Free San Francisco Noir by Peter Maravelis

yours.” Her lower jaw stuck out: Nobody fucked with Mission history.
    Joey shrunk back, her lilting voice floating as if it was a whisper of wind. “Oh. I see.”
    “No. You don’t see.” Gina made a small grunt as Alhambra kicked her under the table. “Yesterday a complete toad haulin around a Day-Glo wheelchair told me the same thing.” She moved her chair back in order to speak directly up at Joey. “I apologize for bein harsh to you, but the skinny fucker popped me in the eye when I told him to go fuck himself.”
    “That asshole! He been stealing my designs, calling them his own.” The color rose in Joey-Big Rig’s face, her eyes went glinty gray, her arms swelled up like pumpkins as she clenched her fists. “That gnarly bastard couldn’t put a tattoo on a fucking grapefruit.”
    Gina thought better of pointing out that the design on her arm wasn’t Joey’s. Instead she nodded, glad to have support in her appraisal of the man. “Dead eyes? Mummy face? Crap ink?”
    Joey nodded, her color shading to something less volcanic. “He kills people. He uses the same needles on everyone. Steals other folks’ work and twists it into something ugly.”
    “Carryin bad tattoo art is death in itself.” Alhambra spoke, cool waters to soothe a restless soul.
    “You know what I’m talking about, then.” Joey became their comrade again. “You staying clean and sober? Yes?”
    “Yes. Well, no. I mean…”
    Joey laughed, a hearty trill—it would have been a trill except it came from a mountain, so it was, well, hearty. “Been seventeen months for me. Clean. And. Sober.” The laugh stopped and her eyes went flinty. “I ain’t never going back.” She paused, looked at each of them in turn, her huge hands opening and closing in spasm. “Never. Never going back.”
    The air had gone out of the diner with a psychic whoosh .
    “Never. You got that?”
    Alhambra sighed, softly refilling the place with air. “We got it, Joey. Good for you.”
    “Good for you.” Gina’s voice clicked in her throat, stuck on something she hadn’t known was in there.
    The big woman’s face shifted into a smile, she leaned forward and knocked on the table, “Good talking with yas. Hope to see yas around, then.” She straightened up, “Don’t forget what I told yas. None of us ever going back. No way. None of us.”
    The door closed behind her with a small plock .
    “We done here, I think?”
    “Dayam. We be done and done again.” Gina stared at her hands clenched tight as two poodles fucking. “Holy crap.”
    “Let’s walk down to the river and catch a breath of massive water power?”
    “Wash away all our sins?”
    “Take more than a river in full mud raging flood to do that.”
    They passed a sign: Welcome to Monte Rio! HATE STOPS HERE.
    “You guys hava different definition of hate up here than we do down in the Mission where folks aren’t all completely bonkers?”
    Alhambra, lost in her own thoughts, nodded uh-huh .
    They crossed the parking lot, started down a scrubby slope to the curve of the rumbling river. “Jeezuz! She’s goin in the water!”
    Joey-Big Rig, hip deep where the water curled against a set of rocks, was wrestling something out of the scrub.
    “Holy Christ, it’s that wheelchair I tossed.” Gina didn’t know whether to jump right in, in some goofy heroic attempt to help, or back away in shame at the calamity she had set in motion: Joey was going to be slushed away to drown.
    Alhambra’s hand touched Gina’s shoulder. “She’ll be fine long as she doesn’t go past the rocks. Water boils around in there but there’s no big current, that’s more to the center. See the logs out there?”
    “That’s not a log—”
    One of the logs flipped upright at Joey’s side, eye-blink fast he grabbed for the chair, hissing.
    “Crap. That’s the guy.”
    “Too right.” Alhambra’s full lips curled up. “This is gonna be good.”
    “Uh, Alhambra? Karen? Those two people can drown in there.