999

by Al Sarrantonio

  The alarm blared, sending piercing shards of noise into my shattered sleep. I clutched the pillow closer to my head, trying to drown out the tintinnabulations crescendoing in my screeching brain. Finally, I gave up the fight and swung out of bed, cradling my pained head in my hands. Suddenly the memories of the night before crashed blindingly into my consciousness. “My God!” I thought. “Did I do that?” My cat, Mr. Menick, leapt to the floor as I realized I had spoken my thoughts instead of just thinking them. I jumped to my feet and raced into the kitchen, where the events of the previous evening seemed to have occurred. Sighing with relief, I slumped against the refrigerator. No, there was no blood, no breasts, staining the lovely white walls of my modern prepatoire de manger. Everything was as it should be.

  I crept over to the stove and poured into a large mug the dregs of the coffee I had prepared the morning before. I stared out the window, at the robin redbreasts bob, bob, bobbin’ outside at the birdfeeder, as I pulled a Thomas’s English muffin out of the box, split it open with my stainless steel forked tongue, and watched the surface of my coffee as a taupe nipple bobbed insouciantly to the surface.

  The End?

  Ed Gorman

  ANGIE

  Ed Gorman, like Joe Lansdale and a few others in this book, has worn many hats—which is an apt description, since he’s been a Western writer, and the image of Ed in a cowboy bat just isn’t something I can hold in my head. He’s also been a book editor (as one example, he edited, with Martin H. Greenberg, one of the most successful and lauded horror anthologies of the 1980s, Stalkers), magazine editor (Mystery Scene), columnist (Cemetery Dance magazine), mystery writer (A Cry of Shadows and the more recent thrillers Black River Falls and Cold Blue Midnight), and, of course, horror writer (short stories under his own name, novels under the name of Daniel Ransom). The fact that he’s managed to distinguish himself in all these capacities is remarkable, and ample proof of his energy and versatility.

  For 999, Gorman has produced a cold-eyed and sneaky little study of human nature; if Guy de Maupassant were still around, he might have penned this story.

  Roy said, “He heard us last night.”

  Angie said, “Heard what?”

  “Heard us talking about Gina.”

  “No, he didn’t. He was asleep.”

  “That’s what I thought. But I went back to the can one time and I saw his door was open and I looked in there and he was sittin’ up in bed, wide awake. Listenin’.”

  “He probably’d just woken up.”

  “He heard us talkin’.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked him,” Roy said.

  “Yeah? And what did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “See, I told ya.”

  “Well, he was lyin’.”

  “How do you know?” she said.

  “He’s my son, ain’t he? That’s how I know. I could tell by his face.”

  “So what if he did hear?”

  Roy looked at her, astonished. “So what if he did? He’ll go to the cops.”

  “The cops? Roy, you’re crazy. He’s nine years old and he’s your son.”

  “That little bastard don’t give two turds about me, Angie. He was strictly a mama’s boy. And now that he knows—”

  He didn’t need to say it. Angie had been waitressing at a truck stop when she’d met Roy. He was living in a trailer with his son, Jason, and his wife, Gina. He went for Angie immediately. On her nights off, he’d take her to Cedar Rapids, where they’d go to a couple of dance clubs. They always had a great time except when Roy got real drunk and started trouble with black guys who were daring white girls. Roy had some friends who were always talking about blowing up places with blacks and Jews and fags in them. Roy always gave them a certain percentage of his robbery money. That’s what Roy did. He robbed banks, usually small-town ones that were located on the edge of town. Roy was a pro. He figured everything out carefully in advance. He knew the exit routes and where the bank kept the video surveillance cameras, and he checked out the teller windows in advance to see which clerk looked most vulnerable. He’d served six years in Fort Madison for sticking up a gas station when he was nineteen. He was thirty-six now and vowed never to be caught again. What she liked about him was that he had a goal in life. There was this one bank in Des Moines where he said he could get half a million on a payroll Friday. They’d go to Vegas and then they’d go see this whites-only compound up in the Utah mountains. That was the only part that Angie didn’t like. She didn’t understand politics and Roy and his buddies always carrying on about Jews and queers and colored people bored her. She had a way of looking awake when she was really not awake. She did that practically every time Roy and his buddies started talking about some militia deal they had heard about and intended to join.

  The wife got wind of the courtship between Roy and Angie, though, and raised hell. She wouldn’t give him a divorce, and she threatened to tell the cops about all his robberies all over the Midwest. So one rainy night he killed her. Shoved a knife into her right breast, which silenced her, and then cut her throat. He loaded her into a body bag and packed a hundred pounds of hand weights in there with her and then drove his two-year-old Ford out to the river that very moonglow night and threw her in just below the dam. The only trouble Roy had was his son, Jason. The kid just kept wailin’ and carryin’ on about where’s my mom, where’s my mom? He hadn’t wanted the kid in the first place, had beat the shit out of her, but she still wouldn’t get an abortion. Even back then he’d had the dream of this big Des Moines bank on payroll Friday, and who wanted a kid along when you had all the cash with you? But Gina had her way and Roy was stuck with the little prick. And now Jason had overheard him talkin’ about killin’ his mother. Roy knew that somehow, some way, the little prick would turn him in.

  Roy said, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

  She watched him carefully. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me, Roy. You really do. He’s your own flesh and blood.”

  “I didn’t want him. Gina wanted him.”

  “And you killed Gina.”

  “For you” he said. “I killed her for you.” Then, “Shit, honey, here we go again. Arguin’. This ain’t what I want and it ain’t what you want, either. You c’mere now.” Then, “A kid like that, he’s a ball and chain.”

  He liked it when she sat in his lap. He liked to feel her up to the point that his erection got so big and bulgy it was downright painful. She’d wriggle on it and make him even crazier. Then, as now, they’d go in on their big mussed sleepwarm bed and do the trick.

  Afterward, today, he said, “I better get into town. I want to be there at noontime. See what the place is like around then.”

  He was scoping out a bank. He was planning to rob it day after tomorrow. Their cash supply was way way down. The trailer park manager was on Roy’s ass for back rent.

  Roy said, “Don’t say nothin’ to him when he gets home from school.”

  “All right.”

  “You just let me handle everything.”

  “All right.”

  “It’ll be better for us,” Roy said, trying to make her feel better.

  “Haulin’ that kid everywhere we go, that isn’t the kind of life we want. We want to be free, babe. That’s just the kind of people we are. Free.”

  Roy had killed people before and it had never bothered her. But never a kid before, that she knew of. And his own kid to boot.

  He kissed her breasts a final time and then said, “I’ll figure out what to do about Jason and then you’n me’ll go dancin’ tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay, Roy.”

  Roy was gonna kill him for sure.

  One day, when Angie was thirteen, her grandmother said, “That body of hers is gonna get her in trouble someday.” The irony being that Grandmother herself had had a body just like it—killer breasts and hips that made young men weep in public—when she’d been young. And so had Angie’s mother, the per
son Grandmother was talking to.

  The thing being that the worst trouble Grandmother had ever gotten in was getting knocked up by a soldier home on leave from WW II, a pregnancy that had brought Angie’s mother, Suzie, into the world. The worst Suzie had ever gotten into, in turn, was getting knocked up by a Vietnam soldier home on leave, a pregnancy that had brought Angie into the world.

  Angie, however, got into a lot more trouble than just spreading her sweet young thighs. She saw a TV show one night where this beautiful girl was referred to as a “kept woman,” a woman who lounged about an expensive apartment all day, looking just great, while this older man paid her rent, gave her endless numbers of gifts, and practically groveled every time the kept woman was even faintly displeased. An Iowa girl with a wondrous body like Angie’s, was it any wonder she’d want to be a kept woman, too?

  When she was fifteen, she ran away from home in the company of a thirty-two-year-old woman from Omaha who took her to a hotel in Des Moines. Angie slept with ten men in three years and made just over a thousand dollars. One of the men had been black, and that gave her some pause. She could just hear her dad if he ever found out about her (A) screwing men for money or (B) screwing a black man for money.

  She went back home. Her dad, who worked as an appliance service repair man for Al’s American Appliances, didn’t have the money for a private shrink so they sent her to the county Human Services Department, where she saw this counselor for free. She spent two hours filling out the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test, which just about bored her ass off. He kept peeking in the room and asking her if she was about done. That’s what he pretended to do, anyway. What he was really doing was staring at her breasts. Held fallen in love with them the moment they walked in the door. She ended up screwing him on the side. He had a wife who worked at Wal-Mart in Cedar Rapids and two little girls, one of whom was lame in some way and whom he got all sad about sometimes. He was thirty-eight and bald and felt guilty about screwing her and cheating on his wife and all but he said that her tits just made him dizzy when he touched them, just dizzy. He kept her in rap CDs. She loved rap. The way the gangsters in the rap videos took care of their girlfriends. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to meet some guy who’d give her a life of ease. A kept woman. No work. No hassle. No sweat. Just sit around some fancy apartment and read comic books and watch MTV and porno movies. She loved porno movies. The thing was, she didn’t like sex very much, except for masturbating, but if sex was the price she had to pay for a life of ease, so be it.

  She dropped the counselor as soon as she managed to get through high school. She got a job in Cedar Rapids as a clerk in a Target store. She lasted three weeks. She took her paycheck and bought a very sexy dress and then she started hanging out in the lawyer bars downtown. Her first couple of months, things went pretty good. She hadn’t found a guy who’d make her an official kept woman, but she’d found several guys who’d give her a little money now and then, enough money for a nice little apartment and a six-year-old Oldsmobile.

  But things did not go well after a time. She caught the clap and profoundly displeased a couple of the men who gave her money. Then she ran into two men who were long of tongue but short of wallet, a car salesman who drove them around in sleek new Caddies, and a supper club owner who wore her like a pinkie ring. They were full of promises but had no real money. The Caddie man had two wives and two alimonies; and the supper club man owed the IRS boys so much in back taxes, he could barely afford a pack of gum. He’d had a supper club over in Rock Island several years back, and he’d been charged with tax evasion, later dropped to a simple (if overwhelming) tax debt.

  Then, the worst thing of all happened. On the night of her twenty-sixth birthday, Angie got busted for prostitution. She was in a downtown bar sitting with a couple of hookers she knew getting birthday party drunk, when one of the lawyers suggested they all go out to his houseboat. Well, they did, and the cops followed them. Angie insisted that she accepted gifts but never cash for sex per se but it was a distinction apparently too subtle for the minds of the gendarmes. They hated these two particular lawyers and were gleeful about arresting them. Cedar Rapids had a new police station and Angie was impressed with it. She saw a couple of cute young cops, too, and thought she wouldn’t mind dating a cop. It was probably fun. She was booked and fingerprinted and charged. It all, like much of Angie’s life, had a dream-like quality. She was just walking through it—as if her life was a TV show and she was simply watching it—the reality of her trouble not hitting her until the next day when her name appeared in the paper. The Cedar Rapids paper was read by everybody in her hometown. Angie called home and tried to explain. Her mother was in tears, her father enraged. They told her not, definitely not, to attend the family reunion two weekends hence.

  Now it was two years later and Angie was living with Roy, who robbed banks and killed people when he thought it was necessary. She saw plainly now that he was never going to have the kind of money it took to make her a kept woman. Hell, he’d even hinted a few times that she should get another waitress job to help out with the rent and the food. Plus, there were the people he’d killed, three that she knew of for sure. The only one that really bothered her was his wife. Killing his wife was a real personal thing, and it scared Angie. Killing his own son scared her even more.

  She spent the afternoon getting depressed about her bikinis. School would be out in a week. Swimming pools would be opening up. Time to flaunt her body. But this year there was too much of her body to flaunt. She’d put on twenty pounds. Ripples of cellulite could be seen on the back of her thighs. She wished now Roy hadn’t talked her into getting his name tattooed on both her boobs.

  At three-thirty, Jason came home. He was a skinny, sandy-haired kid with a lot of freckles and eyeglasses so thick they made you feel sorry for him. Kids like Jason always got picked on by other kids.

  Something was wrong. He usually went to the refrigerator and got himself some milk and a piece of the pie Angie always kept on hand for both of them. Roy had a whiskey tooth, not a sweet tooth. Then Jason usually sat at the dining room table and watched Batman. But not today. He just muttered a greeting and went back to his little room and closed the door. Something really was wrong and she figured she knew what it was. She slipped a robe on over her bikini— you shouldn’t be around him, your tits hangin’ out that way, Roy said whenever she wore a bikini around the trailer—and went back to his room and knocked gently. She could never figure out what he thought of her. He was almost always polite but never more than that.

  “I’m asleep,” he said.

  She giggled. “If you were asleep, you couldn’t say ‘I’m asleep.’ ”

  “I just don’t feel like talkin’, Angie.”

  She decided to risk it. “You heard us talkin’ last night, didn’t you, Jason?”

  There was a long silence. “No.”

  “About your mom.”

  “No.”

  “About what happened to her.”

  There was another long silence. “He killed her. I heard him say so.”

  So Roy was right. The kid had heard.

  She opened the door and went in. He lay on the bed. He still had his sneakers on. A Spawn comic book lay across his chest. Sunlight angled in through the dirty window on the west wall and picked out the blond highlights in his hair.

  She went over and sat down next to him. The springs made a noise. She tried not to think about her weight, or how her bikinis fit her. She was definitely going on a diet. She was going to be a kept woman, and one thing a kept woman had to do was keep her body good.

  She said, “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, what he did, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  “And I also wanted you to know that your daddy isn’t a bad man.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Sometimes he is. But not all the time.”

  “He broke your rib, didn’t he?”

&n
bsp; “He didn’t mean to hit me that hard. He was just drunk was all. If he’d been sober, he wouldn’t have hit me that hard.”

  “They say in school that a man shouldn’t hit a woman at all.”

  “Well,” she said, “you know what your daddy says about schools. That they’re run by Jews and queers and colored people.”

  He stared at her. “I’m gonna turn him in.”

  She got scared. “Oh, honey, don’t you ever say that to your daddy.” She knew that Roy was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to kill Jason. “Promise me you won’t. He’d get so mad he’d—”

  She didn’t need to finish her sentence. She sensed that the kid knew what she was talking about.

  She said, “Is that a good comic book?”

  “Not as good as Batman.”

  “Then how come you don’t get Batman?”

  “I already read it for this month.”

  “Oh.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She’d never done that before. He was a nice kid. “You remember what I said now. You never say anything in front of your daddy about turnin’ him in. You hear me?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You take a nap now.”

  She stood up.

  Her mother had once said, “You give a man plenty of starch and a good piece of meat, he’ll never complain about you or your cook-in’.” Angie had told this to Roy once and he’d grinned at her and pawed one of her breasts and said, “All depends on what kind of meat you’re talkin’ about.” At the time, Angie had found his remark hilarious.