A Mutual Friend

by Layla Wolfe

  Something black and round flew at Luke horizontally. One millisecond he was there, a scary clown with his mouth wide open, crouched in a silent scream. The next millisecond he was gone.

  “Motherfuck!” shouted Flannery, awestruck.

  “Shiiłhash!” said Lily simultaneously, a Diné phrase that meant something like “bite me!”

  “Blood and soil!” squeaked Neil, giving the impression that bird watching wasn’t all he did.

  Whatever it was had the power to completely wipe Luke from my field of vision, and I turned back to King, caressing his head softly. No blood was visible, but a nasty welt the size and length of the paddle was rising on his forehead.

  “King, King. I love you. Come back to us.”

  He wouldn’t, and I took to peppering his face with kisses.

  “Stand down, Finn!” ordered Flannery.

  “You first, you fucking cuck!”

  “Where’s the fucking Black Tar?” screeched Lily. “It’s two against one!”

  “Two against two!” Finn yelled, talking about Neil, a guy holding a hot dog. “I’m telling you, I don’t know where it is!”

  Finally, I had no choice but to stick my piece back into my waistband and pick up King in my arms. He flopped all over, like some junkies I’d had the misfortune to carry. He was definitely just a shadow away from being completely unconscious. The priority now was to get him away from this danger. Then I could help Flannery and Lily.

  I set him down gently below a wall of camping coolers. I grabbed a sleeping bag stuffed into a sack as a pillow to keep his head off the floor, but it kept sliding away from us, so I rolled it down the aisle.

  That’s when I saw it.

  Beelzebub, oscillating at a medium rate. It seemed he was mellow despite the warehouse chaos—or maybe wondering what to wreak next.

  I was so taken by surprise, I didn’t know what to do. Now it was following us instead of Barclay? I certainly didn’t want to disturb King by engaging with the demon, so I merely lifted a hand, as though I held my cross in it.

  Then I remembered, I was clad in vestments already. Maybe that would help keep it away.

  I resumed dotting King’s face with my dry little kisses. “King, King. It’s me, Anton. Anton Primo. Remember, you friend the former priest? The demonologist? It’s me. King, King. I love you like life itself.” Cornily, my heart actually did ache with emotion.

  I glanced down the aisle. The black mass seemed to vibrate at a slower rate.

  I kissed King’s closed eyelids. “I yield myself to you, King. I will never disobey you again.”

  Beelzebub suddenly took off like a shot. It came toward us, going through us before proceeding down the aisle toward the shouting by the ping-pong table. A deep, soul-shattering boom rendered me helpless. It shook me to my inner spine, like an earthquake you know you can do nothing about, not even hold on to anything. You were powerless over such a force of nature, and it was incomprehensible whether or not it was malign or beneficent.

  You just closed your eyes and waited, trembling like a coiled snake deep within.

  King shuddered. He looked at me clearly for the first time since being hit with the wooden racket.

  “Barclay,” he said in plain English. “Four people.”

  I knew what he meant, of course. But I had to ask. “What about four people?”

  “Four people dead.”

  Piercing shouts from the central play area distracted us. All I could make out was Flannery bellowing, “Holy mother!”

  “You stay here,” I said, patting King’s hand lamely, draping it over his stomach.

  I started rising, then had second thoughts. I kissed him quickly on the mouth. “I love you, you fucking truck driver,” I said, in case he hadn’t heard all the prior proclamations.

  I could have sworn I saw a smile. Then I had to leave.

  Flannery was whooping, fist in the air as though at a rodeo, about to shoot the ceiling. Lily looked even more cowgirlish in her plaid school skirt and pink cowboy boots. She brandished something dark like a giant piece of coal wrapped in plastic. Finn was nowhere to be seen. On my way over, I passed by Luke. Sprawled like a bug specimen, he was pinned to a display of baseballs in their boxes knocked all chockablock. An actual bowling ball sat embedded so deeply in his ribs I knew they had all been broken, although he still breathed, unconscious.

  “¿Que pasa?” I eagerly asked, grabbing Flannery’s muscle shirt.

  I’d never seen such light, such joy in Flannery’s eyes. “I’ll tell you what’s up, Father. That fucking bag of smack just fucking floated over here, took a dunk through that basketball hoop, and plunked itself down right at our feet. It’s dripping with pee, but at least we got it.”

  “Joder,” I muttered. Demons often left behind offal, pee and excrement —blood. “Where’s Finn?”

  Lily pointed with the bag of drugs. “After I picked up the black tar, that backboard fell on him.”

  “We better disarm him,” I said. On my way over, I passed by the unfortunate Thalhammer. The dodo king and erstwhile lover of brown pelicans and wood ducks had finally met his match. I saw that my bullet had just zinged him, merely torn away some pectoral, leaving an actual trench where the round had continued on its way. It was Flannery’s bullet that had nailed him right in the heart.

  We have a new Prospect, I thought. Then I realized. Did I already consider myself a Bent Zealot?

  Did I want to become one?

  W

  A

  nton moved me to a swank, comfortable couch I could sink into. This was Thalhammer’s office. I tried to think as much as possible, because I knew I had a concussion but could not allow myself to forget what I’d seen while in a half-coma in the sporting goods store. Thalhammer had a pillow. This was the head lawyer’s office. He had nice leather couches. Green lamps. Best view of the London Bridge.

  “Come on, sweetie,” said Anton, laying his cool hand gently on the side of my face. “You need your sleep. We can find Barclay tomorrow.”

  “When will I give the Zealots back their Black Tar?” I asked. The headache was like a cleaver hacking away at one side of my brain only. I tried to recall what I’d always heard about traumatic brain injury among truck drivers who’d hit their heads on the steering wheel. Puking. Sensitivity to lights and sounds. Dizziness. Did I puke on Anton’s lap on the way home? A couple of Lily’s Diné friends who were still boys, Brick and Merwin, had come to drive us back to the Nichols in their pickup truck.

  At that point, the entire world was topsy-turvy. But now I’d been parked on a leather couch for a couple of hours, and Anton was trying to get me to sleep. We all need sleep. Thalhammer just died, and we left his body there, just like the Death Squad left Crusty at the Happy Hour.

  “Tomorrow,” said Anton in his most soothing priest’s tone. “Tonight we all sleep. It’s been a long fucking day.”

  I grinned. I always liked the way he said that word, focking. “Where are you sleeping?”

  “On that other couch right there.”

  I tried lifting my head, but the migraine blinded me, so I dropped it. “That couch is too small.” It was the loveseat of the duo.

  “Who cares? You wouldn’t believe where a priest in Brownsville youth centers slept.”

  “The bowling alley?” I said, trying to chuckle. In the truck, they’d been goofing all over some story about Luke being slammed out of nowhere with a bowling ball, flying sideways like a startled bird.

  Anton smiled. “Pretty much. I slept on a basketball court once.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d have to tell future generations that I was wiped out by a ping-pong paddle. Sleeping on a basketball court had nothing on me. It disturbed me that Thalhammer had to pay such a price for his theft. But he rolled in ruthless, coldhearted circles. He knew we were all armed. And we had the heroin back. “When can we go see the Bent Zealots?” Now that I had the product in hand, I wanted nothing more than to make amends to the club. Better late than n
ever. Anton had weighed the missile in the mailroom, and it wasn’t missing a gram.

  “Tomorrow, if you’re feeling better.”

  “Wait. No. We have something more important to do.”

  Barclay Samples. That woman. That poor woman. Yet I had no idea whether the murders had happened yet or not, much less where.

  Pink wall-to-wall carpet. Lime green curtains. It was like the house had been decorated in the forties. Yet wasn’t that color scheme popular again in the eighties? Still, that told me nothing. Just that she lived in an older house that hadn’t been redone lately. Sort of like us, in LA.

  “There’s a BOLO out on Barclay,” said Anton with false reassurance. “They know he’s a deranged kid off his meds and needs to be returned to us. Meanwhile, you have no idea if these murders will even happen. You got a concussion, King. Guido hasn’t told us about any new murders, and we told him to tell us, night or day.”

  “It was too real to not happen.” I threw my arm over my face and peered past my elbow, as though the lamp on the ceiling were the sun. “Another kid murdered.” Six-year-old kid shot, lying in bed next to Jessica. Jessica’s—for I knew the dead woman’s name—friend Jason shot in the hallway. And a toddler missing.

  Where is the kid? Was it the kid from the dumpster? His crib was empty…

  Anton petted my cheek with the back of his hand. “I know, I know. But you’ll be of no help to anyone unless you sleep. Look, if it’s any consolation, I’m going to have to wake you every few hours anyway, to make sure you waken normally.”

  I tried to chuckle, but I’d already passed out by that time, I think. I don’t know. The veil between sleeping and waking seemed to be much flimsier these days.

  The first thing I remember was falling. How could I fall when I was already at ground level? Was I dropping down into Hell? But you know that feeling of a sudden fall when you’re about to go to sleep? That’s what it was like, only longer, deeper, farther.

  Constellation, someone whispered loudly in my ear. I thought the person, of unknown sex, was referring to the sky. Oh yeah. I can go flying through the sky. So I shot upward, miles and miles. I must’ve been above the ozone. The earth stood out in such sharp relief I could see smog over Hong Kong and Calcutta. Hovering there for a moment, I enjoyed the view.

  I must’ve begun to realize how high I really was. The second the fear crept in, I was doomed. I began falling toward the planet, but not at the speed a real projectile such as me would have fallen. It all seemed to take a long, leisurely time, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. A beatific sensation soaked my soul, and I imagined that was how Anton had felt when doing his righteous, priestly work. I felt bad he’d given it up, but then wasn’t he still doing that sort of work?

  The moment I thought of Anton—as I shot down past a flat-topped, snowy mountain like Fuji or Kilimanjaro— a parachute came into view. The closeness of another person nudged at the edges of my brain, as though someone were in that parachute, but I couldn’t see. The multicolored thing was left behind as I sped through the mountain’s lower slopes. That’s when I stopped the dream. I didn’t want to hit the ground.

  Whoa! I sat up bolt straight on the couch. A rectangle of sun lit up the carpet nearby. It’s daylight. Did that dream take the entire night? A headache, not as sharp as the night before, reminded me that I had a concussion. Maybe I was just plain knocked out, literally, the rest of the night.

  I looked to Anton, on the next couch. How many times had he said “I love you, King” while I’d been lying on that sporting goods store floor? I had to grin. At last, we were both on the same page.

  Then he, too, sat up like a shot. “Constellation!” he cried.

  What the fuck? What kind of weird coincidence was it that he was shouting out the same word that I—

  He whipped the blankets off. Yes, the lawyer had had pillows and blankets. That fucking Thalhammer, hogging the best office. “Constellation Drive or Street, it’s down there near where Barclay offed that guy bringing his family groceries!”

  Holy mother of tacos. Did he just have the same fucking dream I had? Was there such a thing as a shared dream?

  But Anton had no time for such nonsense. He continued whisking his clothes on so energetically I hoped he didn’t get whiplash. “I’ll go get Flannery, Lily and Twinkletoes. Oh, wait, we need to leave someone here in case Barclay comes back. I’ll leave Flannery and Lily. They’ve worked hard lately. I’ll go grab Twinkletoes, and you go wake Brick and Merwin, ask to use their truck. I’m not having you on my bitch seat with wind in your face.”

  After pulling on a Queen T-shirt, Anton finally looked at me. “What? Do you feel worse? Are you okay?”

  I instantly decided not to waste time telling him we’d had the same dream. Was he the guy in the parachute I’d seen falling back to earth? “No, I actually feel better. Yeah, let’s go! I sure hope it’s not a long street.”

  Although I was the truck driver, no one would let me drive Merwin Bigwater’s truck because of my concussion. Twinkletoes drove, with me squished between him and Anton on the bench seat. Navajo loved the older sort of pickup without a king cab, so Twinkletoes actually had to shift, with my knees knocked up against Anton’s. We were crossing the London Bridge, the site of so many of my hopes and dreams. Tourists wandered, pointing and smiling. Would I ever be that happy? Had I ever been that happy? Maybe when I’d been at college.

  “Constellation Drive is sort of a longish street,” said Twinkletoes, pointing to the cell phone he had stuck magnetically to the truck’s air vent. “How are we going to be able to tell which house? Anton, did your dream tell you anything other than the street name?”

  “No,” my lover admitted. “Just that one word. But I knew it was the name of the street.”

  “I dreamt that one word, too,” I finally revealed.

  Anton’s eyes were wide with the wonder of a child. “You’re fucking kidding me. Mutual lucid dreaming,” he declared.

  I shrugged, as though it happened every day. “That’s all I got, too. Just that one word. No more visions of dead people. But like you, I knew it was the name of the street of the dead people.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Twinkletoes, “and Barclay will be wandering down the street like a zombie, covered in blood.”

  “Don’t be coy,” Anton said, frowning. “You do know we’re going to eventually have to somehow turn him over to the cops. This has gotten beyond even the Bent Zealots’ realm of responsibility. Has this ever happened?”

  “No,” Twinkletoes said without hesitation. “Not at all. Either they take care of it themselves, or some enemy does. But in this case, who’s the enemy? Who would take Barclay out before we do?”

  I asked, “Are you prepared to take Barclay out? He’s one of us.”

  Twinkletoes shrugged. “It’s happened before. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Ford, who took over the Presidency of the Bare Bones mother club in Pure and Easy, rubbed out his father down in the Sonoran Desert. Of course, that’s all just hearsay, right?”

  “Right,” Anton and I said simultaneously.

  “Cropper had gone way beyond the beyond, molesting Ford’s old lady. So yeah, shit does happen. Once in a blue moon.”

  “Well,” I said, “if we see dead bodies and Barclay has got a half a kidney hanging from his mouth, let’s all agree to take action.”

  “Agreed,” said the other two men.

  I sighed. I’d already dealt with mayhem and murder the night before. The Facebookers had no MC creed telling them not to run to the cops. What was stopping them from detailing our path of destruction, other than having to explain the presence of the heroin? Did Luke make it after being gut-punched by that bowling ball? Neo-Nazis might not like pigs any more than we did, but I doubted they had that moral imperative not to squeal when one of their own was dead.

  Either way, we had to get out of the Nichols Building, hopefully hide under the cover of the motorcycle club.

  “That guy�
��s going to work like normal,” said Twinkletoes, indicating a guy getting into a white Chevy truck.

  Other houses were harder to discern. Anton said, “We could pretend to be selling roofing or something and go up and down the street. If no one answers, we could look in the windows.”

  That seemed to be our only option when I noticed something. A little white dog, a terrier of some sort, paced back and forth in front of a house. Occasionally he’d bark at the door or the window. I was familiar with little dogs like this, and they did not shut up. This guy must’ve been out there for hours trying to get someone’s attention and was finally tiring.

  Anton and I both pointed at the same time. “That house.”

  A car and a truck were in the driveway. Twinkletoes parallel parked at the curb. The dog came toward us, renewing its ear-piercing barking.

  “Hi, guy,” I said, bending and ruffling the dog’s fur. “Do you live here?”

  Twinkletoes, too, seemed to prefer petting the dog to going to the door. Barclay had once told us that he just went up and down a street looking for blood. If a door was open, that meant he was welcome. That’s how he decided who to “harvest.”

  So when Anton approached the front door and opened it, we all knew it was an omen. Anton drew his piece from his waistband, but he hadn’t allowed me to bring one. I guess with a concussion, I might make a wrong decision. I was the worst shot, as well. I went behind Twinkletoes, who was armed to the teeth with a giant-bore Colt Python.

  The little dog tore ahead of us into the depths of the house. Immediately I was hit with a strange stench. It wasn’t necessarily the odor of dead bodies—I was familiar with that from Crusty.

  It was the metallic smell of blood.

  These murders had just happened, as seen in my vision. Jessica. Jessica. And Jason. Where’s Jason?

  We practically tiptoed, eerily silent against the pink wall-to-wall carpet, until we found our first crime scene. In a bedroom, a crib was empty. But it was awash with blood. The plastic liner had mostly kept the plasma in, and it was a veritable boat of blood, bits of brain, and fecal matter, actually swimming in fluid and flies. An expended round floated like a tiny boat.