Pain Management Read online

  Ah, whatever. Trying to figure out every reason people scope hooker strolls would give a mainframe computer an aneurysm.

  “You know a cop?” I asked Gem one morning.

  “I know many police officers.”

  “Any you can trust enough?”

  “Enough to . . . what? There are degrees of trust.”

  “Something’s going on. In the street. I think I know what it is, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the girl you are looking for?”

  “I . . . don’t know. Don’t think so, in fact. But it may affect the way I look.”

  “Do you have something to trade?”

  “Trade?”

  “Yes. Something in exchange for the information you seek.”

  “I always have the same thing. Just depends on how much of it he wants.”

  “He?”

  “The cop. Or ‘she,’ I guess. It doesn’t matter. And I’m talking about money, Gem. What else?”

  “I am not sure. But . . . not money. There is one policeman I know who is a detective. He is not . . . I would not say he is unhappy, perhaps that is wrong. But he could do more than he has been . . . given the opportunity to do. I know what he would want; and it is not money, it is information. I just don’t know what kind.”

  “I’m not a—”

  “Burke, what is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That does not seem correct, ‘nothing.’ You thought I was suggesting you become a police informant?”

  “I . . . no, I didn’t think that. It’s just that . . . you can’t speak for this cop you know. It may not be in your mind, or in mine, but it could be in his, understand?”

  “Understand? Yes, I understand. I am not as stupid as you seem to believe, sometimes.”

  “Gem . . .”

  “Never mind. You will meet my police officer, then you will decide for yourself.”

  By the time I took off that night, Gem still hadn’t said another word to me. But she’d been on her phone a lot.

  The stroll I tried was one of those streets that always seem wet at night, as if the violence shimmering beneath the surface had popped out like sweat on skin.

  I caught the Subaru’s chromeless flicker as it came up on my flank like a moving oil slick, then veered off into a side street. By that time, I had enough of a sense of the car to be able to pick it up on my own radar. The Subaru was a streak of light-eating matte against the sheen of the street, running through Hookerville as steady and mysterious as a midnight train.

  But I never thought about trying a tail. Gordo had hooked the Caddy up with a set of toggle switches so I could alter the light configuration at the front and rear ends, but anyone who’d gone to the extent of powder-coating his car wheels black would be hip to that trick. Besides, whoever was piloting the Subaru knew the back streets real well, and had the horsepower to run away and hide, if that’s what they wanted.

  I talked to a few more girls. But the only thing shaking was what they were selling.

  I slept late, spent the afternoon killing time. The radio had some homophobic harpy who seemed to believe God had anointed her to rant her sleazy morality at the rest of us. I treated her show like its sponsors should have, then turned on the TV. Local news had a story about some community-spirited woman who apparently devoted her life to harassing hookers out of certain neighborhoods. Seems she built up quite a following . . . until she pepper-sprayed some teenage girl on her way to school. I bet the self-righteous babbler on the radio would have approved.

  I gave the hookers the night off, tried my luck in downtown. The weather brought out the flowers. And the humans who live to pluck them. Most predators have a sweet tooth.

  Plenty of kids on the street. Some of them cute as candy-stripers, some as ugly as truth. The usual mix—kids who believed they could read crop circles, and kids who snuck out at night to make them.

  All trying to manage their own pain, their own way. Thinking of a rich girl from Connecticut who’d named herself Fancy. I can still see her. On a bed. On her hands and knees, facedown, marble bottom thrust high and defiant. “Kiss it or whip it,” she harsh-whispered to me. “I don’t do vanilla sex.”

  And the Prof, watching with me as rubber-gloved guards carried past the body-bagged remains of a young con who’d hanged himself late the night before. “The poor dope couldn’t cope with hope,” the little man said, warning me and keeping me focused at the same time.

  I always listened to the Prof. Not just because I loved him; because he knew. “You call it, you got to haul it,” he’d taught me.

  That was the truth, Inside or out. If you took the label, you had to live up to it.

  Different labels, different expectations. Watch enough prizefights, you’ll see plenty of heavyweights who aren’t tough at all; they’re just bullies. They lose their spine quick enough when they have to face an opponent who can really slam. But you’ll never see an intimidated bantamweight.

  Something wasn’t adding up. I had an idea, but that was all. The next morning, I drove over to where Gordo and Flacco were working. When they weren’t at sea, they spent all their time in the garage, doing a frame-off on Gordo’s ’56 Packard Caribbean hardtop. Gordo had spent years working on Flacco’s 409; now it was Flacco’s turn to make his partner’s dream come true.

  “¿Qué pasa?” I asked, ritualistically.

  “De nada,” one of them replied, completing the circuit. The two men liked their games—neither one remotely resembled the name he went by.

  “Going to be unreal,” I said, sighting down the rear fender of the Packard toward the trademark cathedral taillight. They both made sounds of fervent agreement.

  “It was your idea, hombre,” Gordo, the mechanic half of the team, reminded me.

  “It was,” I acknowledged, proudly. “Never thought you’d find one so quick, though.”

  “Well, it was a total basket case,” Flacco said. “No engine or tranny; the torsion bars all busted down below—no way anyone does a numbers-match resto on this bad boy. Good damn thing, too; they wanted too much for it as it was.”

  “It’ll be worth it,” I assured him. “You could cruise for years and never see another like it.”

  “¡Sí!” Gordo confirmed. “And I got the best metal man in the business going for me, too.”

  “This job’s going to be a stone motherfucker,” Flacco said, bobbing his head slightly at his partner’s praise. “But we get it perfect, amigo, this you can take to the bank.”

  “You’re going to need major cubes to move this monster,” I said to Gordo.

  “It came with major cubes, man. More than six liters’ worth. Twin fours, duals, high compression . . . I’ll bet it could move, back in the day. But there’s no way we’d ever find a drop-in lying around. I been studying on it, and I figure, the way to go, we get us a custom-rebuilt Hemi. Plenty room under there for the Elephant; and that way, we got something real special, you with me?”

  “Perfect!” I agreed, offering him a palm to slap. “There’s no replacement for displacement.”

  I hung around for another hour or so, listening to Flacco. How he was not only going to make the hood scoops functional, he was also planning to flare the fenders so the nineteen-inch wheel-and-tire combo would look as if it were factory stock. And then Gordo explained how he was going with a full air-bag suspension, so the monster could get into the weeds for show but be driven on the street without a problem.

  Just before I left, I asked them if they had a convertible I could borrow for the night.

  “Sure,” Flacco said. “You got clean paper, amigo? La Migra is a motherfucker.”

  It was their joke that I was running the same risk with INS they were, only paper standing between me and deportation.

  “I’ll just speak Spanish,” I told them.

  That cracked Gordo up. “That plan, it is muy estúpido, hombre. They hear your Spanish, they know you ain’t from down south.”<
br />
  “Not like your English,” I complimented them.

  “Ah, I got a better plan,” Flacco said, bitterly. “I ever get dropped, I tell them I’m a fucking cubano, okay? Instead of shipping me back across the river, they buy me a house in Miami. ¿Verdad?”

  “Right,” I agreed. America doesn’t care much about why you came here, just where you came from. We take Marielitos with open arms because they’re “fleeing repression.” But when people try to cross the Rio Grande to get away from death squads and drug armies and bone-crumbling poverty, we ship them off like a NAFTA export.

  The real reason Congress excludes Mexicans is that it doesn’t want California turning into another Florida. You give wetbacks a chance at political power, the ungrateful bastards will actually use it.

  “Hell, friend, no offense, okay?” Smilin’ Jack told me the next day. “But I’m trying to run a comics business here, not a message drop.”

  “Sure, I understand. But, like you said, you’re a businessman, right?”

  “Right . . .” he said, guardedly.

  “And a business like this, one thing you always do, you take extra-good care of your best customers, right? I mean, let’s say they wanted to meet one of the artists who draw these comics, and you knew the artist was going to be in your store, well, you’d be sure and let the customer know, right?”

  He nodded like he was going along. But then he blew me off with, “One, Madison isn’t going to be dropping in to do a signing anytime soon that I know of. Two, you’re not exactly what I would describe as a good customer.”

  “What’s a good customer?” I asked him. The store was empty, but I needed more than just his casual attention. I had to keep him engaged until he saw the light.

  “A good customer is, first of all, a regular,” he said, as if he could conjure one up by describing the prototype. “We keep a hold for all our regulars.”

  “What’s a hold?”

  “Well, it’s, like, the customer tells us what comics he wants. And every month, or whenever their favorites are published, we pull what they want from our shipment and we hold it for them until they come in.”

  “What’s the big deal about that?”

  “Well, for one thing, we’re taking a risk.”

  “What risk?”

  He tapped his fingers on the counter, waiting patiently to educate me. “We have to buy the merchandise we sell. I mean, we pay cash for it. Then we own it. So we can sell it for whatever we want. But if we don’t sell it, we eat it. That wasn’t so bad, once. When sales were slamming.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, picking up from his tone that those days were gone.

  “The elevator cable snapped before the car got to the top floor,” he said. “Some people were smart enough to get off in time. And they made a ton of money. But most weren’t. It was wrong, anyway.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Comics are about the . . . Well, it’s like music, okay? Melody and lyrics? Comics are about art and story. Not about how ‘collectible’ they are. It all went to hell when folks started buying comics like they were stocks—more like stock options, actually. Most people, they never even read them, just bagged and boxed them, and waited for them to go up in value.”

  “But now . . . ?”

  “Now that’s not happening. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You find me an early enough Superman or Batman, nice clean copy—with this stuff, condition is everything—and I’ll make you some serious cash. Quick. And it’s not just Golden Age material, either. The early Marvels, they’re good, too. But no way the current stuff is collectible. Remember the death of Superman?”

  “I must have missed it.”

  “Yeah, well, it was one of the biggest events in comics history. You had all kinds of people lining up to buy copies—with all the variants, too—for whatever the dealers wanted. But how is something ever going to be collectible when you sell millions of copies to start with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not,” he said, with don’t-argue-with-me finality. “And it’s never going to be.”

  “But didn’t they always print millions of copies? When I was a kid, they only cost a—”

  “Printed? Sure. Survived? Not even a handful. Comics were printed on low-grade paper, stapled together. They weren’t designed to be collected. Most kids rolled them up and stuffed them in their back pockets. And nobody really stored them properly. Back then, we didn’t know anything about the effects of light, or temperature, or moisture. Nobody cared.”

  “But you said that it’s going to make a comeback.”

  “I did. And I believe it,” he said, reverently. “But the natural market for comics is people who read them. And that’s a pretty small, steady group—college kids, mostly. The new generation is more interested in computer gaming.”

  I walked over to a floor-to-ceiling rack next to the counter. “Is there much of a market for this stuff?” I asked him, holding up a comic with a picture of two women stripped and shackled on the cover.

  “Yeah!” He chuckled sadly. “Sure is. In fact, it wasn’t for porno, I don’t know how most comics operations would survive at all, anymore.”

  “Pretty expensive, too,” I said, looking over the racks.

  “It is. But the people who like that stuff, it doesn’t bother them.”

  “You don’t sell it to kids?”

  “Hell no! This stuff isn’t exactly Playboy, friend. It’s really hardcore. I’m as much free-speech as the next guy, but nobody underage even gets to browse that stuff, much less buy it.”

  “Any of your customers have this kind of stuff in their hold?”

  “They might,” he said, suspicion lacing his voice. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I was looking at those prices. I bet a guy could easily run up a tab of a couple hundred a month.”

  “Before, that was common. Now, if we had a customer with a hold that size, he’d be a goddamn treasure, I can tell you that.”

  I nodded, as if I was thinking it over. “Not all the comics are done by big publishers. You said that before, when I was in here.”

  “That’s right. There’s lots of people trying to publish their own. Not many as successful as Madison, but there’s always new players every month. They come and they go.”

  “And some of those comics—a few of them, anyway—they could end up being collectible down the road, right?”

  “It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

  “Not the farm, maybe,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “but what if you pulled two hundred bucks a month worth of those new comics for me? Or maybe a little less, and use the rest to put them in those protective bags. In a couple of years, I’d have a real collection.”

  “You would. But so what? There’s no guarantee I could pick any winners. Or that there’d even be any winners to pick.”

  “I’m a gambler,” I told him.

  “A professional gambler?” he asked, like he’d heard of them but never met one in the flesh.

  “Yeah. Let’s say you pull the comics for me every month. And let’s say I pay you six months in front, just so you know you’re not going to all that trouble for nothing. And so there’s no risk.”

  “That would be—”

  “Twelve hundred, right?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “Is my math wrong?”

  “No. No, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . Well, our best customers get special discounts; they don’t pay retail.”

  “So I’d actually be getting more for my money, then?”

  “Yeah. I can’t say exactly how much more—it kind of varies.”

  “Sold,” I told him, handing over the bills.

  “I’ll get you a receipt.”

  “Nah, that’s not necessary,” I told him, keeping my voice light to take the sting out of what I was going to say. “I know where to find you.”

  “We’ll be here,” he promised. “I took a long-term
lease on this spot when things were . . . different.”

  “Great. Now, as a valued customer, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”

  The convertible Gordo and Flacco lent me was a bone-stock Mustang. It had been sitting around in the shop waiting on a custom paint job. I drove it through the strolls with its top down. The radio dealt out the new Son Seals cut, “My Life,” which was getting a lot of air play:

  I’ve been so cheated

  Until I was just defeated

  But still I went and repeated

  All of my mistakes. . . .

  I didn’t see the Subaru flit by until right near the end of my tour. And I didn’t have any better luck with the girls.

  “Tonight is satisfactory for you?” Gem asked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “To meet. As you asked.”

  “Oh yeah. Your cop.”

  “He is not my cop,” she said sharply. “Sometimes I do not understand where you—”

  “That’s what you called him, Gem.”

  “I did not,” she said positively, hands on hips.

  “What’s the big—?”

  “You are wrong,” she said, turning her back the way she does when she’s angry.

  “I’m sure,” I told her, keeping my apology deliberately hollow. “What time?”

  “It must be after one in the morning. When . . . Detective Hong is off-duty.”

  “All right.”

  “He is a very meticulous police officer. If he were to meet you while on duty, he would have to make a record of it.”

  “I got it.”

  “Very well,” she said. All Gem’s movements are economical. She was raised in the jungle, where blending is safety. So it was no surprise that she kept her hips under control. But when she walked away that time, even the subtle hint of a wiggle she usually allowed was gone.

  Nobody spun around on their stools when we entered the bar, but the current shifted just enough to tell me our presence was noted.