Deadside in Bug City (7 page)

“That’s the detectives,” Joe said. “We should tell them what we saw.”

“No. Not me. I don’t trust any of ’em. I was never here. And don’t you tell them my name.”

She let go of his hand. They stared at each other a moment, then she turned and started walking down the sidewalk. Her footsteps were in sync with the chimes of the bell. “You’re crazy to stay here,” she said over her shoulder. “Come with me.”

He saw the two plain-clothes detectives climb out of the sedan and march toward the store’s entrance. One of them glanced his way with cold eyes. Joe turned away and went after Suzie. “Wait up,” he called softly. She slowed to let him catch up. He took her hand and they continued along the sidewalk, both trying to look like two carefree lovers out for an innocent stroll.

As soon as they turned the next corner, they both burst out with nervous laughter.

“My God,” he said between barks of laughter, “that was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I know,” she agreed with a guilty giggle. “They had the broomstick
up his ass.
I mean…shit!”

“Exactly.”

“Shit, there’s Gary.” She realized they were still holding hands and she shook hers free as her boyfriend’s pickup truck pulled up alongside them, one of the big steel-belted radials bumping up onto the curb. “Out of the fucking frying pan,” she muttered under her breath.

Gary flung the door open and bounded out of the truck. He was a tall skinny guy with a ball cap sitting askew on his head and unlaced work boots riding loosely on his feet. He was wearing a faded stretched-out New England Patriots T-shirt. His eyes were so bloodshot that Joe wouldn’t have been very surprised if they started leaking blood like a vampire in a cheesy horror movie. “What the hell is this?” Gary demanded. He smelled like a beer hall.

“It’s not what you think,” Suzie said, echoing the baton-wielding cop’s earlier words.

Gary crowded her space. She backed against the side of the building. Joe stood his ground on the sidewalk.

“I send ya out for beer and here ya are holdin’ hands with this dickhead. Ya fuckin’ slut. I oughta—”

“Now wait a minute,” Joe said. “We—”

Gary shoved Joe with both hands, and Joe stumbled against the brick wall beside Suzie.

“Goddammit, Gary,” she said, “leave him alone. We were getting away from the cops, trying to look like we don’t know nothing about the shooting back at the store.”

Joe’s temper flared. The infernal chiming of the bell up on Holy Cross Hill seemed to open a way for his anger to come roaring out and he pushed himself off the wall and jabbed his finger an inch from Gary’s crooked nose. “Keep your hands off me, asshole,” he said through clenched teeth. Gary’s face flashed a look of surprise, as if he weren’t used to having anyone stand up to him. He quickly regained his angry countenance and cocked his fist.

“Gary, no!” shouted Suzie.

He swung a roundhouse right, and Joe, using moves he’d learned in a PE boxing course in college, bent his knees and ducked to the left. Gary’s fist hammered into the brick wall and he yelped. Joe countered with an uppercut to Gary’s gut. He knew he’d hurt the guy and that he had to hit him again before Gary had time to retaliate. Fear drove Joe’s second strike, a solid right to Gary’s jaw. It made a hollow popping sound, sending Gary into a slow-motion pirouette to the sidewalk.

“Jesus,” said Suzie. “Come on. Let’s book before he wakes up.”

Book,
reflected Joe. Did people still use that quaint bit of 70’s slang? He rubbed his aching knuckles and fell in step with the girl as she moved down the sidewalk. “Book?” he said aloud.

“Hell yes. As in haul ass outta here. Do you have a car?”

“Yeah, but it’s…we’re going the wrong way. It’s back by the Jiffy-Quick.”

“Fuck it. Get it later. Too many psycho cops back there.”

“Right. Where can
you
go? I mean, you can’t go back to your apartment, can you? Gary’ll turn up after he comes to and you don’t want to be there for that, do you?”

“No.” She shrugged. Her brow knitted lines of worry.

“Is there some place you can go? A friend’s?”

“My best friend Joan is out of town for the weekend and I don’t have a key to her place.”

“You can come home with me,” said Joe, already surprised at himself for saying it. “For a little while, I mean. Give the bastard time to cool off.”

“Gary doesn’t cool off. Something pisses him off, he just lets it build and build till he blows up. It just makes it worse when it does happen.” She absently reached a hand behind her back to check the knot holding her halter-top in place. “Bill’s Bar is a couple of blocks over. We could hide out there for a while. Give the cops time to clear out and then you could get your car. I could use a drink anyway. How about you?”

“Yeah, I could. But my wife’s probably wondering where the hell I am. I should’ve been home half an hour ago.”

“Call her from the bar. Explain what happened.”

Joe considered her suggestion. He was hot and sweaty and still charged with adrenaline from his fight with the drunken, irate boyfriend and from the violence in the convenience store. “A drink sounds good,” he said.

“Sure does,” she said. “We could cool off and I can figure out what to do about Gary. The son of a bitch.”

“Who pays the rent on your apartment?”

“I do. Gary buys the beer and an occasional bag of burgers. He’s only been staying there a couple of months. He’s got this construction job, but he doesn’t go in half the time. I don’t know why I put up with him, to tell you the truth. I’m just not sure how to get rid of him. He’s…scary.”

“I noticed.”

She laughed. “You sure decked him good. Where’d you learn how to box?”

“College PE. Many moons ago. I’m surprised it came back to me like it did. I mean, I was pretty good way back when, but I haven’t sparred since then. Don’t even go to the gym.”

“Guess it’s like riding a bike or something. Your body remembers the moves.”

Joe chuckled. “Not bad for an old fart, huh?”

“You don’t look that old. Just…I dunno, the gray around the temples makes you look sort of distinguished.”

“Yeah? Thanks. I think.”

“Like a bookstore guy.” She smiled at him. A smile of unabashed warmth.

He tried to keep his eyes off her breasts jostling inside the red halter-top. He wondered what Sara would think about his keeping company with a scantily clad young woman like Suzie, a tavern waitress who gave off strong vibes of unmistakable sexuality. A young damsel in low-rent distress. He was glad Suzie hadn’t taken him up on his invitation to his home. What the hell had he been thinking? The last thing he wanted was to give his wife reason to be suspicious of him. Sara had a jealous streak as wide as this steaming-hot day was long. It wouldn’t do to set her off with the likes of Suzie Shrimpton. The girl seemed sweet in her own way, even vulnerable, but there was a slutty air about her that Sara would lock onto in a second, and then it was off to the damn races, with Jealousy the heavy favorite to win.

“God, listen to all those sirens,” Suzie said. “They couldn’t all be for the Jiffy-Quick, could they? That one sounds like a fire truck with that foghorn
waw-waw.”

“I don’t know. Sure sounds like a wild night in peaceful little Druid Hills.”

“That damn church bell must be driving
everybody
crazy.”

“I don’t know…we seem reasonably sane,” Joe said.

“Yeah, right. We’re hiding from the cops and a pissed-off boyfriend. I guess that’s sane, considering the circumstances.”

“Absolutely. But that damned bonging
is
getting on my nerves.”

“Know what you mean,” she said. She raised an arm and pointed at the neon sign ahead of them. “There’s Bill’s. In a minute we’ll be inside with cold drinks and a blaring jukebox and that ol’ bell can go to hell.”

“Amen, sister.”

* * *

The bell called him and he came out of the darkness and into the fogged light. He saw two men in suits standing over him, talking to Sergeant Fuller, the fat fuck.
The bastard clubbed me,
Todd Sarkanian remembered
. He butt-fucked the perp with the broomstick and he clubbed me.

“He’s coming around,” said one of the suits.

“What goes around comes around,” Todd said—or thought he said—sitting up and unsnapping the leather strap securing his pistol in the holster.

“Kid ain’t right in the head,” Fuller said. “He went fuckin’ nuts abusing the suspect and I had to put him down.”

“Lying,” mumbled Todd, getting to his feet. The walls of the store were throbbing in and out of focus. The faces of the two detectives seemed distorted, grotesque, as if they were wearing demonic make-up. His head hurt, and each clang of the bell drove a spike of anger deeper into his brain.

“Hey, he’s—”

Todd drew his .38 and pointed it at Sergeant Fuller.

“Sonofabitch,” Fuller blurted. He fumbled for his own pistol.

Todd squeezed the trigger. The slug slammed into Fuller’s bulging gut. Todd fired again. The second shot tagged the fat fucker’s chest and knocked him on his ass. One of the suits grabbed Todd’s wrist and tried to wrestle the gun away from him. The pistol barked again. The suit’s eyes went wide and he reeled backward, holding his belly. Blood poured through his fingers.

The other detective drew from his shoulder rig and fired three, four times point-blank at Todd’s chest. The breath went out of his lungs, but there wasn’t much pain. Getting shot wasn’t at all like he’d expected it to be. He grinned at the man who’d shot him, then his legs decided to quit holding him up and he dropped to the floor.

The fog thickened. The bell called him back into darkness. Funny, Todd thought, how the ringing of the bell was everywhere, bridging this world with the next…

* * *

Daisy Winter was between worlds, living in a hazy limbo of her own making (or so she suspected, being what her son called “a control freak”), but what better place to be was there after you’d nearly killed your own mother with your bare hands? Daisy raised the bottle of vodka to her lips for another big pull. It burned good going down, burned even better when it got to where it was going, down there in the belly, close to a cunt that hadn’t had any decent action in months, she sadly lamented. That was how she had come to think of it: A cunt. Not
her
cunt, but a thing living almost apart from her, denying ownership and existing independently, a pariah, an outcast organ denied any semblance of pleasure. Daisy had been the Queen of Denial. She’d denied herself booze for six months. She’d turned down dates with local lounge lizards and had even denied herself the solitary pleasure of masturbation. But now her denial was over and done.

Ignoring the pain of her scratched eyeball, she leaned back in the armchair, hiked one leg over the arm, slipped her hand into her panties and fingered herself.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
It was time to reclaim her cunt the way she had just reclaimed vodka as her drug of choice. Self-medication was the way to go when all else failed. And failed all else had.

Blame it on the bell.
Each time that iron bell rang she felt its sonic vibration between her legs. After almost choking her mother to death, she had run out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the cupboard where she’d stashed a fifth of vodka. She chug-a-lugged half the bottle right off the fucking bat. All the while, the bell kept ringing, tweaking her clitoris, making it throb erect. It wasn’t that she was denying what she’d done to the old lady. Not at all. She’d even gone back upstairs to check on the old bitch. Sure enough, old Dora was still breathing, if not kicking. Her eyes were fixed open but Daisy didn’t think she was seeing much of anything. Probably stroked out during the fight. Probably turned her brain into cauliflower. A fucking vegetable. Be better off dead. Then Daisy had picked up the pillow and put it over her mother’s face. After a few seconds, she pulled the pillow away. If she killed her, she’d have to call somebody to take the body away and the coroner would see the bruises on the old bitch’s throat and know foul play was involved. Better to keep her alive till the bruises faded,
then
give her the pillow trip to heaven—or hell. And in the meantime, Daisy Winter was going to enjoy life, live it to its fullest. That was what the music of the bell was about. Life was as transient as each chime of the iron bell and you had to wring all you could out of your life before you went to your fucking doom. It didn’t make too much sense when you tried to put it into words, but in its immaculate ringing, the bell was saying it all. Without words. The bell spoke directly to her soul. She was not going to be a stupid cunt and deny its mystical message. Her stupid-cunt days were over. She intended to live with cunning, with her revitalized cunt (the word
cunt,
she knew, had originated from the same root word as
cunning
,
and only in recent history had come to have a negative connotation).

She rubbed the moist button at the mouth of her cunt faster and faster, and cried out when the orgasm rang her like a flesh-and-blood bell.

Then she drifted between worlds, floating on the iron bell’s celestial chiming.

* * *

James “Slim Jim” Winter nearly ran off the road to let the ambulance pass him, and he hooted as his tires kissed the edge of the gully running beside the blacktop. “Hooo-eeee! That was close.”

“No shit,” said Josh. “I thought it was gonna hit us for sure. Where’d the asshole learn to drive?”

“Ambulance school. I dunno. Did you catch my wheel man action? Just like Jeff Gordon.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“You know, the race-car dude.”

“I don’t watch that crap. Too boring.”

“I don’t either, but my mom loves that shit. Dad used to take her to the track and they’d get tanked up on a cooler of beer and be at each other’s throat when they got home, but while they were there they had a hell of a good time. That’s what she says, anyway. Who knows. She’s pretty fucking weird lately.”

“No shit,” said Josh.