The Shaft (40 page)

    He did not want to carry the dope into the streets for his rendezvous with Jamaica. Stash it in the elevator cubby until Bauhaus has his fit. Come back in the dead of night, liberate it, and take off. A plan, was that.

    He'd have to figure out a way to convince the elevator to stop in mid-shaft. Maybe he could just climb through the ceiling hatch from the second floor and reach the mystery gap that way. He'd need a chair or something to hoist himself through. His arm hurt less right now and he might be able to unsling it for a single life-saving pull-up.

    He closed the apartment door behind him and heard the latch click. If the elevator cooperated by rising to the second floor when summoned, Cruz figured it was trustworthy… for now, at least.

    Machinery ground and he listened while the lift clunked and wheezed upward. Christ only knew what shape the cables were in.

    When the doors parted, Cruz aborted his plan to walk right in. The missing Velasquez kid was waiting for him there on the floor of the car. Half of him, anyway.

    

    

    Just when had this movie tipped over into comedy?

    What was the equation, Jamaica wondered, for stuff so absurd that your only sane response could be slackjawed hilarity… until you became the one taking the big bow for precipitating that absurdity?

    A serious gust rocked the car and she jogged the wheel in response. A nonslip pro driver s sheath wrapped the wheel and the car had power steering. Cabin fans breezed out good heat in thick drafts. Mechanical air. Another benefit of civilization.

    She didn't even want to ponder the riot shotgun by her knee. The hat was what made everything a giggle-fest.

    Welcome to the Comedy Dungeon our special guests: Groucho, Chico, Harpo… and Bimbo!

    Her brain speed-reeled tidbits in terms of her yellow sheet: Accessory to homicide. Culpability in possession of narcotic substances for sale. Concealment of an unregistered loaded weapon. Theft of firearm. Accessory, again, to homicide, again - this one a police officer. Grand theft auto. Willful theft of police property. Leaving death scene. No phone calls to Mom.

    Impersonating a police officer.
Ha. Ha.

    She had perched Stallis' service cap far back on her head, lest it dump forward to blind her. Stallis had owned a lot of headbone. It wasn't the first time Jamaica had worn his cap; once or twice he'd forced her to model it while enacting his own sordid form of speed bail. In her life Jamaica had definitely seen as much of Stallis below the belt as above the neck, even counting the leer.

    The storm made it absolutely impossible to perceive who might or might not be piloting the Oakwood police cruiser. Visibility was double-ought. Guilt and paranoia supplied the mean justifications for donning the hat.

    Trying to see through the unrelenting assault of blowing snow was like trying to steer through a tidal wave. The left front wheel broke through an iced-over pothole; the jounce made Jamaica grip the wheel hard enough to snap a fingernail. Gray slush splashed to freeze on the windshield, where the wipers bumped over it until the de-icers coaxed it free. The cloudy scab broke apart and ran.

    Alibis scampered through her mind similarly. Furtive excuses; ratlike.

    It was improbable that she would actually be caught on a night like this - spotted and pulled over by Oakwood's minions of right and might. The knowledge did not ease her fear or make it less rigid or consumptive. What was she supposed to say to the men with a thousand questions, if busted? That blood and violence had transacted at Kenilworth Arms… that she could not locate a phone… that she had dashed into a blizzard and there was the patrol unit with keys waiting, and that maybe they'd take her wild story seriously if she brought home the cruiser as proof?

    In sum, she'd tell them she panicked.

    They were all such macho jerks at the Oakwood station that they would jock-itch to believe little Jamaica, hardcore penis wrangler, had spilled her cool and bolted like a frightened deer. Hah. Women.

    Even given the power steering, hanging corners had proved the hardest manuever. She felt the heavy backside of the cruiser slide around to ding curbed and snowbound cars. She could not muster the nerve to employ the lights or siren. To what purpose? No traffic to clear this late. She had sought out the switch for the base radio and clicked it off. The company of voices was something she did not desire just now. Transmissions had bled sporadically through the banshee howl of atmospheric interference. The voices on this channel were all bad, and she had no mouth for ghost accompaniment that would make her feel as guilty as she unequivocally was already.

    Nearly blind. She cranked hard right.

    She banged her lip against the wheel as she felt the crash bumper stave in the driver's side door of a Lincoln Towne Car half-buried in a rising bank of street snow. Impact reverberated in her spine. Now she had to shift, back out, renegotiate. She had not yet topped twenty-five miles per hour for this entire excursion… nor would she. The fifteen minute haul to Bauhaus' winding driveway took nearly an hour.

    She was sweating now. The back windows were totally iced.

    The perspiration that oiled her back was a fifty-fifty mix of nerves and heat. Had she fogged the back windows herself? There was a strong chance that after tonight she might have to spend a couple of decades in a cell with a lidless toilet. She was wagered in for the whole kitty, and if she was fated to fail and fall, then a few items were going on the record, by god, before she got pushed off the diving board.

    
Item #1…

    Only a fraction of people in the world knew how to handle the rudder of their own future. To the rest, life was a mystery. They sat and waited for exterior miracles to render their options academic - death, divine intervention, addiction, winning a lottery. Her tiny apartment in Elmwood Park was a 'working woman's studio.' In it, she slipped on stale workout clothes and did stretches before a JVC television that needed to be replaced. In it, she wore ankle weights and brewed hibiscus tea and looked forward to maybe buying herself a CD player for Christmas. In it, she never read the paper nor watched the news. She slept, wrapped up in print sheets on a second-hand queensize that she'd bought from another prostitute. Asleep, she sometimes suffered nightmares. They were never sexual.

    Jonathan -
poor Jonathan, goddamnit
- had never learned how important it had been to her not to return to her working woman's studio the night after Cruz had gotten busted. Contact, that night, had been paramount. Contact with another human being. No one else Jamaica knew counted.

    In her apartment, she took very long showers, never baths. At Jonathan's, the bath had not been a threat. She spent a lot of time naked in front of angled mirrors, vigilant for any hint of stress or age so she could mount a cosmetic counterattack that would intimidate the offending obsolesence into retreat. Let stretch marks and varicose veins bushwhack the weak of spirit.

    Looking at herself in her mirrors, she thought tragicomic things. Assessed her own vagina as 'fit'. Wondered how many liters of semen she'd 'processed'. How much mouthwash would be used up by the end of her life. If she would ever get sufficient sleep on a nightly basis.

    If there was any such thing as love, outside of fiction.

    Chemical entertainment, and its availability, were a big minus factor. A touch too much Equatorial Sneeze-Whiz. How many kilos, when her life tallies were toted? Bauhaus and his phylum were overjoyed to play generous, ushering their pets toward flame-out. People were toys to Bauhaus. You wound them up, they did their tricks, and eventually they broke. Especially if you played with them hard and frequently. You laid your hands upon them, yet never touched them, except on a mercantile level.

    Unfair, it seemed, that Bauhaus would most likely be wheeling and dealing long after she had eaten grave dirt.

    To Bauhaus, she was no different from his onyx bar top or his projection TV or his fleet of limos and sleek, overpriced urban speedsters.

    Item #1 peeled down to a simple imperative:
Shed Bauhaus. And parasites like him. Hadn't she swallowed enough fast-lane horseshit to know how superficial glitz was, and what the true costs were?

    Item #2:
Stop your own stagnation, she thought. Change. Get out. Save yourself. Look what happened to Jonathan
.

    Item #3:
If people like Jonathan had to die… shouldn't it count for something?

    Item #4:
If you die, will anybody give a damn?

    Her emotions were no longer individualized. The fear, the anger, pain and confusion had all melded seamlessly with her exhaustion to yoke a weight of conscience to her neck and cinch straps tightly enough to bestow a sledgehammer migraine. No longer could this circus of events be idly noted, and it was no good to pretend her reality had not been coarsely disrupted. The pile-up demanded a climax, a capper. A definitive act of will. She had to do something about all this, and her actions would alter the matrix of her whole existence. It was time to move to new digs. You either packed in advance or you blithely waited for your old place to collapse around your ears.

    Her catalyst, more than any single wrong, had been the look in Cruz's eyes just moments ago. His pathological, barely suppressed desperation to dig into that kilo of blow on Jonathan's toilet and metabolize it,
arriba, arriba, posthaste, goddamn NOW before I die
.

    Cruz's eyes no longer saw the coke as a nest egg. Their plans, born grandly of panic and jailbreak desperation, had drowned with Jonathan and were now so much melted sooty snow. She had to pull herself clear of this death-dive. Save Cruz only if she could. If the drags got in her way again she'd have to brush him away like lint.

    

    

    She nearly missed Bauhaus' slanted driveway altogether; the cruiser was against the wind now and its low beams bounced swirling whiteout off her retinas. It was dark and noiselessly snowbound.

    Better to pace up there unannounced.

    She killed the running lights and ditched the car keys under the floormat. Stallis' revolver, one shot spent, was tucked into her waistband beneath the Beverly Hills sweatshirt, its bulge concealed by the bulk of the bomber jacket.

    After a fast camera ID she was buzzed through Bauhaus' security by one of his coke ornaments, Chari or Krystal; she never could remember which was which. Bauhaus himself was holding court from the cushioned circular pit of the living room. Silk smoking jacket, baggy velvet pants, new Bambi-hide mocs on bare feet. Eight or nine grand in slush gold was tangled up in his graying chest hair. Chari or Krystal - the other one - was squinting like a nocturnal rodent at MTV on the video projection screen. It was all fast cuts, flashing motion, eye-searing color - the acid hallucinations of a psychotic. She wore an open towel, one hand at her pubes as though it had forgotten its mission, the other lingering in a bowl of cheese popcorn. She was starting to sprout zits around her mouth from all the junk food, and pretty soon Bauhaus would flush her.

    Kill her, if she was lucky.

    Closer to Bauhaus, now turned towards Jamaica 's entrance as though interrupted in the midst of a critical exchange of information, was a guest she had never seen before. He stopped talking and smiling when he saw her; it was a baring of teeth marinated in olive oil. His hair was thick, layered, virulently black. He was one of those men with a permanent fecial shadow of stubble and vast fields of dense body hair. His forehead was high and wide. Good cheekbones narrowed to a pointed chin, lending a mantis aspect to the whole face, which had been tanned by ultraviolet to an unnatural bronze that made his eyes seem to bug. Whites were visible above the iris. He looked mildly insane.

    Jamaica smelled a man who would slap down cash money for her, here and now, and not be nice.

    'Speak of the devil,' Bauhaus began, fat and happy. He halved the sound on the TV remote and recrossed his thick legs with a grunt. With a flourish he lifted a Cuban cigar, nine smoldering inches, from a quartz ashtray and sucked on it. 'Trot on down, babe. Got company here you need to meet.' Need to meat, she thought.

    'This here is my good pal from Florida, Emilio.'

    Emilio rose, courtly, did a semi-bow and squeezed her hand. Contact lingered. When he bent she could see the platinum straight razor on its chain around his neck. His grin was having a hard time not being predatory.

    Bauhaus tried to make a smoke ring and failed. 'Emilio and you have something in common, my dear.'

    Oh, shit - here it comes, like an arrow in the back.

    'Simian ancestors?' She smiled sweetly.

    They missed it. Bauhaus puffed. His end of the cigar was too soggy. 'Our good compatriot Cruz. You wouldn't happen to know where he is, would you, cookie?'

    'Last I heard, he was in St Jude's. You should know; you booked him in after you and Marko finished with him.'

    'Mm.' Bauhaus was disinterested in the recap. 'Yesterday's news, I'm afraid. Marko went to check up on him, in fact. I'm afraid Cruz gave Marko mistaken directions to your friend Jonathan's apartment. Remember your little waif friend, Jonathan? Am I going too fast for you?'

    She shrugged. 'So what?'

    Lord Alfred flounced in, doe-eyed and spaced out. He delivered a mug of black Colombian coffee to Emilio, who had not yet graced this confab with a word. From an inside pocket of his Versace jacket he produced a carved vial of black jade. A tiny golden spoon was attached to the vial's screwcap by a delicate chain. Two spoonfuls vanished into the coffee; he noticed her watching and a tight smile twitched up one side of his face.