The Business at the Aztec
Another short about dirtbag activity in norther California-- now with a Subaru!
Roanne crushed the PBR can and tossed it out the window of the Subaru Brat. It clattered against the rest of them in the flatbed. He looked through his windshield at the office building. The Aztec Building was this vaguely pyramidal thing, made out of stone, painted green, and covered in plastered sconces of winged serpents and jaguars and the faces of gods taken completely out of context. As a kid he always wondered what the deal with this place. His Dutch courage told him it was time to find out. He slammed the door and crossed the lot, his fists deep in his pocket.
Darkness hung over the lobby like a light hadn’t been there in years. His eyes took a moment to adjust. Dead plants and long out-of-date government advisories. He walked towards the directory. It was flanked by a meaningless frieze of base-twenty math. He was about to run through it when he spotted a man sitting in the corner of the room. He looked like he was a part of the darkness. Like it had grown around him.
“You Jason’s friend?” he man asked. Roanne couldn’t make out his lips moving.
“That’s what he keeps telling me,” Roanne repied.
“Right. Let me see.”
Roanne reached into his jacket and came out with a scrap of paper with writing on it. The man straightened it out like he was doing origami in reverse. Satisfied, he crumpled it back up and stuck it in the pocket of his trucker jacket.
“Yeah. Alright. This way.”
He was careful not trip on the busted tile as he followed the man down the hall. Behind the office doors he could hear chanting and the faint clank of machinery. It smelled of fried food and joss and rotten produce. None of the doors were labeled. It felt less like an office building and more like a hospice for LLCs. He could see why the man did business here. Even the cops wouldn’t want to be here for long.
He thought about the weird knot math of the Aztecs. How he saw some in a museum once. How they had these strings of numbers and lengths and hitches meant nothing because the conquistadors killed anybody who could read them. That and smallpox and TB and all the rest of it. He heard a loud, wet cough behind one of the hollow core doors. He should have brought a mask. That would have been two reasons to wear one.
The man stopped in front of a door with a broken seal from the city fixed over the joint. He put in a key and shouldered it open and waved Roanne inside. He did. It was dark and he felt his stomach tighten up. He braced for impact. If he was going to get blackjacked anywhere, it’d be right here, right now. The fluorescents flickered to life. No sap. No sudden drop. Just the rot of another office. Faux wood-paneling and moldy reproductions of Monet. Missing furniture stood out like silhouettes from an A-bomb. The man shouldered past Roanne and went through a doorless doorway and into the dark.
“Step into my office,” the man said.
He realized that the Aztecs didn’t do that knot math at all. That was the Incas. He didn’t know a thing about the Aztecs other than they had the same end as everyone else that ran into the Spanish.
Another dust filled room. No posters this time. There was a steel sink and a wall of cabinetry with its doors removed. Bare shelves stared back. The only decoration was an oriental rug on the floor. It extended from wall to wall. A little garden of bright red in this drab and dying building. It was neatly covered with guns.
None of them touched each other. They were all slightly used. Scuffs on the handle. Sheen removed by use. There were calibers of all kinds and weapons of all ages. Guns he knew from movies and video games. Strange weapons he would barely know how to operate except where to point them. All these weapons laid out with the eyes of an artist. Roanne looked over them for what he wanted.
The man cleared his throat. His thumbs hooked into his Levi’s. His ringed fingers tapped against the denim. Roanne could see the pocketknife was clipped to his pocket.
“You armed?” the man asked.
“No.”
“You a cop?”
“No.”
“You’re not wired?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Am I—yes, I’m sure.”
“You’re Jason’s friend?”
“Yes. I told you that already.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s an asshole and he walks with a limp.”
“Yeah. That’s him. What’d he tell you about me?”
“He told me you were the man to see about my problem.”
“He say anything else?”
“He said you didn’t have much of a sense of humor and that if you ask me questions, I should be honest with you.”
“He’s not wrong there.”
“He said—”
“A lotta bullshit.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s him. You talked to him. You talk to anybody else about this?”
“What’s with all these questions?”
The man looked Roanne over. “If I were you, doing what I do, would you deal with you?”
“Probably not.”
“Especially since—”
“Jason is my reference.”
“Yeah. The guy with the well-earned limp. Now, did you talk to anybody else about this?”
“No. Why the hell would I talk to anybody about this?”
“Plenty of people talk about plenty of dumb shit, man. And I don’t know you, so I gotta ask.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So,” the man said. He cracked his knuckles. Inked eyes on the back of the man’s palms stared at Roanne. “Tell me why you came here.”
Roanne scratched his chin. The PBR pumped through his veins came out as cold sweat. This was not his world. Big a game as he talked, it was not Jason’s world either. How the hell did he get here? How the hell was he going to get out? All he knew was that there was a cliff edge out there in the dark and there was no telling when he would tumble off it.
“You know what I want,” Roanne said.
“Be specific. I don’t deal in theory.”
“Okay. Specific.”
“Model. Make. Color.”
“Color?”
“I’m being funny. What do you want?”
“Is this the type of thing where I have to say what I want or you won’t help me?”
“Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”
“Fine. I want a .44 automag.”
“Sure. You want an original Picasso while we’re at it?”
“I’m serious.”
The man gave him a look as blank as slate. He clicked his tongue and raised his eyebrow.
“Are you?”
“What? I want an automag pistol. With rounds. Do you have one or not?”
“The fuck are you going to shoot with a .44 automag?”
“What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t, I’m just curious if I have to worry about the return of the t-rex or not.”
“You don’t. Now, could I please get it. I have the money.”
Before the salesman could stop him, the money was out. Even as he was doing it, it felt like a mistake. The wad hit the counter and it split open, sending fifties and twenties and tens everywhere.
“How much is that?”
“Enough.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Twelve hundred bucks. You can count it.”
“I believe you.”
“You didn’t believe me about anything else.”
“You know what a precedent is?”
“Yes. I know what precedent is. I’m not an idiot.”
“Right. You told me that already.” The man counted out the bills, straightening them out as he went. Sounds of tinkering leaked through the Eisenhauer-era ductwork. When he was done, he slapped four bills down on his side of the counter and set the rest of the blown semi-stack down and pushed it towards Roanne. That kind of money was hard not to snatch right back up. A little voice in the back of Roanne’s head told him that was a bad move. For once, he listened.
“That is my fee,” the man said.
“Fee? You haven’t done anything yet. I got twelve hundred large and you’re looking at it like it’s dogfood.”
“You got a thousand large. I took two hundred.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” and then he just sort of trailed off. Roanne looked for something to stare at and all he found was dust and guns and the weird washed-up rocker squatting there, his hands hanging down over his knees. The man did not meet his gaze. His bloodshot eyes stared past Roanne, past the doorframe, and out to somewhere in the dust and dark of the Aztec. Then he started speaking.
“Two hundred bucks is the best buy you’ll ever make, because you, kid, have no idea what you actually want. You come in here asking me for the impossible, which tells me, either you don’t know what you’re talking about, which means that you’re the last person in the world who needs one of these things, or, you’re asking for the impossible because you don’t want to actually go through with this, which also tells me—shut up—” Roanne wasn’t aware that he was about to interrupt until that moment. He zipped it up. “You are still the last person in the world, in this state, in this county, who needs to be walking around with a piece. You’ve got no clue, so let me give you one, all two-hundred dollars of it. Say you’re sorry.”
“What?”
“Whoever it is, whatever it is, you’re coming to drop twelve hundo over, tell them you’re sorry. You don’t even have to be. You don’t even have to be wrong. Just say you’re sorry. Trust me.”
“I’m not sorry. I’m not wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just say the words to whoever you have to. Say them to yourself if you need to.”
“This self-help shit?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“I got enough of that.”
“Maybe listen this time.”
“Or what?”
“Or I take the full thousand and really teach you a lesson.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Probably not. Am I?”
Even standing there Roanne could feel the bruises underneath his clothes swell and push against the skin and in the pain he tried to remember the anger that pushed him to this place. Instead he found he was just tired. He wanted out so bad he didn’t even know it. Now he was stuck here, his morning buzz burning down, his back throbbing with pain. In the vents above he could hear somebody working away on nothing.
“I wasn’t going to shoot anybody. Just his car.”
“What kind of car?”
“’56 Chevy.”
“Nice car.”
“I helped him restore it, too. We got the frame from his uncle’s house out in the sierras. I mean, this thing was Scrap City, USA, you know what I mean? But we fixed it up from the ground up, man. Sourced the parts, made some of them, put it all together. Best years of my life put into that thing. And then he goes and fucks my girlfriend.” He caught himself. “Ex-girlfriend. And I was cool with it, you know, the breakup, but he didn’t even wait twenty-four hours. She still had her hair crap in my bathroom! I just wanted something big enough to stop it, you know. A .22 isn’t going to slow down a piece of Detroit steel like that, is it?”
“No, it is not.”
“No, it isn’t. I just wanted to take something away from him. But I guess that isn’t the car’s fault, is it?”
The man folded his hands. Silver and turquoise clinked together. Squatted there like a picture-perfect rockabilly buddha. “You going to do it?”
“I don’t know.”
Roanne turned and took the money. A thousand dollars still felt like a lot. It felt like he’d come ahead on something for the first time in forever. As he did so, the gunseller took the crumpled paper out of his pocket and took a Zippo to it. The paper burned blue and he held it in his hand longer than he should have been able to and then he let go of it, letting the bill of passage float down into the sink.
“You can see yourself out.”
Roanne stood there at the precipice of this hollow core door, with the hallway in front of him and the strange office behind him, and sort of expected something to denote the change that had just happened. A bell ringing, a curtain closing. Something. Instead, he heard chanting somewhere down the hall. Loud and muffled and pointless to his ear and over that he could hear clanging of dead machinery and of business slowly grinding to a halt. He closed his eyes and thought about the about his ex and his friend and their car, and he figured the gun seller was right about one thing: He was sorry that he ever came.
Love this old man