Lucky Bastard (22 page)

“It’s in the car with the douche bag,” I say. Which is
the truth. It’s just in a different car. With a different douche bag.

“Where are you?”

“In a cab. On my way to North Beach.”

“I don’t like this, Monday.”

“I don’t like this Monday, either. Or is this Tuesday? What day is this anyway? I’ve lost track.”

“You better make a deposit before the bank closes if you want to stay out of my doghouse,” says Tommy.

And by
doghouse
he means
body bag
.

“Since when do I have a deadline?”

“Since now.”

Then he hangs up.

It’s already after five. I don’t have time to properly process Donna Baker’s luck out of my system and make it to the Wells Fargo on Market before six o’clock. My only other option is to give Tommy the stash of luck in my refrigerator and hope he doesn’t know the difference.

Up ahead of us, Scooter Girl is out of the Broadway Tunnel and turning left onto Powell. I throw another hundred on the front seat for the cabdriver to beat the light.

My phone rings again.

“Nick Monday.”

“Mr. Monday, this is Tuesday Knight.”

“Which one?”

After a slight pause she says, “I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.”

It’s the first Tuesday. The fake one with real breasts. At
least they looked real. But I’m not discriminating when it comes to breast implants. If it’s a mammary gland, I’m a fan.

“Never mind,” I say. “I’m just having trouble keeping track of the days.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“That’s okay. Neither do I.”

Scooter Girl turns right a block ahead of us. When the cab pulls up to the stop sign at the corner of Powell and Green ten seconds later, Scooter Girl is getting off her scooter in front of the Green Street Mortuary.

Even the symbolism isn’t working in my favor.

“What can I do for you, Miss Knight?”

“I wanted to talk to you about my father.”

And I’m thinking, that makes two of us. Instead I say, “I’m all ears.”

Half a block down from us, Scooter Girl is locking up her helmet and fluffing up her hair.

“I was hoping we could meet,” says Tuesday.

“Sure. My schedule’s wide-open.”

I don’t know why I say it. I don’t have time to meet with a woman who’s apparently pretending to be Tuesday Knight. I’m following Scooter Girl. I have bad luck to pick up and good luck to deliver. Not to mention that I should really transfer the good luck out of my system before I end up addicted to it. Or pissing it into a urinal.

I can feel the two cappuccinos I’ve had since my last luck transfer already starting to bully my bladder into submission.

“Why don’t we meet at my office in forty-five minutes?” I say.

That should give me enough time to get home and process Donna Baker’s good luck. I don’t know how I’m going to get to the bank in time to deposit anything into the safe-deposit box, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

If not, then I’ll probably be back here at the Green Street Mortuary on business.

“I was thinking we could meet for a drink,” says Tuesday. “Do you know O’Reilly’s?”

I watch Scooter Girl walk across the street, toward the sidewalk tables filled with the early-evening work crowd enjoying happy hour out in front of O’Reilly’s Irish Pub.

“I know the place,” I say.

“Good,” says Tuesday. “I’ll meet you there at six.”

“H
ey!” I shout as I run from the cab.

Several of the patrons out in front of O’Reilly’s turn and look my way. When Scooter Girl sees me, she walks away from the entrance and meets me in front of the alley next door.

I probably don’t have time to do this, but I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to confront her. Or ask her out on a date.

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“Top secret,” I say, catching my breath. “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to . . . well, you know.”

I give her my most charming smile and hope she reciprocates, but all I get is a cock of her head as she looks past me and sees my cab waiting at the corner.

“Were you following me?”

“No. I just happened to be in the neighborhood and saw you.”

“Uh-huh. What do you want?” She’s still angry about lunch.

“I’m sorry about lunch. I was out of line. It’s none of my business who you work for.”

“I told you, I don’t work for anyone.”

“Okay,” I say. “It doesn’t matter. You’re a poacher. I’m a poacher. We should be on the same side. Let me take you out to dinner so we can talk.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Come on. It’s just dinner. It’s not like I’m going to kidnap you.”

She smiles. “Look, Nick. In spite of everything, you’re kind of cute, and if the circumstances were different, I might consider having dinner with you, but it would never work out between us.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say it’s complicated and leave it at that.”

“But—”

“Good-bye, Nick,” she says, waving her fingers at me. She doesn’t move but just stands there, looking at me, her head cocked to one side.

I finally get the hint and walk back to my cab, feeling like the high school nerd who just asked out the prom queen and got totally rejected. When I slide into the backseat of the cab, Scooter Girl is walking into O’Reilly’s.

I consider going after her to find out what she meant by
it’s complicated
. And what was that
in spite of everything
crap? But I can’t afford to miss getting to the bank before it closes, not if I want to avoid ending up at the Green Street Mortuary, so I give the cabdriver my address and throw another hundred on the front seat.

Less than ten minutes later I’m at my apartment, where I fill another backpack with the bottles of low- and medium-grade good luck from my refrigerator, though I leave one bottle of lemonade because Tommy only had two on his list. Then I release Donna Baker’s luck into a plastic water bottle half-filled with a mixture of water, ice, and sugar. The reason for the water is to dilute the urine. The reason for the ice is to keep the luck from overheating. And the reason for the sugar is to make the mixture sweeter going back down.

As a luck poacher, you never want to have to resort to emergency measures or quick fixes. It’s always best to have a plan. But when you’re making up the plan as you go, you have to improvise, and I can’t afford to be out there unarmed while dealing with greedy Chinese Mafia overlords and dickhead Barry Manilows and multiple Tuesdays. Which means that sometimes, you have to do things you’d rather not admit to.

Like drinking your own urine.

When you don’t have the time to properly process good luck or when you don’t have access to transference equipment, drinking your own urine is one way to keep from wasting the good luck you’ve poached. If you weren’t born with it, it’s not meant to stay in your system and will eventually
find its way out. But you can prolong the beneficial effects of the luck by reconsuming it.

If you’re not interested in drinking it straight or mixed with sugar and water, you can run it through a carbon-based water filter to help remove the acid, the color, and even improve the flavor. You just don’t want to let it sit because that’s when it can start to breed bacteria.

Some poachers practice urophagia regularly, rationalizing that by consuming their own urine they’re not only prolonging their luck high, but re-ingesting their own abilities. While no hard evidence backs up their claims of urinary self-actualization, the concept of extending the beneficial effects of poached luck through urine consumption isn’t without precedent.

A tribe in Siberia that uses psychoactive mushrooms for ceremonial purposes often engages in the sharing and drinking of urine. Since the urine retains the intoxicating effects of the mushrooms, some tribesmen who can’t afford the mushrooms drink the urine of those who can, while other tribesmen drink their own urine to prolong the experience.

Nothing like passing out cups of warm pee to get a party started.

Although this practice isn’t observed regularly in most cultures, urine has been used for all sorts of purposes throughout the centuries.

In China, the urine of young boys is considered a curative.

In seventeenth-century France, women used to bathe in urine to beautify their skin.

In ancient Rome, urine was used to whiten teeth.

Just to name a few.

And I won’t even go into the people who drink it for sexual pleasure or who get off by getting pissed on.

Other than a bacterial infection in the urethra or the high salt content, there’s not much risk in drinking your own urine, so long as you don’t drink it while you’re dehydrated and you make sure to dilute it with water. Poachers who don’t dilute their urine with water have been known to develop receding gums due to the high acid content.

Drinking my own urine isn’t something I’ve ever had to resort to before now. But I don’t have the time to properly process the luck into a consumable form, and as the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Over the lips and past the gums . . .

It’s not as bad as you might think. A little tangy, and I regret having had steamed asparagus last night, but I just pretend it’s really bad lemonade and that helps to justify the aftertaste.

I need a breath mint.

When I get back to the cab, it’s a quarter to six, and if I’m lucky, I can make it to the Wells Fargo on Grant and Market before it closes, which I hope will get Tommy off my back while I figure out how to infect him with the bad luck I’m supposed to pick up in the Tenderloin.

And I thought sleeping with multiple baristas was complicated.

We pull away from my apartment and race down Lombard
and I’m sitting in the backseat with my backpack full of good luck, thinking about Tuesday’s phone call and Scooter Girl going into O’Reilly’s, and I wonder if there’s a connection between the two of them. I wonder if they know each other. I go back over the day’s events, trying to play detective. Find a clue. Discover something I missed.

In addition to heightening your physical senses, poaching good luck, especially top-grade soft, often provides moments of omniscient clarity; an almost godlike perception into situations that would otherwise be muddled or confusing. Moments and circumstances that seemed disconnected at the time suddenly become related, a series of events leading up to right now.

Except it’s not always the same when you reconsume the luck.

I’m not getting that aha moment. I’m not having any epiphanies.

So maybe there’s no connection. Maybe they don’t know one another. Maybe it’s just a circumstance diverting me from something else I should be focusing on. A smoked herring. Or is that a red herring?

I never was good with idioms.

I figure it must just be a coincidence that they were both going to be at O’Reilly’s. Except the one thing I’ve learned over the years is that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Scratch that. I’ve learned two things:

One, there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Two, a lot of women like to be spanked.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure there’s one or two other things I’ve learned, but my memory isn’t what it used to be.

Part of me wishes I’d stayed at O’Reilly’s to wait for Tuesday to show up and see if she and Scooter Girl got together. Not in a lesbian-porn kind of way, although I wouldn’t mind watching that, either. But I was thinking more along the lines of listening to them have a conversation. Not as entertaining, obviously, but more relevant to the situation.

But had I waited around, that would have meant risking the wrath of Tommy, and I couldn’t risk having him more pissed off at me than he already is. Plus I really needed to pee. And I doubted I was going to see any girl-on-girl action. So I’m hoping I made the right decision. With my recent track record, I wouldn’t lay down any bets.

The cabdriver gets me to Wells Fargo in record time and with another C-note in his pocket. Since there’s no place to park on the street, I tell him to grab a cup of coffee or a burger or a quickie and come back to pick me up in five minutes, then I head into the bank to deposit my bottles of luck.

When I step inside the door, a tall, male employee approaches me in a canary-yellow shirt, black slacks, and a coordinating tie. He looks like an anorexic bumblebee. His name tag identifies him as Oscar.

“Welcome to Wells Fargo,” he says. “How may we help you?”

“I need to access my safe-deposit box,” I say.

He motions to the queue, which is five people deep waiting for two open tellers. “If you’ll just wait over there, someone will be with you as soon as they’re available.”

I’m not interested in waiting. I have a date with a femme fatale.

“Look, Oscar,” I say, hoping Donna Baker’s good luck and Tommy Wong’s reach have some influence here. “I’m supposed to meet someone and I’m in a bit of a rush. My name’s Nick Monday and I—”

“Oh, of course. Right this way, Mr. Monday.”

Well, that was easier than I expected.

Oscar leads me back to the safe-deposit boxes without signing in, takes my key, opens up one of the large boxes on the lower shelf, then leads me to a booth and stands guard outside while I fill the box with plastic bottles of liquid luck. Sixty seconds later, I’m done and walking out with an empty backpack while four of the five people are still standing in line giving me dirty looks.