You have to start somewhere, even if it means you start in a bedroom.
There are worse places to start. Prison, for one. You get a warped sense of how the criminal world works there, because you’re only getting the vantage point of the people who get caught. In a bar, for seconds. That’s where the desperate go to find work. Except you don’t find the real enchiladas there, the ones who really work and network and know their city, and they can’t find you because you’re both blitzed.
But a bedroom. That’s not so bad. Bedrooms are underestimated. You end up in a bedroom with someone, it’s because you care very deeply, and so does the someone. And so then you spiral, willingly, into the underworld, into the criminal abyss, hidden in the one-thousand-thread bedsheets.
Here’s a story about a man named Cole. Obsessed with relationships he couldn’t be a part of. Determined to put away cases not because it might bring someone else peace, but because it might bring him a little action. Unfortunately, it brought him the wrong kind of action, and by the time he realized that, he was already on his way, beginning again, starting from a bedroom.
“So! What do you want to eat?” Cole said, completing his spiel. “Might I suggest the Denver omelet?
“Why the Denver?” asked Cole’s dinner date.
“It has a certain faux pas.”
The man across the table was young. Born and bred in Whittier, Alaska, where he lived his whole life up to this point in a big, tall, cement building with the rest of the residents of his town. Now he was looking for work. Cole was his headhunter.
“I can bounce,” said the man. “Maybe cat-ladies—”
“Cat-ladies?”
“Ladies of the night. Maybe they need protection?”
Cole’s mind drifted back to Jun, his ex-wife from the brothel, whom he’d officially divorced a month earlier back in Tong Hall.
“Mazel tov,” said Cole at the time.
“Not how that works,” Ben said.
“And I’m sorry for your loss.”
“He left me no choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Sometimes, choices just suck.”
“It was me and him, or me or him.”
“He wouldn’t have been successful anyway.”
“Eh?”
“Killing off the Ring.”
“Why do you think that?”
The boy behind the desk stamped the divorce paper and handed a copy to Ben, who handed it to Cole. Cole pocketed it.
“Too powerful,” Ben said.
“And too messy,” Cole said to his dinner date at the cafe on Piedmont. “Unregulated. Not worth it. You’re better off elsewhere.”
“You’re free,” Cole said to Jun just outside Tong Hall. A VROOM car was waiting for her. Jun said nothing. She had one small handbag and was dressed in Gap clothes that appeared uncomfortable. She looked as though she hadn’t seen the sun in months.
“I mean it. You’re done with this. No more woo-hoo. No more clients. You can do whatever you want.”
Jun said nothing.
“Back to China. Or Taiwan. Or whatever.”
Jun said nothing.
“You’re all free. You, the rest of … I thought you said she understood English,” Cole said to Ben, who was at the door to the gift shop store front.
“She does,” said Ben. “She just doesn’t believe you.” Ben spoke Chinese to Jun, as if that cemented the point. At the end of it, though, there was a look of relief in Jun’s face. She grabbed her handbag off the sidewalk and made for the VROOM.
“What magical thing did you say?”
“Her family’s still alive. She has a daughter back home. We refused to tell her before.”
“All this time?”
“Leverage … This won’t end it, though. There will be more. We run a brothel or someone else does. And not every brothel offers this kind of security.”
“Well … We’ll deal with that then. Won’t we?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying for years. You’re going to do well here, Cole. You’ll be a great asset.”
Cole mused, “A great asset. A good guy. A dependable, loyal human being.”
“Let’s start with the first part and work our way there,” Cole said to his dinner date.
“Hard work. That’s what I can do. Whatever you need me for,” said the man.
“Can you take orders?”
“Any order.”
“Even the difficult ones?”
“Especially those.”
“This is a difficult one,” Cole said to Four Fingers.
“She was loved, squaddy.”
Four Fingers sat at the bar in Ghosttown while his scribe took notes and Cole sat on a stool next to him. Someone was screaming from the locked restroom.
“That the guy with the blue hair?”
“His name was Jake.”
“Really?”
“Yeh.”
“Shit.” A general of Four Fingers poured two drinks and handed them out. Cole raised his high. Four Fingers followed his lead. “To Sibs, man.”
“To Sibs. Cole … She’d want it dis way.”
“What way?”
“The men who loved her talking about her.”
“Bottoms up.”
They drank. Cole realized it was apple juice. But he said nothing.
“Whiskey,” Cole then said to his dinner date. “That’s what we need. They got a whole bar here, you know.”
“Sir, we Alaskans do know how to drink.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Now what exactly do you do, sir? It wasn’t clear when we spoke on the phone.”
“I work with the Oakland police.”
“But you’re also a … job finder?”
“Something like that. For the right clientele.”
“Is that an official police position?”
“Define official.”
“Like with a blue uniform and all that?”
“Kid … keep the color out of it.”
“Don’t repeat what I say,” said Kinsey at the winery.
“Don’t repeat what I—”
“I mean it,” and now Kinsey was gruff. And almost seemed ashamed of himself.
“There’s one part I just don’t get,” said Cole.
“Okay.”
“Grunk.”
“I never got that idiot.”
“What did he do for Inforcement, exactly?”
“Do me a favor, Cole. Find your inroads. But don’t you ever, ever look into Inforcement again.”
“You’re looking better,” said Nolden as Cole stumbled back into work on a new day. The sun was there. “You’re not contagious are you?”
“Food poisoning all cleared up.”
“That’s good news, Hoffer.”
“Great news, in fact.”
Nolden raised an eyebrow.
“I did some work while I was barfin’ at home. Should be able to close a few cases today since I did the footwork already. More names to throw into a vault and forget forever.”
“Excellent news. I like your style, Hoffer.”
The ventilation kicked in.
“Hear that? That’s the air. The Diablo Wind has been kicking in on five minute intervals. You’ll have to get used to that. It’s just a professional hazard of living in the Bay. How’s your Denver? Good. See the sun up there? It’s bright. Right? That’s good, too. It ought to be. Sunny days are what we wish for. It reminds you how fragile life is. How that big fireball in the sky will one day kill us all, make this whole thing we’re doing meaningless. How no one will ever know we existed at all.”
Cole finished off his third glass of four fingers of whiskey opposite the Alaskan.
“If you want to do this, have a job here, it better not be for the glory, or the attention, or for your record, or your reputation. None of that will ever matter. One day, you might be a name on a gravestone, but even if you do something remarkable, in a generation or two, no one will know what that name means.
“You better do this for the passion. Do it because you love it. Do it because you love the Bay. The Bay is a wonderful lover. She, or he, however you see it, has a lot of twists to her personality. She doesn’t just sleep with you, but that’s okay, because she always has room for you regardless. She never takes. She just modifies what it is she’s giving you. And she asks only one thing in return. She asks that you stay.
“So there you go. It’s a lifelong commitment. It’s rich with relationships. You’ll need to know Four Fingers and his crew, the Mighty Kings, the Rangers out in Pleasanton, La Mano Negra, the Goalie Boys, High House Thirty, the Paupers, the Pinky, and that’s just the surface. You’ll need to learn about the Ring, the New Vigilance Committee, Inforcement, VROOM, the Herald, the Twelve, Air Fist, and whatever the peddlers at Fisherman’s Wharf are calling themselves these days. You’ll need to make rich relationships with these people. You’ll need to figure out what it is you can give them so that they can give you something in return. You’ll need to make yourself indispensable. An A-plus player.
“So what do you say?” Cole said to the Alaskan.
“I say,” the Alaskan was picking at his teeth in the aftermath of the omelet, “we should ask the waiter for toothpicks.”
— THE END —