Bad Intentions

by Norman Partridge

  Buddy Holly's song rode the icy wave of a big Hammond organ, a horribly steady drumbeat, a guitar line as pure and frightening as the night. Frightening. Because things waited for the man just beyond the Highway Styx. Exits. Service stations. Telephones. Desert casinos offering one last chance to those with no chance at all.

  Most of all, other people waited beyond the road. People who would ask questions about a man driving too fast, a woman broken and battered.

  Still, he had to take the chance. After all, the van required gas. The man required food. To obtain these things, he required money. The woman required... What? The man thought he knew the answer to that question, though he could not translate that answer into words, and that was why each stop was made quickly.

  The woman remained in the van. Desperately injured, still unconscious. In the casino, the man focused on the ATM as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world. He didn't spare a glance for the slots or the thin-shadowed cocktail waitresses or the bullet-ridden car which rotated with macabre slowness in the center of the gambling pit, its shadow as heavy as Detroit steel. The man ignored these things because he knew that this was not a time to examine irony, which was a habit that had powered him forward for twenty years. His vision, his mission, was monastic in its purity. He hid his hands from the view of others and kept his eyes off the shadows that pooled at the ankles of the living. It wasn't hard. The people around him were either in a hurry to get to Vegas or glad to be free of it, and they weren't exactly observant.

  Outside the casino, the man tossed the ATM card into the night, his right front pocket thick with twenties. He pulled into a service station, topped off twin tanks and attended to a parched radiator, gobbling a cheeseburger while he worked.

  He returned to the safety of the Highway Styx. But even the safety of the highway was relative, for the night was so much more than one big shadow. In the heart of night, engines growled like hungry beasts and inquisitive hi-beams severed the fiber of midnight anonymity. A highway patrol cruiser hugged the shoulder just ahead. A black sedan with smoked windows passed on the right, then slowed. The man drove on, passing the cop, passing the sedan, passing other drivers lost in faint green rivers of dashboard light.

  Vegas was still so close, just a U-turn and a couple hundred verses away (as the dead rockin' boppin' Texan sings)... An empty house stood in Vegas. And in that empty house, a man waited. Or what once had been a man. He waited in the dark, without a shadow. Soon daylight would come, and men would return to the empty house like vampires seeking shelter. They would find the man who had no shadow. And then others would travel the Highway Styx.

  The driver palmed shadows from his raw knuckles, his face. Wiped his palms on his jeans, leaving dark stains, immediately regretting his stupidity. He could get rid of bloodstains—that was as simple as changing his clothes, which he'd done shortly after leaving the house in Vegas, but these were stains of another kind.

  Buddy Holly sang about people who took things for a game, and people who didn't understand, and sweet lovin' that was better than a kiss, and the driver's eyes were no longer fixed on the highway with its hungry, growling cars or the things that waited beyond it.

  The rearview mirror trapped his gaze—a slab of silver nailed to the night sky, containing the woman. And that was as sweet an illusion as could be imagined, because for the last twenty years the man had known that such a thing was impossible.

  He had to be careful. The mirror was no more a cage than the van, or the highway. That was why he had to hurry. Get off it. Find a place where others wouldn't interfere.

  The man reached for the mirror, but he couldn't change its angle, not when it held her reflection. He could only touch it, touch her... He could only listen.

  Buddy Holly had changed his tune.

  Just you know why... The man thought it, but he didn't dare say it, because the woman in the mirror was staring at him from behind a mask of bruises and blood, her lips puffy with a tortured smile that ran deeper than simple wounds of the flesh, and all the man could think of was that he had to drive faster because this road was so damn long, and he had to find the place where it came to an end, where there were no other cars or exits or people, where the van would be free of harsh white boundaries and tempting detours, where they could be alone.

  An empty place.

  He drove, faster now, the music his fuel.

  The van's headlights washed a sign: NO SERVICES THIS EXIT.

  "We've crossed the river," the man said, down-shifting, hugging the off-ramp.

  The steering wheel shuddered. Much worse, the steering column rattling now, because the smooth black highway was gone.

  But the man kept driving.

  Into the night. Across the earth, the sand, the shadows.

  To the place that waited for them.

  It was obvious that the big Italian couldn't quite believe what he'd heard. "You expect me to pay him for what?"

  The doctor, a florid-cheeked Irishman, blanched. "It's strictly legitimate, Carmine. The cops pay for Mr. Bramble's services. So do the feds, though you never read about it in the papers. That's a sizable plus." The doctor turned to Bramble. "That's correct, isn't it?"

  Bramble smiled. "I'm discreet, if that's what you're trying to say."

  Carmine Tonelli muttered a few words which were very indiscreet, eyeing the black man suspiciously. "Let me get this straight—you're telling us that you can find out who killed my brother by talking to his ghost?"

  Bramble sighed. "It's not quite that simple, but— "

  "Lew might buy this shit," Carmine said, thumbing the doctor's sunken chest, glaring at the little man. "But I didn't grow up in the Hamptons with a silver spoon and an antique Ouija board. Look, I got a dead brother upstairs... I need someone who can give me some real answers... I don't mean the cops... We don't handle things that way... We're— "

  "Discreet?" Bramble offered.

  And now Carmine's glare was all for him. "Don't get smart with me. You're not smart, you see? I been around. I heard some of this spookshow boogieman shit before. Maybe not your particular line, but my mama spent a goddamn fortune on palm readers. My idiot sister, too. I got a few gypsy pelts on my wall. I know the look of a bloodhound that's got the money scent. So don't try— "

  Bramble held up a hand. "The price just doubled."

  Lew gasped. "What?"

  "I can ignore the canine reference, which might be purely coincidental, but the other..." Bramble shook his head. "Spookshow... boogieman? You want to talk like that, Mr. Tonelli, it's going to cost you."

  Carmine's eyes narrowed. "What's this golden-tongued asshole doing in my house. Lew? Get this nig— "

  "Tripled," Bramble said.

  " —out of here!" Tonelli turned and started for the staircase.

  Bramble watched the big man traverse a patch of morning sunlight that spilled from an upstairs window. Carmine's shade played out behind him. Thin for a fat man, dull and nearly brown—an ugly stain on the white carpet. The sunlight ate at the edges of the thing as if trying to eliminate it, until the mobster's shade trailed behind him like the tattered train of a whore's wedding dress.

  Dreadful. Bramble had to look away. "Colon cancer, wasn't it?"

  Carmine Tonelli stopped cold, but he didn't turn. "That was three years ago," he said. "The doctors got it. All of it. And you read about it in the National Enquirer."

  "Don't be so sure." Bramble paused before continuing. "You don't sleep much anymore, do you, Mr. Tonelli? You see things in your dreams. Dead things, dead people. They aren't pretty and they never shut up, do they? You close your eyes and you go to sleep, and you find yourself among the long shadows, and there are nasty whispers under your pillow."

  Carmine whirled. Now there was a gun in his hand, but Bramble's eyes stopped him cold. Something dangerous lurked in those brown-black pools... something that knew too much.

  "It's a funny thing," Bramble said. "Some people are more dead than alive. They've got one fo
ot planted in another world, and they could step over at any moment."

  Carmine turned toward the bedroom at the top of the stairs. "Okay," he said. "Triple my original offer. Consider your pound of flesh extracted; consider my Eye-tie ass scared good and proper. Now get your African-American ass up here. I ain't leavin' my brother lookin' like this for long."

  The abandoned motel fought the morning light. Peeling white paint caught the sunrise and sent it tumbling away in rippling heat waves that worried the net of yucca trees surrounding the property.

  Dead leaves rattled and stuttered like wild castanets in the yucca forest. The man smiled. The trees didn't like the sunlight any better than he did.

  He sat under a slight overhang that ran the length of the motel. The sunlight could not find him. He closed his eyes and tried to catch the yucca beat, strumming his guitar, picking out the heart of one Buddy Holly song or another with aching, swollen fingers.

  "Peggy Sue" worked pretty well. The rattling leaves provided a driving, if erratic, beat.

  "If you knew..." the guitar player said, and then he laughed as the memory of the man in the house in Vegas played through his head like a familiar riff.

  That man hadn't known anything at all.

  Vince was the man's name. The guitar player didn't know much about him, apart from the fact that Vince was connected to the woman and Vince was afraid of guns. Too bad on both counts, especially the latter. If Vince hadn't panicked at the sight of the gun, he might be okay right now, and the man with the guitar might still have some bullets in the pistol tucked beneath his belt.

  He might never have felt the warm flecks of blood spraying his face as the pistol bucked in his hand and Vince's chest erupted in a half-dozen wounds. But Vince had mistaken the guitar player for a jealous husband or a knight in shining armor, and the man wasn't either of those things. Not at all. Hell, he was only a guitar player.

  Dry heat killed the breeze and quieted the yucca trees. Tangled shadows stretched from countless trunks, shimmering, dancing on the sunbaked desert sand.

  Scratch one rhythm section. The man's fingers traveled cool steel strings, all alone.

  There were no shadows in music.

  Not even when you played a dead man's songs.

  "Is something wrong?" the doctor wanted to know.

  Bramble ignored the question. "Tonelli, do you know who was with your brother last night?"

  Carmine didn't take his eyes off the bullet-ridden corpse. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Vince not talkative, or what?"

  Bramble knew the time had come to ignore sarcasm. "The more you can tell me, the more I'll know."

  Carmine sighed heavily. "Like the old saw goes: I am not my baby brother's keeper. Get that straight. I can tell you that Vince wasn't particular about his women. Picked 'em up like most guys pick up a six-pack. Drained 'em and tossed 'em. That was Vince."

  Drained 'em and tossed ’em. The words sent an unfamiliar shiver up Bramble's spine. He bent low, close to the corpse. Oyster-white flesh. Lips gone blue, going black. Bramble ignored these things, looking for shadows that most people couldn't see. Some called them ghosts, but Bramble didn't use that word. It wasn't quite accurate—after all, he could glance at Carmine Tonelli and see his "ghost," and Tonelli wasn't even dead. Not yet, anyway.

  No. What Bramble could see was the essence that often remained even in the wake of death—the human soul, the human spirit. Or, as his mother had called it: the shade.

  Some people took a long time to die. Like Carmine Tonelli, they lost their shades bit by bit, piece by piece. And if they lived an especially long time, they might leave behind nothing more than a few tatters, like pieces of a crazy quilt.

  But this...

  Vince Tonelli was much younger than Carmine. But on the floor, next to his corpse. Bramble saw nothing more than a narrow crescent moon of oily blackness—rich and heavy, but painfully thin.

  The edges of the crescent moon were ragged.

  Torn.

  As if something had ripped the biggest part of Vince Tonelli's shade free.

  Stolen it.

  Bramble had never seen anything like it. Generally, it took hours, days, for a shade to overcome the trauma of death and move on, if indeed it moved on at all. To heaven, to hell... to somewhere. Bramble had no idea and cared less. Money over metaphysics any day, as far as he was concerned. But with so little of Vince Tonelli's shade remaining, Bramble didn't know how much he could learn.

  "So," Carmine said, "who did it? Tell me, so I can kill the bastard."

  "Give me a minute." Gingerly, Bramble stretched out a hand.

  He touched Vincent Michael Tonelli's shade, expecting the familiar icy ripple to travel from his fingers to his brain, expecting the connection.

  But the shade rippled and pulled away, up the corpse's arm.

  And it was warm! Bramble stumbled back, wiping his fingers on his slacks, whimpering.

  The corpse's eyes flashed open.

  "Help me!" Vincent Michael Tonelli screeched. "Jesus God, help me!"

  In this case, music didn't exactly soothe the savage breast. The man's fingers knotted in pain; even three chords could be hell when your knuckles were hamburger meat. And the desert air didn't help any. It was too dry—like sandpaper on his voice.

  The man set the guitar aside. He rose and stepped away from the overhang, into the light.

  The sunshine felt good on his knuckles. He opened the back of the van and took a cold cheeseburger and a can of beer from the ice chest. Funny, dipping his hands in the half-melted ice felt good, too.

  He drank first, and his throat felt a little better. He figured he could make it feel better still. He drained the first beer, and then he got another. After his fourth beer, he remembered to eat the cheeseburger, even though he wasn't really hungry anymore.

  Something to wash it down. That was what he needed. Another beer. A can crumpled in his powerful fist, which didn't hurt so much anymore. He stared down at his cowboy boots, wondering if Buddy Holly would have liked them. That made him giggle. He looked at his boots and the ground that surrounded him, twisting his neck this way and that like some crazy long-necked bird, and all he could see was sand bleached white by the unrelenting sunlight.

  That made him laugh.

  "Shadow-free, that's me." He hadn't cast a shadow in twenty years, since the night he first met the woman in a Lubbock honky-tonk. Back then he was a guitar player ripping through one Buddy Holly request after another for a drunken, sentimental crowd. Twenty years since she'd torn his living shade from his backside. And hardly anyone ever noticed, because guitar players, good ones, moved in the night.

  He wasn't all that good, but he sure as hell had learned how to move.

  Twenty years, and now he'd finally tracked her down.

  He figured another beer would be pretty good about right now, but he didn't get one. Instead he wondered how many men she'd been with. Hey, scratch that, this was the nineties—how many people had she—SCRATCH THAT TOO—had it been with?

  He wouldn't think of the battered thing in the motel room as a woman, because that was what had gotten him into trouble in the first place. Still, he wondered about other people who had crossed paths with that thing. He wondered how many—who couldn't see shadows the way he could—didn't even know that something was missing.

  How many how many I wonder... but I really don't want to know.

  Buddy Holly didn't do that one.

  Singing it anyway, he stumbled to the door of room number 12.

  He got it open. Spilled into the room with the morning light.

  There she was, all bruised smirk, lips buttoned tight.

  "Give it back," he said.

  She didn't say anything.

  He hit her again, flush, just the way he'd hit her—SCRATCH THAT, hit IT—at the house in Vegas before the guy with the torn shade got all stupid-brave and tried to attack him.

  Her nose started bleeding.

  "Don't pretend with me," he
said. "Just you know why."

  A wave of cold laughter shivered over him. "It's funny." A girlish voice just above a whisper. "I almost remember you."

  He hit her and hit her, until she was gone and both eyes rolled up in the thing's head and thick shadows spilled from its lips.

  Carmine was gasping for breath. "You think he's here?"

  Bramble didn't spare Tonelli a glance. There were too many people in the casino, too many shades to watch. "I don't know," he said. "Your brother... the way he is... This isn't the way I usually work. Let's just say that I've picked up a scent. Someone connected with your brother's murder was here."

  Tonelli's doctor hurried along behind the two men. "I still don't understand," he said. "About Vince, I mean. I examined him. Six bullets in his chest. He doesn't breathe. No heartbeat. He's dead."

  "No he's not," Bramble said. "He can't die. Someone stole the part of him that would allow that to happen. And unless we can find a way to get it back, you're going to have to keep him locked in that basement for a long, long time."

  The scent grew stronger. Close now. Bramble hurried past a thin-shadowed cocktail waitress, pushed through a tight knot of people.

  He stopped short, a heavy shadow pooling at the tips of his shoes. A big car loomed before him, a relic from the days of the Depression-era bandits.

  "Shit," Carmine said. "Bonnie & Clyde were killed in that car. It's a hook to attract the tourists. If this is what your nose has found us, you've screwed up bad, Bramble."

  Bramble turned away from the car, as if drawn by a magnet. He spotted a bank of ATM machines along the far wall.

  "Look at him," the doctor said. "He really sees something!"

  Carmine didn't say a word.

  Bramble grabbed the big man's elbow and hurried toward the ATM machines. "You had it right all along, Carmine. I am a bloodhound, and I'm about to pick up the scent of money."