Bad Luck City - Matt Phillips Page 6

  The taxi shot forward with a firm, steady acceleration. Through the window I saw the flashing marquee again—there it was, high above the city: “The Tokyo.” But the words began to melt, the letters started to blend. Darkness again. It surged from the edges of my vision. I swallowed the air inside the taxi, the musty new–car smell from a package, but I slipped beneath the shadows.

  ***

  That night, as a young boy, I sat on the curb for hours. My dad bled beside me. His breaths were shallow and dry. I tried to wake him, but he stayed unconscious, a rotten gambler bleeding in a big city gutter.

  Near dawn, he shifted in his sleep. His eyes opened. He sat upright and looked over at me. “Hey kid, you okay?”

  “Those guys beat you up,” I said.

  My dad nodded. He reached inside his coat pocket and came out with his gun. I always thought of it as a toy gun. It was small, but my dad carried it either strapped beneath his belt or somewhere deep in his coat. He was never without it. My dad looked at the small black gun and smiled. His lips were purple and fat, but he still looked happy to me.

  I smiled back at him.

  “It’s okay to take a beating son,” he said. “As long as you plan to give a beating back.”

  “You gonna beat those big guys up?” I said.

  My dad nodded. He held the gun aloft, pointed it at the sky. “Am I gonna beat them up?” he said. “I guess you can say that if you want. See this gun?” He held it parallel to the ground then, let me stare at it. “This is a Colt Detective Special, a .38 snubnosed belly gun,” he said. “It’ll shoot a man’s belly out his lower back, Sim. And one day, when I die, this gun’s gonna be yours.”

  “I can shoot people?”

  My dad shook his head. “You only shoot people if they do you wrong, if they deserve it. It’s better to come at life with a strategy. You watch the moves and then you make your own—like on the chess board. You remember how I taught you that game, the one where all the pieces move in different directions?”

  I nodded.

  “See, Sim,” my dad said, “shooting a man is like knocking over his king before the game is over. It’s only right under certain circumstances.”

  “Like right now?”

  He nodded. “Like right now,” he said. His lips scrunched up and blood seeped from them like water from a squeezed sponge. My dad stood and wobbled there in the night air, like a chess piece rocking back and forth along its base. “Now, I want you to plug your ears,” he said. “They say a belly gun can make a lot of noise, and I know for a fact that’s true.”

  “Okay, daddy,” I said.

  He limped to the building and opened the door. He held the snubnosed revolver out in front of him as he entered, like the gun was a flashlight casting a beam of light.

  I didn’t plug my ears. I wanted to hear it.

  There were muffled shouts. Then a small flurry of gunshots echoed like sonic booms. There were two more shots that came like canon fire, though they were later and a few minutes apart.

  I sat there, listening—a small, patient boy waiting for his dad.

  ***

  Up from the depths.

  Bright lights shined in my eyes and shadows drifted above me. My limbs were loose, as if my joints were held together with rubber bands. My vision cleared. I saw beige ceiling tiles and the dark edges of a bandage covering my nose. A face appeared above me.

  Finnegan.

  The last bastard I wanted to see.

  “Got yourself into some shit, Palmer,” Finnegan said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Just asking some questions,” I said. My lips were dry and bloody. I could still taste the copper seasoning in my blood.

  “Looks like you were asking around in the wrong place. You’re pretty messed up.”

  “That means I was asking in the right place.”

  “You’ll need to tell me what this one’s about, Palmer. I know last time—with the smuggling ring—you played fast and loose, but I can’t have reporters beaten to a pulp and keep my job.”

  Fucking liability. But he was right. Finnegan wasn’t the most ballsy editor, but he had a right to know what his reporters were working.

  “I had a source come to me about a missing woman,” I said. “He made it seem like maybe it was connected to my smuggling stories, like there was something else going on, like there was more to it, that it hadn’t stopped.”

  “If someone’s missing, you should go to the police,” Finnegan said.

  “I’ve never seen the woman except in pictures. I don’t know if she’s missing. I don’t know if my source is full of shit. All I know is that some sonofabitch beat me to hell.”

  Finnegan let his gaze drift over my face. He studied me. “He sure did beat you to shit.”

  “Well, what the hell are we going to do about it?”

  Finnegan didn’t answer me.

  “Well? Tell me, what are we going to do about it?”

  Finnegan’s eyes settled deep into his face and his dark eyebrows moved toward each other. “I guess you better keep digging, Palmer. If you got roughed up, I guess it must be important. Just don’t come crying to me when you see yourself in the mirror.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said. “That’s what I like to hear.” I mumbled something unintelligible and then drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  Later, I woke up again.

  Gloria stood over me. It was a face that seemed too familiar for how little I knew her. She reached out with one hand and placed it on my forehead.

  “You know you don’t have to wait around,” I said.

  “I know, but if I leave, you’ll be alone.”

  “Hazard of the working–too–much–man. He never has anybody to wait around for him at the hospital.”

  “I’m off for the night. It doesn’t matter.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” I said.

  She rubbed her eyes. “Maybe not, but it’s still horrible. You still have the pink tie, though.” She lifted her hand and my pink tie unfurled like a cartoon character’s tongue. “There’s that.”

  I smiled at her, at least in my head I smiled at her. I couldn’t feel my mouth or lips too well. “Sometimes you get the best and most honest answers when you ask questions at the worst times. That’s part of the job.”

  “Does this have to do with that girl, the one in the picture?”

  I let that hang over us for a moment. “I know Evers knows something. He knows Chelsea, he’s seen her, I think. He’s got something to hide. It’s my job to find out what that something is.”

  “Why don’t you follow him?”

  “I’m not a cop. I’m not a PI. I’m a reporter.”

  “And?”

  “Reporters don’t follow people. Violates the code of ethics,” I said.

  “You think you’re going to find this woman following some fucking code of ethics? Here? In this city? Did you learn anything today? There are no ethics, Sim. There is no code. The code is a lie they tell you so you’ll stop—so you’ll give up, that’s it.”

  I’d always followed some code. I needed a code because that was how I stayed in line, that was how I stayed on the right side of things. It was my anchor point, the place where I knew I could find hard proof that I was okay—hard proof that I was one of the good guys, not like my father. But maybe, like Gloria said, the code was dead, no good. Maybe it hurt me more than it helped me. “What do you think I should do, you’re such an expert?”

  She said, “I think you can’t live by a code that everybody else ignores. It makes you weak.”

  ***

  Two hours later, I left the hospital with a minor concussion, a broken nose and a few bruised ribs on my left side. It wasn’t too bad. I got some oxy for the pain and, the truth was, I needed the sleep. The swelling in my eyes went down by the time Gloria dropped me near my Volvo, just down the street from The Tokyo. I thanked her and we promised we’d meet for that drink another time. I drove home, took a pill, and collapsed
into bed. I slept for a few short hours wrapped inside a tiny drug–induced cocoon.

  Chapter Eleven

  Later that night, after I shook free from the chains of sleep, I called Mathis.

  This time he came to the phone and said, “You find her?”

  “No. I had a nice stay at the emergency room, though. Does that surprise you?”

  “Was it Evers?”

  So, I thought, Evers was tied to Richie. “Nope,” I said. “A guy named Richie with a bunch of silver rings on his fingers.” Mathis grunted over the line. I imagined him pulling that low–brimmed hat across his eyes.

  “Sorry to hear you got roughed up—it’s never a good thing.”

  It was time to push the guy. He was lying, too. My whole life people had lied to me. It started with my father and it continued into my career. There was an itch inside me that kept springing to life, one lone deep cell that longed for truth. No more lies. “You mind if I call you Freddie?” I said. Silence on the line. “Or, I could call you Midnight if that makes you feel more street. Would that be better?”

  “Freddie is okay. Yeah—that works,” he said.

  I sensed a rough edge in his voice. He’d tried to play on the edge of this for some reason, but now I’d brought him back into it. “What is Chelsea to you? Now, I need to know.”

  “She’s nothing to me, Palmer.”

  “You knew my dad, that why you chose me? Did Chelsea work for you, she owe you money? What the fuck is it?”

  “I didn’t simply know your dad,” he said. “I loved him like a brother. Shit, I remember when you were just a punk kid, a little pale baby with drool on your lips. Your dad and me, we had some good times. He was a real pro. He brought elegance to the hustle. I liked that about him. Wore a suit. Carried a pocket watch. Knew how to play chess. All that shit.”

  “You can spare me the fucking portrait,” I said. “He wasn’t a stranger to me.”

  “Wasn’t he though?”

  My dad appeared in front of me. He drifted over my bed like a ghost. He had a suit on, a charcoal three–piece number, and he smiled like a king. There was a blood–red handkerchief in his breast pocket. Sometimes I saw him like that. It happened late at night while walking home from a neighborhood bar. Or it happened in the bar; his ghost arched out in front of me like a flashlight beam. I blinked at the vision until it vanished. “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe.”

  “No, you don’t.” Mathis paused and then said, “I think we should meet. I’ll answer your questions, but you might not like everything you hear.”

  “Where?”

  “Same place I found you the other night,” he said.

  “Aero Lounge.”

  “Twenty minutes,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”

  We clicked off the line. My cellphone flashed the time: 9:39 pm. I closed my eyes and gnashed my teeth together. I knew how I connected to Mathis, but how did he connect to Chelsea? In my head, I heard voices:

  —Wore a suit. Carried a pocket watch. Knew how to play chess. All that shit.

  —You watch the moves and then you make your own, like on the chess board.

  —Chelsea was one hell of a chess player though. I only beat her a couple times.

  The voices whimpered, died. I saw it then—the way my dad used to disappear for hours at a time. The way he used to kiss me on my head and say he was headed across town. I’d always asked him why, but the answer was a mumbled response. I remembered… I thought a foreign thought. Maybe my dad had another kid. Maybe Chelsea Losse was my sister. Whatever the truth, people were willing to beat me bloody to keep me from her. Maybe they were willing to kill me. It was time for me to get willing to do a few things myself.

  Again, my dad’s voice came into my head: “It’s okay to take a beating. As long as you plan to give a beating back.”

  ***

  I never thought I’d need my father’s gun. Or want it.

  I pulled myself from bed and ambled to the dresser. The oxy had me in a thick fog, but it began to clear as I stood there and breathed deeply. I unfolded the white t–shirt on the dresser and stared at the ominous shape of my father’s snubnose .38. I placed one hand on the gun and raised it to eye level. It was heavier than you’d expect, like holding a brick in one hand—more firepower though. I saw Richie’s flat brown eyes in my head, imagined pointing the .38 at him and squeezing the trigger. Could I do it? I thought, maybe, maybe I could, if it meant being dead or alive. But I wouldn’t know until the time came; that’s like most things in life—you don’t know the truth of your nerves until they’re shaken, until it’s you or somebody else.

  I needed to get dressed. I wanted to be at the bar before Mathis.

  I decided to take the .38 with me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Aero Lounge was busy; Saturday night and the working crowd—if they didn’t pull the night shift—was out for some relief. I moved through the crowd and found a seat at the end of the bar. When Jackie came by I asked for a beer and, with a look, told her not to ask about my face. I knew it wasn’t the best idea to mix hard liquor and pain meds, not when I had thinking to do. But a beer, I could handle that. She brought it back and I sipped slowly, watched the door through the sweaty dancing and thick–lipped conversation of halfway drunks.

  A few minutes past ten, Mathis sauntered in wearing the same suit as the previous night. His gray fedora hung low across his eyes and he scanned the room before wading through the crowd and taking a seat next to me. I asked, “See anybody you know in here?”

  “Just you,” he said. “Looks like someone really got ahold of you.” He studied my plump face and bulging eyes, placed his gray fedora on the bar and scratched his close–cropped hair.

  “He was clear about all his points,” I said. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him it was you who got me looking for Chelsea.”

  Mathis pressed his lips together and glanced around the bar again. He nodded at Jackie, pointed at a bottle of bourbon. “I just told you about her, that’s all,” he said. “Why do you think it would matter if he knew it was me, whoever did that to you?” Jackie brought Mathis a glass of the bourbon and he lifted it to his lips, took a long, hungry sip. “I just handed you some pictures, a few receipts.”

  “It would matter because he’s the one pays your bills, am I right? I think that’s where this conversation will end up, so let’s get right to it.” I chuckled through my fattened lips and leaned in close to him. He smelled like fear, bourbon, crushed cigarettes and cheap motel rooms. “I mean, really—tell me all about it.”

  Mathis finished his drink and tapped the bar for another. “I’ve got nothing for you. Like I said before, it’s just a thing I thought I should do… To tell you about her.”

  “Because you were pals with my dad?” I said. “Or because she’s my sister?” I turned my head to see his reaction—I didn’t want to miss the look in his eyes.

  Jackie poured Mathis another drink and he brought it straight to his lips, guzzled. His eyes got big and wide and white. “Younger sister,” he said. “She’s your younger sister.” He dipped his head like a tired bird and rubbed his jaw. “That’s why I brought this to you. I thought you’d get ahold of her and figure all this out. I was trying to do a good fucking deed. For you. For Stretch… Your dad. And now, look.”

  “Is Richie your boss?”

  Mathis huffed air though his nose and sighed. “Richie Fresco—I run things for him in a couple places.”

  “Women,” I said. “Human trafficking.”

  Mathis swirled the bourbon in his glass. “High–end escorts. It starts like…” He paused and grunted. “I mean, it starts like that, yes. But most of these girls, they make good money and I know—”

  “If it was all you knew,” I interrupted. “It’s all you’d be, too.” Jackie brought me another beer and we sat there in silence until she moved down the bar. “And when did Chelsea cross your path?”

  “About a year ago. One thing I’m supposed to do when the
girls come in, if they’re American, is I try to find family links. I ask questions, get them to tell me things—it’s so I know what the risks are, that’s all. She told me she was born in Vegas, that her dad died when she was real young. The thing was, she looked like somebody I used to know and—”

  “My mother.”

  “Francie was her name. She was a good lady, but she was on the level, Palmer. She didn’t like what your dad did. And that thing, this business, it ended the two of them.”

  “And she left me.”

  “It didn’t happen like that—I guess you can imagine, your dad could be pretty persuasive when he needed to be. And, as you know now, they saw each other for years after all that… Kept on seeing each other. When Stretch wanted to.”

  “Gun and all,” I said. My mind touched on the .38 lodged in my waistband.

  Mathis nodded. “Gun and all.”

  “So, she got my sister. And he got me?”

  Another nod from him and a long sip of bourbon.

  “Is my mom still alive?”

  “Chelsea told me she died a few years back. Chelsea would have been, let’s see, sixteen or so.”

  I said, “And that explains the street life.”

  “It does, more or less.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “You should have told me she was family.” The word felt weird in my mouth: Family.

  Mathis leaned away from me and studied my face in profile. “You thought you didn’t have any family.”