by Adam Howe
“Just stay where you are, Mr. Levine.” She began making the incision, slitting the donkey’s belly along the line of the sutures. The scalpel popped through the stitches, sounding like a carpet knife slicing slowly through a thick rug. “Hold this,” Shelby said, and though my eyes were closed, I could hear the smug smile in her voice.
Then she slapped something squishy and wet in my hand. Warm liquid oozed through my fingers and spattered onto the felt top of the pool table. I shuddered and choked down my gorge. I heard Walt chuckle. “Y’alright there, Reggie? Looking a little green, son.” His voice grew distant, floating away above me like a helium balloon; like Harry Muffet’s giant inflatable effigy breaking free from its moorings and drifting silently across town.
And that’s about all I remember of the operation, because down I went.
I came around about a half-hour later, still lying flat-out on the floor. People were moving around me like I was a piece of furniture. Fucking Walt … I bet he hadn’t even tried to sit me up. I could hear Enrique snoring on the pool table above me. Then Marlene stepped over me, her ass looming into view like a flabby Death Star. She was still wearing nothing but her G-string and pasties, and was holding up an IV-bag that was hooked to the donkey.
Shelby was cleaning her instruments. She glanced down at me and smirked.
“Aren’t you a little squeamish for a boxer?”
“How’s the jackass?” I croaked.
“Stable. Considering what he’s been through, it’s a miracle he survived.”
“A miracle, amen,” Lou agreed enthusiastically. “Praise God!”
Shelby frowned at Enrique. “I’m still concerned about this bruising on his face—”
I clutched the edge of the pool table and hauled myself to my feet. “He fell on his face when he keeled over,” I told Shelby. “Right, guys?”
I shot Walt a shitty look for not rolling me into the recovery position when I passed out, or at least sliding a pillow under my head, but he was staring gravely at something on the edge of the pool table. I figured he was estimating how much it’d cost him to replace the felt tabletop, or if he could get away with leaving it stained with donkey blood.
Then I saw the five plastic-wrapped bricks of white powder.
“That was inside him?”
“Sewn under his hide,” Shelby said.
Walt looked at me and said, “It’s primo yayo, Reggie.”
His eyes were big as saucers, near most bursting from his skull.
“And how would you know that?” I said, with a sinking feeling.
Shelby said, “Against my advice, Mr. Wiley insisted on cutting into one of the bags with his pocket knife, and sampling the contents.”
“It was the only way to know for sure, Doc,” Walt insisted.
“Damn it, Walt,” I said. “You promised me you were never gonna touch this shit again.” Walt’s history of substance abuse is a story for another time, but if you’ve ever seen The French Connection II, the scene where Gene Hackman goes cold turkey should give you an idea of what we went through.
Walt looked away guiltily, swiping his nose and grinding his teeth.
I gazed down at Enrique and the bricks of white powder on the pool table.
“Well, I’ll be … The damn donkey’s a drug mule.”
Walt said, “Gotta be about a hundred K’s worth here. Maybe more.”
“Mr. Levine,” Shelby said, “I think you’d better tell me exactly what’s going on here.”
But before I could, the phone in the phone kiosk started ringing.
Lou went and answered it. “Reggie, it’s for you.”
“Take a message.”
“It’s Nicolas Cage again. He sounds real upset.”
“Nicolas Cage?” Shelby said.
“Close friend of mine,” Walt said, directing her attention to the signed poster behind the bar.
I raced to the kiosk, snatched the phone from Lou.
“Harry!”
I never would’ve believed I could be so happy to hear his voice.
“Reggie! You gotta help me, man! These fucking guys are crazy—”
The phone was wrenched from his hand. I heard a meaty thud; Harry yelped in pain and started sobbing. Then the devil’s baritone of Mitchell Coogler growled down the line: “You got something that belongs to me, motherfucker.”
5.
* * *
I cut a nervous glance at the jackass convalescing on the pool table, and the bloody bricks of coke Shelby had removed from his gut.
“I’d be happy to return it,” I said.
“Mighty white of you,” Coogler said.
He took his mouth away from the phone. “Good news, Harry—Hey!” Another thump; another yelp of pain. “I said, good news. Your buddy’s gonna bring me back my jackass.” He came back on the line. “He’s crying he’s so happy.”
But it didn’t sound like tears of joy I could hear in the background. “You don’t have to hurt him, man.”
“Hard not to,” Coogler said. “He’s got one of those faces, you know.”
“I’ll give you what you want. No one else needs to get hurt.”
“Like the old man? I feel terrible about that. Like, boo-fucking-hoo. If the stubborn old fuck’d just given me my jackass like I told him, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to—”
“Shoot him in the back?” I said with a surge of anger.
Coogler snorted contemptuously. “I’m sorry you had to witness such an ugly scene.”
“Me too.”
“Have you tattletaled to the law already?”
“No.” I neglected to mention that it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“Good. Then let’s keep this between us girls,” Coogler said. “Now get your ass out to Harry’s Wherever-the-fuck. Car dealership. Looks like a bomb hit a junkyard.”
“I know the place.”
“Then it shouldn’t take you longer than an hour to get here,” he said. “You bring me my jackass, I give you yours.”
“There’s just one problem.”
“Harry’s gonna be real sorry to hear that.”
“The jackass, he—well, he got sick—something he ate, maybe.”
I heard the crunch of plastic as Coogler tightened his fist around the phone.
“I had to call the vet,” I told him.
A chill traveled down the phone line; it suddenly felt like I was clutching an icicle to my ear. “What the fuck are you saying to me, punk?”
“I have what you want,” I said, “only—it ain’t inside the jackass anymore.”
“Is it damaged?”
“No.”
“All five intact?”
“Yeah.”
I heard him exhale.
“Okay. Then I guess you won’t need a full hour after all, not without a jackass to wrangle. Thirty minutes. Come alone. Every minute you’re late, there’ll be a little less of Harry here waiting for you. Are you feeling me, chief?”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do …
“And Harry,” Coogler said, “he’s praying on it.”
6.
* * *
I hung up the phone and staggered from the kiosk on rubbery legs. Helped myself to a hit of the good stuff Walt had left on the bar slab. Walt opened his mouth to object, closed it again, and mentally deducted what I drank from my next paycheck. I wondered how he’d settle things with Enrique; maybe he could put the donkey to work, have him plow a few yards until the debt was squared.
“The big guy’s got Muffet,” I said. “Says he’ll kill him, he doesn’t get his yayo back.” I prayed Walt hadn’t sampled too much of the wares.
“Big guy?” Shelby said, frowning. “Are we still talking about Nicolas Cage?”
I gave a weary laugh and then told her what was going on: “It all started with a chupacabra …”
To her credit, Shelby heard me out. Then she shook her head as if to unscramble what I’d told her. “This is some kind of joke
, right?” She looked at each of us in turn, even shot a fishy glance at Enrique, as if she suspected the jackass was in on the gag too. “You’re making fun of the townie, is that it?”
“I wish it was and I wish we were, Doc.”
“This town, I swear …” She gave a give-me-strength sigh.
“Old man Grabowski,” she said, “he’s really dead?”
“The big guy—Coogler—he shot him in the back like it was nothing.”
Her eyes fired with fury. I made a mental note to never get on her bad side.
Walt said, “What are you gonna do, Reggie?”
I noticed he didn’t say ‘we.’
“Don’t see what other choice I got,” I said. “I’m gonna do what Coogler says.”
I started bundling the bricks of coke into the same grain sack I’d used to carry Gizmo. The hole Walt had cut in one of the bags, I patched with duct tape.
“This is crazy,” Shelby said. “You have to call the police.”
“There’s no time for that,” I said. “And Coogler said no cops, else he’ll start carving Muffet up.”
“Besides,” Walt said. “Reggie’s persona non grata with Sheriff Jaynes after that Backseat Strangler thing. The Strangler’s lawyer says Reggie used excessive force making his citizen’s arrest, reckons he can get the charges dropped. The Sheriff’s kinda salty about it. So you can forget about the cavalry riding to the rescue.”
“What about Constable Gooch?” Shelby said.
“You didn’t hear about his balls?” Walt said.
“And I don’t want to.”
Shelby looked me up and down like she was trying to picture me as a hero.
“But—but you’re just a strip club bouncer, for God’s sake!”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Doc,” I said. “But I don’t see no one else stepping up.”
Shelby glanced at Walt.
He promptly snatched Enrique’s IV-bag from Marlene. “Hey, I’m nursing the jackass here.”
Shelby looked me hard in the eye. “We’ll take my truck.”
“We?”
She hurriedly packed her supplies back in her medicine bag. “Someone may need medical attention.”
“My money’s on Reggie,” Walt said.
“And you’re in no fit state to drive,” Shelby added.
I glanced down at myself. “It’s just a few bumps and bruises, is all.”
“You’re drunk, is what I meant.”
“Half-drunk,” I said. “I wasn’t, you think I’d be doing this?”
She finished packing her medicine bag and stared me down.
I said, “You sure about this, Doc? These boys; they’re some serious bad news hombres.” Point of fact, what the fuck was I thinking here?
“You can try and talk me out of it while we’re driving,” Shelby said.
“Fair enough.”
She reached under the back of her jersey and snatched a pistol from a waistband holster. “Whoa!” we all said. Shelby shrugged. “You didn’t seriously think I’d come unarmed to a place like this after midnight?” She checked the pistol and returned it to the holster. Walt said, “A place like what?”
He returned the IV-bag to Marlene, went behind the bar and reached under the slab, pulled up a shotgun and tossed it to me. “I want this one back.”
The last shotgun he loaned me, I’d lost in a firefight with those Damn Dirty Apes.
“I’ll do my best.”
I gave him a nod and he nodded back; it’s a guy thing.
“Soon as we’re gone,” I said to Walt, “call Martha Gooch back, get through to Randy-Ray, try and convince him this is bigger than his balls.”
Walt whistled through his teeth. “I’ll try.”
I glanced around The Henhouse as if for the last time; I wouldn’t be missing much, but I’d miss it all the same.
I slung the sack of coke over one shoulder, propped Walt’s shotgun against the other. Walt said, “What about Muffet’s ugly fucking dog?”
And just like that, he’d given me a plan. Admittedly it wasn’t much of a plan. But even a dumbass plan was better than no plan at all. “Walt, I could kiss you!”
“The hell you will.”
Walt fetched Gizmo from the stockroom, and I tucked the dog under my arm and went outside to Shelby’s truck, where she was gunning the engine impatiently.
She glanced at Gizmo. “Do I even want to know?”
“Probably not.”
Shelby left it at that; she hit the go-pedal and the truck lurched forward and we roared away …
Into the night, and to almost certain death.
SIX
TESTICULAR FORTITUDE
1.
* * *
For Constable Randy-Ray Gooch, the whole shebang started with a tingling sensation around the perineum, and the underside of his scrotum. It was not, at first, an entirely unpleasant sensation. A little like when he was setting a new personal best on his exercise bike, and his balls started prickling with pins-and-needles. But then the tingling turned to a rampant jailhouse itch, and there was nothing pleasant about that. No, sir. No amount of scratching could satisfy the itch. And by God, it was not for want of trying; he could hardly keep his hands out of his uniform pants. Soon, he was tearing out pubes by the fistful, like a frantic dog with the mange. Anything to get more purchase on his inflamed nutsack. Frankly it was a poor example to be setting around town. Hard to lay down the law with your hand down your pants. Pulling over some gal for a traffic violation, he’d felt like Harvey Keitel in the Bad Lieutenant, forcing female drivers into lewd displays while he mauled his meat.
Then the swelling started. Like any man in his situation, the first thing he did was ignore it, and pray it went away. Day four of the problem, he emerged from the shower, dropped the towel from around his waist, and said to Martha, “You notice anything different, hon?” His cock looked like a pitiful pale snake that’d choked to death while swallowing a hippity-hop. His balls had swollen to the size of grapefruits. They were cobwebbed with livid purple veins, and seemed to be visibly pulsating. And by now his pubic hair had molted entirely, which really dropped the curtain on the horror show. Martha Gooch screamed and fainted dead away on the bathroom floor.
When she’d recovered, under interrogation from her husband, Martha broke down and tearfully confessed to buying a batch of bootleg laundry detergent from a bucket seller. First wash, she’d used it to clean Randy-Ray’s jockey shorts. And in Martha’s defense, those shorts had come out dazzling whiter than white. “Damn you, woman!” said Randy-Ray. “I give you a plenty fair allowance. Your eye for a bargain may just cost me my manhood.”
Reluctantly he went and saw his doctor. Dropped his drawers, saying: “Now it’s probably nothing—” The doctor had him rushed by lights-and-siren ambulance to the hospital emergency ward.
And that’s where I met him, shortly after the Backseat Strangler thing, and he told me all about it while I was doped to the gills on painkillers, and a captive audience—so if you think I’ve told you more than you wanted to hear about Randy-Ray Gooch’s privates, well, I sympathize.
After treatment, the swelling went down some—deflating from the size of grapefruits, to baseballs—and he was discharged from hospital and returned to work. To hammock his tender testicles, the doctors had given him the truss to wear under his uniform pants; the bandage mankini I’ve previously, and would hope memorably described. His balls remained bald as Yul Brynner. Randy-Ray was convinced the problem was psychological; that he would not sprout a single pubic hair until he’d brought the bucket selling sonofabitch to justice.
So he started kicking down doors.
Gingerly.
Rounding up the usual town ne’er do wells, he put the squeeze on them until he got an address. According to Gooch’s intel, the bucket seller was operating out of the old train yard, having converted an abandoned cattle car into his makeshift laboratory. He staked out the place over several nights, huddled in his u
nmarked Bronco with an icepack nestled against his nuts. And around the time I was riding Enrique to The Henhouse, Gooch had caught his sworn enemy in the act.
The bucket seller, wearing an army surplus gas mask, was mixing a fresh batch of laundry detergent in an old clawfoot bathtub, stirring the seething witch’s brew with a canoe oar. His cattle car laboratory was cluttered with a dozen or more heavy-duty plastic drums, plus the stockpiled chemicals required to manufacture his counterfeit Tide. As Randy-Ray stormed the lab, the bucket seller’s eyes widened in surprise through the plastic window of his gas mask.
“Drop the oar! Lemme see those hands!” Randy-Ray yelled at him, his service revolver shaking in his fist. Gooch would later wonder how he’d resisted the urge to just blow the punk away and plant a throwdown piece on him.
The bucket seller did as Randy-Ray told him. Gooch shoved him back roughly against the wall of the cattle car. Clawing the gas mask from his face, Gooch identified the punk as a two-bit yokel wastrel named Dougie Pruitt.
“You fucked up good this time, Pruitt,” Gooch said. “You should’ve stuck to cooking crank like your momma. You’re in the big leagues now, son.”
Then he groined the sonofabitch with a savage jack of his knee.
Pruitt crumpled to the ground, wheezing in agony.
“And that’s just for starters,” Gooch promised him.
Gooch gave the punk a little time to recover, relishing his pain. Then he ordered him to start loading the drums of detergent from the cattle car and into the bed of his Bronco truck. And that’s what was happening when Martha Gooch patched Walt’s call through to the radio mike in the Bronco.
“Damn it,” Gooch said, “I told that woman I was not to be disturbed. What’s the big emergency, Walt? You got a phony ID needs my immediate attention?”
“It’s a little more serious than that, Randy-Ray.”
“Yeah? Tell that to my balls.”
Walt told Randy-Ray the whole sorry story; at least, Walt hoped he was speaking to Gooch, and that Randy-Ray wasn’t literally holding the radio mike to his crotch.