Literary Log: Chapter 2

[mallorys_camera]

Costco was the cement bunker where retail rehearsed its last stand. Fifty thousand square feet of windowless shelf space piled high with tuna-packed snare-drums, mayonnaise in five-gallon tubs. A bargain was a bargain, after all: you never knew when a mega-fun-pack of bone-shaped chew toys might come in handy. Or an eight-in-one specialty tool socket set. Or a gift basket filled with tiny jars of Napa Valley mustard. Jessie seldom walked out the door without dropping a hundred bucks at the cash register.

Today her budget would take a bigger hit since she'd have to buy the children off for the scene in the parking lot. Mark loitered pensively by a display of computer games just inside the front doors. Anna paused to stroke Avril Lavigne's face on the cover of her new CD. Jessie shepherded the kids quickly past distraction – make them sweat – and marched them past banks of sixty-inch plasma screen TVs , rotisserie grills designed for human sacrifice, miracle vacuums guaranteed to suck sour off a lemon, towards the non-alcoholic beverages section in the very back of the cavernous warehouse.

She peered nearsightedly at her list. The all-natural sodas were one aisle over.

"Can't you buy Coke like a normal mom?" asked Mark.

"Or at least 7-Up," said Anna.

"I like root-beer," said Christopher.

The shakedown had begun.

Jessie stood by as the kids did three tours apiece of the cherry cheesecake sample line. She said nothing when Mark lobbed three jumbo-sized bags of innovative, bleu-cheese-flavored potato chips into the cart, or when Anna plucked the latest Olsen Twins straight-to-video off the shelf, arguing with a straight face that she was actually helping save money because if her mother bought this, then they wouldn't have to spring for a DVD player.

In between blackmail attempts, the children conspired together in whispers. It was nice to see the kids cooperate for once even if the unifying dynamic was extortion. But Jessie couldn't shake the notion they were after prey more treacherous than old guilt-stricken Mom. She glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. She wasn't doing so bad time-wise, she was on the home stretch, heading down the cleaning supplies aisle towards the packaged meats.

Then Anna's elbow shot out to jab Mark in the ribs. Blood in the water. Jessie turned around to look.

It was the guy from the black car, Dimitri. He was wheeling a cart in the opposite direction. The cart was loaded with toilet paper and caseloads of room deodorizers. Vanilla scented.

Dimitri had his own list. Jessie could see his lips moving as he squinted over it. He paused to grab the last dixie cup off a table and slide its contents into his mouth. The chicken fajitas. The only sample Jessie thought might possibly be worth tasting herself and the disappointment must have showed in her face because the sample lady pursed her lips, adjusted a hair net over stiff gray curls and chided, "You'll have to wait your turn in line like everybody else." The red stitching over the pocket of her 50's-style dirndyl apron read Doris.

Low-level service people revel in petty tyranny. And always have names like Doris.

Jessie heard a click. Turned to find Mark wielding his camera.

"What?" Mark demanded.

Dimitri slit his dead blue eyes in their direction.

Jessie's heartbeat sped up. "Mark, let it go."

"Why?" asked the boy. "Because you're such a wimp? I thought you were supposed to be this big feminist."

She'd seen this same thrusting lower lip and defiant tilt of chin on the face of a tow-headed toddler resisting bath and bedtime many years ago, ontologic forerunner to the glowering adolescent who stood before her now, and for a moment Jessie's heart broke, she felt paralyzed by the limitations of the time/space continuum. The toddler had been easily appeased with a hug and a kiss. But what could reach this kid? The court-ordered mediator, in whose cheerful Thomas Kinkade-appointed office Jessie wasted two hours of her life every month, said Mark had unresolved anger issues stemming from the divorce. The mediator strongly recommended counseling.

"Terrific," said Mike Ventimiglia. "And where's the money for that supposed to come from?"

The mediator offered a neutral smile. "If you make it a priority, you'll find the money."

"You mean, I'll find the money," said Mike. He was a big, rangy guy with a handsome face, straight off the Dean Martin: Early Years commemorative medallion series. This, combined with his father's real estate holdings, had made his life one sweet sail until fairly recently. The hardest part of the divorce for Mike was trying to figure out why Jessie wasn't laying down anymore to let him run over her.

"You'll find the money," the mediator repeated.

Mike glared at Jessie. "Why don't you find a real job?"

"I have a real job," said Jessie. "I help real people. I really help them."

"You make twenty-eight thousand dollars a year," said Mike.

Jessie beamed at him. "That's why my lawyer makes you pay me the big bucks in child support."

"This isn't what I meant by constructive dialoguing," the mediator interjected briskly.

Mike's hot black eyes across the table were laser death beams aimed at Jessie's jugular. "Can you make me pay for it?" he demanded.

The mediator chose to believe the question had been addressed to her. "No I can't make you pay for it," she said with a small sigh. "Only the judge can make you pay for it," she added, closing the thick brown Morasca- Ventimiglia case file in front of her. She was a big-boned, attractively blowsy girl who looked at this moment as though she'd rather be slinging Guinness in an Irish bar as her ancestors undoubtedly had done before her: her client success rate would be higher.

"Then I'm not going to," said Mike. "I'm already strung up by my balls here. Eight thousand dollars tuition, the orthodontist, piano lessons. Horse camp! What, she wants the kids to ride in the Kentucky Derby?"

Jessie was ashamed of herself but she was sneakingly relieved when Mike had refused to pay for therapy. She was horribly afraid of what Mark might confront her with.

Just as he was confronting her now.

"You're just gonna let that Russian dude get away with it, huh? Did you see how hard he hit her? He could have broken her jaw."

Now was not the moment for a symposium on underworld ecology, on the complicated symbiosis between ho and pimp daddy whereby each one believes they've racked up the better score at survival.

Jessie sighed, ducked her head. Muttered, "You don't know as much as you think you do, Mark." Which sounded lame. Even to her.

The checkout line loomed ahead, straight shot to freedom. Jessie steered the cart toward carnivore paradise, began to root through ground-beef Valu-Paks.

Anna took this as her cue to whine. "Can't we at least try to be vegetarians? It's a much healthier life style."

"Vegetarian. Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can’t hunt or fish," said Mark.

"We could eat beans –"

"Yeah, sure, if you like to fart," said Mark.

"Mom, tell him to stop picking on me –"

"Mark, stop picking on your sister," Jessie said. Chopped meat or chicken? E coli would kill you, salmonella could only make you wish you were dead. But you could get five meals out of a package of chopped meat and only two out of a chicken.

"I'm not picking on her," said Mark. "I'm merely stating a physiological fact. Beans make people fart. It's the cellulose."

"We don't have to eat cellulite," said Anna. "We could stir fry tofu –"

"I'd rather stir-fry snot."

"Mom –"

What the hell, thought Jessie. Money was a renewable resource, particularly if you put in for overtime. She'd buy both.

Then she realized the kid count was off by one. She whirled around.

Some twenty feet distant, over by an esplanade of cut-rate strawberries and cryogenically reconstituted Chilean peaches, a little boy was waiting in the chicken fajita sample line. Doris was all smiles until the boy got to the head. Then she pushed her glasses up over nose, started in with that pointing finger.

Why didn't the old bat lighten up? Of course, the kid's mother didn't mind if he ate samples. That's why she'd brought him to Costco. Free lunch.

It took a moment for the boy's unfamiliar features to resolve themselves into Christopher's.

From behind him on line, a man slapped his hand down hard on Christopher's shoulder.

Dimitri.

Jessie had never run so fast before in her life.

When she grabbed her son by his shoulders to shake the Russian off, his small body went limp under her hands. "Get the fuck away from my kid!"

"It's just your mama," Dimitri told Christopher reassuringly. He worked hard on dazzling Jessie with his smile. "You scared him."

"Christopher – "

"Nice kid," said Dimitri. "Handsome. Smart too. Maybe little too friendly to strangers."

"I was only telling him about the plan," said Christopher in a small voice.

"Forget the plan," said Jessie.

"I didn't get my chicken fajitas –"

"Forget the chicken fajitas."

Frantically she searched out her other two children. They were still standing by the meat lockers, arguing. She shouted at them, trying to catch their attention, but the produce section was surrounded on three sides by aisles of frozen foods, it was impossible to penetrate the white noise pumped out by the freezers. As she watched, Anna pushed Mark. Mark started to push back and then froze abruptly, his mouth slacking open. He was staring at something at the far end of the store, near the entrance, just out of Jessie's view.

Meanwhile, a small crowd had gathered near the fruits and vegetables, rubber-neckers waiting for more scintillating Mama Lion action. Christopher turned to them for validation. "It's a good plan. See, homeless people get hungry. So Mommy says we should give them all Costco memberships instead of spare change. That way they can come to Costco and eat all the free samples. Then they wouldn't have to beg anymore."

"Why not just shoot them?" Dimitri asked. "Bullets are cheap."

"Get away from my kid," Jessie repeated.

"Very good," he said. "You understand the situation. Give me that camera."

He looked as though he wanted to say more but at that moment a breathless man in gold chains and a ponytail materialized from the frozen corn-dogs. A badge identified him as Rufus, a drug-free employee of Costco, and he too was staring at the front of the warehouse, shouting something, his hand lifted mid-air in a gesture popularized by Diana Ross and the Supremes with their Motown classic, Stop! In the Name of Love. The freezer hum was too loud to make out his words.

Jessie turned around to look.

The woman in the red shoes. Half-naked. Here inside Costco. Staggering clumsily up aisles loaded with penny-stretching solutions to grease and grime. Her breasts had flopped loose from her bra. They jiggled stupidly, balloons with small pink nipples. She was screaming. And trying to run. Though of course you couldn't run in shoes like that, you could only mince and teeter like an exhibitionistic cartoon character before falling flat on your face.
Which she did.

A mountain of multi-ply, super-absorbent paper towels came tumbling down on top of her.

Jessie felt herself starting to laugh.

The woman raised herself on one elbow. Clawed ineffectually at cardboard cartons filled with multi-purpose cleaners that deodorize as they disinfect. Collapsed again upon the floor. Her rump was raised high in classic fuck-me-sailor invitation, black thong caught in the crack of her ass.

What happened next happened so fast the pieces didn't fit together in any logical sequence inside Jessie's head.

Other members of the Costco posse jogged into view. A heavy-set manager type in a buttoned down shirt with rolled up sleeves, a slightly built Oriental youth in a Raiders sweatshirt. They'd just reached the woman on the floor when a bright light flashed from the entrance, like the strobe of a studio camera. With it through the dense white freezer noise came the ghostly sound of a backfiring truck.

The woman's pig-like squealing carried over the white noise. The manager toppled to the ground. His fingers grabbed at the heel of one of the woman's red shoes. There was a stain on the back of his white shirt; as Jessie watched, it grew larger. His hand let go and twitched again. Then his legs began to jerk, like a dead frog riding an electrical current.

A smell like fire crackers.

Another boom. Closer this time.

Doris, the chicken fajita sample lady in the frilly red apron tumbling into a pyramid of cherry tomato flats. There was something wrong with the chicken fajitas, they were all sticky and red. Doris took a sucking breath, and then another. Tried to push herself upright. Her eyes were bulging in their sockets.

She crumpled on to the cement floor.

Fresh blood was a smell Jessie knew.

[Russian: "Drunken cocksucker"], screamed the Russian. "I knew I should take gun!" He rammed his body across Christopher's. "Get down!"

Jessie didn't have to be told twice.

Her ears were ringing. A heavy surging sound. It took her a second to recognize the throb of her own heart beat, a moment longer to decipher the thin wail of Christopher's panic.

Jessie squashed her nose to the cement floor and began inching her body infinitesimally slowly over to where Dimitri and Christopher lay. When she got there, she straddled her leg over the Russian's muscular thigh and reached up to graze Christopher's hot little fist with her cold fingers. Christopher's eyes bolted open. He tried to grab hold. She shook her head once, darted her finger to her lips, hoping that all those hours she'd logged reading aloud about the Lion King and all his brave adventures would finally pay off. Christopher's eyes widened, he seemed to get it. Or if he didn't, he shut up anyway. Jessie blew him a kiss.

Another shot rang out.

Adrenaline was a fisheye lens with the chicken fajita lady lying right at its convex heart, five feet in front of Jessie. Doris’s breaths were coming out in shuddering gasps, she was trying not to cough. Her eyes were enormous through her glasses with the effort of straining oxygen through damaged lungs.

Jessie started to crawl towards her.

From far away Jessie heard the sounds of panic, two more shots. The room seemed to grow darker as if some spectral hand had turned up the contrast. Jessie could make out the shiny fluorescent fixtures on the piece of ceiling just beyond her, their reflection on the metal freezers and in the sample lady's glasses, but the rest seemed dim. There was a wound in the lady's chest underneath the jagged black hole in her white blouse.

Jessie kept moving. Slowly. Slowly. So slowly she was lying still and willing the distance to close.

By the time she reached Doris, the woman's lips had turned blue.

On the floor, an upended tomato box. The tomatoes had been packaged in a tough cellophane wrapper. Jessie took a big mouthful of the wrapper, started to gag. Bit down hard. Ripped a chunk loose. Swarming with Jessie's germs and microorganisms now, but better than nothing, better than dying like an animal slaughtered for a psychopath's amusement.

Jessie worked the buttons of the blouse loose. Medium caliber bullet: the chest was still in one piece but alongside one sagging breast, an oozing pink fistula blew bloody mucoid bubbles.

"Can you hear me?" she whispered.

A flutter of the woman's eyes meant yes. Maybe.

"I need you to breathe out as hard as you can."

She slapped the cellophane across the wound. Held it down with her hand. The wheezing didn't stop entirely but at least it was out of the broken washing machine universe, back into the realm of malfunctioning Mr. Coffees, and Jessie thought what a shame it was she had to die turning common household appliances into metaphors for life and death.

What a shame she had to die.

She leaned on her side, worked her free hand over to the stricken woman's neck, felt for the carotid pulse. Thready. Glanced down at her watch. Only ten minutes had passed since she'd headed for the meat lockers. It seemed like a lifetime and it had been for the manager lying in a pool of his own blood, still convulsing, just a few feet away. Who else? The woman's pulse was down to forty. She wouldn't be able to hang on much longer without more sophisticated medical attention.

Abruptly the overhead lights went off, the droning freezer noises stopped. Some joker had finally figured out the circuit breakers.

Panic was just like any other party that had gotten out of hand – people shouting, people crying, things breaking. The pandemonium in the store was clearly audible now. Jessie prayed to the God she didn't believe in that Mark and Anna were part of the human stampede that had made it to the other side of the front doors. The hand that clutched the plastic to the sample lady's chest was icy cold.

When her eyes got used to the darkness, she looked up and saw someone looming over her.

Her heart started pounding.

Mark.

He was weeping. "Are you all right?"

She could only mouth the words – "Down, down" – and gesture with her chin.

Footsteps echoed from the wrong direction. Coming back towards this end of the store.

The space was not completely dark. A small skylight cast a dingy halo around the woman in the red shoes who was still lying butt-up on the floor, making frightened barnyard noises.

Weaving down the household supplies aisle with a gun in one hand and a vodka bottle in the other was the Mexican guy from the maroon car.

"Loser bitch" The man paused to take a slug. [Spanish: "Fucking cunt." Or appropriate generic Mexican insult.] "My money no good? I want my cock sucked."

"I tell you, my tooth is broke," wailed the woman. "He hit me too hard. I never –"

"Never's a long time, bitch," said the Mexican. "But you know, I think you right."

He took another swallow from the bottle, then placed the bottle on the floor in an elaborate pantomime of care. With his free hand, he fumbled with his fly. "It won't choke you. Till it get big." He grabbed her by her hair. "Take you a while to figure out I get what I pay for, huh? Fucking Russians think you gonna steal my money." He eased his small brown business into her mouth, slammed her head down.

And almost immediately yelped. Stumbled backwards, overturning the bottle.

The woman was on all fours, babbling in Russian.

"You bit me, bitch!" the Mexican bellowed. "And you make me spill my drink!"

He pointed the revolver at the skylight, pulled the trigger.

A blast like thunder. A rain of broken glass.

"You like to use your teeth, huh?" The Mexican's voice was gravelly, almost affectionate. He reached again for her hair. "Suck on this."

He shoved the smoking revolver barrel into her mouth.

Her scream came from the dark side of the moon.

He laughed, pulled the gun out. She struggled to her haunches, her hand on her throat, choking and gagging, her burned tongue flapping. There was a smell like charred meat.

Beside Jessie, Dimitri had risen to a crouch.

"What are you doing?" Jessie screamed. "Get back on the floor!"

The odd solidarity of victims together on the wrong side of the trigger: for one split second she honestly believed Dimitri intended to charge the Mexican, rescue the woman. He'd showed guts, compassion – something – when he'd thrown his body across her child. His head was turned in her direction but he was staring straight through her and looking into his empty eyes, Jessie realized the dodge had been an autonomic reaction, a damaged motor control circuit, a behavioral response left over from the days when he used to be human.

That had been a long time ago.

Six bullets to a round, no bullets left.

The last blast had been the sixth shot.

Jessie wasn’t the only one who could count. Dmitri was sizing up escape routes.

The woman in the red shoes had fallen back face-down on the floor. Overjoyed when he picked up his bottle to find its contents had not all spilled, the Mexican now turned kicking her into a kind of drinking game. In between boots and slugs of vodka, he was laughing and singing upbeat Spanish songs, odes to the Revolution and the white sand beaches of Puerto Escondita.

Through the broken glass of the skylight, the sounds of approaching sirens were growing louder. Dmitri scanned the distance to the faint daylight at the front of the store, then back towards the side door on the other end of a loading area cordoned off by an Employees Only sign. It led to a freight dock, just a few hundred yards away from a freeway and a beach.

He was no fool. He picked the back way

"Nadie comprende lo que sufro yo canto pues ya no puedo sollozar," sang the Mexican. "Solo temblando de ansiedad estoy todos me miran y se van."

The sample lady moaned softly, opened her eyes. Pulse up to somewhere in the fifties, stronger now.

"Mark," said Jessie.

The boy next to her raised his head.

"Mark, I've got to go over there. Try to help that –" She swallowed hard. "All you have to do is hold this plastic over the hole, see? Not too hard, steady pressure. Mark. Can you do this?"

The boy made a wrinkled, gingerly face. Clean your room, take out the garbage, don't steal Dad's reefer and smoke it in my house. Save this woman's life.

Jessie wanted to make some sort of physical contact with her son. To comfort him, put her arm around his shoulder, hold him.

"For shit's sake, Mom," Mark said. "Are you nuts? What are you doing?"

He let her take his hand and guide it over the plastic. The sample lady groaned.

Jessie ran.

The Mexican seemed amazed to discover that anyone would take his shooting rampage for something other than what it was – a little joke that had gotten out of hand.

"Lady, I don’t mean nothing," he told Jessie. "Fucking puta, she ask for it. Hey, you ever go to Vegas?" He reached out a hand to steady himself. Boxes tumbled. "I go to Vegas, I lose a lot of money. I don't feel so good. [Spanish: "My head feels like somebody fed me my balls."] He slid down to the floor and vomited.

Jessie sank down on her knees in the vomit, turned the woman in the red shoes over. ABC – Airway, Breathing, Circulation. The woman's tongue was deep purple, swollen to several times its normal size, flopping loose from her mouth. In its center was the charred black imprint of the end of a pistol barrel. The woman made small gagging noises, one manicured hand raked at her throat. Her eyes were open. Darting.

"Hang on, hang on," Jessie begged. "They're almost here."

The woman's almost naked body strained as if against an invisible lover's. A funky smell rose from her genitals – she'd soiled herself. Her skin was ashen; on the smooth oval of her gray belly, the lurid blue of the RV tattoo stood out in sharp relief, nagging again at Jessie's memory. You'd expect a woman who looked like this to go in for body art. But not this kind of body art.

The woman's eyes locked in to Jessie's for an airless second. Pupils dilated and fixed.

She made a gagging sound, her back arched slightly, her eyes rolled back. A webwork of fine hemorrhages had turned the whites of her eyes the color of strawberries in cream.

An explosion went off in the front of the store. Flashbang device – Jessie remembered it from her field emergency training.

Then there were bullhorns. Streamlights. Men in gargoyle glasses and tactical Blackhawk gear maneuvering shields, shouting, stomping. A cop in a space suit shoved a rifle in her face, screaming, "On the ground." He didn't exactly kick her, but that was a black leather boot on her head and when Jessie glanced down at her hands, she could see why: they were drenched with blood from the sucking chest wound.

It took one of the EMTs to set them straight. Milo Jakubowski, burly, tattooed, nose-ringed, who most improbably entertained a hopeless romantic fixation on Jessie that had survived several encounters with her offspring.

"You're Marky Ventimiglia, aren't you?" Milo asked after he'd slid an emergency chest tube into the chicken fajita lady's chest. "Did your Mom put you up to this? Holy shit – Jessie saved this woman's life."

From potential assailant to heroine in point four seconds – the g-force almost knocked Jessie flat. A silver space blanket was draped around her shoulders, a styrofoam cup of Gatorade shoved into her hand. Jessie didn't like Gatorade. She twisted and squirmed, craning for her children – a sharp pain ran up her neck, along her jaw, into her ear. She didn't understand why her body was so stiff, why all of a sudden she was shaking all over, and when a hostage worker in a charcoal suit and a bad HerbalLife executive haircut, draped his arm across her shoulders to tell her: Everything's Going To Be All Right, she screamed at him. "No it's not going to be all right! It's never going to be all right! How could something like this happen in Costco? You don't expect stuff like this to happen in Costco! You expect it to happen in Target!"

And then she started laughing again and didn't stop till Milo came to give her a shot.




Logistical problemo here in that I know absolutely nada about guns. I'm assuming a gun would be hot after it's shot, but maybe I'm wrong in which case I'll have to think up some other way to kill off the hooker.