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Nobody saw him come in.
He materialized out of the smoke, the gloom of thick blue hovering around the bar like a mist. Lean and shifty, probing the environment with the hardest green eyes I’d ever seen, malevolent sparks under the shadow of his hoodie. From the way he moved I could sense that he was agile. He hovered in the center of the crowd for a moment, assessing his situation with devilish calm. I leaned against the jukebox and watched him. When his eyes finally swiveled towards me, they revealed an instant flicker of recognition.
I fled towards the back of the bar, burst into Charley’s office, and dived through the open window, managing a rough landing on the gritty fire escape. Wrought iron bars scratched at the palms of my hands as I climbed over the edge and jumped down, rolling into a courtyard that was dense with overgrown grass and bushes. Not far behind, the sound of my pursuer clambering through the window. I staggered towards the chain-link gate up ahead, crashed against it, shook the damn thing until realizing that it was graced with a hefty lock. There was no other option but to scale the gate. Just as I reached the peak, I heard a distinct click, a sound that froze me to the bone.
I looked downwards. The green-eyed man in the hoodie, cool and composed, held a gun pointed in my direction. It glinted in the pale moonlight. “Remove yourself from that gate,” he spoke in a clear and cold voice. “Slowly, now. No sudden movements. I’ll blow your brains out.”
I smirked at that last remark, despite everything.
“Slowly!” he barked disapprovingly at my hasty descent from the top of the gate. I landed on the ground with an ungraceful flourish. After a quick pat-down, he glared at me with those menacing eyes of his. “I need to ask you a few questions, Eugene Thompson.”
Returning his glare, I replied: “Let’s see some credentials, first. You a cop or something?”
He disdainfully flashed his identification.
“FBI, huh?” I attempted to feign surprise. “What the fuck do you want with me, then?”
“Like I said before,” He carefully tucked his gun away . “I need to ask you a few questions.”
Upon his request, I took him to my apartment. The place was a decrepit mess, littered with ancient food wrappings, Chinese take-out boxes, books, old bicycle wheels, cinderblocks, broken radios, old turntables, prehistoric televisions, car parts, functioning traffic lights, gutted computers, and anything else of interest that I’d picked up off the streets. Damien gingerly stepped through the clutter and settled down into a couch that I’d pinched from my asshole friends down the hall.
Damien pulled his hood down, and surveyed the environment for a few moments before finally resting his eyes on me. “I’m sorry about pulling the gun on you. I had deduced beforehand that you would be uncooperative, so I rightfully came prepared.”
I silently checked him out. I could already sense a certain stiffness to him, a coldness that was standard fare for FBI types. He looked strange in his slyly crafted disguise—chuck taylors, ratty jeans, dilapidated hoodie with the faded logo of some death metal band stamped onto the front. His dark skin contrasted with his eyes. The black hair on his head all but devoured any light that hit its surface. The sharp features of his face reflected the keen wit that I had suspected earlier. Intelligence crawled under his prominent cheekbones.
Damien scratched a spot in the back of his Brad Pitt-styled hair. “When and where did you last see Lars Harding?”
I perched on a small stack of crates. Lars. I’d always known he’d been involved with some bad shit, but the FBI? It was too much. Too much. “Lars?” I put on a façade of nonchalance. “That asshole? Well. He was my roommate, till he disappeared ‘bout three weeks ago. Said he was heading down to Tumulty’s, and I never heard from him since. That was our daily haunt, you know. That karaoke bar. Tumulty’s.”
“And what, exactly, was the nature of your relationship with Lars?” Damien slightly narrowed his eyes.
I shifted my gaze. “Like I said—he was my roommate.”
“From what I heard, it was a bit more than that, Eugene.”
My voice hardened. “What’s that got to do with anything? I’ve told you all that I know. Look, I don’t know where the fuck he’s gone off to—“
“It’s got everything to do with it,” Damien interrupted, eyes locked onto mine. “You’re protecting him because your connection to him was much friendlier than you care to divulge.”
I glared at the wall, the peeling wallpaper adorned with rows of ladybugs.
“And what were you doing at Tumulty’s, tonight?” Damien pressed on.
“Hanging around,” I shrugged. “I’m there all the time, just ask Charley—“
“No. You were waiting. Waiting for Lars. You don’t know where else he might show up, so you figure Tumulty’s is your best bet.”
I stared at the floorboards.
Damien scooted forward in his seat, and folded his hands together. “You know why I’m here. You know damn well why I’m here. So tell me, Eugene, tell me what Lars’ profession is.”
“Cocaine salesman.” I fumbled around my pockets for a cigarette.
Damien approvingly nodded. “It’s good that you’re nervous, Eugene. You’re afraid—you never wanted to be involved in such a dangerous situation, isn’t that right? You only stood by Lars because of your unfortunate attachment to him. Stood by him, supported him, even. But you never favored his profession. Would I be correct in that assumption?”
I took a good, long drag. “Are you done?”
“Tell me who Lars worked for.” Damien eyes were intense, electric. The stagnant air in the room became charged up with his fervent energy.
“I don’t know.” And it was the truth. Lars and I had rarely discussed his line of work. It was something that he’d never spoken of lightly. Something to be kept under wraps, hidden even from me, his childhood buddy.
Damien pursed his lips, and waited for me to elaborate.
“We never talked about it,” I continued. “I don’t know anything about who he worked for, or where he obtained the drugs.”
Fury shimmered across Damien’s features for a moment. He quickly composed himself, stood up, and began to pace the room. Muttered curses escaped his lips. “If what you say is true,” he growled, “Then I’ve fallen prey to yet another dead-end lead. And Lars is probably lying deceased on a soiled mattress in some seedy crack house, along with the information in his head that I so desperately need. God…dammit!” Damien banged a fist against the wall. When he withdrew his hand, he removed pieces of the wall with it. He absently gazed at the hole. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I’ll have that repaired—“
“Don’t bother. This place is a shithole and my landlord doesn’t give a crap.” I doused the cigarette and meandered towards the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”
No answer. I turned towards the refrigerator, only to discover that Damien had already materialized in front of it. He threw me a dry smirk and helped himself to a Miller Lite. “This case is very important to me, Eugene. You see, according to local rumor, Lars had a connection to a rather prolific Columbian drug lord.”
This was news to me. “A Columbian drug lord?!” I leaned against the kitchen counter for support. “Holy fucking shit!!” No wonder the FBI was on to him.
“I had been hoping to extract from you information pertaining to Lars’ whereabouts.” Damien took a swig of beer. “But I can see that you are, quite obviously, the victim of a rude awakening, an undesirable epiphany, a—“
“Yeah, I get the point!” I buried my face in my hands. “Holy shit. Fuck, man.”
“I take it that you never suspected?” Damien raised a brow. “You really ought to…reconsider the fellows you choose to share your company with.”
“So you think Lars is dead?” I asked numbly.
“Don’t know,” Damien shook his head. “I certainly hope not. He’s of extreme value to me. Without him, this case is sunk until I manage to discover another lead.”
I dazedly wandered back into the living room and deposited myself onto the threadbare couch. The notion of Lars being dead had never occurred to me before. Lars was the type to disappear every now and then—I was accustomed to his ways. He’d always turned up sooner or later, right as rain, ready to resume his clerk post in Kim’s Video on St. Marks street.
We’d been through a lot of shit, Lars and I. Elementary school, middle school, high school. Petty thievery at the convenience store. Blow-jobs in the back of his piece-of-shit station wagon. Nights spent cruising the town with our motley crew, blasting the Dead Kennedys, Motorhead, Anal Cunt, and any other band that the locals might have deemed offensive to their sensitive ears. With a weird sort of fondness I recalled our daring escape from slow Oklahoma to the gritty universe of New York City. Things became rocky after that, due to conflicting ambitions.
Lars had been determined never to grow up.
Something strange began to happen as I thought about Lars and all the time we’d spent together, all the stupid shit we’d been through. I wanted to feel upset about Lars’ possible demise. But the bad feelings didn’t come. The tears never surfaced. Numbness prevailed.
Damien must have been watching me. He pointedly cleared his throat. “I apologize for what I said before. About Lars, I mean. Being dead. I didn’t mean to make light of the situation. It’s a very serious matter, and I want Lars alive, just as you do.”
I glanced up at Damien. A different person stood before me, and he had gentle eyes.
“If he’s found, you’re going to arrest him?” I asked.
Damien sighed. “Eugene…”
“And how do you know that I’m not involved in it, too?”
Damien revealed a small smile. “…because I know these things.” Then, after a brief pause: “And…I’ve been monitoring your behavior for about a month now. You work a nine to five job as a receptionist for LeadTech, a computer programming facility. Before coming home, you usually pick up dinner at Saito’s, the Japanese place around the corner. Then you rest up a bit, and head on off to Tumulty’s, where you brood over the jukebox, waiting for Lars to reappear, or hoping for some sort of clue as to where he’s run off to. Tumulty’s is quite a useful mecca of information—I have firsthand experience of that. Charley, the bartender and owner, had absolutely no trouble aiding me in the process of obtaining the information necessary to find you.”
“That bastard,” I muttered. “I’m never tipping him again.”
Damien patiently folded his arms. “I revealed to him that no harm would come to you, and that you were not under investigation for a crime of any sort.” He reached into his back pocket and retrieved a wallet. “My card,” he said, handing me a bone-colored rectangle. “Please don’t hesitate to call me, should anything come up.” With a slight bow of his head, he turned and gracefully retreated from the apartment.
I tacked Damien’s card to the refrigerator, duct-taped the fresh hole in the wall, and retired to my room for the night.
That goddamned Lars. Maybe it was time to tender my resignation from his company, break off all ties with the fucker before he got me involved in some sort of serious trouble. The FBI was after him—so what next? A fucking S.W.A.T. team? “Lars,” I whispered to myself as I drew the shades in my room. “You goddamned idiot.”
I crawled into bed around two A.M. and listened to an insane new-age radio broadcast about a colony of aliens that lived beneath the earth’s crust and plotted world domination while us ignorant humans scuttled around the surface like termites, like drones.
Am I destined to become a drone? I pondered the question as my consciousness began to drift away.
Only time could tell.