Free California Bones by Greg van Eekhout

proof! And that’s what I’m giving you right now. What do you say, miss? Are you a believer?”
    Gently, he took her hands away from her face. The bags beneath her eyes were gone. The jowls were smooth, the flesh of her neck taut.
    As the hawker began struggling to manage the fistfuls of cash people thrust at him, the woman made her way through the crowd, out onto open sidewalk.
    Daniel followed.
    “So, you’re a thirty-seven-year-old woman now?” he said, drawing up even with her.
    “I’ve been a woman before.”
    “Well, okay, but last time I saw you, you were a sixty-year-old dude, so…”
    “You know me. Whatever the job requires.” A police cruiser puttered down the canal, and Daniel turned his face away. But Jo Alverado didn’t have to worry about being recognized. She could always change her face again.
    “You call this a job?” Daniel said, once the cruiser turned onto Vine. “Why are you hanging around a low-rent grifter like that anyway?”
    “You don’t have to insult Fargo.”
    “Mr. It-Slices-It-Dices? Nothing against him, but with your talent, you should be doing jewelry stores and banks. Hell, you could be stealing real skull-stones.”
    “How do you know they’re not real skull-stones?” she said, stepping around Shirley Temple’s star.
    Daniel tapped his nose and sniffed conspicuously. “Look, I didn’t come here to question your life choices. I have a job.”
    “Oh?” She looked up at him, curious. She’d given herself a very cute nose and a sensuous mouth, and Daniel reminded himself that the last time he’d seen her, she was a dead ringer for W. C. Fields. “Lucrative?”
    “Remember the warehouse in Rosemead?”
    “With all the griffin claw?”
    “That’s the one. This job is worth, oh, sixty times that.”
    She stopped dead on Alan Ladd.
    “It’s not an Otis job, is it?” she said.
    “What if it is?”
    “I don’t work for Otis anymore. I’m not one of his.”
    Daniel smiled his most confident, convincing smile. It was the one she’d taught him. “And that, Jo, is exactly why I need you on my crew.”
    *   *   *
    Tommy’s, Big Tommy’s, Original Tommy’s, Tom’s Number 5, Tomy’s, Big Tomy’s. And there were more, spread all over Los Angeles and beyond, from Simi Valley to the San Gabriel Valley, all the way down to San Diego. The burger joints shared two things in common: the oddly compelling generic meat flavor of the chili, and the ubiquitous presence of his friend Moth, whose lifelong meal plan consisted of a circuitous pilgrimage to every one of the Tommy’s variants.
    Daniel caught up to him near closing time at the Big Tomy’s in West LA, at Pico and Sawtelle. Moth was just about to tuck into what was probably his third or fourth or seventh chili burger of the day when he saw Daniel approach and rose to engulf him.
    “Man, I’ve missed you,” Moth purred, like the lowest note on a cello. “But you gotta fuck off.”
    “Well, aren’t you Mr. Hot and Cold. What’s up?”
    “I’m meeting people in ten minutes. Working a deal.”
    “Here? What happened to not shitting where you eat?”
    “Not here, here,” Moth said. “But close enough I don’t want you around.”
    It was then that Daniel noticed the plastic lunch cooler on the cracked tile floor.
    “What’s in the box?”
    “Ah, you don’t want to know.” Moth wouldn’t meet his eyes.
    “Moth? What’s in the box?”
    Moth blew out a puff of air. He looked around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping. “Okay, fine, it’s a kidney. I’m selling a kidney. Are you happy?”
    “Please tell me it’s not your kidney?”
    “Well, fuck, who else’s kidney would I be selling?”
    Daniel buried his face in his hands.
    He’d first met Moth on an asphalt basketball court at Venice High, a school neither of them attended. They’d been on opposite teams for a pickup game, and Moth had used his superior size to foul Daniel on every possession, whether or not Daniel was driving