by Del Howison
Wait a minute. He’s supposed to help him stop drinking.
Drinking, yeah. But not cannibalism …
“Um, Dwight?” Bob V. said.
“On it,” Dwight assured him. “The soup.”
He walked into the kitchen. There was a clean, empty pan on the stove, and a can opener and a can of chicken noodle soup on the pink Formica counter beside it. Chicken noodle soup was Dwight’s favorite.
Maybe that’s a sign.
Of what?
The stove was gas. He turned on the burner, and lifted up the pan. Turned on the faucet to run the water. The sound of the stream filled his ears. White noise.
Then he looked up and to the left, on top of the refrigerator.
Bottles. Most of them two-thirds to half-full. Tequila. Scotch. Gin. Glittering and shimmering in gauzy halos of light; as if behind gels and scrims and wide-angle lenses.
Beside the can of chicken noodle soup, a roll of paper towels.
He thought about how Bob had let Angelo walk right out of the room with someone to eat.
He thought about how much Angelo had said he wanted to stop eating people.
He thought about the broken bridge with all its body parts.
He thought about how handsome Bob was, and what a fucker he was.
Dwight’s father had taught him a lot of things. How to swear. How to hit. How to drink.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, son.”
Wrong, Dad. So very wrong.
He got down the bottles, swigging a little out of each one.
“How’s that soup coming?” Bob called jovially.
“Just fine,” Dwight called back.
Dwight wadded the paper towels into the bottles. Then he found shit to make seals—pieces of plastic plates, other stuff. He got into it. It had been a long time. Some things you never forget. Bicycles, Molotov cocktails.
He was getting ready to light them when Bob walked into the kitchen. He was holding Angelo’s jacket like it was Elvis’s cape.
He said, “Everything okay in here?” His glance ticked toward the bottles, lined up in a row. “What are you doing?”
“Yes, Bob V., everything is okay,” Dwight told him.
Then he picked up the soup pan and swung it at Bob like a baseball bat, catching him full in the face.
The man slammed hard against the wall. Blood spurted from his nose and he shouted, “Gah! Gah!” as he flailed at Dwight.
Dwight grabbed the tequila bottle, lit the paper towels wadded down in it, and thrust it at Bob, igniting his black T-shirt. It smoked. Bob screamed, so Dwight hit him with the pan again, in the face again. Once more, just for good luck, and Dwight dropped the bottle on the floor. He gathered four others against his chest, lit them quickly, and ran out of the kitchen.
Elario had stood up; he was staggering toward the kitchen, yelling in Spanish. Dwight charged him and knocked him over. Then he stomped on his face and started throwing the bottles at the walls. They exploded. Fire blazed everywhere.
He ran out of the room in the same direction where he had seen Angelo leave with the babe, shouting. “Angelo! Stop!”
Angelo burst out of a room at the end of the hall. He was naked and erect; he looked past Dwight to the smoke pouring out of the living room and yelled, “What’s going on?”
The girl’s face appeared under his arm; she screamed, “Daddy!” and pushed past Angelo, grabbing his wrist, letting go, rushing over to Dwight, pushing him backward. She ran into the blazing room, and Dwight did nothing to stop her.
“What the fuck did you do?” Angelo bellowed.
There was a roar from the fire, and a lot of agonized screaming. It was the chick.
Angelo grabbed Dwight’s wrist and they raced out the back door of the house, out to the small backyard, where Angelo threw Dwight to the ground and covered him with his body.
And then the house exploded. It just went up, whoosh! Wooden boards and electrical wires and roof tiles and furniture and a bathtub; it just went up in a fireball, whirling and churning, dropping stuff everywhere like bombs.
Angelo said, “Come on!” and heaved Dwight to his feet. Then he dragged him along to their Beemer, which was still down the street at the curb, and they got in that sucker and drove off just as the very first neighbors started poking their heads out of their houses.
“What the hell happened?” Angelo demanded.
Dwight hung his head. He said, “I saved your life.”
Angelo didn’t appear to have heard him. “There must have been a fucking meth lab in that house,” he said. He gestured to the backseat. “Get me a blanket, for Christ’s sake.”
They usually kept a blanket back there so they could cover up a victim if they had to. Like when they pulled over and grabbed someone off the street.
As Dwight covered Angelo’s chest and privates with the blanket, Angelo glanced over at him and said again, “What happened?”
Dwight sighed. Heavily. “I don’t know. Bob got up to make Elario some soup, and the next thing I know, he’s throwing flaming bottles of alcohol at me and they’re just, like, exploding! He went crazy!” Dwight covered his face, wishing that Lou S. had half his acting talent. Just for Lou’s sake. “I thought I was going to die. I fought him off—I got him good—but by then everything was on fire!”
“And you came to save me. Damn it, Dwight.” Angelo welled up. “I’ll bet we do some research, it turns out Bob had some grudge against us. Maybe we ate someone he knew. Maybe he thought we owed him royalties off some song he wrote that sounds like one of ours.”
Maybe he just wanted to be your new best friend, the fucker.
“Screw it,” Angelo said, waving his hand. He started laughing the laughter of a guy who had just nearly died. “Screw the metaphor. Let’s go for the epiphany, dude! If life’s going to be dangerous anyway, we might as well enjoy ourselves.”
He grinned at his blood brother, his friend, his fellow cannibal. “Goddammit, Dwight, let’s go out and find some hot young chick to eat. And if they catch us, I hear the drugs they use to kill you are fucking righteous.”
Dwight said absolutely nothing. He was back in the zone, back in the silence.
But what he thought was, I gotta get my butt to CoDA.
I am too codependent by half.
BLOODY MARY MORNING
JOHN FARRIS
“SO YOU WERE in St. Bart’s for four days,” George Whitaker said to his wife Lisa, “and Lyle just happened to show up.”
“Yes,” Lisa said.
“Happened to show up.”
“Yes.”
Thunder shook their limousine, which wasn’t moving in rush-hour traffic downtown. Lisa flinched slightly. She didn’t like thunderstorms. She didn’t like being cooped up with George anytime he was taking a certain tone with her. Rain pelted down.
George said idly in his soft Texas drawl, “Did you evah wondah what the fuck kinda name is Lyle?”
“No,” Lisa mumbled, scrolling on her BlackBerry. Sitting as far away in the back of the limo from George as she could get. He occupied the corner where the bar was. Eight forty-two and he was having a Bloody Mary morning. “I don’t know.” Five seconds ticked by. She didn’t look up. She knew what expression she’d see on his lean, handsome, sardonic face. “Scottish,” she said. “Lyle is a Scot on his mother’s side.”
“Is he hung pretty good, Lise?”
Lisa breathed deeply enough for George to hear. Another point for him. She imagined which smile he was wearing. She wished the goddamned limo would move.
“I’m … not going to do this, George. I have … you know I have a presentation to make at ten o’clock. I have sweated my fanny off on this deal, and—”
“My little career gal.”
“Just shut.”
“Of whom I am so proud.”
“The fuck up. I didn’t inherit a company, George, I have worked—” More thunder jolted her. Lisa’s lips drew back in a rictus. They moved a few feet. Stopped. There w
as a bus right on the limo’s bumper.
“Jump out of your skin?”
“I hate—”
“Almost as fast as you can jump out of your clothes when ol’ Lyle shows up.”
Now she made herself look at George. Wanting him to see the hatred in her face.
George had one of those playful little smiles marinated in rattlesnake venom. Her expression didn’t bother him a bit.
“Lyle, Lyle, crocodile. My guess is with a pussy name like that, he has to be haulin’ big lumber to interest a connoisseur like yourself. How long did it take Lyle to get to you, ovah there in sunny St. Bart’s?”
“Oh, God.”
Lisa stowed away her BlackBerry, locked up her attaché case, and reached for an umbrella.
“I’ve always been generous in sharin’ my little adventures with you, Lise. So I’m up in Washington getting my ass filleted at a RICO hearing … you didn’t spend the night with him in our digs? That would’ve violated one of our rules. We only wake up in the mornin’ with people we’re married or uthuhwise related to.”
“Oh, God.”
“Hey, where’re you going?”
“I’m walking! I mean, this time for good!”
“What do you mean? Walkin’ out on me?”
“Yes, you asshole.”
“Aw, c’mon, Lisa. Just tell me you didn’t wake up in bed next to Lyle with the toucans chatterin’ in the palm trees or whatevah the hell toucans do. And I’ll leave the subject alone.” His voice took on a familiar whine. “I had kind of a bad week, Lisa. Henry says I could go to Club Fed for ten years. Damn it, nobody is playin’ fair with me.”
He lunged in her direction, reached past her, and took hold of the door on Lisa’s side just as she was opening it. He elbowed her back into her seat. Lisa grimaced.
“Hey, just sit still a minute. I got somethin’ for you.”
George picked up his own Hermès attaché, put it on his lap, undid gold locks while Lisa struggled to get her breath back from the cruel elbowing. She looked at him, lips apart. Not afraid. Just sick of him, and contemptuous.
“Asshole,” she said again.
George nodded soberly, as if they had concluded a deal. He bit his lower lip momentarily, then took out a black steel Heckler & Koch .32 automatic and shot her in the forehead.
Her head rocked back on the leather seat. The look in her eyes was quick-frozen, a fish on ice. Then her head sagged forward. Her body remained upright, wedged into the corner.
George’s vision was a little blurred. He blinked but couldn’t clear the cloud obscuring the sight in his left eye. He took off his amber-tinted, steel-rimmed glasses and saw that a drop of her blood had spattered the lens. He didn’t have anything handy with which to wipe it off. He put his glasses back on in spite of the annoying blood spot.
The limousine had been moving but stopped again. George leaned forward, the automatic still in his right hand, and knocked on the privacy panel with the butt. When the black glass slid down the chauffeur looked around at him. George held the .32 below seat level.
“Yes suh, Mr. George? I do apologize but the traffic lights is all flummoxed this mornin’.”
“Hey, don’t give it another thought, Delano.” George’s mouth was very dry but his voice was steady as she goes. “Delano, I’m truly sorreh; you know I could kick myself.”
The chauffeur looked puzzled. From his angle behind the wheel he couldn’t make out Lisa’s still form back there.
“Excuse me, Mr. George?”
“I forgot to ask you: How are the wife and kids?”
“Oh, well, they be doin’ just fine, suh.” Delano blinked. “Mr. George? Pardon me, but there’s somethin’ on one lens of your—”
“I had a Bloody Mary on the way in. As is my mornin’ custom.”
“Well, sure. Thass right.”
“It must be the Tabasco, Delano. I wonder if you have a tissue?”
“Surely do.”
When Delano looked away from him and reached for the box of tissues on the other seat, George raised the H & K and shot his chauffeur over the right ear. When Delano’s foot left the brake pedal, the limo surged forward ten feet and ran into the back of a double-parked UPS truck. Stopped there.
George picked himself up off the floor. He reckoned, peering through the heavy rain, that they were still two blocks from his office.
When he was seated again he reopened his attaché case and laid the pistol inside next to the Van Cleef & Arpels box that contained a ruby bracelet he had designed for Lisa. He looked at her. She looked back at him. The hole in her forehead was oozing a little. Otherwise she looked okay, really. It wasn’t a very large hole.
Blood dripped from the left lens of his glasses and fell on the Van Cleef & Arpels box. So the morning could have gone either way, George reflected. Pay or play. Lisa had played, and collected her payment.
“I may be an asshole,” he said to his wife’s corpse, which looked hazy through that smudge of her blood, “but you’re fuckin’ dead.”
George opened the door on his side and stepped out into the slash of winter rain, attaché case in his left hand. With his other hand, he pulled up the collar of his Burberry. He strode toward the office through an obstacle course of potentially lethal umbrellas. Homs, horns, horns in the streets. The irritability level of his fellow citizens was reaching blow-off proportions. With cold rain in his face, George still felt calm, even jaunty. But the damned bloodstain wasn’t washing off his glasses. He reached up and removed them. Then he was more than half-blind, but at a familiar corner.
He paused there, shuddering, and wiped the back of his free hand across his eyes and matted lashes. He was jostled and almost lost his balance.
For the rest of the short walk to the building where George’s company occupied three high floors, he kept his head down and into the blowing rain, wiping and blinking. Barely able to see anything.
Then he was inside the huge marbled atrium with a hundred office workers or visitors headed for one bank of elevators or another. All the people were mere shadows to his eyes. Lightning, then thunder outside. The atrium lights dimmed momentarily.
George was drenched. Should’ve taken Lisa’s umbrella. Other than that he wasn’t thinking about what else he had left behind him in the stalled limo on the traffic-choked street.
Ten minutes upstairs in his private office suite, he reckoned. No more. That would be long enough to remove the six million in bearer bonds from his safe along with mucho cash, after he made one phone call. His Falcon Jet would be fueled and ready for the two-hour flight to Panama. From there he’d move on to a well-stocked hideaway, obtained on the basis of his father’s experience and wisdom.
George, always know when the exits are about to be closed.
Given the traffic pileup outside, call it thirty minutes before the cops got a peek inside the limo. By the time they began seriously to desire a conversation with George Whitaker, he’d be high over the Gulf of Mexico having another Bloody Mary.
Ole, motherfuckers.
Express elevators. Five people waiting. George joined them. Their faces were indistinct. A mother with a little girl who looked to be about eight years old. Black woman with a large superstructure, carrying a purse the size of a saddlebag. Young couple wearing school jackets who couldn’t get enough of nuzzling each other. George reached for the glasses he’d stowed away. The inside pocket of his Burberry felt sticky, as if someone had poured pancake syrup in there. He winced and tried to get a grip on a temple bar of the glasses as he followed the others aboard the newly arrived elevator.
The doors closed. The black woman sniffed and looked around at everyone as if she smelled something dirty, or ominous. The mother with the kid was by the control panel, the girl calling out, “Your floors, please.”
“Forty-four,” George requested loudly.
The girl hit forty-seven by mistake.
“Damn it, I said forty-four!” George snapped, surprising everyone by his tone. T
he Teen Queen’s husky boyfriend glowered at him as George succeeded in freeing his glasses from the stickiness in his coat pocket.
The other passengers reacted with varying degrees of shock and horror, instinctively pressing away from him.
“Mama!” the little girl said shrilly. “His hand’s got blood on it!”
A small dog with a flat pugnacious face poked its head out of the black woman’s tote and began excitedly to bark.
George stared at his incarnate hand and the soaked cuff of his trench coat, at the glasses he was holding. The spot of Lisa’s blood that had left the limo with him was still there, round as a quarter on the lens it had spattered. Now it seemed to be producing blood of its own, drops at the rate of one every three seconds, without diminishing in size.
“Oh, my God!” the Teen Queen said. “You are bleeding!”
“No, I am not!” George snapped again, shoving the glasses behind his back. “It isn’t me! I mean, I’m all right! It’s not even blood!”
“Oh, yes, it is,” the black woman said, stroking her manic little dog with one hand. “I was an ER nurse for seventeen years, and I know what fresh blood smell like! Mister, you done hurt yourself even if you don’t recollect how it happened. You best get off the elevator right now and—shut up that yappin’, Marquesa!” To the woman with the small girl, both of them looking petrified, she instructed, “Hit the ’mergency button if you please, because I also knows a ’mergency when I sees one.”
“Don’t anyone touch a damn thing!” George snarled. “I have to get to my office. I—I’m late for an important meeting! Just let me off and y’all go about your own business!”
He had no sooner finished speaking than the elevator jolted to a stop. The lights went out. The other passengers gasped and squealed. The dog went nuts.
“It’s nothing!” George said. “The power has gone off. It’s the storm outside. Don’t be gettin’ your panties in a bunch.” He felt blood dripping off the hand that was holding the glasses behind his back. “We can’t fall,” he insisted. “We are perfectly safe.”
“Yeah, everybody be cool,” the high school jock advised.