Chapter 8. Smokin' Paranoia

Startled, awake to it… still dark… the sound of crashing... muscle memory… thump-bump… instincts honed. I simultaneously; rolled off the couch to the floor for cover, and reached for a sidearm that hadn’t been there for a decade. I looked up across the darkened room. A light came on… the only light… a lamp clamped on the easel… it silhouetted a single form in a painter’s smock holding a brush.

My roll from the couch startled her too and she stopped doing what she’d been doing and let out a laugh, “Ha, shit! Sorry, Crash. It was dark, I tripped over that crate.”

Embarrassed, I stood, “Whew, girl. I nearly shit my pants.”

“Sorry, didn’t want to wake you. You were talking in your sleep. I should say shoutin’. Real loud sometimes too… you hollered, ‘Was what worth it? Was what worth it?’ over and over.” I couldn’t wake you.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay, ‘cause when I shook you, you said, and kind of sweet too, Happy Birthday Anna. Why would you say that? It ain’t even my birthday. You muttered some more shit but you were asleep.”

I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d been going through her journals. Some take offense to someone snooping in their shit. but I confessed, “I couldn’t help but to look through your journals.”

I sat back on the couch while she pulled out the urn from the coffee-maker and poured a mug, setting it in front of me on the coffee table. She switched on a lamp next to the couch. I realized I was sitting there in one of my graying pairs of stained and stretched out of shape jockey shorts, and pulled a sheet over my lap.

She hardly noticed. I don’t think she cared much, then she said, “I need some help.”

Help? I could barely help myself. I knew that some shit had been happening and had no idea it involved me. I might have seen the signs but I hadn’t read them. What my ears had been bleeding from back in Saigon was a concussion from the blast of a mortar round during the siege at the Presidential Palace… the PSI of it worked havoc with the soft tissue inside my skull, they say. I could still read a newspaper but I couldn’t hold anything in there.

The subject was disturbing to me because I felt like something was getting shook up… like a light I been hiding from was no longer avoidable… like the words, you shall know the truth. I’d never been interested in God… but the truth… the whole truth compelled me to ask, “When are you going to tell me about the Professor and Bob? I need a shift.”

“It’s as hard for me to talk about as it might be for you to understand why they would’ve black-balled you from all the companies in town.”

“Black-balled… me? Why would they do that?”

“Remember the night you picked me up from that place on Canon Perdido… I gotta tell you the reason I was crying. Some dark shit I was in the middle of happened in the wine cellar of that place.”

“So, what’s that got to do with me?”

Anna was going to tell me about the business I had been only peripherally involved in… the reason she dropped out of sight and ended up snagging me at the Ofice. I was exceptionally naïve about it considering the field-craft I’d plied with the Army. The venue I worked within employed every possible conspiracy on a stage that required stealth and an active imagination to improvise in life or death situations far more complex than Anna’s story. But I had been out of action since April of seventy-five and had scrambled eggs where a good fuckin’ brain for it had once been. I knew my machine was out of order… It’s been ten years and I could drive a cab and find my way through the maze of a small town, but anything more complex or demanding than occasionally tossing a belligerent drunk out of my cab was out of the question.

I thought, Canon Perdido… basement? There are no basements in Santa Barbara. I know Mel’s had a cellar with a bricked up door that led to god knows where. I was told it was a speakeasy in the twenties… probably not true… that it was an opium den back when Santa Barbara had a China Town. People like to romanticize their digs.

Anna dumped the contents of a zip-lock on the coffee table and began rolling a joint, “I’m not sure, Crash. I should have given you a bus ticket instead of taking you here. Just knowing me puts you in deep shit. You might have to lay low until we know it’s safe.”

“Safe? What’re you talking about? You’ve been smoking too much paranoia.”

“No, but a touch of paranoia ain’t such a bad idea sometimes,” she said. “Look, Bob and the Professor are probably thinking you know more than you do just because you and I are, what... friends?”

She lit up and passed me the joint. I held it at ready in my fingers for a minute but I didn’t take a toke… passed it back… I think I wanted to clear the fog. “So tell me straight, I’m ready for it.”

“Crash, don’t worry, you’re safe here for a while.”

“Safe here? You haven’t told me. Why should I be in danger?”

She shrugged her shoulders and readied herself by letting out a deep breath to confess, “I blackmailed Doc. That’s how I got this place. I’m sorry I got you involved. It was just by association. But…”

“Wait a minute… let me digest. You have to tell me how I’m involved.”

“I didn’t want you in on this but you are without knowing it. When you picked me up a year ago no one knew exactly who got me out of there… no one in the cab company even knew you were my personal driver. You keep a secret pretty good. That’s why I used you. No one knew until a week ago when I bailed you out of jail.”

“You did that? I was so drunk I didn’t pay any attention. I just threw away the paperwork. I thought I was out on O.R. But why would they, whoever they are, why would they care who your friends or clients are, one way or another?”

“I didn’t think they would. I had no idea they would even care who drove me that night. If it was any other driver, I wouldn’t have cared either but they would have. You haven’t heard about Perry yet, have you?”

“Perry?” No I hadn’t heard about Perry. Perry was a graveyard shift driver too. My cab was in the shop that night I picked up Anna. Perry and I had a long running agreement. We scheduled with each other to put our cabs in the shop for maintenance on our days off. That way Perry could loan me his cab and I wouldn’t miss a shift. I did the same for him. We’d been doing this for each other for years. “No, what about Perry? I was in jail, remember?”

“Yes I remember, dammit. While you were in jail they found him in his cab on Camino Cielo with a twenty-two round in his skull.”

“Fuckin’ shit. Why?”

“They thought he was the one driving me that night I was crying. Because you were driving his cab.”

“I see. Doc and Bob… they know our cabs.”

“They killed him, Crash.”

“Shit, what the fuck happened there?”