddamn bunnies on crank. I must have walked funny for a week.

I started eating in that place every night, and almost every one of those nights we’d wind up in bed together, and that’s probably the happiest I’ve ever been or ever will be. Sure, the sex was absolute supremo, standout – state of the fucking
art
of fucking – but it never would have been enough to keep things going after a few weeks. I don’t care how sweet the cock, sooner or later, if that’s all there is interest wanes and I start to drift. I used to think maybe my libido had ADD or something, or I’d convinced myself that commitment meant I might miss out on something better. What matters, though, there was more, and four months later Eli packed up his shit and moved in with me. He never asked what I do to pay the rent, and I’ve never felt compelled to volunteer that piece of intel.

“You’re still awake,” Eli says, and I hear him toss his book onto the table beside the bed. I hear him reach for a pill bottle.

“Yeah, I’m still awake.”

“Good, ’cause there’s something I meant to tell you earlier, and I almost forgot.”

“And what is that, pray tell?” I ask, listening as he rattles a few milligrams of this or that out into his palm.

“This woman in the restaurant. It was the weirdest thing. I mean, I’d think maybe I was hallucinating or imagining crap, only Jules saw it, too. Think it scared her, to tell you the truth.”

Jules is the noodle shop’s post-op hostess, who sometimes comes over to play, when Eli and I find ourselves inclined for takeout of that particular variety. It happens. But, point here is, Eli says these words, words that ought to be nothing more than a passing fleck of conversation peering in on the edge of my not going to sleep, and I get goddamn goose bumps and my stomach does some sort of roll like it just discovered the pommel horse. Because I know what he’s going to say. Not exactly, no, but close enough that I want to tell him to please shut the fuck up and turn off the light and never mind what it is he
thinks
he saw.

But I don’t, and he says, “This woman came in alone and so Jules sat her at the bar, right? Total dyke, but she had this whole butch-glam demeanor working for her, like Nicole Kidman with a buzz cut.”

“You’re right,” I mutter at the wall, as if it’s not too late for intervention. “That’s pretty goddamn weird.”

“No, you ass. That’s not the weird part. The weird part was when I brought her order out, and I noticed there was this shiny silver stuff dripping out of her left ear. At first, I thought it was only a tragus piercing or something, and I just wasn’t seeing it right. But then…well, I looked again, and it had run down her neck and was soaking into the collar of her blouse. Jules saw it, too. Freaky, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I don’t say much more, and a few minutes later, Eli finally switches off the lamp, and I can stare at the wall without actually having to see it.

04.

It’s two days later, as the crow flies, and I’m waiting on a call from one of Her Majesty’s lieutenants. I’m holed up in the backroom of a meat market in Bella Vista, on a side street just off Washington, me and Joey the Kike. We’re bored and second-guessing our daily marching orders from the pampered, privileged pit bulls those of us so much nearer the bottom of this miscreant food chain refer to as Carrion Dispatch. Not very clever, sure, but all too fucking often, it hits the nail on the proverbial head. I might not like having to ride the Speedline out to Camden for a handoff with the Czech, but it beats waiting, and it sure as hell beats scraping up someone else’s road kill and seeing to its discrete and final disposition. Which is where I have a feeling today is bound. Joey keeps trying to lure me into a game of whiskey poker, even though he knows I don’t play cards or dice or dominoes or anything else that might lighten my wallet. You work for Madam Adrianne, you already got enough debt stacked up without gambling, even if it’s only penny-ante foolishness to make the time go faster.

Joey the Kike isn’t the absolute last person I’d pick to spend a morning with, but he’s just next door. Back in the Ohs, when he was still just a kid, Joey did a stint in Afghanistan and lost three fingers off his left hand and more than a few of his marbles. He still checks his shoes for scorpions. And most of us, we trust that whatever you hear coming out of his mouth is pure and unadulterated baloney. It’s not that he lies, or even exaggerates to make something more interesting. It’s more like he’s a bottomless well of bullshit, and every conversation with Joey is another tour through the highways and byways of his shattered psyche. For years, we’ve been waiting for the bastard to get yanked off the street and sent away to his own padded rumpus room at Norristown, where he can while away the days trading his crapola with other guys stuck on that same ever-tilting mental plane of existence. Still, I’ll be the first to admit he’s ace on the job, and nobody ever has to clean up after Joey the Kike.

He lights a cigarette and takes off his left shoe, and his sock, too, because you never can tell where a scorpion might turn up.

“You didn’t open the case?” he asks, banging the heel of his shoe against the edge of a shipping crate.

“Hell no, I didn’t open the case. You think we’d be having this delightful conversation today if I’d delivered a violated parcel to the Czech? Or anybody else, for that matter. For pity’s sake, Joey.”

“You ain’t sleeping,” he says, not a question, just a statement of the obvious.

“I’m getting very good at lying awake,” I reply. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Sleep deprivation makes people paranoid,” he says, and bangs his loafer against the crate two or three more times. But if he manages to dislodge any scorpions, they’re of the invisible brand. “Makes you prone to erratic behavior.”

“Joey, please put your damn shoe back on.”

“Hey, dude, you want to hear about the Trenton drop or not?” he asks, turning his sock wrong-side out for the second time. Ash falls from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth.

I don’t answer the question. Instead, I pick up my phone and stare at the screen, like I can will the thing to ring. All I really want right now is to get on with whatever inconvenience and unpleasantness the day holds in store, because Joey’s a lot easier to take when confined spaces and the odor of raw pork fat aren’t involved.

“Do you or don’t you?” he prods.

Not that he needs my permission to keep going. Not that my saying no, I
don’t
want to hear about the Trenton drop, is going to put an end to it.

“Well,” he says, lowering his voice like he’s about to spill a state secret, “what we saw when Tony Palamara opened that briefcase – and keep in mind, it was me
and
Jack on that job, so I’ve got backup corroboration if you need that sort of thing – what we saw was five or six of these silver vials. I’m not sure Tony realized we got a look inside or not, and, actually, it wasn’t much more than a peek. It’s not like either of us was
trying
to see inside. But, yeah, that’s what we saw, these silver vials lined up neat as houses, each one maybe sixty or seventy milliliters, and they all had a piece of yellow tape or a yellow sticker on them. Jack, he thinks it was some sort of high-tech, next-gen explosive, maybe something you have to mix with something else to get the big bangola, right?”

And I stare at him for a few seconds, and he stares back at me, that one green-and-black argyle sock drooping from his hand like some giant’s idea of a novelty prophylactic. Whatever he sees in my face, it can’t be good, not if his expression is any indication. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and balances it on the edge of the shipping crate.

“Joey, were the vials silver, or was the silver what was inside of the vials?”

And I can tell right away it hasn’t occurred to him to wonder which. Why the hell would it? He asks me what difference it makes, sounding confused and suspicious and wary all at the same time.

“So you couldn’t tell?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t much more than a peek. Then Tony Palamara shut the case again. But if I had to speculate, if this was a wager, and there was money on the line? Was that the situation, I’d probably say the silver stuff was inside the vials.”

“If you had to speculate?” I ask him, and Joey the Kike bobs his head and turns his sock right-side out again.

“What difference does it make?” he wants to know. “I haven’t even gotten around to the interesting part of the story yet.”

And then, before I can ask him what the interesting part might be, my phone rings, and it’s dispatch, and I stand there and listen while the dog barks. Straightforward janitorial work, because some asshole decided to use a shotgun when a 9mm would have sufficed. Nothing I haven’t had to deal with a dozen times or more. I tell the dog we’re on our way, and then I tell Joey it’s his balls on the cutting board if we’re late because he can’t keep his shoes and socks on his goddamn feet.

05.

Some nights, mostly in the summer, Eli and me, we climb the rickety fire escape onto the roof to try to see the stars. There are a couple of injection-molded plastic lawn chairs up there, left behind by a former tenant, someone who moved out years before I moved into the building. We sit in those chairs that have come all the way from some East Asian factory shithole in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and we drink beer and smoke weed and stare up at the night spread out above Philly, trying to see anything at all. Mostly, it’s a white-orange sky-glow haze, the opaque murk of photopollution, and I suspect we imagine far more stars than we actually see. I tell him that some night or another we’ll drive way the hell out to the middle of nowhere, someplace where the sky is still mostly dark. He humors me, but Eli is a city kid, born and bred, and I think his idea of a pastoral landscape is Marconi Plaza. We might sit there and wax poetic about planets and nebulas and shit, but I have a feeling that if he ever found himself standing beneath the real deal, with all those twinkling pinpricks scattered overhead and maybe a full moon to boot, it’d probably freak him right the fuck on out.

One night he said to me, “Maybe this is preferable,” and I had to ask what he meant.

“I just mean, maybe it’s better this way, not being able to see the sky. Maybe, all this light, it’s sort of like camouflage.”

I squinted back at Eli through a cloud of fresh ganja smoke, and when he reached for the pipe I passed it to him.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told him, and Eli shrugged and took a big hit of the 990 Master Kush I get from a grower whose well aware how much time I’ve spent in Amsterdam and Nepal, so she knows better than to sell me dirt grass. Eli exhaled and passed the pipe back to me.

“Maybe I don’t mean anything at all,” he said and gave me half a smile. “Maybe I’m just stoned and tired and talking out my ass.”

I think that was the same night we might have seen a falling star, though Eli was of the opinion it wasn’t anything but a pile of space junk burning up as it tumbled back to earth.

06.

I’ve been handling the consequences of other people’s half-assed
mokroye delo
since I was sixteen going on forty-five. So, yeah, takes an awfully bad scene to get me to so much as flinch, which is not to say I
enjoy
the shit. Truth of it, nothing pisses me off worse or quicker than some bastard spinning off the rails, running around with that first-person shooter mentality that, more often than not, turns a simple, straight-up hit into a bloodbath. And that is precisely the brand of unnecessary sangre pageantry that me and Joey the Kike have just spent the last three hours mopping up. What’s left of the recently deceased, along with a bin of crimson rags and sponges and the latex gloves and coveralls we wore, is stowed snugly in the trunk of the car. Another ten minutes, it won’t be our problem anymore, soon as we make the scheduled meet and greet with one of Madam Adrianne’s garbage men.

So, it’s hardly business as usual that Joey’s behind the wheel because my hands won’t stop shaking enough that I can drive. They won’t stop shaking long enough for me to even light a cigarette.

“You really aren’t gonna tell me what it was happened back there?” he asks for, I don’t know, the hundredth time in the last thirty or forty minutes. I glance at my watch, then the speedometer, making sure we’re not late and he’s not speeding. At least I have that much presence of mind left to me.

“Never yet known you to be the squeamish type with wet work,” he says and stops for a red light.

Most of the snow from Tuesday night has melted, but there are still plenty of off-white scabs hiding in the shadows, and there’s also the filthy mix of ice and sand and anonymous schmutz heaped at either side of the street. There are people out there shivering at a bus stop, people rushing along the icy sidewalk, a homeless guy huddled in the doorway of an abandoned office building. Every last bit of that tableau is as ordinary as it gets, the humdrum day to day of the ineptly named City of Brotherly Love, and that ought to help, but it doesn’t. All of it comes across as window dressing, meticulously crafted misdirection meant to keep me from getting a good look at what’s really going down.

“Dude, seriously, you’re starting to give me the heebie-jeebies,” Joey says.

“Why don’t you just concentrate on getting us where we’re going,” I tell him. “See if you can do that, all right? ’Cause it’s about the only thing in the world you have to worry about right now.”

“We’re not gonna be late,” says Joey the Kike. “At this rate, we might be fucking early, but we sure as hell ain’t gonna be late.”