This Is Life Read online

  His days of enjoying the view, of trying to live the calm life for the past three years while he built himself back up piece by piece, don’t fit anymore. He doesn’t want to go back to the hard work on his body, the same boring routine. Since he got started with Ralph a few months back, he’s been cruising, and part of him wants to keep rolling with that instead of building every step of the way.

  If he’s going to keep on like this, though, he has to get his head on straight and start paying closer attention to the details. He’s glad he took the time to put a few boards over the broken glass on his back doors and pack some clothes into a gym bag.

  Looking out the hotel window down onto Post Street, Jack sees the cars and the foot traffic and knows he can get used to the action of the city again.

  He finds his cell phone in one of his jacket pockets and turns it back on. The familiar graphic of two friendly hands joining lights up the screen, then its song starts chiming. Jack waits for the number of messages to show and then, impatient, he calls his voicemail.

  He hasn’t checked his messages or answered his phone for six weeks. The eight messages start with calls from Mills Hopkins, then an old one from Joe Buddha asking if Jack is okay and where he is. Next he’s got a call from Victoria: not a happy one, worse than her usual annoyed tone, wanting him to call her back as soon as possible because she “really needs him for something.” He figures she called back after this but wouldn’t leave another message. Typical her: needing him but not wanting to show it too much. The truth is, Jack’s glad not to hear more from her.

  There’s a message from the guy at the bank, his mortgage broker, the same guy who used to call and harass him to pay up, thanking him for the payment, late and for more than he owed. Now the broker says if there’s anything else he can do for Jack that Jack should feel “perfectly welcome to call.”

  The last calls are another one from Buddha and one more from Sergeant Hopkins, saying that he’s concerned about where Jack is and whether he’s all right, but that he’d know if anything happened because he’d recognize Jack’s ugly mug on any John Doe that turned up. Hopkins ends his last message with “Shit, Jack. If you don’t give a call sometime, I’m going to have to go over to your casa and let my ass in to look around.”

  Jack puts the phone on the bedside table. He made the right decision to leave it behind, but now that he’s back, he’ll have to start belonging to the city again, its game.

  He lies down on the bed and closes his eyes, tries to meditate away some of the stress from the morning, but when he does, he sees the open spaces of Montana and Nevada, the mountains in Wyoming—the pictures all there on the backs of his lids, almost as if he were still on his bike.

  Then his phone rings, and Jack opens his eyes. He looks at the clock and sees it’s almost five. He sits up and shakes his head, realizes he’s been sleeping in his clothes for the past four or five hours. Hasn’t even moved. The phone rings again.

  “Okay,” he says.

  He knows who’ll be on the other end: Hopkins, the only one Jack told he’d be at the St. Francis. And Jack knows he’ll be ready to talk.

  “Yeah,” Jack says, picking up the phone. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “That’s good,” Hopkins tells him. “I’m in the bar.”

  4

  Jack gets downstairs in five minutes, not fast enough to see Hopkins drink his first martini. He finds the cop fishing an olive out of an empty glass with his finger.

  “That good, huh?” Jack asks, pulling out the chair next to Hopkins at the bar.

  “A shit day. Press was all over this.”

  “And?”

  “And shut up. Sit down and order a drink.”

  The bartender looks at Jack as he fills a shaker with ice for Hopkins’s second martini. “Just a seltzer with lime for me.”

  Hopkins looks at Jack for a moment, starts to say something, then waves his hand through the air as if it’s not worth it. Jack knows it isn’t worth it; they have bigger things to discuss.

  “Walnut Creek took it, O’Malley’s case. But that’s not even the worst.”

  “Okay.”

  “The worst is someone above me gave it to them, passed it right off. The whole thing smells like shit, Jack. A big shit burger.”

  “Nice image. Talk to me about how I fit into this. Because I’m still pissed about someone trying to shoot me.”

  Hopkins puts his hand over his eyes, massages his face for a few seconds, long enough for the bartender to finish making the second martini and set it down on a napkin.

  “Yeah,” he says. “How about because this involves you. You’re a part of it, Jack. As soon as you fingered O’Malley. Soon as I busted you out and you started owing me favors. Now, listen.” He taps the bar with his index finger. “The first part is this weird stakeout in North Beach that O’Malley was on. Someone high up put him on it. I can’t even rate a look.”

  “So somehow I owe you favors?”

  “You got it. The covered-up part involves more young girls like the dead one in O’Malley’s car. Some kind of porn, sex-slave, prostitution ring that no one on the force is supposed to have heard of. That seem weird to you?” Hopkins doesn’t wait for Jack to answer. “And now SFPD can’t investigate this murder. No one’s looking into the connection to North Beach, because none of us on this side of the Bay can work on O’Malley’s death.”

  The bartender sets a lowball glass in front of Jack. This place is all class: dark wood, low lights, a window looking out onto the busy street outside. There are a few other people drinking at tables, but Jack and Hopkins have the bar to themselves.

  “Plus it’s not suicide. More we find out, the weirder it gets.” Hopkins fondles the thin stem of the martini glass. “The guys who found the car heard two shots, and O’Malley’s gun only fired one of them—not the one that killed him.”

  “So go find out who did. Isn’t that what you guys do?”

  Hopkins takes a long sip of his drink, long enough that the olives bounce once against his mustache, and then sets it down. “You listening to me? This is a bigger problem than just O’Malley. One that goes up the force. Higher than I want to know.”

  “But?”

  Hopkins nods. “But we’ve got to uncover it, right? Fuck if I don’t have eighteen months left to retirement and could probably walk clean away from this, but it looks too dirty to leave. Not that I even care so much about O’Malley. He got what he deserved.”

  “He’s dead, and I’m alive. Let’s talk about my burned bed. What the fuck is that about?”

  “Because what I think this all means is that we have some legitimate police officials, ones with big pull, associating with a known prostitution ring in North Beach and helping it stay under wraps. You know, your basic big-time civil-corruption type shit. And that we can’t have.”

  Jack tastes his seltzer: nothing. Useless.

  Hopkins sits back and grips his belt with both hands, pulls it up. “Yes, Jack. We have a problem with this, and we won’t let it stand.”

  Hopkins puts his hand in front of Jack’s face. “You listening to me?”

  “What is this we?”

  Hopkins laughs once. He takes another pull from the martini. “You saying you don’t owe me? After all that shit I helped you with, after me keeping you and Junius Ponds out of jail—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Just so he can get killed. Not to mention your duress job on the Russian drug lord.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with those deaths,” Jack says. “Is what I would say.”

  “Whatever, Palms.” Hopkins waves his hand across the bar. “Half our suspects shoot themselves to shit in Tony Vitelli’s. You leave me Alexi, one asshole Russian, and not enough to make anything stick on his ass?”

  “This is my fault?”

  “And I let you get away to have a nice vacation with your warlord pals and their coke buy, which yes, I know did happen. You going to make me go on, Jack, or should I jus
t take you downtown to the Hall and we’ll get this all really squared away?”

  Hopkins looks at Jack for a long moment, maybe ten seconds, and then picks up his martini and drains off what’s left, rolling both olives into his mouth.

  Jack waves to the bartender. “Talisker.” He points to the top-shelf scotch, the last one from the left. “Rocks.”

  The bartender smiles as he pulls out a new lowball glass and spins it right side up without looking. He starts for the bottle.

  “That’s right, Jack, now you’re talking. Seeing what we have on our hands here.”

  “And by our you mean—”

  “That’s right, buttercup.” Hopkins claps Jack hard on the back. “You and me, motherfucker.”

  5

  The bartender sets Jack’s drink down in front of him: four ice cubes and two fingers of good scotch. He’d had a few drinks on the road, but being off the wagon still makes Jack uneasy. He’s an addict, after all. Maybe that doesn’t mean everything in this world, but it should. He lifts the glass and takes a long swallow, pulls back his lips at the taste and feels the air on his teeth. “You going to protect me?”

  “I’ll do everything in my power.”

  “And then what will you do?”

  Hopkins nods at the bartender’s suggestion of another martini. He brings out a manila folder from the briefcase that’s been sitting next to him on the floor and drops it onto the bar. When he flips it open, Jack sees a picture of O’Malley with half his head blown into next Tuesday. “Here’s our boy. Remember the face?”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “Yeah. O’Malley was carrying a standard .38 revolver. Even at point-blank range, that caliber bullet doesn’t do this. So who shot the gun that did?”

  Hopkins slides the picture aside for another: this one of a young girl, hands cuffed in front of her with a set of nylon flex ties. Jack’s seen the flex ties before: They’re the kind cops always have on hand, but the bouncers at the Mirage and the Coast also used them. Her throat is slit.

  The photo is taken from outside the car and the girl is laid out across the backseat. She’s naked other than the cuffs. Clean shaven head to toe. “Shit. That’s a sad thing to see.”

  “No blood around her.” Hopkins points to the girl’s neck and the seat around her head. “Dry as new leather.”

  “She wasn’t killed in the car.”

  “Good job.” Hopkins pushes the picture over to reveal another shot, this one of the car from the passenger’s side. Jack stops, freezes in the fraction of a second it takes him to recognize the yellow Mustang redo.

  “Motherfuck!” Jack stabs the picture with his finger. “This is the same car.”

  “Same as—”

  “Last night. The dude who shot at me! I chased him out of my backyard, and this is the yellow piece of shit he drove off in.”

  “See what I’m saying, Jack?” Hopkins reaches out to touch Jack, but Jack moves away.

  “Why’s O’Malley shoot at me then wind up dead?” Jack turns to Hopkins. “Did I mention someone torched my bed? Burned the shit out of it right down to the rug?”

  Hopkins looks at the car and then looks at Jack.

  “If O’Malley took a shot at you—”

  “Shots.”

  “—then you’re in deep, pal.”

  “Shit.”

  “So it’s we. Whether you like it or not.” Hopkins smiles, and Jack thinks he’s going to be sick. He takes a long pull off the scotch. Maybe too long. He coughs, feels the room drop a little.

  “Calm down, man. Go easy. What time was this?”

  “Close to three. What time did they find the car?”

  “Four-thirty.”

  Jack shakes his head, takes another hit of scotch. “Motherfuck.”

  Hopkins sits back, raises his glass as if making a toast. “How can we know the paths of our lives, Jack?”

  Jack sees Hopkins take a drink, and he wants to walk out, check his car out of the garage, and head east, never looking back. But he knows if he did, he’d never be able to stop looking back—over his shoulder, behind his car, everywhere; he’d always be afraid of someone coming at him.

  “How’s a cop afford a car like that? Where’s he get the money? These are the questions you might ask.”

  “Fuck you, Mills.”

  Hopkins flips the folder closed. “In yellow, too. Motherfucker wasn’t afraid of attention.”

  “What is that thing? Some kind of new Mustang? It doesn’t have half the balls of my ’66.”

  Hopkins opens the folder again and looks at the car. “Come on, Jack,” he says, turning the folder and the picture toward him. “That’s a nice fucking car.”

  Jack snorts. “Sure.”

  “Don’t you read your Car and Driver? It’s a Saleen. The fanciest take on the new model.”

  “Must’ve let my subscription run out.” He closes the folder and looks at Hopkins. “Let me guess, though: You subscribe in a package deal with Cock and Balls?”

  Hopkins nods, tips his new drink at Jack. “That’s my boy. You starting to feel better?”

  “So what the fuck was this guy doing in my backyard?”

  Hopkins shakes his head as he drinks, and Jack can only assume the worst: that O’Malley knew Jack had fingered him or that he was sent by someone else—the Russian.

  “You said you were watching him.”

  “You know,” Hopkins says, “the shit of all this is I actually do give a fuck. I never got into this business for the money.” He takes a fast drink. “The thought of my own force, my department, being corrupt all the way to the top gives me the agida worse than you could guess.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “Right here.” Hopkins touches his heart and laughs. “It sounds dumb, but that’s how it is. This thing’s too big for me to walk away from.”

  Jack takes a pull off the scotch. It’s bitter and it burns. He closes his eyes for a second. “So don’t walk away, then.”

  Hopkins’s lower lip rises, sucking up his mustache; he scowls but starts a slow nod at the same time. Then he taps his knuckles on the bar. “That’s what I’ve been getting to, Jack. Fucking Walnut Creek investigates this shooting?” He laughs. “No way we let that pass. One of us gets killed, even one like O’Malley, we stop at nothing to find out who did it. And someone high up broke that code.”

  “Go get him.”

  “Our hands are tied. We need someone who’s not on the force to do some investigating. A couple of us, call us the Concerned Citizens of the Police, we want to hire you, Jack. I put the funds together to back you.”

  “You want to hire me?”

  Hopkins nods. “You did a good job with that Vitelli shit, whether I like it or not. I recognize you left me a pretty good package with that Russian. He is the primary new supply line of coke in this town. And when I say we’ll stop at nothing, I mean we’ll even go to unconventional means.”

  “That’s some shit.”

  “Right, Jack. You are our unconventional means. Fact is, you’re the guy on the outside I know. You can do this like we can’t.”

  Jack looks hard at his scotch. He runs his fingers along the side of the glass. Part of him doesn’t know, part of him wants to run, and part of him wants to get his ass to Walnut Creek to see what he can find.

  “Plus there’s the shit at your house. You work this through, it benefits you. You see it cleaned up and know where you stand.” Hopkins pauses a beat, his eyebrows rising. “I got a friend in Walnut Creek we can trust. He’ll set you up for a look at the car.”

  The bartender slides a receipt on the bar toward Hopkins, goes back to polishing glasses while he watches a small TV above the bar.

  Jack swallows another pull of scotch and turns to Hopkins. “If I do this, you keep me updated. I want total access to whatever you know.”

  “Whatever I have, it’s yours.”

  “Even if Walnut Creek is doing the investigation, you find out what you can about what
ever I need. And if I do this, I’m bringing in help. I get the man I need, he’s going to need something from you, something good.”

  Hopkins nods, doesn’t ask who Jack means—a good sign.

  “Someone to watch your back is a good idea. There’s money for him too. Don’t you worry.”

  Hopkins waves the bartender over and asks for water.

  Jack looks at the scotch. It’s time to go to work, to tighten the strings. He pushes the drink away and picks up his seltzer with lime. Now he wants a smoke.

  Hopkins raises his water glass, clinks it against Jack’s. “So we work this?”

  “I’m staying here at the St. Francis. The department will pick up that tab?”

  “That I can do.” Hopkins taps his billfold. “I’ll give them my witness account before I leave.”

  “Good.” Jack knocks a cigarette out of his pack and taps it against the bar. “Tell me where to start.”

  6

  Up in his room, Jack drops onto the bed, a hotel drinking glass and a lighter in his hand. He props his head on two pillows and lights a cigarette, knowing it’s illegal in the hotel but beyond caring. The smoke will smooth out the burn of the scotch and the nerves he’s got from Hopkins’s proposition. He takes a long drag, blows smoke straight up in the air like the assassin in his favorite French movie, Le Samouraï.

  Someone coming after him isn’t anything Jack likes to think about, but Hopkins hiring him to do this job makes him sit up a little, even smile. This is the closest he’s felt to being a part of something in three years, the closest to having a career, actually being something. He knows he’s not cut out to be a fitness guru or someone’s personal trainer, and he’s still in the Hollywood deep freeze, and the NFL’s not chasing after his thirty-two-year-old ass. So what is he? Fact is, whatever this is, it’s something. Mills fucking Hopkins, ball-breaking cop, thinks he did a good enough job on Vitelli that he wants to pay to see what Jack can find out about O’Malley’s death.

  Damn.

  Just the thought of getting hired gets Jack to snap straight up off the bed and kick his feet onto the floor. He ashes his smoke onto the carpet and stamps it down. Any fines or fees and the SFPD can get that tab. Jack wishes he’d booked a suite.