Stagger Bay Page 3

  “You are an old fool,” Sam said, favoring me with a pitying look. “Karl was straight edge, he didn’t even smoke cigarettes. Listen to you, believing in a cop’s lies over your own brother.

  “Uncle Karl always knew how jealous you was of him. You were the junior partner, Karl was the bad ass,” Sam said, glancing over at me to enjoy his harshness.

  “But he’s dead and gone, ain’t he? And all I’ve got now is you?” Sam asked, his voice suddenly choked. “Then I’m truly out of luck. I’m on my own here all the way. You’re useless to me, what good are you to anyone?”

  There were so many things I could try to say to that, but instead buttoned my lip. He wouldn’t trust anything that came out my mouth. If I wanted him to hear me in future I’d have to snarl in resonance with him, choose only the words I knew he’d hear rather than the ones I wanted to say – but I suspected there wasn’t going to be much opportunity for that.

  “I’ll be getting out here,” I said.

  Someone hit their horn and leaned on it as Sam swooped the Lincoln to the curb. As I got out an immaculate candy-apple red Cougar hotrod tore around us, narrowly missing Sam’s rear bumper.

  I couldn’t get a good look at the big blond man driving the cherried-out Cougar as it roared past; the morning sun’s reflection obscured his features behind the window. But his face was pointed right at me through the glare, and I had a good idea what kind of expression was on it. I was surprised he didn’t give us the one-finger salute for punctuation.

  As I stood on the curb I looked back at Sam, but he stared straight ahead as though near collisions didn’t even get his attention.

  The situation didn’t seem to call for any heartfelt goodbyes. I started walking and Sam pulled back out, blended obnoxiously into the traffic flow, and was gone.

  Chapter 7

  I was on Fourth Street, the one-way thoroughfare running south through the heart of Stagger Bay, turning into Highway 101 above and below town limits. This was the neighborhood folks called Old Town.

  Back when Stagger Bay was first founded, the second thing they did after massacring the local Indians was build Old Town, a rickety warren of wall-to-wall whore houses and bars conveniently adjacent the waterfront. By the time we’d moved up here from Oakland in the ‘90s, the original shacks and hovels of that frontier red-light district had mutated into it’s present day architecture, mainly brick multi-stories heavily retro-fitted to earthquake resistance.

  We’d come up here because the cost of living was cheap, and I thought I could finagle a job in one of the lumber mills or on a boat. Unfortunately the logging and fishing industries were already withering on the vine by that point, and Stagger Bay was pretty depressed – I’d been lucky to get the job at the soda distributor.

  Then, a few years before the Beardsleys were murdered, some bright boy decided to build the Mall on the south edge of town – half the local mom & pop businesses folded, unable to compete with those big box chain stores. That was a real stake through the heart for Stagger Bay.

  Driving through Old Town in back then was like sightseeing in a ghost town, what with all the darkened storefronts and whitewashed windows. There’d been trash in the gutters and newspapers spinning in updrafts; it was pretty run down.

  Old Town’s empty squats had been crowded with homeless transients, pan-handlers, drug addicts and other low-end would-be outlaws – up from the Bay Area chasing welfare checks. The Stagger Bay Police Department had a beat cop annex there but closed it down because there was ‘too much crime’ – that one had been laughed at on all the late night network talk shows.

  Our hookers were an especially sorry bunch, mainly speed freaks missing a few teeth and dressed in thrift-store chic. Angela always felt sorry for those working girls; she wanted to stop and do an emergency makeover whenever we passed one by.

  But Old Town had changed a lot since last time I’d seen it. Now it looked like someone had come through with a broom and swept all the wild life away. Walking down the street, all I saw was decent citizens, not a wannabe-an-outlaw in sight.

  It was also booming with new construction and renovation: Toward the waterfront the Andersen Mansion loomed above the smaller interposing buildings, sporting a new paint job. A work crew was power washing the side of a building across the street from me. On the next block a guy telescoped up in the bucket of a cherry picker was doing some kind of work on a bronze art deco façade spanning the second story of the Emporium, our sole vintage department store. A designer coffee shop and a chain bookstore were doing brisk business on the block I currently walked down, and lots of quaint little boutiques and art galleries dotted the cross streets to either side; I didn’t recognize any of them from before.

  Even though all this had nothing to do with me, it still didn’t feel too bad to see the old neighborhood on its feet again. After all, it wasn’t Stagger Bay per se that expelled me from my family so rudely; it was the featherless bipeds infesting her that did the dirty deed.

  It was a little confusing, though. Like I said before, the fishing and logging jobs had pretty much dried up years ago, small business was still limping, and we had no industry – someone was doing some real fast talking to convince this much investment in a dead-end podunk town like Stagger Bay.

  No one on the streets seemed to recognize me, which was fine. But I saw more than one person shopping or driving by that had been pretty bloodthirsty when I was on trial.

  No complaints, I was lucky to be alive and free. A backwoods place like Stagger Bay, I reckon they would’ve saved the state a lot of money in the old days; maybe just strung me up from a tree, photographed themselves smiling around my stretch-necked corpse and sold copies of the snapshot as souvenir postcards.

  Chapter 8

  I turned east on E Street and cut across Fifth, the one-way main drag paralleling Fourth in the opposite direction. I was in the neighborhood Angela, Sam, and me had once called home.

  When we first bought our house it was what realtors liked to call a ‘neighborhood in transition,’ meaning property values were low enough for a family starting out to leverage themselves a mortgage – as long as they didn’t mind drug dealers to one side of them, and nightly drunken brawls on the other. No biggie: I chastised the worst neighbors into minimally acceptable behavior after we finagled a mortgage out of my double shifts on the loading dock.

  There’d been a reason for the neighborhood’s chaos, and for all the riffraff that used to infest Old Town. Round about the time we first came here, in a celebrated class-action lawsuit resulting from Stagger Bay’s refusal to pay General Relief to qualified professional transients, a federal judge forced the county to pay the highest disbursements in the state.

  Welfare offices as far south as San Diego handed out flyers to their ‘customers,’ informing them of the windfall awaiting them up here. LA Cops passed out one-way bus tickets to Stagger Bay to the Southland’s homeless vagrants. The Big City, dumping it’s parasites in the lap of Small Town America: it was a historic mass movement of people; one that, curiously, was never discussed in the media.

  The resulting influx of aid recipients was large enough Stagger Bay quickly had one of the highest per capita percentages of people on assistance in the nation. All those high payouts had almost bankrupted the city, and put its treasury into its current downward spiral.

  Another side-effect of all those newcomers was a severe housing shortage. Rental owners capitalized on the tight market by subdividing existing homes into shoebox-sized apartments.

  For a while it was a cottage industry for local landlords to buy one rundown Victorian after another, subdivide them, and pack them as full of Section 8 Housing Assistance recipients as topologically possible – slum-lording as a growth career. That income property boom led to severely inflated home prices; outside money had gobbled up a lot of houses too, ‘smart’ investors figuring Stagger Bay’s yokel tenants could pay their mortgages and property taxes for them.

  Before we bought
the house we’d gotten a lot of dirty looks from the old family locals – they assumed we were on AFDC, part of the invading unwashed horde of big city welfare barbarians that had crowded Stagger Bay to bursting.

  I’d never been on the dole myself. When I was a kid me and Karl was all the way carnivores: we’d steal from you honest, to your face, like good thieves. But after I hooked up with Angela and had Sam, I’d always worked for a living – to my brother’s ridicule I might add.

  Still, it had been an eternity since we bought our own little slice of the American Dream here, and there were few living-wage jobs in Stagger Bay anymore. Except, judging from what I’d seen on my bus ride in, for members of the construction industry.

  I stood in front of the home that was ours once. The stucco exterior had been tan when we lived there. The new owners had painted it a bright chalk-yellow with light purple trim; it looked pretty nice, a stylish color scheme I wished I’d thought of when the decision had been mine to make. A Big-Wheel trike and other toys lay scattered around the well-tended front lawn.

  A Ram pickup truck was parked in the driveway, twin to the one I’d once owned. The only difference? This truck was red and had a big shiny steel tool locker mounted directly behind the cab; my truck had been black, and I’d never been a toolbox kind of guy. Looking back, had to admit the Ram had just been a big boy’s toy; a status symbol to help me make believe I’d made the grade.

  Studying my old house, I had the crazy notion for a second that all I had to do was step through the front door, and the past seven years would turn out to be a dream: Angela would be putzing around the kitchen, Sam would be watching TV or playing a video game, and both would smile at me as I entered, happy to see me.

  I shook it off fast. I didn’t live here anymore, and never would again.

  Chapter 9

  I headed toward the Bay. Fourth and Fifth Streets doglegged inland here and came together to form Broadway, a fast four-lane drag sprinting south between the Mall and the cemetery past a small patch of nondescript light industrials encroaching the wetlands of the Bay, past both our car dealerships and out the bottom edge of town toward SF, which was a day’s drive away on winding mountain roads. Up ahead was the place I used to work: a soda distributor supplying the entire county.

  This was the first and only straight job I’d ever worked, and I’d been surprised to find I loved it. I’d sweated those loading docks when I was a family man, spent most of my waking hours there: unloading stacks of soda cases from 48-foot big rig trailers out of the Bay Area, doing the basic split for all the delivery trucks, ensuring every little string town in a county the size of Connecticut got their daily allotment of name-brand carbonated sugar water.

  Sixteen hours a day in exchange for my own house, food on my family’s table, and no life at all. Still, it looked mighty damn good from where I stood now.

  I walked into the office and saw only two faces I knew from the old days: Bonnie, who was still a secretary after all these years; and Takeshi, a Japanese kid who’d been a route driver when I got busted.

  Bonnie gasped when she saw me and busied herself with the paperwork on her desk. She’d put on some weight.

  As for Takeshi? He hustled me out the office as soon as he recognized me. He offered a cigarette but I shook my head. He shrugged, sparked his own coffin nail, and looked across the parking lot at the shimmering tidal mudflats of the Harbor.

  I was the one who’d gotten Takeshi his job here; Angela and Tak’s girlfriend Tiffany had been coffee buddies. Tak and Tiff had come over to our house more than once for potlucks or drinks, or for card games. We’d considered them friends.

  Takeshi had put on a little weight his own self, but he still had that thick mop of black hair combed straight back Eddie Munster style. He’d grown himself a thin, scraggly little mustache and soul patch that were probably more trouble to shave around than they were worth. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd graduated to managing the distribution center.

  Today Tak appeared old. But then, I was no spring chicken anymore myself. “How are you, Markus?” he asked, exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke out the side of his mouth.

  “Well enough,” I said. “I’m just looking around the old place, seeing what’s what. How’s Tiffany?”

  He smiled, looked at the coal on his cigarette. “She’s great. You know we got a bambino now? His name is Kobi; he just turned two last week.”

  “Well hell, I’ll be sure to send something when I get on my feet.”

  “I got you a job here, Markus – if you want it.”

  That actually felt pretty damn good; I’d always had this dorky pride in how well I humped the docks when I worked here. “Well, that truck platform probably ain’t been run right for the last seven years. You know I was the best they had. I’ll bet it took three guys to do my job after I left.”

  Tak’s face put on a pained expression. “It couldn’t be the loading dock, Markus – I’d have to keep you out of sight. Janitorial or something, I’ll figure it out.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “You know I was cleared, right Tak? I didn’t do it, I’m innocent.”

  He took another drag off his cigarette, and I realized he hadn’t looked at me once since we’d come outside. He dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel, then gave me a flat look. “It’s the best I can do for you, Markus. There’s people around here I got to listen to, to keep my job. I got my own family to think of.”

  I turned away and headed toward Broadway. I heard the office door open and close behind me, probably Takeshi going back inside – but I didn’t bother looking.

  Chapter 10

  I crossed Broadway and walked uphill toward Stagger Bay Center, which had passed for a downtown shopping center back in the days of doo-wop and Petula Clark. Here were our two supermarkets, our hospital, our twin water towers, our bank, and our two elementary schools: one Catholic for the upper crusties, the other public.

  Down the block our local burger drive-in was opening up, the smell of heating grease reminding me I hadn’t eaten in a while. Clumps of students of varying ages hurried down the sidewalks en route to school. That big old Cougar, the one that had a close encounter with Sam’s Lincoln, squatted in the drive-in parking lot aimed at me like a sleeping rocket; the big blond driver looked my way, waiting for whomever.

  It was still the same all-American time warp here that Angela and I tried to submerge our family into. But now there was nothing for me in Stagger Bay, nothing to keep me.

  I was an invisible man here at best; at worst, someone this town obviously wished would just go away. Well, I knew how to oblige when I was in the mood, even if it felt suspiciously like surrender.

  Oakland looked better and better, even if I had no idea what I’d do down in my hometown once I got there. I’d come too far just to crime spree ‘til I got chopped, or drown myself in the bottle in a cardboard mansion. But I wouldn’t be in Stagger Bay anymore, which was the main thing – I wouldn’t see the reminders of my failure everyday.

  It was time for me to swing back to the Greyhound station and disappear all the way.

  Chapter 11

  Up ahead was Sam’s old elementary school. Back before I went in, sometimes I was so beat when I got off at dawn after working a double shift that I’d be hallucinating from sleep deprivation as I walked Sam to school.

  But I never missed walking him once, even though sometimes my tired legs had a hard time keeping up. The sun rising, strolling with my boy whilst knowing I’d survived everything life had thrown at us when so many of my homies hadn’t? It was magic, man.

  And whenever we got to his school and stopped at the entrance, Sam always let me squat down and give him a hug and a kiss. Every day I’d dreaded the time my son would be too old to let his daddy kiss him in public. Every day I’d known he was getting older, every day needing me a little less. I can admit now that scared the hell out of me.

  The day of my homecoming, that crisp
early morning air was wasted on me. I had no appreciation for the morning sun spilling onto my face like liquid gold. Whatever magic I’d ever felt was gone, as I strolled along examining the exposed wreckage of my life.

  I was walking past the main gate in the cyclone fence. The playground was empty, and the wind seemed to mock me as it moaned through the childless swings. From out of sight in the direction of Stagger Bay Center, I heard gunfire; multiple pistol shots that made me stop and stand in place, jolted by a rush of adrenaline as I tried to see where the unseen shooter was.

  The gunfire didn’t end; instead the pistol was joined by other weapons. I could identify the spaced booms of a shotgun, and even the stutter of what had to be something fully automatic. I couldn’t tell you what went through my mind as I listened to that invisible fire fight, other than there was no sense of relief when the shooting finished up with some sort of drastic explosion.

  I had to squint against the early morning sun when that battered blue step-van lurched around the corner a few blocks down in the direction of the shooting, its stereo system blasting out Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin.’ The van slalomed a bit from side to side and then accelerated right toward me. I was disconcerted, both at how fast it was coming on, and at how many sirens I now heard, all closing rapidly.

  A black and white skidded howling around the same corner, right on the van’s ass. The cop in the passenger seat leaned out his window and started shooting, the noise of his pistol fire slapping through the air like the cracking of a whip. The spang of rounds hitting metal proved that at least some of his shots were on target.

  My jaw dropped open, hung and dangled that way as a grenade arced out the side door of the van and bounced a few times on the asphalt. It exploded as the cop car drove over it, shredding the front tire and lifting that corner of the roller on a loud BOOM-ball of fireworks.