Ch. 53 – Breaking Point

Derrick got off the bus and walked the rest of the way to Hack Alley. The sun glared as it peeked out from behind a cloud, only to then disappear behind another one.

The sun had stayed hidden when he arrived at Hack Alley. The gray world around him gave way to utter darkness as he stepped through the entrance and closed the door. He pulled his smartphone out and shuffled around by the screen light until the blinds were right in front of him. With a pull of the cord, slits of light streamed into Hack Alley, shining on the laptop, which was sitting atop a pile of unpaid bills that was many times larger than the laptop. Derrick swept the bills aside, set the laptop down, and started transcribing Tony’s plan for spending their eighteen thousand dollars. Soon after, his phone lit up again, and vibrated on the table. It was a link from Tony: a listing for the solar panels that could be wheeled around.

The laptop’s battery was at fifty percent, but given that it was super old, the battery probably wouldn’t last long. “Alright, better order this thing before it’s out of juice,” Derrick said.

Derrick placed a hold on a set of secondhand panels—of the type that Tony had requested—which were available for pickup from a gray market dealer in the city, and then shut the laptop off to conserve battery. It was time to give Bernard’s number a call. The phone rang a few times before going to voicemail.

Bernard’s wheezy voice came through the speaker.

Derrick hung up the call and glanced at Tony’s Beacon. The bank would probably raise an alarm if they deposited such a large chunk of money in cash, and then used it to send a Beacon-verified payment to Bernard. It was much safer to pay in cash, but if Derrick were to do so, he didn’t want to be waiting around for the man to show up. Loitering in Chinatown with a pocket full of cash was asking for trouble.

But showing up empty-handed would make it seem like Hack Alley was just looking to delay payment altogether. So it was better to bring at least some money . . . but how much money? That was the question. Maybe one month’s worth of rent? Yeah, that sounded right. It was enough to show that they were serious about repayment, but it also left enough cash so that Tony and Derrick could pay the other bills, restock on consumables, and perform the equipment repairs they’d been putting off.

Plus, if Derrick only brought one month’s worth of rent, he could try negotiating the terms of their remaining back rent; the longer that Hack Alley could drag out repayment without suffering new fees, the better. It would make time to pay off other debts and keep up the shop. If Derrick showed up with more cash, however, Bernard would want to take all of it, no matter how much he would have been happy with in the first place. It was better for Derrick not to show his entire hand, so to speak.

The next step, then, was to locate Bernard, hand off the one month of rent money, and negotiate the payment terms. The landlord lived a few blocks from Hack Alley, although sometimes he could be found at a seedy Mahjong place instead, gambling away the blood, sweat, and tears of his tenants.

No one answered the door at Bernard’s home, but after Derrick went crawling through one cramped, dingy Mahjong parlor after another, he did indeed eventually find Bernard.

Bernard was at a table, sweating, and pushing his glasses up. Derrick moved up behind him and glanced over his shoulder. Bernard had a shit hand, but he also didn’t know when to quit. Derrick grabbed a seat at the side of the room, and waved to the parlor’s owner, who peered down his glasses at Derrick, and gave a slight nod. The old man had gotten repairs at Hack Alley often enough to know Derrick’s face, and he didn’t seem to mind if Derrick just stopped by every once in a while, since the young apprentice mod-doc wasn’t disturbing anyone.

After the game had finished, and Bernard stood up from the table and knocked his pieces over in disgust, Derrick called out.

The landlord spun around and glared at Derrick, perked up, and then his glare got deeper.

Derrick nodded. If he could get Bernard to come back to Hack Alley before paying him, that would be even safer than pulling out the wad of cash in front of the crowd of disgruntled mahjong players.

Bernard scoffed.

Bernard would likely have no trouble paying his own bills if he didn’t gamble, but Derrick kept that thought to himself.

The two of them left the Mahjong parlor and made their way to Hack Alley. Derrick unlocked the door, and let them both inside, before locking the door again, and closing all the blinds. It wouldn’t be good for someone to walk in while they were handling all this money. Derrick switched on a flashlight and set it on a table to give them some light, and then gestured for Bernard to sit down. Derrick shuffled over from the kitchen so as not to spill anything, and left a glass of water for Bernard to drink. The glass of water gleamed in the darkness as the flashlight’s beam passed through it.

Derrick said. He took the wad of cash out from his pocket and placed it on the table in front of Bernard. Derrick held the flashlight up so it would shine down on the bills, which Bernard snatched up and counted through.

Bernard whined. He stuck a finger up.

Bernard nodded, take a gulp from his glass of water.

Derrick grit his teeth.

Bernard spat the damned figure out of his mouth, and had the audacity to leave it hanging open, as if he hadn’t just said something so horrible that it would’ve been only decent to close his trap immediately. Bernard had raised the rent by exactly as much as Hack Alley’s protection money fee had been, before they had gotten it waived by Theo.

Derrick asked, trembling.

Bernard pulled out a stained handkerchief from his pocket and hocked a loogie into it.

Derrick growled, Anger was building in his throat, and each breath felt like it was going to send force surging through his arms, into fingertips that would dig into Bernard’s crooked adam’s apple.

Bernard scoffed, and sipped his tea.

If only Derrick had placed a hidden microphone somewhere in the shop. He almost wouldn’t mind selling Bernard out to the White Leopards if he got to see the landlord cry and beg.

Bernard said.

Bernard said, looking at Derrick,

Bernard and the White Leopards had an effective partnership. Bernard would pay the White Leopards to not destroy his rental properties, and generally leave him unmolested. In exchange, they also collected rent for Bernard from troublesome tenants, which meant going around door to door to said tenants, and beating the cash out of them, if need be. Bernard had shown a form of restraint in that he hadn’t sent the Leopards to Hack Alley in years at this point, and he’d never asked the Leopards to beat them. Badly, at least.

And still, Bernard had a point, as selfishly as he had put it. How would a different landlord have handled getting their operating costs increased to such a large degree? They would’ve just done as Bernard had done, and passed the costs on to their tenants; or if they had too much of a conscience, just taken the loss until they had to close down their business.

Derrick asked.

Bernard said.

Derrick said.

Bernard said, snorting.

Derrick couldn’t persuade Bernard to reduce the rent increase. And if the Leopards weren’t even willing to waive even a few months of Hack Alley’s protection money until Tony and Derrick had saved Ah Jun’s life, they probably couldn’t argue on Bernard’s behalf without performing a similar miracle for the Leopards. So the only thing Derrick could do without any other means at his disposal was haggle the repayment schedule with Bernard.

Derrick said, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

Bernard said.

#

Derrick waved goodbye to Bernard as the landlord left the shop, and then Derrick closed and locked the door again.

He wanted to cry. After all he had done to try and make enough money, he and Hack Alley were still in a financial hole. And as he was trying to climb out, the White Leopards were poking him with sticks. There was no way Hack Alley would make progress on their other debts and expenses if they were going to be effectively be paying the protection money after all; the payment would just be paid indirectly, through Bernard.

Derrick slammed a fist on the table, making the tools and parts on top of it jump. Shit. I can’t lose control inside of the shop and break something again. It’s not like we’d be able to replace it. A strangled chuckle escaped from Derrick’s throat. It was as if a dam had broken, and all the anxiety and anger that had been bottled up in his chest came pouring out in the form of hysterical laughter. Laughter, and screeching, even. Derrick’s vocal cords grew sore, but he couldn’t stop. It was just too funny. Even when utterly consumed by rage, his first thought had been about how they couldn’t afford to fix something if he broke it.

Derrick’s chest still heaved with laughter as he stood up, swaying back and forth. He pushed the chair in, and then ambled towards the front door of Hack Alley. The world was spinning. He tried breathing in between bouts of laughter, but all his breaths were too shallow. He had somehow made it over to the front door, and leaned on the door frame as if it was his anchor to the world.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

But the laughter just kept coming. The keys jangled in his pocket, and Derrick yanked them out and locked the front door behind him with jittery hands.

It was cold, and he had left his jacket in the shop, but if he went back inside this moment, he would break something. The streets zoomed past him as he ran. The stump on his right arm was cold: chilled by the titanium rod on his prosthesis that went deep inside him.

Turn after turn after turn, he ran, until he finally got to the ladder in the alleyway he had been running towards. He always ran towards this ladder when he was escaping from something else.

Clink. He gripped the first rung with his prosthesis and pulled himself up. The ladder vibrated and rang as he sprang up, leaving the ground behind him like a rocket leaving the earth. By the time he pulled himself over the last rung and sprawled out onto the hard concrete of the rooftop, his heart was threatening to explode.

Something wet hit his cheek. And something else hit his hair. His hand slid around on a discarded plastic wrapper as he tried to push himself up. Drops pattered down on the wrapper. It was drizzling, and he was going to regret this later.

Rain dripped down the pock-marked concrete wall in the center of the rooftop.

Derrick stumbled over to the pile of bricks, and sat on a stack of them, leaning back into the bricks behind him. They were leftovers from an unfinished construction project, which had eventually become an abandoned construction project, after the developers had quarreled with the Leopards. A few years ago, he hadn’t been able to see over the pile, there were so many bricks on it. But he had used them, in fits of rage, and the pile was now low enough to sit on. It was just that sort of world.

The world had stopped spinning. He picked a brick up in his left hand, and it almost slipped out of his hand from how slick he was, with sweat and rain.

He stood up, took a deep breath, and hurled the brick at the concrete wall.

It shattered, taking off a sliver of the wall as well.

Fwoosh. Crack.

Fwoosh. Crack.

Derrick wound up, taking the brick all the way behind his head, and feeling his entire body contract as he loosed it at the wall. Skin tore off his left hand as the brick left his fingers and shattered like the rest of them.

The rooftop was high up: high enough and far enough from Hack Alley that he could toss bricks without hurting someone.

And toss bricks he did.

His mouth was dry. Even the rain dribbling down into it did nothing to quench him.

With each brick he broke against the concrete wall, he let out a guttural yell; it beat against his own eardrums, but sank into the rain amid the top of the Chinatown buildings, so that it would never reach the streets below. And so he threw, and threw, and broke, and broke, until his arm was spent, and there was frayed skin and streaked blood all across his left hand.

#

“Fuck, why am I so stupid,” Derrick said to himself. He dabbed the alcohol against his torn left fingers and palm, and winced at the pain.

He was soaked from head to toe, as the drizzling had turned to rain during his brick-throwing session.

Throwing bricks was a bit like masturbation: it felt almost necessary in the moment, but afterwards you felt dirty, and like a dumbass.

Derrick shivered, and finally got up to toss his wet clothes into the laundry bin. It was cold even inside the shop on a day like this.

Even dry, he was cold inside and outside. His bed was cold, and it wasn’t getting any warmer, either.

He poured himself a cup of hot water from the kettle, and burned the roof of his mouth with it. But he still shivered.

There was one thing that did work. Derrick opened the cabinet where Tony had stashed away some of his liquor, and took a swig.

It warmed him up inside, and he took another swig. The room began to swim.

‘Who’s gonna clean up after me tomorrow?’ Derrick wondered, head nodding as he sat, leaning against a kitchen cabinet. Acid reflux climbed up Derrick’s throat, and he fell sideways to the floor and let it out on the tiles. At least it didn’t get all over his pants.

And then he drifted off to sleep.