Berkeley Noir Read online

  "Ever since I managed to get away from you." I looked pointedly at his arm, at his turtleneck.

  "Yes, but now there's no reason to chase you. I'm everywhere. Even if you don't own a cell phone, everyone you encounter does, and if you talk to them, I hear it. You ever step in front of a security camera, or enter someone's house, or pass through an automatic door, I'm there with you. I told you, I've won. Take the car, collect your son. If you're smart, you'll send him to school and he can make something of himself. That's better than whatever you were planning to make of him."

  "A god," I said. "Thanks for the juice, Riley."

  "It's matched to your metabolism. Yoga suits you. You've slimmed down. Looks good. Are you the local occult MILF?"

  "Don't neg me, bro," I said, and he laughed.

  In the car, I slid into the driver's seat. The mechanisms were strong; you weren't supposed to be able to wrestle the steering wheel away from the AI, or press the pedals against the will of the machine. But I had spent years practicing my asanas, tensing and flexing my muscles, exercising my tendons. It's isometrics, powered by will. I sank into the seat, lowered my chakra, put my hands on the wheel, and gripped with all my strength.

  * * *

  Driving the car was like trying to navigate the RV with the emergency brake on, but I did it. I could feel where the car wanted to turn, and assert my will. It was a long crawl through winding hills, but at least there was no chance of coincidentally-on-purpose heading off a cliff. Of course, Riley was actively monitoring my route; he knew everything about me, like a proper stalker, except for my thoughts.

  I was telling the truth when I said to Riley that I'd know if Pan were dead. My lie was one of omission—I knew Pan was dead. I felt it when I'd told Lindsey the story from Plutarch. I hadn't even meant to; it had just come out of me. My True Will.

  I let the car leave the road and take a recently carved dirt path into the hills. The Mercedes had been modified for rugged terrain, and I let it do most of the work. The car took the long way around, down through Siesta Valley, then back north on a route parallel to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, until I was back in South Berkeley, and Claremont Canyon. In the woods I could see the search parties at it again, those little lights, but they were unnecessary.

  The car's headlamps illuminated Pan's body. He was laid out on a blue tarp, his flesh white as bone, horse flies and night birds evacuating in the glare. There was a neat hole in the middle of his forehead, an open third eye. The engine idled, the passenger-side door unlocked, and I had to scootch across both seats to step outside.

  My poor son.

  My poor dead god. A sacrifice I made, of a god, not to a god.

  Of course Riley didn't do it. He just hired someone and gave him the order to shoot whoever came close. Property rights. That it was a child, my child, was just one of those coincidences that any occultist will tell you do not exist. There are no coincidences. And I was there now, to be found by the search parties and their smartphones, the insane and abusive mother who killed her own child. And they'd only be half wrong. There was probably a gun nearby, with my fingerprints lifted from my old arrest records, artfully decorating the grip.

  The machine stood next to Pan's body, like an obelisk. It was a bit like a cell phone tower in appearance, definitely a sensor of some sort, and not an "earthquake machine."

  I, however, was an earthquake machine. And after long practice, I was immune to pain. I kneeled before my son, and sat into the thunderbolt asana. I tensed every muscle in my body, forced my Muladhara chakra down into my coccyx and deep into the hill, deeper than Riley's futures machine had been sunk, and focused my will, calling out to the restive Hayward Fault.

  And O, she answered me.

  STILL LIFE, REVIVING

  by Kimn Neilson

  Ocean View

  I have loved leaving things behind: lovers, cities, jobs. Leaving before the end of things, the nasty part, the annoying part. I just bought a computer, my first. You tap the track pad with two fingers and a little box comes up. You can tap "back" with one finger and it returns to the previous page. Back, back, back, though what I liked to do was skip forward, forward, forward.

  But then something lies in wait for you, doesn't it? Life itself taps back, back, back; time itself wheels around and bites you.

  Hired for a weird job, that's how I met you.

  I came into town too broke for a room so I slept behind a building on the campus that first night. Next night I was drinking one long beer at a place called Marvell's, sitting at the bar reading—it was Giles Goat-Boy—and you spilled my beer and apologized a little too much and bought me another and then two more and at the end of the night I was in your bed in a rooming house down the street and had a particularly unspecific bit of work for the next day.

  In the morning you bought me eggs and toast at the Cecil—it just closed only last month—and we drank lattes and I began to feel situated. I relaxed a little. There you go. See? I go back, back, back, and I can trace exactly where it went the wrong way, where it went, as they say, down.

  We walked around the corner and got into your beat-up truck with a Six-Pac on the back. I noticed the gun rack sans guns running behind our heads. The truck was old but the interior was clean—no wrappers, old coffee cups, not even dust or dirt. I felt even more keenly how stinky I must be getting—well, that night I'd have money for a laundromat.

  The work was at the marina, you said, simple stuff. Shifting boxes, cleaning. Ever work around boats? I'd done a little trawling in Alaska, like everybody, and before that stewarded on a cruise ship, but that was like waiting tables. Besides, I got fired and put off at the next port, hence Alaska, hence the trawler.

  You listened and nodded and turned on the radio. We rolled down University Avenue and onto the road leading past boatyards and bait shops, then fancy restaurants at the end of the pier. It was your basic winter morning, nothing spectacular, but even so, the water glittered as the sun rose, the air smelled different, the wind was sharper, all giving me the feeling things were shifting forward, forward, forward . . .

  You told me to stay in the truck while you opened the gate and checked the boat. Coming back a few minutes later you said that the owner's selling and needs to move his stuff off and clean the boat. That's it. But really clean—I thought you meant oil the woodwork, polish the chrome, but you brought out disinfectant, rubber gloves, scrubbers.

  The hold was jammed with boxes. We began by pulling some out, then you were down in there handing them to me. These weren't boxes picked up behind the liquor store. Not large, maybe a foot square of super-sturdy cardboard and all about equal weight. When they were all out on deck the boat looked like a sandcastle moving gently with the tide. You went to the truck and brought back a dolly; as I stacked the boxes on the dock you ran them back to the truck. It probably wasn't two hours gone when we were done.

  You handed me a hundred dollars in twenties and told me to start scrubbing—every inch. The boat needed to be pristine for the new owners. You'd be back in a few hours with another hundred but if I finished before you were back just lock up the boat—it was a simple Yale lock on an iron bar—and meet back at the rooming house.

  A kiss and you were gone.

  * * *

  I should have been a scholar, that's what my folks thought. For the only child of two professors, it was obviously the path for me. I did seem to drift into university towns a lot. I understood how they operated, always cheap food joints, cheap beer, places to hang out, places to wash up, plenty of books, bookstores, cafés. I no longer really looked like a student, but I looked exactly like those people who had graduated and never moved on. Why leave when everything that made life easy was all around you?

  My life wasn't exactly easy but it seemed to be the way I needed it to be. My parents died in their sixties, a few years apart. After that, feeling no ties to our hometown, I never went back. I wasn't happy but I wasn't particularly unhappy either and I'll tell you, I think that's how
a lot of people feel and it's probably enough. I would have been happy/unhappy enough to just keep riding around America but you arranged for me to get nailed down pretty permanently here in good old Berkeley.

  * * *

  I'm a good worker, in a shallow, time-sensitive sort of way. A few days, clear instructions, decent money—no problem. I can do stupid work well for a short period of time. The longest I stayed on a job was also one of the filthiest—digging worms in a bank of a river in Kansas. On yet another college campus, I was sitting on some steps in their main plaza when I saw a young woman carrying a stack of buckets, just a few buckets too high for her to manage. I caught them on the way down and helped her into the biology building with them, after which she asked me if I needed work and how did I feel about mud and bugs?

  The pay wasn't that good but I liked her and she respected me and didn't pry. We dug worms, she sorted out the ones she needed for her study, and we put the rest back. We did this for a month. Then her funds ran out, we shook hands, and I headed west.

  * * *

  I spent the next few hours scrubbing that boat down and the whole time it nagged at me that I was waiting for you to come back. It would have been fine for you to give me the whole two hundred dollars and say see you in a few days, but here's what I hate: feeling stuck somewhere while waiting on someone else's plans. I was going to do the work then leave, as you'd said, whether you showed up or not, and I told myself to let go of worrying about the money, let go of meeting up again with you, and yet, it hovered—the money, you—as I moved from cabin to deck, a little sick from the constant smell of the disinfectant, only a little better on deck, but definitely feeling worse and worse about being trapped into this day on the boat, even though I had right at the beginning, as always, decided not to allow myself to be trapped.

  So there I was, in my innocent state, worrying about an illusory entrapment. By then it was close to noon. A late-middle-aged man in tennies and a polo shirt let himself through the dock gate and as he walked by he said hi and asked if that was my boat. I told him I was just cleaning it for the owner and he nodded and kept going, boarding a boat near the end of the dock. I heard him say something—maybe there'd been someone on his boat waiting?—but ten minutes later it was cop cars and sirens coming down that road and I didn't wait to see but dropped the scrubber, grabbed my coat and pack, and ran. I'd seen a scrabbly park just a little south of the restaurants and I headed there.

  I noticed I still had the rubber gloves on. I pulled them off still running and dropped them in a trash can at the back of the last restaurant. Once in the bushes I changed from my sky-blue T-shirt into one that was a washed-out gray, and I put on my sunglasses and a baseball cap. The shore curved a little and I could see cops spilling out of their cars and onto the dock and talking with the man in the polo shirt, who was pointing at the boat I'd been on, and right then the coroner's van pulled up and I was off, coming finally to a frontage road and then San Pablo Avenue where I caught a bus to downtown Oakland, knowing that somewhere down there was a Greyhound bus station. I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and I knew how to get out of town.

  I hadn't realized how 1984 things were already getting. I mean now, apparently, you can't go a block without CCTV grabbing a shot of you. Back then it was much spottier, but not spotty enough: dockside, first restaurant, second restaurant, liquor store where I got on the crosstown bus—all had me on their radar. I was sitting in the Greyhound station when they arrested me.

  * * *

  I was left to stew in a decrepit interview room. Boredom and tension fought over me. After a few hours there was a scrambling in the hall outside the door and two big detectives burst in and deposited themselves opposite me. They introduced themselves as Doran and Peake, and Doran, the bigger of the two, started in. You know we have the gloves, right? With perfect prints on the inside, you know? We have all kinds of pictures of you. So you might want to tell us exactly what happened and maybe we can work something out with the DA . . .

  So I told them. I didn't protect you and it didn't help me one bit. Something (someone) had blocked off the camera for a couple of hours that morning on the dock, so all they had was me and Polo Shirt, who turned out to be a retired judge. They had witnesses for you and me at the bar, but we didn't see anyone at your rooming house and you'd paid them in cash up front and left with no forwarding address. They got prints from your room—of dozens of people. It seems they didn't waste much time and money trying to track those people down and none of the prints matched up with the few they had from the boat. The part of the boat I hadn't gotten to yet had some brain matter belonging to the body that had worked itself loose from its weights and bobbed up next to the judge's boat. Their only question was what was my connection to the victim and motive for the crime?

  Mine too, about you. And I've had fifteen years to think about it. Because I wouldn't tell them what they wanted, I got fifteen years to life; because I was a model prisoner, I got released at the first parole hearing, with the stipulation that I remain in Alameda County and out of trouble and in touch with my parole officer for the next five years.

  So here I am, stuck in Berkeley, though it's a wide heaven after prison, and all I want to do is go out looking for you. This is my fantasy: I find you and I go to the police and they still have those fingerprints on file and I let them take it from there. Or, I find you and do the thing I just spent fifteen years paying for.

  Or I could let it go. In prison I taught myself to do internally what I'd been doing outside: drop it, move on. Forward, forward, forward. I read a lot of books, I kept to myself. I wrote one letter—to the Kansas grad student studying worms—but it turned out that she and the grad student she'd married—another worm specialist—had been killed in a tornado while on a worm expedition. Her mother was kind enough to write me back.

  So I keep to myself, I do stupid jobs well, I live in a rented room. I saved enough money to buy a used computer and pay a guy living here to teach me how to use it, and now, my friend, I'm tracking you down.

  SHALLOW AND DEEP

  by Jason S. Ridler

  Downtown Berkeley

  Now

  "Worried you were gone, bro."

  We'd circled North Berkeley BART once, like friends who didn't want to go home. Because this is what the market wants. Not tomes analyzing the realpolitik in Stalin's Russia. Or the butchery of the Gulag in gold mining. Or anything else from my fields.

  "Need fresh shots. Nothing fuzzy. Clear. A hundred. I can make anything work, but a hundred is best. Gives me variety to play with, allows for redundancy. Video good if you can scratch it."

  The homeless bundle shook. Slip-on sandals and black-bottomed white socks, it nestled like a dust bunny on the outer rotunda of the station, desiccated mouth twitching beneath a yellow Warriors shirt. We descended the stairs to a parking lot we didn't use, Ford bikes with punctured tires stationed to our left.

  "Variety is good. But just the face."

  My next class was eight a.m., if Bernie showed.

  5Chan snorted, then spat phlegm on the windshield of a red Prius. "The body is useless to the client."

  A gaggle of passengers scurried out of the station with intentional steps and a panoply of uniforms: suits, skirts, bike shorts, designer jeans with custom rips, and everyone's perfume and cologne long liquidated.

  "Meet in two weeks here on Saturday. Old e-mails are dead. Got it?"

  I nodded. 5Chan liked me timid, quiet, and listening. Made him feel in control. And it bought me work and information.

  5Chan lit up an immaculately rolled joint and took his time dragging in smoke. Hoodie, limited-edition Purple Rain concert shirt before his time by a decade, Chucks, and well-cultivated and shiny beard that smelled of pine. Berkeley trash, but "computers" got him leveled up. He had never offered me a hit.

  "Two grand. More coming if you stick. No more vanishing acts. You are my golden egg, Koba. How the fuck do you do it?"

  I shrugged, because it
was rhetorical.

  The smoke flittered out of his mouth as he spoke. "My dad was a grocer. Worked at Andronico's for years. Said that there was only two things that people always need. Bread and caskets. But he was wrong. Lust, bro. That's our bread and casket."

  I just wanted the assignment, not a lesson, I had prep. We turned left.

  "I saw it coming," His eyes narrowed, an oracle revealing wisdom to a plebe. "People are tired of fake. Silicon tits and Kardashian ass outside their paygrade. They want to fuck their neighbor, their boss, the UCB slut at Trader Joe's who thinks they're a cuck, their mom, their grandma. That's the escape, Koba. Slap the ex-girlfriend's face on a porn star, then watch her gangbanged and double-stuffed until she's sucking come between ten guys' toes and calling them daddy. That's the dream. That's the future, Koba. And we're the kings in Berkeley. Say, you ever want one for yourself, you let me know."

  I smiled. "Can't afford our rates."

  He wheezed, holding the joint at his lips. "No doubt. No doubt. Okay, back to work."

  He gave me the target, then went his own way.

  Walking down Delaware, I steadied my breathing while the sun flared my skin.

  I knew her. But we hadn't met.

  Sonja was a Republican. Former track star who hurt her knee and switched to teaching. She was recently promoted up and into the position of bulldog between teachers and parents. We'd never met face to face, but she'd given a tour around the school's cubicles once. Busty blonde, high voice, pink heels, with a lime sundress and bubbly affect that assured the parents walking the grounds that the teachers here were first-rate. "We even have PhDs in biology, history, and more. So Ainsley is getting the best." The mother mentioned her daughter had an intensive cross-country running schedule. "That's great! Where do you run?"