San Diego Noir

takeout. “If you’re hungry. It’s good. You can have it.” She held it out to him.

For a moment, they both stood there, frozen, him with the knife, her with the bag.

She heard the front door of her house creak open, a sliver of light spill out. Was that David?

Suddenly, the bum started to sob. “I’m sorry,” she made out. “I’m sorry. I listened to the Shining One. He said you were a fallen Host. He said he’d give me gold. But he lied again. He always lies. I asked for food, and you fed me.”

The sliver of light vanished. The door had closed. David must have seen her, seen her and the bum. But he stayed inside.

What’s happening here?

An easy out.

She wasn’t sure she was thinking it through, exactly. It was more like the thought just came to her.

“I know how that is,” she whispered back. “Cause the Shining One, he lives with me. Right inside that house.”

The bum nodded, his head bouncing up and down, like he wasn’t in control of it. “Yes. Yes, he does. He speaks to me. He told me lies about you.”

“I want to get him out of there,” she said. “But it’s hard to make him leave.”

He nodded again, and even in the dark she could see the change that had come over his face. He’d been like one of the cats she fed. Now he was more like a dog on the beach, and she’d just thrown him a bone.

“If you cast him out, he can’t lie to you anymore,” she said.

One way or another, she was through feeding that bum.

MOVING BLACK OBJECTS

BY CAMERON PIERCE HUGHES

Mission Beach

May 2007

FIRST PROTOCOL: FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE

Moses Johnson takes his job way too personally. He knows it, his colleagues know it. It’s why his wife of twelve years divorced him four years ago, though it was mostly a peaceful divorce and they’re better friends than they were a couple and he’s a good dad. See, people who go into Moses’s line of work go through steps. First they do it because they need the work. Then they start taking it seriously as if it’s their patriotic duty, and before you know it, it becomes, “Asshole, you owe me the money.” Moses skipped the second step and embraced the third step—by his sixth month. He cultivates looking imposing. Black suits (always black), blood-red tie, and shoes so shined that they could probably blind someone. He doesn’t wear sunglasses, even when the temperature is at its highest and the sun at its brightest. He was hit in the face with shrapnel on a classified op somewhere overseas which makes his left eye droop. It makes him scarier when he’s after a deadbeat. A deadbeat know he’s screwed if he sees Moses coming toward him with the attache case he always, always has with him and that look in his eye like when Michael Jordan has his sights set on the basket and there ain’t nothing in this world that’s going to stop him. When looking for someone, you become your mark, you eat where he eats, you talk to who he would, you order his drink and eat the same food. It’s the reason Moses is so good at this, he can think like a deadbeat. He’s close friends with his ex and he spoils his daughter, who was born with spina bifida and is in a wheelchair, rotten and visits with her every chance he gets. You can see him racing her in her chair all over the boardwalk most afternoons. It’s his military special ops background. Be All You Can Be extended to all parts of his life.

He’s been working for The Guys downtown for twenty-one years. He’s forty-four.

The current deadbeat he’s looking for owes tens of thousands of dollars. He’s an Internet pornographer named Theodore “Teddy” Bear.

“Teddy’s a piece of work,” George Leedom, his boss, had told him three weeks ago.

Leedom is a legend, been around for decades, completely hairless with less of a tan than Casper the Ghost. When out of earshot, and making sure he’s not even in the same neighborhood, his underlings call him the Greasy Old Bastard because he always gets his money no matter what and his skin has a peculiar sheen to it. His voice sounds like Darth Vader, if the Sith Lord smoked three packs a day. He sees Moses as his successor and always sends him on the tough jobs, except east of the 5, because Moses’s skin is a few shades too dark in places like Santee (Klantee) and Lakeside (Whiteside).

Teddy was your average kid at USD in the late ’90s pursuing a career in computers and getting his hands on all the porn he could, really kinky and filthy shit. It wasn’t long before he put his passions together and he was a multimillionaire by twentyfour. File-sharing by the early twenty-first century was a godsend for him. He created a powerful search engine to find streaming videos of filth and it wasn’t long before advertisers were lining up and he became the King of Filth on the Internet. Then he sold the software for millions and went back to his passion of making and distributing porn to stream on the Internet. Now it’s come to light that he has been cheating the guys who run the city for quite some time. It’s not like he couldn’t afford to pay what he owes and still be richer than God, he’s just greedy.

“We don’t know who’s protecting him, and every time we think we have him, he slips away. I need you to get him,” Leedom rasped.

So Moses has been following him around San Diego and every time he thinks he has him, the guy suddenly gets in a car or lost in a crowd. It’s gotten perversely funny for Moses, every other time he gets close, a sleek black car stops to let Teddy in. These cars are so featureless that Moses has started calling them Moving Black Objects, slang from his days in the military. The dude even changes where he lives frequently. Moses figures he has something serious going on in San Diego, because most cheats would be out of the country by now if they knew they were in trouble. He tracks him to Mission Beach, where he’s been seeing him for the past few days, always slightly out of reach. A buddy of his once said that the only mission to be found there was getting laid, pounding beers, catching a wave, and maybe riding the roller coaster.

It’s Moses’s first break. He’s lived in San Diego all his life, and was born and grew up in Mission Beach. He still