Heaven, INC: Chapter 25: JIMMY AND THE DEAD GUY

Broke into the old apartment
Forty-two stairs from the street.
Crooked landing, crooked landlord
Narrow laneway filled with crooks.
—The Old Apartment,
BARENAKED LADIES

NORCESTOR ARMS EAST,
LINCOLN PARK
10:59 AM PDT

JIMMY ROUNDED THE CORNER as the Greeks were disappearing into the Norcestor Arms. Crossing the street, he hurried up the steps and then the broken walkway leading up to the building marked ‘1’.

Four teens sat on the crumbling planters lining Building 1's front entrance, a boom-box booming hip-hop as they sat like stone gargoyles, staring and saying nothing.

Jimmy gave them the stare you learn in prison, the one that says, “I am not the person you want to fuck with.” It was a stare that had gotten Jimmy through five years at Donovan and worked here just as well.

Passing the gargoyles without incident and on into the bowels of the grim building, the first thing that caught Jimmy’s attention was the overpowering scent of urine and mildew and, beneath it, the smell of cooking. He squinted to adjust from the dazzling light of late-morning sun to the dim overhead lighting of old florescent bulbs.

A long hallway of doors leading to apartments, a hallway stretching beyond sight. There was an elevator with a steel gate, a chain and padlock securing the gate. There was also an open doorway leading to some stairs.

Jimmy paused at the foot of the stairs. From somewhere above came the sound of heavy footsteps and a man speaking in Greek. Another man grunting in response, followed by more Greek.

Jimmy paused to peel some annoyance from the bottom of his shoe. It was one of the nasty red berries. Discarding it, he began climbing in pursuit of the voices.


THE SECOND AND THIRD floor landings were empty, but on the fourth, Jimmy found a man laying still on the concrete. Jimmy rolled the man over to find blood streaming from his nose.

“Hey, you all right, buddy?”

The man opened his eyes, rising with trembly outstretched hands and a smile of sparse and rotted teeth. He raised a hand to his mouth. “Smoke smoke?”

Jimmy shook out a cigarette as the man swayed unsteadily. When Jimmy lit it, he puffed contentedly while haphazardly brushing blood from his nose with the back of a hand.
Jimmy pointed at his own nose and then the man’s, shrugging his shoulders and adopting a quizzical expression. “Who did that?”

The man puffed on his cigarette, watching Jimmy with rheumy eyes. He grinned and balled his fist, pretending to punch himself in the nose, before pointing again down the hall. Jimmy pointed at his head, pantomiming a hat, and the man nodded vigorously, before crowding close bumping Jimmy as he grabbed Jimmy’s hand. “Dollar, dollar? You got a dollar?”

Jimmy pushed the man away, not wanting to be touched by him or anyone else in this joint, and the guy settled for the sixty cents in Jimmy’s pocket, then pointed Jimmy up a floor higher.


THE FIFTH FLOOR was cracked, government-green tile and punched-in walls, graffittied sheet-rock and neglect. A dozen doors down the hallway, there was a bloody hand-print head high on the wall. Jimmy slowed, listening and scrutinizing.

Each apartment door was set back from the hall a little, the doors themselves made of heavy steel through which Jimmy heard the sounds of televisions.

Jimmy continued down the hallway until he’d passed maybe forty or fifty doors without anything to tell him if the Greeks were even on the top floor. In fact, he was headed back up the hall and thinking about the bloody-handprint when he saw one of those berries he’d scraped off his shoe.

Probably my shoe, else I’d’ve seen it coming up the hall . . . Right?

Jimmy paused at the intersection of four doors numbered 522 to 525, where all four doors emanated with Spanish programming. It being the 11:30 station break, it was all commercials, but in the background of 523 and a commercial for Pablo John’s PayDay loans, Jimmy heard a man and woman fucking with gusto and he was ready to conclude the berry had come from his own shoe when the TV in 522 abruptly switched off to two words: “Fucking Malakas.”

Immediately, Jimmy moved down the hallway to slip into another recessed doorway as 522 opened and No-Hat Greek exited, pulling out his cell and muttering under his breath. Jimmy watched him to the end of the hall and out onto the landing before crossing to 522 and finding that, sure enough, the door was unlocked, meaning the guy was coming back. Jimmy entered to discover a man staring back at him.

And it wasn’t even the other Greek.

Oh, shit . . .