by Jim Nisbet
The pain was not occluded, but grew. He gripped the rim of the steering wheel, concentrating on the light in the frosted window at the bottom of the hill, and pulled himself straight in the seat. Beads of sweat broke the surface of his forehead, and cooled there.
On the seat beside him was a small backpack. He opened it, taking care with the noise the zipper made. From it he withdrew a small flat tobacco tin. He snapped its lid open and studied its contents by the diffuse glow of the streetlight. He selected three pills. One was a Codeine tablet, of 60 milligrams. The other two were Dexamyls, each capsule bearing 15 milligrams of dextroamphetamine modulated by about a hundred of barbiturate.
One pill to kill the pain, two more to keep him alert in its absence.
He snapped the tin closed and set it into the catch-all molded into the plastic behind the gearshift. From the backpack he drew a bottle of beer. The cap made only a slight hiss when he twisted it off, and a couple of clicks when he threw it into the passenger foot-well. He took a sip, hiked the pills into his mouth, chased them with another sip, and another.
The bathroom light went out at the bottom of the hill. By the time he finished the beer the pain in his back had diminished to the far-away call of a coyote in dense, snow-filled woods.
He sat in the truck with the empty bottle resting on the lower rim of the steering wheel. The pain in his back almost a memory, his vision lucid, his mind awake, he felt better than he’d felt in nearly two months.
He knew it was an illusion. He knew he was a sick man, but, just now, he didn’t feel like one. At the moment, he felt, he might manage to take charge of his own destiny.
Perhaps this illusion was particularly cohesive because he was sitting under the wheel of a pickup truck. One always feels at least partially in charge of one’s destiny, at the wheel of a pickup truck. Stoned on a cocktail of speed, essence of poppy, a barbiturate, a beer, and — what’s that? a touch of fear? — he, Stanley Ahearn, felt as if he might be taking charge of his destiny.
What a joke.
He laughed grimly, without mirth.
His eyes hardened. Fuck the facts.
He considered the Chippendale O’Hare setup.
Stanley didn’t even know if he was going to be able to get inside the building. He certainly had no idea what he was going to do if he did. He didn’t know what he was going to discover. He didn’t really want to discover anything.
What he wanted was his life back. He wanted to be able to sit on his rooftop and sip whiskey out of a bottomless quart, go to his little job in his little salt-rotted pickup truck and make his little wage and eat marginally nutritious meals and get back up on the roof in front of his little shack and sit in front of that magnificent view and drink his little life away with no help from anyone else, thank you very little.
Corrigan had him pegged there.
He visualized Green Eyes, as she watched her goons load poor Ted into the van.
His face burned with shame as he thought of her. She was a beauty, all right. And she had cleaned his clock. He could clearly recall his feelings as he sat next to her at the bar. After so many drinks he’d practically given up on talking, just to stare at her. She had a mouth that taunted him, challenged him, laughed at him, invited him, did everything but inhale him. And those lips. Even in their natural rest position those lips drew him to her as inevitably as a sun draws its satellites through thousands of millennia of captivity toward absolute, certain doom.
Then she’d touched him. It had been a long time since a woman had touched Stanley for free — for free — hah! What a laugh! For ten thousand dollars she’d touched him.
It had been a longer time since he’d really wanted, desired, to be touched by a woman. And it had been an even longer time since he’d touched a woman he desired to touch, and whom he desired to touch him back, and who, moreover, desired to be touched by him and to touch him back too. These things, it seemed to him, were very delicate to arrange, almost impossible, a matter of coincidence and spontaneity, and, let’s face it, close to miraculous and maybe even worth the risk of rejection.
They were not to be taken lightly.
They were not to be betrayed.
He wondered if they’d found Ted yet.
Green Eyes had taken his, Stanley’s, hand, and guided it to where she wanted him to touch her. Right there in the bar. He’d had to put down his drink to do it.
He wondered whether they’d found Giles’ friend Tommy yet, dead or alive. Maybe even now Corrigan was interviewing Tommy or Ted in a hospital. He wondered if Corrigan had taunted Ted about picking up women in bars, yet. He wondered if Iris had…
He tightened his grip on the beer bottle.
He wondered if Ted had any insurance.
Maybe it was different for Ted. Maybe Ted had a regular enough job with a regular enough contractor who carried regular enough insurance to cover a decidedly irregular catastrophe. Maybe, Corrigan would say, maybe if you just tell me everything, Ted, how it happened, where you were, when you got there, when you left, what kind of car she was driving, which way you went when you left the bar, where she… you know… touched you…
Maybe Ted would have the answers that would enable Corrigan to solve the case. Maybe put Green Eyes out of business. Maybe soon…
She’d put his hand between her legs. Right there at the bar. It was warm, between her legs. And she’d pressed herself against him and sung along breathily in his ear with I Fall to Pieces, by Patsy Cline. Then she put her tongue in his ear, all wet and, uh, sexual. Stanley had heard the ocean: had Ted heard the ocean? Then she took her drink and rolled the tall glass over the front of his pants, over and over, like the glass was a rolling pin and his abdomen was a marble pastry counter and she was rolling out sourdough for that great day in the gold fields and she whispered, “Oh, my, Stanley.” She whispered, swaying back and forth in front of him, her forehead touching his forehead, the bottle between them, the both of them watching it, she had whispered, “Maybe it’s time to get out of here…”
He’d not forgotten her sympathetic psychology. On the contrary, he remembered every word of it. Completely. But not until he overheard her laying it on poor Ted, sex in the guise of radical ecology, had he grasped the masterful scope of her duplicity. He remembered every syllable of it, and might never shed the mortification of having been so thoroughly taken in by this woman’s deception.
And those green eyes, too, of course. There was some compensation in them, wasn’t there? Wasn’t it better to be taken in by one’s delusions of feminine beauty than one’s susceptibility to an unexpected intelligence?
Why unexpected?
Because it was possessed by a woman?
He threw the empty beer bottle into the foot-well of the passenger seat, with a little too much force. It took a few ricocheting thumps to settle down there.
The breeze picked up again. Across the street, the top of the Monterey pine swayed. Above it a few of the brighter stars were visible. A single star twinkled through the tree’s branches. It must have been a hundred, maybe even two hundred years old, that tree. How much had it seen?
And that smokestack next to the tree. The atomized corporealities of how many souls had risen into these breezes, to be sifted through those same branches as their last contact with things of this earth?
Ted?
Are you alive, Ted?
Tree? Have you seen Ted? Touched him? Sifted him?
Stanley reached into the daypack and pulled out a thin black pen-light. He held it under the dash to twist it on and off. It worked, and he slipped it into his hip pocket. Then he reached into the daypack and pulled out a blue steel automatic pistol.
It was an old one. The neglected bluing had long since blistered off the muzzle and breech. The sweat of forgotten hands had long since corroded the shellac off its walnut grips.
This was Stanley’s secret quality-of-life insurance policy. When the going got too rough, when the pain became unendurable, when he’d become hope
lessly incontinent, he’d blow out his brains. Simple as that.
He’d always planned it that way. He’d bought the gun, learned how to shoot it, and filed it away in a drawer.
Just like any other insurance policy.
Better, call it quality-of-death insurance. Or assurance, like they say in Canada. Quality-of-death assurance.
The assurance that he wouldn’t die in a hospital, quilled by needles and tubes, speechless, pissing the rubber sheets, undrinking, a corpse animated by pharmacology and shame and the ability to wiggle its toes in response to yes/no questions.
Forty-five caliber quality-of-death assurance: only $150. Plus tax and bullets. A single-payment policy. A short waiting period, only ten days. No physical examination. No flexible sigmoidoscopy.
Until recently it hadn’t occurred to Stanley that this insurance tool, this handgun, might come in handy for anything else.
But now…?
He turned the butt up and looked at it. The clip was still missing, so it hadn’t loaded itself in the dark. You laugh. Guns do things like that.
He rummaged in a side pocket of the daypack until he came up with two clips. The dull tips of the fat slugs shone in the gloom like two stacks of inquisitive maggots.
He dropped one clip into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. The other he slid into the butt of the automatic until it locked into place.
He held the pistol down below the steering wheel and jacked a shell into the chamber.
A wave of nausea passed over him. He leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel, the gun pointed between his feet.
When the nausea passed he gripped the pistol with both hands, its muzzle aimed between the clutch and the brake pedals, and let the cocked hammer gently down onto the firing pin with both thumbs, and set the safety. This operation had always made his hands sweat, and the hammer, though serrated, never seemed properly curved to accept the pad of a single thumb. Not like in the movies, bub. Which was why he always used both thumbs and a neutral target like the floorboard of a pickup truck when he cocked or uncocked the .45.
Though nobody died when it happened, he had learned this bit of gun control the hard way, and blown a great hole in the side of a perfectly good refrigerator in the process.
Gray Eyes found the slug a week later, when she thawed one of her dietary linguini dinners.
They’d shared a bottle of wine over the linguine and stuck the cork in the bullet hole in the side of the freezer, where it stayed until they split up.
Those were the days.
He released the clip and fished an extra cartridge out of the backpack. He thumbed the shell into the clip, replacing the round now advanced to the firing chamber. Ordnance topped off, he fed the clip back into the handle of the pistol until it locked into place with a single, metallic click.
Stanley quietly rolled up the truck window, staring past the edge of glass as it passed between him and the mortuary.
Across the street the Monterey pine swayed in the breeze. The shadows of its limbs played over the linear taper of the smokestack. The heat from the stack would make the air dance above its mouth: the dance of Adios.
It was time to go in.
The Fusion Vipers
Chapter Twenty one
AT THE NORTH END OF THE BUILDING THE STEEP SLOPE OF THE hill gave access to the brick perimeter wall, and from there it was an easy scramble onto the roof.
The brick wall stretched away from the building to the east, cornered, and ran south until it encountered the rear access gate. This right angle enclosed a small meditation court, complete with overhanging acacia and a whispering spruce tree, stone benches, and a small pond with scattered lilies. Against the far corner of the court a stand of cattails clicked softly.
Walking the parapet wall, the garden to his left and the gravel roof to his right, Stanley approached a clerestory that rose no more than five feet above the south end of the roof. This would let north light into a room below, perhaps a chapel or reception area.
The six rectangular frosted windows were in a line, and illumined from within. Standing on the parapet, eighteen inches above the first roof, his head was about a foot above the second roof, topping the clerestory. Beyond the skew, dark plane of the upper roof the Monterey pine and the smokestack loomed side by side.
An irregular ticking turned out to be a wire, which the breeze caused to tap the rusted stanchion of an old TV antenna.
He stood there for a while, getting used to it.
Just as he had stepped down to the roof in order to try the nearest window he heard a rustling sound.
He strained his ears until all he could hear was the ringing induced by the drugs he had taken.
Something was unmeditatively making its way through the cattails, diagonally across the garden from him.
He stood with his head four feet above the parapet, an excellent and disconcerting silhouette to anyone who might look up from the courtyard below.
The rustling abruptly ceased.
He collapsed onto his haunches, one hand on the scored grip of the .45 in his belt. But for the codeine he’d taken, the pain of his incision would have made this position untenable.
A minute passed, then another.
The cattails rustled. He strained to locate the source of the noise in the darkness. Then he saw two bright yellow eyes, looking right at him.
His mind nearly stalled, then raced. It was way too soon to pull out his cannon and blast the neighborhood, but he was tempted.
Framed by the gently waving cattails, as if peering out from under a giant fright-wig, the eyes blinked.
Raccoon.
Stanley exhaled a puff of air and sat down. After a dazed moment he leaned back against the wall. Despite the dose of speed in him, he was thoroughly fatigued. He unclenched his hand from the butt of the .45 and stared at the fingers. They quivered.
Chickenshit.
If a fellow were to set himself up in the business of stealing human body parts, wouldn’t a funeral home provide a perfect cover? He wondered if Corrigan had thought of it. Even if he had, there must be a couple of mortuaries for every, what, 50,000 people? Which would net, let’s see, long division in the middle of the yellow-eyed night on several drugs and a rooftop with a gun in your hand, carry the two, 120 of them in the Bay Area alone. It seemed perfect. For one thing you, like Death, having no documented respect for Time, could keep weird hours. For another, a fully equipped operating theater might not look at all out of place in a funeral home. Don’t morticians remove organs and pump fluids with the best of them? And who would willingly snoop around a funeral home? Anybody would assume that, behind any given door, corpses slept. What snoop needs to see that?
The grounds around him backed up this supposition. At first, Stanley had been surprised by the evident lack of security surrounding them. That bench on the south side of the building, for example, underneath a cypress tree. A perfect place to sit and smoke a joint — right? But no. The place was too creepy. Sooner than later, the awareness of what was going on immediately around him would leak into the pothead’s little mind. Very quickly, the stoned party wouldn’t be having fun anymore, would instead find his thoughts adrift along dark and maudlin shoals, his lee shore eerily lit by funeral pyres and obscured by an acrid smoke that hung close to the dark waters, an atmosphere difficult to breathe… The stoned party would shove off to vistas less moody.
No. Nobody would visit this place unless they had business here.
So, what’s with Yellow Eyes?
Stanley peered over the parapet.
Yellow Eyes had disappeared. Maybe with good reason? Stanley slowly trained the automatic over the cattails.
Nothing. The eyes were gone.
Then he heard a splash.
He looked straight down.
A very large raccoon stood on its hind legs, waist-deep in the lily pond, looking directly up at Stanley. It was as if the creature had been waiting for him to look over the wall. Its front pa
ws were dripping, and a gleaming orange fish writhed futilely in their grasp.
Now, both Stanley and the raccoon waited.
If Stanley was afraid of the least noise, the raccoon seemed afraid of nothing. The raccoon after all was minding its own business. It had come for a nice, fat carp.
Depleted, Stanley leaned back against the vertex of the parapet and clerestory walls and sighed as raggedly as the necessity for absolute silence would allow. His shoulders shed tension like a steeple its bats at dusk. But for the codeine every joint would have ached. Sweat gleamed on his face. He clutched the checkered butt of the pistol between his sweating palms, its barrel between his drawn-up knees.
He sat for a long moment, watching the stars to the north and breathing the cool night air. Sapped by his nerves, his strength was waning. If he didn’t move soon he wouldn’t move at all. What the hell was he doing on the roof of a funeral home at two o’clock in the morning with a gun in his hand?
The water thrashed in the pond beyond the wall, and the raccoon blundered hastily into the cattails.
“You see?” said a voice. “I told you. It’s that old bull coon.”
Stanley froze. I know that voice.
“I guess it was,” said a second voice.
A beam of light swiveled through the lower branches of the acacia and played along the clerestory wall, just above Stanley’s head.
“How’d he get down from the roof so fast?”
“Same way we got out here so slow. Put that heater away.”
“Man,” said the first voice, “I don’t care how much money I make here. I don’t care how much time I spend here. This place gives me the willies like a airborne ball of snakes.”
“What’s your problem? It’s just a raccoon. I thought you grew up in the country.”
“I did grow up in the country. The wine country.”
They shared a knowing laugh.
“Lettin’ a old bull coon throw a scare into you.”
“It ain’t the coon. It’s this goddamn funeral home, and that goddamn Djell. The man’s nuttier than Telegraph Avenue.”