Among the Living (43 page)

Crab Boy. There he was in his perfectly white sneakers. The stand was busy, every stool taken, a cloud of steam engulfing the scene. A heat lamp kept the curly fries warm. The light turned the whole steam cloud red. Dante’s Crab Stand. The kid recognized Jimmy, jerked his head up in a noncommittal greeting, but never slowed the pace of slinging that Dungeness into those red-and-white paper boats. A sheet of white wax paper, a handful of crab, a white plastic fork, a tear of sourdough bread, a look up at the customer for a nod or a no, and then a wedge of lemon. Or not.

“Gimme one,” Jimmy said.

“Aye aye, Cap.” There were four orders ahead of him.

“You seen Jeremy?” Jimmy said when a stool came free.

“Who?”

“Jeremy.”

“I don’t know any Jeremy,” the kid said and made the name sound funny. “I just barely know
you
. Who’s Jeremy?”

Since they were using lines out of movies, Jimmy had one of his own. “Somebody said look him up,” he said.

Crab Boy didn’t say anything for all of a minute while he filled orders, then got to Jimmy’s.

“Where’s your metal nigger friend?” he said.

Jimmy wondered if Crabby was related to the blockhead East Bay boys trying to make Shop crack.

“If he heard you say that, he’d . . . turn the other silver cheek.”

The kid put the crab and a cup of horseradish in front of Jimmy. “You want that wine again?”

“A beer. An Anchor Steam.”

“You’re trying too hard, man,” the kid said.

Jimmy waited him out.

“I’m just dicking around with you,” Crab Boy said. Two more customers were coming up, a couple. “Jeremy’s around somewhere. He usually comes later. What do you want with Jeremy?”

“I have ten grand to give him,” Jimmy said. “Or is it twenty?”

“That’s good,” the kid said. He looked at the newcomer customers, raised his eyebrows, brightened his face a little, his version of, “What’ll you have?” The man held up two fingers to order, but a forefinger and thumb. European.

“Where ya from?” the kid asked. “Deux. Due. Dos.”

“France,” the man said. “Montpellier?”

The kid rattled off three or four lines of French, but it was mostly wrong and more than a little confusing to the French couple. But Crab Boy slung it with feeling. He was already prepping and filling the paper boats.

“Who’s next?” Jimmy said, apropos of nothing.

It took the kid out of his crab-slinging rhythm, but he tried not to show it. “What did you say, sir?”

“Who’s next?” Jimmy said.
“C’est qui, le prochain? Wer ist an der Reihe? Chi é prossimo?”
he added, for fun.

“Ask Jeremy when you see him,” Crab Boy said after another delay that showed the kid was anxious about answering wrong.

Jimmy got up, surrendered his stool to the French lady. He overtipped the kid, which was a way of insulting him, because Jimmy knew he wasn’t down here on the waterfront to make a living.

He went trolling for Jeremy.

It didn’t make any sense, but he went first to the place where he’d last seen him, the only time he’d seen him, Pier 35. Where the girls had jumped. Tonight, nobody was naked, nobody was dying. But, hey, it was early yet. There was a crowd, gathered around a man with a trained cat act, cats walking a little tightrope, jumping from perch to perch. Then he’d have them walk back and forth across his shoulders to show that they enjoyed it as much as he did. For some reason, the ringmaster narrated the show with a thick French accent, at its thickest when one cat “pretended” not to want to do this tonight, and he had to go to his knees to scold her with a finger in her face. Jimmy turned away when the flaming hoop came out.

“Have you ever
smelled
burned cat hair?” he said to a girl as he was leaving.

She gave him a smile. He had seen her in the crowd. She was alone, maybe twenty, twenty-one. Or sixteen. A blonde. Pink Juicy knits, top and bottom. Cute sneakers. There was something about her eyes . . .

But she wasn’t a Sailor. She certainly wasn’t Christina Leonidas, unless she’d adjusted to her new state faster than anyone ever before. This girl looked more or less at peace, a place few Sailors ever found.

Jimmy bought a coffee and found a bench where he could sit alone to drink it.

He wasn’t alone for long.

Meet Jeremy.

Suddenly, he was right in front of him, apparently dropped right out of the sky onto the bench across from him. Their knees were almost touching. Jimmy would have wondered if it was a gay attempt at a pickup if he hadn’t recognized him right away, what with the length of long black coat (was it a cape?) thrown over the knee. Jeremy. And here was his “support staff,” close by but not too close, three strong-looking ones ten feet away, sitting on other people’s cars. Make that four. There was Red Boots.
Five
, Red Boots’s sidekick. Good Lord, they
were
capes. Half of them wore long black capes. With silky rope ties to wrap them at the neck. New Romantics! One of them was one of the men who’d stood over Machine Shop on night one, punching him in the face.

“What’s that smell?” Jimmy said.

“You’re not in L.A. anymore, Brother,” Jeremy said. Projected. Rumbled. He had an unnaturally deep voice, like a DJ, a DJ gone bad. Unless that’s redundant. It was the kind of deep, dramatic voice that sounded worked on. Probably in front of a mirror. “
All
the senses can come into play here,” he intoned.

“You know, I’ve noticed that,” Jimmy said. “At home, I can’t smell anything. Here, it’s sea spray and patchouli and steamed crabs and . . . what’s that purple flower, out under the Golden Gate?”

Jeremy’s face was in the light. He wore a black turtleneck over black gabardine slacks. He liked jewelry. Silver. He was an
old
Sailor. Anyone passing by who didn’t know him, or who didn’t suspect anything about him, who didn’t
know
who/what he really was, would peg him for early forties. That was another thing about them. It wasn’t that Sailors didn’t age, just that they aged on their own clock and calendar. There wasn’t exactly an answer to how old he was, how old any of them were. You might as well just pick a number out of the air. Sometimes a Sailor looked ninety and had died at thirty and been in this state just ten years. Others times, more likely, a guy would look mid-thirties with fifty or sixty New Years on him. Doing the math didn’t do you much good. This one had probably been a Sailor since the 1950s. Maybe since the 1930s. At least the ’40s. Maybe he’d been down here, this Jeremy, watching the wives and girlfriends saying good-bye in the war. Picture him sidling up to them, insinuating himself into their blues, offering his handkerchief for them to dry their tears. He was a predator. He’d probably be here another hundred years.

He looked like Charlie Watts. But without the happy-go-lucky disposition.

“So it’s true?” Jeremy said.

“What’s that?” Jimmy said.

“That the Sailors of the north have, what you call it, an identifying scent.”

“I think I just meant your cologne,” Jimmy said.

“I heard the scent is rather sweet,” the other said. He was a familiar type among those on the bad side of the Sailor world, pretensions of sophistication, but a thug.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Jimmy said.

Over by the cars, Red Boots got a message from somewhere, just like the other night, another Sailor running up. There was action somewhere. It didn’t seem important enough to involve Jeremy, but Red Boots went away with the runner.

A moment later, Jimmy saw Lucy. Lucy and company actually, Lucy and the two women moving through the crowd fifty yards away.

Jimmy looked away quickly. He didn’t need for Jeremy to connect her to him.

“So who
is
next?” Jimmy said.

It was like Jeremy was ready and waiting for the line. No hesitation. “I was hoping
you
knew,” he said. “They say you’re a somebody down south.”

“You ever been down south?”

“Man of the north, tried and true, Brother,” he said. He uncrossed his legs and leaned back. He opened his thighs and hustled his balls, rearranging things in that way jocks do. And salesmen, trying to close the deal, man to man.

“What does killing a couple of girls get you?”

Jeremy just took the line like he’d probably take a two-by-four between the eyes. Rock steady.
What else you got?
That’s what it meant to be an old Sailor. And this was sure enough a salty dog. Jimmy started wondering if maybe he’d been around for the ’06 quake.

“One step forward, two steps back,” Jeremy said. “They’re in a better place, some would say.”

Jimmy had had enough cryptic bullshit to last him awhile. “I believe I’m going to get me some more of that crab,” he said.

But, before Jimmy could split, Jeremy suddenly sat up straight and lifted his nose in the air. One of his Watchers across the way perked up a second later, as if he’d gotten the silent signal, too. Suddenly they were all on their feet, Jeremy’s crew, looking around in every direction. Like hunting dogs.

And then they were gone, all of them.

A second or two later, the background noise changed. A movie sound engineer could explain it, would know all the layers, would know what had built the previous sound, the ambient resonance of the water, the waves against the pilings of the docks, seabirds on top of that, the traffic near and far, and all the ways the crowds were noising, and would know what had changed.

It wasn’t a silence exactly. It was nothing, turned up loud.

Jimmy looked over to the right. Whatever had happened, it was to the east, the Embarcadero.

He found it.

He walked into the back of the crowd. Here was another kind of audience. Jeremy and his men were already there, had already pushed through to the front.

It was a streetcar, stopped dead in its tracks.

It was a body, cleaved into halves.

It was a transit driver standing there with that nothing-I-could-do look.

And that smell in the air, spilled gore.

Jeremy dispatched his men. To Look. It was like the other night, the men circulating through the bands of spectators, staring individuals in the eyes. Looking.

Jimmy moved closer. He couldn’t see if it was a man or a woman, old or young.

Of course he thought,
Lucy.
When he’d seen her, with Sadie and Pam, they were heading this way. If they were headed anywhere. They were just strolling. Pam had a drink with a straw, something bright red in clear plastic. Sadie had her arm in Lucy’s.

It was a man. Two halves of a man.

Jimmy stepped closer.

The eyes were still open. The upper half was on its side. The lower was on its back. (Had this human being already lost the right to personal pronouns?)

The impact had torn open his pants. He had an erection. Jimmy had heard of it, a final jolt of nerve voltage through the cord, a last rude impulse. A last joke.

“Don’t you have a tarp or something?” Jimmy said to the driver.

The driver shook his head. “You don’t touch ’em. You just wait.”

Then Jimmy saw Lucy in the crowd, across, on the far side of the halved man. She had seen it, and seeing it had changed her face.

But she was moving away, or being moved away, Sadie with her arm around her, Polythene Pam coming along behind them, finishing her drink, cute as a bug.

He went after them, pushed people out of the way to get to them, but they were too far ahead of him.

He heard the newspaper land on the carpet in the hallway, against the door.

Some call it morning.

He was in the club chair with the drapes open. There was a little blue on the right side of the sky, but it was still dark. He had a glass of vodka in his hand, the glass from the bathroom, but he wasn’t drunk. It hadn’t done anything for him. He never read the paper anymore. The news always seemed to be something he’d already gotten some other way. But he got up anyway and went to the door.

It was fat. A fat paper. He let the door close against his back standing there and then held the lever and let it close quietly, with just a click. No use waking anybody.

He went back to sit in the chair by the window. He put the paper on the ledge. He’d gone to get it not for the news but in the hope it could renew the sense that the world was still out there, remind him that maybe the world wasn’t as small and as empty as it felt right now to him. The cold air from the AC ruffled the edges, made it flutter.

He turned the paper over to the front page.

It was below the fold, but there it was:

With a picture. The body covered.

Things tend to be a little dead at a newspaper on a Saturday night. They’d given the assignment to a reporter, probably somebody young, maybe even an intern, and let him or her do a feature treatment rather than just the hard news. So the first graf wasn’t the five W’s, but more along the lines of . . .

The dead man was thirty-six years old. It said so, right there in the seventh paragraph. Jimmy made a point of not letting his eyes linger over the name.

He snatched up his cell phone and called the first number on the scroll. His “client.”

“A voice from the past,” Angel answered.

“And I haven’t even said anything yet,” Jimmy said.

“You caught me. I was just getting ready for services, just getting in the shower.”

“I forgot it was Sunday.”

“It’s raining here. Maybe I’ll just go stand outside.”

“Rain . . .” Jimmy said, thinking about it.

“So what’s up?”