by Brian Hodge
And grew quiet.
The light was now a pinprick on the skin of the vast night.
His heart stuttered one last time, stopped. He was letting go, the train was stopping for John.
But something deep inside of John Warrick rebelled. He bit down hard on his tongue and warm saltiness flooded the back of his throat, choking him and he awoke to—find himself lying on the floor. He was terrified and he tried to crawl to the bathroom before he threw up. He didn't make it. He lay face down on the beer stained carpet and waited for the shaking to finally subside. His entire body was soaked with sweat, acrid and stinging. His terrified mind tried to sort out what he had just gone through while images flashed in and out of his mind. The train was still running and it still wanted him on board.
After a while he made it to his knees.
Most of what he had gone through was symbolic, he knew that. It couldn't be interpreted literally. And yet what he had just seen defied all logic. He could make no sense out of it.
When he finally found enough strength to make it to the bathroom, he found more than just his bitten tongue. His nose was busted and his entire body was covered with red welts. Some of them were bleeding. The worst injury was the oozing slash across the top of his forehead. He looked as though someone had tried to scalp him.
Chapter 3
John was too keyed up to sleep so he eased the cue stick under the mattress and left his room. At three in the morning the parking lot was dead quiet, with only a few shadows chasing after the cars on the interstate, in the motel lobby the night clerk sat behind the counter, asleep, bathed in the soft glow of the Coke machine, settled back in his chair with a paperback perched atop his protruding stomach. It rode there like a small schooner on an ocean of blue.
The night was still clear and it looked as though they were going to get the first frost of the year. John was glad he was wearing the denim jacket that Louise had given him last Christmas. For a moment, he thought about calling her up. She would know what to do. But he didn't. Instead he fired up a cigarette and tried to think. He touched his nose. It was no longer bleeding, although the cold air made it sting. The welts were almost gone; the gash on his forehead was still oozing red.
What in God's name had he seen back there in his room?
He didn't know. Most times all he got in his visions was a few vague images, feelings of fear, lust. Nothing so detailed. Nothing so frightening. He could still feel those damned rats crawling around inside of him. Worse, he could feel that kid's heart stopping.
Had any of it been real or had he just picked up a little mental debris from some psychotic? What if he had seen an actual murder? Jesus, what was he going to do? He knew the streets he'd walked in the vision. They were just off the strip in Vegas. A lot of rough trade went on there. If you had the money you could get anything you wanted. Anything at all.
From one of the rooms he heard a woman laugh, and he knew that he wanted to be around people. All this quiet was getting to him. He crushed out his cigarette and climbed into his old Jeep Cherokee. The first thing he did was to turn up the radio, even before he turned on the heat.
Most everything was closed at this hour of the morning, but he knew that Pop Turner's doughnut shop would be open and the coffee there was always good and hot. He wanted coffee, lots of coffee. The thought of going back to his empty room and trying to sleep was out of the question. Maybe he could even negotiate a little female company. Pop's primarily catered to two groups; cops and hookers.
Both groups were well represented when he slid onto a stool at the Formica counter. A couple of the girls gave him the once-over as he ordered his first cup, but he found he wasn't that interested anymore. One of them wore perfume that smelled a lot like Joey Estevez's after-shave. It made him queasy.
Pop came over, poured the coffee. "You look a little rough, son. You want something to eat?"
John tested his bitten tongue and shook his head no.
"It's on the house," Pop said.
"No, I'm okay, Pop. Got plenty of money." He pulled out a twenty and laid it on the counter. "Just keep that coffee coming."
The sun came up while John was on his seventh cup of coffee and second pack of smokes. He stared out the plate-glass window with red-rimmed eyes as the early morning traffic piled up. He almost envied the people who had normal jobs, someplace to go, someone to go to. His prediction about the frost had been wrong, but he had made up his mind about what to do. He hoped it was a better call than the frost.
Pop gave him an understanding look when he asked for five dollars in quarters and made his way to the phone. He glanced at the clock before he dialed the Crowder Flats number. It was a little after six.
It rang four times. The voice that answered sounded a little harder than he remembered.
"Hello, Louise."
"John, is that you?" She seemed faintly surprised.
"Yeah, it's me. Sorry to bother you but I wanted to catch you before you went to work. I need a favor."
The line went dead and then filled with laughter. "I've got to hand it to you, John. You're one in a million. We haven't seen you in over ten months and you call at six o'clock in the morning to ask for a loan. Things have been a little tough around here lately. I can't loan you any more money. Amy's got tuition to pay for."
"Listen, I'll try to send you something. I—"
"Look, John, what do you want? I've got to get to work. Frontier days are coming up. Things are getting busy."
"I need some information. See if you can get one of your police buddies to see what he can find out about a kid from Vegas by the name of Joey Estevez."
"What's so special about him? You owe him money, too?"
"No… I think he was murdered."
There was silence for a beat. "Jesus, what've you gotten yourself into this time?"
"Maybe something, maybe nothing. I don't know yet." He hesitated, looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to him. "Shit, Louise, I stole a pool cue from this guy over in Carruthers and I picked something up from it. Really weird crap. Stuff I couldn't make any sense out of. All I can be sure of is the kid's name, Joey Estevez, and that he's an under aged male prostitute."
"Do you know how crazy this sounds? I could get into a lot of trouble. I'm just a dispatcher and you want me to poke around in police business just because you think you had another of your so-called psychic experiences?"
"Yes, I do. I've got to know if that kid's okay or not."
There was a brief pause. "I'm not making any promises, but I'll see what I can do. Where are you staying?"
"The Milner in San Benito."
Louise laughed. "I thought they tore that place down years ago."
"Nope. It's still there, classy as ever. I couldn't get room twenty-three, though."
"You still remember the number after all these years?"
"Sure," he said, "you were the first girl I ever liked enough to spring for a room."
"That's what I liked about you, John, you were always such a romantic." Her voice had lightened a little and he wondered if she was smiling. "You sure knew how to show a girl a good time on her prom night. Warm champagne in a cheap motel room."
"Hey, I was only eighteen. Do you know how long I had to save up for that room? I was so scared your old man would find out about us. You remember how he said he was going to have you dusted for fingerprints after I brought you home? He threatened to shoot my ass off if he found any of mine on you. He was a cop. I believed him."
Louise laughed and this time there was no bitterness in it.
A young woman's voice sounded in the room, asking Louise who was on the phone. Louise said something to her, then came back on the line. "Look, I've got to go. If I have anything, I'll call you at seven tonight."
He held the line. "Louise…."
"Take care of yourself, John." The connection broke.
John picked up his remaining quarter and eased out the door. In the bright morning sun, with people swarming aro
und him, the darkness inside his head didn't seem so real. He thought about Louise on that long-ago prom night. The room might have been cheap but what had happened between them that night hadn't been.
Pop yelled something at him but he couldn't quite make it out. He waved as he climbed into his Jeep.
Pop came out into the parking lot and waved him down. The old man held a white sack in his hand. "You weren't gonna leave without taking some of my doughnuts, were you?" He handed the sack over to John. He stood there for a moment, studying the younger man's face. "Hope everything works out for you, son."
"Much obliged, pop."
When he got back to his room, he was too wired to sleep so he turned on the TV.
He didn't make it to the first commercial.
The phone pulled him out of a heavy sleep and he had to crawl across the bed to answer it. The room was dark, but he could make out a white shape on the sheets. Pop's doughnuts lay beside him, smashed. He mumbled his name into the mouthpiece.
"It's Louise. Damn it, you gave me a scare. It's seven o'clock. The phone rang nine times before you picked up. I thought something had happened to you."
"Slow down, Louise. I'm fine. Did you find out anything about Joey Estevez?"
"A lot more than I wanted to know. You were right, he was a male prostitute and he was murdered in Vegas two weeks ago." Her voice filled with sadness. "He was only fifteen… three years younger than Amy."
"How did it happen?"
"He was stabbed, oh God, John—he was stabbed fifty-three times. And then somebody scalped him."
John thought about the rats, the sharp pains that the boy had felt all over his body, the slash on his forehead. It was beginning to make sense. "Where was he found?"
"Let's see." She paused to consult something.
"It was in a second-story walk-up," John said, watching it happen again inside his head. "They found him lying on the bed and he was dressed all in black. Black high-tops, black jeans, and a black leather jacket."
"Stop it, John. You're scaring me."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. Something else happened in that room, something that I couldn't get a fix on. Is there anything else?"
"Well, there was one thing…"
"Please, Louise, I've got to know."
"I don't know if this will mean anything to you. There was too much blood in the room, even for a stabbing. But maybe they're wrong about that. They said," she hesitated, "there wasn't anything left in him. It was all on the walls and floor."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, the report said something blew every drop of blood out of his body."
Chapter 4
The bar was a cheap bar in a cheap part of town.
The bar was called The Watering Hole. The town was called Vegas.
Inside the bar, the cigarette smoke was thick enough to cut with a knife. Nobody seemed to mind. Three people, so old they were sexless, were feeding quarters to the one-armed bandits against the wall, making mechanical love to the machines. Their money went in. Foreplay began. The arm went down. Back up. Holding them at bay. No consummation between flesh and blood and metal this time.
The expressions on the faces of the slot players matched those of the machines they courted: cold, hard. They seemed to have no expectations of winning. And yet they kept at their chore with dogged determination, as though they had forgotten why they were doing it.
On a raised stage, three girls were dancing, moving in and out of the dimness with indifference, thrusting their naked bodies at the crowd without any semblance of passion. They couldn't even fake it anymore. Their faces were slack, without emotion. Slack faces stared back at them from out of the dark. Most had more interest in their drinks than the girls.
All but one, Billy Two Hats.
Billy, who went by the name Billy T, was dressed in jeans, a white chambray shirt, and a denim jacket. A snow white Stetson rested on his head, snakeskin boots adorned his feet, making him look like a Saturday matinee cowboy. Nothing could have been farther from the truth—the only horse Billy T had ever been on was the kind you shot into your arm.
Billy T was a full-blooded Navajo.
And something rare for an Indian, he was a full-blooded psychopath.
Billy T was playing nine ball against some slumming yuppie and Billy T was getting his ass kicked up one side of the table and down the other. He knew why; his concentration was off. The girls on the stage were the reason. Billy T hadn't had a girl in over two months; however that was a situation he hoped to remedy tonight.
A few of the female patrons gave him a speculative glance, and he could have had any one of them.
But Billy T didn't want his women willing.
Billy T wasn't bent that way.
The yuppie in the expensive suit sank the nine ball and smiled. Earlier he had said he was a banker. He had a banker's smile. It looked like the one on the face of the man who had evicted Billy T's mom from her house when Billy T was ten. It looked like the smile on the face of the men who had come out of his mom's bedroom after working out a deal on the rent of whatever shithole place they had been living in.
"That makes twenty you owe me," the man with the banker's smile said. He made a motion to one of the waitresses for another scotch-and-soda. "How about you, chief, you drinking?" He smiled to show he meant no harm by the remark.
Billy T shook his head no. "We gonna shoot another game?"
"You going to pay me the twenty?"
Billy T laid the money on the table.
"You want to raise the stakes?" the banker asked. The smile was back as though it had never left.
Billy T had already lost a hundred, a hundred he couldn't afford. "Fuck you," he said. "And you can take that to the bank."
The smile left the well-fed face. "What's the matter, chief, the stakes too rich for your blood?"
The Navajo considered smashing his cue stick across the man's face, but he didn't want to get kicked out of the bar. One of the girls on the stage had caught his eye. He looked at the white man on the other side of the pool table and smiled. "You call me chief again and I'm going to cut your balls off." Billy T smiled to show he meant no harm by the remark.
The fleshy middle-aged man braced his back against a wooden column and gripped his pool cue. The five scotch-and-sodas he had consumed in the last hour gave him all the courage he needed. "Is that right? Well come on, chief, cut my balls off."
Billy T risked a quick look over his left shoulder to see where the bouncers were. Luck found Billy T for the first time tonight. They were busy trying to throw out a burly construction worker who had kept complaining the drinks were watered. There was plenty of time to take care of this white asshole.
Reaching down into his boot, Billy T produced a knife. Thin and sharp, perfectly balanced. Made for cutting. Or throwing.
He hefted the knife in his hand, his eyes those of a lover caressing his loved one. "Say good-bye to your balls, you white motherfucker."
The white guy raised the cue stick to hit Billy T.
Across the room, the construction worker got in a good shot and knocked down one of the bouncers. Blood spurted. The crowd cheered.
Billy T laughed, drew back his arm. And threw.
The knife was a smoky sliver of light, too fast to follow. There was a soft snicking sound as the blade buried itself in the wooden column. It was as though the knife had appeared there all by itself.
The white guy looked down at the blade that nestled in the juncture between his legs and then looked up at the Indian. His expression was one of wonder, like that of a small child who has just seen something magical happen. He reached down and touched the knife. His hand came back smeared with red. "You cut my balls off." He looked at his hand, covered with his blood, while he considered the implications. His blood was warm and red and he could feel it running down his legs. "You cut my balls off," he repeated.
Billy T stepped around the table and caught the guy a second before his eyes rolled up
and he fainted dead away. Grasping him under the arms, Billy T half carried, half dragged him over to an empty table and sat him down. The banker slumped forward on the table as though drunk.
"You can relax, pal," Billy T said to the unconscious man. "Your balls weren't as big as you thought they were. I only nicked 'em."
The fight with the construction worker was still under way and nobody was paying any attention to what was going on in the corner. The crowd was still cheering the construction worker, who was beginning to tire. Billy T lifted the banker's wallet, then retrieved the knife and slipped it back in his boot. The whole thing hadn't taken more than ten seconds. Billy T felt good for the first time in a long time. This was going to be his lucky night, he could feel it way down in his bones.
Finally the bouncers got the construction worker out the door, and the waitress came over to the pool table with a scotch-and-soda. She saw the banker passed out at the table. "Shit, what am I supposed to do with this?"
Billy T pulled out a twenty and laid it on her tray before picking up the scotch-and-soda and downing it in a single gulp. "Keep the change," he said.
The waitress looked at him with new interest. Her interest was, of course, fueled by the twenty he had just given her. "You need anything, sugar, you just ask for me, Josie. I know how to show a cowboy a good time."
Billy T looked at the slightly heavy body of Josie and felt a faint stirring of heat in his stomach, but she wasn't what he wanted tonight. He looked past the waitress, at the stage where the blond with the creamy white body was gyrating for the drunken businessmen. Her eyes were hooded, her lips were moist. And her expression was bored, completely indifferent. There were ways to remove indifference in a woman.
The dancer was the most desirable woman Billy T had ever seen. He was going to have her. Tonight.
He placed his foot on a chair and adjusted his jeans over his boots, letting his fingers touch the handle of the knife, then the blade, sliding over the sharp edge until blood appeared. Touching his bloody fingers to his lips, he smiled.