Bad Chili (19 page)

“Get on with it,” Booger said.

“Shut up, Booger,” Big Man said. “I’m talking to Mr. Collins. You know, Collins, I know a lot about you. I been following you around. Having you followed. I know when you eat. When you shit. When you beat off. I know you’re throwing a pound of round to that little nurse. I’m thinkin’, all this gets through, you’re nothing but a greasy rag, I might could pay her a visit.”

“Leonard will kill you.”

“The nigger? I don’t think so, Collins. I think I will kill him.”

“Whatever,” Booger said.

“Mountain,” said Pock Face, “I ain’t ate yet. Can’t we get this shit over with? I want to grab a burger.”

“Get the ball bat,” Big Man said. “Warm up a little.”

Pock Face got the bat and started swinging it through the air. He banged it hard on the floor a couple of times, smashed it into the wall once. While this was going on, Big Man kept talking in that slow sweet voice of his.

“So, this shock business, if you’re used to it, you can take a little voltage. You’re not, hurts. I’m gonna hook your balls up, give you a few leaps to the meat, then I’m gonna ask some questions. Things about what you know and what you’ve done about it. Now I got to be honest here. You aren’t going to make it, Collins. Don’t try to imagine you are. You’re gonna die. The boys here, they’re good. They can make you suffer a long time. The faggot, Raul, you know about him. He made it hard on himself. I wouldn’t have thought it, you know. A fruit with balls, but he had them. Literally. They were big mothers when we put them in the ice.”

“Weren’t so big later,” Booger said.

“That’s right,” Big Man said. “That ice, the electricity. It doesn’t do a man’s
cojones
good, Collins. But you see, you tell us what we need to know, no voltage. Just a good shot to the bean with the bat. Puts you right out, if it don’t kill you. Couple more, gone for good. You only feel the first one. And not much ’cause you get nailed hard. No more worries. Try to be the tough guy, hold out, we got to give you some business. Hear what I’m tryin’ to tell you, Collins? Answer me, man.”

“I hear,” I said.

“Good. So we got no hearin’ problems here. Now here’s your first question, and I beg you to consider before you answer. Where’s the video?”

“What video?”

Big Man hung his head. “All right. Booger, take down his pants.”

“You take down his pants,” Booger said.

Big Man, who had been kneeling, came up suddenly and slapped Booger behind the head, pulling him into his other hand, which took hold of Booger’s throat.

“You big black dick!” Big Man said. “I told you to take down his pants. Now do it.”

He pushed Booger to the floor. Booger unfastened my belt and tugged at my pants and underwear, pulled them down to my knees. Pock Face handed him the pillow. Booger shoved me up and put it under my ass. He sat the bowl up next to me and scooped out a handful of ice with his hands and put it in the bowl and then he pushed the bowl under me so that my testicles hung into it. At first it was a cold jolt, but almost immediately I started to numb. I tried to shake myself loose, but Booger held the bowl. Pock Face came up behind me and slipped a rope over me and tied me more firmly to the chair.

Big Man said, “You aren’t gonna believe the kind of trip you’re gonna take. Over there into Pain City, my man. But, I’m gonna give you another chance to take the Ball Bat Highway on out of here. Last thing you’ll hear is the wind from that bat. Then it’s all over.”

“I swing it just right,” Pock Face said, “you won’t hardly hear that.”

“There you are,” Big Man said. “Now, once again. And I want you to come right at me with the answer when I ask this. Where is the video?”

“You’re supposed to know so fuckin’ much about me, why don’t you know where the video is?”

“Okay,” Big Man said. “Maybe I don’t know as much as I said. Maybe I know a lot less, but I’m here to learn, Collins. Where is it?”

“Go to hell.”

“Kinney,” Big Man said to Pock Face, “hook up the battery, bring it over here. Couple shots from Reddy Kilowatt, this fucker’s gonna sing like a mockingbird.”

Pock Face set to work.

“I ain’t gonna keep hold of this bowl now,” Booger said.

“’Course not, you moron,” Big Man said. “You done this before.”

“Naw, I did the bat last time,” Booger said. “I like the bat.”

“Everybody likes the bat,” Big Man said. “Except, of course, the man in this chair. There’s been a couple others in this chair, Collins, you know that?”

I wanted to say something smart, something strong. But I couldn’t.

“You look a little nervous, Collins. Want to say about the video?”

My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. “No.”

“Man, what’s the deal?” Big Man said. “It ain’t nothin’ to you. You’re gonna die anyway. We don’t get it from you, we got to go after the nigger. Maybe the nurse.”

“She doesn’t know anything,” I said.

“I got to be the judge of that, Collins. I think you’re an honest man. Really. I get those kind of vibes from you, but still, you see, I’m a professional. I might have to bring her out here. But I promise you this, Collins. I do, we’ll make it nice for her. And since she ain’t got no balls to drop in the ice, we might make it nice for her a lot of times. So many times it ain’t so nice. And maybe it’s not nice for her any time, but if it’s nice for us, we got to keep it up till maybe she tells us something.”

“She doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

“Come on, Collins. Save her some trouble. Spare your nigger’s balls. Tell us about the video.”

“The police have it.”

Big Man shook his head. “No they don’t.”

“Yes they do.”

“Nope.”

“Yes.”

“Nope. They don’t have it, Collins. I know that. You have it, or you know where it is.”

Pock Face dropped two cables into the bowl. Booger let go of the bowl quick. Pock Face gripped the handle on the generator.

Big Man moved very close to me. He said. “We hit the crank, you get the juice, I can tell you now, you’re most likely gonna shit yourself. If not this shot, the next one. Save the humiliation. Take the bat. We’ll tidy you up a bit afterwards, pull your pants up, dump you in your nigger’s yard. That way, you don’t rot somewhere.”

“I don’t think you’d do that,” I said.

“Use the bat?”

“Clean me up and dump me where I’d be found.”

“You might be right,” Big Man said, “but you could go out without all that pain. All right, Collins. The moment of truth. One last time, then Kinney, he’s got to hit the crank, and then we got to start breakin’ some things too. Where is the video?”

“What video?”

“Hit it, Kinney.”

And Kinney did and the world went black and then white and then it threw colors all around and I felt my body jump like frog legs on a griddle, then I heard a scream, a loud, horrible scream, like a woman in fear, but the scream was mine. The room was blood-red, then black, and out of the blackness Big Man’s face floated and hung above me like a moon made of gangrene flesh surrounded by hair and the sweet smell of a breath mint.

“How was that?” Big Man asked.

It took a while for me to get my breath. “Invigorating,” I said.

“Oh,” Big Man said. “You liked that, huh?”

Again, some time passed. I said, “I prefer it as a one-time experience.”

“I bet. We got to do it again, Collins. Unless you want to tell me something I want to know. I’ll say this for you, you let a fart like the clap of creation, but you didn’t shit yourself. But let me tell you this. Booger, he knows better than to stand behind that chair. Shit has a way of flyin’ out from the back there and sprayin’. Those stains on the pillow, what you think that is?”

“Olive oil?”

“Shit. A little blood.”

“You might as well finish me,” I said. “You aren’t going to get anything from me, because I don’t know anything.”

“He might be tellin’ the truth,” Booger said.

“Yeah,” Big Man said. “He might. But things still got to come out the same. How’s about we give him another boost?”

I already felt as if I were going to pass out. I pulled up all my reserves, which were mostly AWOL, and steeled myself.

There was an explosion and the walls of the shack vibrated and the floor jumped and the lightbulb above me rocked and I realized it wasn’t my balls and brain dealing with electricity. It was a real explosion, outside the shack.

Big Man bent down, snapped a revolver out of an ankle holster, leaped for the door, jerked it open. The night was bright orange and yellow with flecks of red. I could see the ’64 Impala. It was blazing, sending up gasoline and oil to the great motor gods of the heavens.

A sound behind me. A
wham!
Followed by another. Then another. Booger leaped and got hold of the ball bat, and Pock Face jerked back from where he was kneeling. The wires on the battery jumped out of the bowl, and the bowl turned over and the ice ran under my ass. Pock Face bumped my chair and I went over sideways. Pock’s head knocked against the lightbulb, sent it swinging.

Then it all happened in the alternating light and shadow of the swaying bulb.

Big Man popped a shot from his little ankle gun. It made a bright burst in the shadows. The bulb swung back and there was a blast from a shotgun.

Pock Face, a.k.a. Kinney, hurtled over my chair, crashed to the floor next to me. Some of the dark jelly that was now his face slapped against my cheek and chin. The blood was so hot it stung.

Big Man bellowed, bolted through the open door as another blast from the shotgun ripped into the air where he had been standing. Fragments of the wall and door frame leaped toward me.

Shadow.

A tall man, the one with the shotgun, stumped past me, and as the light swung back and finally came to rest, I saw his shotgun stock swing out, catch Booger upside the head with a sound like someone popping loose the vacuum-packed lid of a jar.

Booger took the blow with a grunt and a spray of teeth. He swung the bat, but the man holding the shotgun used his weapon to block it, brought the barrel around in a short arc and hit Booger in the face. Booger did a kind of backwards hop, hit the table, knocked it flat, fell down on top of it.

The man with the shotgun kicked his boot into Booger’s balls. Booger screamed and the man fit the shotgun into Booger’s mouth. He said, “Good night, ass-lick,” and fired.

Booger’s head sort of went away.

I lay very still. The man with the shotgun squatted down and looked at me. He was a lean-faced dude wearing a stained white cowboy hat, old boots, blue jeans, and a faded western shirt decorated with little green flowers. I realized the face belonged to the man in the yellow Pontiac.

“Your ass is hangin’ out, friend,” he said.

“I’m also tied to a chair.”

“I see that.”

“You planning on shooting me, too?”

“Well, you are kinda gift-wrapped . . . But no.”

The cowboy took a large knife from his jeans pocket, cut the cord on my feet and around my chest, then he got behind me and went to work on the wire, twisting it free.

I wobbled as I tried to stand. The cowboy put the knife away with one quick movement, took my arm and helped me. I pulled up my pants and fastened them. I said, “Man, I don’t know what to say . . . Did you have to kill them?”

“How about ‘Howdy’? And yeah, I guess I did. I started to just yell time-out, but decided that wasn’t a good idea. I’m Jim Bob Luke.”

“Hap Collins,” I said.

“I know who you are,” he said. “I followed them out here, then drove past, you know, to stay cool, so they wouldn’t know I was following them, but the sonofabitches sort of lost me for a time or I’d have been here sooner.”

“I’m just glad you showed up. Not that I understand why. What about Big Man?”

“Oh, I ain’t worried. I been watchin’ the doors.”

“Confident, aren’t you?”

“I invented the goddamn word. Now, why don’t you use your shirtsleeve and wipe them brains off your face, and let’s skedaddle before ole big un comes back.”

“I thought you were confident.”

“I am. But I ain’t stupid.”

Jim Bob Luke led me out through the back way, over the door he had kicked down. We went quickly into the woods. He moved well in the woods, and we went along like that and found a spot where we could look through the foliage, back at the shack and the raging fire of the Impala, but there wasn’t any sign of Big Man Mountain.

“Hated to burn a classic car like that,” Jim Bob said. “I started to just kick the door down and come in blazin’, but I like a little edge. You any good with guns?”

“I don’t like them, but I’m good with them.”

“Good. I got another one here, and it ain’t no peashooter. It’s a forty-five automatic.”

He gave it to me. We sat there and watched the car burn. The fire wasn’t so high now and it licked around the frame of the Impala like the devil’s tongue licking the bones of an animal.

“Ole big un is out there somewhere,” Jim Bob said. “I’m tryin’ to decide I want to hunt him down or not.”

“He has a gun.”

“I know. He shot at me with it. He’s a shitty shot. Couldn’t hit a circus elephant in the ass with a trick stool. But out here in the dark, and this being his stomping grounds, maybe I ought not. How you feelin’?”

“Queasy.”

“Can you buck up?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on.”

We moved deeper into the woods, along the edge of a swampy creek, then finally out of the trees into a clearing. We climbed under a barbed-wire fence and onto the grass next to the road. The yellow Pontiac was parked there, in the grass. It sat on four flat tires.

“Well,” Jim Bob said, looking around. “Looks like ole big un got here ahead of us.”

“Think he’s watching us?”

“Could be.”

Jim Bob reached in his back pocket, took out a penlight and flashed it around. He found tracks in the soft dirt of the road. He said, “Motherfucker’s got some feet on him, don’t he?”

“I’ll say.”

“And look here.”

Jim Bob put the penlight’s glow on the side of his car. There was a deep scrape along the side.

“He just had to do that, didn’t he?” Jim Bob said. “Well, the scraped paint don’t stop me, and I got me four spares in the trunk, so fuck him. I used to be a goddamn Boy Scout. I came prepared.”