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. He’s up and away from the seats and heading for the stairs before he realizes what his hand knew at a touch—there’s no money under the jacket.
Mustache comes right behind Jacob, following him to the top of the stairs, when Jacob wheels around so suddenly they almost collide. Their eyes meet, and for a moment neither is sure what the other will do.
Jacob says, “Excuse me,” and steps around the cop. Walks across the floor, past the info desk with its narrow-eyed employee typing on a computer, and enters the Rare Book Room.
The ancient, balding custodian of this quiet, carpeted, precisely climate-controlled cell hunches over a book at his desk, folding Mylar over a dust jacket. He doesn’t seem to register Jacob’s arrival—nor, from appearances, much care about anything that doesn’t have brittle old pages and hand-woven binding.
Jacob browses a hundred-year-old atlas displayed on top of a waist-high bookshelf, allowing him to watch the door as Mustache comes in. Roughly as tall as his partner and just as wide, but with a case of beer where Shoulders has a six-pack. Mustache stands directly on the opposite side of the bookcase, hardly feigning interest in the musty tome he opens.
“Boy, I’ll tell you somethin,” he says. “Life, huh? Whole lotta foreplay, not a lot of fuck.”
Jacob glances at the book in Mustache’s hands. “Mark Twain said that?”
The cop lifts his dark eyes to fix an amused gaze on Jacob—not unlike a sadistic child pepper-spraying flies. “You know you got an empty jacket, right?”
“I don’t mind. It’s chilly out.”
“And I bet my buddy’s got an empty jacket too. So. How we both gonna get what we want?”
“We could swap pants. But mine’ll probably be loose in the crotch.”
“Can I help either of you gentlemen?” the guardian of rare books calls out, loud enough to communicate his disdain for human voices.
“Just browsing, thanks,” Mustache says. Then turns back to Jacob and says, in a softer whisper, “I know you’re not him. Just some idiot took a few bucks to make a handoff. I got no beef with you.”
“If you knew me, you might.”
“One-time offer. Now or never.” He reaches for the inside pocket of his leather jacket. Jacob tenses, and before he can recoil a brown paper bag lands on top of the bookcase. Thick, square-shaped, like a brick.
“I don’t mind spendin the money. I just don’t wanna give it to some shit-stain thinks he can screw me and my partner. Laugh about it with his retarded cronies on their stupid tiny bikes. That chaps my ass, man.”
“Mine too. I hate those little bikes.”
Jacob stares at the bag, so much thicker than the measly bundle in his pocket. His lack of civic duty coming back to him.
“The full amount,” Mustache says. “Twenty grand, all yours. Just give me the punk.”
Jacob’s gaze returns to the dark eyes. The amusement is gone, replaced by a barely contained fury that reminds Jacob why he changed his mind.
Mustache taps the bag gently, steadily. “You don’t gotta do nothin ’cept point him out. He’s here in the store, right? Wouldn’t be smart enough to meet somewhere else.”
Jacob shrivels inside.
Now who’s the dumb one?
“Point me to him, take your money, go free and clear. No harm, no hassle. You don’t ever gotta know what happened to him.”
“Twenty grand, huh?”
Mustache nods confidently, his smirk returning.
“A man who’ll pay twenty might go fifty.”
The smirk dies. “You tryin to extort me?”
“You’ve already been extorted,” Jacob says. “I’m just haggling.”
Mustache slaps his hand over the bag, big enough to cover the entire brick. The smack it makes jars the custodian’s last nerve. “If you wish to converse,” he snaps, “there’s a coffee shop on the ground floor.”
“We’re talkin books!” Mustache says. Back to Jacob: “Don’t fuck with us. They’ll never
find
all your pieces.”
“Send Mr. Shoulders to an ATM. We can read to each other while we wait.”
The bag goes back into the jacket. “Money’s off the table. You had your chance, fuckface. Now you show us to him or we start breakin bones.”
Evidently not intimidated by the cop’s size and ferocity, the custodian of the Rare Book Room has shambled to their side and is about to utter another protest when Jacob turns to him, holding up the atlas he’s been thumbing. “I’ll take this one. Do you gift wrap?”
Jacob finds Shoulders standing guard outside the room, even less amused-looking than his partner. Mustache grabs Jacob’s arm, steers him toward the windows by the Photography section. “I got you a present,” Jacob says, handing him the atlas.
Mustache flings the book aside. “Your mistake is thinkin you’re safe long as you’re in public.”
Shoulders adds, “It’d be
real
easy to get you someplace private.”
“And
then
we’ll have some goddamn fun.”
“I can see you guys mean business,” Jacob says. “Final offer. You keep the book, I’ll take the money, and I’ll go set up an introduction with my client.”
Mustache and Shoulders bookend Jacob, glaring down at him from impressive heights. “You know what we are, right?” Shoulders says. “Fuck with us, you ain’t safe crossin the street. Ain’t safe in your home. From here on out, there’s no such thing as you bein safe, ever again. Got it?”
Jacob holds out his hand expectantly. Mustache looks at Shoulders, who nods, then Mustache takes out the money and fills Jacob’s palm.
Jacob goes downstairs, the cops trailing him—hanging back far enough to be inconspicuous to anyone who doesn’t know what to look for. Jacob pauses on the Mezzanine entrance to the Gold Room. Then he walks over to the Green Room, the front entrance.
Glancing around, Jacob notices the cops are tense, ready to spring if he even
looks
at the front doors wrong. Jacob, never very good at improvisation, tries to work out his next step.
He lingers by the best-seller shelves, peering around with a confused expression he hopes is halfway convincing. The cops don’t look convinced. They watch him with massive arms crossed in front of their huge chests, grinding their jaws.
Out of the corner of his eye Jacob steals glances toward the front doors. A constant stream of customers flows from the cashiers out onto the sidewalk, which is crowded with what appears to be a gang of suburban tourists. Mothers and their young children, mostly, perhaps wondering why anyone would make such a big deal about a bookstore.
Jacob considers his chances. He could bolt, catch the right moment, get a few people jammed between him and the cops. He
might
get away.
Then again, he might spend the rest of his life in a convalescent home.
He approaches the cops. “Not here.”
“No shit. So where is he?”
“We had a backup meeting place,” Jacob says, “in case either of us got nervous.” The cops look skeptical as Jacob leads them back to the Mezzanine, up the stairs to the Purple Room, and then a sharp left into the Red Room.
He pretends to pretend to browse the travel guides while looking around for a client who isn’t there. The cops might see right through this performance, but they’ll let it play out for a few minutes before their patience finally gives out. Jacob weighing his options, hoping a few minutes is enough time … but for what?
Across the room, he catches sight of a memory.
The young female employee with the tattooed arms slouching at the info desk reminds Jacob of the woman he dated. She could
be
her, frozen in time. He wonders how many twenty-something kids wander into this job with temporary expectations and stagger out years later, trying to recall where they’d misplaced their youth.
Celeste. That was her name—the one she gave Jacob, at any rate.
And now he remembers the way things ended. When she’d told him she was seeing someone else now. Jacob thinking,
That’s fine, it’s just casual sex
. Surprised to find himself lying awake in a bed that felt too big. Picturing some other guy touching Celeste’s tattoos in ways Jacob never would again. His hand stroking the roses twined around her calf. Lips caressing the blackbirds fluttering above the swell of her breasts. The Celtic knot on her upper arm expanding, contracting, expanding, shiny in her sweat, contracting again as she clings to his shoulders.
A lanky young man with limp black hair, who’s wearing eye makeup and tight jeans that proudly display his androgyny, leans on the info desk and the employee puts her hand gently on his forearm. She beams with an unguarded warmth that no one has directed at Jacob since he was their age. In return, Lanky affects a bored expression, acting like everything else in the room is more interesting than she is.
Jacob catches the cops’ eyes. Nods his head to the info desk.
Shoulders knits his brow with confusion.
Jacob nods emphatically, mimes “jacket” in his best attempt at charades, then indicates the inside pocket. Mustache eyes the studded jacket folded over Lanky’s arm, and starts toward him. Shoulders hesitates another beat, clearly thinking this doesn’t add up, but knowing better than to abandon his partner.
Jacob would love to stick around and see that asshole’s expression as these giants hook his arms in theirs, but schaden-freude is a luxury he can’t afford just now. He dashes back to the Purple Room, bounds down the stairs to the Mezzanine, runs across to the Gold Room—
never move in a straight line when you don’t want to be followed
—and hurries up the aisles.
He finds the kid standing at the endcaps, right out in the open.