Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [61]
THE RED ROOM
BY CHRIS A. BOLTON
Powell’s City of Books
Jacob Black catches the kid’s reflection in the window of the bookstore coffee shop and can tell right away he’s the one. He knows nothing about his potential client—the brief, terse e-mail exchange only led to Powell’s City of Books as the meeting place. Jacob IDing himself by the pile of books next to him: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The client picked the titles. Not exactly subtle.
The kid appears in the large doorway separating the Gold Room from the Coffee Room, wearing an oversized army coat with anarchy symbols and a giant messenger bag spattered with dried mud, carrying a dirt-crusted bike helmet, and whipping his head around like someone’s hollering his name. Sitting at the window despite a roomful of empty tables, Jacob follows the kid’s reflection in the glass and for a moment considers leaving the books and walking right the fuck out of there.
Jacob Black is used to trouble. A guy who finds clients by answering craigslist ads for obscure jobs like “cat walker” and “breast feeding for adults” deals exclusively with trouble and the sorts of people who deeply embroil themselves in it. To seek out the kind of person who knows about Jacob Black, and where to place the ad and what to put in it, requires a level of desperation that may cause cancer by close proximity. But this one—this kid in his early twenties, soft and clueless, a Reed College trust-fund brat who likes to dress up and pretend he’s living in the gutter—this blend of trouble smells too strong.
The kid finds Jacob before he makes up his mind. “Are,” he begins—but has to swallow, nearly chokes on it, and starts again. “Are you him?”
“I’m he,” Jacob says. “Sit down, you’re making the coffee nervous.”
The kid perches on the next stool and tries to size Jacob up. Jacob himself would admit he isn’t much to look at: a face that hasn’t seen a razor since Portland last saw the sun, T-shirt and khakis that look and smell like he yanked them from the bottom of his dirty laundry pile (which is, in fact, his only laundry pile), and a disheveled head of unruly hair that used to be dark blond but has turned muddy with gray.
“So, uh, what’re you exactly, like, a private detective?”
“I’m a guy who does jobs. You got one?”
The kid glances around, as though he could spot anything suspicious if it were there. “What’s your rate?”
“It varies.” The kid gives the coffee shop another scan and Jacob says, “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to tell me what the job is.”
The kid chews his lip, sucks it under his front teeth, chews some more. Finally he lets out the breath he’s been holding. “I got something that someone wants.”
“Don’t be specific or anything. Just give me lots of pronouns.”
He reaches into his army coat, produces a heavily wrinkled manila envelope with a small, square bulge only a few inches long. “It’s a videotape. Wanna know what’s on it?”
“Nope.” Jacob stands, launching the kid’s eyes, hands, his whole being into a frenzy of frantic motion. “You 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