Slashback can-8

by Rob Thurman

  I sighed and reached across the table to wipe the mayonnaise/mustard mustache off his upper lip. “Cops. . policemen, I mean. . aren’t good.” I backtracked. “They are good, but. .”

  Cal gave me the look again. I’d gotten it so often in the past few days I was going to start assuming anything that came out of my mouth was so utterly ignorant that it made Cal’s very brain cells melt under the vast stupidity of it all. And what I’d been about to say was stupid. He knew as much as I did how badly things could go if the police looked too closely at us.

  I held up both hands. “Sorry. I underestimated your enormous brain. You can have an extra cookie for dessert.”

  Mollified, Cal started wiping mustard off his plate, licking it off his finger, and rocking back and forth on the back two legs of his chair. Multitalented, that was my brother. “We should move. Now. You have that nut job’s money. Sophia can find us when she comes back.” He shrugged. “Or not.”

  I wished “or not,” but she’d already made it clear to us both if I left with Cal she would find us and she would involve social services, do jail time, whatever it took. Cal was an investment. If I wanted him, I was going to have to pay for him. Cal knew, he remembered, but memories were the twilight of lost hopes. In the bright of the day, they could be banished. . for a while.

  “How about this: we’ll go to the library”-because we weren’t going to have a computer of our own unless we stole it-“and research the victims. We’ll see if there’s a pattern to where they’ve been taken.” There. That had to satisfy him. It made it clear I wasn’t dismissing him and it kept him from breaking into our neighbor’s house. This was all Kithser’s fault. If he hadn’t disappeared, Cal would’ve stayed on his live and let live as long as the serial killer’s not killing you personally policy. But Kithser was too close. If he had only run off with his drug dealing loser friends, I’d be tempted to kill him myself for putting me in this situation.

  “Boring.” His chair finally tipped too far and began to topple backward. I’d been waiting for it. I hooked an ankle around one wooden leg and caught it. After fifty plus times it was pure instinct now. Cal, who knew I wouldn’t let him fall, had never let him fall, kept talking, unfazed. “Let’s follow him.”

  “Research,” I contradicted firmly. I’d disproved a hundred things in papers for school over the years with it. I could disprove a serial killer too.

  “Following him would tell us for sure. You said we need to be sure.”

  “I know what I said and I know what I’m saying now.” I settled his chair upright. “Research, grasshopper. Absolutely no following.”

  “How did this happen?” I hissed out loud as my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. If I’d kept the question mental, I thought the stress and humiliation of being outthought by an eleven-year-old might trigger some sort of psychotic split. I’d read some advanced psychology books. They hadn’t said that could happen, but it was an imperfect science at best. They didn’t know everything.

  “I lied to Mrs. Spoonmaker about your age and you offered to get her oil changed. You were right there, Nik.” Cal was digging in the ancient glove compartment looking for candy bars or cookies in what was a habit so ingrained I didn’t remember when it started. Dogs humped legs. Cal sought sugar. Two universal laws. “How do you get straight As? You can’t remember anything.

  “Cool!” He popped up with a petrified package of Ho Hos. “Besides, your research sucked. We didn’t find out anything except people at the public library are doing things in the bathroom they should do at home.”

  “I told you to wait for me on the bathroom trips,” I said-a little more loudly than it needed to be said, but that good day I’d been savoring this morning was gone. Cal had driven a stake through its bright and sunny heart.

  “You were glued to the computer, like, literally, superglue between your eyeballs and the screen and I had to go. So I went to the women’s just in case. Women can be perverts too. Who knew?”

  That was a discussion for. . not now. My knuckles turned whiter, if possible, under my darker skin as I tried to tail Junior’s beat-up pickup truck with a grimly dark camper, the serial killer-mobile as Cal was calling it, without being made in a giant metallic green Cadillac born long before I was. “And the research did not fail. It showed the people are disappearing from an area approximately fifteen miles in radius and no bodies have been found.”

  “Yeah, you showed me the map with all the colors and miles and stuff. It was a big blob. On TV they’re a perfect circle, like a bull’s-eye, and the killer’s house is right in the center.” I heard a distinct crunch as he bit into a Ho Ho, the kind of crunch icing and cake aren’t supposed to make.

  “Now you see why I tell you to stop watching so much TV.” I sighed and wove around a BMW. I’d learned to drive when I was twelve. It was a useful skill for picking up passed-out mothers at bars before the police came sniffing around. “But”-as much as I hated to admit it and I honestly did-“Junior’s house is inside ‘the blob.’ The outer part of it, but it’s there.” But so were a lot of very bad people, cheap and unsafe, how we always lived. “Which is why I let you talk me into following him.” And at night, making this area more risky if possible.

  Along the rooftops of the cinder block-style apartment buildings I saw a Grendel racing along, our pale shadow. I wondered if it was curious. I wondered for the thousandth time why they watched. And I thought, with the denial of all that is wrong in the world, that it might be better not knowing.

  I looked away and back at the street. “Now finish cracking your teeth on what used to be food and let me concentrate.” Then because I felt bad about letting Cal lie to Mrs. Spoonmaker, I muttered under my breath, “I think I’ll get her car washed too.”

  Cal knew the signs of my guilt. In knowing me there wasn’t much Cal didn’t pick up on instantly. “Isn’t lying to borrow her car better than letting a murderer kill somebody?”

  He wasn’t wrong. Cal had grasped the gray shades of morality before he grasped potty training. I was different. But I was learning. Too late and too slow, but I’d get there.

  “Look! He stopped.” Cal bounced in the seat as if we were two rogue cops about to make a bust. I was throwing out the TV when we got home. In the trash. I rolled, yes, rolled down the window for a better look. The car’s windows were permanently cloudy from age. Cal followed my action because when it came to things not involving work that’s what Cal and most little brothers did. “He’s picking up a whore.”

  I reached over and flicked his ear lightly. “Not a good word.” But I was also watching Junior talking out the window to a woman selling it for what looked like a harsh drug habit. Even in the night and where only one out of three streetlights worked, that was easy to see. She had a long black Goth wig, short leather dress with fishnet hose and skin yellow with hepatitis.

  “Ow. Hooker?”

  I flicked again.

  “Prostitute?”

  “Better. Not too great for her, but better vocabulary wise.”

  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and a gun was in my face as a snarling twist of a mouth and mad dog eyes demanded my money. Beside me Cal sounded as if he were choking on his Ho Ho. “This,” I told him, “is not funny.”

  The man, boy, whatever he was-that far into the downward slide into drugs it was hard to tell-shoved the gun closer. He hadn’t even bothered to get a pellet gun and paint the orange tip. He’d gone for painting a water gun. I was embarrassed for him. But not so embarrassed that I didn’t break his wrist and shove the gun in his mouth, grip first. Less room and more of a lesson learned that way.

  There was another one coming from the opposite side. . toward Cal. From the way he moved, belligerent but uncertain, he was unarmed. Good practice then. “Cal, time for school.” He accepted the knife I handed him. It wasn’t his kitchen knife, which I’m sure was on him somewhere. This was a K-BAR combat knife with a happy smile of serrated edges. I’d be passing it down to Cal w
hen he was big enough to carry it and it not be instantly obvious under his clothes.

  “Finally. Some fun homework.” Cal already had the knife in the practiced grip I’d taught him, parallel to his body with the edge toward the throat that presented itself.

  “You little shit. Tell the bastard driving to hand over his money or I’ll tear you. .” It took the kid, about sixteen and skinnier than the first, that long to realize he could feel the faint trickle of blood down his throat and metal resting against his skin.

  “I’m hungry and Ho Hos aren’t enough,” Cal said cheerfully. “How about you give me all your money so I can get a Big Mac and I won’t cut your throat?”

  “Cal,” I said reprovingly, but the kid was already gone, his partner with him and unfortunately Junior’s truck as well as we’d sat at the curb looking like easy prey. “We don’t mug or steal and we don’t hurt people unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “I know.” He bounced again. “But his face.” He laughed and handed the knife back to me, not pretending he didn’t covet it. “People can be so stupid. I betcha when he tells his friends how it happened I’ll be seven feet tall and so full of muscles I almost couldn’t fit in the car.”

  “Rambo in the most cunning disguise.” I started back down the street searching for Junior’s truck. I didn’t spot it again until we were at home. There it sat in his driveway. I groaned. “Hookers. . I mean, prostitutes disappear every day for different reasons. I’ll check the papers for the next few days, but even then, we won’t know.”

  “You won’t know.” A hand patted my arm as we crossed the street. “You’re smart, Nik, but sometimes I don’t think you’d know the house was on fire ’cause you were waiting for the oven timer to beep. You think too hard about the little things and not about the big things.”

  Cal smiled happily and it wasn’t a good kind of happy, not for me. I’d seen this particular brand before. I tensed myself for what was coming. It would be painful and it would make my brain hurt, but there was no getting around it. Cal’s mouth could not be stopped.

  “Hey, you know what? We could burn down his house.”

  9

  Cal

  Present Day

  I liked fire.

  Not in a sick arsonist burning down a nunnery full of kittens way. But if something had to be burned down or up or sideways, I didn’t mind being involved. It was better than fireworks and no annoying noise. . or not until the fire trucks arrived.

  “It’s an abandoned bridge. Yeah, they were going to fix it up but of course they haven’t gotten around to it.” I waved a hand at the Google Earth pictures Niko had printed off. . never mind, we all knew what High Bridge over the Harlem River looked like already. “It’s stone and metal. Can’t burn that. But we can get a garbage truck, soak the garbage in diesel fuel for more smoke and a longer burning time, push our way through the concrete barriers off Amsterdam Avenue with the truck, drive onto the bridge, dump the garbage, light her up with my flamethrower, and torch the fucker. Or at least half of it. We need the other half to fight on. If Jack Sprat doesn’t notice that then we’ll get him a Seeing Eye dog and forget worrying about his homicidal and blind ass.”

  This was perfect and going right at the top of my resume.

  “You cannot have come up with that on the spur of the moment,” Niko protested with what sounded a good deal like suspicion and hope mixed into one. I tried to get a fix on whether he was proud or appalled. I was hoping for both. I did love to mess with Nik.

  “Sometimes I get bored. When I get bored, bam, mental mass destruction is my hobby. I’ve had this one on file for a while now.” Did I say that smugly? A little. I asked Goodfellow as Niko appeared too scarred for words, “It’s a gift, yeah?”

  “It is that. I could not be more proud if you were a trickster yourself. I wish you’d been around for the whole Trojan horse event.” Something wistful and somewhat secretive shifted behind his expression but he kept that gleeful grin on his face. “Somehow there would’ve been at least a thousand pounds of flaming horse manure involved. Homer would’ve loved penning that part of the tale.” He took out his cell. “Garbage truck. Give me three minutes.”

  “You can locate a full garbage truck for us in three minutes?” Niko sounded curious despite his automatic caution. After a few years the combination of Robin and me was beginning to send him into Stockholm Syndrome I thought. About time. It would be better for his mental health if he closed his eyes and enjoyed the roller-coaster ride.

  Robin smirked. “In five minutes I could find you a tanker truck of boysenberry-flavored self-warming body oil and six men and women willing to apply it. Care to put it to the test?”

  While he made his call, I was digging out the fruits of one of my own from under my bed. I’d made the call last night after our encounter with Jack to my weapons supplier, Rapture. She’d recently added delivery service-you got your weapons in an hour or ten percent off. . and as always a free cupcake from the bakery that served as a front to the best weapons dump in the tri-state area. That was what I loved about NYC. You could get anything delivered.

  I’d decided to up the ante, weapons-wise. Since explosive rounds didn’t work and I couldn’t open a gate and turn Jack into an explosion himself, the bastard, for fear of turning us or innocent bystanders into the annoying potential of hamburger-textured collateral damage, I went with a nice piece I’d been going to hit up Nik for Christmas. An MP7A1 Heckler and Koch submachine gun with suppressor. Compact, not quite twice the size of my Desert Eagle and with the added bonus of forty armor-piercing rounds. If that didn’t make a dent in Jack, I didn’t know what would. He was too damn fast to depend on the leftover grenades I’d also shoved under my bed.

  Oh yeah. I made another grab. We needed the flamethrower. This was shaping up to be a party.

  “I have the garbage truck and the location to pick it up.” Robin disconnected his cell and checked his watch. “Two minutes forty-five seconds.”

  Niko gave Robin and me both a curdled expression: Goodfellow with his smugness and me with an armful of weapons meant to make people go dead in the night. “I know the two of you want me to praise your excellence in thievery and your preparation to kill anything that might escape Jurassic Park.” I did love that movie. “But any encouragement on my part would only push you to greater heights and the eventual destruction of Western civilization. I’m going to get dressed. Cal, unless you want to fight in a T-shirt that says ‘With a good spotter, snipers can find the G-spot every time’ and a pair of sweatpants, you might want to as well.”

  I decided that wasn’t a bad idea, more as I didn’t want Goodfellow volunteering for the spotter position. I went with the usual black shirt and dark jeans for night-fighting, but didn’t take my leather jacket as usual. The MP7 hung from a shoulder strap and I dug a knee-length black coat out of the winter-wear pile of clothes on my floor. Nik and Goodfellow went with the long dusters to cover their swords but the last thing I needed was to get snagged climbing over some fifteen-feet-tall chain-link fence and hanging there like an idiot-locked and loaded and nowhere to go. The flamethrower I stuffed into a large duffel bag and hoisted it on my shoulder.

  Back out in the living room, I gave the most evil fucking grin I had in me. “Is this gonna be fun or what?”

  It was not fun.

  I plowed the garbage truck through four Jersey barriers, destroying the top half of the walls on either side of the bridge with the garbage truck-I’d remembered the bridge being wider last time I was in the neighborhood, but what the hell? They were planning to renovate anyway. Braking at the middle of the bridge, we dumped the diesel fuel, obtained from Goodfellow’s car lot, into the garbage, then covered the last half of the bridge with it. Backing away, I lit it up with the flamethrower. All-you-can-eat arson-come and get it. If Jack couldn’t see that. . if Russian cosmonauts couldn’t see that from space. . then I didn’t know how to do my job. And while there were a whole shitload of things I didn’t kn
ow how to do, my job wasn’t one of them.

  It was a good plan and all we needed was Jack to show up and he had. It had looked like it was our turn now. An enormous cloud of billowing black, as dark as the smoke rising from the flames of the burning diesel fuel, had appeared, blocking our way off the bridge. That was fine. We weren’t looking to run off. We were looking for a fight. There had been the spark of those electric blue eyes, the crackle of what I thought might be lightning in the cloud and then it was gone. Jack had vanished-but he’d left some friends. And he did his little trick a few more times. He was a low-flying ace strafing us with bombs of the undead.

  I hadn’t seen anything on World War II week on the History Channel that had been anything like this.

  This was where the entertainment element plummeted.

  “Zombies!” I shouted as they rushed us. It was a slow rush, I’ll give you that, but they were serious and there were a shitload of them. We’d have to get rid of them before we could get Jack back out to play. I kicked one over the side of the bridge that wasn’t currently on fire. “Real zombies! You”-and by you I meant Niko, Goodfellow, and anyone I’d met in the paien community-“said they didn’t exist. Not real. Just legends. Now I’m in the middle of every fucking crappy horror cliche known to man!” I hated zombie movies. If you couldn’t speed walk, then you were too fragile a flower for this world anyway and the apocalypse had always been in your future. I used the flamethrower on the next one before kicking him over. Not that it was necessary or useful as it continued to drag its burning torch of itself along, but it made me feel better. But if it was no use, other than improving my mood, there was no sense in carrying the extra weight and I shrugged the pack off.

  “We’ve faced mullo before,” Nik started as he first sheathed his katana in one gaping eye socket to puncture the withered brain, then separated one’s head from its neck. Guess what? It kept coming. That’s why I was throwing them over the side where they could be the problem of the fish, assuming there were any fish alive in the Harlem River that weren’t somewhat zombified themselves.