Thrust

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NOVELS:

A Lower Deep: A Self Novel

Nightjack

Short Ride to Nowhere

Sorrow's Crown – A Felicity Grove Mystery

The Dead Past – A Felicity Grove Mystery

The Night Class

NOVELLAS:

All You Despise

Cast in Dark Waters
(with Ed Gorman)

Frayed

Fuckin
' Lie Down Already

Loss

The Fever Kill

The Last Deep Breath

The Nobody

You'd Better Watch Out

COLLECTIONS:

Futile Efforts

Pentacle: A Self Collection

Tales From the Crossroad,
Vol
1

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

Nightjack
– Narrated by Chet Williamson

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For Michelle

who keeps the ghosts off my back

& To Matt Schwartz & Gerard
Houarner

with extra special thanks to Larry Roberts & Jim
D'Angelo

C
hase wasn't quite ready to be dead yet.
 
The urge continued to ease through, thin as a filleting blade, but he kept slapping the desire aside every morning, each night.
 
It got to be sort of fun after a while.

Shake Sunshine Jr. put it like this during the slam, grooving in place as he stood at the microphone, his buttery voice getting the ladies all slick in their seats:
 
A harvest moon pours down through the dying trees, and the breeze, the breeze is the breath of an angry lover hissing up at your neck, show your class, baby, shake that ass
. The husbands looking aside now, frowning, ordering double
Dewars
.
 
Checking their watches.
 

There's a knocking on the far side of your brain as you open the door and let the naughty girl out, hope she goes her own way through the woods, before my dark paws scrape along your thighs, get you high, and take you down in a carpet of red leaf.
 

Christ, look at the broads squirming, holding their legs tightly together as Shake aims his love in their direction:
pow
, mama,
ker-pow
!
 

My little big man, he wants the keys to your car, palm out, with a shout.
 
Got a pack of rubbers ready and waiting. You take him in hand, in mouth, choking him down.
 
Teee
,
hee
hee
, oh you so bad.
 
The husbands wishing this wasn't Manhattan but maybe East Mississippi, wanting some redneck sheriff to show them the way.
 
That's the knife, my fine bitch, suck it down, the knife of a flung-down life.
  

Eighty, ninety women rolling back in a swoon.
 
Their nipples all thrust out at once, like switchblades. You could set your watch to it.
 
Happened whenever Shake said suck it down.
 
And he said it a lot.
 

He never clenched his massive black hands, refusing to make fists even though his knuckles were distended and flat as quarters.
 
It made Chase wonder how he could go at the world like that and still win.
 

As his chin wagged, Shake swayed and lifted those enormous shoulders, his shining bald head beading up with sweat and catching the stage lights.
 
His goatee was just long enough that he could shape the ends into twin prongs.
 
He held himself like an ancient Moorish king, demanding full attention.
 

But Shake had no rhythm at all and would sometimes trip himself up as he shuffled to the cadence of his own poetry.
 
Sort of funny seeing a black man as bad at dancing as some white dweeb.
 
As bad as Chase.
 
It drew nervous chuckles from the crowd and tended to throw them off some.
 
They were afraid of him.
 
Even the women who loved him were terrified of that intensity, that coca glossy sleekness.
  

He held his hands out and scratched at the air, snapping his fingers too slowly to even make a sound.
 

From out of the darkness came delighted squeaks and the heavy thrum of clapping.
 

The Narrative Bone Palace had been set up like a Vegas lounge, with plenty of small round tables and squat mohair chairs.
 
Lots of candles, martini glasses and linen napkins.
 
Weak track lighting and impressionistic oil paintings on the walls.
 
Chase usually felt like he was opening for Joey Bishop or the Rat Pack back in the day.
 
Most of the time he just wanted to croon into the mike.

He came out from the sidelines and walked across the stage to stand next to Shake, trying to locate that same cool, calm place in the soul, but Chase always overshot.
 
He still hadn't found the right balance to give a truly perfect show.
  

No introductions, exactly as he asked.
 

Shake just dropped back a step from the mike, closed his eyes, fluttered his fingers and gestured towards Chase.
 
Telling him, go on and take it away, baby.
 
He was swaying to his own vibe, looking a little high.
 
A few people clapped politely, unsure of the etiquette.
 

Chase opened his mouth and Shake cut him off without meaning to, not even seeing him.
 
Letting loose with another half-sung, half pillow talk line,
Now you lay it down, lay it down sweet, and now, now you lift it on up
.

Waiting another three beats to make sure Shake was done, Chase let the buoyant energy of the room waft through him.
 
He went, "I—" and spotted
Jez
standing at the back of the room.
 
It made him flinch so violently that he nearly fell over.
 

Huh.
 

Well.
 

All right, he thought, this is a new low in psychosis.
 

Where did you go from here?
 
Was this finally the bottom?
 
His nerves began untangling one by one up and down his body until nothing seemed to function.
 
Really, it didn't take much nowadays.
 

Hell, just look into the crowd and watch her bringing her gold lighter up to a cigarette.
 
You watch the angle of her jaw tilted to show off the curve of her neck, the splendid jut of her chest, and you're immediately back in the hydrotherapy room drowning, but in love.
 

Maybe she's naked on top of you, soaped and glistening, mashing down so your hips slammed the metal sides of the tub.
 
Or maybe
Arlo
Barrack and the other attendants are holding you by your arms and legs, hoping to jab you back into the womb, pressing you under until you're this close to being dead.
 

Either way you're in the water getting a little saner, maybe.
 
Or not.

Shake opened one eye and peered at Chase, did the fluttery fingers thing again.
 

This should've been pleasant, seeing
Jez
in the audience.
 
She used to read poetry to him on the ward—all the suicides: Plath, Sexton, Berryman,
Brautigan
—plus her own poems, after a while.
 
With leaky ball-points she wrote in a cramped script, eventually filling three tiny marble notebooks.
 
He found all the sexual repression imagery in her work to be cold and hostile, but somehow still arousing.
 

So it made a kind of sense that she'd walk into the Palace to watch a few slams.