by Iain Scarrow
He thought about running after him but popped a new stick of gum in his mouth instead.
And it tasted like shit.
Collins couldn’t get anything to stay on his skinny backside.
Must have slept forever.
He’d had to resort to using a nappy pin, just to keep the waist band of his pants tight enough and stop them dropping to his ankles at every opportunity.
His shirt flapped around his ribs like a torn sail after a hurricane. His feet slithered around inside his shoes.
Didn’t even know you could get fat feet.
And being stuck inside his little dimly lit flat wasn’t helping either.
He slipped on a pair of giant sunglasses and hobbled outside to his car. The sun had baked the afternoon air dry, and it felt as if he was inhaling high noon Saharan sand into his lungs as he keyed the lock in the door.
He got in, slammed the door against the heat, and slumped over the steering wheel.
The horn blared.
“Ash!”
He jumped back, wide eyed.
“Fuck!”
Ignition engaged he spun the tires and sped out of the garage in a cloud of grey exhaust.
Using his starving guts as a divining rod, he raced around the streets and ordered pizzas, cans of full-on sugar Coke (none of that diet crap), Wendy Burgers and Big Macs - everything Go Large.
Chomping on a Double Whopper in one hand, he kept his other on the steering wheel and made a detour to the supermarket where he grabbed every just-fire- it-in-the-microwave oven style instant ready meal he could lay his hands on, and tipped a trolley full of fast-food shit into the back seat before making his way to a Booze Central for a dozen bottles of Wild Turkey, where the sales guy behind the counter took one look at him and took a few steps back.
Pure caution you understand.
But Collins could read the idiotism fucking mind.
Trust me to forget the saw off shotgun in the closet.
9
“…because something wasn’t right with the guy.”
Out of work or not, Mark Hansson still turned up at cop shops for the latest media info splurge of the day.
Funny money had been changing hands in the neighborhood.
It didn’t sound promising. Who used cash these days anyhow? But this funny money was different.
“How different and how funny?” Mark asked the cop.
“Because it’s real money,” the cop said.
“So what’s funny about real money?”
“Expired, old, antique notes kind,” the cop said.
“Maybe some old guy dug it out from under his mattress,” Mark said.
There were a few sniggers from the amateur reporters behind him.
“He should have taken it to a dealer, then, shouldn’t he?” the cop said.
“Why?” Mark asked.
“Because,” the cop said, “each one of these particular notes is a collector’s item worth far more than its face value, a fortune in fact. And there’s something even weirder.”
“Tell me about it,” Mark said.
And so the cop did.
10
“Care to elaborate?” Mark asked the serving guy at the Booze Central store.
“The man looked wild, skinny, slobbering,” the store guy said. “I could even see burger meat jammed between his teeth. And I could tell his head was in a mess.”
“How so?” Mark asked.
“It was lumpy,” the guy said.
He lifted a box of cheap vodka onto the counter.
Mark read the guy’s name tag - WILSON.
“Lumpy?” Mark asked Wilson not quite believing what he’d just heard.
“Lumpy,” Wilson said. “Like the guy had been hit in the head with a claw hammer, and not once either. Forehead was all bruised, swollen.”
“Wilson, can I call you Wilson?” Mark asked.
“That’s what it says,” Wilson said, raking a box cutter down the tape holding the flaps the case of vodka closed.
“The guy was not a pretty sight then,” Mark said.
“And he smelled bad,” Wilson said.
“Anything specific?” Mark asked.
“Stale urine,” Wilson said. “I remember that kind of smell from the old folk’s home my granddaddy was in years ago; old stale urine. The whole place stunk of it. That and carbolic soap. The place looked clean enough, but …”
“Was there anything else about this particular customer, the one with the lumpy head?” Mark asked.
Wilson bent back the flaps of the box.
“There was also a smell of onions and cheese off of him, never mind sweat. Not just old sweat either, but as if it had gone rotten. It almost knocked me over.”
Mark hadn’t bothered with his Dictaphone this time. Folks were either intimated by them, or they acted as if they were prima donnas auditioning for The X Factor; gawking and grinning when there wasn’t even a camera lens to be seen. Some interviewees even tried changing their accents when they saw it; going all New England and Gregory Peck (except he was Welsh), either him or Catherine Hepburn, who definitely was N. E. Besides, Mark hated damn Dictaphones himself.
“His clothes didn’t fit too well either,” Wilson said, pulling the bottles of vodka out of the box and stacking them on the shelf behind the counter. “They looked like they were about to fall off his back. I thought he was a vagrant at first. But vagrants don’t tend to wear Ray Ban sunglasses, do they?”
“A tramp might if they’re cheap fakes,” Mark said.
“Even fake Ray Bans aren’t cheap these days, friend,” Wilson said.
“Talking from experience?” Mark asked.
Wilson’s face went red.
“Don’t worry,” Mark assured the sales assistant. “I won’t tell a soul. I promise.”
“Well anyway,” Wilson said, “the guy paid in cash. All cash, which made me suspicious.”
Wilson went to serve a customer who’d just walked in, and Mark moved to the side to give them some room. And himself space enough to think.
He bit his lip as he looked at the notes he made in his little black flip-top reporter’s pad.
Wilson handed change to the customer and nodded a see-you-again-soon at him.
“He really smelled bad,” Wilson whispered when he got back to Mark.
He leaned over the counter.
“And I mean rancid with a capital R here,” he said.
He pulled back again and started hauling more bottles of booze out of another box, stacking them on the shelf beside the vodka.
“So bad,” Wilson said, “that I could feel myself ready to gag.”
Mark scribbled every word down in shorthand, just like in the old days.
The fact was Mark hadn’t used shorthand for years, or notebooks either come to that. But he’d raked out some old ones he’d stashed inside his antique roll-top writing bureau, sharpened a few pencils, and grabbed for his Fedora on the way out. Until, that is, he remembered he didn’t own a Fedora, never had. But there it was, right at the front of his mind: Remember to take your black Fedora, the one with a grey snap-band, and your press pass stuck into it by its corner.
And that’s when Mark realized, that these days, he didn’t look like a journalist at all. No one did.
And that if his name wasn’t really Mark Hansson then it might as well have been Joe Public Any Guy, just take your pick.
But for some reason something had wriggled its way into his mind recently, something like a slow glittering worm that made him want to look like a real news guy. A real journalist, a press guy complete with press photographers behind him, as magnesium bright light bulbs popped supernova bright inside silvery parabolic mirrors with every picture captured on film.
“You okay?” Wilson said.
Bottles, cans, and walnut wooden shelves changed back into MDF and Meccano metal shelving screwed together with wing nuts.
Mark blinked.
“What?” he asked, looking at Wilson
quizzically.
“You looked like you were somewhere else there for a minute,” Wilson said, turning back to the shelves behind him.
“I was just thinking,” Mark said. He shook his head. “So what made you call the police?” he asked.
Wilson shrugged.
“It was money the guy handed over, all right, but it was bad money,” he said.
“You mean forgeries?”
“Not forgeries,” Wilson said. “But out of date notes; way out of date. I don’t even know why I accepted them? And it wasn’t me who called the cops by the way, it was the bank called the cops on me.”
“And you didn’t notice?”
“The cops?” Wilson asked.
“The out of date notes,” Mark said, “at the time the crater headed customer handed them over.”
“Do you think if I had noticed them at the time,” Wilson said, “that I would have deposited them in the bank in the first place, just so that they could call the cops on me, with a place like this? They could have shut me down, accused me of money laundering or some shit like that. Any excuse to shut me down and they’re looking for a way to do it.”
“Who?” Mark asked.
“The cops, for a way to shut me sown,” Wilson said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Anyone else would call it a shudder.
To Mark it was an earthquake, with the epicenter somewhere inside of him.
He was getting pissed off, and Wilson the sales assistant’s attitude wasn’t helping either.
Think I’d have a thick enough skin by now the amount of crap I’ve been …
“Then, of course,” Wilson drawled, “I only had four bottles of Wild Turkey left. He ended up taking those, and three bottles of Rebel Yell. The rest was made up with Canadian Club, Vat 69, and a bottle of pure gut rot we keep for the cheapskates.”
Wilson traced a finger over his bottom lip. “Forget the name of the stuff now.”
“You sell gut rot often,” Mark asked.
“Funny that,” Wilson said. “I sold the guy the stuff and I can’t remember the name of it. Maybe it was a one off,” he shrugged and grinned. “The kind of crap they brew in copper kettles in back yards way out in the sticks probably.”
He laughed.
“I’m only kidding,” he said. “So don’t go off telling the cops on me. I never sell anything but legit booze here. I’d lose my license.”
He frowned. “But what the hell was that last bottle I sold the guy called?”
“Do you remember what it looked like?” Mark asked with a bad Elvis sneer, right canine glinting.
“Hmm, now I do,” Wilson said. “It was blue. The bottle was blue. Like the color of those old fashioned medicine bottles. Bottles of Doctor Feelgood”.”
“A dark blue, you mean, a medicinal blue?” Mark asked.
“That’s right,” Wilson said, tapping his teeth with a fingernail, “A very dark kind of enamel blue. To tell the truth it gave me the creeps even looking at it. Even the glass it was made from felt yucky somehow.”
“What do you mean “yucky”?” Mark asked.
“I mean it had a sort of slimy feel to it, as if it was sucking the skin off my fingers touching it, like a million greedy little mouths kissing away at them. I remember how I wiped my hand on my pants after I dropped the damn bottle into the bag. Come to think of it I can’t remember much after that. The next thing I know is that the guy is gone, the cash is on the counter, and the bottles, all of them, are gone too.”
“And you’ve never sold anything like that before?”
“That’s just it. Out of all the bottles that one is suddenly just there, and I’m putting it down, right there on the counter, beside all the other bottles of booze the guy’s ordered. Strange.”
“What is?” Mark asked.
“I don’t think that bottle even had a label on it. Now why the hell would I sell someone a bottle of booze without even a label on it?”
Mark snapped his notebook shut.