Dead On My Feet - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 1)

by J. A. Konrath

  “You got cell phones?” I asked the stoner dude behind the counter. He was a white guy with dreads and a hemp Baja pullover that would probably give you a contact high if you stood too close.

  “No, brah.”

  “Anyplace around here sell them?”

  “Sure, brah.”

  I waited. He didn’t continue.

  “Can you tell me which places?”

  “Lotsa places. But they’re all closed, dude. How’s the dog?”

  “Terrible. When were they made?”

  “All our dogs are made fresh, brah.”

  “When were these made fresh?”

  “Sometime.”

  I’d already maxed out on my daily limit of stupid with Harry, so I headed for the door.

  “You lose a phone?” he asked before I left.

  “I didn’t lose one. I need one.”

  “Too bad, brah. People lose things here all the time.”

  I stopped. “Actually, I did lose a phone. In here. The other day. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I can let you look through the lost and found, brah.”

  I walked back to the counter, and he stared at me.

  “You should make a donation,” he said, looking at a can that was next to the register. “It’s for sick kids, brah.”

  Maybe this wannabe hippie wasn’t as dumb as I’d thought. I fished through my pockets and gave ten bucks to the sick kids.

  “They’re sicker than that, brah. They’re dying and shit.”

  “Dying for some smoke, I bet.”

  “The medical benefits of marijuana include pain relief, treating nausea, sleep aid, asthma, glaucoma, stimulating appetite, weight loss, arthritis, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  I added a twenty, and rasta-cracker pulled out the lost and found box. It contained a few hairbrushes, some sunglasses, four gloves, and three flip phone cells. I picked a silver one.

  “You sell phone chargers?”

  “Of course, brah.”

  The charger set me back another thirty bucks.

  “Gonna use that in your car, brah?”

  I nodded.

  “You should also get a car charger.”

  After a flash of anger, I said, “I bet your boss loves you.”

  “I am the boss, brah. Bought this place in ’05.”

  “Your hot dogs suck,” I said, flipping another thirty bucks on the counter.

  “Yeah. They’re only twelve percent meat. But I mark them up like a thousand percent. It’s like printing money. Catch you on the flip side, brah.”

  Back in the Bronco I plugged in my new-slash-used cell phone and called Harry.

  “McGlade. Talk, it’s your dime.”

  “It’s more like my ninety bucks.”

  “Hey, Phin. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  “I called to give you my new number.”

  “I got it.”

  “Huh?”

  “When you called me. My phone logged your number.”

  I rubbed my eyes. I was getting a headache, “I still need to follow-up on something. How long you gonna be?”

  “I won’t be back until morning. I gotta see my armorer first.”

  “You have an armorer?”

  “You say that like it’s weird to have an armorer. Call you in the morning.”

  He hung up. I walked back to the Bronco.

  Thought about doing some coke.

  Decided I’d done enough for the day.

  Did some anyway.

  When I got back to the clinic, the window had been boarded up, and I caught Pasha as she was coming outside.

  “Welcome back.” It didn’t sound like she meant it.

  “I had to get some food.”

  “Is that what you got? Food?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have some food on your nose.”

  I wiped, saw coke dust, then walked with her to the parking lot. I tailed her car back to her place, and it was a good thing I did, because I had the same sense of disorientation as I did the first time I’d been there. I never would have found her apartment building.

  I parked next to her car, taped the door, and was greeted by a gaggle of Canadian Geese, all standing around, staring at me.

  “Fellas,” I said.

  They honked.

  Damn odd.

  I walked over to Pasha’s blue Volkswagen Beetle, and the geese waddled after me.

  “Are those geese following you?” she said.

  “Naw. We’re probably just headed in the same direction.”

  We cut diagonally through the lot, going over an island covered with sod and an elm tree.

  The geese hopped up onto the curb, closing the distance. I stopped, turning to face them.

  They honked at me. And I think I figured out what was going on.

  The damn things wanted more codeine.

  “Did you feed them earlier or something?” Pasha asked.

  “Maybe they’re chasing us off. Geese are protective of their nests.”

  They had their mouths open and were bobbing their heads up and down.

  “They don’t look aggressive. They look like dogs, begging for a treat.”

  “Isn’t that strange.”

  “Have you got any food?”

  “I have half a bag of chips.”

  I fished it out, dumped them at my feet. One goose pecked at a chip, then stared at me, looking pissed.

  “Now they appear aggressive,” Pasha said.

  “Maybe we should hurry.”

  We began a brisk walk, and the geese picked up the pace, waddling so fast they’d begun to flap their wings. We made it to the lobby and they scurried right up to the glass, staring at me.

  “Should we call someone?” Pasha asked.

  “Who? Hitchcock?”

  “Animal control. Do you think…” her voice trailed off.

  I turned to her. “What?”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “We were just chased inside by geese. It’s already ridiculous.”

  “I was just thinking, maybe, that they were… sent.”

  “Sent?”

  “By the men who are trying to get me to sell the clinic.”

  “I get it,” I said, grinning. “They’re hit geese.”

  She punched me on the shoulder. It was a playful punch, but after being knocked around by Bruiser, it still smarted.

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said.

  “I’m not. A lot of these geese get desperate. Take risky jobs.”

  “I know, it was stupid.”

  “And they’ll work for chicken feed.”

  “Stop it,” she was smiling wide.

  “I’m serious. Look at that one on the end. You can tell.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He’s feeling down.”

  It took a moment for the joke to register, but when it did her laughter was musical.

  And then the laughter faded, and we were staring at each other.

  Pasha was a beautiful woman, by whatever standards you defined beauty. But beauty didn’t do much to move my needle. The thing I found most attractive in women was their level of interest. With prostitutes, that was a given. Being wanted, aggressively wanted, was the thing that did it for me.

  I saw desire in Pasha’s eyes. At least, I thought I did. It had been a while since I’d seen any sort of enthusiasm that wasn’t linked to money. Maybe her face said kiss me. But maybe I was misreading it.

  She was scared. Vulnerable. I was the protector. Making her feel safe.

  Maybe I was just seeing gratitude.

  I also just got my ass kicked for her. Plus, I was dying of cancer.

  Maybe I was just seeing sympathy.

  “Do you have any sort of rules against sleeping with clients?” she asked.

  Okay, so maybe I had been reading her right and was overthinking things.

  “I do,” I said. “I never sleep with any of the men I work
for.”

  She titled her chin up, parting her lips and I lowered my mouth to hers—

  —and then a goose ran headfirst into the window, smacked its face on the glass, and flopped over.

  Pasha, with her double X nurturing chromosome gushing concern for all life on earth, deemed the bird more important than kissing me, because she immediately crouched next to the window.

  “Is it dead?”

  I hoped so. But I also hoped to get laid, so I kept the comment to myself. Instead, I knelt next to her and tapped the glass next to where its head was resting.

  The goose didn’t respond. But its beak opened, and a very human-looking pink tongue lolled out to the side.

  “We should help it,” Pasha said.

  “How? Mouth to mouth?”

  She’d been laughing with me earlier, but that didn’t even warrant a smile. Bad sign.

  “Bring it up to my apartment.”

  Picking up a filthy wild goose wasn’t on my bucket list. “Won’t your cat be mad?”

  “I’ll put Groucho in the bedroom.”

  I walked outside, the other geese giving me some space, and picked up the idiot who smacked into the glass. It was lighter than it looked, warm, and stank like filthy wild goose, as I’d expected. The head hung at the end of its limp neck, like a slack piece of rope.

  “Oh, pick up its poor little head!”

  So I grabbed its poor little head and threw it over my shoulder.

  Catching a glimpse of my reflection in the window, and how ridiculous I looked, made me rank this moment at number 2 on the list of stupidest things I’d ever done to get a woman into bed. Number 1, done when I was in my teens, involved spray painting a girl’s name on the side of a building, which got me arrested, fined, and subsequently beaten by my father. And it hadn’t led to sex.

  We got into the elevator, both of us cradling the goose like it was our very weird baby, and when we got to her apartment she went in first to lock up the cat. I got the all-clear, and looked around for a place to set down the bird, thinking maybe the bathtub or sink.

  “Put it on the sofa. I’ll get my kit.”

  I placed it on a pillow, and its head flopped over the edge, the tongue touching the rug.

  “At least someone is licking carpet,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Pasha asked, coming up from behind.

  “It was a crude oral sex joke.”

  Pasha was paying zero attention to me, her entire being focused on the goose. She fished around in her first aid kit and then broke a smelling salt capsule under the bird’s beak.

  I needed coke. A lot. I was trying to think of some excuse to go out to my truck when the goose sprang to life and bit my ear and wouldn’t let go.

  Pasha put her hands over her mouth. “Oh my god, he’s kissing you.”

  “This feels more like chewing than kissing.”

  “It’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. I need to get a picture.”

  All the things I don’t know about women could fill up an entire library. But one thing I did know is that if a girl takes a picture of a goose kissing you, you’re not going to get into her pants. Ever. So I grabbed it, not gently, by the neck and tugged the beak off my head.

  The goose stood up on Pasha’s couch, stretched out its wings, and then laid a majestic golden egg.

  Kidding. It took a big goose shit.

  Which actually worked in my favor. When I’d been driving over, my plan had been to sleep on the couch. The kiss downstairs would have led to sharing her bed. With the sofa stained by goose poop, maybe I still had a shot at the bedroom.

  But first I needed to figure out what to do with the ten pound bird staring at me, opening its beak and begging for codeine.

  “Maybe it’s hungry.”

  I eyed the green turds. “Looks like its eaten enough.”

  “I’ll get some bread.”

  Pasha went to the kitchen. I rooted through my jacket for the pill bottle that I was sure I put in there when I changed clothes. I found it, and quickly tapped a Xanax into my palm. The goose snapped at it so fast all I saw was a black blur.

  Pasha came back with a bakery bun and a bowl of water. She fed the goose bits of bun, and I counted the seconds and waited for the Xanie to kick in. After about three minutes, it began to sway back and forth.

  “Maybe it has a head injury,” Pasha said.

  Or maybe it’s riding the benzo train to sleeptown. I kept that thought to myself.

  Two minutes later, the goose was zonked out.

  “I need to shower.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I smell fowl.”

  Again, the joke didn’t register. And I didn’t get any indication at all she wanted me to join her in the shower.

  So the idiot goose, and the idiot who carried it upstairs, sat there like the idiots we were and waited for Pasha to finish her shower. When she did, she didn’t come out naked, like I’d hoped. She didn’t come out in a towel that she let drop to the floor. She didn’t come out in sexy underwear.

  She came out in a ratty bathrobe, the belt cinched tight around her waist.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”

  Sleep. Not bed.

  “There are blankets in the closet. Will you two be okay sharing the couch?”

  The couch the goose just shit on? Really?

  But instead I said, “Sure.”

  Pasha said goodnight, went to the bedroom, and closed the door. I also heard the lock click into place.

  “I hate you,” I said to the goose.

  Then I set it on the floor, cleaned up the poop with some paper towels, found a blanket, and stretched out. I was ridiculously tired. I hurt all over. And I’d just missed out on getting laid because of a dumb bird.

  But the cocaine wasn’t done with me, and I was still turned on because of Pasha, so couldn’t sleep for shit.

  Did you really think you had a chance with her?

  Great. Earl was chatty.

  Earl came into my life a few years ago. The first indications of his presence were minor.

  I started to have back pain, which didn’t seem connected to any injury or exercise. After a few weeks, the back pain was joined by a yellow pallor to my skin that itched like crazy. I finally went to the doctor when I noticed that my bowel movements were white. He took X-rays and found tumors on my pancreas. I had a laparotomy, which is surgery to open the abdominal cavity, and they removed a few tumors along with inserting a drainage tube into my small intestine to stop the jaundice.

  The tumor biopsy proved malignant. I was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the exocrine pancreas, stage 4. I had a chordotomy (celiac ganglion nerve blocks), but since the pain is back, that means the cancer has spread to surrounding organs.

  Earl and I have been doing this little dance for a long time. He conquers a bit more of me. I fight back with chemo and radiation. He backs off for a bit, but then spreads out again.

  Dry. Rinse. Repeat.

  Except I was done with the repeat part. I was in the middle of the latest round of therapy, and I decided I just didn’t want to fight anymore.

  I didn’t see a reason to.

  Don’t believe all that quitting is for losers. Sometimes quitting is the best thing you can do.

  We’re all born to die. You can fight that, and cause yourself unnecessary pain. Or you can accept it, and make the best of the time you have left.

  I’m sick of raging against the dying of the light. Instead I’ll use that light to do a few more lines.

  You keep telling yourself that. But I know you. You’ll never convince yourself that cowardice is strength.

  “Shh,” I said to Earl.

  You fought so hard today. Not like a man who has accepted death.

  “I told you to shut up.”

  You put your fists in broken glass. Why are you so afraid of more chemo?

  “I’m not afraid of chemo.”

  You hate yourself, in so many ways. You’re le
tting yourself die. But you swam like a senator to reach that river shore. Do you know why?”

  He had a point. But I’d been beaten up enough today, so I didn’t need to beat myself up. I considered the few Xanax I had left. But they dulled my reactions, and I was here to protect Pasha. If someone did break in, I couldn’t be in a doped-up stupor.

  There was another thing that relaxed me. Sex. That moment had passed, but I could still go solo. I thought about Pasha, thought about that kiss we almost had, reached into my boxer-briefs—

  —and saw the goose was staring at me.

  “Go to sleep,” I told it.

  He kept staring.

  I wondered what I’d need to make a little goose blindfold. Maybe some paper towels?

  Then I jack-knifed into a sitting position, startled by a horrible beeping sound.

  My new-slash-used cellphone. I flipped it open and held it to my ear.

  “Hi, Bill?”

  It was a woman’s voice. A sexy woman’s voice. I considered impersonating Bill, to see where it might lead, but I didn’t know if the phone had call waiting and I had to be available if Harry got in touch.

  “Wrong number,” I said, closing the phone.

  Which was the wrong thing to say, because it rang again before I could figure out how to turn the volume down.

  “Bill?”

  “There’s no Bill here, you have the wrong number.”

  “Do you know where Bill went?”

  “I don’t know anyone named Bill.”

  I closed the phone.

  The goose was still staring at me.

  “Was that for you? Your name Bill?”

  More doped-up staring.

  “You’re happy now,” I said. “But coming down off that stuff is a bitch.”

  The goose didn’t reply. I almost took a Xanax, resisted, and sometime between then and the morning I fell asleep.

  Waking up was bad.

  Everything hurt. Head, stomach, side, hands, nose, arms, legs, ear—

  The damn goose was biting my ear again.

  I shoved it away, stood up, and forced myself through a bit of yoga to stretch out all the muscles that had stiffened up. Then I padded to the bathroom, did what I needed to do, and found my way into the kitchen.

  I screwed up the first cup of espresso, not understanding the machine.

  The second cup turned out okay. I drank it, and shared some dry wheat toast with the bird.

  The bird kept pecking at the toast, then throwing it off to the side.