by Dick Denny
I got all the sympathy in the world for a wife whose hubby beats her once. I don’t have the time of day for a lady whose hubby beats her twice. She knew what she had and stuck with it. Does it suck? Sure. Do I care? No. Because what good would caring do? I got problems making rent; I got Gretchen and Agnes relying on me to bring in the bacon. At the end of the day, I’m just the Devil’s nephew, not the Son of God. It’s not my job to save anyone, and yet because of the Fiery Sword, it was up to me to if not save everyone, to at least keep this freaking world turning.
I glance at the working girls and pondered the irony that their problems are too big for me to fix, and yet here I was trying to avert Armageddon. I could send them “thoughts and prayers”, but let’s be honest, T&Ps were just mastubatory. They might make you feel good, but don’t really do shit. Nothing’s accomplished. Self-gratification is just selfish. Better to just be a bastard but try to get something done. Or at least that’s the way I see it.
I was about to pass the green-and-pink-haired girl in a neon halter and shorts that didn’t seem to have an ass when I stopped. “Whose girl are you?”
“You a cop?” That was the reflexive whore response to pretty much anything. But you could tell from her voice that she needed to smoke a lot less.
“No.”
She glanced about suspiciously. “Slim Jack,” she said, as she looked around wondering where the smack for just saying the name would come from. I started to pull a business card out then remembered I’ve gotten info from Slim Jack before. He was neither slim, nor was I willing to bet at a big ass Samoan motherfucker like him was born with the name Jack. But his info had always been good and never bitched about the kickback I gave him for it.
“Tell him to give Nick Decker a call. Could be something in it for him.” I didn’t say anything else but just turned and walked off. I tossed my empty Dr Pepper bottle at the trashcan, missed, and kept walking. It wasn’t my job to save the fucking world and somehow it was.
If Uriel had been working at night some of the working girls might have seen. So a pimp might actually know something. I needed intel, so I needed to cast a wide net.
Then it dawned on me who I needed to talk to. Jammer had always referred to it as the Homeless Underground. But Jammer had a way of making things sound better than the reality turned out to be. But bums tended to know places that were safe and places that were dangerous. Places to hunker down in and places to run from. I’d put money on a good bum sniffing out a serial killer before a cop any day of the week. A bum might never thrive, but a good one survived. And survival, a shit ton of the time anyway, was about just noticing things.
I was still miles from the office but that didn’t matter right then. I saw a small mom-and-pop Italian restaurant and I turned down the alley behind it. I banged on the door next to the dumpster. I waited and a dishwasher with a damp, stained shirt opened the door with a confused look on his face. Before he could say anything I held up a fifty-dollar bill. I tried to keep a few fifties and a couple hundreds for times I needed answers and didn’t feel like talking it out of someone. Right now I needed fast, not cheap, so I was willing to pay for it. I waved the bill between the middle and index finger of my left hand.
“I need three pounds of cheese. I don’t care if the shit’s turned, I don’t care what kind it is, but I fucking need it now.” The washer looked at the cash and reached for it. I held it back. “Cheese first, shithead.”
He shut the door and I waited a few minutes. I was about to chalk this up as a dry hole when the guy opened the door and held out a brown paper bag with the logo of the restaurant on it. It was a cartoon older lady and chubby husband smiling and holding out a plate of spaghetti. It was cute enough I realized Gretchen and I would be eating here sooner or later; baring the end of the fucking world.
I handed him the cash and opened the bag, there was a block of provolone with mold sprouting at the end and a ziplock bag of shredded parmesan. The bag was at least three pounds if not more. This would do.
You don’t go approach royalty without a gift. We lower-class non-royals always needed to bring a tribute, no matter how fucked up or unofficial the royalty was.
I was still miles from the office but that didn’t matter. I needed information. I took the bag of cheese and adjusted the carpet-rolled shotgun across my shoulders.
It was time to go see the Rat King.
Chapter Fifteen
The Rat King
“The Sound of Silence” covered by Disturbed
There were a lot of stories about the origin of the Rat King. The one Jammer believed was that he’d been a Ph.D. biologist who worked for some company or another raising rats for experiments. Experiments never really turn out well for rats and having to shovel loads of rats he’d farmed and raised into a furnace after whatever they’d been testing done them in drove him bonkers.
I didn’t really care how he came to where he was in life. Window gets a rock thrownthrough it, shattered when a bird slams against it, hot or cold snaps it, or just decides to commit window suicide. All that really matters is that it’s fucking broken. What I cared about was what he knew.
The first thing I noticed, which was exactly the first thing I noticed the first time I’d ever come here, was the sound of scratching and scurrying behind the rotting walls.
Now in folklore, a Rat King is in which two rats get their tails stuck together then more and more get tangled up into it until you have a fucked up, undulating ball of rats. Now, I never knew if it was something that could happen in reality or not, but either way, it’s jacked up. In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Rat King is a rag-wearing, sewer-dwelling villain who controls a swarm of rats. For me, the Rat King was nowhere near as cool as either.
You couldn’t look at the guy and not know he had a sad story. Homeless people in general aren’t the products of awesome circumstances and decisions, and the Rat King was in a lot of ways worse. He was what I called homeless-fat. No matter what time of year he appeared rotund because of the number of clothes he wore. Layer over layer of dirty, rotting, and fetid fabric wrapped around what I assumed was a crack-skinny frame. His face dropped like it had once had more volume but the air had been let out of the balloon. His hair was thin and wispy and filthy, and whatever color it had once been it was nothing but white now. His eyes were dichromatic, the left one being green and the right one blue. He didn’t have a thumb or forefinger on his left hand, and none of the people I’d talked to about him knew how he’d lost it.
Jammer used to take his aid bag and come check on the Rat King every once in a while. Jammer had been a better person than me. But that’s how I first met the Rat King.
He was in his nineties, we assumed. He’d mumbled about Normandy; he’d broken into tears mumbling about Bergen-Belsen. The only book he seemed to own was a first edition of the Diary of Anne Frank. He’d cry whenever he looked at it.
The shotgun house didn’t even have a power line running to it or a meter. The windows were boarded up and the front door lay in the living room. I stepped through the threshold after setting the shotgun bundle on the front porch.
“R.K. It’s Nick, Jammer’s buddy,” I called out into the darkness. I saw the shadow move as the mound of clothes and short human shuffled past a boarded window. I held out the bag of cheese. “I got cheese for you.”
I couldn't make out his features in the dark, but the smell hit me like the Macho Man Randy Savage’s flying elbow. His thin, gnarled fingers snatched the bag out of my outstretched hand. He opened the top and buried his face in it and I could hear him inhale with the intensity of a guy who had almost drowned but now breached the surface.
“You see a wacky ginger bitch in a red leather jacket?” I asked as his face was still buried in the bag.
“Why?” His voice was tissue paper thin and crinkled.
“Does it matter?” I didn’t want to get in a philosophical argument with a probably crazy guy. Philosophers had tried to figure out why since the be
ginning of time. The best answer anyone had ever given, in my opinion, was Lucifer’s “Why not?”
“Everybody hurts.” He lifted his face from the bag and started shuffling, dropping handfuls of shredded parmesan in the corners.
“Okay, REM.” I paused realizing he wasn’t going to get the reference. “It’s important. Things are going to get fucking worse if I don’t find her, R.K.”
He looked to me and you could hear the tears as he mumbled, “Anne had such hope…”
“Hemingway said, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’” I swallowed as he wept. “I’m trying to fight for it, old man. Can you help me out here?”
He looked up, though in the dark I couldn’t see the expression on his, what I assumed, was a grime-covered face. “The parks.”
I stood there in the silence and saw him reach in the bag and push a handful of cheese into his mouth. From that, I drew the assumption that he wasn’t going to say anything beyond that.
“Which park?” Like most cities there were a lot of parks, spanning from big ones you could have festival concerts in and small parks that didn’t even cover an acre. Granted saying “the parks” was better than him saying, “in town”…but only barely.
“She’s an angel,” he muttered around a mouthful of cheese. “I can see it clear. Clear.”
Six months ago I would have passed that off as crazy talk. It probably was crazy talk. Just because it’s correct doesn’t mean it’s not batshit insane.
“I know, but she’s not aiming for anything good, R.K. Which park?”
“All.” He broke off a piece of molded provolone and knelt down. I couldn’t see the rat but I could hear the pleased squeak as it started eating from his old, liver-spotted hand. “Every, all, all and every.”
“Did she say anything?”
He looked at me and I saw the moonlight glint off his cracked glasses. “She said I was right. Correct. Accurate.”
“About what?”
I saw him gesture toward a spot in the shadow. I squinted, and when I couldn’t see anything I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight. Setting there, leaning against the wall was a placard that had originally been used for some protest probably, but it’d been painted over by hand and in hand-painted black letters it simply and profoundly proclaimed: THE END IS NIGH.
“Well, that’s goddamned comforting, isn’t it?” I sighed. “Thanks, R.K.”
I turned and stepped back onto the creaking, dry-rotted porch. I breathed deep the fresh air of the street, even though I could still smell and, more disturbing, taste the foul flavor permeating from behind me. I stepped down to the bottom step then sat.
I pulled my phone out then dropped a pin and sent it to Gretchen with the text. “Could use a ride, and an extra-large pizza.”
I turned and sat with my back against the wobbly rail and was surprised that it held my weight. A park made sense. They possessed plenty of open ground, wide fields of fire. Fighting in a park seemed a whole lot better than things exploding out into the urban sprawl. But all that was predicated on it being a normal fight. Uriel was trying to kick off the end of the world. Where it started seemed pretty fucking insignificant considering either way life as we know it on this world would be ending.
I don’t know how long I’d sat there but I knew my ass had gone numb by the time she pulled up in the Charger. I managed to get to my feet just in time for her to throw herself in my arms and almost freaking bowl me over.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt? What happened?” she babbled as she squeezed me tight
“I didn’t die.” I smirked and lifted her off the ground in a hug.
She laughed. “Well, that’s obvious.”
“How are Yuri and Mary Jo?”
Gretchen smiled as I set her down. “I took them to the office. Mary Jo’s sister is coming to get them.”
“Good.” I paused, thinking back. “Was anyone at the office when y’all got back?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Okay, did you grab the pizza?”
We sat on the trunk of the Charger and both of us took a slice of the extra-large, supposedly New York-style pizza. I folded the slice in half long ways to keep it from flopping too much as I lifted it. We ate quietly and split a Dr Pepper between us. We looked out over the detritus of civilization. This neighborhood was either dead or past saving. The folks who lived there were either lost like the Rat King or there because there was no place else that would take them. The best hope the legitimate people there had was for a developer to come in, buy them out, and wreck the place to put up a combination shopping-area-with-condos above. Maybe they’d make enough to be able to get a start elsewhere.
I could feel eyes on me and Gretchen sitting on the back of a nicer car than had been in that neighborhood for years. Before we’d sat I’d unfurled the carpet roll and now had the sawed-off shotgun propped next to me in the open. That was enough to dissuade any potential negative interest we might gain by being there. Gretchen, God love her, followed suit, and had one of her revolvers sitting out next to her as well.
The pizza wasn’t good, but at that time of night, it was great-considering-the-big-chain-pizzerias-were-closed great. I got down to the crust when my phone rang. I pulled it out and held it to my ear. “Decker.”
“Yo man, heard you wanted to talk.” The voice on the other side of the line was oddly nasal for being so low pitched.
“This Slim Jack?” I knew it was Slim Jack, but pimps tended to be vain so proving you knew their name never hurt anything.
“Yeah.” His answer was the aggravating combination of annoyed and curious.
“Ask your stable, let me know if any of them have seen a ginger bitch in a red leather jacket hanging around any of the parks. You bring me the good shit that pans out there’s a century in it for you.” I bit into the crust and chewed as I waited.
There was a good twenty seconds of silence before the deep yet nasally voice replied. “I get back witcha.”
The line went dead and I slid the phone back in my suit jacket pocket.
Gretchen glanced at me bemused. “A century? A Benjamin, I get, but a century? Who talks like that anymore?”
I shrugged and crammed the rest of the crust in my mouth. “Dashiell Hammett,” I answered around the food.
She laughed and it made me smile even around a mouthful of food.
I hopped off the trunk and closed the pizza box. “You done?”
She nodded and started sucking the grease from her fingers with a deliciously seductive languidly. I knew she knew exactly what she was doing and doing it on purpose, to boot.
I took the box and walked back to the porch and stopped at the door. My eyes couldn’t penetrate the shadowy gloom of the shotgun house, but I knew the Rat King was still in there. “Hey, brother,” I called into the inky blackness that made a quiet primal part of my brain want to panic. “I got you a pizza. You should eat some of it while it’s hot.” I held the box out to the full extent of my arms.
A shadow shifted and took the pizza box out of my hands. I dropped them back to my sides and slid them into my pockets.
“What happened to Jammer?” the voice of the Rat King quietly asked from the blackness like a ghost.
“He died.” No way around it…and sugar coating has never been my strong suit.
“How?” There was sorrow there, more than you’d expect from someone who had just lost an acquaintance, but less than a father who had lost a son. Who knows how relationships define themselves?
“Like a fucking boss.” I couldn’t think of a way to explain it better; in a way that would hurt less.
It was quiet for a moment and I turned to walk back to the Charger when I heard the Rat King quietly whisper. “The End is nigh.”
“Brother,” I muttered as I started down the creaking, rotted steps. “You have no goddamned idea.”
Chapter Sixteen
Cruising
“Life is a Highway” Tom Cochran<
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Gretchen drove the Charger the way I imaged a grandmother would drive a muscle car. She’d turn her blinker on at the beginning of the block she was going to turn from. She accelerated at a pace that made me wonder if the automatic transmission was just idling up. Her turns were slow and wide. The one time a car passed us she eased over until she almost hit the curb.
“You okay?” I asked as I gave my seatbelt a tug. We weren’t going fast enough to really need it, but she left me with the impression an accident might be a real possibility.
There wasn’t sweat on her forehead but it wouldn’t have shocked me if there had been. “I’m fine. Why?”
“I dunno, you interviewing for the job of Miss Daisy’s chauffeur?”
Her lips pursed but she didn’t take her eyes off the road to glare at me. “NO! Jerk.”
“Do you… holy shit. You don’t know how to drive do you?” I had to be wrong, I knew I had to be wrong. There was no way that a freaking trained ninja-like Gretchen couldn’t know how to drive.
“… Shut up.”
“Holy fucking shit!” I laughed.