The hustle. Moses was familiar with the notion. He’d been under similar stress before. A firearm sale gone wrong in Hayward. A new gun with old heat, found under the driver’s seat of his Honda Accord, some time ago. A disgruntled customer demanding a follow-up meeting—right away—across the Bay. In his formative years, he’d sweat right through his Old Spice and consider the pros and cons of suicide by way of the Golden Gate Bridge.
But it was never life or death anymore.
It wasn’t even living or dying.
It was just a mode.
Something kicked on inside, like the ventilation in that damned, foul police station, and for a few precious minutes, Moses became an observer in his own human vessel, a man in a movie theater, while self-preservation made instinctual decisions on the big screen.
He watched himself slide around passers-by on Stockton before ducking into a nondescript gift shop with Chinese symbols on the storefront awning. Inside, he plucked off a medium-sized tourist T-shirt (reading “ALCATRAZ,” despite the fact that he was nowhere near the prison island). He fingered through cargo shorts looking for a size 30″ waist. They didn’t have it. It was 29″ or 32″. He settled for 29″. The tight fit would keep him focused. A nod to those aforementioned formative years, the Moses of the past, the one who was thinner and dumber. (Or maybe he was smarter then.) He selected a cheap pair of aviator sunglasses, the kind that David Copperfielded your eyes. He looked for shoes. There were no shoes. The Central Station hand-me-downs would have to do.
The gift shop had no dressing room. Instead, Moses feigned interest in novelty pens on a bottom shelf at the far end of the shop. Crouched behind the four-foot-tall partition, he replaced his shirt and pants, one by one, with his new out-of-town identity. A cutscene now. Moses, formative again, young again, working the evening shift at a Walgreens, finding an old man in a corner, half-dressed, in the pets aisle, pissing on cans of dog food, making eye contact with Moses—secure, maintained eye contact—until he was done, and he left. Moses filed the memory away, noticing only now that he was still in open view of the gift shop’s front window where a homeless man gawked at him. Moses pulled the cargo shorts over his white briefs with new purpose.
The homeless man, through the window, made kissy faces.
The people in this damned city.
He met the cashier at the register, who appeared bewildered at Moses’s new wardrobe but didn’t speak enough English to voice his dissent. Moses paid with his new funds. Singles. Fives. Tens. Twenties. Hundreds. As crisp as Violet’s cereal right out of the box. He fashioned a few singles.
“Change?”
The cashier took the bills and punched open the register.
“Quarters.”
The rest of the cash would be enough to get him out of harm’s way. Perhaps enough to get his family out of the city. The state. And then what? And where to?
If it came to it, he would know where to find more. More money. More security. More of more. Moses had two storage units in Dogpatch, a San Francisco neighborhood south of here. One was filled with fire-arms. Product.
The other storage unit had one item inside. An insurance policy, in its own way. The most valuable item in the Bay, provided you knew who to sell it to, and there was only one buyer. It was Moses’s big, red emergency button.
That wouldn’t need to be utilized quite yet.
“Christine. Oh, good god …” he would say into the payphone later. “I can’t tell you many details at the moment, but just get a pen and something to write on and put this down. No. Better yet. Don’t write this. Just remember it. Keep this in your head, Christine. Ten. Thirty-one. Zero. Eight.” He would repeat the number two more times for good measure. “It’s a combination,” he would say. “I can’t tell you what for. Not yet. Things are going to come to light in the near future. I can’t tell you what. Not yet! But just remember those numbers.” She would repeat them through the receiver. “Yes. That’s right. Now … You love me. Goodbye, Christine.”
That’s what he would say.
He paced around an unused payphone a few blocks over like it were a maypole, all the while thumbing two quarters in his palm. Then he plugged them in. Then he dialed Christine’s cell phone number. It rang. Then it didn’t.
“Hello?” asked a feminine voice. Christine.
Ten. Thirty-one. Zero. Eight.
“Is someone there?” she asked.
But his words flushed through him like rain water down a gutter spout.
“I hear … someone?” she tested.
He hung up. He couldn’t speak to her. He couldn’t speak to Violet either. If he did, they’d instantly be involved. In whatever this was. Inserted into his terrible universe. They’d be changed, somehow. (Morphed into a particle or a wave, that stupid inspector might say.) At least they were alive.
Moses rustled for more quarters in his front pocket and silently deliberated who his secret admirer might be. He felt like a girl on a stool in the Dating Game using ethereal feelers to find her ideal partner just on the other end of an invisible wall, but in the absence of silly questions, all he had was hunches. Clients. Customers. Organizations. Men’s Clubs. No gangs. (Moses would never affiliate himself knowingly with criminal activity.) But who?
Four Fingers’s Crew. The Oakland-based organization was a favored client. They had a standing arrangement to purchase three dozen SIG Sauer P2s per month. That’s a high-capacity, very dependable pistol. A wonderful tool. He had no idea why Four Fingers felt he needed quite so many. They must enjoy target practice very much. But would they really arrange for Moses’s escape? Did a man like Mr. Fingers, who maintained a steadfast malice toward golden badges, have the connections necessary?
The High Corner. Those weekend-warriors out of Fillmore were a gruff lot. It was probably their friends that made them that way—they were known to associate with Bloods and Crips elsewhere in the state (and also in prisons). God knows why. He liked to set them up every once in a while with Interarm Star 9mms. A cozy, functional firearm. Good in the hand. Great on your hip. A relaxing tool out on the shooting range. Their accountant was known to associate with certain police types. Friendship mattered to them. They cared about family. A venerable bonfire of love and neighborly goodness. But did they care that much for one Moses Dillard?
The Cambos. Name shortened from the Cambodian Peoples. An Asian youth organization interested in keeping their Bayview community clean and safe. They often requested orders of JA-25s in bulk. The Jimenez brand. Small. Light. Poor aim though. Charitably, a piece of junk. He’d tried to direct their attention to better models, but alas, they treasured economy over accuracy. The Happy Meal of firearms. (No wonder they had that riot.) No, no. Too distant, too decentralized, too gunked up in short-term thinking to have choreographed Moses’s release.
The Mighty Kings. He’d just begun to sell to them. The Chinatown-based organization was so insular, so unknowable. They only bought bullets. Jacketed. Hollow point. The kind that kills people. More than you need on the hunt, really. But there’s a hobby for everything. They’d made it abundantly clear that they did not depend exclusively on his wares; their involvement in his freedom felt like an unlikely scenario.
The Rangers Motorcycle Club? Now, that was an interesting one. The Rangers were older now, but once upon a time, they ran the Bay area. San Francisco. Oakland. All of it. They sold firearms, narcotics, women … But time passed them by. They had neglected to foster a new generation of scoundrels. The ones they birthed gave in to their own intoxicating drugs. Now they were relegated to the edges of the west coast, or east of the Bay rather, in towns like Pleasanton—hardly known for its villainy. Individuals like Moses had arrived in their vacuum, selling to honest gun lovers who needed product. He had heard rumors of the Rangers. He’d heard they’d wanted to return to the marketplace. As well they should; a rising tide raises all boats, kind of thing. But even though Moses was an honest businessman, even though he would never encourage nor actively contribute to violence, could it be—just to entertain the prospect—could the Rangers find a man like Moses more attractive on the loose than in a cell?
Did they—or any of these organizations—have that kind of access to Central Station?
Were they—or any of these organizations—also responsible for the taxi cab just a few nights earlier?
He dared to remember. A cutscene now. Moses sat on the futon couch in his apartment. He watched the news. Violet played with her Legos in the corner. There was a knock on the door. “Don’t open,” the voice said beyond. It was male. “There’s a car downstairs,” the voice said beyond. “Go to it.”
He had looked through the window. He saw the car. A taxi cab. Its number.
“Two. Two. One. One,” he’d told Violet.
He had opened the apartment door. No one was there. He went downstairs. He found his taxi. Better to listen than to go off book.
Who had been behind that door?
Who had wanted Moses out of his apartment?
Who had wanted Moses out of his jail cell?
And where did they want him now?
Perhaps the taxis were the best place to start asking. It was their business after all. He just had to find the right one.
***
Business people in the Bay are the vestal virgins of the hearth, the blood flow, the way of the universe, a necessary operation to continue the not-inevitable ascent of progress. San Francisco proper was built on business. The dreams of Easterners gone west, or those from the Far East gone further east until they’d come out the other end. Commerce founded on gold. Trade. Evolved over time into subsections of trade, and more subsections, and yet more, until over two million people came and went and bought and sold, on the daily, and took form like the bricks of a holy temple. This was the Bay he remembered. But bricks need clay. The temple must be fastened. This is the crux of the Bay’s economy. Bricks and clay. The bricks are the businesses we recognize. Retail stores. Restaurants. Manufacturers. Licensed and regulated services. The stuff you find on Yelp. The clay are the businesses we don’t recognize, yet they keep the structure intact: i.e., people like Mr. Fingers, with his many exploits; i.e., people like La Mitad, R.I.P., with his gambling house; i.e., people like Moses, with his amateur hobby.
And it meant the taxis, too.
What the inspector didn’t know.
Things had been easier prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis. Before that, you could arguably draw a line all the way back to the nineteenth century, when a few “clay” organizations ran the boarding houses and the bars and the shipyards. But alas, all things go to shit.
The crisis affected the Bay’s clay in two ways: (1) clay business people were putting their clay money into brick houses. Dozens of houses per person. Seemed like a smart investment, until it all fell through, and the money vanished. The drop in general liquidity throughout the Bay’s cities left buyers with a lot of product they couldn’t sell. It put young men out of jobs. And unemployed young men were bad news. It was the single biggest shake-up among clay businesses since the end of World War II. (2) Smartphones changed everything. Suddenly, brick businesses that had owned footholds in the industry found their comfortable status upended by the so-called “shareable economy.” Delivery services, ride-share services, streaming services, all of it removed the institution and put the business in the hands of contractors. The shareable economy wasn’t brick, nor was it clay; it was human, for better and for worse. That left brick businesses scrambling to find new forms of income, else the brick disappear. And so they broke down the bricks to become clay.
Such was the fate of the yellow taxi businesses. They created a service called the Herald. A clay business. The Herald would, for a fee, deliver a message—any message—from one waypoint to another. Think of it as e-mail, except there was no paper trail, no record. And in a way, mankind’s great work of art—business—took new form yet again. All because taxis “got the message.”
One night, just a few nights after Charles Hattaran died, Moses became the message. Someone had hired the Herald to escort Moses around. The message being no message at all. The absence of a message, if you’d like.
Now Moses needed a message. He needed to get one and he needed to send one. And he needed it fast, before Moses became the hottest piece of police business discovered running loose around the city.
He watched yellow taxis fly down Columbus Avenue until he spotted a windshield wiper at half-mast. A Herald signifier. It slowed to the curb next to him. The driver inside was a woman. Latina. In her thirties. Tired. Had probably been at this all night.
He opened the rear door and sat down. The woman took off.
“I have a message,” he began.
She shut off the meter and eyed him through the rear-view.
“I need a place,” said Moses. “A, uh, a safe house. Anywhere. Money is no object. Quickly.”
“Who’s it for?” The message, she meant.
“Anyone. The corkboard.” That was code for a general message. It’d go out to a number of known “safe house” entities, each of them a clay business, and they’d get back to the Herald, and the Herald would get back to him.
Moses pawed three twenties out of his wallet and held them out to the driver between the seats. She took it. She pulled over.
“I’ll remain in the, uh …” He scanned the street. He was on Chestnut. A cheap restaurant called Maxine’s was right there. Little corner shop under the big, protruding bay windows of a residential complex. He told her he’d be inside.
She drove off after he stepped out.
“We’ll remain on the air here as the situation develops,” scratched the reporter over the radio inside Maxine’s. It was half-concealed behind the window into the back-kitchen. “What we can tell you right now is that shots have been fired in Oakland near the old California Hotel at the intersection of San Pablo and 35th. It’s believed to be two rival gangs and a large number of both. As soon as we know who exactly …”
The radio scratched out again and the short order cook must have had enough because he changed it to Top 40.
Moses sat at the counter facing the front window and forked at a fatty steak and cold eggs. Even coupled together, they tasted like trash, about as appetizing as whatever pissing contest was occurring in Oakland. At least the whiplash across the water would help overshadow his escape.
Or perhaps someone planned that, too.
“Christine,” he’d say later, when all this was ironed out, “I see now the importance, nay, the necessity in me coming back. No, now just listen. It’s a dangerous world out there and we both agreed, once upon a time, that maybe the world would be a little less dangerous if I had a separate residence. Well, look. We gave it a go. The old Harvard try. Now we know better. And now there’s no need for it. Events have been cleared up. I can come back now. For you. For Violet. You love me. You both do. And we could raise Violet the right way. She’s young still. She’ll forget any of this even happened. The world needs someone innocent. Someone who hasn’t seen the danger. Christine. No, don’t go! Well. All right.”
The yellow taxi was back, parked by a fire hydrant just outside. Moses dabbed his lips with his thin, paper napkin, threw his remaining breakfast in the waste basket, and shoved open the front door. Nearing the taxi, he realized his visitor was a different driver. An old man with acne.
Moses began, “Message?”
The old man nodded. Moses pawed out three more twenties and handed them over through the window. After the old man had placed the cash in a locked glove compartment, he cleared his throat. “Caldwell Towers. Seven. Oh. Five.”
“Where is it?” asked Moses.
“Look it up?” said the driver.
Moses pulled out more money. “Can you take me there?”
“What do I look like?” he asked. He cruised away.
Moses was on foot, headed south on Hyde, assuming a place with “Towers” in its name might manifest where the buildings flew higher. He braved the slow ascent of the hillside like a sherpa, bundled in his Alcatraz shirt in place of mountain gear. His mind’s eye imagined police cars just at the corner of every block, waiting to fish him in their invisible net. The lingering scare gave him a hard-on, reminding him just how little control we have over the human form, physically or otherwise. But there weren’t any police cars. Nary a policeman.
In their place, he couldn’t help but notice the way clay industry continued as if never interrupted. A young man sat on a bus bench with a bouquet of flowers held upright. When another man sat next to him, he tilted the flowers to his left. Then, another young man skipped out of a red apartment building across the street. A drug deal. Clay medication. On the next block, a small one-car garage had its door open, facing the sidewalk. Inside: a NASA shuttle center of computer monitors and keyboards, with a muscular, sandal-clad woman loosening wires under the desk. She came up for air just as Moses passed the cavity. She was unamused. She shut the garage door. Clay communications. It was all right under the city’s nose. In homes. Under desks. At bus stations. Behind cafés. Even at places like Caldwell Towers.
The next block over, he turned on the charm and convinced a pedestrian into mapping the place on her phone. He feigned tourism. He hid his hard-on. He procured an address. He was headed for Nob Hill. A fashionable neighborhood just north of the Tenderloin, yet oddly detached from its neighbor’s systemic failure, like Moses’s steak back at Maxine’s diner: a juicy morsel surrounded by knotted waves of fat, but hopefully, Moses wouldn’t feel it necessary to toss this one away. For as much money as he had, there was one thing he couldn’t afford: more setbacks.
He was still on foot. The walk wasn’t far, just high, higher, as he plodded uphill, up Washington Street primarily (returning towards the direction of the police station; that didn’t escape him), until he reached his destination: two glass-encased, sharp-edged pillars of wealth, bonded together at the bottom in a shared lobby, out of place with the style of the area, almost proud of themselves, casting shadow and harsh reflections of the sun on its neighbors, both giver and taker of light. He pulled open the front glass door and puttered into the lobby, deep and awesome like an air hangar. He croaked to the lobby guard behind the desk.
“Seven. Oh. Five.”
The guard picked up a phone receiver and called. Hung up. Moses waited.
He waited.
He waited until an elevator chimed open to his left at the end of the big hall. Out of the elevator came a woman. The woman wore heels. The heels talked as she closed the distance. She wore a blue pantsuit. Her hair was up and short, like her, even in heels, but even though she barely came up to his chin, she felt giant. She was beautiful, and perhaps always had been, given the way she carried herself, her shoulders back, her chest out, her talking heels, her hand outstretched, firm yet dainty, used to pleasing men with as little as an introduction.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, her voice lower than he’d imagined. “Mr …?”
“Dillard.”
“Yes.”
She turned around and made for the elevator again. She was already halfway back when Moses realized he was meant to follow. He did. They shared an elevator car. She remained the essence of cool, save for her index finger, which furiously tapped the close-door button.
“I hear they leave those unwired,” said Moses. “The engineers, I mean.”
She mumbled in response, pressing it all the same. “This building is very secure.” A woman with somewhere to be, he thought. It shut, finally. The car ascended.
Moses cleared his throat. “I want to thank you.”
Silence.
“Then do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Thank me.”
“Well. All right.” He looked her in her two big, blue eyes. “Thank you.” She never dropped the eye contact. Neither did he. It wasn’t erotic. It was like looking at another animal in the wild.
“No,” she said, not unkindly. “Thank me. Like you mean it.”
He held a breath. The elevator car suddenly felt like the small room it was.
“Thank you very much?” he tried.
“No. Thank me.”
“Uh …” His hard-on had disappeared at some point, the blood gone elsewhere. It seemed like she could smell it. The blood. “I have money.”
“That’s not a thank-you.”
“I’m very grateful.”
“That’s not a thank-you.”
The next few seconds felt like an hour. The fog of memory summoned images of the past. Screenshots of altercations. Moses confronting alpha-male buyers; rival sellers; men and women who just wanted to fuck with him; men in colorful suits; men looking for men in colorful suits …
The seconds passed. Moses dropped to his knees. Made a point to carry his eyeline from her face to her crotch.
“Thank you.”
The elevator reached its floor. Seven.
“There’s no need to thank me.”
“Right.” He returned to his feet.
The doors opened. She led.
He followed.
“And what is your name? Miss?”
“Ilsa Devereux,” she replied without turning around. They passed seven-oh-one. Seven-oh-three.
“And I’m not putting you out?”
“Not at all. In fact, we already have company.” She reached her door. Pulled a cellphone out of her pantsuit blazer and thumbed some numbers. The door unlocked.
“Good company?”
“Very good. The Better Business Bureau would be proud. He needed a place to stay, too.”
He? She opened the door. And it wasn’t the pristine design of the space that left him speechless. It wasn’t the big floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing the urban hills of San Francisco and the Bay beyond. In fact, Moses was most shocked by Ilsa’s guest. He sat in an armchair, at the other end of the condo, framed perfectly by the doorway.
It was the taxi driver that nearly drove him, Violet, and that stupid inspector to their deaths.
Once upon a time, that man had leapt out of a moving vehicle, without so much as a passing glance for where he might end up.
And though Moses did not yet know what awaited him inside of Ilsa’s condo, there was that old piece of advice he’d always held onto that applied even now, for both of them:
Leap before you look.
He stepped inside.