The Fire Rises
A clap of thunder
I split asunder
The people running
And the moon doth rise
Eddie finished his drink and made his way out of the club, blinking under the scorching beams of West Hollywood neon lights, swinging from racks outside bars or sitting comfortably in windows. He’d forgotten how bright this place was at night, when you were right down in the middle of it. It wasn’t daytime bright but after coming out of the darkened club dance floor after the strobe lights turned off, it made the backs of his eyes burn a little bit. Stepping around to the corner of the building he unrolled the note the Gent had handed him. Two names, a short profile of each – John Banks and Frederico Apollo. Transgendered Hollywood priests, some sect Eddie had never heard of, distributing some high-end psychedelics and party drugs. Upstanding community members of course. He was being asked to bring down their small crew and torture them until he got the location of their stash house from them. He figured screams and a long list of bodily fluids were implied as part-and-parcel of an interrogation, or at least they were in the ISA – he’d done some shit that’d give the most jaded, sexually dysfunctional CIA agent the mother of all erections.
Pocketing the note he consigned himself to searching the gay bars for any sign of these fine upstanding gentlemen, as well as a club or two that anyone and everyone frequented. If he got lucky, he might get to swing by a bondage club; as demented as they were, the bondage freaks and gimps knew how to party. Especially the European ones. Rolling up his sleeves and opening his top two buttons was about as gay as Eddie could get to look. He needed some Aviators or maybe a set of Oakleys – everyone seemed to be wearing sunglasses in the dark around here. Which made him want to watch the Blues Brothers.
Hit it.
Eddie bumped through the door of the next bar with his shoulder, just about not wincing when a heavy techno beat assaulted his ears and purple strobe lights seared spastic dancing onto his retinae. Someone cheered at him, Eddie cheered back, throwing his arms in the air, expecting that to be it. No, instead, he found himself being bearhugged from both sides by some extremely hammered patrons of the bar. Now that he thought about it, it had been years since he last got hugged. It wasn’t entirely unwelcome.
Somebody thrust a Jagerbomb into his hand as his vision cleared from another blast of strobe lights. Evidently he’d been adopted by this table of well-dressed queers. And of course it’d be rude to turn down their offers. The table pulled their Jagerbombs and something in the back of his twisted mind told Eddie it was time to call bottle service and do some silver tequila slammers. So he did, shelling out an extortionate fee from the Trailer Trio’s dollar stash for a bottle of Patrón silver and some 7up. The youngest dude at the table – early twenties, just finished his ACA exams according to the oldest – had never done tequila slammers before, so he absolutely had to go first. Eddie demonstrated before properly introducing himself to the crew as Elijah Browning. Everybody shortened it to E and his starting-to-get-more-drunk brain decided that this was okay and that the gays were awesome. Catholic Church levels of awesome, because fuck it, giving large candles to small children in flowing robes was awesome. He had been lied to for eleven years in the enlisted ranks.
So Shaun, the young dude who’d just been taken on as a junior analyst for an accounting firm had actually heard about John and Frederico; they sold a bunch of shit at an LGBTA party when he was at USC and eleven people woke up on a frat house roof in clothes made from toilet paper and silver tape, with no memory of how they got there or how none of them had fallen off and died. Eddie listened along closely, mentally storing away the information and asking a few more innocuous questions about anyone else that might know them. After grabbing a few leads, Eddie decided to kick back for another little while with these fine guys. He got some funny looks when he said he didn’t have a phone, but then he spouted some postmodern bullshit about being more in touch with nature and everyone seemed impressed with his commitment to the cause. Everyone else they’d met sucked on Apple’s tit and posed as someone who gave a shit about anything but looking like they didn’t give a shit about their appearance.
It was a complicated discussion fuelled by many, many tequila slammers and second-hand weed smoke from the table behind them.
Dance floor time? Santana thumped through the speakers, hallucinogenic guitar riffs ringing through their skulls. Dance floor time. Shirts were open and people started asking Eddie how long he was ‘out’ because he danced like a straight motherfucker. No hip movement. Some gigantic Englishman with scarred-up hands tried to demonstrate for Eddie, but he just had that Irish-heritage iron bar through his hips, and a distinct lack of rhythm on the floor. In addition to that, he now had an extremely confused erection, for which he blamed the chunky lesbian.
“You’re one-a those bi-motherfuckers, ain’t you?” little Shaun laughed when he caught Eddie’s eyes following the dyke around the floor.
“Ya got me,” Eddie laughed in relief, raising his hands. Then, against his better judgement, he cupped them around his mouth as Chunky started hitting on another girl, “Hey! Rub those things together like that again!”
Lesbians cheered, gays erupted into laughter, and a hilarious two minutes was had by all until the bitch threw a solo cup full of Miller at Eddie’s head. His thought gap might have widened a little with the alcohol but his instincts kept their razor’s edge. He snatched that thing out of the air and flipped two birds at the bitch. This… this was not de-escalation, which he probably should’ve been doing. Instead, he held his arms out and presented his chin as the girl squared up to him. Security broke them up before she could throw a punch, and Eddie found himself ejected from the bar along with her. Because it was the best plan ever to throw people who had just tried to fight out the same door and leave them to it. The lady wasn’t in the mood for any shit anymore though, storming off when Eddie once again requested that she rub her tits together. Eddie and the two bouncers dissolved into laughter for a few minutes before one of them spoke up.
“Seriously though, fuck off. No fights in this club.”
Seeing as he was drunk and outnumbered, Eddie nodded and carried on down the street, hands stuck in his pockets, shoulders back and his chin up. Somehow he kept things in a straight line better when he wasn’t looking at the ground. Something to do with the camber of the pavement or something equally asinine that didn’t actually explain it. His night was going into a berserk tailspin because hey, he hadn’t kept his eye on the ball. He’d partied with some gays, and now he was drunk. He opted to maybe crash on Skid Row for a while and then returning to his mission.
Sunrise found him steaming with a thumping skull, squatting in a doorway next to a blind homeless midget. Eddie wished he had a phone to snap a picture. He’d never seen a legitimate Asian midget before, much less a blind, homeless one. He went to stand up and realised he was ziptied to the poor unfortunate dwarf. One brief memory came back – after getting even more loaded in another bar, Eddie insisted on calling him Tak, claimed he was a good luck charm after winning a game of craps behind a burned-out dollar theatre, and more or less kidnapped him. Absinthe – not even once.
Cutting the zipties, Eddie turned Tak loose, ignoring the fact that a blind Chinese midget probably wouldn’t do well in Skid Row, what with the dogs and everything. Fuck it, Eddie shrugged it off and stood, shaking himself off and immediately regretting how it made his thumping head move. After navigating his way out of the shanty town (could it legitimately be called anything else?) Eddie swung by a coffee shop loaded to the gills with San Francisco hipsters and brightly-coloured camp gay dudes – little independent coffee places seemed to attract stereotypes; Eddie even counted himself among their ranks, being a disenfranchised, essentially-homeless veteran who didn’t know how to be anything but a soldier. Sighing heavily, Eddie swallowed his coffee slowly and scanned the area for two things – a place to buy some sunglasses, and a payphone so he could call the number haphazardly written on his wrist with a cryptic B.A. under it. Apparently he’d decided that was really important. The squiggly underline extended a good four inches up his forearm.
He needed Gatorade. He wanted the hair of the dog. No. He needed shelter. He couldn’t remember why he thought sitting outside was a good idea. And an ethanol steam cloud was still gently rising from him as he sat, composting under the coffee house awning at the end that didn’t have much shade. Apparently hangovers made his decision-making skills even worse than drinking did.
Finishing the overpriced Americano, and wondering what happened to plain old black coffee, Eddie pushed himself out of his seat and shambled over to the Walmart across the parking lot from the coffee house’s strip mall, looking like exactly the kind of guy who’d stagger into the Walmart Optician’s at 9:00am on a Saturday with red eyes, slight sunburn, and stinking like a wino’s breath, looking to buy some sunglasses. Sticking with a brand he knew (fuckers didn’t have any Oakleys), Eddie left ten minutes later with a pair of Duck Dynasty Wiley-X shades that shielded his wounded eyeballs from that Hellish orb that so often ruled the daytime with its rod of iron. The nearest phone bank with some shade was a set-up by the Walmart Pharmacy entrance, two of which were broken. One of the others was occupied by the reddest-neckest hillbilliest yokel Eddie had ever seen in LA, and the other working phone was occupied by a large lady of African descent, complete with snappy fingers and a volume several bojillion decibels above a safe working level.
Both ends of the spectrum assailed three of Eddie’s senses as the lady deafened him, the hillbilly burned the hairs out of his nose, and both of them offended his red eyes. He was almost certain he could taste the redneck’s body odour, it was that bad. So maybe they were hitting four out of five.
Five! They were hitting five, as the lady rounded on him, planted her hand on his chest and shrieked, “AY! GIMME FIVE FEAT PUNK!”
Old-school 1990’s insults. Cool. Eddie backed up and leaned on the wall, for the first time in his life wishing he had a cigarette to pass the time and kill the odour of the hick. And the overused perfume the woman was wearing. That had just broken through the stench of sweat, head lice, and semen-crusted Y-fronts. Eddie slumped down the wall and let his head sink into his hands. This day was not going well, never mind going as planned. He wanted to be productive. The redneck and the large lady vacated the phones simultaneously, then, against any expectation Eddie had, climbed into the same Toyota. Once he came to terms with that, Eddie rose and deposited a quarter in the phone.
The dial tone hammered his eardrum for a second before some shuffling and a curt, “Yo who dis?”
“Is Jackie there?” Eddie blurted – pretending he had a wrong number was the best he could come up with.
“Nah homie, you got the wrong number. This is Freddie and Johnny’s place,” the voice responded, before being berated by someone in the background.
It slowly, ever-so-slowly, dawned on Eddie that someone had written John Banks and Frederico Apollo’s business phone on his arm.
“Hey sorry about that, you’s like, one digit off my boy Jackie’s number,” Eddie responded in his best Snoop Dogg voice.
“Best watch that shit, case you get charged or summin’,” the overly-cordial dealer on the other end of the line responded, hanging up once he was done.
Eddie shook his head to clear it for a second, then shuffled away from the phones. He needed a new phone bank in a new neighbourhood so the number would be different – what kind of dealer didn’t have caller ID? Stretching his legs, Eddie consigned himself to a walk, and swung back into Walmart to buy himself a shitty, but cheap cup of coffee in the Subway by the front door of the Super Centre. Bleary-eyed, he made his way around the perimeter of the Walmart and out onto the public sidewalk, dodging his fellow pedestrians as he searched for a payphone where he could stand in the shade. A cellphone would’ve been a blessing. Eddie opted to pick one up if he got the chance. A dual-SIM would’ve been a lifesaver right now. He’d worked with some guys from the NSA a few times though… he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to carry something that made him so easy to follow, either.
Maybe that was the PTSD and paranoia speaking…
Eddie squatted against a wall by a low-rise, watching the motel across the street intently, but in soft-focus. His head didn’t move. To anyone passing by he’d look just like any other semi-well-dressed homeless guy in the city, slumped as he was, staring into the middle distance or so it seemed. Someone tossed him a dollar. Someone else, bless her heart, ran into the Dollar General on the corner and came back to him with a bottle of water and a Snickers. Eddie thanked her profusely, it played into the gimmick. But it also meant he had to wait until someone tossed him a quarter before he could shuffle across the street to use the motel’s payphone.
“Yo who dis?”
“It’s E, I’m just back innacountry,” Eddie slurred a little, mostly unintentionally, “Wanna talk to Apollo or Banks.”
“Got the wrong numbah homes-”
Eddie cut him off before he could hang up, “They wanna hear this. It’s about the little Caesar from over the Rainbow,” he wasn’t speaking in code as much as dropping a word every now and then in his hung-over state and hoping he got his point across.
“Who, DP? Fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” the man laughed, “You’s a funny guy, E.”
“Nah, dog. Boy’s a soldier. Word is he might be lookin’ for a war.”
“Whose word?” a new voice sneered – Eddie didn’t even hear the phone being handed over.
“That you Banksy?” Eddie was getting into a showman’s persona. The hiss on the end of the line answered the question for him.
“Whose word?” Banksy growled.
“Just the word of this soldier. Bitch tried to hire me himself when I was in his bar.”
“You some kinda new kid after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?” Banks was trying to get off the defensive and get Eddie’s back up.
“No sir, just a man who got a medal for butchering a man in Afghanistan and a discharge for fuckin’ one on Quantico. He shoulda been the one in trouble, he was the officer,” Eddie sniggered, slipping into another persona entirely.
“Yeah. We gon’ talk,” that had to be Apollo. Sounded like a tranny preacher whose HRT hadn’t gone right.
“Got a place?”
“CostCo on MLK. You gon’ get in the van and we gon’ talk somewhere else.”
“I don’t get in vans with strange men,” Eddie grunted, heckles rising, “Deal’s off.”
Eddie went to slam the phone in the receiver with deliberate slowness, stopping to listen to the scuffle as in their haste, either Banks or Apollo accidentally knocked the phone off the table when they went to grab for it. Both spent a good thirty seconds insulting the other when Eddie announced he was still there by whistling into the mouthpiece.
“CostCo on Fayette, then.”
“The gutted one or the new one?” Eddie remembered reading that in a newspaper a Deportee had brought to a cabbage field once.
“The new one with all the cameras and people. Man, the Marines fucked you up,” Apollo snarled into the phone – Eddie had to smile at the remark. Of course only the Marines could drain a man of all initiative and common sense until he shot R. Lee Ermey in the bathroom and then blew off his own head, because Full Metal Jacket was 100% accurate.
“I’ll be there. You be there too. Or this is off and I go with the new kid,” Eddie rumbled down the phone.
“Big words for one man,” Banks growled, not without some menace.
“A voice of experience, sir,” Eddie smiled into the phone, “I’ll see you gents at ten-thirty, okay?” he glanced at his old, battered, but still-accurate watch to confirm that he’d have time to find his car again and get back to Fayette Street.
First, though, he needed another coffee. Swinging into the Circle-K across the intersection from the Dollar General, Eddie poured himself a cup of hot tar and paid up at the counter, lumbering out of the place feeling a lot less dead than he had before. He was running inventory in his head; he still had a knife and a handgun in the car, but he would’ve liked some body armour. Or something to even the odds when he’d be facing down at least two unknown targets. Hell. He knew what they sounded like over the phone and that was it. He didn’t have faces, just vague descriptions swallowed up by the fog of tequila and vodka and cocktails. God fucking damn the gays and their magical cocktail making skills.
Eddie finally found himself back in the driver’s seat of his Subaru, eyes on the fuel warning light in case it came on. The fuel gauge said one thing but Eddie’s experience with bad situations told him he shouldn’t trust it. It was Japanese and thus untrustworthy. Okay, no, that was his grandfather talking in the back of his head.
Planning out his route with the road map looted from the Peterbilt, Eddie took off from the church parking lot and made his way north. He was following his route correctly, but it began to dawn on him quickly that the road signs had all been turned. Fuck. His brain told him to turn back, the deal was off. He was walking into an ambush he’d have a hard time fighting his way out from. He picked the USP from between the seat and centre console and tucked it in his waistband pre-emptively. The knife and its sheathe found their way into his waistband as well, locking onto his belt with a reassuring snap. Eddie was early – earlier than Apollo and Banks, or their envoys. To give them their due, though, they arrived five minutes early too, pulling up on the far side of the Subaru to him and ejecting a small gentleman from the car. A small gent who spoke with Apollo’s booming voice.
“Follow us for a little while. Then we talk,” Frederico Apollo stated.
Eddie nodded – now the turned signs made sense. He wouldn’t remember where they were going if he decided to try and flip the deal on them. Or, well, so they thought. He was pretty good at getting out of rat warrens.
* * * * * * * * *
Requests:
Frederico Apollo as an NPC Contact. Transgender drug dealer.
John Banks as an NPC Contact. Transgender drug dealer.
-$200 between bottle service in LA clubs and gambling with homeless men on Skid Row.
A meeting with the aforementioned contacts.
Feedback, please.
Leave open for Part 2 please.
Statistics: Posted by Eddie Browning — Sat May 02, 2015 8:13 am