Silent Night

by L T Vargus

  “Sorry to interrupt, Chief Millhouse,” she croaked, although the crackle of phlegmy excitement running through her words made it obvious that she wasn’t sorry at all. “We just got a call from dispatch. Uniforms found your dark green ‘96 Taurus abandoned in a parking garage in Rosemont.”

  Everyone went still for a second. Millhouse frowned, her eyebrows coming together as if she didn’t know what to do with this curveball. Loshak half expected her to ask whether this find had been logged with the appropriate form, but she shook off her surprise with another TV-ready response, one that would come just in time for a commercial break.

  “Get Forensic Services out there, ASAP,” Millhouse said. “I want that car gone over with a fine-toothed comb.”

  Chapter 25

  The drugs faded, leaving him feeling like a washrag somebody had used to scrub their ass and then left all wadded up and wet in the tub. Everything around him turned into a desolate, hollow wasteland. Dragging around on aching feet, eyes scratchy and dry, he was forced to count through the delivery, what felt like billions of totes full of meds, then sign off that he’d received them all.

  To make matters worse, fucking Clint showed up just as Ben finished logging it and followed him back to the pill counter.

  “I’ve been getting a lot of complaints about the drive-thru window, Ben,” the dipshit CVS manager said, leaning his ass against the edge of the counter.

  “Yeah?” Ben counted out Prednisone tablets without looking up.

  Dickface wasn’t getting “a lot” of complaints. He’d probably only gotten one this morning about—

  “People are saying you won’t administer drive-up vaccines or flu shots.”

  “Yeah?”

  Please, condescend to me more, O great owner of a GED.

  “According to corporate policy, you’re required to go out to their car and administer the shots if they ask for one in the drive-thru.”

  “Not before the pharmacy is open.”

  “But you’re already back here,” Clint said. “It takes, what, ten seconds? Can’t you just run out and do it?”

  “Sure, but then we’re telling the assholes that they call the shots,” Ben muttered under his breath, snapping the cap on the bottle.

  Clint leaned in, cocking his ear toward Ben. “Huh?”

  Ben clicked the print button and waited with his hand over the label printer.

  “I said, I really wish I could, chief, but corporate policy says that as long as the pharmacy is unlocked, a licensed pharmacist needs to be present to keep an eye on all controlled substances until there is at least one more member of the staff in-pharmacy. Once it’s unlocked for the day, I can’t step foot outside until Raeanna’s here to watch the back.” He slapped the prescription label on the bottle and smoothed it out. He shrugged. “As much as I’d like to, it’d be a violation of the rules.”

  Clint glared at Ben for a few seconds like that would make him fall to his knees and apologize. He just went on to the next scrip. Finally, without another word, the douchebag left and time started to feel like it was passing again.

  When Ben looked up at the clock, however, it had hardly moved at all. It wasn’t even eleven yet. He was going to be in this godforsaken wasteland of bullshit forever. Why didn’t time ever skip on him when he really could’ve used it?

  He needed to sleep. Eight or ten solid hours. Let the little neurotransmitters in his brain repair themselves while he was off in dreamland.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about the baggies under the bathroom sink in his apartment. His mouth watered at the remembered bitter taste of the pills, the stickiness of the coating when they touched the wet walls of his mouth and tongue and throat. He could gorge himself on them as soon as he got home. Just gobble them up. Bask in the ensuing bliss.

  But he wouldn’t. Not for at least one night. He had to rest up. Regain his strength and stay sharp. Stay one step ahead of everybody.

  When a lull came up front, Raeanna leaned over the counter dividing the front from the back.

  “So, are you doing anything tonight?” she asked.

  “No.” Then he shook his head. “Yeah. Sleeping.”

  She laughed, showing her teeth again. They just looked like teeth this time, not mirrors.

  “Well, I’m going to a club with some friends. Tonight, I mean,” she said. “Just a fun thing, no big deal. You could come, too, if you wanted. First drink’s on me.”

  “Nah. I hate crap like that,” he said. “Clubs and whatever. The public. People.”

  She flipped some of the crimped hair out of her face.

  “Me, too. They’re the worst.”

  The phone rang. She grabbed it and took down the call-in from a GP down the street.

  After she inputted it into the computer, she came back.

  “We could stay in and watch a movie or something,” she said. “Netflix still has a bunch of cheesy seasonal junk, and I could pick up a case of beer. What kind do you like?”

  Just talking and talking while already the phone was ringing again, and he had a hundred thousand prescriptions to fill before he could even take a lunch break. It was like she didn’t know how to shut up.

  “I hate beer,” he said. Which was true.

  “Wine, then.” She scrunched her nose a little and grinned. “I like that better, anyway.”

  “Jesus, Rae, do you ever shut up?” he snapped. “If you want to talk, the phone’s been ringing for like an hour.”

  Her smile melted away. He caught a flash of pain in her hazel eyes before she spun on the nonexistent heels of her flats and headed off toward the back. The bathroom door shut.

  Was she going off to cry? He ground his teeth. He shouldn’t have done that, flown off the handle that way. It’d been too harsh, but it had all come blurting out. He hadn’t even been able to think about mitigating it. She was just so fucking annoying sometimes.

  He needed sleep. Badly. He looked up at the clock.

  Still not moving. Just sitting there, motionless. Mocking him.

  When he scrubbed his eyes, it felt like he was rubbing in a handful of sand, gritty and hot.

  So tired.

  But when he thought of home, that sanctuary from all this bullshit, he didn’t picture his bed, he pictured pills. Pills of every color and size. Bitter, beautiful pills.

  Chapter 26

  Frank fixed the last bug to the underside of the computer desk in the Fed’s room, up against the bottom lip under the shallow drawer. He gave the little box a last wiggle to make sure it wasn’t going to come loose if a knee or the rolling chair’s arm bumped against it.

  Good to go.

  To think he used to use mobile phones for this sort of thing. The good old days, which didn’t feel that long ago to him. Hard to believe that something so tiny could both pick up everything said within a ten-foot range and send it back to their phones, but then again, this was the age of tiny high def television-computer-video game consoles you carried around in your pocket and occasionally made calls on. Making a super small wireless mic was probably nothing to write home about.

  Job done, he slipped back out of the hotel room, making sure to pull it all the way shut behind himself, and took the stairs down to the ground floor. Places like this almost never had cameras in the stairwells.

  Outside, the Windy City had blown in another snowstorm. The bit of sky visible overhead was covered with a lid of smoky gray clouds, and flakes the size of his thumb were plummeting toward the ground and drifting in places. If this kept on, it was going to pile up pretty good by evening.

  Vince was in the driver’s seat of the Buick, scrolling through his phone and listening to the Beatles sing about Christmastime when Frank made it back to the car.

  “You picked the lock alright?” the big lug asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Frank shook the snow out of his thinning hair, then reached over and snapped off the radio. He didn’t bother to explain about RFID-hacking apps. It would just go in one cauliflower ea
r and out the other anyway. “We’re all set up and ready to listen in.”

  “Awesome.”

  Immediately, Vince dialed the number Frank had given him.

  “You’re not gonna hear anything, you knucklehead,” Frank said. “The guy’s still gone.”

  “Oh yeah.” Vince let the phone slowly drift down from his ear. He shrugged. “Well, it’s whatever. You hungry?”

  “I could go for some lunch.”

  “Good, ‘cause I’m starving.”

  Frank doubted that. The cheese was still congealing on the bottom of the cardboard box Vince had bought his breakfast pizza in. Predictably, the Pepto was in the cup holder.

  “Must be all the hard work you been doing,” Frank said.

  Vince pointed the Buick toward the nearest yellow arches and drove.

  “Hey, I wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing while you were bugging the place,” he said. “I was bettering myself. Learning about the animal kingdom and shit.”

  Frank snorted.

  “What, were you watching The Lion King or something?”

  “No.”

  A light turned yellow, and Vince slammed on the brakes. The wheels skidded over the accumulating snow with a bumpy, crunch sound that made Frank cringe. They slid a little, the car drifting a degree or two out of true, but it came to a stop before they hit anything or ran the light.

  “Is this your first time driving in snow?” Frank snatched his cigarettes out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket and tapped one out with sharp, jerky motions. “You let off the brakes to slow down, genius. Keep slamming like that, and we’ll end up in a fender bender.”

  “Sorry,” Vince muttered.

  Frank pinched the cigarette between his lips and snapped open his Zippo. “It’s awful damn hard to fly under the radar when you’re explaining to another driver why you don’t want to exchange information, you get me?”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Just don’t do it again.” But the ritual of lighting up and taking the first drag was already calming Frank’s nerves. He squinted at Vince through the smoke. “What were you saying about the Lion King?”

  “It wasn’t the Lion King.”

  The light turned back to green, but the assholes driving on the cross street had jammed in until they blocked the intersection. Vince inched forward to add the Buick to the crush, like that would help.

  “I was reading an article. The one about the chimp who ripped that lady’s face off.”

  “When was this?”

  “Back in ‘09,” Vince said, inching forward and squeezing in between a pickup and a cargo van. “The crazy thing is, this chimp, he grew up not far from here in a chimp sanctuary. His hometown’s just across the river in Missouri.”

  “Chimps don’t have hometowns,” Frank said, but Vince wasn’t listening.

  “So everybody thought he was really well socialized, and he was in a bunch of movies and TV shows. But then this lady comes along, and I guess she had his favorite toy, so he just went insane. Ripped her hands and face off, the sick fuck. I guess when chimps attack, they break your wrists and jaw first, then they go straight for the genitals. They want to make sure you can’t attack them, bite them, or rape them, in that order. That’s how deep the fear of rape goes in mammals.” He looked away from the road long enough to see how Frank was reacting to the story. Obviously not seeing as much shock as he was hoping for, Vince prompted him with, “Pretty nuts, right?”

  Frank nodded.

  “I never liked the things. Chimps, I mean.”

  “What? How can you not like chimps? They’re like little people.”

  “They creep me out. They don’t look right.”

  Vince’s brows pulled down like he was offended. “How are they supposed to look?”

  “Well, they could start with not looking like they know a lot more than they’re pretending to know,” Frank said. He hit the window button and rolled the glass down just enough to ash his cigarette out the window, then he rolled it back up. “My dad hated the fuckers.”

  “They creep him out, too?” Vince asked.

  “I don’t know. Never asked. He just hated chimps is all. Didn’t have a problem with gorillas.”

  “How can you hate chimps, but not care about gorillas? They’re like huge chimps.”

  Frank shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t hate chimps so much as he was drunk one time and talking shit about them. Me being a kid, maybe I sort of took that as an all-out hatred of chimps when it was really just a one-time thing. He got mean when he drank. Hateful. Maybe that time, he was just taking it out on chimps.”

  Vince nodded thoughtfully.

  “My dad broke my arm when he was drunk.” Then he looked over at Frank. “It was an accident, though. He didn’t mean to. Just went to grab me and used a little too much force.”

  “I ain’t gonna call child services on him,” Frank said, shaking his head a little at Vince’s tone. “Doubt it would do you any good at this point, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Vince insisted. “I was just a soft kid. A little pussy. Dad had to toughen me up. He didn’t mean to break it, but you know how things are. And I figure I turned out OK, considering.”

  Frank laughed, thinking Vince was actually making a decent joke for once. When he looked over, though, the younger guy was frowning, confused.

  “You turned out OK?” Frank said, raising his voice so Vince would realize it was ridiculous. “You murder people for a living, you mook.”

  That got Vince laughing, too.

  Chapter 27

  By the time he got home, sweat wept from his body. The wet collected along his temples and under his arms. He tasted the salt of it on his lips.

  He stormed into his apartment, stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at his bed for about three seconds. Sleep would be the smart thing to do, but… He turned around and headed straight into the bathroom.

  When he opened the cabinet under the sink, a can of Barbasol rolled out. He shoved it back in, cramming it behind stacks of toilet paper to keep it from escaping again. Digging behind his razor case, he pulled out a pair of plastic sandwich bags full of pills, loving the feel of their weight in his hands. Blue, pink, yellow, white, brown. Circles, tablets, bricks, weird little home-plate-shapes. His carefully collected stash from almost three years working at the pharmacy, not to mention the menagerie of street drugs he’d amassed the old fashioned way.

  What he really needed was to relax, so he picked a few off-brand Valium and popped them down the hatch. But he didn’t really want to just konk out, did he? No. He wanted to enjoy his relaxation. He debated between taking Adderall or Ritalin to level the Valium off and keep him awake, finally settling on Ritalin since it would peak sooner and wear off faster. He needed to sleep at some point, and he didn’t want the Adderall keeping him up then. He hunted around for two of the pills and swallowed them dry.

  Upper and downer. Light and darkness. All things in this life had a balance to them.

  He tucked his kit away again, closed the cupboard that hid his meds. Instead of moving on, however, he found himself staring at that little cabinet door, still kneeling before it like an altar.

  Maybe. Maybe just a little more.

  Usually, he didn’t allow himself more than a few — that was a quick way to deplete your supply — but if he was going to be hopped up for the next several hours anyway, he might as well make it interesting. Better top off his blend of up and down with a hallucinogen or three. That just made sense, didn’t it? The good, the bad, and the weird.

  He wrenched open the cupboard again. Dug through the bag until he found a few gel tabs that fit the bill, then went back under the sink for a little PCP.

  Yes, he was one well-supplied gent.

  The PCP could be snorted or smoked, but he’d never gotten around to trying it the latter way. He chuckled. He was a swallower. He knocked it back, then sat on the toilet.

  Now, the wait. It would kick in any minute now
.

  For a second, he saw the marble walls of the movie theater lobby cracking, a little puff of dust flying up from where the bullet had slammed into the rock, but then he blinked and shook the image off. That was starting way near the beginning of the shooting, and he was too tired to go through the whole thing. Too tired to think for that long.

  It was getting hot as hell in the bathroom. He reached over and turned the shower on cold. That would cool the air down a little. A comforting mist.

  He squirmed on the toilet seat. He couldn’t find a position where his legs were comfortable. They didn’t like it. All this sitting. Too restless for all that. He had to get up.

  He started pacing.

  That was better. A nice, relaxing walk around his apartment. He kept the place neat, even though he never had anyone over. The last time he was with a girl, they’d gone to her place.

  He took a sharp turn around his kitchen table and away from that subject. He didn’t like people in his space. Sue him. Lots of people liked their space, their privacy. Nothing wrong with it.

  His apartment was nice in a bland way, he thought. Leather couches, wood tables, an espresso maker. Upper middle class nice. Not afraid to show that he was doing fine in the finance department, but not so fancy-minded as to stretch his imagination with the decor choices. I’ll have the same as everyone in my tax bracket else, please. Thank you, kindly.

  A feeling in his gut signified the coming wave. It was getting close. It was going to happen. Flying. Falling. Weirding out. Any second now. An overwhelming blend of chemicals readied themselves to pounce into his skull, one after the other. He could feel it, this building excitement, like a little kid the night before his birthday or Christmas.

  Finally, as he was coming back through the living room toward the bathroom, it happened. The first wave of narcotics broke, crossed the blood-brain barrier, and he felt this rush of exhilaration and a wave of relief, both happening at the same time. A cresting bliss that seemed to keep swelling and swelling.