Lucky Bastard (8 page)

The destination isn’t important. All that matters is the getting out of town.

I’ve called San Francisco home for the past three years, and in spite of the problems I’ve encountered up until now, I figured I could manage to stick around for a while longer. But once you’ve been kidnapped and blackmailed by some unknown government agency that wants you to deliver thermonuclear bad luck to a Chinese Mafia overlord who has built up an impenetrable barrier of good luck and
already sent a couple of his thugs to threaten you, it’s time to think about a change of scenery.

I’m even thinking it might be a good idea to give up the lifestyle altogether. Go legit. Maybe become a full-time private investigator. Sure, it would take some getting used to, but nearly half of my income since I moved here has been of the taxable kind, anyway. So I figure I’m halfway there. Besides, if Mandy could quit the lifestyle and live the so-called American dream, I don’t see why it would be such a hard adjustment for me to make.

I’m already starting to look for a garbage can to deposit the bad luck so I can pack up and get the hell out of here when I stop.

I see Mandy’s face on Barry Manilow’s laptop screen, and I hear his voice telling me that they can do something to her, and I know I can’t leave. I can’t allow anything to happen to Mandy. Not if there’s anything I can do to prevent her from getting caught up in this. I have to stick around until I deliver this bad luck to Tommy Wong and get the government out of the picture.

I sit down on the steps of Grace Cathedral and try to plan my next move. Which isn’t my strong point. It’s bad enough to have to deal with choices like buying a car or choosing a college or picking an entrée on the menu. But when you’ve been blackmailed by the Feds, threatened by the Chinese Mafia, and hired to find the mayor’s stolen luck, which you poached, figuring out what to do next can be kind of overwhelming.

I never was good at decision-making.

What I need is an adviser. Someone to help me come up with a plan. I’d even settle for a list of Things to Do:

•
Buy groceries.

•
Pay rent.

•
Deliver bad luck to Chinese Mafia kingpin.

Even as a kid I had trouble picking which flavor of ice cream I wanted. I always felt that no matter what choice I made, it would always be the wrong one.

My father used to tell me he wondered how I managed to get dressed when I couldn’t choose between putting on my pants right leg or left leg first. Using the same rationale, he told me he never worried about catching me masturbating because I wouldn’t know which hand to use.

Which, by the way, constituted our entire conversation about the birds and the bees.

Thanks for the talk, Dad.

The first thing I have to do is figure out how to find Tommy Wong. And what to do with this stash of bad luck in the meantime.

The cable car comes rolling along California, headed toward Van Ness. I consider running over to catch it, but decide that jogging across traffic to catch a cable car at an unauthorized stop while packing extremely volatile bad luck isn’t the smartest idea I’ve ever had. Even catching a cab or the bus suddenly seems about as prudent as French-
kissing an electrical outlet, so I put the case in my backpack and walk over to Huntington Park to find a bench and consider my options. When you’ve spent twenty-five years poaching luck, you understand the risks. When you’re suddenly walking around with two ounces of low-grade hard, the risks tend to increase exponentially.

Bad luck isn’t literally hard, like granite or Homer Simpson’s skull. It’s curdled and heavy, with the odor of sour milk and the consistency and color of hot asphalt. Except bad luck isn’t warm. It’s cold, like death. Poachers call it hard because of what it does to you.

Imagine paper cuts the size of the Grand Canyon or ingrown toenails with fangs. Phrases like
industrial accident
and
burned beyond recognition
come to mind.

Not exactly my idea of a good time.

Good luck, conversely, is soft. The higher the grade, the softer the luck.

Silk gloves against velvet pajamas. Goose-down pillows on a bed at the Ritz.

But even those analogies don’t come close to its texture. Top-grade soft is indescribable. I don’t even think the gods of Olympus had anything to rival it. Except maybe Aphrodite. I bet she felt like top-grade soft.

As I sit down on a bench in Huntington Park at the top of Nob Hill, a woman walks past wearing a white tank top, her long blond hair cascading over her bare shoulders. While she’s no Aphrodite, and while no one would ever confuse Nob Hill with Mount Olympus, it’s high enough
above the fog that the August sun has actually made a cameo.

Several women in bikinis are camped out on the grass with laptops and iPods, while two shirtless gay men, one tall and black and the other short and white, compare six-packs. On the other bench to my right sits a middle-aged woman reading a paperback, one of those
Dragon Tattoo
novels, while a young mother chases her toddler around the water fountain.

I watch the young mother and think about Mandy—about what I can do to keep her out of this, about whether I should warn her, about how she’s going to be pissed off that she got dragged into my business.

We didn’t used to be like this.

After Mom died, Mandy and I got pretty close. She was eleven at the time, but even though she was two years older than me, I was already a more experienced luck poacher. Mandy tended to take after Mom. She didn’t think it was right taking something that belonged to others unless they deserved it. Which usually meant some bully at school or some stuck-up little princess who needed an attitude adjustment.

But with Mom gone and Dad emotionally unavailable, Mandy and I started hanging out together, watching out for each other, keeping each other safe. I didn’t have a lot of friends. None, actually. When you can steal luck, it makes it tough to develop any kind of camaraderie. Plus when you have that level of power at nine years old, you
tend to acquire an overdeveloped sense of omnipotence. My mouth didn’t help matters.

Over the next few years, I helped Mandy develop her poaching skills. We didn’t use the luck we stole, but just discarded it or used it to water the garden or gave it to Grandpa.

Once Grandpa died, Mandy was all I had.

In high school, during my freshman year and when Mandy was a junior, we started full-on collaborating, stealing luck from the jocks and the rah-rahs and the social elite and giving it to the kids who didn’t fit in and who got stuffed into gym lockers. Nobody knew what we were doing. Not even the nerds and social misfits we gave it to. We’d just process the luck and spike their sodas or milk shakes with it. Or bake it into cookies and give them out at band practice.

We were like social equalizers, smoothing out the disparity of the high school dynamic. Robin Hood and Maid Marian, robbing luck from the asshole popular kids and giving it to the geeks.

It was one of the happiest times of my life.

But once I started to poach for money as a sophomore, Mandy and I started to drift apart. She didn’t believe in stealing luck for personal profit, and I was starting to embrace the inevitability of my calling. The summer after she graduated high school, we hung out a couple of times and pilfered some luck from a bunch of yuppies for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t the same. When she met Ted a
year later in college, she gave up the lifestyle entirely. We didn’t see each other much after that.

Once Mandy left, that’s when I realized I couldn’t count on anyone but myself, and that relationships would only end up causing me grief and disappointment. Grandpa tried to teach me that lesson years earlier, but at the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

A few years later, when Mandy and Ted got married and I missed the wedding because I was poaching luck from a lottery winner in Iowa, Mandy called to ream me out.

“Where were you?”

No “Hey” or “How’s it going?” Just right into attack mode.

“Where was I when?”

“Last weekend, asshole.”

“I was in Iowa. Why? What are you so upset about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m upset because
you missed my wedding
!”

That’s one of those
ohhh
moments, when you realize no matter what you say it’s not going to make things better.

“Ohhh. I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”

But you can definitely make them worse.

“You forgot?”

“Yeah. I was poaching from a Powerball winner who won three hundred and eighteen million dollars in the lottery.”

It seemed like a reasonable excuse in my head but when the words came out of my mouth, I suddenly realized how petty it sounded.

“Mandy?”

“I can’t believe that poaching luck is more important to you than your own sister’s wedding.”

I tried to explain my actions, but the best I could come up with on short notice was, “It was top-grade soft, though.”
Click
. “Hello?”

We’ve barely spoken since.

The little boy running around the park’s water fountain races past me and continues his circular journey past an elderly Asian man in sunglasses and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap who has now joined the party and is doing some kind of martial arts exercises. He stands near the bench to my right, swinging his arms back and forth like a monkey. I watch him for a few minutes as the boy runs around the fountain and past the gay, shirtless men and the middle-aged woman reading her paperback.

Now the old man’s rotating his hips.

Now he’s thrusting his pelvis.

Now he’s making gestures that look like simulated masturbation.

It doesn’t seem to faze anyone else in the park, not even the mother of the little boy. Maybe the old man comes here every day and does the same thing, so now he’s just part of the experience. Still, it’s kind of creepy. In a tai chi sort of way.

On my left, a young Chinese woman in a blue bikini top and a pair of denim cutoff shorts walks up and spreads out a towel on the grass, bending over in such a way that I can tell she’s not wearing matching bikini bottoms. I consider going over to introduce myself, but that’s not exactly going to help me figure out what to do about the delivery I’m supposed to make to Tommy Wong. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to offer to rub a little sunscreen on her back.

When I turn to grab my backpack, the old Asian guy is sitting on the bench next to me.

“Nice day,” he says.

I nod. I don’t know how he got over here so fast and sat down without my noticing, but it’s a little weird. Plus he’s sitting right next to me. No buffer. No man space.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

Anyone sitting this close to me, I figure I’ve met them. Or pissed them off. Or attracted them with the bad luck Barry Manilow gave me.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “Not officially.”

Other than a slight tingling sensation in my shoulder, I don’t notice anything’s wrong until I try to respond and I realize my lips are numb and weigh about a thousand pounds.

“Blllbb,” I say.

The old Asian guy is on his phone, calling someone for help, saying he has an emergency. At the edges of my fading vision, people are looking at me, coming my way,
offering help. I’m surrounded by naked abs and bikini-clad breasts.

“Blllbb,” I say again.

I hear a siren as an ambulance pulls into view and I feel like I’m floating up into the cosmos.

The Earth spins on its axis, the planets revolve around the sun, the universe continues to expand, and I’m getting sucked into a black hole.

W
hen I wake up, I’m on the floor in a room the size of a leprechaun’s walk-in closet, with no windows and no furniture, just a liter of bottled water on the hardwood floor and a rack of fluorescent lights buzzing into my eyes and frying my brain. My head is pounding and my mouth feels like a used box of cat litter.

The clumping kind.

I close my eyes and roll onto my hands and knees, groping for the water bottle. Once I find it, I unscrew the cap and drink more than half of the contents before I realize I should probably have stopped to think if it was poisoned.

Oh, well. Too late now.

By the time I drain the last of the bottle, my headache is beginning to fade and my mouth no longer feels like it’s filled with Fresh Step. I look around the room and wonder where I am, if I’m still in San Francisco, and how I’m going to get out of here. The door seems like the logical choice,
from the other side of which I hear male voices, though they’re not speaking English. Sounds more like Cantonese.

A light switch is on the wall next to the door, which I presume is locked. The door, not the wall. Though I wouldn’t be surprised either way. But when I turn the knob, the door opens and I step into a mostly empty room with hardwood floors, wall-to-wall dust, a single window, a curtain covering another doorway, and a table surrounded by four old Chinese men playing mah-jongg.

“Mei,” says one of the old men without looking up. “Get our friend a chair.”