“Oh well, Marley.” The hammer of his gun dropped on an empty chamber. He tossed the gun away and clambered upward toward the peak using his hands and feet. The sectioned pole that held the American and California flags aloft was in pieces on the dome. Evidently repair work was being done on the shaft. Twelvetrees grabbed the end with the spear-like tip.

  He slipped but still pointed the dangerous end at Marley. “Come on, you cunning bastard, come on and take it.” He made a thrust, but Marley went flat and slithered out of the way. Twelvetrees’s momentum carried him dangerously close to the edge.

  “You ain’t so bad now, are you?” Twelvetrees giggled—pain and the impending certainty of the gas chamber making him nut up.

  “You’re played, Twelvetrees.” Marley was up, crimping his toes through his shoes to afford him a better grip. It didn’t hurt that he had all his shoes fitted with non-skid soles.

  “Whatever.” Twelvetrees swung heavy like Barry Bonds and caught Marley off-guard. The tip of the flag zipped past him, catching the side of his face. Marley reeled, his back arching away from his waist, and he could feel gravity start to pull him off the damned roof. He put his left foot behind him, skidding toward the edge once more.

  “This is the end of your bitch ass, Marley.” Twelvetrees plunged the staff at his gut, but the player was still in the game.

  Marley latched onto the pole, using Twelvetrees’s grip and weight on the other end as ballast.

  “Let go.”

  Marley gave him a skull’s grin. Hand-over-hand, he began to inch his way along the pole. One of the cops in the ’copter had a high-powered rifle trained on them, but he had doubts. He wasn’t sure which one to shoot. Marley had used an FBI ID to gain entrance to the parking structure. It corresponded to a real file buried in the Bureau’s personnel computer. So as they sought to verify his bona fides, that bought him time.

  And he was glad it wasn’t an LAPD SWAT team—they’d light ’em both up and say sorry later.

  Twelvetrees was shaking. “You pinche bendejo, Marley. You fucked everything up.” He was sliding forward some as Marley kept coming, slow but steady.

  “Just doing my job, chump.”

  “Fuck it then.” Twelvetrees let go of the staff and stumbled toward the other man. Marley got him in a bear hug as Twelvetrees beat at him, screaming and crying. Using Twelvetrees like a sawhorse in gymnastics, he vaulted past the man while pushing him away, toward the rim of the dome.

  “Oh no,” Twelvetrees said, grabbing at Marley’s sleeve. “I’m not dying today.” Marley landed, but Samson Twelvetrees had a hand on his arm. He pulled. “Scared, motherfuckah?”

  “One of us should be.” Marley did a roundhouse kick that connected alongside Twelvetrees’s temple. He blinked rapidly and got all disoriented as his grip loosened. “That all you got, punk?” The bandages had come undone and were skewed over his eyes. He had to reach up to clear his vision.

  Marley was right up on him. “Boo.”

  One punch, and Samson Twelvetrees, the baddest mutha with the coldest hook-up of dope in the western hemisphere, did an involuntary back somersault off the capitol dome.

  “Marleyyyy…” he wailed before he collided with the sidewalk. All the video cameras recorded his descent. Later, Fox would air a special about the Saunders-Twelvetrees conspiracy. A beautiful piano number was added to the slo-mo clip of Twelvetrees falling from the building. Marley had slipped into the slot in the dome as cops came rushing up from below. He went behind some of the boards on the landing. In less than two minutes the police, bristling with nines, had thrown back the building materials, only to expose an air shaft minus its metal screen.

  A special commission appointed by the governor found that Saunders busted drug operations that Twelvetrees ratted out to make his reputation. And Twelvetrees got large and strong in the shadow of the lion, Lina Guzmán’s father. In a safe in an off-site office that Saunders maintained, all sorts of incriminating evidence, including copiously ledgered accounting books, were found. In the mix were DEA surveillance photos of Lina Guzmán kissing her pappa while she handed him a gift.

  At a swank hotel in Newport Beach, Marley and Guzmán met over dinner. She too had gotten away amid the chaos in the garage as the press descended on a dazed Saunders.

  Marley tasted his wine, but the fine vintage was bitter in his mouth. “He made you the offer after Twelvetrees started actin’ ill to make sure you didn’t tell anybody what you knew. This far into the governor’s race, he had to make sure nothing of his connection to Twelvetrees got tipped. Once you went for the supposed deal, those two were gonna make sure you got chilled. Everybody knew Twelvetrees had ordered the hit. Afterward, Saunders would arrange some kind of accident to silence him. He’d be set.”

  Guzmán caressed his hand. “Let’s go up to the room I’ve gotten for us here. I want to massage you in the Jacuzzi.”

  He looked at her evenly. “I’d like nothing better, Lina. But you iced your own father.”

  “I told you, he was a devil.”

  “That could be. But the fact remains you got phat off of what you did.”

  “I’m going legit, you know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he nodded. “I know what I hear, Lina. And I hear you’re buying into high tech firms and so forth, but that isn’t different than what the old school, the mob, has been doing for years.”

  “You can share it all with me, Marley.”

  He stroked her cheek. “I’m tempted.” His hand remained on her face, their eyes absorbing each other. Then he got up and walked out. She lowered her head as he went.

  By the time the press was through with him, Saunders was toast. He was sentenced to hard time at Pelican Bay by a hardnosed judge. The same judge Saunders had pushed hard for his appointment several years before. But Saunders wasn’t down with a 6-by-8 existence. He tried to sneak away to London and wound up in a shoot-out with some security personnel. He finally made the big time; video shots of his corpse was played on all the news shows. Rumor was that Gene Hackman would get the role of Saunders in the movie.

  An anonymous donor sent a donation to rebuild the ruined rec center in South Park.

  And Marley got paid in full. The expediter received a cash delivery covering his expenses and his balance. He spent a few days in Reno, drinking single malt, gambling badly, and trying to forget.

  Back to TOC

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Raised deep amid the cracked concrete and weathered palms of South Central L.A., weaned on the images of Kirby and Steranko in comic books, and Hammett and Himes in prose, Gary Phillips also draws on his experiences ranging from community organizer, teaching incarcerated youth, to delivering dog cages in writing his tales of chicanery and malfeasance. Please visit his website for his latest efforts: http://gdphillips.com/.

  Back to TOC

  OTHER TITLES FROM DOWN & OUT BOOKS

  See DownAndOutBooks.com for complete list

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  Back to TOC

  Here’s a sample from Les Edgerton’s The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping.

  2003

  A STREETCAR NOT NAMED DESIRE

  The first glitch came up right away. In fine-tuning the kidnap plan, in which Tommy explained we’d go in dressed in three-piece suits like insurance salesmen in case any neighbors were up and about and noticed two guys dressed like shrimpers at this guy’s house early in the morning. Well, I didn’t have a three-piece suit and not even a two-piece suit, and upon further researching my memory, didn’t even have a sports coat and after quizzing Tommy, discovered he didn’t have one either. I figured we’d just go in like we were dressed, but Tommy wouldn’t have none’a that.

  “Jeez Louise, Pete. We can’t do that. This is a big-money community where this guy lives. In-ground swimming pools, that gives you any idea. We show up looking like we usually dress, there’s gonna be some dame across the street calling the cops for the two guys look like a home-invasion team.”

  Turns out he had a plan to get us a few bucks to get suits with. It was a strange-enough idea I thought it could work. I guess you had to be there when he was laying it down. Sounded righteous enough then… I mean, the guy was an Indian…

  An hour later, Tommy and me are sitting on the St. Charles streetcar, at the stop by the zoo down by Club 4141, watching people get on in the front. The last two on are a young tourist couple in matching yellow Bermuda shorts.

  “Cool,” Tommy said. “Tourists. They’ll have cash.” He took a drag from his cigarette. He was sitting directly under the “No Smoking” sign, but held it outside the window.

  I didn’t disagree. There were maybe fifteen people on board, not counting us and the motorman. This was looking better and better. Might get as much as a couple of thousand out of this crew. Get us suits somewhere else than the bargain bins of the Men’s Wearhouse.

  “See that?” Tommy said. I followed his eyes which were locked on the buxom female member of the tourist couple. She was a looker.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So this.” He brought his forearm up, pretending to take a bite out of it.

  “You wish,” I said, grinning.

  “Yeah, well I got something her boyfriend ain’t.”

  I laughed out loud. “Right, Tommy. Ugliness. But I think she’s maybe one of those weirdos goes for brains and looks. At least one of those.”

  Tommy turned and gave me a look. “I’m talking technique here,” he said. “I got this technique.”

  “Technique?”

  “Technique.”

  “What… you got a cute way of gettin’ on and off?”

  “Naw, man,” he said, shaking his head like he can’t believe how dumb I am. “That’s like a big dick. Everybody’s got that.”

  I snickered. “I don’t recall you was so blessed in the big wang department, Tommy.”

  “Yeah, well I was cold that time. We just got out of the lake, for crissake. See, Pete, being a champion at sex is like being good at basketball. You got to be able to go strong to the hole.”

  There was a young gal behind us who I could see was trying to ignore what Tommy was saying. She squirmed in her seat and studied the scenery out the window, them mansions sliding by.

  I was dying to know Tommy’s “technique,” and asked him.

  “I piss in ’em,” he said.

  The gal behind us grabbed her purse and sniffed, loud, got up and moved three rows back to the last seat.

  “Fuck you, lady,” Tommy muttered. “You don’t like the conversation, relocate.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “She did. What’s this pissing thing?”

  I saw the street sign flash by. Coming up was where we planned to do our thing. The corner where St. Charles turned onto Carrollton, by the Camellia Grill. Three blocks from where we’d stashed Tommy’s Nova to make our getaway.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Here it comes. You ready?”

  “I was born ready,” Tommy said. He stood up and reached his hand into his waistband.

  The gal who had relocated screamed out, “This man has a gun!”

  Shit.

  The streetcar went nuts. Pandemonium erupted—passengers screaming, brakes screeching as the conductor slammed the car to a half. Tommy lost his balance and recovered. The tourist woman in the front screamed one long banshee scream—Ayyyyeeeeeeeaaahhhh! She’s just one long scream, punctuated only by the times she has to draw breath.

  Eeeeeeeeeaaaaaayaaaaah! Ayaayaaya! Aaaaaayaeeee!

  “Shut up!” Tommy screamed. “Shut the fuck up!”

  He looked down at me where I was just kind of sitting, pretty much in shock.

  “You on a break here, Pete?”

  I just gawked at him. This wasn’t what I’d envisioned. His eyes left mine and I followed his stare to the gal who’d blown the whistle on us in the rear seat. She had a gun out, trained on him with both hands, just like they do on TV. I couldn’t move. My entire life didn’t flash before my eyes, but about twenty-six years and three months of it did.

  “I’m throwing up in my mouth, is what I’m doing,” I said. What had I got into?

  “You’ll wanna brush your teeth before you kiss any girls, then,” he said.

  Tommy brought his own gun up to bear on the woman in back, same two-handed grip she had. Mexican standoff.

  He turned his head slightly down to me, still keeping his gaze on the woman. “Shoot her!” he said. This was just completely fucked.

  “You got the gun, Captain Marvel,” I said, finally. “You shoot her.”

  Instead of answering or shooting her, he began to back up toward the front door, his piece still trained on the woman. I got up to follow him. It got worse. Four people in the back pulled out weapons and pointed them our way.

  “Shit! Shit, shit, shit!” It was all Tommy could say. My sentiments exactly.

  I had to hand it to him, though. He didn’t lose it.

  “Look, folks,” he said. “We’re gonna just get off now, leave all you good people be. Everybody just stay calm.”

  One of the male armed passengers near the back door stood up. He said, “Like hell. I’m taking you out, cowboy.”

  I felt like I was going to pass out.

  The conductor opened the back door with his control and stood up. “Let ’em go,” he said. “I don’t want no blood in my car.”

  The guy with the gun didn’t like what he was hearing. “Aw, man,” he said in a whiney voice. “You can’t just let criminals roam around. We got to take a stand. This is New Orleans, not Fucking-Pansy-Ass-New-York-City. We don’t take no prisoners in this town.”

  “Listen, Dirty Harry,” the conductor said. “This is my streetcar. I make the rules. Siddown and shut up and let these folks pass.”

  Tommy ran for the door and I was closer than his shadow behind him, leaping off a nanosecond after he did, scrambling as fast as we could across the street.

  The mouthy man and the woman in back opened up with their pistolas. I didn’t turn back to look, just kept running as hard as I could, but I heard glass shattering, people screaming, and the pop-pop-pop of handguns. Something whizzed just past my ear and I was pretty sure it wasn’t a mosquito unless insects came in calibers. I ran smack into a braking car, bounced off the hood, got up and kept on running. My side was on fire. Any second now, I imagined a hot piece of lead finding my skull or some other tender part. The regrets were coming as fast as the bullets and I kept wondering like you do in such times of stress when it was exactly that God had dropped my case and went off to take a nap or something.

  I knew when. Like all of my wrong turns, it had started with my gambling jones.

  1998

  Ten years before we had to jump off that streetcar, I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Giants’ park and sitting in the bullpen enjoying the crap out of the last game of spring training before we headed north. On my way to the Show. Better, I am about to win a shitload of money for the game we was currently engaged in against the fucking Dodgers. Well, at least get even with my bookie and that was a boatload. Plus, there was a hottie in the stands who kept showing me she’d forgot to wear her panties that day. Shining me two smiles: one horizontal and one vertical.