Portland Noir

blackmailed some asshole, now you want me to be your bag man? Fuck off.”

“Five hundred,” he whispers in desperation. “Half now, half later.”

Jacob turns away, all set to walk and never look back. The kid reaches into the other side of his coat and flashes the cash. “I’m good for it.”

Jacob plops back onto his stool.

The kid spits out the rest in one breath: “There’s a reading upstairs, ten minutes. The guy’ll be in the audience. His coat’s folded up on the chair next to him, with the money under it. You sit in the next seat-take his coat, then leave yours in its place with the tape underneath.” The kid reaches into his messenger bag and hands Jacob a brown Members Only jacket. “That’s it. Come get your two-fifty.”

Jacob thinks it over. Plays it out in his head, looks for all the flaws, every conceivable way this goes sour. He finds a dozen in under ten seconds.

The kid presses: “No risk, either-it’s totally in public.”

“It’s a book reading. I’ll be lucky if we aren’t the only two people there.”

The kid counts out 250 dollars, slaps the cash into Jacob’s hands. “I’ll wait for you in the Mystery section. Who’s your favorite writer?”

“Michael Connelly.”

“That’s where I’ll be. You come find me, okay?” The kid is half-sitting, half-standing, one foot solid on the floor, both eyes scrutinizing Jacob. “Okay?”

He holds the envelope out. Jacob pockets the money, thinking about his empty cupboards back home, and grabs the envelope from the kid’s clammy fingers. Thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

Knowing full well it isn’t.

Jacob arrives a few minutes early for the event. He walks up three flights of stairs, marveling-as most do-at a four-story bookstore that encompasses an entire city block. Each room is color-coded, which either makes things easier or more confusing, depending on how readily you associate gold with genres like Sci-Fi and Romance, purple with Military History and Philosophy, and orange with Cooking and Business.

He remembers dating a woman who worked here back in the late ’90s, wonders if she’s still around. Her name lost to him. Probably wouldn’t recognize her anymore. Pierced, tattooed, dyed Goth hair, and a fondness for industrial wear back then; now she’s probably got a house, family, hybrid car, and those Mom jeans that turn a woman’s ass into a denim landing strip.

Jacob enters the Pearl Room wondering what’s “pearl” about it, why “pearl” and not “silver,” not that there’s any silver to speak of, either. A few rows of folding chairs fill the Basil Hallward Gallery next to the art books. A dais is set up beside a cart loaded with books to be signed-though, judging by the half-dozen people scattered about the seats, they won’t sell many copies tonight. Jacob glances at the author’s name-no one he recognizes- then pretends to be extremely interested in a 200-dollar book containing photographs of fat men in diapers.

He finds his mark instantly-a tall, muscular black man with curly hair cut close to the scalp and shoulders so broad and thick they need their own chairs. The guy sits in the back row, a high school letterman’s jacket neatly folded on the seat beside him. Tight short-sleeve button-up shirt tucked into faded blue jeans. Beige hiking boots. Cell phone in a holster clipped to a leather belt.

What interests Jacob even more is the man hovering by the shelves of remaindered books. Black leather jacket, T-shirt tucked into dark blue Levi’s, sunglasses resting on the back of his head. Military-style buzz cut and a thin mustache. And he’s “reading” an oversized book about Gustav Dore while discreetly scanning the room.

Jacob calmly descends the stairs and strolls back to the Gold Room. As the kid looks up from a used copy of The Clos-ers, startled, Jacob presses the jacket, the tape, and the cash into his arms.

“Turn around,” Jacob says. “Get the hell out of here. Don’t look back. This never happened.”

Jacob heads through the Blue Room toward the entrance. The kid is right on his heels, completely ignoring his advice. “What’re you doing? I told you, it’s easy, just two minutes and-”

“And I’m dogshit. Those are cops, kid. At least two, maybe more. But you knew that-that’s why you paid me. You are way out of your league. Walk away and hope they never find you.”

The kid lurches ahead, blocks Jacob’s path. “They pulled a Mexican out of his car and beat him.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“You don’t wanna see what they did to his wife.”

“I don’t wanna see what they’re gonna do to you. Because they’ll catch you. They’re police. Probably dumb police, since you caught them on tape-but you’re even dumber, so they’ll catch you.”

“You know CopStalker?”

Jacob nods, Of course. A band of “concerned volunteers” whose goal is to hold police accountable for their actions-or that’s how it started. CopStalker now mostly consists of bike messengers, anarchists, and indie media activists who need something to do while sober. They follow Portland’s Finest on their bikes, documenting every traffic stop and harassment of the homeless, then post the accounts on a website whose cluttered design and abbreviated text make it nearly impossible to decipher.

Fifteen years ago, Jacob would have been one of them.

“My girlfriend shot the tape,” the kid says. “She’s scared shitless-jumps every time the phone rings or someone knocks. I told her I’d take care of it.”

“So you blackmail cops. Brilliant.”

“Not for myself,” the kid says, sounding hurt. “For the victims. They’re too injured to work, they barely know English, and they’re terrified to leave their apartment. This is all they got.”

Jacob stares into the kid’s eyes, searching for a tell. The slightest hint he’s being lied to. If the kid isn’t giving him the truth, he’d make a killing in the World Series of Poker.

Jacob Black doesn’t possess what can be called a sense of civic duty. Nor much empathy. But years ago he had a badge, and then he didn’t, and the circumstances that cost him his badge suddenly feel too familiar.

He takes the bundle from the kid. “I sense the slightest fuck-up, I walk. You’ll never see me again.”

“Fair enough.”

Jacob takes his time going back. He glances at the journals tucked into the Mezzanine, then lingers in the True Crime section of the Purple Room. Little memories bobbing to the surface like bodies in the spring thaw. When he dated the woman who worked here-what the hell was her name?-he’d wait for her shift to end in a different room. Can’t recall if he made it to every room in the store before things ended.

Mostly they’d just fucked. Sometimes they smoked a joint in bed afterward and she told him stories about all the weird customer incidents at Powell’s. Mainly junkies in the bathrooms. Though there was the time someone found a homeless guy who’d climbed up one of the twenty-foot bookcases in the Purple Room and fell asleep on top until a manager heard him snoring. And the time a crazy woman tried to abduct a six-year-old girl, so the store went into total lockdown-no one allowed in or out-while the employees combed top to bottom, front to back, until they found the girl in a restroom stall.

When he heads back up to the gallery, a paunchy, bushy-haired cowboy in snakeskin boots is reading a poem about the desert being both his mother and his lover.

The black cop has never looked more out of place. Long, muscular arms draped across the seat backs to each side, he bounces one leg impatiently-a leg almost as thick as Jacob’s torso.

Jacob takes the seat next to the letterman jacket. The leg stops bouncing.

Shoulders keeps his gaze fixed on the dais, trying to appear interested, but his senses have clearly zeroed in on the man in the wrinkled T-shirt and khakis who dropped into the hot seat.

Jacob listens through another stanza. Pretends to glance at the art on the gallery walls, peripherally spotting Mustache as he crosses from the remaindered books to the info desk. A perfect spot to cut Jacob off from the stairs.

He waits. They wait.

The Poet Laureate of Somebody’s Backyard declares his yearning to make love to a cactus, and Jacob makes the switch. Scoops up the letterman jacket and in the same movement drops the Members Only one in its place.