San Diego Noir

She decided that the best thing to do was to pretend that she didn’t know what he’d been up to, and to not tell him about her own plans. Wait until her lawyer told her he had “all the ducks in a row,” whatever the ducks might be.

The light was on in the living room, and she thought she saw movement behind the curtain.

“Spare some change?”

Kari flinched, her heart pounding. “You scared me.”

The bum wasn’t leaning against the telephone pole. Instead, he stood next to it, close to the fence that surrounded her house.

“I need some money,” he said. “So I can get something to eat.”

“I gave you some earlier today.”

“Bitch!” he whispered. “Deceiver … full of fucking lies …”

What was that in his hand? A knife?

“I cast you out,” he said. “I reject you.”

He clutched the knife, the tip a short lunge from her belly.

She stared at it.

“Okay,” she said. “But here’s some food.” She slowly lifted her hand, the one holding the bag of Chinese takeout. “If you’re hungry. It’s good. You can have it.” She held it out to him.

For a moment, they both stood there, frozen, him with the knife, her with the bag.

She heard the front door of her house creak open, a sliver of light spill out. Was that David?

Suddenly, the bum started to sob. “I’m sorry,” she made out. “I’m sorry. I listened to the Shining One. He said you were a fallen Host. He said he’d give me gold. But he lied again. He always lies. I asked for food, and you fed me.”

The sliver of light vanished. The door had closed. David must have seen her, seen her and the bum. But he stayed inside.

What’s happening here?

An easy out.

She wasn’t sure she was thinking it through, exactly. It was more like the thought just came to her.

“I know how that is,” she whispered back. “Cause the Shining One, he lives with me. Right inside that house.”

The bum nodded, his head bouncing up and down, like he wasn’t in control of it. “Yes. Yes, he does. He speaks to me. He told me lies about you.”

“I want to get him out of there,” she said. “But it’s hard to make him leave.”

He nodded again, and even in the dark she could see the change that had come over his face. He’d been like one of the cats she fed. Now he was more like a dog on the beach, and she’d just thrown him a bone.

“If you cast him out, he can’t lie to you anymore,” she said.

One way or another, she was through feeding that bum.

MOVING BLACK OBJECTS

BY CAMERON PIERCE HUGHES

Mission Beach

May 2007

FIRST PROTOCOL: FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE

Moses Johnson takes his job way too personally. He knows it, his colleagues know it. It’s why his wife of twelve years divorced him four years ago, though it was mostly a peaceful divorce and they’re better friends than they were a couple and he’s a good dad. See, people who go into Moses’s line of work go through steps. First they do it because they need the work. Then they start taking it seriously as if it’s their patriotic duty, and before you know it, it becomes, “Asshole, you owe me the money.” Moses skipped the second step and embraced the third step—by his sixth month. He cultivates looking imposing. Black suits (always black), blood-red tie, and shoes so shined that they could probably blind someone. He doesn’t wear sunglasses, even when the temperature is at its highest and the sun at its brightest. He was hit in the face with shrapnel on a classified op somewhere overseas which makes his left eye droop. It makes him scarier when he’s after a deadbeat. A deadbeat know he’s screwed if he sees Moses coming toward him with the attaché case he always, always has with him and that look in his eye like when Michael Jordan has his sights set on the basket and there ain’t nothing in this world that’s going to stop him. When looking for someone, you become your mark, you eat where he eats, you talk to who he would, you order his drink and eat the same food. It’s the reason Moses is so good at this, he can think like a deadbeat. He’s close friends with his ex and he spoils his daughter, who was born with spina bifida and is in a wheelchair, rotten and visits with her every chance he gets. You can see him racing her in her chair all over the boardwalk most afternoons. It’s his military special ops background. Be All You Can Be extended to all parts of his life.

He’s been working for The Guys downtown for twenty-one years. He’s forty-four.

The current deadbeat he’s looking for owes tens of thousands of dollars. He’s an Internet pornographer named Theodore “Teddy” Bear.

“Teddy’s a piece of work,” George Leedom, his boss, had told him three weeks ago.