Thalo Blue (15 page)

His more complete understanding of that came as he staggered down the hallway back in the direction of the room where he had lain on the mattress nearly defeated. The buzzing would ruin everything and the blood from his wound, and spilling from his lips, meant that his last chance was approaching. No one home, right? Wrong. Completely wrong.

When he had moved into the front-facing bedroom and grabbed Zeb he could barely stand. This was nearly it for him—he could feel it all draining away. But there had been no fight left in the boy, this one dragged like a strip of tape from the carpet. If Zeb had struggled harder it would have all stopped then and there. But he hadn’t. So it was all right again for a moment. All right. Okay. But only for a moment. He would take this one and use him as he had used the others. Just until he could catch his breath and find someone else.

But the police had bolted in.

And he had only the small derringer pistol to fend them off. One bullet had been fired at the shop so there was only a single shell left. To remove Zeb and the two raving paranoids at the doorway he would need at least one more.

One bullet had meant only one alternative.

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Pulling them down, he had discovered, was easier if he held them with a firm grip around the neck. If his body enveloped the other’s, like a cradle holding a baby perhaps, the pull felt easier, more controllable. The Thief didn’t know if it had something do with the neck’s connection both to the brain and the heart. He didn’t know if there was a soul crawling in the cords that ran between both, whatever a soul is. But from day one—night one actually—he found it worked better to grasp the throat, to cloak the other like that, so he did it that way and never strayed. He was meticulous in that detail.

In his most recent life—the one he had ended earlier the morning of the gunfire—there were two sons, Justin and Hayward, seven and five. Both had glorious and angelic blonde hair, the gold of woven straw. He liked to round his palm on the backs of their golden heads, hide his after-dinner toothpick in his cheek, and kiss them both on their foreheads, his whiskers tickling them, before their mother finally put them to bed. Sitting back in the leatherette recliner in the living room, he would contemplate what dreams the night might hold for them. His job at the plant had paid for their pajamas and their frozen peas at supper. It didn’t afford much more. But pjs and peas were enough, he decided—nearly three and half years before when he had stepped into their lives.

Names were about as empty as the vessels they stood for.

But in this life, he had been called Willem Nash, Will by his work buddies, by his wife too. She would deliver him a bottle of Boh’s while he stood on the deck in summer and watched the kids roll on grass and play on a swing set with blue and white poles, one that he had put together out of the box for them the year before.

And at night, he would make love to the wife and his head would flourish inside languid memories of another woman from a long time before.

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Dreams plagued his sleep from the start. For a long time, they went away. But then they returned.

After the accident, and his homecoming from the hospital, the wife had said he seemed different. He told her to let it go.

I’m better, aren’t I?
he asked.

Yes.

Well
then leave it. And we’ll be happy again. Together.

The dreams had driven him, at least in part, to an argument with her. And the argument, at least in part, had driven him to hit her. She took Justin and Hayward to her mom’s in Thornhill and he was left alone. The sight of his seventy-seven Thunderbird sinking in rushing waters, only its front bumper still visible on the surface and looking shinier than it ever had on the road, was trapped in his mind like a bird in a cage. He couldn’t force it out so he picked up his keys and headed out for a drink.

He had been drinking more in the weeks leading to his eventual explosion at her. But it wasn’t a dependence on the liquor to drown out his everyday life that kept him tipping them back. He had seen countless souls drown in that misery. He had witnessed that kind of self destruction first-hand and he assured the wife—and himself—that this was different. He knew the bottle was never a fix, but when sleep came after a few drinks the dreams stayed away. The T-bird’s chrome didn’t shine when he closed his eyes.

So he sat at the bar of a pub called Pilate’s Purple Pill. The bar keep told him he didn’t look so good, but gave him his second high-ball after four Boh’s anyway. He started to agree with the judgment. He mustn’t look good because he assuredly did not feel good. His head hurt and he was shaking. There were noises in his mind, like a static. And he was squinting to read labels and make out faces. There was a shaky blur across the world that made going home to bed the best decision. He stood, went to settle up, and fished his wallet and keys from a pocket while heading for the register at the end of the bar.

The bartender looked him up and down and said: “Two birds and one stone.”

“What?”

“Two birds—two tens—and a one. Twenty one bills. That’s what you owe.”

He started to reach into his wallet with a sweating hand—
Two birds and one stone. Haven’t heard that in a while.
When he glanced up the keep’s face looked like the sordid visage from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. All of them did, every face in that pub. He looked around the low-lit room filled with smoke and laughter and saw the contorted, twisting faces of madmen. Deformed and foul they were, all cackling with wickedness. He ran out into the crisp, cool air of the early morning.

The fresh air pacified him some.
Two birds and a stone. I took the grocery money to the Pill and all I got for it was four bottles of Bohemian and two highballs. Two birds and one goddamn stone.

Several blocks down Yonge it got worse again. The sweating and the shakes were debilitating. Again he saw the vision from his dreams: that Thunderbird’s grill and dark treetops beyond it. He staggered and banged into a light post. A snow plow was flashing amber across the street and was making a neatly packed ridge of firm snow running parallel with the sidewalk. The grinding noise of it faded off as it passed, and the sheer of sparks from its blade on the asphalt arced in the distance. It was nearing two in the morning and Will Nash, not drunk, but going quickly into shock, fell across the mound of newly graded snow.

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He awoke later, still under the crushing weight of his head—there was a pinging inside it now. His body was weak and heavy. The air felt cold and he was chilled. Snow was falling and his breath was white fog coming from lips that felt like warm strips off a rubber tire. He lugged himself to his feet and headed down the road, north. Blocks and blocks seemed to pass as he searched for any store that would be open. He didn’t trust himself to drive; his senses were not acute at all and the snow falling now was icing across the roads. There were no shops open. None. What store would have hours at this time of the morning, whatever time it was?

This had happened before. The alcohol did it and he should have remembered. But he didn’t. Never did. When you’re not born with a condition, living with it day after day, maybe you don’t ever really get used to it. The wife had to remind him when to take his shot, had to remind him each time. And she had let him only have one drink a day. Alcohol, she repeated at him—nagged at him, the original Nash might have said—made the chances of this much greater. Just like the last time—there was a vague recollection of what had happened then—his body went into insulin shock, what some called diabetic shock. This was a later stage, brought on in part by a lack of glucose in his blood, and in part by the alcohol he had been downing at The Purple Pill since eleven. He needed to raise his blood sugar soon or a hypoglycemic coma would come next. And there would be nothing after that. Except perhaps lost memories and an empty life.

If he recovered, that is.

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Ahmed Izhad Farukh owned and operated the Pit Stop, a tiny convenience store which dedicated most of its space to cigarettes and dirty magazines, more than it did to food products and beverages. But, nonetheless, the Pit Stop did have a large cooler for cans and bottles of pop, water, juices and cold teas along one side of its narrow innards.

Above the door there was a jingle as it came open. Will Nash moved through the belly of the store like an empty strand of smoke, blowing straight for that cooler where he snatched out a cold can of Orange Crush. Standing under a flickering yellow fluorescent, he was about to place his thumb under the tab, pop it, and chug from it when Ahmed was there, standing between Will and the front counter.

Farukh’s father had owned this shop and had sunk a considerable chunk of cash into its down payment a year after his second son had been born. He nearly lived at this store, made the monthlies to the bank for its eventual full title, had it open at any hours that the municipality would let it, stood behind the counter and greeted every customer personally, and eventually made enough money, besides payments and his own day-to-day expenses, to send for his wife and two sons living at home in Iran.

That had been four years ago. The store had opened twenty-three before that. Except for pirated videocassettes and CNN, Ahmed and his brother were strangers to the English language and everything this country had to offer when they landed. The elder Farukh had been shot to death by a street junkie looking dizzy from a fix and screaming about “taking care of Pearson.”

After, his two sons took over the business, eventually starting to sell the magazines and a huge variety of imported cigarettes. Profits increased enough in the last three years for Ahmed’s older brother to move to Trenton, New Jersey and open his own store there.

But the death of his father left the youngest boy, Ahmed, shaken. Every night—though he kept the light on, the door unlocked, and the open sign hanging in the window—he was nervous about what could happen to him. He stared with accusing eyes at customers and it’s a wonder the demeanor didn’t hurt his bottom line. He sent agitated letters to Jersey, and his brother finally came to visit. He brought with him a gift he said would alleviate his brother’s fears.

It was a small black derringer, two-chamber, with long slender handle. Forty-five cal. Ninety-seven fifty. The highest closing bid on an Internet auction site specializing in guns and related pre-owned goods. It was delivered easily enough, with no contest from the postal service in Trenton. But that was across the border. He brought it to Ahmed, wrapped in a pink rag in the center of the spare tire at the bottom of his trunk, hidden from border officials who would have dished out a hefty fined and confiscated the weapon had they found it.

Ahmed kept his brother’s derringer on the shelf immediately below his cash register. Easy access. Less than an arm’s length from where his stool sat.

“You pay now,” he said to Will, in tight, controlled English, as Will held the pop can in a shaking hand.

“Yeah, okay.” Will Nash could barely get the words out.

“You pay now,” Ahmed Farukh said more adamantly. “Drink after.”

“All right.” He followed him, staggering, sweating, knocking cans from a shelf, back to the counter, where the shop owner hit keys on the register. Its jangle-rattle-grind was a loud crash in Will Nash’s head. It shocked him and his half-closed eyes sprang wide open. The flourescents overhead were bright, buzzing loudly and flickering like a mosquito light. The pain, as always, was more intense.

He put the can on the counter, nearly knocking over a cardboard display box of jerky. He hunted in his coat pockets for a wallet. But the wallet, and his keys, could not be found.

Farukh was growing more wary, nervous, jittery. He too had begun to sweat. It stood out in drops across his dark, wrinkled brow. There had been junkies in here before—crackheads, dope-fiends, and shooters too—he could recognize their wet faces, their smudgy eyes, and the way they had trouble walking and putting words together. He still couldn’t understand English as well as he thought he should, still used movie dialogue when he didn’t know what to say, but he could tell when someone else was having problems with it. This one had been speaking with a slur so thick that Ahmed took almost no meaning from it—only assumed the customer would be paying for the pop when he came with Ahmed back to the counter and started rifling through pockets. This one’s eyes were red and his face was pale. What was he hopped up on?

They always need a drink, the shooters. Usually they buy whole two-liter bottles of pop or sometimes just a jug of water, whatever they can afford. Some of them can’t pay so he kicks them back out into the street. But most can—after counting out nickels and dimes, pennies even, to cover the enviro deposit. And, on occasion, some get irritated. Some don’t have enough and he has to call the cops or place his hand on the derringer his brother gave him. The derringer his brother gave him: it was, at that moment, still resting under the register, atop the pink rag, a loaded piece of machinery, wound up like an industrial strength cork. Just as it had on a few other occasions, Farukh’s right hand lay on its grip hidden below the counter, as the man with the red eyes searched in pockets for money that probably wasn’t even there. Like the other shooters, this one was making Farukh nervous. But there was something else. Past the shakes and the sweating, past the surface flags of someone fighting bodily addiction, something more, something greater was tinkering in Ahmed’s mind. Something made this one seem...not quite right.

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Will Nash had no recollection of where his keys or wallet were. His mind was thick and he was having more trouble seeing. His body was past the insulin shock. He was moving into territory untouched for nearly three years. The buzzing in his head had started and that only happened in the last moments, he remembered, when nothing could fix anything.