Dead Nolte (29 page)

“That mauffauker better pack a lunch.”

“Y
ou
weren’t shitting me about Walmart, were you?” Ron pulled the Diablo into the
middle of the parking lot and killed the engine. “Looks closed to me.”

Azazel jingled a ring of keys at the end of a long perfectly
manicured finger. “Come with me, I want you to meet some friends of mine.”

Keys or no keys, Ron surveyed the parking lot and
surrounding streets for law enforcement, he was still dealing with some
unresolved trust issues, not to mention that some rich family out there was
missing their insane daughter, wife and or mother and he was with her. Private
investigators were probably combing the country, trying to find her before she
blew the family fortune on king fantasies.

“Don’t worry, we’re shopping like Elvis tonight, I rented
the store for the evening.” Azazel got out and walked toward the entrance. Ron
watched for a moment, he knew he would follow that walk anywhere, even through
the gates of Hell.

Walmart, whether it was closed or open, was Walmart, or so
Ron thought, yet, the silence of this one was overwhelming. Even at the oddest
hour, in the twenty-four-hour versions, there was the sound of activity, even
if you couldn’t see it. It might look like you were the only soul in the store,
but the sounds of floor buffers, box cutters and occasional dropped can let you
know that you weren’t alone. This Walmart was dead silent, other than the
bubbles from unseen fish aquariums.

Azazel made her way to Customer Service; Ron lagged a few
paces behind her to watch the show her ass was putting on beneath her skirt.
The echoes of their footsteps were obscenely loud in the quiet store.

From behind the Customer Service counter, Azazel produced a
Tom Ford briefcase and handed it to Ron. There were strands of copper wire
threaded through the zippers and bonded together with a melted metal seal, much
like one would expect to find on an ancient king’s correspondence.

Ron ran his thumb over the seal, “This looks like gold.”

“It is silly.”

“Of course, it is, silly me. Who is funny sign, funny sign,
funny sign, funny sign, (
תרסו
)?”
The initials appeared to be scratched into the golden seal by a child.

“It’s Hebrew, but it’s nonsense, it’s more like a barcode
than a word. You will be seeing it more and more often, as time goes by. In
fact, you will keep track of your subjects with this code.” Azazel removed
Nolte’s coin from her purse and laid it over the seal. Nolte’s nest egg
absorbed the gold, letting the wires fall free. “The gold will help with
indigestion; you will soon see what I mean.” She tossed the copper wire aside.
“Pick up the case and come with me to the Sporting Goods section and meet my
friends.”

Again, Ron followed at a few paces. On the way through the
bath section, Azazel took a towel from the rack and draped it over her arm. Ron
looked around to see if anyone was watching, the noise from their steps,
somehow made him feel guilty, as if they were violating the law of sound.
Azazel looked over her shoulder and caught him staring at her ass.

“This is going to be so much fun.” Her eyes twinkled.

“Yeah, Walmart’s great, especially Sporting Goods.”

“You’ll see.” Azazel stopped in front of a rack of fishing
poles and got down on her hands and knees. From her purse, she pulled a wad of
hair from a sandwich bag.

“This is wonderful isn’t it? This is camel hair from the
coat of John the Baptist. ‘The one, who cries out in the wilderness.’”

Ron’s heart dropped to his knees, he knew it had been too
good to be true, she was having an episode. He had no problem fucking a crazy
woman, he figured at least half of the women he had been with, were some kind
of crazy, but he never took advantage of them in the midst of a mental break
from reality.

“I knew this was going to go south, you’re straight up
fucking nuts, aren’t you?”

Azazel smiled up at him. “Take off your trousers.” She began
to swirl the wad of hair around in circles on the floor as if she were cleaning
a spot on the tile. “Hurry, take off your trousers. Underwear too.”

"I go commando." If Ron had a ‘carved in stone’
rule against fucking schizophrenics, at that moment, he couldn’t think of it.
He would sort it out later and somehow justify it.

 
He quickly removed
his pants and tossed them next to the fishing poles, as he did, he saw a dark
stain spread beneath Azazel’s wad of hair. Crazy Lady was rubbing away the
floor.

“Pick up your trousers; you’ll want to look nice for my
friends.”

“Oh yeah, they like half naked men sporting a chubby, with
their pants in their hand, do they?” The black spot expanded to twice the size
of a manhole cover. Azazel rose to her feet and stood on it, holding the towel
she had taken from the shelf and the briefcase in one hand and beckoning Ron
with the other. The dark spot was vibrating as he stepped onto it. A tingling
spread across the roof of his mouth.

“Here, hold the towel over your penis; humans have a
tendency to spray between dimensions. Hand me your trousers.” Azazel winked at
him and Walmart disappeared and reappeared as a stark white room, with fifty or
sixty naked men surrounding them. The men all were sipping from brandy snifters
and murmuring in a strange language. When they saw Ron and Azazel, their faces
lit up like children at Christmas.

“What the fuck just happened?” It was the most amazing magic
trick Ron had ever seen. He looked down at the towel he had covering his dick,
it was soaked. “I pissed myself.” Azazel squeezed his hand and giggled like a
little girl.

“Don’t be afraid, these are my friends, they are
celebrating.”

“It’s a fucking Sausagefest. I’m not going to be celebrating
with them. I thought you and I were going to be swapping out some DNA?” Ron
held the wet towel a little tighter to his crotch.

“Look around you, Ron, they don’t have genitalia, silly.” By
then, all the men had noticed them and shouted in unison.

“Christós!”

“Ahhh, isn’t that cute, they taught themselves Greek.

“What in the fuck did they say?”

“Anointed one, that’s you; they are just darling, are they
not? Here, you go, put your trousers on and let’s get busy.”

Getting busy was usually something Ron did, once his trousers
were off. After he had donned his pants, one of the men offered Ron a snifter.
Looking from the face of one naked man to another, to another, Ron realized the
men were all identical in every way. All were grinning like idiots.

Azazel walked to a table in the center of the room and
opened the case. Stacks of passports and bundles of hundreds filled it
completely. Ron by-passed snifter formalities and downed his brandy. Azazel
snapped her fingers, and one of the Identicals arrived with a fresh one.

“Don’t drink this one yet, you are going to need it for the
shekel. You will want something to wash it down.”

“You weren’t shitting me about eating that thing?”

“If you want to be King, you must eat it.” Azazel laid the
shekel in the center of the table and one by one the Identicals gathered
around.

“What’s with all the twins?”

“They are my Watchers. When mankind was in its infancy, they
and I helped man to understand the complexities of the world. They kept order.”
Azazel scooted the brandy and coin across the table, toward Ron. “Are you ready
to be King?”

The memory of the last time he touched Nolte’s nest egg
revolted him, but in light of the money, Azazel’s magic and the dickless dudes,
everything told him the crazy lady was on the level. Why would she show him all
this, if she were just going to coin poison him? “What’s going to happen to
me?”

“You will become like me.”

Ron glanced around the room at the Watchers, more to the
point, at their blank crotches. “It’s not going to make my dick fall off, is
it?”

Azazel smiled, she felt she had chosen wisely with Ron, he
was going to make it all, so much fun. “No, your dick will not fall off.”

Ron brought the snifter closer to his mouth, “You didn’t put
antifreeze in this, did you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Fuck it.” Ron tossed the coin into his mouth and washed it
down with brandy. Applause arose from the Watchers. The room began to strobe in
and out of existence, one moment a thick, soundless void, the next applause and
cheering from the men without dicks. One moment he was a disembodied presence,
in complete darkness, the next he was holding an empty snifter, with a fire in
his gut. The one constant, was a silver thread streaming out and away from him.
In the white room it shot out from his stomach and disappeared through the far
wall, in the void, it extended from nothing and went into infinity.

Memories that weren’t his and knowledge, beyond his
comprehension, flooded into him. Ron screamed into both dimensions. The fire in
his stomach was replaced with an empty hollow gnawing in the white room; in the
void, it was gone. It felt as if someone was punching him in the stomach with
the speed of a machine gun. In the white room, the cheering and applause grew
in volume, in the darkness; silence. The void trembled, as millions of bits of
information flooded into him through the silver thread.

Light began to form in the void, a green glow slowly spread
through the blackness. The pulsating between the dimension swap slowed like a
roulette wheel that seemed to favor black, each flash into the void grew
longer, as time in the white room became shorter until the white room no longer
appeared. The silver roulette ball had finally come to rest, wholly in the
silence of the void. Ron watched bulges in the thread; move in a pulsing
succession toward him, as if he were being fed liquid information in spurts and
gobs through a cartoon garden hose.

Ron had failed high school Spanish, but the thread allowed
him to see each thought he had, in hundreds of languages at once, without confusion.
He had never cracked a physics book, but suddenly understood both, the strong
and weak force of gravity and how it was an illusion, supplied from a far
larger dimension; he could only feel. In fact, all of the laws of physics were
pumped into the universe through two filters, one from the center of creation,
and one into the quantum fabric. Ron had never before heard of quantum fabric.
He had always associated gravity with apples.

What once was a place to ponder and speculate, Ron’s mind
was full to bursting with data, from the formation of every star, to the rise
and fall of every civilization, with every speck of knowledge, gleaned from
sun-bleached bones and tucked neatly into an amazing spectrum of information
and complete understanding. Ron watched the last bulge in the thread flow into
his essence. With it came a voice, “Go prepare my throne on Earth.” Ron
recognized the voice, it was his.

The void dissolved into the white room, the applause became
screams of triumph. The Watchers were almost frenzied; Azazel had tears rolling
down her cheeks, she looked even more beautiful. In that moment Ron realized
that she had been wrong, swallowing the coin did not make him like her, she was
nowhere near him in the pecking order. Ron had become God.

***

“W
here’s
the gate, Baal?”

“Baal believes it to be in Sporting Goods.”

“Look at what they’re driving.” Jeremiel parked the Prius in
the same row as the Diablo but allowed ten or twelve spaces between the two
cars.

Michael whistled through his teeth. “Must be nice to be on
the wrong side, huh Jerry?”

Charlie had awoken when the car had pulled into the parking
lot; the yellow Lamborghini was hard to miss. It was no wonder Ron wouldn’t
answer his calls. Charlie no longer felt guilty about the bullet hole in his
brother’s seat. “Motherfucker. Is that what that chick drives?” He imagined Ron
was beside himself. Ever since he had seen Dumb and Dumber, Ron had said that
he would offer his left nut, as a sacrifice to the car gods, for that exact
same car.

“Azazel prefers Rolls or Bentleys, I’m thinking that is the
carrot at the end of a stick,” Jeremiel said flatly. “I’m sure she has offered
you brother the world on a silver platter, by now.”

Michael shot Jeremiel a sour look, yet he knew that sooner
or later, he would have to fill Charlie in, if for no other reason than to keep
him safe. “Your brother might have made a deal with Azazel. She needed the coin
and one of you to start the End of Days.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? This is the end of
time, Revelation shit? Ron runs a bar. Why would she need him to start the End
of Days?”

Nolte chuckled, “Nolte gets fucked again. That bitch told me
I was going to live forever. There has to be some fucking law against broken
promises in Heaven and Hell.”

“There is,” Baal growled.

Michael pointed a finger at Nolte, indicating that he should
shut up. “Yeah, Revelation shit. That coin can tie one of you three, to Satan.
I’m pretty sure, that if your brother doesn’t take her up on her offer, she’ll
be out here talking to you in a few minutes, and if you turn her down, she’ll
resort to the old man.”

“She’s asking Ron to sell his soul? He’ll never fucking do
it, at least not for a Lamborghini. She’ll have to do a lot better than that.”
Even as Charlie said it, he doubted it; he knew how much Ron wanted a supercar.
Couple that with Ron’s skepticism about God, and who fucking knows what would
happen. “After all the shit we’ve seen in the last three days, what could she
offer him to make him want to sell his soul?”

“Everything, and by Everything, I mean everything. If he
uses the coin to tie himself to Lucifer, he will own the world. That is, he’ll
own it until Lucifer wants it back.”

“How did Ron and I get caught up in this shit? Other than
the cash, we wanted nothing to do with the fucking coin.”