Squid Pulp Blues (7 page)

Then the sound of more sirens tore at Robert’s ears.

*
                     
*
                     
*

Officer Freddy Fernandez jumped out of his squad car.

“Drop your weapon!”
 
He had his gun aimed on Robert
Hapertas
. Freddy watched as the guy did as he was told and then walked over and kicked the thing away. What a beauty of a weapon the guy had.
Had to be, what, at least thirty years old. Shit, they don’t make guns like that anymore.

Freddy cuffed him making sure to pull on the guy’s arms hard because he knew one of them was broken.

The guy said, “Son of a bitch.”

Once seated in the back of Freddy’s patrol car, the guy started babbling. Something about a woman with no feet and a naked woman. Freddy heard this kind of shit before.
Sick of these crazy fucking assholes with guns.

Another ambulance arrived a minute later and an EMT took her time getting to Robert who was trembling in the backseat. He looked over at the EMT: a woman, probably in her mid-thirties, cute and wearing well-worn sneakers.

Wonder what those smell like.

Chapter Twelve

Henry looked over at Dix who was lying on his stomach convulsing.

“Dix, can you hear me? There’s help coming.”

He could see an EMT coming over quickly and wanted to tell his friend what he had seen before it was too late. Though he wasn’t sure if any of his words were being heard, he told Dix what he saw in the bathroom.

Dix didn’t seem to hear. Slowly he stopped shaking and just as the EMT got over to him, he died.

Henry put his forehead down on the asphalt. He felt like crying but knew that the tears wouldn’t come, not after all the shit he’d been through in his life. After this, he’d try to go back to a normal life or as normal as he was accustomed to having. He knew he’d be arrested and probably would go back to
Rahway
for a few years but hopefully the evidence would show that he wasn’t the one who killed Eddie Ford.

Eddie Ford, his parole officer.

Eddie Ford, the crab-thing in the bathroom with its throat slit.

From behind him an authoritative voice said, “You Henry Hooper?” and then he felt the cuffs tighten around his wrists. He thought of Peggy the bartender spitting in his beer, telling him it was good luck.

Henry looked over at Dix.
Good luck. Yeah right.

*
                     
*
                     
*

Marie woke up to an empty room. She felt a draft and saw that the door to the motel room was open, the doorknob broken off.
What the fuck happened?

It wasn’t a dream; she really didn’t have any feet. It wasn’t a drug-induced a hallucination though she couldn’t be sure about the naked woman and her machine.

Marie picked herself up, wondering if she could perhaps walk on the bottoms of her calves. As she put pressure on them, she fell face first into the corner of television stand, the wood piercing her eyeball and sending it straight into her brain.

Her last living thoughts were of Japanese spider crabs, of a man being eviscerated by them. She instinctively knew that the man had a grandson somewhere who was witnessing the same thing she was and for that, she felt sad.

In the next room, Grant finished another beer and continued to watch television.
I wonder when the guys are coming back. I’m
gettin
’ hungry. Horny, too.

He got up from the bed and with slow, deliberate steps walked to the bathroom.
Shit, what a mess.
Grant looked at the butchered mass of flesh and shell in the bathroom. He saw the image of Blanche
Devereaux
on the back of the body and walked over to it.

He loosened his belt.

What the hell. I’m not picky.

THE END

THE LONGHEADS

CHAPTER 1

The donkey on the hill laughed loudly through its Halloween mask.

It stomped its feet, shaking the snow off its fur, and let out a small, deep-throated giggle as well as a squeaky fart. The donkey turned toward the sunset, its eyes filling with pure light, and then dropped dead in the same way it had lived: joyful and filled with gas.

At the bottom of the hill, the city of
Thompson
,
New Jersey
bustled, despite the heavy snow and bitter cold. It acted out its routine like an oversized ant colony. Each man, woman, and child went through the motions of good citizens, despite the underlying hum of several factories that pumped noxious smoke into the air, adding cancerous spice to the falling snow.
 
           

Tommy
Pingpong
sat in his car with the engine running. Jake should’ve been out ten minutes ago
. What the hell’s taking him so long?
Tommy knew he was taking a risk idling in front of the building like that. Sure, the cops didn’t patrol often but when they did, they were a bitch to get rid of. Despite that worry, he stayed, looking at his watch every thirty seconds and glancing up to see if Jake was on his way.

Fifteen minutes.
Shit, where the hell is he?

Finally, through the snow flurries, he saw Jake run out of the building, almost tripping over his own feet. Opening the passenger door with a frantic pull, Jake plopped down in the seat, out of breath. “Just drive,” he coughed.

Tommy put the car into gear and stepped on the gas. The car’s tires lost traction for two seconds but then regained control and moved quickly down the block. Jake turned his head and kept his eyes on the back windshield. A thin blanket of snow covered most of the window. “I can’t see a thing.”

“What happened? Who’s following us?” Tommy’s voice was calm though inside he was as frantic as his friend. He knew that he had to balance out Jake’s emotional outbursts with a good amount of composure.

Jake kept looking though he could barely see through the snow. “I don’t know. Everything got fucked up. It wasn’t my fault, no fucking way.”

“Yeah, okay, calm down. What happened?”

Turning to the front, Jake moved the rearview so he could keep an eye out. “Everything was going great. I was telling Aaron the whole plan and he seemed into it or at least that’s what I thought just by the way he was acting. But then Peachy walked in and everything got fucked up.”

“Christ almighty,” Tommy whispered.
Okay, I’m not going to freak out. I know damn well Jake’s a paranoid motherfucker. Stay calm…stay calm.

“How the fuck was I supposed to know Peachy would be out already? He was supposed to do at least half of his time.”

Tommy nodded his head. “Yeah, well, apparently he got out early. So go on, what else?”

“I was nervous to begin with, then he walks in and just stares at me, fucking smiling at me. I lost it. I don’t even remember what the fuck I said. I just ran out.” He ran his hands through his hair.

“What’d Aaron do?”

“He looked at Peachy and then he said something like ‘I’ll have to think about it’. That was it. They smiled at each other and I just fucking ran out.”

Tommy threw his hands up. The car jerked to the right. He put his hands back on the wheel. “And you RAN out? Jesus Christ…”

“I’ve been in those situations before, I know what that fucking means. I’m not a complete idiot, you know. Trust me on this, will
ya
?” Jake looked at
 
Tommy, waiting for an acknowledgement. Tommy kept his eyes on the road, careful not to get into an accident on the snowy, congested streets.

“Jake, I trust you.” As it came out of his mouth, he realized that his tone betrayed the message even though he believed that statement whole-heartedly. “All I’m saying is that you might have, MIGHT HAVE, over-reacted. Look, is Peachy a back-stabbing prick? Yes, but that still doesn’t mean that he’ll cause problems at every step of the way. You could’ve stayed cool, kept talking to Aaron. Now they both know you’re fucking freaked out. There’s no doubt now that someone’s coming after us. Even if it’s just to ask why the fuck you ran out.”

Jake sighed. “I don’t know, man. You know that creepy
sonovabitch
better than I do. Doesn’t he still blame one of us for that shit?”

A year and a half ago Tommy and Jake worked a job for Peachy. The job went south and the two of them got pinched. By sheer luck, they were let go because the witness couldn’t, with one-hundred percent confidence, identify Tommy and Jake as the culprits. They were released soon after.

However, someone had left a dirty diaper behind at one of the job sites and a dirty diaper at a crime scene meant only one thing to the Thompson Police Department: Peachy was behind the whole thing. With as much diligence as they could muster on a weekend, the cops cornered Peachy at the local pool hall where he was showing his fellow patrons how far he could stick the pool cue in his ear without damaging a single brain cell. He was arrested without incident but had squealed on Tommy and Jake as soon as he was taken into the station. Since they had already released those two and didn’t want to make it appear that they had made a mistake, the cops ignored
Peachy’s
accusations and charged him for the whole thing.

In Tommy’s opinion, the two of them had every right to be pissed at Peachy and not the other way around. They could have ratted him out but choose not to do so simply because snitching could ruin your reputation fast. Peachy, on the other hand, betrayed whatever trust they had between the three of them. To Tommy, however, all was forgiven. He never liked holding a grudge; it got in the way of executing a successful job.

Jake got more frantic. “When I was running out, I totally got the feeling that they’d be coming after me. I really think
Peachy’s
gonna
come after us.”

“Yeah, probably, after you ran out of the room like a goddamn rat off a sinking ship.”

“Whatever. You always blame this shit on me. I’m sick of it.”

Tommy rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ. I just don’t want any fucking trouble, that’s all. Sometimes you overreact, okay? That’s it. Doesn’t make you a bad person or anything and it doesn’t mean I don’t take you seriously. Now, is there anything else I need to know? Before Peachy came into the room, did Aaron say anything else?”

“No, he just nodded. He looked like he was into it. Until Peachy walked in. Then there was some weird vibe, I’m telling you.”

Though Tommy was doing his best to restrain himself and act like the calm half of the partnership, he felt himself falling deeper and deeper into a whirlpool of aggravation. “Fuck!” He slammed his fists on the steering wheel. If Peachy was again in Aaron’s good graces, even more so than Tommy and Jake were, then the two of them were fucked pretty good.

Jake got defensive. “Why’d you make me go in there by myself, anyway? If you were so afraid I’d fuck things up, why didn’t you do it your goddamn self, huh?”

“I did the last meeting. If Aaron was normal and let us both in, we wouldn’t have this problem but when we deal with him we have to alternate.” Tommy wasn’t too crazy about Aaron’s eccentricities. He never allowed a meeting with more than one person who didn’t belong to his organization. The fact that Peachy was there in the room with Aaron and Jake also gave Tommy some worry.

Their relationship with Aaron Jeffords was strictly business related. Because of that, there was always the chance that there would be a falling out. No personal attachments meant no assurance that Aaron would think twice before putting a bullet into both of their skulls. Now with Peachy involved, Tommy was worried that everything might turn to shit.

“What’re we
gonna
do, man? What?” Jake trembled, partly from the cold (the car’s heater hadn’t worked since Tommy got the car ten years ago) and partly from the stress.

“Okay, listen. We’ll stop at a payphone and I’ll call Aaron, try to test the waters, see what his reaction is. I’ll explain that you overreacted and hopefully I’ll be able to smooth things over.”

Jake’s eyes widened. “What good will that do? I told you, it wasn’t an outright threat. It was sneaky the way they looked at each other. He’ll just lie to you, tell you everything’s okay and that he was shocked when I ran out, whatever, but really he’ll just be bullshitting you. Next thing we know, both of us are in the river swimming with the Thompson squid.”

“I’m going to have to take that chance. I’ll make it clear how we feel about Peachy, don’t worry. There’ll be no confusion about that. This way, if he is bullshitting me, he’ll know that we’re fully aware of things and that we’ll be on our toes since we know
Peachy’s
somewhat involved.”

Tommy slowed the car down easy, not wanting to skid into a telephone pole or one of the many pedestrians on the sidewalk. As he parked the car in front of an alley, he looked to his right to see if he was close enough to the curb. His eyes caught something in the alley.

“Christ almighty, what the hell is that?”

Jake looked over. “What? Where?” He followed Tommy’s finger.

“Looks like a longhead but what the hell is he doing?” Tommy asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer. Ever since the war ended, he was made uneasy by the fact that a small fraction of the troops came back looking like
that
. Their skulls were vertically elongated, the skin stretched close to its breaking point to where it was translucent and one can see straight to their skull. One of the odd things about the whole situation was that all the longheads ended up moving to Thompson, forming a small ghetto at the south side of town. They took up with desperate prostitutes and had children who came out looking like even more sinister versions of their fathers.

The longhead in the alley was dressed in a cowboy costume and standing on a soapbox. In his arms was a strange contraption that looked like a combination of a manual meat grinder and cappuccino maker. His right hand furiously twisted a lever while his left held it tightly to his chest. Out of the top of the machine came spurting long, curly strips of what looked to Tommy like pasta.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah, Jake?”

“Is that longhead making…pasta?”

“Yeah, Jake, I think so.”

They stared at him for five minutes totally forgetting about Aaron and Peachy. Watching the pasta drop to the snowy ground made Tommy think of footage he once saw from the war of a troop getting disemboweled by a guerrilla fighter who used only a set of sewing needles. The troop’s entrails fell to the ground with the same wet clunk as the pasta.

“Tommy?”

“Yeah, Jake?”

“Can we go to another payphone?”

“Yeah, Jake, I think we can.”

They drove off, Tommy keeping his eyes on the road and Jake keeping his eyes on the alleyway, hoping to God that he would not see that longhead again.

CHAPTER 2

Aaron grinned at Peachy. “What the fuck was that about?”

“What’re looking at me for? I didn’t do anything. The bastard got scared, what’s that
gotta
do with me? You’re the one who said I could sit in on this one.”

“Yeah, I wanted you to sit in so you can patch things up with those two assholes.”

“So why didn’t you invite
both
assholes?”

“I didn’t want things to get crowded in here. You know how I feel about that. Things get too crowded, I start to get jumpy.” Aaron took a cigar out of his front pocket and lit it. “Why do you look so bulky?” He pointed at
Peachy’s
pants.

“Diaper.”

Aaron stifled a laugh. “Oh yeah, I forgot.”

Peachy blushed and had a seat in the chair across from the desk.
Motherfucker didn’t forget. He knows I shit my pants. At least I don’t have a squid fetish..
He leaned forward, cupping his hands as if to tell his boss that he was ready to get down to brass tacks. “So, what are we going to do about this?”

He could tell Aaron wasn’t listening. His boss was too busy looking at the cigar smoke, his eyes a heavily sedated green haze of preoccupation. He ignored
Peachy’s
question and instead asked his own.

“Peachy, do you know why I really invited you to the meeting?”

“No….”

“I had a dream last night.” Aaron got up from his chair and came around to the front of the desk. He leaned on it like he felt a real boss was supposed to do while he looked down at Peachy, his long-time employee. “I had a dream that changed my life. For better or for worse, I don’t know. It was about my stint in the war. I told you about that, right?”

“Yes, you’ve talked about it a little.”

“Well, I probably didn’t tell you the bulk of it for fear of having you think of me as a coward or an asshole or something. Anyway, I had a dream about it again last night. I actually have these dreams quite often, but most of the time half of my body is a squid while the other half is completely covered in sunburn. So yeah, I have these war dreams a lot, you know, in between the ones where I’m screwing Chesty Morgan and that one about taking a nap in a fruit stand but anyway, let me go on.” He puffed at his cigar. “I was in battle, the rest of my fellow troops having gone deep into the shit, fighting their little patriotic asses off while I stood there, watching the sun in the sky as it turned into the face of Barbara
Stanwyck
. You know Barbara
Stanwyck
, right? I’m not that old, am I?”

“I don’t think I know her, no.”

“She was an actress from when I was a kid. Beautiful, beautiful woman. I was looking straight at the sun, being blinded by her face but also by the rays of sunlight. I swear I even felt the heat in this dream, like my skin was going to burn off. Then my troops came back, half of them were blown to bits, being brought in on wheelbarrows, donkeys, and I think even an elephant. Their eyes were falling out of their faces and their cheekbones were all busted up. But the ones that weren’t wounded were even more disfigured. They were the longheads. That’s one thing I never told you about my tour of duty. I was there when that shit happened. I’ve felt guilty about that every day since. I should’ve been one of those longheads. I choose not to go in there and all those boys came out looking like….
that
.” He made a face of disgust.