Hustle by Tom Pitts Page B

find. You look around down here. Anything hand-written. Phone numbers, addresses, whatever. I’m gonna look in the bedrooms upstairs. Tell your friend not to steal nothing and don’t go anywhere.”
    Bear walked up the stairs, knife in hand. He opened each door. There was a guest bedroom, untouched. Another bedroom, obvious ly reserved for the grandchild—kid posters on the wall, a gaming system, toys neatly placed. He moved along down the hallway. He opened the bathroom door. The first thing he noticed was a funk, a musty, sweaty smell. The next thing he saw was the blood on the floor, in the shower stall, on the toilet seat, and streaked out of the bathroom back into the hall.
    He followed the streaks of blood to the master bedroom. He opened the door slowly. This room stank worse than the bathroom, cigarettes, sweat, and the odd chemical smell of speed. There were crumpled-up papers all over the floor. Bear picked up one and looked at it. A pencil drawing of a man with his dick cut off. The dick lay at the man’s feet and from his groin there were angry streaks representing blood. Bear tossed it on the ground. He picked up another. This one a portrait, a man’s head with daggers stuck into each of the eye sockets. More angry blood was scratched in with pencil, streaming down the man’s cheeks like tears. The floor was covered in these drawings. Maybe hundreds of them, crumpled up like trash.
    He moved to the dresser. There were empty baggies with what looked like speed residue inside of them, an overflowing ashtray—Marlboro Lights—three or four Bic lighters, and a heavy wooden box that, when opened, revealed three dildos in assorted colors and sizes and different kinds of lube. “Fuckin’ weirdoes,” mumbled Bear. He reached down and pulled open the drawers. Underwear. Pants and T-shirts. Then, there it was, a fat, black, overstuffed address book. The old-school kind that people kept before everyone owned computers. There were scraps of paper sticking out of each edge. It was packed so tightly the little leather strap seemed strained with the contents.
    Bear went back downstairs.
    “You find anything?” asked Donny.
    “No, ” said Bear, “you?”
    Big Rich said, “You want some wine?”
    “I think there’s a liquor cabinet above the fridge. Pour me a glass of whiskey, would ya, kid?”
     
    ***
     
    Gabriel leaned his head up against the window. Every few moments he let out a quiet moan. The night was black and fog filled the streets. He paid no attention to what direction Dustin drove.
    “Where are we?” he asked.
    “Where the fuck do you think we are? In the middle of San Francisco.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “We’re going to finish up the work we started. We have some unfinished business, you and me.”
    “Dustin, I told you, I can’t do as you asked. It’s impossible. The courts will never ratify it. It’s not even legal.”
    “ Of course it is, all you have to do is make it legal. And you know what’ll happen if you don’t.”
    Gabriel looked out the window and said, “I know, I know.”
    They were rolling downhill now and Gabriel knew that they were heading to the Mission District. Soon the streets leveled out and they were in the flat underbelly of the city. The fog had thinned to a mist and the sky began to lighten to a shade of dark blue. Dustin pulled into an all-night gas station. He rolled the Bentley up toward a set of payphones near the back of the lot by the air and water pumps. The shiny black car magnetized the few homeless guys who were waiting around to pump gas for strangers.
    Dustin stayed in the driver’s seat staring at the phones he took from the intruders. There was a gentle knock at the window. Dustin rolled it down.
    “Hey buddy, nice car. You want me to do the windows?” An unshaven bum with only a few teeth left in his head stood there holding a bucket and squeegee.
    “Get the fuck away from the car before I cut you, scumbag,” Dustin hissed.
    The man