Usual Spot

            by Ryan Race

 

            It was a Thursday night, or Friday morning I suppose, around 1 a.m. I was on my way to the library, where I sleep. It’s got the cushiest grass and a nice little nook around the back, hidden by a patch of trees. The cold, brisk air nipped at my cheeks and nose as I walked along Hopkins Street. The sky was dark and the stars were hidden in a soupy fog. The sidewalk was damp and dewy, and the only sounds on the deserted street were the rustling of my plastic bags, the scuffing of my shoes on the pavement, and the scraping of my Safeway shopping cart and its broken wheel.

When I got to the library I put my cart behind the bushes on the lawn and pulled out my green sleeping bag. As I spread out my sleeping bag on the grass, I heard a car pull up on the other side of the library. The humming of the engine stopped and a door opened and slammed shut. Occasionally on weekends rowdy groups of kids would wander by, but normally, I was the only one at the library until morning.

I dragged myself on my hands and knees to the very corner of the cold, crimson wall to peek around the building. A man was standing alone outside a silver car on the corner, under the unnatural yellow light of a street lamp. He had on a dark suit and shiny black shoes. His tall, slim build resembled that of a Macy’s mannequin. He looked clean and expensive; there was something very familiar about him. White smoke from a cigarette blew from his mouth and trailed from where he stood. He stayed there for a long time, his polished shoes catching the yellow light and flashing whenever he paced or rocked back on his heals.

            After a while I got tired and cold, so I pulled my sleeping bag over to the edge of the wall to bundle up a bit as I watched. I figured he was waiting for someone, but what felt like hours went by and no one else came. My eyelids grew heavy and I must’ve dozed off because the next thing I remember, Cookie was poking at me.

“Bill. Bill, get up. Get up before the school buses arrive.” Cookie’s a skinny old bird, always has on thick, pink-rimmed spectacles. She wakes me up every morning before the library opens and people begin to arrive. She tells me that she’s been the librarian there for fifteen years. So I picked up my stuff and pushed my cart down the street towards the long blocks of shops on Solano.

 

 

The man did not return to the library the next night, or the night after that, but each night I set up my sleeping bag so that I had a clear view around the corner. A week passed and when Thursday night came around, I laid out my pillow and everything, then wheeled my cart to its usual spot. I remember it wasn’t foggy at all that night; the air was cool and clear. I stared at the stars for a while and then rolled over and let myself drift into a light sleep, which was interrupted by the slam of a car door only moments later. I rolled over and looked towards the street lamp where the man had been standing the night before. Sure enough, there he was, wearing his black suit and rocking on his heels in that yellow light, puffing on a cigarette. Moments later, a second car came and parked right behind his silver one. It was black with shiny silver hubcaps and tinted windows. A man dressed in a blue suit got out of the back seat on the street side of the car and walked over to the other man. A woman stepped out of the silver car, a real classy looking broad. Her blonde wavy hair came to just above her shoulders, which were covered by a soft, white fur coat. A silky, turquoise dress hung to her knees, exposing her calves and a pair of strappy silver heels. It was difficult to see their faces, and their voices were muffled. The two men greeted each other, and lead the woman from the silver car to the black one. The man in the blue suit opened the back door, and helped her in, then pulled out his wallet and handed a few bills to the man in the black suit, who graciously accepted them. They spoke a few words, then shook hands and parted. The two men headed back to their cars and departed in different directions.

 

 

I was at my best friend and coworker, Nick Alvarez’s bachelor party at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco when I met Vivian. She was a stylish, witty girl who would show you the time of your life if you paid her enough. We enjoyed each other’s company for a month before she stopped charging me and started calling herself my girlfriend. I had it bad from the moment she looked me in the eye, she had damn pretty eyes. We moved in together after another month and things were going fine until the day I came home from work and found all three floors of my house stripped bare of her belongings. All she left me was a brief note explaining that she’d met someone else and was flying to England with him that very evening. I stared at the blue ink on that orange post-it for what felt like hours, her signature and heartless apology eating away at my insides.

I was real depressed right after she left me, didn’t go to work for days. My job was a dull one, I handled all the money and accounts for a large toy store called Jimble’s Toys, had been the accountant for almost five years. Nick kept calling me and leaving messages saying crazy things like I’d better come in to work and explain some things before I got in serious legal trouble. He said that he’d tried to make up excuses and cover for me as long as he could, but that our boss had noticed large sums of money missing from the company’s trust fund and wanted an explanation or he was calling the feds. I had no idea what he was talking about, figured it must’ve been either a bad joke or a terrible misunderstanding.

So I finally go into work one day, and sure enough, there was a serious problem. There was money missing, a lot of money, a few million dollars worth of money. It seemed that cent-by-cent, money was automatically being transferred into an unknown private account, which didn’t show up in the same program as the firm’s accounts. The money had already been withdrawn from the private account by the time the situation surfaced, and the transactions were somehow made under my name and information through a bank in San Francisco.

Someone somehow got very private information that I was under contract not to release, the effect was detrimental to a very large company, and my boss was pressing charges. There were security settings and programs on my computers at work and at home that should have kept out anyone but myself. Hackers skilled enough to have broken into the programs wouldn’t waste their time with such small sums of money, and there wasn’t anyone to vouch that I had been in my apartment at the time of the withdrawal. I talked to lawyer after lawyer and each one said the same thing: the chances of me getting out of all this without serving time were slim. The common consensus was that I should “settle”. Luckily, Nick was able to talk my boss into striking a deal with me; I pay the firm back, they drop the charges. I had enough equity in my house and belongings to sell everything and replace the money, but I was most certainly out of a job. Since the scandal had been widely publicized, I couldn’t get work anywhere. The business world doesn’t value thieves unless they’re powerful and rich as hell.

 

 

            A month or so passed before I saw the man with the silver car again. It must have been around midnight, and I was sleeping in my usual spot. I was woken up by the sound of raised voices coming from under the street lamp on the corner. I scooted up to see around the wall. The woman with the wavy blond hair and the man in the black suit were standing outside his silver car, engaged in an animated argument.

            “God damn it, what exactly is the problem?” The man’s voice was short and frustrated.

“I told you, I’ve got a bad feeling.” The woman’s words were emphasized but not anxious or loud.

            “Oh, you’ve got a bad feeling, do you? Well, I’m very sorry but it’s too late now, that’s for sure. There’s no backing out.”

            “Rudy, I’m telling you, Connohan is no idiot. I’ve spent way more time with the man than you have, and I know that we cannot pull this one off. He can influence a lot of people; he’s more powerful than you think, he’s got a voice. We have got to call it off.”

            “Call it off? Call it off! This is a fucking fifteen million dollar job, and you want to call it off?” The man’s voice rose to a shout and I’m sure he was red in the face, though it was too dark to tell.

            “Quit shouting, you’ll wake people up.” She lit a cigarette and took a puff.

            “Don’t fuck around with me right now. I’m at the end of my rope.”

“You aren’t the only one in debt here. We can find another candidate, what about Jeffery Johnson from Power Bar, or Bradley Cohen from-”

“Quit shitting yourself. That won’t make us half as much as this job will and you know it.” The generic ring of a cell phone interrupted them, and the man walked away from the woman to answer it. She stood there under the light with her back to me, puffing on her cigarette. 

“Get in the fucking car and let’s go already, he doesn’t like the usual spot, he’s meeting us at the Ivy Room instead,” the man declared after hanging up. When the woman turned to walk to the car, she paused for a few moments with her body facing me, getting the last of her smoke. My heart stopped as she threw down her cigarette and patted the butt with the toe of her silver heel. “Vivian, hurry the fuck up.”

She’d dyed her hair and lost a few pounds since I’d known her, but hadn’t changed professions. She was in the silver car and down the street before my heart even started beating again.