The Kneecap Banker Read online



  The Kneecap Banker

  By L. Jordan James

 

  The first time I caught her scent was from sofa cushions and tangled bedding in a hotel that was half a notch above fleabag status, down on the East Side called The Memphis. The neighborhood, the room, the furniture were all ratty, but I was intimate with the area. I knew what to expect. I also knew Elsa, a maid who worked there. She let me into the room.

  When Elsa unlocked the door, I tried to pass by, but she partially blocked the entrance and there seemed to be an unspoken purpose involved. Elsa faced me, looked into my eyes, held them until she smiled, blushed and looked away. She stepped around me to the stairs and hurried down but found enough time to say over her shoulder “Call me, Chauncey.”

  I smiled and watched her, now acutely aware of the swaying movement of her hips, the light feminine way she touched the banister, the quick beat of her heart. I knew it wasn’t really me she was attracted to. Her interest was because of my werewolf pheromones. Some women respond to it. Most don’t. Maybe I would call her later but at that moment I had business to attend to.

  No one was in the room and the place was a mess and for some reason, I wasn’t surprised. I was looking for Steward Stevens or “Big Sweet” to people who knew him. But there had been another person there as well—a woman. They were together. I smelled the intense sex between them, which convinced me that anywhere I’d find her I’d sure as hell find him.

  As I stood there taking in the space, the sight of the upturned furniture, the smells of both people, something unexpected happened. Her scent overpowered his and it was…intoxicating. Yes, she smelled of cigarettes, cheap perfume, desperation, and the local bar—a dive just down the street where prostitutes, pimps and cops mingled. But, somehow, her cheap perfume, when mixed with her pheromones, reminded me of the most expensive fragrance on the market.

  Both scents—the perfume and her pheromones—made each more complex than either one would’ve been separately, like she understood how they both interacted. The synergistic effect was something that not many people knew how to accomplish. Well…I didn’t know of anyone that could do it. Maybe her choice in perfumes was an accident or maybe it was done on a more subconscious level.

  There was another scent too, just below her perfume, below her pheromones that refused to rise to the level of recognition. The scent danced just beyond the periphery of my understanding, and it was driving me crazy. I walked back and forth in the small room, frustrated, on the verge of anger, trying to identify that damned lingering fragrance.

  All of the smells in the room were an assault on my senses, except for her pheromones, and this one small deviation from the norm that cut through all of the other scents, and forced me to pay attention. Because it was unrecognizable, because it demanded my scrutiny, it rose from obscurity, climbing high above every other fragrance in the room. It cut across every scent, a disconcerting sound in a room full of mundane babble that first began with a squeal. At first, it was like listening to an old, rusty nail being pulled out of wood under protest, but it slowly, surely, rose into something that Beethoven would’ve been proud of in both its simplicity and depth.

  I stayed hopelessly lost when I tried to identify the smell, though. Adding to that lost feeling were all the questions that presented themselves to me, that baffled me, while fewer and fewer answers were available. Where was Big Sweet? Why did he run? If he chose to run with the Boss’ money why did he hole up in this rat’s nest in the Boss’ backyard? And who was this woman that smelled like heaven on Earth? Questions rested on top of questions without any kind of definable answer.

  Big Sweet’s odor, by contrast, wasn’t new to me. It spoke of stupidity, anger and self-indulgence. Each negative aspect was dangerous by itself but all three coupled together in one person was unusual…and volatile.

  Maybe these bad thoughts about him rolled through my mind because I was envious. I had met Sweet several times before and he always looked like he was on top of the world with that big cheesy smile of his, loud wardrobe and large assortment of beautiful women floating on his arm. Or maybe it was this new scent that I couldn’t identify. Or maybe it was because he was running from me and I hate runners.

  My next steps were uncertain as though I were walking on thin, slippery ice. But just being in the room gave me my next move—the tavern, down the street. I had smelled it on her. Maybe I could pick up the trail there or even come to recognize this other odor. Places like that bar—“Obviously” it’s called—are hard on my sense of smell. They are hard on all of my senses but on my sense of smell particularly.

  I paused at the threshold of the room, looking back over my shoulder at the wrecked scene—furniture turned on its back, ashtrays on the floor, the TV on its side. It looked as though there had been an altercation. But I didn’t buy it. It was more likely staged. The TV was on its side but undamaged. Someone placed it there noiselessly, so that no one would have to answer any pesky questions from the boys in blue about a fake fight. It was probably staged to throw me off. It wouldn’t work.

  I took one last short sniff before closing the door behind me. It was like hitting the save button on a document. Now the smell lay on my hard drive—waiting…

  As I walked down the stairs, past the main desk and out of the front door into the hot sun, my stomach tightened. There was a hint of blood in the water (not real blood but pending blood) permeating everything and everyone involved. The blood was comprised of this unknown smell, Sweet running, and this staged hotel room. When I smell sangre this early while tracking someone, it usually ends badly.

  A woman passed me wearing a heavy brand of cologne that almost covered up the smell of her sweat, her body powder, her pheromones, her cancer—almost; but not quite. There’s always a part of me that wants to run after people like her and tell them to go see their doctor but after years and years of passing people in bars, on sidewalks, riding the subways, who were in the unknown throes of death from one disease or another it gets kind of old.

  I reached into my pocket, removed my handkerchief, and placed it over my nose and mouth. I loved the city but this was one of its drawbacks for me—its high concentration of people, the cars with its exhaust spewing from its innards, the garbage. The different smells assault me and sometimes leave me with blinding migraines. But I always fought through. I had a job to do. I work for a kneecap banker—a loan shark—whose rates were so high that very few ever came to him. I’m the werewolf muscle that gets sent in to collect when payments are missed, when people run, or when things generally go sideways instead of according to plan.

  Those who went to my boss were the very desperate who needed money, like homeowners who needed to catch up on bank payments or the embezzling businessman who needed to put the money back into the business until the I.R.S.’s eyes wandered off. There are others, of course—stupid people who have an inside track on a “can’t miss” gambling tip or a foolproof way of winning at roulette. Stupid people.

  I stepped away from the shaded overhang of the hotel and the sun burned me and everyone else who walked the concrete sidewalks. The waves of heat seemed to liquefy the air, the tar-covered roads and to obscure the distant concrete landscape. The usually definite shapes in the distance, of houses and cars, blurred and melted together. No breeze brought relief. I was lucky the bar wasn’t too far from the hotel.

  I stepped inside, out of the sun, into cool dimness and desperation of the bar and was reminded of a day when I was young. When I was a little boy my mother had sent me to go get my father out of a tavern and come home. My mother had a way of trying to shame my father into staying home, shame him into working, shame him into paying the bills, into doing what she thought was right.
I don’t think she understood him. He was shameless.

  The day my mother sent me to collect my father had been a scorcher like this one. As soon as I entered the bar, and felt the cool air brush against my sweaty skin, providing instant relief, I thought I understood why he came to that dark place. I thought I knew why he spent his days and a great many nights sitting on a barstool drinking foul smelling liquid that made him and other grown men grimace. I thought I understood. But I didn’t know about hopelessness. I didn’t understand about wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t know about despair or the deep dark hole that a person can dig themselves into one drink at a time. I must’ve been seven.

  I remember going up to him and standing quietly beside him until one whiskey-sodden eye fell on me. Looking back on it from an adult’s point of view I now know that I had felt inconsequential like a fly hovering around him, of no value, no worth. A nuisance.

  “Mom wants you,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, people in hell want ice water.” He hadn’t even looked my