4

Emily woke up at dawn, freezing cold. She had no idea where she was. She saw wet leaves and dirt. Her head felt like it had been smashed with a metal pipe. She had experienced many bad mornings in her life, but this was the worst.

She was in the woods. Dirt and woods and trees. The cold was painful, like cuts and burns. Every inch of her body hurt. She knew she was outdoors, but she didn’t know where. Her mind turned over images, trying to straighten things out; she tried to trace the night. How the fuck did I end up here? The Russian popped into her mind and stayed there like a picture. She remembered his face, she remembered him looking at her. And then there was more.

The hotel, the van, the wig, the redhead, the guard, the cops, the customers; all of these images slowly rolled through her mind. She didn’t feel panic yet, just guilt. She felt guilt inside her like she was filled with black tar. She was swimming in it. What have I done? She had pointed a gun, she’d stolen, she’d yelled—she had done all these things, including the drugs: the crack, the booze and the pills (what were the pills?). She had been made into a slave. She cursed herself in her head until the pain became overwhelming, at which point she cried. Her head pounded; her hands ached with cold. For a few seconds she sobbed into the side of the canvas bag, and then she realized what it was. Her chest tightened with panic. She opened the top of the bag with her cold fingers. It was like a postman’s sack: it had a tie on the top that cinched through five holes to keep it closed. She pulled the bag open. There were stacks of bundled money: hundred-dollar bills. She stopped crying.

She got onto her knees and threw up violently. Where am I? She was deep in the bushes. Everything around her was still. The sky was beginning to turn a lighter shade of gray, but it looked green. The streetlights made orange circles in the sky. Her head hurt. She was dying of thirst. Her mouth tasted like battery acid.

She patted the bag with her hand to get a sense of the size of it: it was large and full. Fuck me. Her face was bunched up in pain; she felt like she had overdosed. It hurt to breathe.

There was another bag handcuffed to her left hand. She fumbled it open with her cold fingers and saw a black wig; under the wig she saw the bomb and the gun. The bomb was blinking red-green. She thought she could hear it ticking. Waves of fear washed through her. She tried to shake the bomb out of the bag, but it wouldn’t come out. She put her finger on the wires and was about to pull them, until she became paralyzed by the idea of the bomb exploding. She took the gun in her right hand and pulled the handcuff tight, laid the bag down on the ground so the chain was resting on the dirt, put the gun to the chain, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The safety was on. She switched it off and squeezed the trigger again. The gun fired, and her hand jerked back. She hadn’t thought about the noise. She held her hand up and the bag was still attached. She had missed. She repeated these actions again. This time she hit the chain, damaging but not breaking it. She was able to work it back and forth until it broke completely, leaving her with the metal bracelet of the handcuff and a few links hanging from her wrist. Her ears rang from the gunshots. She stumbled away from the bomb and the bag, wondering if she was going to die from the pain in her head.

She hurt everywhere. She was covered in dirt and leaves; her clothes were wet. What fucking clothes am I wearing? Her memory was murky. Her stomach felt torn open, her legs hurt. With her hand holding the gun in place, she picked up the bag of money and limped out of the bushes toward the street.

She walked along Clement Street toward downtown with the bag slung over her shoulder. Each step was a challenge. The park, where she’d fallen unconscious, was on her left; there were mansion-looking houses on the right. She had never been in this neighborhood. She wasn’t even sure she was in San Francisco. A man jogged past without looking at her. She felt like she looked homeless, like her face had finally become homeless looking. She couldn’t close her mouth. A childhood memory of three ugly boys yelling poor, poor, poor played through her mind.

A few minutes earlier a DeSoto cab had driven past her and now it came back on its way downtown. She stood in the road waving at it. The driver squinted at her and pulled up. The sun had risen.

“Where you going?” asked the driver, looking at her like he couldn’t decide if he should take her.

“Take me to a hotel on Lombard,” she said. She needed to sleep some more. She needed to sleep and hide. She needed to die from her pain.

The driver took her. He headed over to California Street. She looked at the banks as they passed by, a new kind of dread growing in her. The radio tortured her.

The driver cut through the Presidio and took her to a nondescript motel. She squinted at it, then she bent over the bag and fished out a hundred dollars for the driver and two hundred for the motel. The driver sucked on his teeth and scrutinized the money. He gave her the change. It looked like he was trying to memorize her face.

An Indian manager checked her in at the front desk. He didn’t seem to like her. He was hard of hearing and leaned in when she spoke, but away when she didn’t. She must have looked poor.

The hotel room was plain, the walls were white, the carpet was blue, and the place smelled vaguely of disinfectant, cigarette smoke, and cinnamon spray. It wasn’t as nice as the one the Russians had used, but it was nicer than the one she lived in.

She drank water straight from the tap in the bathroom and then lay down on the bed for ten minutes. A million voices spoke in her head; images came flying in her mind. Then she fell back asleep for another fourteen hours, waking only once to go through the money looking for GPS devices.

When she woke up again it was dark outside. The pain in her head and in her body had gone down, but she still felt miserable. The sound of cars driving by hummed in the room. There was a high-pitched noise, but she couldn’t tell if it was electronic or imaginary.

She made sure the blinds were closed and not see-through, then double-checked the lock on the door. She strained to listen for footsteps, but she could only hear the cars and the blood in her head. The money was under the bed; she had to lower herself down to the floor like an old woman to pull it out. She dumped the bag on the table.

Thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She had never seen anything like it. It was like the movies. She counted it, then put it back in the bag and hid the bag under the bed: $882,600.

After an hour she brought the bag with her into the bathroom and took a shower. Afterward she looked at herself in the mirror. Her head hurt. Her back hurt. Her gums hurt. Her mind was a train filled with bad memories: beatings, fights, and loneliness.

The next five days were similar to her days at the hotel with the Russians, except instead of being drugged and brainwashed, she detoxed. She began to feel somewhat normal.

She slept fifteen, sixteen hours a day. Each day the same nervous boy came and delivered food from the Dragon Sky restaurant. On the third day she gave him a twenty-dollar tip to go and get her some candy. He brought her bags of it. She drank water and slept. She stayed in bed and watched TV and ate candy.

She thought about her life. She thought about being a child. She had grown up in Sacramento. Her birth mother had been a heroin addict. She had never known her father. She didn’t have any sisters or brothers. Her mother died when she was only six years old. She had been raised by a foster mother, a woman named Stacey, who had been a good foster mom; Emily knew she had been lucky that way, but Stacey had died of breast cancer eight years ago, and Emily had never felt any connection to Stacey’s husband. There were other foster kids in the house, sometimes as many as five at a time, but Emily didn’t feel particularly close to any of them. Not close enough to call and explain her current situation. In terms of family, she was alone.

Emily tried to make sense of her time as a teenager. While she lay there in her hotel room, she tried to look over her years and come to an understanding of how she had ended up on drugs, how she had ended up in the Tenderloin, how she had ended up ripping and roaring all the time. She couldn’t find an answer. The feeling of being an outsider was all she could recall. The only feeling she could remember when she looked back at her childhood was pain mixed with boredom.

She found drugs in middle school. First, just alcohol and weed, then mushrooms, acid, ecstasy, and by fifteen she was using heroin and crystal meth. The drugs helped her deal with the pain. By using drugs she made friends. Sacramento was a good place to be a drug-using teenager. She dropped out of high school her junior year. There was nothing there for her. She got a job at a 7-Eleven. She met a boy named Malik, and, when she was nineteen, they moved to San Francisco. He was the first of a string of boyfriends who tried to pimp her out, but she didn’t go for it. She’d been in the Tenderloin ever since then. She moved from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend, scam to scam. She joined sober programs and dropped out. She’d get arrested for petty charges, and would spend a few weeks in jail. Her entire existence had become centered around trying to get high, but as she lay in that hotel room, her mind looped through random memories: she used to go to the library in Sacramento and read horror stories; she used to draw embarrassing fashion sketches in a notebook; her friends once surprised her with a birthday cake; she had been in love with a girl named Astra; Astra had a dog that wore a handkerchief around his neck; Emily wanted the three of them to run away, but they never did.

All these memories didn’t help her with her current problem. Emily dialed Pierre’s number every day from the phone in her hotel room. Each time a recording said: Metro PCS. The customer you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try your call again later.

She didn’t know why she was calling him. She told herself she was through with him. He was violent and vicious and selfish. He was a bad man. But at least he knew her. He knew who she was.

She tried to make sense of the Russians. They had used her, that much was clear. She decided they had probably planned on either killing her or simply dropping her off unconscious on some street corner. They probably would have pushed her out of the van while it was moving. She figured she’d been given just enough drugs to get her through the bank, and then what? Did they want her to overdose? Had they wanted to kill her? She wasn’t sure. She was anxious; every little noise made her sit stone still and stare at the door like a mouse.

What did they know about her? She remembered talking about Pierre at least once in the hotel, but what had she said? Only his name—and Pierre wasn’t even his real name. But there was only one Pierre, and he wasn’t hard to find. Just go to Sixth Street and ask around. Everybody knew him.

What about herself? What had she said about herself? She had mentioned being born in Sacramento. She had talked about having gone to jail in San Francisco and Alameda. Had she said she lived at the Auburn Hotel? She couldn’t remember. Had she said how old she was? Each question brought a new wave of guilt and fear. Why had she talked about herself? She normally didn’t go on and on like that. It must have been all the pills they’d been feeding her. She remembered that they had her phone. And they had taken pictures of her. Her body sweated. The television in the hotel room was playing an infomercial about an exercise machine. They had her phone. They had her wallet. They had her California ID card. The address on the card would lead them to a drug program on Treasure Island, but with the phone they could easily get hold of Pierre. Please don’t pay your fucking bill, Pierre. What would they say to him? He wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t just start talking, but still, she had to get over there, she had to warn him, she owed him that much. And besides, Sixth Street was her home. She certainly didn’t feel safe here.

She had to do something about the money, too. She sat and stared at the stacks and counted them again. Eighty-eight stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Each stack had a hundred bills, ten thousand dollars a stack. Plus one short stack of what was now twenty-three bills. She couldn’t be walking around with all that.

The money was a problem and her head was a problem. She needed some pills. Everything they had given her had worn off. She needed pills. She couldn’t think straight. She was hurting. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt. It was like the whole inside of her was fucked-up. She was so scared. She needed some relief. She needed to relax. She vowed in her head that she would not smoke crack, but she needed something, and she was rich now.

She called Jules Gunn from the hotel phone. Jules was a stripper at the Market Street Cinema. She was Emily’s best friend. Emily asked her to bring eight thousand one-dollar bills. “Yes, Jules, eight thousand.” She told Jules she would pay her sixteen thousand dollars to bring her the eight thousand bills and a bottle of pills. She had to repeat herself a few times and swear it wasn’t a joke. “That’s one hundred percent profit,” she told her. Jules was the only person Emily knew who could do something like that. She was the only friend Emily had who could be trusted. “Don’t get followed,” Emily said.

Six hours later, Jules pulled up into the parking lot of the motel. Emily snuck out from her room and jumped into the Escalade. Jules looked like an R&B singer in rehab; she was wearing a pink warm-up suit and she had big hair and bright nails. She smelled of perfume. She was pretty, but tore up, too. She kept trying to ask Emily what the hell was going on, and she looked mad every time Emily refused to explain.

“What the hell you need eight thousand ones for?”

“I lost a bet.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, mama is going to worry if her little chicken egg starts doing all kinds of crazy things.”

“I know, Jules.”

Jules didn’t turn her head. She just stared out the Escalade. “And why you at a hotel? Come stay with me.”

“I needed to get away.”

“Needed to get away. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say some man’s got you working the track. Where’s Pierre’s punk ass at?”

“Jules, I’m in a hurry, sweetheart.”

Emily gave her the sixteen thousand dollars (unbundled, ruffled and piled in a plastic bag).

“What the fuck is this?” said Jules, looking at the bag.

“It’s all there,” said Emily.

Jules gave her the pills first, then the money. Emily took a Dilaudid and kissed Jules, who leaned away.

“I’ll call you soon,” said Emily.

Back at the hotel room, alone again, Emily crushed up another pill and snorted it. She was finally feeling a little bit better. She dumped the one-dollar bills on the bed, checked again to make sure the door was locked and the blinds were closed, and began counting out stacks of ones. She made eighty stacks and slipped the bands off the hundreds and slid them over the small bills. Then she took the hundred-dollar bills and put one on top and one on the bottom of each stack. It was hard to waste all those hundreds, but you had to pay to play. Dummy stacks. It worked on TV. It cost almost twenty-five thousand dollars, but that was all good if it bought you a last ticket out, a backup plan. She filled the bank bag up with the good stacks and stuffed it under the bed. She put the dummy stacks into a pillowcase and jammed that into a closet. Always gotta have a backup plan.

Six days. She had been holed up in this new motel for six days. The only time she’d stepped out of her room (besides with Jules) was to go to the front desk to pay for another couple of nights or to get some toilet paper or plastic cups. She had been too scared and depressed to leave, but she needed to get the hell out of there. She needed to get back to the Tenderloin, back downtown, back to Sixth Street, back to her life. She didn’t feel safe in this hotel.

She had to change her look first. She stood at the door and talked herself up until she had the courage to walk to the Walgreens on Lombard. The walk there was a nightmare. She still didn’t feel right, and she had left the gun in the hotel. Everything was scaring her. She felt weak, like she had the flu. People seemed to be staring at her. She felt like men were following her. Tall men were standing everywhere, talking on cell phones and looking at her. Every car was an SUV. Every car was a van.

The Walgreens was all bright lights and endless aisles and Filipino women working and tall blond ladies in exercise clothes drinking big bottles of water. The aisles were too small to let anyone pass. She kept bumping into things. She finally found a large black duffel bag and put it on over her shoulder to test it out. The price tag said two-for-one. She grabbed another. She found a black San Francisco Giants jacket, a matching baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and some black sweatpants. She picked up some dark sunglasses and some scissors and paid for it all feeling like she was committing fraud. Even with all the new money, she still felt poor. It was the most she had ever bought in a Walgreens—in fact, it was the most she had ever bought in a store. On the way out she stopped near the door and put on the cap, glasses, and jacket.

Back at the hotel she went into the bathroom and began snipping at her hair. She tried to keep its general girlish shape intact, but it didn’t work. She ended up with a short, punkish cut. She looked like a crazy little boy with lady skin. She put on her sunglasses and looked at herself. She put on the hat, lowered the bill down. She looked like one of the dykes who lived at the Auburn; like a little Mexican boy-dyke.

She picked up all the hair from the sink and wrapped it up in a ball of toilet paper and put it into the trash. She put the turtleneck, the blue sweater, and the pants from the Russians into the trash, too. They were hateful clothes. She threw everything into a Dumpster in the parking lot.

She put the hundred-dollar stacks in one duffel bag and the stacks of ones in another. The bags felt equally heavy. She put the empty canvas bank bag in the Dumpster with the clothes and the hair and moved the other trash around to hide it. She drank some water and ate some candy. God bless Jules Gunn, she thought. God bless Jules Gunn.

After walking through the room with the Indian manager she was given her cash deposit back. He didn’t seem to notice the haircut or the new clothes. He just nodded and nodded.