Every Man a Menace (25 page)

Gloria looked up and smiled. “Pullman,” she said. “You never visit anymore!”

He had never visited her at all. When she wanted to speak to him, or vice versa, she picked him up, drove him around the block, and dropped him back off. Until a few hours earlier, he hadn’t even known she had an office in San Francisco.

She rose from the desk, walked over to him, and took his hands in her own. They stood facing each other like dancers. Shadrack’s forehead became warm. He wasn’t used to dealing with people in the light of day, and he certainly wasn’t used to holding hands with Gloria and looking her in the face.

“Tell me everything,” she said.

“Nothing to say. Everything’s good. Shit, you know.” He shook his head, gently freed his hands.

“Sit, sit, sit.” She pointed at a chair.

Shadrack—after smoothing his pants and wiping his nose with his knuckles—sat. “You had me all scared, calling me in,” he said. “I thought you were about to yell at me for something.”

“Why would I yell at you?” asked Gloria, sitting back down behind her desk.

“Nah, just like yelling at me to change something.”

“Well, now, see”—she pointed at him, raised her eyebrows—“you’re not so wrong there. You’re not so dumb as people say.” Her accent made her sentences sound percussive. “Maybe you’re smarter than they imagine.” She smiled at
him, lifted her chin. “So, tell me then, Shadrack, in an ideal world, what would I like to change?”

She’d raised the price last year. If she tried to increase it again, he’d have to argue. He didn’t want to do that. He shook his head.

“Stop being so nervous, man,” she said. “This is a friendly call. You’re all”—she imitated a man holding his fists up, clenching her arms and shoulders, tightening her face like a child—“you’re all tense. Relax.”

Shadrack took a deep breath. He tried to relax.

“So tell me for real,” she said, smacking her lips, “
For real, for real,
as my boys say, what would you change, if you were me? Not you. Me.”

An idea occurred to Shadrack. He didn’t like it. He sure as hell wasn’t about to utter it. He reminded himself, as he had many times before, that the best way to deal with this woman was to play dumb.

“I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “I really don’t. I’m clueless here. Everything’s cool, you know. I wouldn’t wanna guess in terms of what you would or wouldn’t wanna do.” He raised an arm, let it drop. “I trust you.”

Gloria took her glasses off and rubbed the area between her eyes. Bass noise from the speakers of a passing car reached the third-floor window:
boom-boooom-boom-boooom.
Shadrack waited.

“How did we meet?” Gloria asked.

“How did
we
meet?”

“I’m asking you, how did we meet?”

“Arthur hooked us up.” He couldn’t avoid saying it any longer:
Arthur.

“So?” she asked.

Shadrack stayed silent.

“I have an offer for you,” said Gloria. “You’re acting too scared to speak, so I’m going to make it simple, explain everything, and afterward, you can say yes, I like it, or no, I don’t.” She sat looking at him for a moment, and then continued. “Arthur is sending someone to look in on us. This man is supposed to arrive soon. I don’t know when, but soon. Three times I said to Arthur: ‘Don’t send a man.’ And three times he insisted. So what does it mean?” Gloria’s gaze went from Shadrack’s eyes to his lips, and then back up. The space between her own eyes furrowed sympathetically, as though she was about to deliver a painful prognosis. “It means he wants to replace you. I’ve known him for almost thirty years. I know how he thinks, and right now, he’s sitting there locked up in his little cell, thinking:
My ten percent is not enough. I need the whole thing.
”

Shadrack shook his head involuntarily.

“He told me that rumors of your eccentricity are reaching him in Tracy,” Gloria said. “I said, ‘No, Shadrack is fine. We do business every month. He’s reliable.’ He tells me: ‘I just want my boy to take a look at him.’ I tell him again: ‘No, no need, don’t send anyone.’ He says, ‘I’m sending someone to help you deal with fucking Shadrack.’ He wants to make a move.”

“So maybe he wants to replace you,” said Shadrack. His mouth had gone dry.

A hint of anger moved across Gloria’s face, then transformed into a look of slight amusement.
A silly idea,
it seemed to say. She shook her head.

“I’ll ask him,” said Shadrack, trying to project calmness into his voice.

“Do that if you want,” she said. “You’re a free man in a free country, but I wouldn’t if I were you.” She rested her elbows on the desk and watched his reaction.

Her words sounded like a warning. Shadrack felt anger spread through his body. He wiped his forehead and cursed.

“No, no, calm down,” she said. “Listen to me. My father used to tell me it’s easier to walk in the dark if you close your eyes than it is to do it with your eyes open. You know what that means?” Shadrack shook his head. “It means that if you admit that you’re blind, you end up taking the appropriate steps. Get it?”

Shadrack still didn’t understand. Apparently sensing this, she changed tack. In a soothing voice, she asked whether they could agree that Arthur sending someone was a bad thing.

“Sure,” said Shadrack. He flicked his hand up as though chasing a fly and nodded again. “But let me ask you a question,” he said, pointing at her. “If he sends someone out, how do I know this dude’s not going to push me out right away? Throw me on my ass?”

“You don’t,” said Gloria. “Nobody does. You never do, right? But I’ve made it clear to Arthur, I’ve told him again and again, that any act of aggression against you will be considered an act against me. Against my organization.”

Shadrack didn’t know whether to believe this or not. He warned himself not to feel flattered.
Listen to what she says,
he told himself.
Take it in, but don’t give anything back.
He studied her face: she looked perfectly unbothered.

“One must take normal steps to protect oneself,” said Gloria. She put her hands behind her head, elbows out, and leaned back. “If a man comes to your house, you check if he has a gun. If he has a gun, you turn him away. Do you have a gun? Maybe you’d be safer if you did. Look, at the end of the day, he’s only sending one man, not an army. But you’re playing with sharks now. You’re not in Humboldt County anymore.” She dropped her voice all the way down to a whisper. “We are about to be moving ten times more. It’s a lot of shit. Arthur’s not going to come in shooting. He’s not going to come in and kill you. He’s sending this man—probe, poke, sniff—see what he finds out, see if he can find an advantage, and then, once he knows, then he’ll make his move.”

Shadrack watched her, wondering what advantage she was pushing for.

She went on. “If Arthur wants to send someone to look in on us, under the false pretense that you and I”—she waved her hands back and forth in front of her as though drying her fingernails, pointed at him, then set them down gently on the desk—“that you and I have a problem with each other, then here is what I propose: instead of denying any beef, we should exaggerate it.” She raised her eyebrows. He nodded. She continued, “Fine, we don’t get along. We play this man—this rude interloper—off each other. Keep him engaged in petty conflicts.” Shadrack’s face showed concern, but she waved him off. “I have ways of handling men. Let me worry about that. But as soon as he arrives, we start
handling
him: give him drugs, keep him awake, don’t let him sleep. We keep him busy, running this way, that way,
and then—only then, when he’s ready—we really begin to play him.”

Shadrack sat silently, studying her. Her face remained serious, but underneath it, in her eyes, Shadrack could see that she enjoyed this stuff. It made her feel high. She loved it.

“Listen to me,” she said. “If Arthur wants to put his nose in our business, then it’s time for him to go. This ten percent deal is no good. Who pays for it? You do! No, no, no, no good. But you can’t just push a man like Arthur out.” She raised her hands from the desk, rubbed them together. “Let me ask you a question. What if the man that Arthur sent decided to rip us off?”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m saying, what if it looked like he did? Couldn’t we say, then: ‘Sorry, Mr. Big Dick, but no more points, ‘cause your man stole from us?’”

“And how the hell you gonna make it look like that?”

She squinted. “You make him do things that a man preparing a rip-off would do. Make him get a fake ID. Make him buy a plane ticket to Mexico. Make him buy guns. I don’t know. Make him stop communicating with Arthur. Make him tell his family to move to a safe place. But finally, most importantly, the both of us—two separate camps—we both tell Arthur that his man stole our package. And even more to the point, if the Israelis have a problem with us pushing Arthur out, then we now have a reason. We have good cause. We can show them why we did it.”

“So where would that leave me, exactly?” Shadrack asked. He couldn’t hide his anger. “You want me to play Arthur? Next thing I know there’d be a contract on my ass! I’d wake up in the morning and find some Aryan Brothers sitting in
my bedroom with condoms on their dicks and knives in their hands. Shit! You got no idea what you’re talking about.
Cut Arthur out?
Nobody gonna cut Arthur out.”

“Calm down,” said Gloria. “Nothing happens to you. You’re just being you. Normal you. Crazy Shadrack. Doing LSD, changing your cash into jewelry. Wearing dirty clothes. Not showering. Everything you’re already doing. He can’t kill you for that.”

“And what about the man he sends?”

Gloria held her right hand up in the shape of a gun, dropped her thumb, and made a popping noise with her mouth. “Buried. Bottom of the bay. Never heard from again. He flew to Mexico with our shit. He’s gone.”

They sat staring at each other for a long moment.

“And so what the fuck am I gonna do? You want me acting all crazy? I’m not a damn actor.”

“All you have to do is blame everything on me. Just blame me. Use all that anger that you feel in your heart, right this second, and push it on me. Ice cold, you can curse me up and down. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

“Nah,” said Shadrack, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I gotta take a pass on this one.” He put his hands on his knees as though preparing to stand.

“That’s fine,” said Gloria. “No hard feelings. But that means that you and me, we’re done. I wash my hands of your dirty scent forever. I can’t sell you anything. Deal over. No ten times, no nothing. You can go fuck yourself. Maybe you can go back to growing marijuana in Eureka. It’ll make it easier for me. I’ll just give your spot to Arthur’s man.” She sat there breathing hard. Her face darkened.

“You are one coldhearted lady. You know that?” he said.

She smiled.

Four days later, Arthur called Gloria to give her final notice that his man was coming.

“His name’s Raymond Gaspar,” Arthur said. “He’ll be there in less than two weeks. He’s done some good work for me. He’s my partner. You understand?” She could read the threat between the lines. “He’s a good kid. Smart. I want you to welcome him with open arms. You can trust him. He’ll help you deal with Shadrack.”

Gloria thought about telling him, one last time, not to send anyone. But he’d already been warned. The fact that Arthur was sending the man right before the first big shipment had all but proven her case for her. He was making a move; she was sure of it.

Jackie Santos began watching Gloria as soon as she returned to San Francisco. The woman wasn’t hard to find. She owned five different homes in the Bay Area, but she lived in a modest two-story house in Daly City.

One of Jackie’s occasional boyfriends, a man named Johnson Lake, was a war vet. He’d been with the Special Forces in Afghanistan; he had that time memorialized above his heart with a tattoo that read:
THE QUIET PROFESSIONALS
. He had been honorably discharged for medical reasons after being arrested in Kabul carrying a pound of heroin. He avoided prison by making a single phone call to an associate at the
CIA. The associate had shown up within the hour and had the whole misunderstanding cleared up within the day. Johnson Lake returned to California with a beard and a nasty heroin habit. He told Jackie all of this in bed the first night they met, two years before her trip to Miami.

When Jackie presented him with the hypotheticals of the Gloria job, he said he could put together a team of three other soldiers in exchange for 50 percent of the take. It was painful, but she agreed to it.

She spent the next few weeks tracking Gloria. She watched the woman from her car, following her from place to place. She stared at doors and waited for them to open. It was a time characterized both by dullness and a desperate hunger. Jackie wanted to pull things off so badly that it felt like a physical craving. But what was the plan?

The truth was she didn’t know. She would wait and watch, and see if an opportunity presented itself. For fifty million dollars’ worth of Molly, it seemed reasonable enough.

On the twenty-third day of her surveillance, at 7:52 p.m., Gloria left her office and got into the minivan that normally drove her home. Jackie was prepared to follow the van south, to Daly City, but instead it circled around and headed in the opposite direction, toward downtown. It was almost two hours later than Gloria’s normal drive home, and that, coupled with the change in direction, made Jackie’s pulse quicken. This is what she wanted to see: change, variance.

She followed the van down Mission Street, staying a few cars behind. At Nineteenth, the driver pulled a U-turn, passed a parking spot, and backed into it. Jackie continued
driving, and then double-parked. She turned in her seat just in time to see Gloria and the driver get out of their vehicle and buzz the front entrance of the Prita Hotel.

Jackie found a parking spot on Eighteenth, fixed her hair in the mirror, applied red lipstick, and walked toward the Prita. A black guy trying to sell her drugs said, “Wassup, mama? Outfits, outfits, outfits. I got two-for-ones.” She ignored him. At the Prita, she buzzed the bell and ascended to the second door. It looked to her like a third world jail. Jackie pressed the second buzzer. Behind the front desk, a bulletproof box with a ticket slot on the bottom, sat an Indian woman. The smell of Indian food filled the air.