Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

I hadn’t made a noise. Not good: someone was watching me. I stepped back after I gave Al the receiver. He listened for a while, then said, “How did…I’ll get it back, I swear! Give me a minute.” He muffled the phone on his stomach, carefully placing the receiver where there weren’t stitches, I suppose.

“Manny, I need the address book. They don’t trust me anymore, and they’re going to snub me if I don’t give them that stuff back. I don’t know how,” he said, but I knew how, because as he said that a little red dot appeared on his right nostril and wiggled around for a while until it disappeared.

“Listen, Al: ‘they’ have a laser trained on your face right now,” I said and he froze, looking out the window. “Which brings me to who ‘they’ are. Some sort of family going on? Spill.”

I was expecting a hesitation like in the movies. There was one. After a few seconds of biting his lower lip, Al said, “‘They’ are called the Barbershop. That’s all you have to know, because if you don’t look for them, you’d never know anything about them. They don’t run this town, but they tell who comes in and goes out of my business.”

I said, “Hmm.” I remembered promising myself years ago that I’d never get caught up with drug cartels. I guessed the address book was full of contact information for customers, cohorts, or both.

The red dot appeared again and moved over his left eye, so he could see it was there. He was sweating. Suddenly he burst into a sob and screamed, “Show them the book!” That scream was going to attract some attention, and I couldn’t afford putting anyone else in danger, so I jammed the visitor’s chair under the door handle. I could hear the cop stirring.

I whispered to Al, “Put the phone back up to your ear and tell them I’m going to slide the book under this door, so they’d better send someone here in three minutes. Tell them to take the gun off of you, and tell them that if I don’t hear someone knocking in some creative way I’m going to do something irrational. And I want another creative knock on the door after they’ve got the book to let me know the right person got it. And whisper that to him.” I was sweating too. I didn’t want any part of this, but my desires got me nowhere. I was in this trouble, and I had to get out.

He told the Barbershop rep all that I wanted him to tell. I waited a minute and a half. I heard footsteps and someone trying the door handle a couple of times, and then I heard keys jingling. A key went in and turned, but the door stood still because of the chair, and because I was sitting in the chair. The footsteps went away. Where was the bull? I took the chair down and cracked the door open, enough to poke my noggin out. I looked to the right, and there was nobody in the hall. I looked to the left, and there was the cop talking with the nurse, holding his keys up for her to look at.

One minute left. I closed the door again and didn’t put the chair back. The laser was bouncing around on the art deco painting on the wall by Al. His eyes followed its every move, and he was tense, but happy it wasn’t on his head anymore. He sort of reminded me of a cat.

Then came the knock like a drum roll and then a staccato set of triplets. I toed the book under the door, and the same knock came again. Relief. A minute later the laser disappeared for good.

A minute after that and the cop tried the door again. It opened slowly, and the bull’s hand was on his hip between his keys and his Glock. He relaxed when he saw me sitting with my hands folded on my lap in the visitor’s chair next to Al.

“Sir, what went on in here? And who was that clown who was just kneeling by the door?” he asked. I ignored his questions and said that I was calm because I was trying not to cause the man with the gun on the roof across the street to get suspicious. I knew the sniper was gone because I had risked a look out the window, but I wanted extra police presence to ensure I could get to my car safely. The bulls came, and I had a few last words for Al.

He promised me he would put me on the white list. That meant protection, or was only supposed to mean protection since there was no way I could trust him. I would just have to be careful. I told him that.

As I walked out, Al called out to me: “Manny, how come you gotta be so rough to me?”

“You’re a leech. Get a real job.” I meant after prison, of course. I flicked the etched key I had taken from him earlier and it landed between his legs on the sheets.

On the elevator ride down to the first floor, I counted $3570 from the bumper sticker cash and the wad from Al’s wallet and I put it all into an envelope. At the front desk I asked about donations to children patients, left the envelope and walked back to my Beetle. As I opened my car door, I looked up and saw a jagged V in the sky. The season was over.