by Chuck Wendig
Conny pulls a pair of shot glasses with one hand and they clink together as he deposits them upon the top of the small round table. Appearing in his hands, as if by magic, is a bottle of Bushmill’s with the green label: ten-year.
He fills both shotglasses till they’re overflowing, then slides one to Cason.
“Slainte,” Conny says, then tilts his head back and fills his throat with the whiskey.
Cason knows that if he wants the prize, he’s got to reach for the ring—and here that means drinking with his shit-heel younger brother.
The whiskey turns his throat into a barrel fire. Ragged and hot at first, but then suddenly communal and comforting.
“Whatcha need, Case? Spill it.”
“I want the person who bombed my boss’s brownstone.”
“Bombed my boss’s brownstone. Sounds like some kinky fuckin’ sex move, don’t it? You know, like, I took her back to my bed and I bombed her boss’s brownstone if you know what I fuckin’ mean. Brownstone tells me it’s something to do with the ol’ stink-eye, the dirty rosebud, the—well.” Conny takes the bottle, pours himself another. “So who did the deed?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Got a description? Or you just pissing in the fuckin’ wind here?”
Cason tells him. Describes the freak best as he can. Says he was cut up like a snowflake made out of paper. And as he talks, he can see that Conny knows who he’s talking about. So it’s doubly surprising when Conny says, “Don’t know him.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Not lying. Don’t know him. Know of him. But we’re not girlfriends or anything.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a madman. Bats in his belfry; shit, he’s got bats and spiders and starving owls and a little one-eyed monkey playing the same tune over and over again on a dirty mouth-harp. He’s a bomber. Showed up on the scene about five years ago. Got a real fuckin’ bug up his ass about blowing things up. He’s got a, whaddya call it, a signature: he likes to pack his bombs with... things. Things that make shrapnel. Forks and knives and toys and whatever else he thinks will best sign the crime.” Conny breathes deep through his nose. “They call him Cicatrix. I don’t know what the fuck that means. I think it’s a bug or something.”
“It’s scar tissue,” Cason says, then shifts uncomfortably in his seat. This isn’t somebody he wants to tangle with. But he feels compelled. Whoever that woman was last night—the one who gave him the apple and threatened to pull his head off his shoulders—she has power. Power potentially beyond what her ‘son’ was capable of generating.
If he found the killer, maybe, just maybe, she could help him understand why his wife and son still won’t talk to him. Why they still want him dead. Like they’re programmed to do it. Perfect world scenario, she can even help him undo whatever grim magic is keeping the ‘program’ in place.
“Where is he? How do I find him?”
“I don’t think you want to do that, Case.”
“Conny. I need this.”
“Do you. Do you.” Conny draws a deep breath. Doesn’t slam back the shot this time and instead just sips at it noisily, like someone slurping soup. “I’ll look into it. Give me your number. I’ll call you in a day or three. But you’ll owe me for this.”
“We’re brothers.”
“This goes beyond that. This goes miles beyond. Like I need this whackaloon coming in here with a bomb made of baby dolls and blowing the one thing I got going for me sky fuckin’ high. This is favor territory. You owe me. Say it.”
The words taste like mud and ash. “I owe you.”
“Good.”
Cason stands. Heads for the door. Conny lifts his head.
“Hey. Whatever happened with you and the woman? The wife. She leave you?”
“Something like that.”
“I never met her.”
“No.”
“Did Dad?”
“He didn’t want to.”
“Sounds like him. You had a son, too.”
Cason doesn’t even answer. Just a grunt of acknowledgment.
“I’d sure like to meet them someday. If you work things out.”
“I’m gonna work things out. One way or another.”
Because it’s all I have.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lawn Skillet
MORNING SUN GLEAMS off the stainless steel skillet. Alison squints as the light hits her eye. She stares out the window, wondering just how her skillet walked its way outside.
Had to be Barney.
He’s a kid. He has phases. Last week it was hiding his toys in the bathroom cabinets. Two months ago he thought he could run really fast like the Flash, so he’d run around the house going “zhhhhoooooooom” until he nearly passed out, dizzy. His fourth birthday marked a month-long stint of digging holes in the backyard as he became convinced from some book or cartoon that someone had buried treasure back there.
“Barney,” she calls.
The fast-approaching thumpthumpthump of feet and, voila, there he stands. Shirt off. Pajama pants hiked up to his belly button like some old man. He smiles big, showcasing the gap in his lower teeth—he’s already losing them. (Her heart hurts for a moment—they grow up so fast. Time slips by and all you have are memories—and even some of them fall through your fingers if you’re not careful.)
“Hi, Mom.”
“Barn, can I ask you something?”
“Um. Um. Okay.”
“Did you put the—” But her question halts as her breath catches.
Blood.
He’s got blood on his hands.
Mommy alarm goes off in her head. Klaxons of worry. She hurries over, starts scanning him over and patting him down like an officer of the TSA looking for a bomb on a passenger—looking for cuts, contusions, anything to explain the blood that’s dried on the back of his hand.
“Are you okay?” she asks, still checking. Nothing so far.
“Um. Um. I dunno?” That’s his default answer when he’s not sure if he’s in trouble or not. I dunno. She tries to explain.
“Sweetie, I just want to see if you’re hurt.”
“I’m not hurt, Mommy.”
She holds up his hand to show him. “Is this blood?”
“I dunno.” Is he being cagey? Or honest?
“Is it something other than blood?” She smells it. Ponders licking it. Could be jelly or ketchup or... no. Too dark. Too brown. It’s blood. She’s sure of it.
“I dunno.”
She goes through the scenarios. Blood that came from where? A hangnail? Maybe he was picking his nose, got a gusher. It happens. It’s not like he’d hurt a neighborhood animal. The Burtons next door have a cat and Barn’s only crime there is that he wants to hug and squeeze the cat a little too aggressively (a child’s love cares little for restraint, after all)—but that doesn’t explain blood.
Fine, then. Back to the original mystery—maybe one answer will offer another. Kids are like that, sometimes. You’re missing an earring and later you ask the tiny human why he keeps messing with that tree stump and you find out he’s been hoarding things from inside the house and hiding them inside the stump (along with lots of bugs alive and dead, like some kind of insect graveyard where the living visit the deceased and leave things like Mommy’s earrings as tribute). That actually happened. So:
“Why’d you put Mommy’s frying pan on the lawn?”
“I dunno.” Eyes shifting left and right. Then followed by his feet. “I didn’t?”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t.” Hedging his bets again: “I dunno.”
Parental exasperation takes hold. Sometimes she pursues these mysteries to their meaningless conclusions, other times—like now, blessedly—she realizes that the answer will have very little utility and the illumination won’t buy her back the time it took to get to the truth. Better instead to just go get the damn pan off the lawn.
She sighs, turns, opens the front door to go reclai
m her wayward skillet.
And that’s when she sees the woman on her lawn.
She’s got a wild mane of unkempt hair, dark as a storm cloud and with the same lack of symmetry. T-shirt a size or two too big. Pair of baggy cargo shorts. If Alison had to describe it, she’d say the woman has an Edward Scissorhands vibe going on.
The woman is staring down into the grass. Nudging something with her foot.
“Uh, hello?” Alison says. Barney appears at her side and looks out.
“Whozat?” Barney asks.
“I have no idea.” Alison snaps her fingers at the woman. “Hey. Hello.”
The woman bends down, picks up the skillet from the lawn.
She proceeds to smell it. Then lick it. Then make a frowny face with eyebrows cocked and lips twisted.
“Is this yours?” the woman asks, holding up the skillet by the handle the same way one might hold a pair of mysterious dirty underwear found in a swimming pool. The pan dangles between thumb and forefinger.
Alison offers a lame, bewildered nod.
The woman lets the skillet fall back to the lawn. Thudding into the grass. With that, she begins walking toward the house. Toward Alison and her son.
Again, the Mommy Alarm. Def-Con going up a notch. Or down—whichever is the one where the worry escalates and the klaxons get louder. Something about this woman isn’t right. She walks with her shoulders tight, her elbows pinched to her sides like they’re not used to hanging loose. The woman’s chin is pressed to her chest, and she offers only a piercing, guarded stare as she fast approaches.
“No, no,” Alison starts to say, “no, we don’t want any,” a default response to anyone coming to the door, though she can’t imagine what this lady could possibly be selling (perhaps the Satanic Bible).
But then calmness sweeps over her. It’s like—she feels something sliding along the margins of her mind, and at first it calls to mind a snake, but that changes and then it’s like a pair of warm hands cupping her mind from beneath, the way one might gently hold and stroke a cat or a puppy, and that sensation washes over her like a warm, sudsy tide.
The woman stands on the walkway.
“I’d like to come in,” the woman says.
“Okay,” Alison says. To her own surprise.
“MY NAME IS Psyche.” Sy-kee. “I am the daughter of a king and queen.”
Alison sits on the living room couch, the woman sitting not across from her but next to her, the way that a pair of teens might sit when going out on a first date. Neither of them look at one another. Psyche seems to shy away—like she’s forced to sit next to an uncle who smells like body odor, or next to a grabby jam-handed toddler.
It’s very off-putting.
“My name is Alison.” She clears her throat. “Daughter of a... an accountant and a housewife.”
“Yes,” Psyche says. “I see your bloodline. The connections our heritage affords. A tangle of vines. All the way back and forward to the boy. Barney.”
“Please don’t… hurt my son.”
Alison somehow had the presence of mind to send Barney upstairs to his room for now to read a book. Though her initial response was such a wave of comfort and familiarity she almost picked him up and plopped him down on this stranger’s lap.
Not a normal response. Not at all. Alison feels like the bottom is falling out and she’s slipping down toward the dark. She wants to get up from the couch, but she feels rooted here. Again she finds something running along the edges of her mind. Teasing. Testing. Probing. Fingers. Invisible, impossible fingers. Soon pulling things apart the way one pulls apart a warm dinner roll.
“You smell like that man,” Psyche says. “But your mind doesn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. I don’t know him. But I could smell things on him—loyalty for family, a wellspring of love, an even deeper river of anger. A bloodline that runs deep and strange, farther afield than I can yet suss out. And, of course, I could smell my husband’s life essence on him. Because he killed him. I think. The man murdered my husband.” Psyche stares. An unswerving gaze like you’d see in cats. “But he’s not inside your mind.”
Alison’s skin crawls. And yet she seems unable to get off the couch—she can barely even twitch a finger. Sweat rises warm on her brow, then cools in the breeze of the ceiling fan spinning above.
“I don’t know who you mean,” Alison says. Voice quavering.
“I smell him on your lawn. His grief. His blood.”
“Please—”
“But you have holes in your mind, Alison. Human-shaped holes.”
“Please. Please, please. Leave.” Hot tears press at the corners of her eyes.
“Someone removed something from you.” Suddenly, Psyche nods—and a little lunatic laugh rises up and out of her like a flurry of bubbles. “Of course. Of course. I see, now. Not all of it, but I see. I see my love’s fingerprints.” Another laugh. “My true love has been there. Inside you.” Alison blanches and the stranger shakes her head. “Oh. Not like that. He would never—not you. You’re too plain.”
A spike of fear and anger rises inside Alison—
And instantly it’s tamped back down again by a mental hand.
“I’m going to show you something now. Are you ready?”
“No, no. I’m not ready.”
Psyche shrugs. “That’s too bad. Because you need to see.”
Though Alison’s eyes are already open it’s like her eyelids are being ripped off, her eyes—her inner eye, her third eye—exposed to the bright noon-day sun.
It’s a face she recognizes, a face of—
Cason.
And then all turns to red curtains drawn dark over the light and yellowjacket wings and the shooshing thundering river of blood in her ears and—
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bomberman
COUPLE DAYS LATER, Cason stands in front of a falafel place on South Street. Smells of hot grease and steamed pita reach up his nose and hit that primal part of his brain—his stomach tightens, and hunger growls like a bear in a cave.
Behind him, Tundu honks the horn—“Hey, you good?”
Cason nods, gives a thumbs-up. Tundu pulls the cab away. Back to work.
Now, no time for food. Instead he looks down at the address on a curling piece of paper, an address given to him last night when Conny called right around midnight. His brother didn’t say much. Just this address followed by, “You fuckin’ owe me, remember.”
The address took him here. To a falafel joint. Yehuda’s. He’s never felt compelled to have one before, but right now, his stomach is making a strong case to try one.
He quick steps out of the way as a black kid pedals by on a BMX bike. Cason almost falls into a gum tree—literally, a tree spackled with hundreds if not thousands of smooshed pieces of gum. Couple tourists—white girls with too big sunglasses, sunglasses that make them look like old women or praying mantises or something—hurry past. Again, he’s reminded: You need to get your reflexes back, old man. That kid almost cut you off at the knees and those skinny girls’ elbows are sharp enough to make you bleed.
It’s then Cason sees that to the left of the food counter is a plain door. No address or number listed. Maybe the guy lives upstairs. Two more stories above the restaurants. Probably full of apartments. Hell, Cason’s first apartment of his own town was above a bar. A bar that played loud shitty pop music till two o’clock in the morning.
Fine. To the door, then.
He tries opening it, but isn’t surprised to find it locked.
Sure enough, a list of apartments—the labels all faded.
He runs his finger down all the buzzer buttons, mumbles something into the speaker. The door clicks. Bingo.
THESE ARE NOT nice apartments.
In the stairwell, Cason finds a grungy Schnauzer eating fast food out of a Burger King bag, chasing flies away with his tail. At a door on the second floor, he hears someone wailing and someone weeping—they call to
mind the sounds you might hear at an old asylum, with madmen and women screaming at invisible intruders.
By the numbers, the apartment Cason’s looking for is on the third floor.
Up to it, then.
First door on the right has an Asian girl in a leopard-print top and a zebra-print skirt pounding on it. She’s not using her hand to pound on it, though—she’s using the bottom of a bottle of Asti Spumante. She’s yelling, “Hey! You Jew! Open up! I want to celebrate with you! I got the job!” Thump thump thump. “Jew!”
As Cason ekes past, she shoots him a look, her eyes daggers. “What are you looking at, asshole?”
He just shakes his head and keeps walking.
Door he’s looking for is right around a bend. Last door in the hallway.
Apartment 313.
Down the hall, the echoing thumps of the bottle on the door. (“Jew! Open up!”)
Cason’s not really sure what his next move should be. What the hell was he thinking? Guy’s got a maimed face and a penchant for blowing things up with his own special brand of shrapnel panache, and Cason’s going to just—what? Knock on the door?
Fuck it. He knocks on the door.
Nothing.
(Thump thump thump, “Jew! Job! I want sex!”)
And that ends Cason’s one and only plan.
Well—he’s got one more item on the menu, a back-up plan that has no chance of working, because in this town, who leaves their doors unlocked?
He tries the doorknob. The door squeaks open.
No shit.
LIGHT FILTERS THROUGH gauzy, tobacco-stained curtains. In the beams whirl an endless dance of dust motes and cat hairs. Cason doesn’t actually see a cat, but he smells it—the ammonia stink of spent kitty litter.
The apartment isn’t much to look at, size-wise. One room with a kitchen and a bathroom glommed onto it. The guy’s bed is a rumpled pull-out couch, covered with the remnants of various snack foods: broken tortilla chips, Cheeto dust, M&Ms laying strewn about like the cracked, chipped teeth of a colorful clown.