Know Me From Smoke, page 1
KNOW ME FROM SMOKE
This edition first published 2018 by Fahrenheit Thirteen, an imprint of Fahrenheit Press.
ISBN: 978-1-912526-27-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
www.Fahrenheit-Press.com
Copyright © Matt Phillips 2018
The right of Matt Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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F 4 E
Know Me From Smoke
By
Matt Phillips
Fahrenheit Thirteen
An Imprint of Fahrenheit Press
“If you ain’t gonna do me right
I might just do you in
Ain’t it a sin…
Ain’t it a sin…”
Ain’t it a Sin by Charles Bradley
Part One: Hard Times
Chapter 1
Three weeks before Christmas, a widowed lounge singer named Stella Radney paid two hundred bucks to have a rotten molar pulled. It was a gray Friday morning; sea-mist shone wet along the streets—the shop windows were slick with it, a syrup-like coating Stella noticed as she stepped off a southbound city bus. On the corner, she checked the address written in black ink across her palm and headed west. It was the only dentist she could find on short notice who took cash, and Stella had to get this taken care of. Hell, she couldn’t sing with a toothache.
And not singing—no pay—wasn’t an option for Stella Radney.
She stepped off the curb and crossed the next street, winced at the sharp pain in her mouth. One part of her was nostalgic for the tooth; after all, it had been in her mouth for forty and some odd years and Stella didn’t like to know a part of her was dead. Or dying. You get to a certain age and there’s things about your body that feel unfair. Did a little piece of you have to die each year, Stella wondered? One part of her figured it was so a person can get used to death. If the world kills us little by little, that makes it more acceptable to die for real. And the biggest ending of them all—that’s death—was the biggest sucker punch life could give you. Best we get used to it.
Stella Radney endured more than a few rough endings in her life, sucker punches all.
Getting her tooth pulled reminded Stella of the .45 caliber slug lodged in the plump part of her left hip. The doctors couldn’t get it out and the slug, burrowed inside her like a nasty tick, reminded Stella of her dead husband—there’s an ending you don’t forget. Come Christmas day, it would be an even twenty years since Virgil died. Back then, she’d do a song now and again, just a quick ditty to keep the regulars happy, but she made her money slinging drinks. She got to laugh while tending bar, and that was more than Stella could say for other jobs, more than she could say for the things she did afterwards. But that was another story, a worse story.
Hustling along the sidewalk, Stella cleared her throat and touched a thumb to her throbbing right cheek. That sonofabitching tooth—it was time. After checking the address on her hand once more, Stella passed a liquor store, a squat little post office, and climbed a flight of stairs in a muggy office building with beige walls and a smell like rotten wood. Once she signed her name and the receptionist snapped bubble gum at her with fat rouge lips, Stella sat in an uncomfortable office chair to wait. The ache in her mouth stretched from her chin to the bridge of her nose. Soon, the damn pain would end and she could sleep beneath the haze of pain meds, or so she hoped. And later that night, after the meds wore off and the pain was a dull memory, she’d sing a few jazz standards for clucking old folks in a halfway decent Italian joint. When you’re young you have all kinds of dreams about fame and riches, but the years roll by like lazy notes taken flight from sheet music. You end up a lounge singer waiting in a cheap dentist’s drab office. Talk about the blues.
A bullet in her hip, and here she was getting a rotten molar pulled.
“Miss Radney?” A masked dental assistant breathed Stella’s name into the humid waiting room. “We’re ready for you.”
Stella followed her into an exam room and fell into the body-length dental chair. “This molar hurts like a bitch, but I can’t say I like the idea of having it pulled.” She pressed two fingers against her swollen right cheek and winced.
“There’s still the option of saving the tooth. You can always opt for a crown.” The dental assistant slid alongside Stella in a rolling chair and peered at her with shiny black eyes.
“How much would that run me?”
“A crown can range from eight hundred to sixteen hundred dollars.”
“Well,” Stella said, “there’s your answer. Has pulling teeth changed much since the Old West days? You know, when they gulped bourbon and prayed away the pain?”
The dental assistant lifted a syringe. “We have anesthetic, at least. But pulling the tooth? Pliers still work best.” Her cheeks lifted as she smiled beneath the mask.
Stella groaned and cleared her throat. “Let’s get it over with then.” She dropped a hand to where she knew the scar lurked beneath her blue jeans. There it is, Stella thought, the brother to the bullet that killed my husband. Yeah—in life, you get sucker punched sometimes, and boy does it hurt like you wouldn’t believe.
Chapter 2
They close the gate behind you—that’s all it takes, and you’re free.
Royal Atkins spat onto the sidewalk and cleared his throat. He squinted at a gray sky plastered with flat unbroken clouds, tried to imagine what the sun would feel like on his skin. It might burst through soon. He hoped it would. He slung a plastic shopping bag over his shoulder—extra blue jeans, a pair of clean white socks, a short toothbrush and his ID card—and started walking toward the bus stop.
A voice stopped him: “You got out, didn’t you? How lucky can you get?”
Royal turned and saw a fat prison guard sticking his face through the slotted fence. The man’s pasty lips pressed through the metal, spit a gob of tobacco-stained saliva toward Royal.
“I guess I’m lucky,” Royal said. At the sight of the prison guard, the left side of Royal’s face twitched. He had a thick scar running down his face—it came at the business end of a prison guard’s billy club. The man who cracked Royal’s face went by the name of Zane. Old, fat Officer Zane. The man—if you dared call him that—met his maker a year later at the bottom of a prison laundry tub, snuffed to death beneath stacks of crisply folded towels. It was a team job, that murder. Royal by no means took all the credit for himself. He remembered the scent of laundry detergent strong in his lungs, floral notes edged with the pungent body odor of old, fat Officer Zane. It didn’t take much motivation for Royal to convince the three inmates folding towels with him to kill Zane—truth was, they all hated him. And the riot two months earlier—the appointment for Royal’s permanent makeover—still lingered in all their minds. It was all blood and pain that day; there was no other description for it. When Zane came to escort them back to their cells, Royal hid behind a commercial drying machine and cracked the officer on the back of the head with linked fists. He didn’t knock Zane out, but the man was stunned. Another inmate turned Zane over and punched him square in the nose. Blood poured down the officer’s blue uniform shirt.
He spit blood at them and said, “You pricks better think twice.”
Royal knelt next to Zane, tried to memorize his puffy face with its plump jowls and double chin. He said, “We thought about it every night since you split my face in two. Maybe you should have thought twice about that.”
“Just doing my job.” Zane smiled. His teeth were stained with blood.
“You did good, too.”
“Fucking-A. Plastic surgery, motherfucker.”
Royal raised his eyebrows and nodded. He had to admit: Zane was a tough cookie, but tough only got you so far in prison. Didn’t matter if you wore a uniform or not. Besides, the uniform is cloth and that’s all it is. In this place, you had to be beyond tough—you had to be a killer.
They lifted Zane—it took three of them—and dumped him in a plastic laundry cart. It rolled a few feet as he slumped inside it.
“What the fuck are you pricks doing?” Zane tried to get on his knees, but two inmates held him down.
Royal hovered over the cart, gave Zane a brilliant smile. “I was you, Zane,” he said, “I might try to hold my breath.”
“What the—”
Royal placed two folded towels over Zane’s face, pressed as hard as he could. His shoulders burned with the effort and he was aware of the cords in his neck running tight from head to chest. Zane thrashed his legs, grunted, tried to slap at Royal. But the rest of the inmate killing team held the man down, pressed him firm to the cart like a pancake. Royal smothered Zane, felt the satisfying flush as the man’s last breath shuddered from his belly. When Royal pulled the towels away, they were sopped red with Zane’s blood. The man himself was motionless. His fat mouth hung open above his double chin and a blue tint colored his skin. Both his still black eyes accused Royal with shiny, aimless gazes.
Royal shrugged and said, “Easier than I thought.”
“Fucking deserved it.”
“Damn right he did.”
“That sure felt good.”
Royal looked at his criminal partners on
A chorus of, “We got it, man.”
They covered Zane with fresh, folded towels and played dumb when another guard came to get them. Guards found Zane three days later and, by then, thirty inmates had worked laundry detail. Everybody kept their mouths shut and the homicide detectives didn’t have shit to go on—Royal was lucky.
That one, Royal remembered, faded quicker than it should have, and ten years later Royal hit it big again. He got out of prison on a technicality, or some legal reason he couldn’t quite describe. Whatever it was, it sounded damn good to Royal. You take whatever luck you get in this world, and you don’t think twice about winning big. Take it and run, that’s how Royal played it.
The fat prison guard slapped the fence to get Royal’s attention. “You guess you’re lucky? Shit, you better go play a Lotto ticket right this minute, boy. You get sent up for a murder and walk out free and clear? Shit…”
“I did twenty years.”
“Twenty years? Boy, you got the deal of a lifetime. Better play it straight from here on out, otherwise the devil has you in his sights.”
“I’m not your boy anymore, and you can’t tell me shit about what to do.”
The guard licked his lips, moved the chewing tobacco around inside his mouth. His fingers wrapped around the bars and to Royal it looked like the guard himself was trapped in prison. “There’s no amends for what you did, boy. The law might not hold you, but you’ll pay one way or another—I guess God’ll take it out of you in guilt. That’s worse, in my experience.”
“I paid in full for what I did.” Royal adjusted his sweaty fingers on the shopping bag. He looked down the street; there was a bus stop a few hundred yards down the way and he had forty dollars to get himself back to the city. He had a menial job lined up, too. He was going to be a grunt on a construction job, move dirt and rocks, that sort of thing. The job was set up before he got out, kind of a statewide thing that went with the court decision. All Royal knew was that he needed to lift a hundred pounds, and he had to read and write—he met the minimum standards. And right after prison. Imagine that. There it came again, that patented Royal Atkins luck. He looked back to the guard and shook his head. “I never made the law. The judges decided this all by themselves. You can’t put it on me—I did my time.”
The guard spit through the fence again and sneered. “What’s this country coming to? My, oh my. When a proven murderer gets out fresh and clean. That is a damn shame. It is just such a shame. I can’t even believe my eyes.” He shook his head, left the fence and drifted back into the yard, a fat slow rodent moving into the prison’s shadow, back into his lair.
Royal turned away from the prison—his home for the previous twenty years—and moved down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. A part of him knew he needed to ignore the prison guard’s thoughts, to push them from his mind. It didn’t matter anymore about prison—Royal was a free man. The judges said it. The lawyers said it. And whether fat prison guards wanted to admit it or not, the whole world said Royal deserved to be free. And, dammit, he was free.
In the gray cloud cover, a blue slit appeared and hot sun played along the backs of Royal’s hands and on the bridge of his nose. He squinted at the brightness, told himself to forget the drab building behind him with all its locks and bars and shadows. He wondered how much it was going to cost him to get to the city.
Maybe it’s the smells, Royal thought. That’s what’s most new to me. I never smelled fried chicken on a city bus before, or flower-scented perfume on an old woman with a little shaggy dog on her lap. The dog wore a colored vest. The woman hugged the dog to herself, cooed at it like a child. Royal didn’t understand and he said, “What’s that vest on your dog for, miss?”
“Well, that’s what tells everybody Jingo is a service dog.”
“You mean like a Seeing Eye dog?”
“Well, it’s like that, but I can see just fine.”
Royal shifted in his seat, squinted at the old lady. The dog eyeballed him, tilted its head like a puppy. “What’s he got that on for then? What I’m asking is: how is he a service dog?”
“He’s a comfort to me, that’s how.”
Royal shrugged. “Like a stuffed animal then, or a blanket in a crib?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking, sir.”
“Neither do I, not really. I’m a little confused is all.”
“He’s a service animal, and that’s all you need to know.”
“Like a Seeing Eye dog, right? I get it.”
The lady shook her head and said, “Were you born yesterday, or what?”
Royal grunted and turned to look out the window. The suburbs flew past beyond the highway’s concrete embankments and shiny cars zipped forward into the afternoon’s gray-blue light. No, Royal thought, I wasn’t born yesterday. Yesterday, I was locked in a cell with a cop killer named Reynold Sky. Yesterday, I was eating refried beans and canned corn. Yesterday, I was an inmate in a California state penitentiary and I didn’t have a damn thought about little shaggy dogs and old ladies wearing flower-scented perfume. Yesterday, I was a murderer and a prisoner—I was locked up and I was lost.
Royal pressed his face to the cold window glass, watched his first day as a free man veer into evening.
No, lady, I wasn’t born yesterday.
Hell, I was born today.
Chapter 3
That afternoon, Stella summoned all her energy to leave the couch and get her ringing cell phone from the short table near her apartment’s front door. She lived in mid-city, a tiny one-bedroom place with views to the park across the avenue. She flipped open the phone and put it to her ear, noticed how she couldn’t feel the damn thing against her cheek—God, how that pain pill went straight into her blood—and stared at a tiny boy in a batman costume while he scaled one side of the blue monkey bars. To be a kid again and start over, how’d that be? She’d love to wear a costume until Christmas. Talk about care free. She shook her head and spoke into the phone: “This is Stella.”
“Miss Radney?”
“That’s me. You need something?” It was a voice Stella didn’t recognize, a young guy with clear, strong lungs.
“Miss Radney, my name is Ford Jensen and I’m a deputy district attorney here in San Diego County.”
“Yeah, I know the DA alright. Why’s he calling me though? I’ve already been through all that.” The button-sized scar on Stella’s hip crossed her mind. It never would go away, now would it?
“I’m calling about your husband’s murder, Miss Radney.”
“What about it? He’s not coming back.” Stella watched the batman boy as he dangled from a crossbar, swung his legs and dropped to the sand, his black cape flaring out behind him like one big wing.
“No. He’s not,” Jensen said. “And I understand that. Thing is, Miss Radney…” He paused and the sound of his breathing filled the line. “It’s difficult for me to bring this up. It's been a long time. Twenty years."
"You don't need to tell me that—I’ve been living it.” And believe me when I say: it still hurts like hell. Yet, here’s this DA man calling to chat it's like fresh gossip.
"Well, there have been many technological developments in the last couple of decades, Miss Radney. I’m talking significant improvements."
“What’s that got to do with me, young man?” Stella watched the tiny batman circle the play structure to taunt a cute blonde girl with a playful smile.
“It's about the evidence that your husband’s killer left at the scene. A scrape of DNA. It wasn't much, and it was contaminated. There was nothing the detectives could have done with it at the time, but the sample was collected and stored with the other evidence. And, like I said, times have changed.”
In the apartment, the sound of the refrigerator deadened and the potpourri-laden air thickened.
