by Edward Lee
The dying eyes gazed back up. “Natter? Lab?”
“Natter’s dust lab. It’s got to be out here somewhere. Tell me where it is, Eagle. Then I can pay them back for this shit.”
“The…lab…” was all Eagle could reply with any coherence. A high, wet whistling sound ensued as his chest heaved. He mumbled some words unintelligibly, then twitched. The hand gripping Phil’s sleeve fell away…
Then Eagle died.
Phil sighed. Poor fucker. An array of feelings collided: rage, sadness, confusion. Things like this shouldn’t happen. Why did the world have to be so insane? Sure, Eagle was a penny-ante dust runner, a two-bit criminal who Phil was playing for a dupe, but he didn’t deserve this. In spite of Phil’s undercover role, and in spite of his unrestrained hatred of PCP, Eagle was still, in a way, Phil’s friend…
“Goddamn it,” he muttered.
click.
Phil’s heart seemed to stop mid-beat. The click had sounded at his head. Someone cocking a pistol hammer…
Phil, still on his knees, dropped his own gun. Very slowly, his eyes turned up.
Yet another Creeker stood before him, with odd, knuckly double-jointed hands that seemed to wrap around the revolver he gripped. The right side of his skull possessed a swell large as a cantaloupe, and his entire head seemed to hang off a thin, extended neck. His nose sported but one nostril.
The hard steel tip of the pistol barrel nudged mockingly at Phil’s temple…
I’m dead, Phil was able to contemplate. It was not an easy surmise to make, but Phil managed to do so with a surprising sense of calm.
But the Creeker kid paused. The scarlet eyes, which seemed twice the size of normal eyes, peered down at Eagle’s corpse and the massive, bleeding chest wound.
“Skeet-inner-to,” the kid said. “Ona-prey-bee.”
Creeker jibberish, Phil realized. The words oozed thick in their defect. But why doesn’t he just kill me now?
Then the weird red eyes moved back to Phil’s face. The gun, a Smith .38, wavered.
Mannona, the word suddenly drifted from the kid. And then another word: Onnamann.
Phil’s thoughts seized in a sudden static. He blinked. What eventually occurred to him was this: he hadn’t heard the words in his ears—he seemed to have heard them in his head.
The kid’s red eyes stared at him.
What’s he waiting for? Phil thought, but he didn’t think for long. He used the extra second to his advantage and quickly snapped his hands up. The disarm technique they’d taught him in the academy worked to a tee. His left hand grabbed the barrel, his right hand grabbed the Creeker’s wrist, then, simultaneously, he pushed, twisting the gun right out of the kid’s hand.
The kid’s face went wide with astonishment—the disarm had taken less than a second.
Phil stood up, training the gun between the Creeker’s crooked eyes. “Where’s Natter’s lab, you ugly fuck?”
Fat lips like tumors parted. The kid blinked.
“Mannona,” he repeated. Then he lunged.
Phil squeezed off a single round into the kid’s forehead. The back of his skull erupted, emitting a splat of gore which landed yards behind him in the high grass.
Phil stared through shifting gun-smoke. Goddamn. What a fucking night….
Then he turned for the path and jogged away.
— | — | —
Twenty-Four
“You were supposed to be fucking careful!” Mullins leaned forward over his desk and bellowed. “You could’ve gotten yourself fucking killed!”
Phil shrugged. “Hey, this ain’t Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I’m working undercover on a PCP case. Shit happens.”
“Yeah, shit happens. Well, your shit almost stopped happening!” Mullins reseated himself. Somehow, he looked fatter when he was mad. He seemed to tick behind the desk, an irate Jabba the Hut in a police suit.
It had taken Phil till well-past dawn to find his way out of the woods. Then he hitched back to Sallee’s for his car and made it to the station about a half-hour after Mullins came in, walking up, as always, from the convenience store so his car wouldn’t be seen. Obviously, the chief was not too pleased upon learning of last night’s bullet-fest at Blackjack’s shanty.
“Are you all right?” Mullins finally got around to inquiring.
Phil, for the first time, sipped some of the chief’s noxious coffee. It tasted like bilge, but after what he’d been through he didn’t really care. He needed something—anything—in his system with a little kick. “Yeah, I’m all right. Still a little shaky, though, but at least I wasn’t hurt.”
“Yeah, and you’re goddamn lucky, too. So what else are you trying to tell me? You’re telling me you killed three or four Creekers last night?”
Phil frowned, slumped in his chair. “More like five or six.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mullins exclaimed, peering at him. “Who do you think you are, Wyatt Fucking Earp?”
“Believe me, Chief, I’m not too happy about wasting all those Creekers, but it’s not like I had much of a choice. It was a regular firefight out there. They were all over the place, and they had enough hardware on them to start their very own armory show.”
“Shit,” Mullins grumbled. “I wanted to keep all this out of the papers for as long as I could. But with you blowing six of them away like a one-man killing machine, I guess I gotta call county Technical Services and have them pick up the bodies. After the job you did up there, those county fuckers’ll ask all kinds of questions.”
“Save yourself the hassle, Chief,” Phil pointed out. “You can bet Natter had all the bodies removed within an hour. And when I was jogging out of there, I could see a fire start up on the hill.”
“They burned Blackjack’s place, you mean.”
“Yep, and I guarantee you they took all their dead out, too. No bodies, no shack, no evidence, no nothing. Probably just a whole lot of spent brass which the county won’t give a flying fuck about because none of the Creekers have their fingerprints on file.”
“You got that right. And Peters, you sure he was dead when you left?”
Phil gulped at the recollection. “Dead as dead can be. He took a shotgun blast full in the chest. Died in minutes.” Phil’s thoughts darkened further. “I guess I feel pretty shitty about it.”
“Shitty? Why? The guy was everything you hate. We oughta give those Creekers a trophy for putting that asshole six feet under. Saves the state big-time tax dollars. He was a scumbag PCP dealer.”
But was that really it? Was there no gray area? “Sure, Eagle was a criminal. But he was also a friend, a guy I grew up with, you know?”
“Oh, boo-hoo. You need a hanky for your tears?”
Fuck you, Phil wished he could say. Part of the reason he’s dead is because of me. It was a strange concoction of feelings; Phil really didn’t know how he should feel.
“Only thing that pisses me off about the Creekers killing his dope-dealing ass is it cost you your only good tie to Natter’s PCP net,” Mullins said. “It took you weeks to get where you were. What are you gonna do now?”
“I still got Sullivan to lean on. The county’s putting him in general pop. Give him a few weeks there, and he’ll start singing like a canary.”
“Yeah? Well, let me tell you something, Phil. We ain’t got a couple of weeks. I can only keep a lid on this shit for so long. It’s too bad you couldn’t get Natter’s lab location out of Peters before he kicked the bucket.”
“I tried,” Phil lamented. He didn’t feel very good about that, either. Pressing a guy for info as he lay dying in the dirt. “But he died before he could say anything. And that last Creeker too…” The imagery of the scene reemerged in his head. “It was really strange. He kept repeating this word: Mannona, or onnamann, or something like that.”
“Creekers talk garbage all the time. Half of ’em can’t talk at all. Their brains are all scrambled from all that family fucking they do out there in the boonies.”
“Yeah, sure
, but it was also pretty weird—I had a gun to this kid’s head, and he still lunged.”
“They’re retards, Phil. They’re all a bunch of inbred crazies. And you can bet your ass before Natter sends them out on a job, he’s got them dusted to the gills. You’ve seen what PCP does to people’s heads. Turns ’em crazier than bedbugs in a whore’s mattress.”
It was another legitimate point that Mullins made, however ineloquently.
“I just don’t know what the fuck you’re gonna do now that Peters is dead. Who else have you got to sap info off of? No one.”
“Relax, will you?” Phil requested. “I’m doing the best I can, which—and pardon me if this is offensive—is a lot better than before I came on.”
Mullins nodded smugly. “Go ahead, rub it in. I ain’t arguin’ with ya. You’re right, with you we’re closer to Natter’s dust op than we’ve ever been. But what good is that gonna do me—or you, for that matter—if you get yourself killed?”
“I’m not going to get killed, Chief. Trust me.”
“Okay, killer. But tell me this. What’s Susan gonna think when she hears about your little chopping party in the woods last night? Tell me that.”
Phil looked crookedly back at Mullins. It, too, was a good question, but— “What do you mean, Susan?”
Mullins guffawed, slurping coffee and spitting tobacco juice at the same time. “Like they say, with age there’s wisdom, right? Don’t bullshit me. You and Susan got something going; I can tell just by looking at her. She’s got big-time hots for you, boy. And you got the same for her, and don’t even think about telling me otherwise.”
Was it that obvious? Phil almost wished it were so. But Mullins had made a sound inquiry. Susan would raise hell if she knew how deep Phil had gotten into this mess. And if she found out about the firefight last night…
“So how about doing me a favor, Chief? How about clamming it up to Susan about this?”
“I hear ya,” Mullins said, smiling. “And why don’t you do me a favor, huh?”
“What’s that?”
“You look like death warmed up on my grandma’s wood stove. Go home, all right? Get some fucking sleep.”
Good idea. Phil got up. “Thanks for the coffee; remind me to never drink it again. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Phil made for the door. But before he left, Mullins stopped him with a fat wave of hand.
“Oh, and Phil?”
“Yeah?”
“Tonight when you’re on the job?”
“Yeah?”
Mullins chuckled. “Try not to kill more than ten people, huh? Would ya do that?”
««—»»
Phil drove home numb. Morning sunlight glared like a great blade—an annoying scimitar—across the windshield. Only now were the realities sinking in. He’d killed men last night, a lot of men. Eagle had been killed.
And he’d nearly been killed himself.
All that adrenalin left him hungover now. He felt jittery, dry-mouthed. Two pinpoint headaches buzzed behind his eyes as he drove the Malibu down the Route, and he could swear his heart was still skipping beats in the aftermath of split-second terror.
When he parked at the boardinghouse and got out, he instinctively glanced up at Susan’s window. Her curtains were drawn. She’s asleep by now, he realized, and this depressed him. He wanted to sleep with her, not to make love, just to…sleep. After the frenzy of last night, he didn’t want to be by himself.
I want to be with her, he thought sappily.
Should he go up to her room right now and knock on her door? Should he wake her? Would she mind?
It didn’t matter; Phil never got the chance.
Just as he was about to go up the stairs to her room, the faintest sound wisped from down the darkened hall.
A moan.
Phil turned.
Something sat huddled right beside his door.
Susan? he stupidly thought. No, it wasn’t Susan.
The huddled figure moaned again. When Phil realized it was Vicki—and that something was very wrong—he ran down the hall to help her.
He knelt down; her hand reached out.
“Good God, Vicki. What happened?”
She was only partly conscious when he helped her up. Her hair was disarrayed, her clothes were torn, and when Phil looked at her face—
Oh, Christ, no…
—he could tell at once that she’d been beaten.
««—»»
“Calm down,” Phil said, gingerly daubing at the cut on her forehead. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Vicki flinched for probably the hundredth time. “That hurts, Phil!”
“Hey, I ain’t Dr. Kildare, the alcohol is going to sting a little—”
“A little? Jesus!”
“—but you don’t want it to get infected. So pipe down and let me do this,” Phil finished. There hadn’t been much blood, and the bruises weren’t too severe. It was easy, though, to see what had happened. Yeah, somebody gave her a pretty good knocking around, he observed. But why?
“How did you get here?” Phil asked, next applying a Band-Aid over the small cut.
“I walked,” she said.
“All the way from Sallee’s?”
She nodded groggily.
“That’s some haul.” Phil sat down on the edge of the bed while Vicki lay back on the couch holding a cold wet rag over her eyes. “How do you feel? Are you dizzy? Confused? Are you seeing double or anything like that?”
“Just tired mostly,” she murmured and sighed. “It was a long night.”
I guess it was. For you and me both. “Yeah, well, come on. I better take you to the hospital.”
“No, no—”
“Vicki, it’s a good idea. You could have a concussion or something.”
“I don’t have a concussion,” she complained rather testily. “I just got slapped around a little, no big deal. Just—” She sighed again. “Just let me lie here for a little while. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” Phil said. Actually, it wasn’t okay—what if Susan found out she was here? What would he say? How could he possibly explain it? But he couldn’t very well throw her out. Something serious had happened, and Phil wanted to know what. I’ll just let her calm down a little, he decided. Susan had classes this afternoon before work. She can sleep on the couch till Susan goes to school. Then I’ll figure out how to get her out of here.
“So,” he got on to the next question. “What happened?”
“It’s a long story, Phil. You don’t want to hear it.”
“You’re right, I probably don’t, but tell me anyway. Did your husband do this to you?”
She relaxed back on the couch with her feet up. Her jeans looked scuffed. Her blouse had been ripped open; she feebly clasped it together with her hand but not very effectively. Phil could see almost all of one of her breasts.
“Since I married Cody, he’s kind of held me in reserve,” she said. “He stopped making me turn regular tricks.”
“He made you his top-drawer, in other words,” Phil suggested, remembering how things worked on the street when he was with Metro. Pimps got prestige by “marrying” their most marketable women and charging more for them.
“Yeah,” she affirmed. “He’d save me for the bigger money tricks. Anyway, last night after my set at Sallee’s, he wanted me to do a six-way with three guys and two of the Creeker dancers. I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, Cody would’ve beat the shit out of me.”
“So who did beat the shit out of you?”
She paused as if to quell something. “Christ, you should’ve seen these guys, they were three bikers who ran dust north of Waynesville. Some friends of Cody’s. They just came off a big drop and were loaded with cash. Things got out of hand pretty fast; they were all smoking flake and doing coke at the same time.”
“Bad combination,” Phil said.
“Tell me about it. Anyway, these guys were kinks, and they started beating up on the two Creeker girls. Cody do
esn’t mind so long as they don’t bust them up too bad. Lotta guys pay extra to rough them up. But these guys—shit. They got to beating up on the two Creekers like really hard. So I started to pitch a fit, and when they wouldn’t stop, I tried to leave.”
“So it was the three bikers who beat you up.”
“No,” she said. “It was Druck. He slapped me around and threw me right back in the room. Told me I shouldn’t embarrass Cody in front of his friends.”
“Jesus,” Phil commented. Then he took the mark. “So how is it that Cody’s friends with out-of-town dust dealers?”
She shrugged. “They spend a lot of money in the club.”
“That the only reason?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Was she lying? Was she hiding something? Phil couldn’t tell. Maybe she doesn’t even know that Natter’s the main dust supplier in the area. “I don’t know,” he eventually said. “It just seems strange.”
Vicki let out a quick, cynical laugh. “The whole thing’s strange, Phil. Christ… I could tell you things you wouldn’t believe.”
“Try me.”
“Just forget it, okay? I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”
Phil looked at her. So maybe that means she’ll feel like talking about it later, he considered.
“You know something, Vicki? You’re flushing your whole life down the toilet with people like that. Being married to Natter, working in his club. You’re just a curio to him, you know. You’re just status.”
“I know.” She laughed humorlessly again. “The top-drawer whore. The White Trash Queen of the Creekers.”
“So why don’t you do something about it? That whole Creeker scene is crazy. Why don’t you leave Natter? Go somewhere else, start over and try to get your shit together?”
“Phil, you don’t even know what you’re saying. If I did that…”
“What? He’d send people after you? He’d kill you if you left him?”
She made no reply.
“Well, let me tell you something, he’s killing you right now, and you don’t even realize it. The only way you’re ever going to make your life better is to get away from him.”