Cole was awake well before his eyesight caught up to him. He was still immobile, like a piece of furniture. Cheek kissing a tile floor. The smell of lavender and urine. A ventilation shaft droned. No, wait. It was Cole who was droning. No, wait. He was droning with the shaft. Why was he droning?
Oh yeah, he was in pain. He laid atop his bad hand, a couple of his ribs playing his palm’s broken bones like a xylophone. He tried to pull his hand out from under himself but his movement was limited. He tried rolling instead.
Nope. Stuck there too. His right side came up against a wide post. Was he back on the bridge, inches from a sputtering crotch rocket? A burnt orange light peeked through his eyelids. He tried to swallow but his mouth had dried up some time ago. He forced a cough and was gifted with saliva that still tasted of peppermint tea.
He didn’t hear anyone else. That was a plus. And he wasn’t being attacked or cut or tattooed. At the moment. Score two for Cole.
Ah, but there was a voice. Someone familiar, reaching in and then out like the waves on a beach. A man’s voice, full of certainty. Oh. His dopey brother Blake.
Cole opened his mind’s eye and was back in the Malibu, southward out of Napa.
“I just want to help you,” Blake pleaded, sitting behind the wheel.
Cole mumbled, his lips brushing the tile floor.
Blake handed Cole that blank check, as if Cole had money problems, and got back on the road. “You need to trust me, at least. I’m your damn brother.”
Cole finally got a little bit of his reflexes back and lifted his good hand in front of him and he reached ahead and he landed on something hard. Felt ceramic, like a flower pot. Or porcelain, maybe?
“Nobody wins alone, Cole.” Blake hit an Oakland exit ramp, where Cole could pick up his car. “You go it alone, you get surrounded. Stuck in the middle. That’s no way to win. That’s a B-minus, brother.”
B-minus, son.
Cole took a deep breath and opened his eyes, focus gone foggy and bright. His good hand held onto the porcelain—a toilet bowl—and he lifted himself up to his knees. Looking into the still water of the bowl, old habits awoke his gag reflex. He expunged the contents of his stomach. Mostly empty bile, brown and acidic, accented with lighter blotches from the tea, making little revolutions like galaxies. It hit him how long it’d been since he’d had an actual meal (the alcohol binge had masked the hunger). He thought he had a hangover, but now he realized he only had the expectation of one. As he caught up with the world around him, leaned against one side of the stall (the one that had blocked his back before), he decided he felt fine. For now.
Even if he had been drugged by the woman he …
Had he said he loved her?
“Shit,” Cole said.
He finally got to his feet and pulled open the stall door. Sure enough, the restroom was empty. A windowless, blue cell, the cool tile drifting from the floor to the walls about waist-high because tile with nowhere to go had to go somewhere, like a starving spider building a web in a jar until it was dead.
He tried the handle to the restroom door. Locked. The surprises kept coming. He heard voices on the other side. The 4FC crew.
“Hey … HEY!” he said. No answer back.
Okay. So he was still in the old bar. Presumably.
And, okay. He wasn’t dead. That meant he was important. They needed him alive.
He hoped.
He hobbled to the dual-sink countertop and checked his head for bruises, marks, anything. Did he even want to know?
“Do you even want to be a cop?” echoed Sibs’s question.
Yes, of course he did. Why would she even ask such a stupid question? The business was in his blood. His blood, currently drying like snot on the ins and outs of his old bandages. He unwrapped them with the care of a mother pulling a Band-Aid off a toddler’s knee, hissing and seething at the slightest feel. Then the last layer got stuck, bonded to the wound. He ripped it.
He swore out loud.
But the bandage was off. He threw it across the restroom like a baby’s diaper. It landed on the tile, red and yellow with weather, time, and human body.
He flipped on the single-lever faucet and ran cold water over his wound, waiting for it to warm. He had ten or so long, dark red scabs forming on his palm and on the back side. They weren’t yellow or green yet. No obvious infection. Maybe the chlorine in that pool water helped. The webbings of his fingers were a different story. Mustard-colored abscesses had developed like tiny villages around each knuckle. He poked one. Felt full like a water balloon. He didn’t pop it.
He shut off the faucet and grabbed as many paper towels out of the wheel-spun wall-mounted dispenser as he could hold. He proceeded to wrap them around his bad hand. There was nothing to fasten the paper towels with, so he’d have to secure the towels in a grip, despite the fact that it sent new joules of alarm up his arm. At least it was clean.
Click. The door unlocked behind him. He kept watch through the reflection in the mirror. The handle twisted. The door drifted open.
And an American bulldog, black and white and muscular, trotted inside.
The door shut and locked again.
The dog, still seen through the mirror, sniffed absently at Cole’s old bandage on the floor nearby. Then it turned its attention to Cole. The lips raised. The teeth out. The ears back. The beast grumbled. Cole finally spun around.
“Whoa, girl.”
The bulldog sprinted.
Cole leapt atop the sink counter just as it barked and snorted and swiped and snapped at Cole’s kicking feet, still trying to make purchase along the plastic countertop. One foot got a load of teeth. Cole shook and jerked until the bulldog gagged and let go. But Cole’s position was temporary. The counter was maybe four feet off the ground. The dog could eat lunch from that height—and likely would very soon. It came back, thumping its front legs onto the counter for better vantage. It tried to take down Cole’s ankles. With the wet, hard sting of teeth, Cole knew it had succeeded. Reflexively, he lost his balance. He fell. Slid. He banged his spine against the counter on the way down, awash in a new pain, this one spreading like it spilled over his back. He landed—hard—and his head bounced off the tile floor. That didn’t feel like anything at all, but it reset his instincts, or shut them off for a beat, because before he could retrieve his breath, the dog came back for the ankle. Cole tried to block the beast with his hand.
But it was his bad hand.
The dog sank teeth through the paper towels and through the wounds. Cole shrieked. The dog released—then bit down again, holding as tight as it could. Cole kicked and flailed and beat at the dog’s head with his other hand but it had claimed its dinner and soaked in the juices. Cole became one with whatever was left of his hand. Like the fragile bones, his thoughts jumbled together and cracked in two and crashed and fractured and divided again. He only regained his wits when the pain subsided completely, either because instinct kicked in or there were no more nerves to sever. He externally observed he was being whipped by the fingers and the elbow was nearly pulled from its socket. Mucus and slobber from the dog’s writhing lips landed on Cole’s face, smelling of the dog’s shit and Cole’s own blood. Left, right, up, down, pain or no, he was going to pass out, fade away, be eaten alive, dog meat, kibbles.
So Cole pulled his back up off the ground, no matter the throb in his back, and punched the bulldog in the snout with his good hand until the middle knuckle was wet and raw and burning.
The dog let go. It was just for an instant, and then it was ready to chomp again, but that’s what Cole needed to return to his feet. The hound came flying, front legs in the air. Cole dodged and the dog bounced off the side of the restroom stall behind him. He scrambled and climbed back onto the sink counter, noting vaguely that the pain in his decimated hand was returning in little revolutions of human fire. The bulldog doubled back, perched on one end of the rim, barking and snarling, howls from hell, and Cole punted the dog in the side of the head, instantly drawing his attention back to his ankle, which frothed and blazed from within as if it had been dunked in a vat of acid.
The dog fell over, snarls gone quiet for a moment, replaced by the incessant drone of the ventilation again. Maybe it’d come to its senses. Cole favored his good foot and descended the counter and kept an eye out for something he could use as a weapon. A supply closet—chemicals he could spray. No such closet or supplies existed. The only two doors available were to the toilet stall and the way out of here—the exit door.
That’s when the exit door clicked again. The handle swung. The door dilated. And another dog was birthed. It was a Rottweiler, dark as night, already hyped. The door shut.
“Aw, hell.”
The Rottweiler plowed into Cole’s torso and enjoyed a mouthful of t-shirt as soon as Cole hit the floor. He felt like he fell through the tile, his spine shooting off alarm bells along every disk. As soon as the dog realized its feast was only fabric, it came up for air and returned to dive deeper. Cole put his hand in between. His bad hand. Old habits. The Rottweiler clamped onto that. Cole returned to the soup of pain and disjointed thoughts, jumbled again with each snap and pull, pain filling up in his head as if it were a water balloon and it had nearly reached its zenith. He absently mushed at the Rottweiler’s face with his good hand to no avail. The room drifted away from him and the lights quieted to dark and the thoughts came fewer and further between until the bulldog returned to the scene and headbutted the Rottweiler off his entrée. Cole got his useless hand back and his vision back and his life back. He saw the dogs argue with each other. In the distraction, Cole scurried across the floor on knees and elbows. So close to safety. Nearly out of harm’s way. He’d spotted a little sanctuary: the toilet stall. He got all the way inside and pushed the metal clasp into the locked position.
“Thank Christ.”
The dogs finally seemed to realize their error. Though Cole couldn’t see them, he picked up that they had finished their spat and were rumbling for the stall. The plastic partitions jostled as they flung their bodies against it from the outside. It held. Maybe they’d tire themselves out.
Nope, they changed strategy. The bulldog began investigating the foot-high gap between floor and partition. The paws came first, like a crawling army man, and then the snout and head. Cole kicked it. The dog yapped and backed away.
From the gap beneath the stall door, the Rottweiler trudged, barking and snarling and jerking left and right all the while. Cole kicked the Rottweiler too, but aggravated his threadbare ankle and nearly collapsed on top of it.
To the left, the bulldog tried again. So, too, the Rottweiler. Cole held onto the top of the partition walls; one with his good hand and the other with his arm balanced over it. This gave him some height. From here, he kicked and stomped on heads with the foot that was useful like a deadly game of Whack-a-Mole. He had to admit—he kind of liked it. Stuck in the middle, outsmarting the enemy, this felt like his element. He could do this. This was him. Each yelp and wail and hoot from the hounds was just another boost to his resolve that he’d found a high ground of sorts. A no-lose strategy. A way out, by going all the way in.
Unless he got exhausted first, and then he was done for.
He needed to speed things up. Between kicks (that one was close, shoe in the bulldog’s teeth), he clocked the stall for something—anything—he could use as a weapon. Toilet lid, maybe? Or the plastic float arm inside the tank? Nah, no luck. This was one of those pro-grade jet-engine bowls with the stainless-steel worm that snaked out the back and into the wall, a little flush lever at the top. Useless. The toilet paper dispenser? Plastic. But there was something interesting at the tip-top of the locked restroom door, currently at eye-level as Cole held himself up from the partition walls.
A coat hanger.
It was screwed in, but Cole fingered it with his good hand and pulled, kicking at the dogs all the while. He rested his bodyweight on the hook, and the thought occurred to him that he might pull the whole door down, but the hanger finally gave way, dropping him on his bad ankle all over again, and on top of the Rottweiler, who retreated long enough for Cole to take a new position by dropping his ass atop the toilet lid and kicking at the dogs from there. He kicked away the bulldog again. The Rottweiler again. The bulldog again. Here came the Rottweiler—he kicked it away again. On and on it went as Cole figured the best way to utilize the coat hanger, dulled but still dangerous. He didn’t want to jab it thoughtlessly. Too likely his hand would get caught in the carnage as well. Instead, he pulled at the big roll of toilet paper inside the dispenser and wrapped it around his good hand until his fist looked like a lump of white cotton candy, the hanger’s hook protruding from the tip. The Rottweiler came through the gap again, all teeth and saliva. Cole leaped forward and jousted. The hook met the Rottweiler’s snout, got caught in the nostril. Cole pulled up and back. The dog yelped until the hook came loose, slippery. The Rottweiler tried again, its whole head coming through, pissed. Cole jabbed, hitting the bridge between the eyes, and then again, poking right through the left eye. In and out, because Cole didn’t realize he’d made purchase right away, but when he was sure, he stuck the hook all the way in while the Rottweiler writhed along the floor, trying to escape, but just making it worse. With its whimper, Cole released, losing the hook, some sort of instinctual mercy at play, and the Rottweiler disappeared. He still heard its high-pitched squeals echo off the tile floor and walls.
But the bulldog was not yet intimidated, and while Cole had been fixated on the Rottweiler, the bulldog had snuck through the partition gap far enough to make kicking it useless; it had come through. It snapped at his shoes. Got one. Tore at a shoelace, nearly taking Cole off his other foot. The bulldog had arrived, but the stall was far too tight for it to fit comfortably. Didn’t mean it couldn’t take him from the waist down. Cole tried to force the dog into a corner but that only put its chomps in closer proximity, manic, teeth everywhere at once, nipping and scraping, the dog so much stronger than Cole would have imagined. He finally had to back up, out of his own safety, which gave it an opportunity to strike. On its hind legs, it tried to tackle Cole. He dodged, using his temporary advantage to guide the diving dog into the porcelain toilet. The dog’s neck landed on the edge of the bowl, awkward, busy, a bustling monster. Cole straddled the dog from behind. Held it from an ear and the back of the head. The dog objected, whipping its head left and right, but it had no leverage, its body not meant to compete in such a compromising position. Cole lifted the dog as much as it could and led the dog’s head into the toilet bowl, still filled with water and bile. He dunked the bulldog. It splashed. Made a mess. He lifted its head out, as if he was going to interrogate it, but dogs don’t fucking talk. So he dunked the bulldog’s face into the water again and held it there. Held it there. Its legs scrabbled against the tiles but failed to get any purchase. Cole on top of its shoulders kept its head immobile, caught, stuck. He held it there. Held it there. Bubbles separated the bile at the surface of the frothing, splashing water. He held it there. Held it there. Cole’s grip with his good hand went total, taking as much as of the dog’s tight head skin as he could into his fingers, not letting up, not for anything until the dog finally stopped resisting and the bubbles stopped rising and the water stopped splashing. And the only sound left was the whimpers of the Rottweiler elsewhere in the restroom and the drone of the ventilation. Cole finally let go of the bulldog. It was limp, its body melting away from the bowl and onto the floor. It wasn’t breathing. And Cole realized he hadn’t been either.
Cole inhaled. Sharp. Full. And let it out in a shaky breath. He was alive. For now.
The pain returned to his bad hand, worse than ever, the agony taking a shape in his head, like a star bursting in slow motion and scattering through the universe. He whimpered too, in concert with the Rottweiler. He dropped onto the bulldog, its body a big bony lifeless pillow, and tenderly rested whatever was left of his bad hand on his chest. Those jumbled thoughts tripped over one another like the bones and the nerves, spiky and hot, only finally settling when he didn’t try to control the hand or the thoughts at all. He drifted in and he drifted out.
“You can’t do this alone, Cole,” said Blake, in some faraway place in his dreams. “You need to trust me, at least …”
But then Blake was gone, and so was the restroom. It was just Cole lost in the universe, revolving around a busted star with a trillion other errant pieces, until that turned into the waters of the Bay. Cole coasted along in his dream, points of land in the distance, but those disappeared as well, as a distant light went dark.
***
Cole awoke again in a coughing fit. His nose felt clamped. Somebody was holding the nostrils shut. It was Four Fingers, laughing at some joke. Oh. Cole was the joke. His nose was released and he took a big inhale.
“Squaddy! Ku paan yuh tu. Yuh done good. Get up now.”
Cole was still on top of the bulldog’s corpse in the restroom stall. The stall door was opened, or pulled off more like. He favored his good hand and returned to his knees, his feet, one of the ankles still sore and his back rigid, and when he had his bearings, he tried to sock Four Fingers in the face. He missed, clumsy.
“Nah, nah, nah. Not me pretty face.”
A pistol barrel planted itself against Cole’s temple. Cole side-eyed the holder. It was Dups.
“Careful, kid,” said Dups.
“You tried to kill me.”
Four Fingers flashed his teeth. “Yeah.”
“Again.”
“Yeah.” Four Fingers grinned wider. “You impress me now.”
“Where’s the other mutt?”
“We shot him. He dead now. I and I got three more.”
Cole was exhausted, but when he spoke, his voice came out angry: “Why?” Too angry. He surprised himself. Four Fingers wasn’t fazed.
“Cause I like you, Jake.” Four Fingers patted Cole on the cheek and glided away, out of the restroom, until it was just Cole, Dups, and the gun in between, still resting on his temple.
“It’s good,” muttered Dups, keeping his voice low. “It’s good that he likes you.”
“Let me guess. All his friends kill his dogs.”
“Consider yourself lucky.”
“What did you have to do? Fight a bear?”
“Something like that. The Rangers?”
The motorcycle gang. Situated east of the Bay.
“He made me go undercover. As a quote-unquote crooked cop. You believe that? Had to pretend to want to buy a gun from one of their dealers. A two-story-tall kind of man, know what I mean? Had a name of Wide Load. Not his real name, you can imagine, just what they called him. Four Fingers told me to scare him. Well. I killed him. Made it look like Oakland cops. It was the rest of the Rangers that got spooked. Anyway, that was my test.”
“You were undercover, and then you went undercover as an undercover.”
“I wouldn’t be the first guy.”
“Why would you tell me this? I am a cop.”
Dups chuckled. “Not really.”
***
“Okeh, Jake,” started Four Fingers. “We make business.”
They had moved back to the bar. Cole, Dups, Four Fingers, the guy writing everything down in that damn notebook, and Gummy in the corner. The rest of the guys had left. It seemed darker now, despite the fact that the room was lit exactly the same. Dups mentioned it was nearly midnight beyond the covered windows.
“Where’s Sibs?” asked Cole.
“She still in time out.”
“She was complicit in this. Wasn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“And yet you lock her up.”
“Na-na trust her.”
Cole paced around the bar, holding his gnarled mitt. It felt like a bag of skin full of sticks, when he could see through the pain. Four Fingers snapped at his scribe.
“First-aid, Jake.”
The scribe put down the notepad, ran to the Jenga tower of safes, opened one, pulled out a white first-aid kit, and scurried toward Cole.
“It’s Cole, not Jake.”
“Jake,” started Four Fingers.
“It’s Cole.”
“I got you a solution.”
“What solution?”
“I know your man who shot Chuck Hatt’ran.”
Cole stopped pacing, and the scribe with the kit finally caught up to him. He clasped open the kit on the nearby table and pulled out disinfectant.
“All right … who is it?” Cole asked between grunts, anticipating the healing burn. The scribe dumped the alcohol on Cole’s hand. The world went black for a moment. When he came back, the scribe tenderly wrapped new gauze over Cole’s hand. His movements were slow, careful. It was the most tender touch Cole had felt since Sibs. Or maybe even Mia. Cole was fading …
“Jake!”
“It’s COLE!” he shouted, waking himself up.
“Do you want to know your man, man?”
“Yes!” Cole made the scribe finish as he stormed to the bar and went eye to eye with the Jamaican, ignoring the squiggles at the edges of his vision. “Tell me. Please!”
“My boys. Soldiers … dey still out there. Waiting. Breathing in Ghosttown, where deh air is all ours. But not forever. I expanding. I stretching out like a jaguar, Cole. I building a bigger farm. But I running into bad men. You know who?”
Cole figured, “High Corner guys?”
“Yeah … and Limit Break Boys. And Cambo. And Rangers. And La Mano Negra. And anyone else who decides to dissent. Like … deh Mighty Kings.”
Dups, close by, eyed Cole and Four Fingers carefully.
“So …” said Cole. “What’s that got to do with me? Or my Chuck Hattaran man?”
Four Fingers snapped at Gummy. “Gummy caused some fuckery. Deh longer I keep him, deh more I look like deh bad guy. I turn him over, dey want a ceasefire. But I don’t want ceasefire.”
Cole flitted a look at Dups. Dups returned the favor. Four Fingers didn’t notice.
“I want to win,” the Jamaican said. “Deh bridge was just a battle. I need total surrendah. High Corner been fielding guns, ammo, drugs from boys in SoCal. Up in deh Nort’west. Mexico. And out east too. They could last forever. I can’t have dat. I need you to get deh police to investigate dem. Ovastan?”
Investigated. Why should the High Corner have the cops hanging over them any more than they usually do …?
“Someone in High Corner … killed Chuck Hattaran?”
Four Fingers shrugged his shoulders. “Your call, Cole. That is your call.” Four Fingers snapped. The scribe had just finished putting the first-aid kit away and locking the safe. He unlocked another safe. Pulled out bullets. Cole’s bullets. He handed them to Four Fingers. “You go to High Corner. You get inside. You plant evidence. Implicate dem in deh crime. Bring dem down. You big shot at the station then. You A-plus player. High Corner no more. You see?”
What Four Fingers was suggesting was an epic fuck-you to justice. To the law. To Cole’s morals. Who really killed Chuck Hattaran? Four Fingers appeared to be asking. Who cared?
And yet, perhaps he was right. Perhaps Dups and the rest of the Mighty Kings were lying to him. Perhaps Four Fingers was the one to trust—and perhaps the only way out of this mess was to plant the crime on one of his enemies, call it a day, and get his life back. That was it. There was wisdom to what Four Fingers was saying. Sometimes, there were no good answers. Sometimes, you had to make your answers. Sometimes, you didn’t try to solve the puzzle. You just changed the puzzle’s rules.
And sometimes, you told a Jamaican to fuck himself.
“No.”
“Hmph,” muttered Four Fingers. He snapped at Dups. “Let’s find something for Jake to do. Something where he can really impress I and I.”