Grover City… Mon. 05:00: It was in a borrowed (classic-yellow-1963-Corvette) Stingray, that Nick parked at a spot in an
industrial warehouse area at the tracks on Front Street. Facing Atlantic City
Avenue thinking… looking up at the street sign as he waited… he’d been to the
real-deal Atlantic City and this street looked more like any other in a
semi-industrial area. He’d wanted to meet one of his few heroes, Donald Trump,
at the opening of the Taj Mahal in 1990. He never met the Donald but had blown
a couple grand at the roulette. It was well worth it to him… just knowing he
was there in the middle of it… but this deal? It was far too risky. A couple of
cholos from Santa Maria… he owed them a couple of bundles of bills. It was,
like Atlantic City in that he took a gamble with his life to meet them here.
The classic Stingray was car show ostentatious,
but that’s why he’d borrowed it… he had this meeting…well, sort of borrowed it…
from one of Miguel’s boys, a nephew … a Heavy in Oxnard. The Heavy slept… well,
nodded out after they’d… oh shit… maybe he’d O.D.'d… oh shit, maybe? Shit, shit,
shit, things were piling up.
What the fuck? An hour and a half later the now
familiar black Mercedes came around onto Front Street a block away after
six-thirty. He was getting nervous. This was supposed to be meeting with the
cholos… making him wait... they never made him wait this long... oh, there they
were… He caught sight in the rearview mirror, an Escalade with tinted windows
pulled up behind him... right up to his bumper. Something was terribly wrong.
The Mercedes came up alongside, beginning a
maneuver meant to block any exit. Nick’s instincts for ambush were well honed.
He floored the Vette and tore out of the spot like a mouse from a cat's paw. It
was useless to give him chase on the flat, but he bottomed out on the rough
side streets where the Escalade had an advantage for clearance. Regardless, he
bounced, sparks flying out from even the tiniest ripples… potholes… and RR
crossings… zigzagging in and out of and taking every turn… winding his way
through town and never to give the boyo's behind a chance to open-up with one
of those Mac 11's they packed. Once he hit the onramp, the chase was over, but
he knew that this wasn't the end of it. They would find him even if he could
put a rocket on this car and escape to Venus.
Mon. 07:20: Adrienne stood on the balcony, in a
cotton night shirt, looked back at the lump of sheets over some hunk of a man
snoring so loud he had awakened her. She no longer wondered who he might be, or
where he came from, or if she ever wanted to see him again… It was her house
and her life, and he could fuck off for all she cared… whoever he or she was.
If she let one of them stay for breakfast, they always thought they owned her…
damned men… and dykes too. A warm body was better than any tube of battery
powered plastic… but only for those moments when she needed it. A set of French
doors opened to the small balcony with a view of the city where she loved to
stand and stretch after first getting out of bed. She stepped out, shutting the
doors behind her to muffle the sounds of snoring and let the morning breeze
through the thin cotton… She saw Nick park the Stingray down the street and
coming on foot up towards the house.
“Good morning, Nicky," She spoke so softly
she wondered if he heard her.
He saw her lightly draped body standing
statuesque above him, he answered, "Are you alone?"
"No, I have company." She thought he
was stopping by for a quickie.
It was a courtesy they had worked out for their
dalliances. He would enter the back door and slip up the stairs towards her
room without disturbing Alesandro. She had all the smack she’d ever want from
Nick's business. The trade-off, and there always was one, he had access to her
house if no one was around and, when she was in the mood, her body. It is
almost every man's pornographic fantasy to be intimate with what was once
called a nymphomaniac but that doesn’t last long when the fantasy catches up
with reality. Since Nick quit heroin he became weary of it. He no longer fed on
the drama and, after a few occasions he'd jumped in her bed, he became more
than willing to comply with the house rules. There usually wasn't any sex
happening at any rate. Junkies usually shoot up and lay around in a fog no
matter whether the original intention was to have an orgy. The juice in the
syringe was the orgy... at least the orgasm they sought. Truthfully, Adrienne
knew Nick’s secret... a secret he had kept from even himself. He had begun to
admit to himself that he preferred the intimacy of men. It met his primitive
needs for spontaneous sex.
Adrienne thought she might have loved Nick for
a few split seconds when she looked down on him standing alone in the yard and
wanted to hold him. It was something about the way his face showed fear.
“I can’t stay,” he whispered loud enough for
her to hear.
“What’s wrong, Nick?”
“There’s trouble. Go now. Get out of town...
you and Alesandro... go back to Biarritz for a few weeks... months, have an
agent sell the house... get out for good!” he spoke loudly above a whisper.
She watched him walk out of the yard and out of
sight down the street. Her first inclination was to think Nick was threatening
her before it dawned on her that he was warning her of a threat. Back inside
the bedroom she woke up the lunk of flesh in her bed, “Time to get up!”
“Wha….?”
“I said, it is time to go.” She threw his jeans
at his face as he started to say something. It shut him up. He realized by that
mildly hostile gesture that he ought to best get going.
Adrienne returned through the French Doors to
the bedroom. She was considering the urgency of Nick’s alarming suggestion, “Go
to Biarritz?”
The lunk in her bed thought she was talking to
him, “What?”
“Just go, Damnit,” She was tired and needed to
sleep. Nick was in trouble, but she thought that she had nothing to do with his
troubles now that he was out of the house. Besides, Alesandro was there.
The lunk gathered up his clothes as he left the
room passing Alesandro in the hallway.
Alesandro knocked on her bedroom door,
“Adrienne... Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine... he’s gone now.”
“Who, Nick? I heard him from my room.”
“Yes, Nick. I think he’s paranoid about
something...” she paused and added as an afterthought, “or in trouble. No big
deal.”
Alesandro considered his options but decided it
was just some more meaningless drama, “Good then, we are out of coffee; I’m
taking a walk to Ro-Co after I meditate.”
“Bring back a pound of Mecca blend, please.”
she said groggily while opening a foil of tar.
Mon. 07:30: Twists and turns…Max, after the
graveyard shift on a foggy, June-gloom, morning around seven thirty, was home
sitting at his desk. A yellow Stingray flew by on the street towards the loop
of the cul de sac where Anacapa Street dead-ended. It drifted in a spin and
smacked squarely into a parked van… one of the ones that get moved from place
to place throughout Santa Barbara by, let’s say, the mobile-homeless
population. It smashed up the side of the van. The Vette looked completely
totaled. The owner of the van came out scratching his head, as if he’d just
been woken up, and wondering what in the fuck hit his truck that hard. Then Max
saw the driver crawling out of the classic car, the gnarled and scraggly
bearded man from the van waved his arms in the air as he approached and went
into a ballistic staccato, “Hey, you yup-fuck… what in the hell do you think…
you got insurance… let’s see a license!”
He stopped dead sentence for good reason. The
guy getting out of the car was huge by most standards and not at all pissed.
Max, though he was wearing his reading glasses and anything beyond two feet was
a blur, he could tell it was Nick by his size and gate. The tall blur walked
over to the shaggy owner of the van and thumbed out what must have been some
bills, what was most likely, c-notes.
“Go ahead and fix it or get a new one… will
this do?”
“Sure, that’s a nice car you whacked, eh?”
“You never saw me. You were asleep in the van…
right?”
“Right.”
Max switched eye glasses and saw all the
action. He watched Nick casually walking towards Max’s place. Nick had a grin
on his face that said he cared not a lick about the totaled car. Max had no
desire to get involved in any tangle of deceit that loomed over Nick, and
dreaded what would follow the knock at the door. Standing behind the screen on
the porch, Max said, rather than asked, “What do you want now?”
“Max, old pal, let me hang with you. I have to
think.”
Max unhooked the lock on the screen door and
stepped aside, letting Nick in.
“Damned Nick, what was that all about?” As he
said that, a black Mercedes with tinted windows pulled up next to the ruined
Corvette Stingray.
“I just need to chill a few minutes. Trapped in
a fuckin’ cul de sac. But I’ll be going. Is there a back door to this dump?”
“What the fuck were you thinking? You knew this
is a dead-end street.”
“Yeh, yeh, I know. Say, you’re an NRA guy. Do
you have a piece?”
“No.” Max wondered what kind of fool would tell
anyone that anyway. Adrienne had given him a Walther PPK that Nick kept hidden
at her place, but Max wasn’t about to give it back, “What, a dope dealer that
isn’t packin’ heat?”
He explained as he peered out the side of the
window at the scene, “Shit, I know. I left the wreck so fast I forgot to take
it out from under the seat. I was going to cut through the paint shop down
there. I forgot it was blocked-off by the new underpass.” He watched the
homeless camper handling something from under the seat of the wreck, tuck it in
his belt, turned to walk away, and pulled his shirt over it at the arrival of
the Mercedes.
The homeless guy was shrugging his shoulders
and pointing towards the paint shop when a squad car slowly crept down the
street towards the scene. The paint shop was in an old car dealership show room
built with beautiful Moorish style arched arcada and brickwork in the old days.
It was converted to a labyrinth of shops that lined a passageway new Cadillacs
were once driven through to the showroom or off the lot onto State Street. At
one time it opened at street level, but the newly finished freeway had dropped
the street down for the underpass. This took away Nick’s planned getaway.
“C’mon, is there a back door?”
“You gotta move the fridge in the back…”
blocking the back door for security purposes, Max had one of those small
fridges college kids keep in dorms. The back door had no lock from a hallway
between apartments in the old house and it would have taken some strong
shoulder to break through to Max’s domain.
Nick shoved the fridge to the side with ease
and pushed the door open. “Thanks Max, I owe you one,” and he was gone.
From where Max watched it almost looked as
though the cops in the squad car waited while the Mercedes turned through the
loop and slowed in front of his place. It was only a few minutes, if even that,
but, it was as though hours had passed before it finally sped off. Max watched
and could have sworn the silhouette shadow behind the tinted glass of the
Mercedes was that of the old etchings he’d seen of Torquemada, the Grand
Inquisitor. He sensed the horror he could be facing but was strangely calm
about it. He wondered, “How much more trouble would I go through because of
this prick, Nick? Hadn’t I already sat in a jail cell for the bastard?”
Max didn’t know much of what Nick had been up
to. “Hell, what did I actually know about Nick’s bullshit lately?” He didn't know where that son of a bitch acquired a Corvette Stingray or anything about
these characters in the Mercedes, he just knew they weren’t Boy Scouts.
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