Pain Management

couple of street names. I didn’t push it; why squeeze when there’s no juice?

Pioneer Square was the downtown see-and-be-seen place, preening and posturing the order of the day. There were a few skateboard artists, a juggler, a threesome doing a little close-up Frisbee, music blasting from a dozen boom boxes, some “Look at me!” dancing. A guy made the rounds, flexing an upper body that must have looked a lot better in his own mirror. Anarchists handed out leaflets about some demonstration coming the next day. They seemed pretty organized about it. I watched people watching people for a while, getting nowhere.

It wasn’t a particularly good spot for buskers, but a few tried. None that looked remotely like Rosebud.

A young, pretty, nicely put-together girl walked by, slowly. The black Lab at her side sported a set of saddlebags—a working partner, not a pet. I flashed on Pansy and drove the thoughts away before they hurt me. The girl had a toolbelt of some kind around her waist, and a backpack that looked homemade. She wasn’t panhandling, she was scavenging, carefully checking the ground for anything of value, occasionally putting something she picked up into the Lab’s saddlebags.

There’s plenty of street kids in Portland, but no single street culture. And I was way too old to try fitting in, so I went looking for a guide. I finally ran across one of their halfass gurus in a coffeehouse, but all he wanted to do was rant about the Internet.

“If you deconstruct it, the whole thing is a sham. A fake. The Internet is supposed to be all about personal freedom, but, if you think it through, you see that the whole Net culture is about invasion of privacy. It’s just a ruse to register us all, man.”

I was running into this all the time, that intersection thing—where the extremists on both ends of the political continuum looped back onto each other until you couldn’t tell them apart. This guy wasn’t any great distance from the gun loons who’ll tell you that banning private ownership of armor-piercing bullets or rocket launchers is just the opening salvo in ZOG’s plan to disarm all American citizens.

The guru may have been a little slow in the synapses, but he had his finger on the pulse—if there’s one common cause between the hyper-right and the ultra-left, it’s that they hate the very idea of Registration.

“This girl I’m looking for . . . ?” I opened, trying to get him off his topic and onto mine.

“She has to find you, man. It can’t go the other way,” he intoned, as the two stick- figure kids at his table nodded sagely.

“Fair enough. But she can’t find me unless she knows where to look, right?” I said, handing him a business card with my name and cell-phone number on it, wrapped around a twenty.

“Right, man,” the guru said, pocketing the offering. “The Internet is all bullshit, you know. I mean, even the fucking anarchist Web sites send you cookies!”

I don’t think he noticed me leaving.

The black guy couldn’t have been out of the joint long. The prison weight-room muscles were still chiseled, the eye-lock was race-war hostile, and my color still made him glance behind me to make sure I was alone. “Who asking about Odom, slick?”

“Cash.”

“Like Johnny Cash?”

“Like Benjamin Cash.”

“What the fuck kind of name that be, slick?”

“It’s a Muslim name,” I told him. “Benjamin 5X Cash.”

“You must think I be someone to fuck with, slick,” he said, closing the distance between us.

“No, he thinks you’re someone who understands English, dumbass,” said a voice from behind him. “You’re putting up five yards to . . . what, man?” he asked me, stepping forward out of the gloom in the back of the bar. Much smaller than the bodybuilder, with a yellowish cast to his skin. I’d have about the same luck guessing his age as I would an alligator’s.

“Odom’s the one I need to talk to.”

“And you never met this ‘Odom’ dude, is that it?” the smaller man said, telling me who he was.

“Not by face. Only by status.”

“Status?” the bodybuilder snarled. “Motherfucker, you talk some strange—”

“He means rep,” Odom told his pupil. “Listen and learn. Now,” he said, turning to me, “where’d you get word on me?”

“Inside.”

“You was in the SHU? Where? Pelican Bay?”

“No. I did all my bits on the other coast. But word travels; you know how that works.”

“Yeah, I know. You got friends still in, then?”

“Might have.”

“Might be AB, too, right?”

“Some of them.”

“You going to give up some of those names?”

“I never give up names,” I said.

He smiled at that. Thought for a moment. Then said, “They got some mighty strange-looking undercovers these days.”

“I heard that, too,” I agreed. “But, see, an undercover, he’d be looking to score some dope. Or a piece. Or . . . well, you know how it goes. Me, I got five hundred dollars for you to tell me something. If you know it. And, if you don’t, to find it out.”

“Ain’t no crime to listen.”

“Right. Okay to sit down?”

“Glad you asked, man. Slide into that booth over there.”

I wasn’t exactly blown over from shock when the bodybuilder slid in right next to me, with Odom across the table. No way for me to move. Just the way I wanted it.

“I’m looking for a girl,” I said. “A runaway. Her parents are worried.”

“I got nothing to do with girls,” Odom said.

“I know you don’t. That’s why I came here. If the girl was merchandise to you, then I’d be messing in your business, and I wouldn’t do that. She’s on the street, somewhere. You’ve got people out there. Here’s what she looks like,” I said, handing him one of the copies of Rosebud’s photo I’d had made.

He glanced at the photo, his face expressionless.

“Here’s how to find me,” I said, handing over the card.

“That be two out of three, my man.”

“The five is if you turn her up.”

“No, man. The five is for my people to be on the eyeball. I know there’s got to be a nice reward for this little girl. People had to have money to hire you and all.”

“The reward’s only for people working on commission.”

“Yeah. Brutus, you had his white ass pegged, brother. This motherfucker is slick, all right.” He swiveled his head toward me. “How much?”

“Another five, only not centuries. Five large.”

“That ain’t enough to pay for a tuneup on my Rolls, man.”

“You want to raise, you got to have chips,” I told him.

He nodded slowly. When the boulder who’d been blocking my exit finally understood what the nod meant, he stood up to let me out.

By the time the ten days was up, all I’d accomplished was to make sure the whisper-stream knew a man was looking for Rosebud. It was like betting on a horse without looking at the form. Hell, without even knowing if your horse was in the goddamned race.

So, when the father renewed my contract, I went back inside myself, looking there. I had one card I thought I could play, but it was too early to be sure. And if I moved too soon, it could backfire. In the meantime, that Cuckoo comic still nagged at me, so I went looking for a way in.

Took me only about an hour to find a little comics shop. It was devoid of customers, and the proprietor, a fat, balding guy with a face that had once been jolly, was glad to shoot the breeze with me. He recognized my copy of Cuckoo right away.