They don’t keep me waiting long. The gate slides open on a well-oiled track, the front door opening as I approach, then closes behind me. Archie, waiting inside the foyer.
“More magic?” Funny how the word just slides out now. I must have gotten all the way through to Acceptance.
He shows me a remote. “Sometimes modern conveniences are easier. He’s in the library. Follow me.”
Neumann’s sitting at the same table where I first met him, a thick book in front of him. “Joe,” he says, all smiles. “How are you? Come to give me good news, I hope? You found the stone?”
“A lead,” I say.
“Excellent, excellent. Then follow up on it. Why are you here?”
“I need something from you first.”
“Money.” I can almost smell the acid in his tone.
“No. I need you to undo whatever the hell it is you did to the reporter.”
He leans back in his chair, honest surprise in his face. “Ah, yes. The reporter. I saw you in his room the other night and Archie told me of your, ah, encounter. I’ve also noticed that I can’t see through the eye I gave him. But then you already know that, don’t you?”
I nod. “He’s got information, but that thing you put on his forehead’s keeping him from giving it up.”
“Really,” he says. “That’s fascinating. Now, I don’t suppose you came to this understanding all by yourself?” He stands, starts to pace.
I know that look. That’s the look of someone figuring out something he doesn’t like. I can feel Archie behind me. I wonder, when it comes down to it, who I’ll need to kill first.
“I’m outsourcing.”
“How industrious of you. Who is he?”
“A guy I know. Not your problem. You gonna pull it, or do I let the lead go and lose your stone?”
“I thought you were just as interested in getting it. After all, you don’t want to be eating crack whores the rest of your days, do you?”
“Seems I’ve developed a taste.”
His eyes are weighing me. “I see. You know, Joe, I don’t think I care for the direction our partnership has gone. I think it’s time we dissolved it. I think it would be better for both of us.”
Archie takes that as his cue and makes his move. I’ve been watching him edge his way behind me since I walked in here, and I’m ready for him.
He’s faster than I give him credit for. Barely get a chance to twitch before he has me in a half nelson, my gun arm useless. He brings his other hand around with a pistol in it. Close enough, I’ll have a hole in my head I wasn’t planning on.
It’s not a bad move. If I were him, I’d probably try the same thing.
Too bad for him it won’t work.
I drop to one knee, tear my shoulder out of joint. The momentum pulls him down with me. He grunts, surprised, his shot tears a furrow across my skull.
I aim a backward kick at his knee. A loud pop and a wheezing inhale tells me I hit.
I leverage him over my shoulder, flip him into a desk. He crashes and rolls. By the time he’s up my shoulder’s back in joint, and I’ve got my Glock on him. He’s sweating, knee swollen.
“I don’t want to have to kill you, Doc. I just want you to take your goddamn magic shit off the reporter.”
“What did Giavetti offer you, huh? It’s him, isn’t it? Is that it? Or is it a woman? It’s that bitch, isn’t it? She’s been trouble since I met her.”
“Last chance.”
“Or what, you kill me? Torture me?” He laughs.
“Not you, no,” I say and shoot Archie in his good leg. He screams and goes down. “Boy’s still got two good arms and a head. I could make this last.”
“You don’t know what you’re fucking with, young man.”
Seems he’s right. I’m paying too much attention to Neumann and Archie. A mistake I figure out a second too late.
The midget comes at my head like a cannonball. Claws rake across my neck, cutting to bone, teeth latch onto my shoulder, shredding the tendons. My arm goes useless and the gun drops from my hand.
He moves onto my neck, trying to chew my head off. Making pretty good progress, too. I can’t reach him, so I throw myself, back first, into a bookshelf a couple of times. Hard enough to stun him. He goes so slack I can grab his legs and pull.
Fucker’s got jaws like a pit bull. He rips off my shoulder, and even then he’s still working at a chunk of meat he’s torn out of me.
“You’re gonna have to do more than toss dwarfs at me, Doc.”
“Good idea,” Archie says, lunging up at me from the floor, but I’m ready for him. I swing Jughead up and over, slamming him into Archie’s skull like a baseball bat. There’s a crack like shattering wood, and he drops to the floor.
I beat him a couple more times with the midget, but he’s not staying down, pulling himself up on torn and shredded legs. He makes a grab for Jughead, jerking him out of my grasp, throwing me off balance. He tosses the midget aside, broken and limp, like a rag doll.
Archie’s legs are shredded muscle and tendon, but he’s standing on them anyway. Before I can get my balance back, he’s got me in a better hold. Dislocating my shoulder isn’t going to work this time.
“Well, that was exciting,” Neumann says. He looks over at Jughead’s broken body. A discarded toy tossed on the junk heap. “Pity. I’ll have to make a new one.”
He turns his attention back to me. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t work this out, Mr. Sunday, but you’ve given me hope, if that’s any consolation.”
“Makes me warm all over.”
“I thought it might. Now that I know what’s getting in the way of that reporter’s unfortunate memory loss, I just need to bring him here.” He raises my Glock toward my head.
“You know that’s not gonna kill me.”
“I don’t need to kill you. I just need to put you out long enough to drop you down a hole.”
Archie’s taken the hint and shoved my head far enough away from him to not get hit. Perfect. The change in angle is just what I need.
Pull my knees up, lean forward. The sudden shift in weight pulls Archie down on top of me just as Neumann pulls the trigger.
Not sure if the bullet hits Archie or the other way around. Either way, his head explodes in a shower of red and white. His body convulses as Neumann shrieks like a girl. I shrug Archie’s dead weight off of me, roll to the side and onto my feet before Neumann can readjust his aim. The Doc gets a wild shot off. Puts a hole into an expensive looking book.
I sweep the gun out of his hand before he can bring it around at me. I’m in the middle of a good right hook that should dislocate the old man’s jaw when his fingers twitch.
I get thrown back like I’ve been hit with a semi.
I fly across the room, too stunned to register what’s happening. Stop inches from the wall. Hang in midair. This is not good.
Like a bug pinned to a board I can move my arms and legs, but the rest of me is stuck to … well, to nothing.
Neumann steps just out of range of my flailing kicks. Scowls, rubs his hand where I knocked the gun from it. “Archie told me you were going to be a pain in the ass.” He looks over at the corpse.
“Should have listened to him,” I say. “He might still have his head. And his midget.” I see my gun sitting on the floor under a desk. Might as well be in another state.
“I think I’m done talking to you,” Neumann says.
“Oh come on, Doc, I was just getting star—” And I’m flying through the air again.
This time it’s a bookshelf that stops me. Hard. At least three ribs crack. The shelves crunch from the impact. Books fall to the floor.
I try to grab the shelf. This is just the start. I get a good grip on an edge, but the force of Neumann’s pull is too strong. Back in the air. Face-plant into a wall.
My nose crunches. Rinse, repeat. Bones are healing fast, but they’re barely back in one piece before I hit something new.
Neumann doesn’t seem to b
e getting tired of this game. Cackling like a five-year-old who’s just learned he can set ants on fire. How long can my body hold out before it’s used up?
I’m moving so fast everything’s a blur. Keep spitting out new teeth. Lost count of how many times my nose has been broken.
Another bookshelf. Instead of holding on, I reach out and snag the biggest, fattest book I can get my hands on: a leather-bound, twenty-pound atlas.
“You’re a bug, Sunday,” Neumann screams. “And I’m going to keep squashing you until there’s nothing left.” He hurls me away from the wall.
And as I go by I throw the book at him.
Not sure it’s going to work. He can probably stop it in midair like he can stop me. From the look of surprise right before it slams into his head, I think it caught him off guard.
Momentum disappears. I hit the floor, skid into an overturned desk I’ve hit three times before.
I limp over to Neumann as my legs heal. He’s pushing the book off of him, eyes unfocused, blood running from his nose and mouth.
“That must have hurt a lot,” I say. I pick up a broken table leg from the floor, heft it in both hands. “This’ll hurt more.”
I step on his chest and run the ragged end of the table leg through his throat and into the floor where it sticks.
Neumann convulses, uselessly pulls at the leg. Tries to scream. Pretty sure I’ve taken out his vocal cords. Blood gushes around the wood jammed through his throat.
I grab a nearby letter opener, get onto my knees, look him in the eyes. “You’re gonna suffocate soon, if you don’t bleed out first. And I want you alive for this.”
I jam the letter opener down just below his sternum, reach in with my hand, and start to yank. He gurgles, flails.
“The hell of it is, Doc,” I say, tearing his sternum away from his ribs, “I’m not even hungry.”
Chapter 23
I need new clothes. The midget made a mess of me when he chewed through my neck. Should have killed him when I met him. Neumann’s blood hasn’t helped.
I’m strangely okay with eating the Doc. Not the best way to kill a person who’s pissed you off, but it’s pretty damn satisfying.
I blacked out again while I was ripping out Neumann’s heart. Lost control. Took out a lot more than I had planned. By the time I come back to my senses, there’s a lot of blood, a lot of bone. Not much meat.
My phone rings. It’s slick with blood and hard to get open.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how you convinced him to do it,” Gabriela says, “but the spell’s off. Carl’s still got the eye, though. I don’t think I can get rid of it. What’d you do to convince Neumann?”
“Ate him.”
Silence.
“Okay, then,” she says and hangs up the phone.
No one’s going to walk in on me, so I take my time cleaning up my mess. Neumann never got up like the others. Figure it’s because some time during my feeding frenzy I tore his head off.
When you have a lot of uninterrupted time you can really take the care you need to dispose of a body. I cut them up with an electric carving knife I find in the kitchen, bury their bits in the backyard.
I find some of Archie’s clothes in a bedroom. They’re not a perfect fit, but they’re not covered in guts, so that’s a plus. I shower and change.
The house is enormous, and it takes a couple more hours to toss the place. Most of this crap is useless to me, or I don’t know what it is so it might as well be. Eventually I find some papers with the Imperial Enterprises letterhead.
It’s paperwork acknowledging Neumann’s bid at an auction and then later pulling out of the bid. It takes a few minutes to parse out the legalese to figure out it’s for the book he wrote that he was trying to get back. The one he figured out was a forgery that ultimately went to Giavetti.
So Imperial Enterprises was running the auction? So Giavetti already had the book. So why auction it off in the first place?
Maybe he didn’t know what he had until later?
I’m getting fucking tired of more questions than I’ve got answers for.
I check in with Gabriela a few times throughout the day. See if Carl’s said anything yet. So far, he’s still out. I tell her I’ll be by later and if anything changes to call me. I don’t need to play nursemaid to him. Darius and Gabriela have that covered.
I’ve got nowhere to be for a few hours. I find myself pacing, cleaning the house, finally putting things back in order from when Giavetti ransacked it. But there’s only so much cleaning a guy can do.
It’s funny how you don’t notice how much time gets taken up by things you have to do until you don’t have to do them anymore. Eating, sleeping. Going to the bathroom.
Seriously, I haven’t gone to the can since this happened to me. Where does it all go? I’m not gaining weight, and god knows I’ve eaten enough. Neumann was a hell of a lot more than a cheeseburger and a side of fries.
I keep checking myself in the mirror for signs of rot. Keep thinking it’s there then decide it’s not. I’m getting stupidly OCD about it and force myself to stop.
I don’t know if I’m going to have an episode tonight after eating Neumann. Hopefully that will tide me over for another day.
I try to sleep. Not because I’m tired, but because then I could close my eyes and pop them open, and it’d be eight hours later.
Instead I get three hundred cable channels of the same stupid bullshit it’s always been. This is what eternity looks like?
By the time I find myself watching an episode of The View in Spanish I know it’s time to go.
I head out to the club. They don’t open for another hour, but I want to get there before Giavetti does. The idea of seeing him tonight, especially after hearing about that monster dog he’s got, has me a little spun. So far, nothing’s torn any limbs off of me. I assume they’ll grow back, but I don’t really know.
Hopefully with Frank there Giavetti will have better things to worry about than siccing his dog on me.
The club is still gearing up for the evening. I go in through the back entrance.
The bouncers seem to know I’m coming. They wave me through and give me distance. I get looks that tell me they probably saw last night’s fight.
Without the dim lighting the place looks like a Goth warehouse. The walls flat black, the windows painted over. A DJ is setting up on the stage where last time girls in latex were getting whipped while tied to a crucifix.
One of the bouncers I know, big guy who goes by the name Steroid Harry, is over giving a pep talk to the rest of the crew. They’re shaken, that’s for damn sure. If they didn’t see Giavetti pull out his dog, they heard about it. Heard about Bruno.
I catch Harry’s eye. He heads over when he’s done psyching up his talent.
“Danny tell you what happened last night?” he says.
“Big dog. Bruno in the hospital. Guy wants to see me.”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
“Danny around?”
“Haven’t seen him. Cocksucker better be here. These guys are freaked the fuck out. Half of ’em didn’t even come in tonight.”
I don’t blame them. I don’t really want to be here myself. “Why are you even open?”
“Danny. Goes on this rant about the bottom line. How nobody’s gonna get him to close. Dude, I think he’s lost it. I swear, he better show up.”
“He’ll be here,” I say, knowing he won’t.
I can’t imagine the last few days have been kind to the little cocksucker. Every mob in town sniffing at his heels wanting to pick up where Simon left off. Nobody’s come to me yet, which doesn’t surprise me. They have to know Julio’s dead, and it’s in their best interest to leave me alone. By their thinking, if I get into it they’ll take me out, sure, but some of their people will wind up dead. Give it a week. Then I’ll start getting phone calls.
With all that and Giavetti, the smart money’s on Danny skipping town.
I plant myself at the bar, toss a few drinks back. Wait for the lights to dim and the crowds to show up.
The club fills up before midnight. It’s a very different crowd tonight. Strobe lights, glow sticks. Whistles and pacifiers. Everybody’s chugging bottled water.
Fuck I feel old.
Another hour goes by and no Danny. The light in his office is still out, and I don’t see him. Or smell him. But even through the scents of sweat and drugs filling the club like fog, I do catch a whiff of something familiar.
“Evenin’ Joe,” says a voice at my elbow. I don’t turn, just nurse my drink and try not to snap Giavetti’s neck where people can see. And right now, every bouncer in this place is looking at us.
“Giavetti.”
“Been looking for you, son,” he says, sliding onto the stool next to me.
“So I hear. Doing stupid pet tricks, too, from the sound of it.”
He waves the bartender over, who goes white at the sight of him. She remembers last night just fine. He ignores her look, orders a gin and tonic. She backs away slowly to fill it with shaking hands.
“You use what you’ve got. Sometimes that’s not enough.”
“Saw some of your work up close the other night. You know, I’m in the phone book. Could’ve just popped by any time.”
He shakes his head. “Like you wouldn’t have seen me coming. No, this way I’ve really got your attention, right? Besides, if your buddy in the hotel room had talked, he’d still be around.”
“Think maybe he didn’t know anything?” I say.
“Yeah. Eventually. Took me awhile to figure that one out. Got the job done, though, right?”
I get up from my stool, hand toward my gun, catch myself just as I realize what he’s doing.
He laughs. “You’re easy, you know that? All I have to do is say B-5, and you pop up and yell ‘Bingo.’ Come on. You’re not going to kill me with all these people around. And anyway, I’d just do the morgue drawer two-step again.”
“Was thinking maybe I’d just dump your ass in a cement mixer this time.”
“Like nobody’s done that before. Sit the fuck down. We have things to discuss.”
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