Fogtown by Peter Plate Read Free Book Online Page B

lectured. “Are you going to be a daddy or a father?”
    It was mumbo-jumbo in his ears. “Huh?”
    “A daddy just hangs around. A father goes out and gets a job and takes care of his family.”
    Sharona’s edict had been a major bring-down. Stiv had never met his own father, didn’t even know the man’s name, so what the fuck was she saying? He didn’t have a clue. Here he was, twenty-five years old, fathering a child way too soon. Now he had to step up to the plate for Sharona and the kid and deliver the things he’d never known.
    The trolley shuddered to a halt at the Civic Center station and the coach doors opened. Stiv disembarked and muscled a path through knots of school kids, junkies, suited office workers, and Nicaraguan women selling food. The line of passengers struggling to get out of the station was lengthy. A surveillance camera embedded in a wall gazed unblinkingly at the crowd. Keeping an eye on two overweight Muni cops guarding the entrance, Stiv cut to the front, bestraddled a turnstile, and hopped over it.
    A ticket agent shouted at him, “Hey! You didn’t pay!”
    Stiv jogged across Market Street. Resurgent wisps of fog wreathed the eucalyptus trees and the hillside condominiums on Diamond Heights. A red, white, and blue zeppelin bobbled over the office buildings in the Tenderloin. The weekly farmer’s market was in progress at the Civic Center. Azure blue and orangeade yellow clouds hovered over the gray government buildings in the plaza.
    The neighborhood where Jeeter Roche dwelled, the South of Market, was populated with live-work lofts, high-rise retirement complexes, shopping centers, factories, and warehouses. The writer Jack London had been born at Third and Brannan. The last comprehensive general strike in San Francisco had been organized here by the ILWU in 1934. The district had been a hub for book printing on the West Coast, butskyrocketing production costs had driven the industry overseas to Korea and Singapore.
    The South of Market was also a haven for the city’s leather queens. Bars like the Brig and the Anvil on Folsom Street attracted large mobs on the weekends. Stiv had frequented the Brig; his streetwise scruffiness was irresistible to the leather daddies. One of them, a queen by the name of Robert Opel, developed a crush on him. Usually done up in a black leather vest and chaps and pale-faced with a bushy mustache that masked his sardonic mouth, Robert promoted an ego that took up a lot of room. He’d streaked the Oscar Awards on national television and had become a celebrity. He had a flair for making the people around him seem smaller than they were. The attribute left more than one person wanting to murder him.
    History doesn’t repeat itself; it merely predicts what’s been done before. Robert Opel got involved with the wrong people and was shot and killed in a PCP deal that went south. A pimply-faced queen was busted for the deed. One day while going to a preliminary hearing at the Hall of Justice, the shooter escaped from the holding cell next to the courtroom. Dressed in a pair of orange county-jail overalls, he evaded the cops and vamoosed all the way to Florida before he was captured again. Stiv stayed away from the Brig after that.
    Walking by the warehouses on Howard Street, he was aware that the residual effects of the Haldol had worn off. His head was clearer than it had been all morning. His hearing was more acute. His sight was stronger. His ability to smell was enhanced. It wouldn’t be long before he had another hallucination.
    Hallucinations had a herd mentality. They ran in packs. You had one, others joined in to gangbang your nervous system. Stiv got a hint of things to come when he spotted the wraith of José Reyna on Tehama Street. The outlaw was gauzy, transparent in the sunlight. He was in the saddle of a white stallion. The horse, a muscular brute, reared up on its hind legs and neighed. José waved his sombrero. The poltergeist lasted for all two