The Man Who Wouldn't Die Read online

  The only downside of this public utopia is they didn’t restrict what you looked at; couldn’t, the First Amendment and all, which I generally agree with. But the only terminal I could find was next to a guy watching his evident fetish: some deal, it appeared, where everybody got busy at an Abercrombie & Fitch. Not that I was trying to look, but the sounds of mall sex were unmistakable.

  I lost myself in a search for Don Donogue. Captain Don. Wikimedia, the encyclopedia we get to write ourselves, to the point that some biographies explore the outer reaches of laudatory adjectives. Warranted, it seemed, in this case. Donogue had been engineering and picking winners as far back as Hewlett and Packard. His first big innovation helped reduce the size and range of a transistor to give troops an edge in Korea. It was a big patent that begat many more, and led to licensing partnerships with everyone from Mintel to Qualtech. Later, he personally hosted the House Brew guys, saw or partnered on all the big things. Time didn’t slow his own innovation prowess, it seemed, as he co-owned a series of patents involving data compression to allow almost instant video capture and streaming. That was in the late nineties, pioneering, seeing ahead of curves. Courted by presidents, feted by nations, referred to by Forbes and Fortune simply as Captain Don.

  The last section of his bio covered his growing interest in immortality, “solving” death. “Terminal illness—just another inefficiency,” he was quoted as saying. Not that it should happen faster but that death, by its nature, “gets seriously in the way of productivity.” The whole thing, Wikimedia conceded, was parodied as a hoax, mocked on late-night TV (Jimmy Fallon: “I’d just like a mobile phone battery that lasts forever—or at least until the end of the day”). Undeterred, as always, Captain Don and cohorts talked of marrying Big Data, biotech, and singularity—the idea of sentient computers—to somehow prolong life, create cognizant computers built around individualized DNA, so that a person continued to “think, communicate, and live” even when the body shell gave out.

  I was pulled out of my trance by a sound coming from the terminal beside me and had the bad fortune to glance over and see someone at an Abercrombie & Fitch “asking if they have that in another size.”

  I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone else was dismayed and I noticed the Tarantula. Not the same one who was in the MINI Cooper. But suspicious nonetheless. He was eyeballing me and then quickly looked away to the shelves, pretending to explore them. Trouble was, he was at the braille shelf, which gave him away—that and the wifebeater and the tattoo of a spider with fangs.

  Clearly, they were tracking me somehow. I’d turned off my phone, so that couldn’t be it. Or maybe they just knew my habits, which was scarier yet. There was one way to find out—take this guy back into the stacks and let him chat with my knuckles.

  First, two more quick searches. The first, for Tess Donogue, gave me more boilerplate. Dartmouth undergrad, where she’d snowboarded, Stanford MBA, sat on the boards of a bunch of nonprofits, including the InEf Tour Company. The bio described her opulent property in Woodside, west of the 280, 110 acres. There were two houses on it, which she had been alternately remodeling—living in one for two years while bringing the other up to speed, then switching and doing the same with the other. Repeat. One story I read reported that her latest trendsetting technique was sending American oak to London to be processed as flooring, then reimporting it. You could do the whole thing domestically but she called it a “domestic export-import,” getting the benefit of both American-made and foreign-exotic—depending on your audience—and the whole idea had sent flooring prices soaring.

  I peeked over my shoulder. The brain-dead Tarantula pretended to read a book in braille. I wondered when it would dawn on him that he looked like a horse’s ass. Or maybe that was the point: the Tarantulas were being so transparent they didn’t mind my grasping the extent of their stupidity. Capable of anything.

  Last search was for Danny Donogue, the golden grandson. It was tough to find much on him except speculation. He’d created a lot of the mystery when he dropped out of school after eleventh grade, saying that high school was for people who couldn’t “do.” Now he’d set up a shop that seemed to have made his point. It was called Froom and was getting a lot of buzz, but I couldn’t exactly tell what for. It was either in post-alpha or stealth beta, depending on which taxonomy scale you preferred. In any case, I’d have to at least have a Twipper account to even begin to guess what Froom did.

  Maybe not even then. The younger Donogue had 2,825,209 followers on Twipper before he shut down the account a few months ago. Danny’s partner at Froom, Rajeev Cohen, “Da Raj,” got more of the face time. He was a proverbial old-timer: nineteen.

  One more thing about Danny: he was a regular at the Video Game Olympic Training Center. That’s where I’d heard about him before; he was a donor and sometimes coach, Wikimedia said. Nonsense. I shook my head, the Scorpion Bowl wearing off. I was going to need some more time, and besides, I knew what’d get my juices flowing: a confrontation with my tail.

  I stood and turned around. The Tarantula had disappeared. Rather, was disappearing. I spied him heading out the door toward periodicals, closed my browser, and followed.

  Five

  I HUSTLED THROUGH PERIODICALS but then got waylaid at a climate-change exhibit, where you were not allowed to leave unless you passed a quiz about what you’d learned . . . or made a donation. I gave five dollars to a woman dressed as “the carcinoma cell you’ll turn into if we all don’t compost.” But the way she said it sounded like she thought I was mostly to blame.

  The Tarantula must’ve gotten caught in the same thicket because he was still in view when I hit the ground floor and saw him hightailing it through the revolving doors. Not many steps later, I revolved myself and . . . BOOM. I’d spun right into a full-body tackle. In broad daylight. Audacious, I thought as I sprawled across the marble steps. Took a lot of fella to do that to me, I realized as I felt my head slap against a stair, the lights momentarily clicking off and then on again as I shoved the dude off me.

  I rolled over and stood, woozy.

  “We know where you live,” the Tarantula said.

  “Then come by for coffee and a knuckle sandwich,” I managed. It rang horribly cliché, like I was pulling dialogue from my first five years with a gun license. But my head swirled in a postattack mess.

  The guy was five feet away, stocky, poised to pounce, biceps set permanently on curl. He had that look in his eyes—focus—double-synthetic Adderall, I was guessing. But the tackle nicked him too; looked like a good scrape tore through his cargo pants at the knee. He panted, like me.

  Around us, on the steps and the sidewalk below, a half-dozen people milled about and not a damn one of them even seemed to notice us—or what had just transpired. They stared at their phones.

  “Can I get a witness?” I bellowed, just to see if this would awaken something from the iPhone zombies.

  Nothing.

  “Free Blue Bear Coffee!” Nothing.

  “On DavesList, I just posted a studio for rent, South of Market, $3,850. Plus utilities. On the Gooble Bus Run.”

  This got their attention. Two of the zombies bum-rushed me. One, still typing as he ran, slammed into the Tarantula, who swatted the apartment seeker away with a backhand, causing the guy to careen down the steps and then, undeterred, start back up again.

  “Oops, studio taken,” I said. “Someone got it.”

  “Damn!” said the man. “Almost.”

  So now it was me and the Tarantula again, eyeing each other, sumo chess, when a muted sound came from the pocket of his cargo pants. He pulled out his phone. It was playing U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” he said to no one. “How did they get this on a burner?”

  He dropped the phone to the ground and destroyed it with a vicious stomp of an indestructible work boot, then looked at me, message sent: I can stomp you too.

  “Looks like you got the worst of it,” I said. I was looking
at the hole in his cargo pants, where a bit of shredded knee poked through from his landing on the steps after tackling me.

  “That was nothing. Just giving you a taste, a little app,” he said.

  I shook my head. “App, or appetizer?”

  “Appetizer. Sorry.” He meant it. Then smiled ruefully. “The entrée’s gonna suck. You messed with the wrong ConfirMitzvah.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” This was turning out to be the worst day and I still had expense reports, and the work on the tenant in the Richmond whose landlord figured him for foul play.

  “See you around,” the Tarantula said. He whirled and started walking.

  I pulled out my phone and texted Terry: keep an eye out. I should have gone home but I doubted the Tarantulas would act immediately. Clearly, they wanted to string this out. One part of life in which efficiency doesn’t count: giving someone the slow bleed.

  I climbed into my ’72 Ford flatbed and took Geary to the avenues. I didn’t see any Tarantula-toting MINI Coopers but they blended in at some point with the Fiats and Smart Cars and other MINI Coopers, and besides, I’d forced myself to turn my attention to the people actually paying the day’s rates, Sally and Fred Pern.

  The couple had come into my office a few weeks ago saying they suspected their tenant of shenanigans. In a nutshell, they said the guy had two residences, the one he rented from them and a second in the Bayview that he listed as his primary residence. Why bother? I’d asked. They practically laughed at my ignorance; turned out, if your primary residence was the Bayview, the low-income part of town with historically underprivileged families, you could get your kid into any public school without having to go through the public-school lottery system. Popular scam, the Bayview Double Switch.

  “What’s it to you?” I asked the Perns.

  Two things. They’d just put their own kid in the public-school lottery and didn’t want some snotty professional pulling the Double Switch to take their spot at Claire Lilienthal. Plus, the Perns said, they didn’t want to face any liability themselves: complicity in the Double Switch could get you into big trouble with the city, harboring a Double Switch fugitive. On the other hand, you couldn’t oust a tenant without cause. So the Perns needed proof.

  And they said they couldn’t afford to dick around. The couple owned a booming new restaurant called Urban Ketchup. Served only ketchup, 1,001 different flavors. Lines stretched out the door. The couple wanted to expand, buy the place next door, so they could also start selling fries, which they thought could send the thing into the stratosphere.

  But that meant getting a permit from the building codes department, they informed me, and all the background checks and the rest. So they were paying me to make sure that their tenant wasn’t involved in any funny business. And, if so, help them break the tenant’s lease. Dirty business I do. Dirty city.

  Took me nearly twenty minutes to get past Masonic, with fog inching over this part of the city. I took a left on Thirtieth, a right on Balboa, and a left on Thirty-Sixth, and parked halfway down the block. I could see Golden Gate Park and Fulton running alongside it, the thoroughfare not teeming at this time of day, midafternoon. Time had flown at the library. My stomach rumbled. I scrounged a bag of Baked Gruyère Cheesoes from under the seat and munched and stared at 811 Thirty-Sixth Avenue. The Perns’ place.

  Yellow trim on purple. The paint. This is what happened, I figure, when you painted in the fog. Can’t actually see what colors you’ve chosen. Looked like some kid got ahold of the crayon box. Or maybe someone let the inner child pick the colors, knowing they wouldn’t be easy to see in the low light.

  From the corner, there was an explosion of noise. Fifteen dogs, at least, turned the corner, every shape and size. Right behind them, their walker. She had all their leashes connected by a single leash she was holding in a gloved hand, the kind you’d use to hold a hawk. And she’d lost control. The lead dog, a husky with one blue eye, caught sight of the park and broke into a sprint. The other dogs followed. They created a surge of movement and, suddenly, the dog walker took flight. Like a kite. Flying behind the dogs. She smashed into a light pole, bounced off.

  I stepped from the car. She saw me, and began frantically waving. I momentarily wondered whether my pistol aim was still good enough to sever the leash with one shot. Time was, no one could touch my precision. But even if I nailed the wiggling leash, she’d go splat. I rushed across the street, which caused the dogs to pause, long enough, at least, for me to grab the woman’s Velcro-strapped sandals. I pulled her down to earth and the dogs circled, smelling the Real Smoked Gruyère flakes from my Cheesoes.

  “What are you doing?” she asked accusingly.

  “Saving you from getting brained by the stop sign.”

  “I wanted you to take video. Are you an idiot? I’m training.”

  I could barely respond when she strapped her sandals into a snowboard she pulled from her backpack, muttered “asshole” and said “mush,” and off they went.

  I felt my attention yanked and turned and saw a van that I hadn’t previously noticed. It was back across the street, the same side I was parked on. Dark-tinted windows. Silhouette of a guy in the front seat, looking my way. Logo on the side of the van of a dolphin jumping to the sun, and the word “Flippers.” Not sure what about it snagged my attention. I turned and looked back to the house in question, the one the Perns own and lease out.

  Really, there was nothing to see. A planter on a precipitation-worn balcony, paint-chipped, rusted railing. Cheap faux-marble steps. House attached on either side to like-modeled homes, one green on beige and the other orange on puke orange. One key difference between the neighbors’ and the Perns’ houses: the paint on the Perns’ purple garage looked new. Fresh. Like if I touched it, my hand would come away sticky.

  I looked over my shoulder at the van. Just sitting there, guy in the driver seat too shadowed to judge. Might have been sleeping, for all I knew. I doubted it. I’d done the job long enough to sense what was part of the landscape and what was not.

  I turned my attention from the van to the surroundings. What was I looking for?

  A trash bin.

  Good luck. It was trash day—and recycling and compost. Neatly divided contents. Nice for a private eye. Once it was out on the street, you could pick through without violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights. Sort of. I tried not to get too caught up in the nuances of law. I beelined for the tenant’s black trash container. Opened it, without thinking, then recoiled from the smell. You needn’t have a PI license to have realized this guy had a cat and this bin was filled with its litter. With a stick I found next to the curb, I poked around. There wasn’t much to see unless the Perns wanted to hang this guy out to dry for putting glass into the trash can instead of into the recycling container. Might have been enough with this city—Failure to Segment.

  Recycling was the next stop, the blue bin. As I opened the top, I heard the roar of an engine and looked up. Sure enough, it was the van. I could see the driver’s head glance my way through the tinted glass as it sped off.

  My phone buzzed. I put down the recycling top. A text, from Terry: Everything OK?

  Yep, I tapped back. Home shortly.

  I dug through the recycling. Looked typical but for a smashed picture frame, empty of a photo. Interesting but meaningless at face value. Also, oddly, most of the papers had been through a shredder. Maybe the tenant was hiding something, or maybe he was just smart. I couldn’t discern what the scraps might be. Bills? Shopping list? On one edge of one scrap, I made out words and numbers: Sheldon 415-225-196, but the last digit was missing. I pocketed the scrap.

  I made it back to the car just as the MINI Cooper rounded the corner. It was time to go home to warn Terry to oil up our Second Amendment rights. We’d been down this road before. There was no situation that rattled Terry. That’s why I married him.

  Six

  WE’D MET THE day of the Fillmore Street Fair, neither of us in attendance. Each of us had come to Gran
dview Park to take in the majesty in silence. If you’ve never been, there’s no place on earth like it, a sand dune poking from the avenues into the sky, accessible by steep steps, enough room at the top for a bench and a few milling hikers with cameras.

  With Terry and me, it was love at first nod.

  I reached the top, heaving mildly with age, saw him feeding torn pieces of crusty baguettes to pigeons. There was one other person, a woman, who asked me to time her with a phone while she completed what she described as a “one-minute workout.”

  I caught Terry’s eye. I gave him a nod, got one in return, and after two hours hanging out there, chatting now and again, watching the skyline mostly, we walked down the steps and never looked back.

  On the outside, I concede, we’re a matched set. Two large, burly men, Terry just two inches shorter, a distinction without importance at this size, neither of us much into talking, neither with a Faceburg page. Tweeping is more characters than either of us can manage most days. Strong and silent, we walk into a bar and sometimes people give up their seats, a primitive instinct, I guess, that we might be part of a biker gang, which is only half true. Gang, no. Bikers, yes. Harleys. Rode ’em to the Russian River, where we were married by Terry’s longtime Catholic priest, Fella O’Dell. Terry is deeply religious, one of the many differences between us when you got below the large, soft-spoken corpus aspect.

  He dragged me each Sunday to St. Mark’s, then afterward we’d go to a gathering at someone or another’s house to snack and I’d stand around and look awkward. It was all part of Terry’s Midwest sensibilities, including, while he desperately insisted otherwise, some Tea Party leanings. It didn’t pay to get him started on welfare moms or deadbeat dads, people who text and drive, art that doesn’t look like anything, castration or forced birth control for bad parents, corporal punishment for kids who mouth off. But, underscoring where Terry truly did part ways with the Tea Party, he called for the beheading of Shawn Hammity for more reasons than I could ever remember.