San Diego Noir

He tripped over the curb and fell to his knees, heaved himself up using the streetlight pole for balance. He staggered down Newport, allowing a thought he’d suppressed up till now. The signs—the movie, his gun that appeared as though out of nowhere at the right time, the soupiest fog this year, and the others—they didn’t have to be from God. Some demon could’ve rigged them.

His pace slowed for a few steps, and the fog seemed to whirl around him. The world had turned weirder than back before Barb and Jesus, when he now and then shot dope with his biker amigos, earning himself the death sentence. Maybe he was dying right now. He walked faster, then faster, almost a jog.

Halfway down the block, he weaved through a crowd of Friday-night smokers outside The Jail, a pickup bar. He stumbled and bumped into a girl with buzzed hair, a sparkly halter, and tight jeans. She caromed into a large Filipino who was lighting her cigarette. The guy burnt his finger on account of Greg.

“Dude,” the Filipino said, and took a step toward him, but stopped when a muffled boom sounded. He returned to the girl and lit her cigarette while Greg reeled and thought the sound had to be from God. From SeaWorld, sure. But also from God. Satan wasn’t crafty enough to arrange all these signs.

He double-timed the rest of the way, across Cable Street and past the Newport Café to the walkway east of Rick’s. He didn’t look into it. Not yet. First he glanced both ways through the fog and saw nobody watching him from the porch of the hostel or the crowd a block west outside the Cave dance club or out the window of El Nopal Taqueria.

The walkway led along the west wall of Rick’s to the alley and the staircase to the second-floor apartment where Maurice had gone to live after Olivia kicked him out.

If anyone noticed him disappear into the dark walkway, Greg told himself, they’d think he was some drunk looking for a hole to piss in.

Two booms sounded. Greg stumbled backward, out of the streetlamp glow and into darkness where he slipped on an oil slick or something and clattered against a roll of chicken wire or something before he groped his way to the staircase and grabbed hold. He peered underneath it and saw the trash cans were still where he had set them during the murder game, leaving a roomy space between them and the stairs. He steadied himself by leaning against the wall to Rick’s. He gasped a few breaths and noticed a smell like beef broiling, maybe seeping out a vent from Rick’s, and another like fresh crap, so close he thought it might be what he’d stepped on.

Pulse slammed his groin and his skull. The fireworks kept booming, and Greg waited. After a minute, he checked the gun, found the safety on, released it, and leaned the barrel on the seventh step, unless he’d miscounted. To make sure, leaving the gun on the step, he squatted, reached out, and touched each step. He counted to seven. He tried to remember the equation he and James had settled upon. If he shot from between the seventh and eighth steps when Maurice’s foot touched down on the fourth, the bullet ought to slam his midsection. Or maybe he’d got that backward. “Fuck,” he said aloud for the first time since his last doctor’s visit.

Five rockets boomed in rapid succession. A man rounded the corner. Greg peered between steps. The man’s hair was silvertipped black and high on top, short on the sides. Like Maurice’s. He was smoking, but he kept the cigarette cupped so the fire didn’t illuminate his face. He wore a shiny jacket that looked like polished leather, a checked shirt, dark slacks. At the foot of the stairs, he fished in his pocket and lifted out something that jangled. A key ring. Greg nodded. A visitor wouldn’t be using keys. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.

The man hacked a cough, bent forward, and coughed again and again until he was honking like an asthmatic. He appeared to rock back and forward to the rhythm of Greg’s raging pulse.

As the man climbed to the first step, he grabbed the rail. A flurry of booms, then a dozen of Greg’s heartbeats, passed before he made the second step, but the next pair of steps came fast, as if something had warned him to make a dash.

Greg pulled. Time lost its authority. The world spun faster. Two shots cracked, a hundred times louder than the skyrockets. They echoed off both walls of the walkway. The pistol’s second kick launched Greg backward. He fell butt first on the rim of the metal trash can. The can toppled and spilled him into the alley.

The man on the steps groaned from deep in his gut. Then he hacked out something like, “Who the hell?”

As Greg heaved and pushed to stand, the groaning fell silent.