The Big Bad

by Phil Beloin Jr.

  THE BIG BAD

  By

  PHIL BELOIN JR.

  P.O. Box 84

  Boonsboro, Maryland 21713-0084

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Big Bad Copyrigh t 2010

  By Phil Beloin Jr.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition—2010

  ISBN 1-59133-388-1

  978-1-59133-388-3

  Book Design: S. A. Reilly

  Cover Illustration © S. A. Reilly

  Manufactured/Printed in the United States of America

  2010

  This first one is for my wife. You know why.

  Acknowledgements:

  To my first readers, Steve Arthur and Cindy Cooney. And especially to Dell Smith, whose advice, critiques, and friendship pulled this book together.

  1

  I drink too much. Let’s leave it at that.

  I came to, unsure where I was. Someone was playing pinball inside my head and getting a record-setting score. My eyes were as thick and gooey as pancake batter and burning pitch filled my gut. My mouth was so dried out I didn’t even think about lighting up a smoke.

  Beyond the bed, I spied a double window, the vertical blinds drawn around an air conditioner. Dim rays of daylight seeped in, highlighting the blurs around the room. An empty desk and a chair by it. An open closet a galaxy away. A bureau with stuff stacked on top. A mirror above that reflecting the ceiling fan over the bed. Looked a lot like my bedroom. I was home. Good.

  A body was next to mine. I touched her arm, my fingers tingling like they were still asleep. My hard-on was aching more than any part of me. I got between her legs, parted her, and put myself inside, feeling detached, as if it wasn’t me but someone else. She was neither wet nor dry, just lying there like a blowup doll. I couldn’t make out the face or hair color and her skin felt cool when I put my chest on hers.

  "Lift them legs, honey," I said.

  She ignored me so I started pumping and her pretending to be asleep excited me and I couldn’t hold back. My orgasm exploded through my entire body. I rolled off, weak and tired, my heart thumping, and my headache worse.

  "That was great," I muttered.

  She didn’t say a thing. No big deal. Just some whore anyway.

  I needed to piss but I always liked a cigarette after good sex. The pack was on the table pushed against the mattress. I reached out, but stopped right off. Something was by the foot of the bed. Something that shouldn’t have been there. I had no idea where I left my gun.

  Squinting made the pain wrap around my skull, but I was able to make out a long line of deep green, twisting like a spring to a flat red flourish. What the fuck is that? D.T.’s screwing with you? Why not, Nick? You drink like it’s the last day before Prohibition begins again, and this time the bastards mean to keep it.

  I rubbed my eyes, getting a damp filmy crap on my fingers. I stared at that two-tone soup trying to figure it. The red had a darker red outline, and the top and sides made little half-circles. The green section had offshoots that tapered to a sharp tip. Tiny drops that I hadn’t noticed before fell from the tips. They looked like red tears.

  And then I knew what it was: a tattoo of a rose. The stem began just above the bump in an ankle, snaked along a thin calf, and wrapped around the knee to an open bud along the inner thigh. Instead of thorns, daggers that dripped blood. Nice work. The rest of her was leaning back in the shadows.

  "Hey," I called out.

  No response. What’s with the fucking mutes?

  As my sight adjusted, her form emerged from the darkness. She sat in a chair I had next to the bureau. She wasn’t very tall, but what body she had was lean and tight. The tattooed leg dangled over an armrest and the right leg was spread wide apart, her pussy hair shaved into a thin golden strip. Her blond locks covered one breast, the other defied gravity like only an implant can. She might have been twenty or eighteen. Or even younger. I was never very good with ages.

  Her head was at a crook, resting against the wall. Her eyes were closed and a dark coating had run from both nostrils into her opened mouth. She falls asleep in a chair and gets a bloody nose, I thought.

  "Hey, you," I called again.

  Still nothing. I grabbed the pillow from behind me and tossed it, hitting the side of her face just right. The top half of her body slid like a lump of butter into the bureau, her head striking it with a mushy thud. That ain’t good, Nick.

  I didn’t need to look at the woman lying next to me, but I did anyway. Another young blond with a do-me-hard body. I didn’t notice any tattoos, just some flakes of brownish red crusted under her nose. Vacant eyes, the kind of sky blue color that draws a man in, stared past me at the ceiling fan.

  I leaned back against the headboard and lit my cigarette.

  The headache wasn’t letting up. It was dead-of-summer hot, the air as unbearable as a prison sentence. I finished my smoke and crushed out my butt in the ashtray next to the bed. The ashtray was overfilled and I thought about emptying it to do something.

  I slid off the mattress, kept my eyes on the straight, and crossed the hall into the can. I sat on the sticky porcelain seat, my leg muscles stiff. Soreness was a sure sign of too much fuel. That and not remembering a damn thing from last night. Important stuff, too, like who the dead broads were and how they had spent their last hours in my apartment.

  I grabbed at the beer bottle on the sink, the backwash warm and stale. I pissed out some booze while taking some more in. Good strategy, Nick.

  I went down the hall and into the kitchen. A breakfast bar loaded with empty soldiers partitioned the living room, which looked like a twister had run through. Cushions off the sofa and matching tufted loveseat, glass shaded lamps toasted on the floor. I had paid a lot for that shit, but then I had money to burn. If I smoldered enough greenbacks, I could be even richer. A supply and demand thing, my accountant once said. I hadn’t gotten it then. Or now. He might have been joking, though; it’s tough to tell with that guy, seeing as accountants ain’t known for their sense of humor.

  Clothes were tossed all over the place; paisley patterned panties on the teakwood end tables, a sunshine yellow skirt in a pile on the floor, a pump here and over there, too. A hot pink halter-top was wedged in the recliner. What a party. Wished I remembered it.

  A brown purse had come to rest upside down on the Persian rug whose tag said it was made in Canada. Maybe the rug was an imitation—not so said the guy who sold it to me. I unsnapped the purse’s latch, and dug through the contents: all kinds of makeup, a couple of condoms, gum, a tampon and a picture of a bearded guy. Another compartment held some change, a few bills amounting to squat, a credit card, and what I was looking for: the driver’s license. The tattooed one was named Lisa Atkins and she had turned eighteen four days ago. Her address was an apartment building just across the Connecticut River in East City.

  The other purse was harder to find, hiding on the curtained window ledge behind the loveseat. Mona Christianson had turned legal over a month ago and shared an apartment with Lisa. Companions in life and death.

  Under the kitchen sink I found some disinfectant, wondered when the hell and where the hell I had bought it, and sprayed my way back to the bedroom. The entire apartment was starting to sour, that unmistakable rot of death one never gets used to floating in
the air like dust mites. I misted down the girls until the can quit working. I clicked on the ceiling fan then cranked the A.C. on high. If I could chill the bodies, it might confuse the time of death; place them somewhere else with somebody else. I had read about a fella who had tried refrigerating his dearly departed wife with central air. It hadn’t worked, but he hadn’t moved the body either. Just left her lying on their bed for the cops to find. I ain’t that stupid.

  I turned to shut the door, wanting to contain the smell, when I caught the sheen of glass from the top of the bureau drawer. It was a compact mirror covered in white powder and drops of congealed blood. Next to it, a partially filled baggie and a rolled twenty with Andy’s mad eyes staring me down.

  I used to work for the guy who controlled the drug trade in and around the capital. I was his bodyguard. I tidied up his messes. I did the shit no else had the nuts to do. Then it went bad, and I had no choice but to help the Feds send him to the joint for ten years. But that don’t belong here.

  Cocaine hadn’t killed Mona and Lisa. They thought it was coke, and they had snorted it like it was coke. But coke doesn’t kill you like that. Only heroin does. When too much enters your system too fast, your brain bleeds and your heart bursts. Mona had probably done a line first and then not feeling so swell, went and lay down. Lisa just sat in the chair and died.

  I had missed it all, blacked out in the bed. God looks after fools and drunks.

  I took the drugs into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then I took a long, ice cold shower.

  2

  In many ways this is just a simple love story. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  I had been living above a bar for the last ten or twelve years. When I came into the dough for playing stoolie, I bought the building and became a bar owner, too. At the end of the hall, next to my bedroom, was a door that dove down to the bar’s kitchen, but the stairs were blocked with all kinds of garbage. I think the previous owner was trying to keep me from sneaking down at night for some free goodies. If the junk wasn’t enough to keep me away, some nights I could hear the rats in there, scurrying around, duking it out with each other.

  A second staircase spit me out behind my brownstone, and I walked around front, the neon beer signs in the cut of the windows lit and urging. I went in, the place cool and shady, the smell of cigarettes and cigars ingrained into the fabric of the wood and furniture. The day man was sticking long necks in the cooler where the bar split at a right angle.

  John was sporting his usual colorless clothes and matching hangover. His nose was big and crimson and seemed about ready to split open. His eyes looked like egg yolks, and his face was pudgier than pizza dough. Like a lot of guys who drink too much, he’s been married to the same woman for too long. John’s hobby was building model cars, the kinds he couldn’t afford, which was just about every kind cuz he worked for me. Them dinky roadsters and speedsters were displayed on a mantle he installed near the bar when he owned the place. They’re flawless, miniature recreations. How he does it with his hands shaking like they do, I don’t know. I ain’t asking either.

  "Hey, Nick," John said. "What’s new?"

  "I’m a little hungover."

  "I asked, ‘What’s new?’."

  "Shut the hell up."

  "Want a beer?"

  "Naw, I’m here for my facial."

  "The girl isn’t in yet."

  "Just get me the f-ing beer, man."

  He popped the cap off a brown bottle and placed the drink in front of me. I had a pull, the beer chilled just right, the alcohol going after my hangover.

  I had another swallow before looking around my fine establishment. Cracked vinyl booths lined the wall and went under the windows. Two corner TVs showed reruns of sitcoms that were never very funny. Video games flashed and buzzed, begging for quarters. A dirty drunk sat at the other end of the bar staring at his bottle as if it had held all the answers to those sublime questions; like how many more beers can I get with the chump change I have left? John says that drunk divides his time between AA meetings and here. I wonder how John knows.

  "Pretty slow," I said to John.

  "Slow, Nick? It’s fucking dead, man."

  I reached for a cigarette, thinking I looked too much like the billboard advert man who smoked the same brand. The only real difference between me and that dead spokesman is that my hair and mustache are black. That, and I don’t wear no slick headgear neither. Inhaling, the smoke stabbed at the slush in my head, and burnt my lungs. Just what I was after. Fucking things.

  "We got any dark colored trash bags?" I said. "Like black ones?"

  "I’ve never seen any other dark colors but black," John said.

  "You got any hanging around?"

  "Yeah, sure, Nick."

  "I need the big kind."

  "How big?"

  "I don’t know. Gotta be able to hold a hundred, hundred twenty pounds."

  "I think we have two by three."

  "That should do it," I said.

  "I got one right here." John reached under the bar top and came up with a bag.

  "Is this that strong kind of plastic? Sometimes you get a bag, you put some snot rags in there, the thing falls apart."

  "I hate that shit," John said.

  "Fucking ridiculous, you ask me."

  "That’s a solid bag, Nick."

  "How solid?”

  "It’s three ply."

  "That’s what I’m looking for."

  "Nothin’ gonna fall through this muther."

  "Good."

  "Strongest product in the industry. Money back guarantee."

  "How’s that work?"

  "If it rips, you bring it back to the place you bought it from."

  "That wouldn’t help me much," I said.

  "Why’s that?"

  "I’ll need two bags, I think."

  "Let me check in back. Should have some more."

  John went into the kitchen. Last time I was there, I did battle with the cockroaches. I’ll tell you what; the cockroaches won.

  Looking down the bar, having another cold pull, I thought about throwing the alkie out, but he was the only customer, and for a change, he had money on the bar. He probably returned all the cans assholes like me throw out of their car windows.

  John came back, holding the second bag open, tugging at its sides. It covered nearly half his body.

  "How’s that?"

  I sized up the mess that was right above me. The girls would fit, though rigor mortis might be an issue. "Perfect, John. Grab me another beer."

  The second bottle was as good as the first. My headache faded into the distance.

  "You need them to clean up?" John said.

  "Huh?"

  "I could hear you down here."

  "Yea, it’s a fucking disaster," I said.

  "I’ll bet."

  I took a long, slow swallow. "When do they empty the dumpster?"

  "Our dumpster?"

  "Who else’s?"

  "You never asked before."

  "I’m asking now."

  "It’s just you never took an interest in the day-to-day bullshit involved in running this place."

  "I’ve been busy."

  "Doing what? Drinking?"

  "What’s the deal with the dumpster?"

  "Tomorrow morning around ten."

  "I may need your help carrying out some trash," I said. "You know, from upstairs."

  "Sure. Whatever. Tell me when."

  I held the bottle at my lips, trying to be casual. "You could really hear us through the ceiling?"

  "Hell, yea. You had the stereo cranked. I even heard some shouting."

  "The bar never filled up last night?"

  "You were here. You saw how quiet it was."

  "Right," I said, hoping to sound convincing.

  "I thought about coming up and joining you three."

  Joining us? That meant the girls and I had started in the bar. That was news to me. "Those two I was with...
"

  "Corn muffins."

  "What?"

  "Blondes, Nick. Where’s your head at?"

  "It was between their legs.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You ever seen them in here before?"

  "Fuck, man, they weren’t even old enough to drink," John said.

  "They were eighteen."

  “That ain’t of age.”

  “It’s old enough.”

  "Yeah? You card them before you stuck your dick in?"

  "So you never saw them?"

  "Nope." John started wiping around me with an old dishrag. "I can remember seeing in the papers you having some trouble with the underage poon."

  "Forget it."

  John held his fingers a half inch apart. "You were this close to going to jail, Nick."

  "I got off," I said.

  "That would be the problem."

  "I said forget it."

  The front door opened, setting off a buzzer, and that noise washed the booze off my memory card, and it was last night and I was sitting at the bar and Mona and Lisa strolled in, stopping by the entrance to scope the joint out. Mona was wearing a tight halter-top, braless, nips pushing out the ribbed fabric. Her hair hung behind her shoulders, showing off the gold earrings that dotted her lobes. Lisa had hit the town with a knee-length skirt, a size too small, sticking to her curves like it was self-adhesive. The dress’ lemon color clashed with her blonde hair and blue pumps. Some kind of vine tattoo snaked up and around her left leg before disappearing under the skirt. Hello, ladies.

  They noticed me at the same time and strutted my way, long slutty steps, taking the two stools on my left. I had a cigarette and a good buzz going. John went to serve them, but looked at me first. I moved my chin down and up.

  "What’ll it be, ladies?" John said, his eyes darting on their boobs like he was reading a menu.