by Chuck Wendig
She pauses, because she is remembering.
"Go on," Paul says.
"We weren't friendly, he and I. Never said two words to each other. But sometimes I'd catch him staring at me, or he'd catch me staring at him. We'd pass each other in the halls, stolen glances, all that clichéd crap. So one night, it happened. My mother was not a drinker by and large. Condemned it like it was the milk of Satan. And yet, I knew that once in the bluest moon she'd take a nip from this nuclear green crème de menthe bottle she kept under her bed. I stole it, and I went right to Ben's house, and I did the stupid teen thing where you throw shit at the other person's window to get them to come out – I threw twigs because with my luck I'd throw a pebble and break the window. His house was one of those country farmhouses with the old, warped glass. Fragile.
"He came out. I showed him the bottle. We went into the woods. We sat among the crickets there in the darkness, and we had a great time telling stories and making fun of people at school, and then – we did it. The rumpy-pumpy, the beast with two backs. Up against the tree, like a pair of clumsy, rutting animals."
"Romantic," Paul says.
"You kids and your sarcasm. You joke, but in a weird way, it was romantic. I mean, if you subscribe to this Hallmark fantasy that romance is all about the greeting cards and the dozen roses and the diamonds are a girl's best friend, no, this wasn't that. But it was an… honest connection. Two wayward idiots in the woods, laughing and groping and drinking." She pulls out her pack of cigarettes, sees that she's smoked them all already. She mashes it up and pitches it over her shoulder. "Of course, I went ahead and took a shit all over that beautiful human connection. As I'm wont to do."
"Oh? How so?"
"We get back to his house, and I'm feeling high and giddy and I'm grinning like the cat who killed the mouse, and his mother is waiting for him. For us. She's got one of the local cops with her, this bald prick named Chris Stumpf. Guy looks like an uncircumcised penis. So. Ben's mom starts reading him the riot act, and me, she tells me that if she ever sees me again, I'll be sorry, she'll get me, blah blah blah."
Miriam snaps her fingers.
"That's when it hits me. What we did in the woods. The kindof-beautiful thing he and I shared turns ugly. Shame floods in. I'm like Adam and Eve, made to realize my own nakedness. My own mother wasn't there at that exact moment, no, but Ben's mom did the job well – a perfect stand-in. I could hear my mother's voice clear as the night sky, stripping me of all my dignity, shoving me toward the belching gates of Hell itself. I suddenly felt like I was both used and user, a worthless lazy whore who gave her virginity to some sweet simpleton from down the road. And that was the end of mine and Ben's fleeting half-ass relationship – soak it in crème de menthe, light it on fire, and head home."
Paul shifts uncomfortably. "You never talked to him again?"
"I did, but only in passing." Miriam idly fingers the booze bottle, wishing she had more smokes. She wants to cut this short to go get some, but she can't. Things have to happen a certain way here. Order of operations, and all that. "He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn't have it. I told him that what we'd done was wrong, but he still wouldn't take no for an answer. The dumb idiot told me he loved me, do you believe that? That's when the floodgates opened."
"What happened?"
"I let fly with some of the meanest shit you could imagine. I slung acid in his eyes, pissed in his ears. I called him a moron, a retard, even though he wasn't either of those things; he wasn't even slow, he was smart as a whip but just… came across the wrong way. I told him he had a limp dick, couldn't fuck, wasn't fit to lay a cripple or a coma victim. I mean, it was like I was possessed. I don't even know that I'd heard words like that before, and they came rocketing out past my tongue – I wanted to close my teeth and stop them from coming, but there it was. All that bile. Unstoppable."
Miriam takes one last look at the bottle in front of her. More than halfway empty now. She whistles low and slow, and then pulls back the bottle and drinks. And drinks. And drinks. Throat bulging with each gulp. She's already hazy. Her words, already slurring. Might as well go for broke, she figures.
Her throat burns.
But it goes numb fast.
She gasps, catching air, then pitches the bottle over Paul's head. He winces, ducks, and winces again when the bottle pops against the concrete.
"That night," she continues, stifling a little burp, "Ben goes into the bathroom, his head probably full of all the spew that came out of my mean-ass mouth, and he sits down in the shower stall and he peels the sock off of his left foot. Then he sticks the double barrels of a fuckin' shotgun between his teeth – the two barrels forming a sideways eight, what they call a lemniscate, a sign of infinity, what irony, right? – and then he curls his big toe around the double triggers. A tug of the toe. Boom. He was kind enough to do it in the shower so it required as little clean-up as possible for his mother. Nice guy till the bitter, blood-soaked end."
Miriam doesn't stifle the next belch. She vurps whiskey breath. Her eyes water. She tells herself they're just watering because of the whiskey. It is a good lie; Miriam almost buys it.
"The real bite of it is, he left a note. Well, not so much a note as a, I dunno, a postcard. He wrote on a piece of paper in big black marker, 'Tell Miriam I'm sorry for whatever I did.'"
She stares off at nothing, uncharacteristically silent.
TWENTY-ONE
The Suitcase
She throws open the door to the motel (motels, motels, always another motel, another highway, another stop on her coast-to-coast tour of nowhere) and finds Ashley naked, on the bed, his cock in his hand. Miriam can't see the television, but she hears a porny moan, the kind of moan women don't make in real life.
Ashley freaks out, tries to grab for his pants lying in a fabric puddle by the side of the bed. He fails and rolls off the bed, slamming into the floor shoulder-first.
"Shit! You ever hear of knocking? On the door?"
He doesn't put on his pants – he just ducks behind the bed, using it to cover up his nudity.
Miriam marches into the room and flips the blinds closed.
"I paid for this room," she says, then glances over her shoulder. Two blonde trollops with milk-jug breasts are wrapped in a sixty-nine on the tube. They're going at each other like frenzied cats. "And apparently I paid for lesbian porn."
"I thought you were on your date."
"Put on some pants. We have to go."
"Go? What? What did you do?"
Miriam's reached her boiling point. She feels like a cornered rabbit, ready to kick.
"What did I do?" she asks. "Me? That's a ripe one. What did you do is the question we should be asking ourselves, shithead. Why would the FBI be interested in you?"
His reaction surprises her: He laughs.
"The FBI? Please. Don't they have more important things to worry about, like pedophiles, or terrorists? Or pedophilic terrorists?"
Miriam snatches the jeans off his lap, then throws them in his face.
"Hey, don't fuckin' laugh about this, Smiley McGee. Quit with the grins. This is serious. I was at the motel, or the motor lodge, or whatever the fuck they're called, and these two FBI agents walked right up like they could smell the stink of you all over me. Ashley, they had a photo of you."
Ashley's smirk melts away. It's the first time she's really seen him stunned.
"What? My photo? You're serious?"
"Asshole! Yes!"
He chews the inside of his cheek. "What'd they look like?"
"Tall, Dark and Asshole was… well, tall. Italian, maybe. Dark suit. The other one was this mean little woman, this Napoleon in a turtleneck. Adams and… Gallo, I think. Like the cheap wine."
Ashley goes pale. "Shit," he says, quiet-like. His eyes search the room. "Shit!"
He grabs the remote control off the bed and pitches it against the TV. The remote shatters. The TV flicks off – the lesbian porn fading to a bright dot, then to nothing.
&n
bsp; "Now maybe do you get the gravity of the situation?"
Ashley grabs her wrists, snarls, "No, you don't get the gravity of the situation. Those two aren't FBI. They're not cops. They're not anybody."
"What? What the hell are you talking about?"
"They're demons, devils, ghosts. They're goddamn thugs. Killers."
"Killers? You're babbling. Stop babbling."
Ashley isn't paying attention anymore. He mind works; she can see it. He starts to pace.
"Grab your shit," he says. He moves to the corner of the room, and he throws aside his duffel bag before lugging out the metal suitcase. Ashley grunts as he hoists it onto the bed.
"This is about the case." She says it matter-of-factly, because she knows it's true.
"Probably." He grabs Miriam's messenger bag from the other side of the bed and slings it at her. She catches it like a football, right in the bread basket. She oofs. "Keys. Give me the keys."
"No."
"Give me the keys to the Mustang. Now."
"Not until you tell me what's going on."
"We don't have the time for this!"
Miriam grits her teeth. "Tell me."
"I swear to God." His hands ball into fists. "You give me those keys right now."
Miriam pulls out the keys, which hang from a fuzzy dyedgreen rabbit's foot.
"These?" she asks. She dangles them in front of him. "Go on. Take them."
He reaches in.
She whips him across the face with them. The keys cut a gash across his forehead. He staggers backward, pressing his forearm to the cut. Pulling his arm down, he sees the blood; an astonished look crosses his face. The second time now that he really looks spooked.
"You cut me," he says.
"Yup. You wanna get grabby again? Unclench those fists, buddy boy, and get to talking. Because if you don't tell me what the hell is going on, I will cut your fucking throat with these keys and stuff the rabbit's foot up your asshole for good luck."
Miriam watches him. He thinks about it. He's probably thinking, I can take her, or I'll lie, I can always lie. But then all the gears and pylons and tumblers fall into place, and he makes his decision.
With nimble fingers, he works at the combination lock on the metal case.
The lock releases with a pop.
He opens the lid, and Miriam sighs.
Inside the suitcase are little baggies, each piled atop the next, each no bigger than a coin-purse or a snack bag. But these baggies don't hold Oreos or spare change. In each is a baby's fist of little crystals, like broken quartz or shattered rock candy.
Miriam knows what it is. She hasn't tried it, but she's seen it.
"Meth," she says. "Crystal meth."
Numbly, Ashley nods.
"Tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"Tell me how this giant fucking suitcase of drugs made its way into your hands."
He sucks in a hard breath through his nose. "Okay. You want to waste time? You want to get us killed? Fine."
INTERLUDE
Ashley's Story
Jimmy DiPippo was my weed dealer in high school. He was a rich kid anyway, but the weed only made him richer. He had a used BMW, a nice watch, a couple gold rings. He was a nice guy, Jimmy, but rich or not he was dumb as a bag of retards, and smoking all that weed didn't help. Well, last year I was… passing through my hometown… and I heard through the grapevine that Jimmy was still around, that he was still a dealer and still about as sharp as a tree stump.
Naturally, I figured we'd catch up, and I'd dick him out of some money.
I track him down at this party. Some girl's house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of the suburbs of Scranton, which is about as awesome as it sounds. House party full of teenage assholes, for the most part – beer bongs and regular bongs and some kid with a super-bong made out of a World War Two gas mask, and bad techno music and dudes in sweetsmelling frat cologne. Just some shithole party, whatever, no big deal.
I find Jimmy out on the patio, smoking up this cute little hottie and her lunkhead fat-ass linebacker boyfriend, trying to sell them some weed, and I say hey, and he seems surprised to see me, too surprised, nervous surprised. But I don't think much of it, because Jimmy's always been itchy-twitchy. Sweaty, too – kid looked like a drowned rat in high school, and he wasn't much different now. Sweat was soaking through the band on his longbrim cap, the hat pulled cockeyed like he was some kind of hip-hop suburban hero, and I figured if you reached down the waist of his pants – which hung around the crack of his ass, thankfully covered up by his tighty-whities – you'd find his balls were floating in a swamp, too.
I let him finish his deal, then we stay outside and head to the patio furniture by the pool to play catch-up. He tells me he's still dealing, he's doing well for himself, and I tell him I'm a Wall Street broker in the big city, and I don't know why he believes me. I'm convincing, I guess. I was always convincing. Plus, him, dumb, you know the drill.
Thing is, he's getting more and more nervous by the minute. His foot's tapping. He keeps licking his lips and looking over his shoulder, and right then I have no idea why. First I think, it's just because that's how he is. But this is something else.
"Whatever," I say to myself, I don't care about Jimmy. He sells drugs to kids, and more power to him, but we're not talking sacred cow-tipping here. I decide to get into the scam.
Scam's not a real complex one, and it's something I pretty much make up on the spot. I figure, if I'm playing the Wall Street broker made good, I can pretend like I have some cool insider trading secret. Some tip about a pharmaceutical company about to release a new antidepressant, some new concept car coming out of Japan. Whatever. I could've told Jimmy that Wal-Mart was designing a new shock-absorbent anal tampon and he'd have bought it. I say to him, if he wants in, I can do him a solid like he did for me so many times way back when – and he did do me favors, free weed, lots of it – and I'd be happy to invest his cash without taking any cut for myself.
I have him interested, I can tell. But then he sees something out the corner of his eye, and he tells me he's gotta go meet some people, and he'll find me later. Then zoom, he's off like a bottle rocket. I trail him inside, and I lose him for a minute – some busty chick, busty because she's a little overweight but that's fine, she wants to do a shot with me, and that's okay, I'm good with shots. We slam back tequila shooters with the lime and the salt while the techno is doing its thump, thump, thump and the red Christmas lights are winking to the beat even though its summertime, and yay, whatever. She takes a picture of me with her cell phone. Everybody's having a good time, and for a second I forget why I'm even here.
Then I see Jimmy coming downstairs with a metal suitcase.
Yeah. This metal suitcase.
I hang back and trail him – he's out through the kitchen and into a dark two-car garage. I follow him out there, and I duck behind a Range Rover and then, boom, the lights come on.
"Damn, man," I hear Jimmy say. "My eyes, that's bright."
From where I'm at, all I can see is feet. I see three pairs. I see Jimmy's high-tops. I see a pair of scuffed black loafers. And then I see a pair of white sneakers on small, stubby feet.
Nobody says anything, so Jimmy has to fill the space: "It's cool, you just surprised me is all. Hey, what's up? I got your message, I brought the case. I don't know what the problem is, not like you guys do a recall on this product, right–" And he laughs, a nervous heh-heh-heh. "So, what's up? I'm good to go in case you were–"
And then this woman speaks. Her voice is a monotone.
She says, "I hear you've made some new friends, James."
And it's weird, because I don't know that anyone has ever called Jimmy "James." Not even his parents. I always figured "Jimmy" was the name on his birth certificate.
He stammers something out, something like, "Yeah, man, I'm a – I'm a real friendly dude, everybody knows Jimmy." But he knows something's up. I can't see him, but by now I figure the sweat's po
uring off him.
"Even the police," the woman says. It's not a question. It's an accusation.
"No," Jimmy says, but it's half-hearted at best.
"Oh, yeah," the dude says, got a Bronx or Brooklyn accent. "Jimmy, you been talking to po-po. You been cozying up next to the pubic fuzz."