Snitch World (2 page)

One building further up the sidewalk and two stories up, the weights of a double-hung sash rattled in their soffits. “What’s up?” a sleepy voice asked.

“Not sure,” Klinger replied without turning around. “I thought it was an accident, but there’s a lotta cops.”

The fire truck finally arrived, and shortly thereafter the commander’s red SUV, and then an ambulance, and finally another police car.

“Jeeze,” said the man in the window.

“Yeah,” Klinger allowed.

“I always wondered,” said the man in the window, “why San Francisco always sends two fire trucks and an ambulance to every single fucking 911 call. You know?”

Klinger nodded.

“I mean,” the man in the window continued, “that’s costing the taxpayer money.”

Klinger nodded some more.

“You gotta wonder, what with all these budget shortfalls, closing schools and parks, cutting back on police foot patrols and whatnot, how come they don’t just send one truck to a fire, or one ambulance to the shortness of breath, or one cop car to the domestic disturbance. You know?”

Now Chainbang was face down on the hood of the police car, talking over his shoulder as one of the cops, ignoring him, methodically went through his pockets. Surely Chainbang had ditched the knife? And nope. There it was on the trunk lid, its blade still open, just at the edge
of a pool of light, with his bandana. The bandana still had a knot in it.

Chainbang like to hold up stores with a bandana tied over his nose and mouth. Like Jesse James and shit, as he liked to say.

“Don’t you think?” the man in the window repeated after a moment.

“Yeah,” Klinger nodded, as if thoughtfully. “But San Francisco is a wooden city. Used to be, anyway. You get a call for a fire, you just about have to respond with the heavy hand. Hell, it wasn’t the earthquake that did in the town, in 1906, it was the fire that raged for days afterwards. They couldn’t get up no water pressure, see, and the whole town was built of wood then, so the place went up like Dresden in World War II. Also a wooden city. So was Nagasaki, for that matter. And Saint-Malo.”

“The hell you talking about?” the man in the window said.

Klinger frowned. “Combustible cites?”

“Yeah?” The man in the window yawned. “I never heard of any of those places.”

Klinger resisted the impulse to confront the only other witness to the crime scene on Webster Street with his own astonishment. “They all burned,” was all he said, and he said it as if he were speaking to himself.

The man in the window made no response. Down in the intersection, the investigating officer had extracted a fistful of hastily bundled cash from Chainbang’s hip pocket. I thought he pulled that cash from the pocket of his wind-breaker, Klinger observed to himself.

“Still,” the man in the window started up again. “If only they could do some sort of triage on the original 911 call.”

“But they do,” Klinger insisted. “You called 911 lately?”

No answer.

Okay, thought Klinger. Either the guy’s chickenshit, or he calls 911 all the time and doesn’t want me, whom from Adam he knows not, to think he’s a snitch. “They ask you now,” Klinger said. “What is the nature of your emergency, sir or ma’am as the case may be?”

“Oh,” said the man in the window. “They do?”

“But they still send at least one fire truck and an ambulance.”

“But why?” insisted the man. “It’s expensive.”

“Maybe you should go to the meetings,” Klinger suggested.

“Like I got time to go to the meetings,” the man said tiredly.

Klinger shrugged. “Maybe you could look it up online.”

“Man,” the man said, “I need to look up what happened to my life online.”

You said it, Klinger thought to himself, I didn’t.

The window rattled shut.

Down the hill in the intersection, a cop was reading Chainbang his rights. The ladder truck made a U-turn through the intersection and headed back to the station house.

This’ll be strike three, Klinger thought, so it wouldn’t make much difference if Chainbang snitched me out or not. Things will go hard on him, no matter what. Klinger made a face. He might easily have killed me, and he probably did kill that store clerk. It could well make the difference between life without parole and the hotshot. But Chainbang won’t snitch on anybody.

Back to prison, and for what? A hundred bucks? Two hundred?

Klinger had no idea how much money they’d snatched from the cash register, but it made no difference now.

A few yards down the sidewalk a door opened, and a
woman appeared with a dog on a leash. The dog gratefully relieved itself against the trunk of the first tree it came across.

“Hello,” the woman said quietly as they moved up the hill. She was young and pretty and nicely dressed.

“Evening,” Klinger said. “Nice dog.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

Klinger offered the back of his fingers and the dog sniffed them perfunctorily. “Looks like some kind of mix.”

“Labradoodle, actually,” the woman said.

“Oh? That’s a breed?”

The woman nodded and smiled sleepily. “It is now.”

“Labrador and poodle, I’d guess.”

“That’s right.”

The dog wagged its tail a little.

“What’s her name?”

“His name is Latte.”

Klinger blinked first.

“What’s going on down there?” she asked.

Klinger looked up from patting Latte’s head. Down in the intersection, one cop held open the back door on the black and white. Another cop, holding Chainbang’s elbow with one hand, pushed his head down so it would clear the top of the door. Even from that distance, Klinger might have seen that the back door had no handles on the inside. Or maybe he just knew it. “Some kind of accident, I guess.”

“It looks as if they are arresting that man. Was he the driver?”

A tow truck arrived, yellow lights flashing, and stopped so as to perfectly obscure Klinger’s view of Chainbang. The driver stepped down from the cab of his truck and initiated some paperwork with one of the cops.

“I don’t know,” Klinger said. “I was walking up the hill, heard a crash and …” He shrugged. “I think he took out
a streetlight. Next thing I knew, there were many flashing lights down there. They got here really quick.”

“Both the fire house and the police station are just up the street. Maybe he’s impaired,” the girl suggested.

“Could be.” Klinger managed a smile. “It’s pretty late not to be impaired.”

The young woman looked at him. He looked at her. If I had the money, Klinger thought to himself, I damn sure would be impaired. By the look of you, young lady, you can well afford to be impaired and yet, at three-thirty in the morning, you’re not. “Just getting home from work?” he ventured.

“Just long enough to freshen up,” she nodded, “walk the dog, grab a nap, get back by eight.”

“Some kind of deadline,” Klinger inferred.

“IPO,” the woman told him.

“IPO,” Klinger repeated stupidly.

“It’s very exciting,” she told him. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

“That’s the damn truth,” Klinger nodded wearily.

The labradoodle whimpered.

“Latte’s gotta go,” the woman said. “Nice talking to you.”

She turned the dog with his lead and walked quickly down the hill, toward all the lights.

Klinger watched her go, then turned up the hill, where there were no lights.

Mary Fiducione always took her morning coffee in the little yard behind her studio.

Dexter Gordon’s cover of “Don’t Explain” quietly interpolated the morning, emanating from a pair of battered speakers screwed to opposite ends of the header above the seven-foot slider, and under the short eave that provided a little protection from the elements. A hummingbird took turns with a fat bumblebee as they both investigated the refulgent trumpets of a datura that towered over the back corner of the little yard. A neighboring ornamental plum, heralding spring only a week ago, now lofted its mauve blossoms above the graying board fence that ran along the north side of the lot.

The weathered table before her was covered by a fading cloth depicting a woman wearing sunglasses, a Jackie O coiffure, and a cocktail dress, surmounting the motto, queen of fucking everything. On it lay the
New York Times
, the
Chronicle
, a copy of
The Furies
by Janet Hobhouse, a pot of Scottish breakfast tea, a teaspoon, and a very delicate-looking ceramic cup and saucer decorated with pinkly-tinged cerise tea roses.

But what compelled her interest this morning was the
Idiot’s Guide to Programming iPhone Applications
, a scratch pad, a small netbook computer, and her iPhone itself.

The doorbell rang.

Mary frowned and continued to tap at the phone’s virtual keyboard.

After a minute, the doorbell rang again.

Mary suddenly remembered that she was expecting UPS to deliver a new belt holster for her phone. Still frowning at the keyboard, she stood up, passed through the open side of the sliding glass door, through the length of the ground floor apartment, and opened the front door.

“Hey,” said Klinger.

Mary looked up from her phone, looked back at it, then looked up again. “Are those the sepals of
Salvia leucantha
woven into your hair, or are you just glad to see me?”

Klinger lifted his eyeballs to the tops of their orbits. “If it’s the purple parts of Mexican sage you’re referring to, yes. Probably.”

She looked up again, said, “There’s blood on your cheek,” and looked back down at the device in her hand.

Klinger touched a fingertip to his cheek and looked at it. “Must have cut myself texting.”

With no visible reaction to this quip, Mary held her phone aloft and stepped aside.

Klinger entered. “Checked your mail lately?”

Mary frowned. “It doesn’t come until—. Oh.” She stepped into the entry hall.

Klinger went straight to the bathroom, closed the door, and relieved himself. Flushing the john and zipping up, he headed into the kitchenette to draw and down, in quick succession, three large glasses of tap water.

“Hydrating so early?” Mary commented, closing the entry door behind her.

Lowering the empty third glass as he swallowed, Klinger nodded with a wordless, weary vigor, and exhaled loudly.

“Nobody about,” Mary said simply as she passed him. Klinger nodded, then sighed so raggedly that his lips flapped. “Cold last night,” he said at last. “Foggy, too. Damp. Wet. Miserable.”

“You should pick your camping dates a little more rigorously,” Mary suggested as she exited the sliding door. “Although, I feel compelled to remind you, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear.” Once in the yard, she resumed her seat and waved at an empty chair across the table. “Come in, sit down.” She gestured toward Klinger with the phone. “Hungry? Still thirsty?”

“Tired,” Klinger said as he passed through the back door. “Worn out. Damp through and through.” He took a seat as Dexter Gordon faded to silence. “Unshaven. Unlaundered. On the run. A failure in life.”

Mary tapped the screen on the phone. “Whining,” said a robotic voice, followed by the very tinny sound of someone scratching out “Beautiful Dreamer” on an out-of-tune violin. “Whining,” the phone repeated.

“The fuck?” Klinger blinked.

“Pissed off,” the phone said. “Pissed off …”

“Mood-identification app.” Mary tapped the screen and the phone went silent. “It’s been around for maybe two months and already clocked 135,000 downloads.”

Klinger exhibited bepuzzlement by lifting a hand and shaking his head.

“Can you multiply nine ninety-five by 135,000?” Mary said impatiently. “I’ll give you a hint.”

Klinger frowned.

“Round up to ten.”

Klinger scowled.

“One million, three hundred and fifty thousand,” Mary told him, “is the answer. That’s dollars, and that’s gross.”

Klinger sighed loudly.

“The current arrangement grants the developer a seventy percent royalty against sales. Can you do seventy percent of 1.350 × 10^6? I’ll save you the trouble: 945,000.” She held up the phoneless hand. “That’s laughably close to one
million dollars.” She slapped the table so that the teapot, the cup, the saucer, Klinger, and even Janet Hobhouse jumped. “In two months!”

Klinger clasped both hands over his stomach and stared at the ground. “I think I’m about to puke.”

Mary ignored him. “And my own sublime app, Aunty Cringle’s Guide to California Flora, has been downloaded a miserable thirteen thousand times,” she grumbled.

“Yeah?” Klinger’s stomach made noises like unto those it might emit if he’d swallowed a vibraslap. “So what’s that mean? You made, what, a lousy nine thousand bucks in, what, the two months since you launched your application?”

“Three,” Mary corrected him sententiously. “I made nine thousand bucks in three months. What with rent control and socialist health care, I quit my day job two weeks ago,” she added proudly.

Klinger frowned. “Were you still at the fortune cookie factory?”

Mary nodded.

“Good on you.” Klinger belched sincerely. “Now you’ll have the time to get really good at canasta.”

Mary sat forward in her chair and spoke in earnest. “You know what the best-selling sensory app is?”

“No,” Klinger admitted truthfully.

“You hold up the phone to a person who’s belching or farting?”

Klinger frowned suspiciously. “Yeah … ?”

Mary nodded. “The phone tells you what the person’s been eating.”

“You mean you … you hold the phone to their mouth or their asshole?” Klinger said incredulously. “Are you serious?”

“As serious as Mahler’s Ninth.” Mary thumped the table in syncopation with various syllables of the bottom line: “Fourteen million, five hundred thousand downloads.”

”What if you’ve been eating nothing?”

“Fasting?” Mary frowned. “Probably generate a discontinuity,” she concluded. “An error code.”

Klinger burped, not so quietly. “I’ll buy that.”

“Well over ten million in royalties,” Mary pointed out dreamily.

“Talk about your motherfucking charlatan culture endorsing its own reality,” Klinger declared testily. Klinger was beginning to wonder about his stomach. Strange gases were making their way to the surface of the water he’d just consumed, thoroughly acidifying its pH along the way. His stomach hadn’t been right since he’d started shitting blood during a drinking binge about … Since … Klinger frowned. Klinger couldn’t remember. Anyway, he’d cut back on his drinking lately, somewhat. Having no money, of course, made cutting back easier. Wrong word. But he was worried that the damage was permanent, which called the bluff on his slow-motion suicide-by-alcohol, which made him nervous.