A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

Since marijuana doesn’t make me paranoid, except when I eat it, I had to assume that the tingle was coming—like a preconscious telegram—from that special part of the brain that knows things before it knows things. But that part of the brain doesn’t use words. It uses feelings. Like foreboding. And fear.

Then again, I told myself, a muscle car like a Challenger isn’t great for a tail job—it’s too conspicuous and sticks out too much. So maybe it is the pot, I thought. Nobody would follow me in that car.

Or maybe whoever was in the Challenger didn’t care if I spotted them. Maybe they didn’t care about being discreet, which could make them cops. Undercover but showing themselves. The undercover units like muscle cars, and so it was worrisome if it was detectives. The LAPD wasn’t fond of me. Hadn’t been for a while.

I tried to see who was driving the car, but the sun—which was already starting to set—was glinting off the Challenger’s windshield, just about blinding me, but I could distinguish that there were two shapes in the front seat.

Which would make sense if they were police. They always travel in pairs.

When I turned left on Franklin, the Challenger turned left, which wasn’t so unusual, one goes right or left there, and I told myself to forget about it. Told myself I was being jumpy.

Franklin has four narrow lanes and I went to the far-right lane, nice and slow, which is often how I drive—senior citizen–like and methodical, because I’m usually smoking a joint, like I was just then, and so I try to be extra careful, giving myself plenty of room for error and delayed marijuana reaction time.

But I also drive slowly because I try, as a fledgling student of Buddhism, to be mindful.

I try to do that thing where when you’re driving, you’re driving; like when you’re washing the dishes, you’re washing the dishes.

The result is that between the mindfulness and the marijuana, I’m an annoyingly slow driver, and yet the Challenger didn’t get into the left lane to pass me, as numerous other cars did.

And now that we were heading east, with the sun at a different angle, I could see who was maybe following me: a white male was on the passenger side and a brown-skinned man was driving. And they looked large and wide. Too big for the front seat of the Challenger. So maybe they were detectives. Cops often come in large.

They were close on my tail, and I opened my window—it was getting pretty hazy in the car from my joint—and I sent them an obscure smoke signal, written in Cheech and Chong, which didn’t merit a response.

So there we were, my Caprice and their Challenger, meandering like a tandem—if we were a tandem—down Franklin, and my office was five minutes away on Vermont, but wanting to test something, I hung a quick right onto Garfield Place without putting on my signal.

Following so close, the Challenger seemed to take the turn a little late, but still managed to make the right onto Garfield and have it look somewhat intentional.

Fifty yards later, I pulled over to the side of the road.

They drove on past, feigning disinterest, I imagined.

But because of their tinted windows, I couldn’t get a look at the white man on the passenger side, which was frustrating, and maybe it was all a coincidence.

So I just sat there, smoking, and watched the muscle car make its way down Garfield, a street of squat apartment buildings, and the light in the sky was violet-hued and beautiful. The sun must have just dipped into the Pacific, cooling itself and turning Los Angeles, as it did each day, into a purple city.

Then the Challenger crossed Hollywood Boulevard, disappearing from my line of sight, and so I did a quick U-turn and headed back up to Franklin.

Five minutes later, I turned right on Vermont, went down two blocks, and then parked my car in the quiet, narrow alleyway behind the Dresden bar.

I put my joint in the ashtray, grabbed my thermos, and as I slammed my door, it didn’t really surprise me to see the Challenger coming down the alley, glowering in its dark paint job.

I could have run or gotten back into my car, but there was the feeling that I would only be delaying the inevitable, and so I waited for them in the beautiful light. It was what they call in the movie business magic hour.

The Challenger parked right behind my Caprice, blocking it, and the two men boiled out, moving fast for their size. They were both about six four, 250, like brother slabs of beef in a meat market.

The white beef looked like a farmboy from the Midwest, and the brown beef looked Hawaiian. Midwest had blonde hair buzzed down like a peach, and Hawaii had black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail.

They both were wearing jeans and sneakers and hoodies, and they had that look. A look that said they wanted to hurt someone. That someone being me.

I did a quick scan of the alley for witnesses, but we were all alone. On the plus side, these two didn’t seem to be cops. Their eyes were too eager: violent but maybe not cruel.

So I put my thermos on the roof of my car, like it was a casual thing to do, and I fingered the steel baton I was carrying in my sport jacket pocket, because I needed something to even the odds. There were 500 pounds of them and only 190 pounds of me, most of it alchemized silvery fish from a can.

“You boys seem to know where I live and where I work,” I said, as they came to the front of the Challenger, about six feet away. “How can I help you?”

I pegged them to be in their early thirties, and I called them ‘boys’ because I was fifty-one and missing a kidney, which made me more like