San Diego Noir

He fetched a Diet Slice and carried the shoe box out front. In the fog, thick and greenish, Greg sat on the folding beach chair with plastic slats. He smoked a few hits and discovered that tonight the weed’s first effect was to revive the sucking pain in his liver. He popped the tab on the Slice to lube his dry mouth and to wash down another Vicodin.

Green lights the size of fireflies began flitting around him. With each hit, more tiny green lights appeared in the fog. By his last puff they were a legion. Harbingers of death, he imagined. To soften his rising terror, he muttered, “I’ll shoot the bastards,” and reached down to pick up the shoe box, on the porch floor at his feet. But when he leaned, he toppled forward, and only braced his fall by grabbing a post, just short of a nosedive off the porch into Barb’s tulips.

The folding chair had collapsed behind him. He knelt, turned and unfolded the chair, set it upright, and sat in it with the shoe box on his thigh. He ripped off the duct tape, tore off the lid, and tipped the gun onto his lap. It was wrapped in a dish towel, which he unwrapped before he remembered that when he packed away the gun, he’d put a round of six cartridges with it.

Without thinking why, he loaded the gun. But the instant he gripped it with his finger on the trigger, even before he catalogued the reasons or checked the time, he knew why.

Suddenly, as though he’d gotten bewitched, turned from a frog into a prince, he saw everything with different eyes. His chest swelled with tangy air, though he couldn’t remember breathing. His brain dismissed all the dread, gloom, and sorrow for a lifetime of wasted opportunities and lame decisions. He believed the act he was created to perform had presented itself. For once, he felt like a champion.

But the next instant he thought, Murder?

He wasn’t going to kill anybody. The idea was just another of his fantasies, like when he used to imagine playing lead guitar for Bob Dylan even though he only knew six chords and lost the rhythm a few times every song he tried to play.

The guy he ought to shoot was himself, he thought.

He tried to remember the last time he’d gotten this mired in despair. If he could remember, maybe he’d also remember a way to climb out of it.

“David,” he muttered. King David made a habit of sinking in despair and climbing out. David was usually in danger. Because he was always killing people. “Saul killed his thousands but David his tens of thousands,” he quoted. David killed people because God told him to.

Greg lay the gun in his lap, sat motionless though the heat surging through him made him ache to move, and counted the signs he’d been given, maybe by God.

First, the movie flier that reminded him of the murder game. Barb had posted that flier. She never posted fliers. Next, Barb and Chez fell asleep at eight-thirty, when every single other night Chez would throw a fit if they tried to put her down before the SeaWorld fireworks.

And a few minutes later the gun appeared, after so long he’d forgotten he owned the damned thing.

“Man,” he mumbled, “how many signs do you need?”

He jumped up and stuffed the loaded gun into his baggy front pocket.

God wasn’t urging Greg to bomb abortion clinics or risk hurting innocent people. Nobody could call Maurice innocent. Only a few years ago, he was Pete Pinella’s “bodyguard” until the gangster went to Pelican Bay on a murder charge.

Greg rushed inside. He strode to the kitchen and looked at the clock. Ten minutes before ten. Another sign. The SeaWorld fireworks would blast off at ten, just when Maurice was supposed to leave his bartender shift at Rick’s Lounge, and just enough time for Greg to get there. If he hustled.

Greg tiptoed through the living room to Chez’s bedroom door and turned the handle slowly until it stopped. He pushed the door open wide but only leaned his head and shoulders into the room.

Gaping at the beauty of his girls, the soft cheeks, glossy hair, the moons of their eyelids, he wondered how such a loser as himself had won the mother and helped create the daughter.

He crept out of the house, staggered down the porch steps, then steadied himself. He tried jogging, but the slap of his feet on the pavement spooked him.

Down the hill in thickening fog, he remembered Abraham. God commanded the patriarch to sacrifice his son not to get the deed done, only to test the man’s faith.

Giddy with relief, he thought God wasn’t going to make him kill Maurice, only make sure he was willing.

Between gasps to catch his breath, he told himself, Just go there, get ready. Then God would show up and stay his hand, like he did Abraham’s.

The red light at Sunset Cliffs Boulevard was a dull splotch in the fog. He listened for a moment. Though he knew that in fog he might not hear an approaching car, he jogged across, hoping nobody was crazy enough to drive lights-out tonight.