Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “ ‘Glory and Eternity,’ ” I read aloud.

  Father Blue Hair became excited. His smooth tan face moved very close to mine, close enough to show the hairline fissures at the corners of his eyes and the pouches at the ends of his mouth. His eyes were as devoid of color as puddles on asphalt. They were nice eyes for that, brimming with kindness.

  “You know the inscription,” he said, and I felt his breath, warm and sweet as a kitten’s on my face. “Do you see the cross, Amos? Do you see it?”

  “Pretty cross.” I smiled when I said it. The words tickled my lips. I said them again and giggled.

  “Yes, yes. But where is it?”

  “Shiny. I can see my face in it.”

  “Where?”

  I started to cry. Hot tears left molten tracks down my cheeks and puddled in my ears.

  “There, there, Amos. Daddy’s sorry he yelled. Rest, now. We’ll talk later.” A towel made from the same cloud-stuff as the bed stroked my face gently, mopping up my tears. I slept.

  More dreams. The carnival, a rowboat on a green pond where I used to fish and tangle my line in the eel-like superstructure of the calm lily pads, a stroll along a familiar rutted clay road where ancient snapping turtles used to cross like great dusty gray beetles with the moss thick on their humped backs. The silver cross showed up in those places too, soothing places with nothing worrisome crouching in the bushes or among the reeds or behind the booths where cotton candy was sold, just the kind brown face with blue-rinsed hair breaking over one neutral eye, its lips shaping gentle questions about the cross. I decided definitely that I was in heaven, but that I was undergoing some sort of catechism that I had to pass in order to stay. I cried whenever the blue-haired man’s reaction to my answers told me they were wrong. More than anything I didn’t want to have to leave.

  A troll entered my paradise. I smelled him first, a foul animal stench, and then his misshapen shadow swam across the fluid of my eyes and crockery rattled and then the shadow swam back the other way, leaving its odor curling in the corners. It was the first smell I’d smelled in years; my olfactory sense had been on vacation, but it was back. I lay breathing poisonous air and looking at the stars overhead. There shouldn’t have been stars. Wherever I was, and I was becoming less sure that it was paradise, it felt like indoors. I closed my eyes tight and snapped them open. The stars remained. They were pale blue on a background of turquoise, spaced regularly, and formed no recognizable constellations. I moved my head left and right. The stars didn’t move with me. They were painted on the ceiling.

  I turned my head sideways. The corner of a foam-rubber pillow in a cotton slip blocked my left eye. My right saw a wall with more stars on it. I turned my head the other way. Stars on that wall too, and before it, next to the bed, a nightstand with a stainless steel tray on it with a white cloth spread on the bottom and six disposable plastic hypodermic needles lined up neatly on this cloth. A small glass brown-tinted bottle stood on the corner of the tray. That explained the rattling I’d heard.

  What I did next was very hard. I pried myself up on one elbow and peeled aside the thin yellow fuzzy blanket covering me. I slipped off my elbow the first two times and the blanket was heavier than it looked, it was made of woven iron with steel reinforcement, but I puffed and sweated and strained my eyeballs and finally lay unencumbered on the sheet, naked except for one of those thin white cotton hospital gowns that fasten in back. My head was heavy and sloshed when I moved it. I tried not to. My left arm was sore. I looked at it without trying to lift it. The underside of the wrist was dotted with blue holes. Someone had been using me for a dartboard and there was a fresh set of darts waiting for another game on the tray on the nightstand.

  Light found its way into the room through green curtains drawn over an ordinary window in the right wall. The semi-opaque fabric diffused the light and I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon. My watch was gone with my clothes. I didn’t know what day it was, and then I felt the cold touch of terror that comes to a man who isn’t sure what month it is either, or what year. Psychiatrists would have a name for that. The smug bastards have a name for everything. They would probably call it the Van Winkle Syndrome.

  I heard footsteps muffled by a wall. They had a familiar cadence, sort of a thump-thump with a beat between the thumps, like someone walking a piece of furniture that was too heavy to lift. They grew louder.

  I moved as fast as a man who has been kept drugged and locked up in a room for days or months or years can move, which is not fast. I pulled myself to the edge of the mattress and leaned on my right shoulder and reached out with both hands until I had the brown bottle between my palms, and then I pried at the plastic top. I was lucky. It wasn’t a childproof cap and I had it off in five minutes, or it seemed that long anyway.

  A key rattled in a lock. I sobbed audibly, snatched at the needles, scattering them and pricking my hand, finally got hold of one and got its point inside the mouth of the bottle on the second try. I pulled back the plunger. It made a greedy slurping noise and colorless liquid filled the hollow plastic handle. I didn’t know how good a dose it was. Maybe it was fatal. Whatever it was it went well over the top measuring mark. Air stirred in the room. I smelled Paul. I fumbled the bottle back onto the tray without its top and let my left arm drop to the floor. I had the needle in my right hand pinned under my body. I hoped I wouldn’t stick myself or lose sensation in the trapped arm.

  Paul’s footsteps were a long time thumping into the room. I was afraid he’d seen what I was doing. Then the cadence started. I lay with my eyes closed and felt his shadow pass over me on his way past the foot of the bed to the nightstand. Lord, he stank.

  “Kicked off your covers, huh? Guess you’re ready for another helping.”

  There was a two-foot space between the bed and the stand. He sidled along it and turned his back to set down a smaller tray containing a blue plastic pitcher and matching cup. My eyes were open now. His back muscles tensed. He’d seen the disarray on the nightstand.

  I came up off the bed in a kind of slow-motion, but I must have been faster than I seemed because he was just turning when I got my left arm across his throat and stuck the needle into the carotid artery on the side of his perfunctory neck and rammed home the plunger.

  It didn’t work. He shrugged out of my grip like a bull bursting through a ribbon of crepe, roaring and clawing at the thing that stung him. He looked at the needle in his palm for a stupid instant, then dashed it to the floor and forearmed me in the throat. But I had lost my balance and was already falling backwards across the bed, missing much of the blow’s force. I wheezed anyway. I landed on my back on the mattress and bounced and then Paul was on top of me, hot and heavy and spraying my face with spittle through his bared brown teeth and stinking like a slaughterhouse in July. He wrenched my right arm up and back and I yelled and he got the fingers of his other hand inside my mouth and tried to tear loose my jaw. I bit down hard, tasting the stink of him on my tongue. He whined keeningly through his teeth from the pain of it but he didn’t let go. I had shot my assailant through with vitamins or something equally counter to my welfare and was going to die with my mouth gaping horribly. Rynearson’s laughing-skull ashtray flashed to mind. My strength was going. I was beating the back of his head with my left fist, but it was like pounding a tire. I couldn’t get any force behind the blows. We might both have been underwater. My jaw muscles creaked.

  Suddenly my right arm was free. I felt his grip slipping and threw off his hand just like that. Panicking, he tried to regain the hold, only to grasp empty air as I got my palm against his ugly face and shoved. His fingers tensed mightily on my jaw, but it was only a spasm. They slid out of my mouth, smearing my chin with blood from the knuckles my teeth had torn. He stopped resisting the pressure of my hand on his face and lay like a sack of iron on my chest.

  We were like that for a while, reconstructing a depraved frame from a Fellini movie, and then I pushed and slid and finally rolled out from und
er him and went down on my hands and knees on a spongy green carpet, panting and dry-retching, spitting out blood and the taste of Paul. I wondered if I would ever eat again. I wondered if I would ever care. I wondered what I was doing on my hands and knees in a strange room with the breeze fanning my bare backside.

  I pulled myself to my feet, using the bedframe and leaning against the star-papered wall. The headboard was six feet of dark oak, very old, and carved all over with fruit and braided vines showing the marks of the chisel. I looked down at Paul, snoring on his face on the mattress with an arm like a bent log hanging over the edge. If someone didn’t turn him over he could suffocate. Yes, he could. I moved away from the bed.

  The blue plastic pitcher still stood on the nightstand. I lifted it in both hands and sniffed its contents. No smell. I tipped it up, took some of the liquid in my mouth, and sloshed it around, not swallowing. Water, with an added metallic taste that took me back to my college boxing days. Liquid protein. I swallowed the mouthful and waited five minutes with the wall holding me up. When I didn’t fall asleep or feel like running up the ceiling fixture I drank some more. I set down the pitcher and snatched the white cloth off the other tray, scattering the rest of the needles, and mopped Paul’s blood off my face. My flesh stung. I explored my features with cautious fingertips. I had a scab on my nose and my right eye was tender and a little swollen. My front teeth moved a little when my tongue touched them from behind. I was lucky. I could have been seriously hurt if I hadn’t broken my fall downstairs with my face.

  The room had two doors. One would belong to a closet. Clothes are kept in closets. Trouble was, the one that looked most likely was clear across the room. I took some deep breaths and squared my shoulders and started pulling myself along the wall the long way.

  It wasn’t much of a hike. Guys with one leg and cancer eating their insides make lots longer ones for the research foundations. I leaned against the wall until my breath stopped whistling and my heart got through whacking my breastbone, and then I tried the knob. Of course it was locked. I worked my way around the rest of the distance, which brought me back to the bed, and went through Paul’s pockets. Of course they were empty. I leaned against the wall and felt my brow wrinkle. Then I grinned. I reversed directions and went back past the closet door, moving a little faster now. About crawling speed. I bumped the wall from time to time for reassurance. I grasped the knob on the other door and pulled. It came open. A ring of keys wobbled from the key in the lock.

  The fourth key opened the closet, where my clothes hung among a dozen suits in muted colors with tailor’s labels sewn inside the jackets. My wallet was in my inside breast pocket where I’d left it, contents intact. The packet of hundred-dollar bills was not. I found my wristwatch in another pocket. The battery was working. The hands read 7:10. The calendar said it was Sunday. I’d entered Rynearson’s house on Friday.

  My shirt was on the hanger — it was a wooden one, I hoped I’d remember to thank Rynearson for that — and I took off the hospital gown and got dressed. I found my shoes on the closet floor with my socks rolled up inside and put them on. Just for the hell of it I went through all the pockets in the tailored suits. I found two silk handkerchiefs and a book of matches. I wondered what a man with a jade lighter would want with matches. I put everything back and walked around the bed to where I’d started. I was doing fine now. I felt like a one-legged milking stool. Paul snored.

  The drawer in the nightstand was empty. I left it open and looked at the two needles left on the tray. Selecting one, I filled it from the brown bottle and held up the point and squirted a short thin stream, testing it. I was ready to talk to someone.

  23

  OUTSIDE THE ROOM was a short hallway paneled in yellow, with a door standing open to an unoccupied half-bathroom across the way and at the far end a square of strong sunlight. I locked the door to the room with Paul in it, dropped the ring of keys into my pocket, and crept toward the light, holding the needle underhand with the point forward like a knife. The hall opened into a room I knew. It was the one in which Rynearson kept his personal collection of eastern art and antiques. The light slanted in through an unshaded window in the east wall and lay solidly on the fragile canvases and paper-thin stuff of the ornate rug, probably for the first time since they had taken up residence. I didn’t like that. The pieces of the Ming vase I had shattered on Paul’s head had been swept up, but I found them still lying in a wicker wastebasket in the kneehole of a fey teak desk with an onyx pen set on top, and I didn’t like that either. A man who wears a smoking jacket should be more careful about his things.

  The desk drawers were locked. I selected a likely looking key from the ring and it worked. All the drawers were empty except the top one on the left side, which contained my Smith & Wesson in its holster. I unleathered it, swung out the cylinder, said hello to the brass cartridges, snapped it back in place, strapped the holster to my belt, dropped the needle into the drawer and locked it. When in doubt go with the weapon you know. With it in hand I went through an open door into the next room.

  It was an office, with only a dark tapestry that Christ might have seen hung on one wall to speak of Rynearson’s weakness. A glass cabinet held more needles and two small brown bottles like the one in the bedroom. The place looked untidy for a man of his habits. Three empty file drawers were stacked crookedly, one atop another, on the big modern desk. Two of the desk drawers hung open with nothing inside. I slid out the others, and also those still in place in two tall file cabinets in the corner. The same. The air had a charred smell. There was a fireplace in the corner near the window, with a heap of ashes in the grate. I touched them with a poker and they broke apart. It was a funny time of year to build a fire.

  I tried the handle of a gray steel safe set in the floor behind the desk. Whoever closed it last had either forgotten or hadn’t bothered to spin the dial. The door hinged open and I reached down inside and lifted out a familiar-looking packet.

  I counted the bills; they were all there. The safe was empty otherwise. I stood there with my lips pursed, riffling the bills. Then I put them away inside my jacket and got back to work.

  At the end of the hall opposite the living room was a dressing room in a five-foot space between walls, containing an upright hickory bench like a church pew, its curved seat polished by contact with many rumps. A wardrobe too cheesy for show held a couple of camel’s-hair overcoats and a white lab coat and some empty hangers. Rynearson’s burgundy-colored lounging outfit was draped over the bench, the slippers with dragons on the toes kicked underneath. The trousers had no pockets. In the pockets of the smoking jacket I found the ebony cigarette holder and the jade lighter. I flicked open the lighter’s lid and spun the wheel. An invisible seam popped open in the side and a thin steel rod two inches long licked out. There was a hollow in the end of the rod. I placed my thumb against it and pushed. The rod telescoped back into the lighter with some resistance and the complaint of a tiny but feisty spring concealed inside. I kept pushing until something clicked and then closed the little doors in the side.

  The lighter had no flint and there was no reservoir inside for fluid. Yet the last time I’d seen it he’d had it in his hand to light a fresh cigarette in his holder. Not long afterwards my system had started shutting down. I remembered the stinging sensation in my left arm, that I’d blamed on a pulled muscle. I thought about the hollow in the end of the spring-loaded rod.

  I pocketed the lighter and went back toward the main room, stopping along the way to unlock the bedroom door and look in on Paul. He still lay on his face on the bed, his snores shaking the frame. I locked up again and took the spiral staircase to the ground floor. I holstered the Smith. I was pretty sure now I wouldn’t need it soon. The rail stayed put this time, it was just cold brass after all, but my ankles wobbled and I leaned on it plenty. I was sweating again by the time I reached bottom. I rested against the banister for a moment before continuing.

  There was nothing for me there. The shop
didn’t look any different. All the windows were shaded. I punched NO SALE on the cash register on a glass counter with moderately expensive carved jewelry on black felt inside and looked in the cash drawer. It was as clean and empty as a TV minister’s head. There was a kitchen with a breakfast nook, a full bathroom, a storeroom containing packing crates and a cot with rumpled bedding on it and artistic odds and ends on shelves and in boxes that there was no room for out front. No basement. No Eric Rynearson. My hat decorated a peg near the shop door as if I’d hung it there. That was a nice touch.

  I climbed the stairs again, stopping to rest twice on my way up. Paul’s snoring was inspired. I stood between the bed and the nightstand looking down at him for a moment, and then I grabbed a fistful of the thick matted hair on the back of his head and lifted his face and dashed the contents of the blue plastic pitcher into it. He gasped and spluttered and went on snoring.