The Badge

By D. Paul Fonseca

To say they were friends was a stretch, but they were as close as they could be, despite their distrust of each other. The emotional distance between them forged a unique and comfortable bridge, and it was enough for them to feel right at home with one another.

On a bright summer day in San Diego, in the heart of downtown, there stood a small thrift shop.  Originally, it was built as a grand theater back in the early 1930s. Across the marquis were tall capital letters spelling out, “SECOND CHANCE.” The locals knew they could always find something worthwhile there. Lately, it has become one of the trendiest neighborhood haunts due to the recent addition of a modestly sized art gallery and the use of the theatre space in the rear of the establishment. The glamorous hall had been transformed into a venue for parties, music, and art shows for the San Diego art scene. If the owner had her way, she’d also have a liquor license, but an undermining investigation into her establishment by the police had convinced her it wasn’t a good time to ask the city for the permit.

The entrance to the theater, below the marquis, had been restructured into a fashionable glass-walled foyer allowing access to either the quaint secondhand clothing store or the showcase venue in the back.

The large hall often stood empty, closed by day, and only came alive at night. It had become a social hub in its own right.

Two employees of the shop and the owner stood around the counter toward the back of the store. They made small talk about their latest adventures in love, life, and whatever hustle they felt confident to boast about. The brunette, a petite, young woman they called Vanessa, stood directly behind the counter. Her stunning appearance, with cinnamon-colored skin, Asian eyes, and long black hair, made her look powerful and confident. Vaness owned the shop; in fact, she owned the whole building and half the block, due to a meaningful inheritance and a lucky streak of investing.

Next to Vanessa stood another girl, a redhead named Ana, a regular store customer who’d come in about every other day since they opened four years earlier.  She was also a tenant in the building.  That contract also made Vanessa Ana’s landlady.  Depending on who you asked, Ana found creative ways of paying the rent when her money was tight. It was a game that she had become accustomed to playing when her back was to the wall.

  Beside the women, a tall, thin young man, a light-skinned Latino named Thomas, pronounced, Toe-Maas” chewed on peppermint gum as he folded T-shirts. His quiet demeanor endeared him to the women in the room, and over the years of association, they learned to feel safe around him, despite his occasional off-color comments.

The group dallied, talking and joking. The red-headed girl with cat's-eye glasses, Ana, had told a joke about why six was afraid of seven… The dad-joke was bad, but they laughed anyway. Thomas shook his head as though he was resigned to her dry sense of humor.

Then Vanessa told them she wished she had a boyfriend. Her last boyfriend, Kyle, had dumped her. It was abrupt and left her confused. She even contemplated playing for the other team. Throughout the first week after the break-up, Vanessa had nightmares of being alone, wondering if she would be constantly starting over. She decided to give it another shot and try to "Hang on to a guy" for longer than two weeks. Ana said she’d keep an eye out for someone “good and juicy.”

Vanessa played with a Chinese finger trap; one of many that sat next to the register in a glass jar marked “99 cents.” Ana remarked that if Vanessa could get herself a guy to fall for that trap, she could Shanghai herself a good one. Thomas snatched the finger trap out of Vanessa's hands and told her it would take more than that to fool a guy into staying with her.

Thomas was a joker, but sometimes he pushed the wrong buttons. "Go fuck yourself,” said Vanessa. With a smirk, Thomas wedged the finger trap behind his belt buckle, motioning for her to give him a hand. Ana began laughing.

  The front door chimed, and a tall man walked in. He wore a dark suit and tie, like so many of the lawyers working downtown, but his face was smothered in a beard. So, he was most likely not one of the attorneys.

Thomas said, “Hello!” and waved at the newcomer.

The customer smiled at the people in the back of the shop and went about his way, fumbling through the racks of long-sleeved shirts and sports coats. He flipped through them quickly, slid the hangers a few at a time, looked over everything at speed.   In no time at all, he gravitated towards the girls and Thomas.

The chimes clanged on the front door with a bright sugary sound, and two more suits walked in. They searched the room.  Their heads snapped quickly back and forth. Their eyes settled on the earlier customer. They made a beeline for him. But as they drew near, they also noticed the three pairs of eyes watching them from behind the counter. They relaxed and made a show of browsing through the slacks on the rack, two aisles over from the counter.

Vanessa looked at her employees, and they exchanged concerned looks with each other. The vibe had just changed into something more suspect for all of them. As the owner, Vanessa gave Thomas and Ana a nod and walked closer to the two men.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” She said, politely smiling. “can I help you find something?”

The men looked at her with clear hate in their eyes. “No, it’s fine. We’re just looking.”

“Great. Well, let me know if there is anything I can help you with,” said Vanessa.

The man who had come in first kept his back to the room, looking over the back shelf, behind the counter. After a few minutes of browsing the pile of shoes, he noticed taxidermy trophy heads on display there.

While he was back there, Thomas asked if he could help him with something.

“Actually, do you have a phone I can use? I need to make a call and I seem to have lost my cell.” All the while, the handsome customer kept making eye motions towards the other two men, making a show of  concern about them for some reason. He looked over his shoulder at them.

Thomas noticed that when the two men saw him watching them, they turned around and quickly exited the store.

Ana had been watching the scene with other concerns. She smirked at the guy borrowing Thomas’s phone and headed towards the large storage room through a doorway in the back of the store. The guy using Thomas’s phone was tall, thin and seemed like a good fit for Vanessa’s vacant boyfriend position. Something about him made Ana think to herself, definitely yummy.

After giving Thomas back his cell phone, he asked Vanessa about a wall-mounted goat head in her store. “A thrift shop seems like a weird place to find a goat head,” he said. The man looked at the trophy the way an artist critiqued a painting at a gallery.

Vanessa was quick to respond, “Well, we cater to a more enlightened crowd. It’s obvious you’re new to goats.” She flipped her hair. “We, here at Second Chance, have a knack for finding more eccentric pieces.” Vanessa did her best to keep from erupting into laughter. She held her composure and gave him her best deadpan stare, taking advantage of her exotic looks. “Besides, a little head never hurt anyone.”  As soon as she’d said it, she blushingly turned her face away from the man, who had started to laugh.  

“I meant to say …” Vanessa stepped into that one so casually, Thomas was unsure if she’d meant the double entendre or if it was a true Freudian slip.

“It’s okay,” he said.  Do you have any more unusual heads in the back?

Vanessa recovered and said, “Sure, this way,” and led him across the large room toward a gross of domestic and exotic taxidermy. The animal heads were mounted in a corner of the room, which presented like a theme had been arranged. A high-backed red leather chair stood on a bearskin rug, and tall, dusty bookshelves, heavy with aging books, had been placed strategically behind the chair. The space assumed the air of a late 19th-century trophy room.

As Vanessa and Ana walked the handsome customer through it, Thomas found himself alone at the desk. He went into the back room to talk to his friend, Jake. Jake was an intimidating guy, tall, muscular, tattooed, shaved head, burly beard, etc… Jake looked like the guy who would break up a bar-fight with his bare hands and throw you out. Jake had been busy working on an electrical kitchen appliance since early morning, and Thomas found him still entangled in a pile of wires. His cell phone was in his hand, and his YouTube app was open as he searched for a Vitamix blender repair tutorial.

The two guys heard the door chime on the front, and went into the main store to see if someone had come in. They looked but nobody was there. Then Vanessa came back in from the back door, which also had the same key chimes. After they realized there were no new customers, they talked about the big show coming up. Vanessa had been talking about it for days.  The show would be a renaissance of iron sculpture, real Avant Garde stuff, from what she’d been saying.  The auction drew fans from all over the county. The artist, T’jon Conrad, was new on the art scene, and this was to be his first show.

  Vanessa went on to describe some of the pieces in his collection, and the afternoon ran late. Thomas excused himself, clocked out, and walked home, a few blocks away, downtown.

  Later that night, Thomas got a call on his cell phone, but nobody answered when he said, "Hello." The call was labeled as "Private Caller." So he dismissed it as a wrong number.

  The next day, Thomas returned to work. Jake raved about a haul he had worked on overnight. He said he took in a bunch of good stuff because he had met some ripe out-of-towners. He bragged about how he stole their things right out from behind them, and he didn’t even need to beat them up because they never saw him take the stuff.  They were a bunch of suckers. Jake wasn't opposed to going to any length for a good score. He preyed on the naive and the elderly. Sometimes, Thomas thought about cutting off ties with him, but the guy always brought back the goods.

Jake ran around the room pushing at Thomas’ chair, re-enacting the night’s antics, “What?  Oh my God, it’s missing?  Who would do such a thing?” He took off his ball cap and scratched his head, exaggerating his concern. It was all to show Thomas how good he was.  He laughed and kicked Thomas’ chair.

All the while, Thomas sat deep in thought, typing away at a computer while Jake talked about how a guy they used to hang out with had been arrested. They both agreed that he deserved to get caught since he wasn't good enough.  After all, if he was so dumb that he got caught, it served him right to be in jail. There was an unwritten code of ethics between them, indeed, throughout their small circle of friends, who were more like family. You do a good job and you don’t get caught, “Above all, we don’t shoot cops.” Jake had not understood this part initially.

Given that Vanessa knew about his long thug background, he believed she would want him to take care of any police business that might come their way. One day, he had been chatting with Vanessa in her office when he noticed a photograph of a police officer standing in front of a squad car. It was her father. He’d been shot in the line of duty when she was just fifteen. If you were friends with her, and it paid off to be her friend, you had to abide by that. It was a game of cat and mouse. If you were caught, it sucks for you, but that's the way of their world.

After Thomas and Jake finished their chat, Thomas stepped out to have a cigarette in the alley near the store. Lucky Strikes, a choice acquired from the years of looking up to his father, an Air Force pilot during Vietnam. "An MRE just wasn't the same when they forgot your pack of smokes," his dad used to say.

Across the street, steam came out from the ground at the edge of a steel manhole cover.  Suddenly, a small car stopped in front of the brick apartment building.  An old Asian man got out and looked around as though he were lost.  He pulled off his cap, revealing his balding head.

Thomas noticed a small circular bandage behind the guy’s left ear when the guy looked around and scratched his head.  He seemed to be looking for an address, because there was a small scrap of paper in his hands, which he held close in front of his eyes.  As soon as he’d turned completely around, a MACK truck slammed into the old man’s Nissan Sentra. The impact was strong enough to push the Nissan three car lengths, but it stopped with the truck driver’s window directly above the old man.

A flurry of expletives from the old man in some Asian tongue made Thomas start laughing so hard he dropped his cigarette right out of his mouth.  Then the old man heard him laughing, and he turned toward Thomas, yelling in his direction.

At first, Thomas thought he was busted for laughing at the guy, but then the guy yelled and pointed at him, “Stay!  You witness! Stay!”

Thomas took off running.  He didn’t want to be on any paperwork the cops had, no matter how innocent he was in this.  He ran down to the street corner, turned right, and then ran around the building. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic on the main street, so it was easy to get lost in it before ducking into a door back into Vanessa’s building, The Brighton Theater Building.  It took him a second to pull out his keys, but he got in all right.

Once back inside, he turned and ran down a deserted hallway.  The floors were hard, polished, white marble.  As he walked, his tennis shoes, soft as they were, still made noise, echoing down the length of the giant-sized hallways. At the end of the building, most of the offices were vacant.  Vanessa kept this space open for her “personal use.”  It was spooky walking through the halls.  Every light was on, and most of the doors stood open a crack or fully open. Some rooms had radios turned on. Vanessa liked to make it look like people had left recently. But most often, the only person who went through there was Leticia, Vanessa’s housekeeper, and Leticia knew better than to ask Vanessa questions.

Thomas walked down a long hallway.  He passed several open doors and saw some closed, and when he checked them, they were locked tight.

He kept walking and found a lounge area outside a large glass double-door office.  A black granite coffee table sported several business magazines and a candy dish.  Vanessa must have a blast in here, thought Thomas.

He stepped into the lounge and tried to peek into the glass doors, but they were frosted except around the edges of an intricate floral pattern.  He peered into the darkened office through tiny slits of clear glass.  A large bust of Voltaire stood far across the room, illuminated by a soft white light beneath it.  “Weird,” Thomas said.

Other than the bust, glowing blue dots flickered near a box with green blinking lights.  Probably a router, he thought.

As he was snooping around, his cell phone rang. It caused him to jump back and look around. For a moment, he felt he’d been found by the old guy from outside. He opened his phone and said, “Hello?” But like before, nobody answered his greeting. He closed his phone and headed for the theater.

Thomas was rattled.  He ran down the hall to an elevator and went to the basement.   Then he followed a route back inside the actual theater and tried to shake off the feeling that someone was trying to find him.  The sound his shoes made gave him even more of the creeps.  As he sped along, the echo made it sound like he was being followed.  Once upstairs, and on the soft carpet, he felt safe again.

He found Ana fondling some used lingerie.  She seemed particularly fond of some skimpy pink ones with tassels.  Thomas was so spooked that he walked right up to Ana and embraced her.

“What’s wrong?” She asked.

“Nothing.” He replied.  “I…  I just gave myself the creeps walking around alone downstairs.  I came in off the street through the North door.  I haven’t been down there since Vanessa remodeled it last year.  It looks nothing like it used to.”

Ana laughed, then she spanked his butt hard. “Well, that’s no reason to come in and grope me, perv.” She smiled at him. She liked to tease Thomas. She did that a lot.

Thomas saw what Ana was looking at. “That looks great.  You thinking of buying it?”  He put his hands on it, running his fingers across a silky pink ribbon that ran around the waist of the nighty.

“I don’t know, I’m just feeling fat.” Ana stepped over to a tall mirror and held the dainty garment in front of her.  She wore a short blue summer dress and white sandals, and her red hair set off the blue in a way that made Thomas really look at her.

Tempting, he thought.  Thomas had never gone out with Ana before, but as he looked at her with the nightie up in front of her. She certainly made an impression on him. Judging by the way she looked at him, looking at her, Ana considered him in new ways as well.

Thomas changed the subject.  “So, how is Vanessa doing? Is she still searching for Mr. Three Weeks?”

  Ana told Thomas that Vanessa really has caught a guy this time. It was so sudden, it caught Thomas by surprise. Thomas was happy for her.  He said, “I hope she can hang on to him this time.”

Ana said she thinks Vanessa has it under control this time. "Guys are suckers." Then, as an afterthought, "No offense!"

So, Thomas asked Ana about Vanessa's new guy.  Ana said that she's “So happy.” Then she alluded to Vanessa having the guy all tied up. “It’s actually a beautiful thing.”  She says it as brightly as though she were speaking of a girl who got asked to the prom.

Thomas laughed it off. Ana seriously looked at him, as though she believed he was not understanding, and he should, knowing Vanessa. He finally understood. He said, "Wow. That is pretty under control then, huh?" He pictured some guy tied up somewhere in the labyrinth of the building Vanessa owned. Most of it is connected with secret tunnels and passageways. From time to time, the group made jokes about Vanessa being the last of a line of a once-great Gypsy family, but her roots didn’t go too deep. Just deep enough to be dangerous.

      Ana went into the other part of the store, headed toward the stage area of the old theater. She worked on preparing sculptures for the upcoming show. She set them up on the sides of the stage in case anyone had an urge to make a purchase.  Large shiny sculptures encircled the stage. White sheets covered each piece, which made it difficult to discern what they looked like.

When Ana left the room, another phone call buzzed Thomas’s cell.  Thomas heard mumbling and the words, "Got it," on the other end. He hadn't been busted since he was 18 and didn't feel like finding out what kind of slop they were serving on the jail-house chow line that night. Not likely, pork-chops.

It was clearly a man’s voice, but it sounded odd, detached. Thomas hung up quickly. His imagination began to assume the worst, that it could be the police on the other end.

By the next morning, Thomas felt his nerves fizzling out. He didn’t know what to think about the silent calls. It wound him up so much that he told Jake in the morning, when they met in the back room. They often worked in the same room together since Thomas’s computer was set up there. Everybody at the store had a particular job. Jake found things to sell. Ana was great with customers and at keeping inventory. Thomas had a particular gift that helped the store out of many hard places. 

Thomas hacked bank accounts. He loved doing it, loved the challenge of it, and Vanessa made sure to keep him around even if he became annoying. Thomas compromised accounts by exploiting several accounts at once. He would intercept an outgoing email from a member of the bank staff, bound for multiple recipients. Once his hand-coded program found one, it trapped it, embedded some invisible code into it, and sent it back on its way. Once a recipient opened the email, the trap was set. The next time they opened a browser, all their passwords would be sent back to Thomas over a secret VPN.

While he talked to Jake, Thomas got another call, and this time Thomas held the phone out so Jake could lean in and listen. Jake had some rank breath that morning. Just another reason to ditch this dude, thought Thomas.

They heard nothing at first, but then, “We got you, John Edmond. We're coming for you." Jake took the phone and began to threaten the caller, but they had already hung up.

“Who's John?” asked Jake. Thomas told him that was the name he put on the throwaway phone.  “Maybe someone got hold of my phone records.”

Jake said, "Dude, not on a burner phone. It's gotta be the police. They’re probably looking for Vanessa's guy! Shit."

It didn’t take them long to find Vanessa.  After confirming that she’d been seeing the guy from the other day, her chest deflated. She sighed, and her brow looked troubled. She knew that her play time with the guy might be cut short. "It hasn't even been a week, and I'm still on the rag!" She was heartbroken.

Thomas observed that she was cute as a button as she pouted, but he saw the gears moving in her head. They all knew she wouldn't just let the guy go. They asked her where she had him. She said that he was actually right next door to where they were.

She pointed. “There.” It was next to the shop storefront, aka the concessions area of the old theater. “But there's no longer a way to get right over there. I had the space partitioned two years ago.” Her head raced. There had to be some way to keep him here. She said, “You go out the back, down the stairs, across the hallway, and then through the closet on the left, then back up the stairs in the back behind the bookcase, then over back this way, and voila! There's a large red brick room with several ledges. There's a bed in there!" she said, quite proud of herself. The guys snickered and looked her up and down, impressed and oddly turned on. Vanessa said, “We’re going to have to move him and soon.”

She sent the men to check on her guy. His name was Benjamin. She loved that. It sounded sophisticated to her. She thought about all the time she’d spent with him lately. At first, he was worried that he would end up as a John Doe in the coroner's office. Vanessa assured him that it would never happen. She was friends with the medical examiner, and if she wanted to hurt him, she’d make sure to give his real information so they could erase it before she got into trouble.

But the truth was, Benjamin told her, he was relieved to be off the street and missing for a while. He had some bad blood with the two guys who were chasing him, and they wanted him dead. He had one job: kill the owner of the new imported sports car dealership and then deliver the dead guy’s watch back to Louie, one of the bad guys. But Benjamin couldn’t do it. He thought he could, but lost his nerve. He’d never killed anyone before. He was hard up for money, but not that hard up.

All the while that Benjamin told his woeful tale to Vanessa, she fell deeper and deeper in …. something, something emotional. But she really liked the guy. She told him she just wanted to get to know him. That’s why she tied him to the bed in the hidden room. He told her he was glad she did. He wasn’t ready to die. That’s when she took off his ropes and handcuffs. That’s when they made out all afternoon, two days earlier.

Thomas and Jake moved Benjamin to another room in the building next door. They took the underground passages to avoid being seen. The building was quiet. It felt empty despite being brightly lit and the rooms full of furniture. It felt eerie to Thomas

The art show and auction fast approached. Soon it would be night, and guests would arrive. Ana and Vanessa got ready in the back office. It was handy that Vanessa had put a shower in the restroom.

A crowd gathered inside the theater and art space. Auction items lay all around the stage under lights. The room was so crowded, you couldn't see much else other than everybody’s heads. It was shoulder to shoulder in there, and the music was loud. The excitement in the air fueled Vanessa as she walked around and greeted people.

At the far end of the room stood a flat, rectangular box, surrounded by cables, attached to the audio equipment. Thomas checked it out and thought to himself that it looked like a turntable coffin from the early 2000s. Looking back at Jake, he motioned for him to come over and check out the cool hardware.

Across the room, Jake nodded and turned towards Thomas. Then, out of nowhere, Jake got a gun pushed into his ribs. The gunman pushed Jake toward the back of the room, up towards the main shop area's back office. Thomas was in there, and his face went white. The guy with the gun wore a black jacket.  He was clean-cut and all muscle. Jake saw the silvery metallic flash of a badge under his coat. The guys thought they were just about out of tricks for this cop. He demanded they not make a scene and take them to Benjamin. They agreed while their hands remained up. He jabbed the gun in their direction and told them to put their hands down.

They walked through the elaborate tunnels and stairs to reach the room where the guy should be. But Benjamin had already gone.  When they moved to the back of the room, Jake pushed over the cop and grabbed Thomas, dragging him out to the street exit.                 

They booked it down J Street on foot about a block and turned into the alleyway. Jake hoped to make it into his buddy Harry's loft, but it was dark, and the back door was locked. "Shit!" They looked around and found several large foul-smelling dumpsters. Without a lot of options, they hid behind two of them, one on either side of the asphalt alleyway. Jake whispered the name ‘Wendy,’ and Thomas realized that his friend had started talking to his Smith & Wesson, a gun that he was never without. He must have had it tucked away.  God only knows where it was hidden, but there he was, talking to it: "I'm sorry, baby, but I can't do no cop. I just can't. I don't want to get the chair or injected. That's not my way. I just can't."                  

As they hid in the alley, Jake and Thomas shivered at the thought of the cops having them cornered. They heard the guy speak. "You guys can't hide forever. We're coming for you. My buddies are on their way, and the cops can't save you now."

Hearing this, Thomas looked over across the alleyway at Jake. Jake had the nickel-plated barrel of a large-caliber revolver in his hands, and his eyes went wide as he turned to look at Thomas. The broad smile on his face looked so much like a babe on Christmas morning, it scared Thomas for just a moment. Then he realized that they might just be saved.

Thomas looked at Jake and said, "He's not a cop!" Two shots cracked open the alley with bright flashes of white light. A thud is heard as the man who just entered the alley hit the pavement. Half his face was gone. So was his right foot.

Jake stood up and walked over to the dead man. He holstered his pistol back into his dark brown corduroy coat.  "That's weird."

"What is?" Asked Thomas as he came up to meet Jake.    

"I could have sworn I saw a badge." Jake nudged open the guy’s coat as he lay on the ground. In the chest pocket of the deceased was the chromed backside of an old iPod Touch.

Thomas pulled it out and looked at it. "Ha ha.... ha." He sniffed.  The foul, damp air wreaked havoc with his sinuses.

Jake shook his head and pulled out a cigarette. "Fucking Apple."

  Thomas grinned, and they worked together to pull the body to the dumpster, where they lifted it and pushed it in.

  Jake patted Thomas on the back and said, "This will do for a little bit, until the party winds down. We can throw out the trash later tonight. We'll be ready for this assholes’ friends when they get here.

“Let's go tell Vanessa the good news,” said Thomas.

Jake put his arm out, made a fist bump with Thomas, and laughed out loud.

"You got it, pal."