Lucky Bastard by S G Browne

to cut and run. Grab a cab back to my apartment, pack up what I need, gather up the cash and fake IDs I have stashed away in my apartment and in my office, and head north to Canada or south to Mexico. I hear Vancouver’s nice, but I don’t really care for the snow. And now that I think about it, I hate Mexican food.
    The destination isn’t important. All that matters is the getting out of town.
    I’ve called San Francisco home for the past three years, and in spite of the problems I’ve encountered up until now, I figured I could manage to stick around for a while longer. But once you’ve been kidnapped and blackmailed by some unknown government agency that wants you to deliver thermonuclear bad luck to a Chinese Mafia overlord who has built up an impenetrable barrier of good luck andalready sent a couple of his thugs to threaten you, it’s time to think about a change of scenery.
    I’m even thinking it might be a good idea to give up the lifestyle altogether. Go legit. Maybe become a full-time private investigator. Sure, it would take some getting used to, but nearly half of my income since I moved here has been of the taxable kind, anyway. So I figure I’m halfway there. Besides, if Mandy could quit the lifestyle and live the so-called American dream, I don’t see why it would be such a hard adjustment for me to make.
    I’m already starting to look for a garbage can to deposit the bad luck so I can pack up and get the hell out of here when I stop.
    I see Mandy’s face on Barry Manilow’s laptop screen, and I hear his voice telling me that they can do something to her, and I know I can’t leave. I can’t allow anything to happen to Mandy. Not if there’s anything I can do to prevent her from getting caught up in this. I have to stick around until I deliver this bad luck to Tommy Wong and get the government out of the picture.
    I sit down on the steps of Grace Cathedral and try to plan my next move. Which isn’t my strong point. It’s bad enough to have to deal with choices like buying a car or choosing a college or picking an entrée on the menu. But when you’ve been blackmailed by the Feds, threatened by the Chinese Mafia, and hired to find the mayor’s stolen luck, which you poached, figuring out what to do next can be kind of overwhelming.
    I never was good at decision-making.
    What I need is an adviser. Someone to help me come up with a plan. I’d even settle for a list of Things to Do:
     
    • Buy groceries.
    • Pay rent.
    • Deliver bad luck to Chinese Mafia kingpin.
     
    Even as a kid I had trouble picking which flavor of ice cream I wanted. I always felt that no matter what choice I made, it would always be the wrong one.
    My father used to tell me he wondered how I managed to get dressed when I couldn’t choose between putting on my pants right leg or left leg first. Using the same rationale, he told me he never worried about catching me masturbating because I wouldn’t know which hand to use.
    Which, by the way, constituted our entire conversation about the birds and the bees.
    Thanks for the talk, Dad.
    The first thing I have to do is figure out how to find Tommy Wong. And what to do with this stash of bad luck in the meantime.
    The cable car comes rolling along California, headed toward Van Ness. I consider running over to catch it, but decide that jogging across traffic to catch a cable car at an unauthorized stop while packing extremely volatile bad luck isn’t the smartest idea I’ve ever had. Even catching a cab or the bus suddenly seems about as prudent as French-kissing an electrical outlet, so I put the case in my backpack and walk over to Huntington Park to find a bench and consider my options. When you’ve spent twenty-five years poaching luck, you understand the risks. When you’re suddenly walking around with two ounces of low-grade hard, the risks tend to increase exponentially.
    Bad luck isn’t literally hard, like granite or Homer Simpson’s skull. It’s curdled and