Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (13 page)

I shrugged and smiled. You know me.

“Never mind,” he said. “You are what you are. That vial”—nodding to Jerry—“will make you feel better, give you energy and allow you to focus.”

“Awesome,” I said.

“Yes… awesome,” he said, then turned to Jerry. “Do you have the address I gave you? The one with the rich lady I told you about?”

“Uh… yes, Mr. York,” he said, throwing a furtive glance my way.

“Take Kevin to that place you’re staying, give him a dose, and when he’s ready go see that rich lady. Think you can do that?” His tone was that of a father trusting his son with the family car.

“Yeah Mr. York, sure, no problem,” Jerry said, stealing another look at me.

“Excellent,” Mr. York said, clapping his hands. “Well, up you go—out, out. There’s money to be made and you won’t make it sitting here depreciating my vehicle.” He chuckled, kindly, and made shooing motions.

Jerry got up and headed out, with me following. The look on Mr. York’s face as we exited the RV had grown even more fatherly. If I were the real Kevin, I imagine I would have felt warmed by his sudden generosity of spirit. Maybe I would have felt resolved to redeem myself in his eyes and make the most of my second chance. I’m sure I wouldn’t have felt like sitting down somewhere and not getting back up.

Ever since my suicide I’d lost the ability to lie to myself, but sometimes I still pretended to. Right now, I was trying desperately hard to pretend the casual nature of what I’d fallen into hadn’t shaken my faith in the rightness of the universe.

I’ve seen how bad people can be to each other, but cold-blooded, systematic slaughter was something else. Even Jake, the serial killer in New Mexico, hadn’t been so completely evil. He was pretty messed up and had done some awful things, and I’d punched his ticket for it. But back in his hotel, I’d found around fifty composition journals filled with dark ramblings about being the reincarnation of an Aztec god. I’d figured that, like me, after he died, the Great Whomever would send Jake off to get fixed up.

This thing with Jerry and Kevin, though—Mr. York knew exactly what he was doing and he just didn’t care. I’d looked in his eyes. He wasn’t crazy—he was a willing predator. He needed money for gas and restaurants and RV parks. Other people worked and saved their whole lives for that lifestyle, but not Mr. York—he murdered old people for it. On top of that, he’d browbeaten and brainwashed two imbeciles to help him do it. How could there be any redemption for someone like that? And if so, if there really was a Great Wherever or something like it for Mr. York, could it be that what I’d done to Sandra was equally wrong? Was it right to imagine there were even categories for evil? For my own sanity, I had to believe so. To be right with myself, I had to know I was different from people like him.

Most of my rides are as the name implies—a vacation from limbo. It’s the rare exception where my interest grows much beyond that. Mr. York’s operation not only disgusted me, it had done something worse: it made me doubt things about myself I’d thought long since squared away.

Chapter 16

Jerry drove us back to the island. On crossing the bridge he turned right, away from the slain couple’s bungalow. He wasn’t talking much and I thought I knew why. A few miles later, he pulled up the driveway of a large house on the water, painted pink and white. It rose from the ground on a thick concrete wall built to survive even the worst storm surges. Easily worth a few million. I waited for him to turn off the car but he didn’t. He just sat there.

“We going in?” I said.

He shook his head, just once. I gave him a minute to collect his thoughts.

“I can’t do it,” he said, then pressed his lips together tightly, staring straight ahead.

“What, kill me with the bad dope Mr. York gave you?”

Eyes widening, Jerry turned and looked at me.

“Shit, you knew? How’d you find out?”

“I got mad skills, yo.”

“Damn, you must,” he said. “So uh, you ain’t pissed or nothing?”

I smiled and shook my head.

“Nah, you were about to tell me, how could I be?”

Jerry nodded. Then nodded again, with vigor.

“Fuck Mr. York. Always telling me what to do, like a dog. Now he want me to kill my friend? Nah, man.”

Jerry could kill harmless old men and women without a qualm, but poisoning a friend with bad drugs made him feel guilty. I hate it when people go and get all redemptiony on me. It interferes with my righteous indignation.

He gave a short laugh.

“I like how you sat on his stupid couch without asking—you depreciated the
shit
out of that motherfucker.”

“It’s just what the fuck I do,” I said, then did the little handshake finger-snappy thing with him.

We got out and went to the front door. I wondered if Kevin had been here before.

“I wish I had a house like this,” I said, trying to fish it out of him.

“It’s nice ain’t it? Wait till you see inside.”

Mad skills, yo.

He opened the door and stepped inside. I followed him. Nice house, furnished with sturdy wooden furniture that looked manufactured by the same company. The art on the walls was pretty enough, but generic and inexpensive. Nothing like the house with all the sailboats. This looked more like stuff the owner wouldn’t cry about if it went missing. No chandeliers, either. All these subtle clues had me thinking I was in another vacation house. Also, there was a stack of Norton Realty brochures on a table beneath a sign telling guests where to leave the keys on their last day.

I sniffed. Then I sniffed some more, but I couldn’t smell anything. No death.

“Smells nice,” I said, daring to hope Jerry’d been pulling Mr. York’s leg and had only been robbing people.

Jerry grinned.

“Follow me Kev.”

He led me upstairs. Down the hall on the right was a door sealed thick in about five rolls of silvery-gray duct tape.

“That’s how I do it,” he said. “I came up with it on my own. Mr. York didn’t even tell me how, neither.”

We stood gazing at the sinister looking mess together. Admiring it, I supposed.

“So, uh, what’s behind it?”

I knew, but I didn’t know enough.

“Some old man and his ho.”

That was odd.

“A man and a prostitute?”

“What? No, man, not a
ho
ho. Just a regular ho. You know, his bitch.”

“Ah, his
bitch
,” I said. “Totally get it now.”

Jerry looked at me.

“Kev, I been holding back sayin’ on account of you being a recovering sick person and all, but you like, I dunno… like, weirder than usual. Like you bought a dictionary and shit.” He held up his hands defensively. “I ain’t saying you did or nothing—just saying.”

“I been so bored I started reading this book I found. Kinda stuck on me.”

Laughing, he pointed at me.

“See I knew it was something. Anyway, what you gotta do when you take a house is tape ’em in a room like this. But you also gotta tape up the windows inside so the stink don’t leak out. Vents too. Now, we up on the second floor and the neighbors ain’t stacked all close, ya know? So I probably be ok if I don’t do the windows like I did. But I do things right cuz I a proud motherfucker, got my new callin’ card tight and everything.”

“Calling card?”

“I told you. You really don’t remember?”

I smiled, sheepishly.

“I was probably high at the time.”

Jerry laughed.

“You always high. So you know what happens when the cops finally come and look in that room? Know what they gonna find?”

“An old man and no ho ho?”

“Uh… yeah, but… no wait, what they find is—get this—it look like they having sex. I used the rest of the tape to make it like they fuckin’. She on top, hands taped behind her to his ankles. Wait a second, I took a picture for you.”

He ran downstairs.

And here I’d started thinking Jerry was just misunderstood.

“Got it,” he yelled, sprinting back up.

Whatever Jerry wanted to show me, I didn’t want to see. I hadn’t wanted to look at Eddie Jacobi’s double tongue, either, but I did. That was in fifth grade. We all did. He’d stick his tongue out as far as he could and make a sound like “lowaaiee,” and at the back of his mouth behind his tongue there’d be this little flap of skin sticking up. Grossest thing we kids got to see with any regularity, so we never missed looking when he felt like showing it.

The picture Jerry showed me made Eddie’s double tongue seem positively commonplace. It showed a man and a woman in a spacious bedroom, positioned in the middle of the floor. Naked, with multiple stab wounds visibly draining into the carpet. The man looked like he was pushing seventy, his head almost completely bald. The woman was about ten years younger, a little heavy, with a thick mane of glossy red hair. Her head lolled backward and to the side, mouth and eyes wide open, staring into the camera in a ghastly echo of stunned horror. Jerry hadn’t just killed them. He’d completely robbed them of their dignity.

Jerry leaned in close, looking at it over my shoulder.

Almost defensively, he said, “I had to tape broomsticks to the arms like that so she wouldn’t fall over.” He tapped the man with a finger. “And I couldn’t keep
that
motherfucker up no matter what—too damn fat. That’s why he on the floor and she on top. Wanted to put them on the bed, but …”

I nodded.

“She got some big titties don’t she?” he said, laughing, nudging me with an elbow. “They got kids somewhere—told me about it right away, ’for I offed them, like that get me to stop. Be cool if the kids walked in on it. I need to get a video camera, for next time.”

“Jerry,” I said. “Just when I’d begun to doubt myself, along you come and deliver me from the lie of moral relativism. For that alone, I thank you.”

“Thanks, Kev,” he said. “That’s prolly like the nicest thing you ever said. What’s the name again of that book you reading?”

***

Back downstairs, I laid out my plan for dealing with Mr. York.

“Jerry,” I said. “It’s about time you and I got what’s coming to us.”

He nodded.

“Most definitely. What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you what I mean: we’re taking over. From here on, this is our operation. Why do we need Mr. York, anyway? We both know what to do. You came up with that duct tape idea all on your own. Right?”

“Damn right,” Jerry said, getting into it.

“And you came up with that calling card too, right? You think Mr. York could come up with a calling card like that?”

Shaking his head, Jerry said, “Nope. All Mr. York care about is money—he got no appreciation for artistic shit.”

“I thought so,” I said. “Yet for some reason, Mr. York gets all the money.
Mr. York
gets to drive around in a big RV, not letting anyone sit on anything and making everyone listen to
his
music. That sound even a little bit fair to you?”

Jerry cocked his head and looked at me, as if seeing it all for the first time.

“You know… I never thought of it that way. You absolutely right. Me and you do all the work, take the risk, and he act like he doing us some big favor driving us around.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“But what we gonna do?” Jerry said. “Just take off? All we got is a stolen car. Soon as the cops find the bodies we won’t even have that. And we just gonna let Mr. York roll off with all that money?”

“Not if we do it my way, he won’t. I got a plan.”

I spent the next ten minutes going over what we needed to do. How I’d lay low in the back seat while he drove back to the RV park. We needed Mr. York to think I was dead if this was going to work. Together, we rehearsed how Jerry would go in first and distract him, and how I’d sneak in after. I even drew a little map out on paper showing where I wanted Jerry to stand, where I expected Mr. York to be if we did it right, along with the path I’d take up the stairwell. Jerry may have been a sociopath, but he proved an able study. Sort of a dipshit savant. We only had to go through his lines twice before he’d successfully memorized them.

“All right,” I said. “You nervous at all?”

“Hah, no—ready as a motherfucker.”

I held up my hand.

“Hold on, there’s one more thing.”

“Shit, you serious? Let’s just figure it out when we get there. Sometimes you just gotta flow with the—”

“Nope, not for this. Mr. York’s been around a long time, we don’t wanna underestimate him. He’s a wily old bastard.”

Jerry rolled his eyes, but he seemed ready to hear me out.

“We’re going to need the bad dope he gave you,” I said. “The needle too.”

“Really? What for? Oh…
yeah
, I feel you. Good idea.”

He ran out to the car and brought back both, then handed them to me. The vial was warm from sitting in the car. I read the label:
Pancuronium Bromide, 100 mg/10 mL.
A powerful muscle relaxant with a variety of uses, in the right hands.

“Excellent,” I said, sticking the syringe into the foil cap and drawing as much as I could.

“You ain’t gonna try that shit, are you?” Jerry said, a bit wild-eyed. “Mr. York said it’d mess you up.”

“Relax—I ain’t stupid.” I covered the syringe with the plastic protector. “Ok, when I sneak up behind Mr. York—wait, turn around, you be Mr. York for a moment.”

He turned around.

“Ok,” I said. “So here I am, sneaking up behind, and when he least expects it—”

I pulled the cap off and jabbed the syringe deep into the side of Jerry’s neck while pushing the plunger as far as it would go. Jerry screamed and spun around. With his free hand, he jerked the spent syringe out, staring at it in mounting horror, then over to me with an expression of shocked betrayal.

“What the fuck you do that for!” he screamed, then ran at me, fists flying—and careened sideways into a table, knocking it over and bringing the lamp on top crashing down on his head. He started to get up, then fell again, yelling something about me being a backstabber. I didn’t bother to correct him.

I leaned down in front of him.

“Jerry? Listen to me. Before you go into the dark, I need to tell you something: I’m not the Kevin you knew. I’m someone else inside his body, here against Kevin’s will. You’re a really bad person, one of the worst I’ve ever known, but even you shouldn’t die thinking your friend killed you when he didn’t.”