The BIG UNEASY
by
Stel Pavlou
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Vibrant
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed within are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
THE BIG UNEASY
Copyright © 2006 by Stel Pavlou
This eBook edition published 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4763-9362-9
This ebook is printed on electronic paper.
All rights reserved, without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Ebook Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
* * * * *
Also by Stel Pavlou
Decipher
Gene
* * * * *
The BIG UNEASY
by Stel Pavlou
* * * * *
Even Blobs get depressed.
All the signs were there. The sudden weight gain, the binge eating, the long ooze toward self-destruction. Reno Floyd wished he’d paid more attention, but he’d been busy. He was always busy, and now his friend was gone.
It was a ritual. He came in to the office early on Fridays to get the papers. He left a to-do list for Gill, flirted with Irena. She’d say something catty about his needing to take a bath and he’d skedaddle. He’d walk the three blocks down to the corner of Lugosi and Bacharach, stop to get a shoeshine, and spend the morning picking unholies at Sonny Noose Neck’s. At half past ten, the Blob would squeeze into the joint with a quart of anti-freeze, pick his own spread and they’d listen to the corpses on the wireless together. It was like clockwork.
Today the clock had other ideas. It wasn’t that the spring had wound down and the hands were all over the place like a sailor on a hooker’s ass, so much as the clock had decided to leap up and smash itself against the wall showering the room in tin shrapnel.
Reno Floyd stood six feet tall with a jaw like an iron skillet and wore his coat and tie like it was the only place he could find to hang them. This morning those facts impressed nobody. The to-do lists were piling up, Irena said she had to go get a manicure and Gill had called to say he wouldn’t be in today.
Floyd wasn’t worried about Gill. That was easy. Floyd could guess what he was up to. If anyone knew about the rapacious need for quim it was that oyster. Without an ounce of self-control Gill was like an aneurism looking for a brain. God help the dame that had caught his eye this time. Though knowing that about the seven foot amphibious romantic didn’t help any.
What cornered Floyd was that it was his name over the door. Floyd answered for Floyd’s sins. And he had many. With no secretary, he was forced to work alone. He called clients into the office one by one. By the time he’d worked his way through the line in the reception room he had promised the Earth to just about anyone with cash in their wallet but he intended to deliver on nothing. Whatever it took to get them out of his armpit.
By the time he’d rolled up at Sonny Noose Neck’s it was way past eleven. The ritual was out of whack. But the Blob wasn’t there.
His first clue should have been the grating dirge of Folsom Prison Blues straining from the crackling wireless. The Blob wouldn’t have allowed that.
Sonny stood behind the grill with the kind of po-faced sneer that invited swift shovel work. But when the bookie saw Floyd walk in, he backed into the corner like a thirty year old still living in his parent’s basement, who’d just been caught trying on his mother’s underwear. Sonny already knew his best route to survival was to change the channel.
Nobody played Johnny Cash around Reno Floyd.
“I thought you weren’t coming in today, ” Sonny said, his hand shaking as he fumbled with the wireless knob. Like he’d just developed Parkinson’s. Which was ridiculous because everyone knew that required a pulse.
Floyd replied. “Where’s the big guy?”
Sonny shrugged. “Not here.”
“Why not?”
Had Floyd forgotten that he and Sonny weren’t actually friends? Sonny dithered. “How the hell should I know? You’re the gumshoe.”
“He owe you money?” Floyd asked sharply, his voice betraying his genuine concern.
Sonny was baffled. “He wouldn’t be The Blob if he didn’t.”
Reno Floyd laid his paper out on the counter. He circled three races and liked the form on Holy Ghost running in the third. That one had spirit. But without his old friend around for confirmation, things just didn’t seem right.
Floyd eased an Andrew Jackson across the counter and quietly slipped the stub into his pocket when it was offered. It didn’t settle his stomach. The Blob’s absence just didn’t feel right.
“If I see him, should I tell him to call you?”
Floyd didn’t trouble himself with a reply.
Like one end of a sad tapeworm caught in a futile bid for freedom, the Blob’s apartment sat inside an old water tower that loomed up out of the ass end of town.
The rusting studio showed all the signs of a scattered mind. Scads of unopened mail lay in damp piles by the doorway. The pantry held two cans of condensed milk on a single shelf. Empty beer bottles and torn candy wrappers were holding a rally by an upturned armchair.
Floyd knew that the Blob had destroyed armchairs just getting up to go to the bathroom but something about this seemed different. Desperate.
Floyd’s eye caught the scratch marks only in passing at first. Deep groves running parallel in an arc down the steel wall and across the stained mattress, leaving mildew scented stuffing and bedspring blossoms along their furrows.
Dog-eared magazines lay scattered on the side table. Cat Fancier’s Monthly; Kitties and Kittens and the bi-annual: Claws. Cat litter had been tossed liberally all around the bed and on the headboard hung a small pomander of catnip. It was obscene and it begged the obvious question: when did the Blob find time to get a cat?
But it was the note that finally cemented things for Floyd. Hand scrawled on a square of toilet paper it read: I can’t live, if living is without you.
Floyd felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. His friend had toppled into a downward spiral and he hadn’t even noticed until now.
He hoped he hadn’t gone and done something stupid, or worse. Floyd acutely remembered the last time the Blob went postal: the shot that was heard around the world. The circus cannon that launched him over the city limits where he nearly ate Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen! What a disaster that would have been. No Bullitt. No Magnificent Seven. No Le Mans, which is no bad thing, but you get the picture.
“Well, well, well, who have we got here?”
Reno Floyd sized the weird woman standing in the doorway, the voodoo pendant swinging from her pretty neck. Woman or witch? Temptress or killer? Floyd watched her saunter into the room and waited for her to show her hand.
“Where’s my rent?” she asked flatly.
“Where’s the Blob?” Floyd replied coolly.
“If I knew that don’t you think I’d already have my rent money?”
Touché.
She gravitated toward the counter and dusted off the bottle of Bacardi. “I can tell a gumshoe’s cheap suit a mile off,” she said looking for a glass. “'What's your name?”
'”Floyd.”
“You got a first name, Floyd?”
‘”Yeah.”
She handed him the glass and smiled. “You're my kind of dick. If I wasn’t married I'd think about asking you out.”
“If I wasn’t dead I’d think about killing myself.”
She snatched the glass back into her skeletal claw and downed it. “What do you want?”
“You seem pretty well at ease in the Blob’s place of rest. Does your husband know?”
“Does my husband know what?”
“About you and the Blob.”
“Ha! Me and the Blob? Do I look like I need attention from a water balloon?” She reached for a cigarette. Her shaking hands a sure sign that Floyd had hit a raw nerve. “He wasn't interested in me. It was her. It was always her.”
'Who her?'
“Look around, Floyd. I told him: no pets. But he wouldn’t listen.”
Floyd reappraised the claw marks in the wall. His stomach churned. “That’s disgusting”
The landlady became incensed. “What’s disgusting about falling in love with a woman who has issues?”
“A woman?”
“He called her Irena.”
The name sounded familiar. The cogs of Floyd’s decomposing mind whirred but drew only blanks. “Do you know anything more about her?”
“She worked for some heartless bastard in town is all I heard. A private dick just like you. Ha! Sounds like the Blob got the drop on you.”
Floyd came in close, letting her get a whiff of the masculinity she so obviously craved. “Listen, if you hear from him, let me know.”
“What kind of a fool do you take me for?”
“What kind have you got?”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Don't worry, you'll know when to laugh, doll,” Floyd said as he headed for the door. “They'll light up a sign and play a laugh track.”
The Big Uneasy went Theremin long before Reno Floyd showed up; it was that kind of town. Yet even by Nyxon’s preposterous standards, the unfolding events were taking a decidedly sideways bent.
Floyd spent good shoe leather retracing the Blob’s steps for the rest of the day. Every seedy haunt. Every comforting distraction. The salt-water taffy-stand in Cheney Park. The funny balloon mime on 5th Street.
By sunset Floyd was sitting rubbing his aching feet on the steps of the George W. Bush Presidential Bookshelf, wondering whether he really should find the time to see the exhibit on how best to clear brush, when a crowd came screaming around the corner.
Floyd got up. “What’s going on?”
“Don't go down there, man!” one kid warned. “People are getting' eaten!”
Oh no. It was too late. The Blob had gone off the deep end.
Floyd felt his stomach fall out from under him. How could he reach his friend and get him to calm down when he clearly wasn’t in his right mind?
Floyd pulled his pants up, took a deep breath, and waded against the terrorized crowd.
The bodies were piled deep. Gutted. Entrails hanging from streetlights like Christmas decorations. The Blob clearly hadn’t been here yet, so Floyd moved on to the next cross street.
It didn’t take long for the scattering crowds to herald the Blob’s creeping arrival.
Floyd saw his shadow first, a gigantic heaving mass, advancing against the crumbling brick of an upscale tenement.
Floyd stood at the end of the street and called out to his friend. “Don’t do it, Blob! She’s not worth it!”
The Blob turned around slowly, a sandwich hanging from his mouth. “What?”
“Don’t do it.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t kill all these people.”
“What…?”
“I know you’re upset. I’m here to help you. I understand where you’re coming from. You look in the mirror and all you see is a bloated metaphor for the 90s, when you didn't even like the 90s, all those plaid shirts and Pearl Jam. You asked yourself: is this all I am? The ultimate consumer? A post modernist expression for the capitalist soul? I’m here to tell you that you are more than that.”
The Blob quivered for a moment before glistening. “Floyd, what the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re depressed, you’re binge eating, you’re ready to explode.”
“Uh… I’m happy, I haven’t eaten all day and I’m getting married.”
That wasn’t what Floyd had been expecting to hear. He found it hard to accept. “You’re getting married?”
“Yeah…”
“To who? You’re a three and a half ton sack of protoplasm. You have a right to be depressed about that.”
“Hey, watch your mouth, kid.”
“Well who’s going to want to marry you?”
The Blob shifted uncomfortably. If he had eyes maybe he’d have looked at his feet. As it happened, he just kind of bobbed up and down. “Irena.”
There was that name again. Now maybe Floyd might get to the bottom of this. “Irena?”
“Irena.”
No… “Irena Dubrovna?”
“Irena Dubrovna.”
“My secretary?”
The Blob started to blub. “You ever wonder why you never see her around the office much anymore?”
“What are you talking about? I just saw her this morning.”
“I mean at night. You ever wonder why she’s not in the office at night?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“The place is closed. No one’s there at night.”
“But if it was open…”
“Yeah…?”
“She wouldn’t be there.”
“Really? So who would be there?”
“What?”
“If the office is open someone’s got to be there, you know, to mind the store. If Irena isn’t there, someone would have to be there. People could just wander in-”
“Anybody could be there. A fucking temp! I don’t know. I’m talking about Irena. She wouldn’t be there.”
“Maybe she’s at home.”
“She’s not at home. I guarantee you, if you went to the office, or went to her apartment, at night, you wouldn’t find her.”
“Maybe she went to dinner.”
“Good fucking God! Y’know I can see why Johnny Cash wanted to watch you die.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re fucking annoying! Here I am trying to pour out my heart---”
“I’m just trying to be logical!”
“Fuck logic, this is love! Irena’s good people. She’s Cat People but she’s good people.” A feline roar echoed through the dusky streets of Downtown Nyxon. The Blob was downcast. “Aw, nuts. She’s doing it again. Only I could pick a dame who turns into a man-eating cat when she gets her jollies.”
The Blob finished his sandwich and turned to leave.
Floyd went after him. “Wait. When’s the wedding?”
“A week on Saturday.”
“Really. That’s fast…”
“When you know, you know. Y’know?”
Floyd scratched around looking for some tact. “Hey, er, you er, what I mean is. Who’s you’re Best Man?”
“You are, you big lug.”
And with that, The Blob oozed off into the darkness. “Honey! Give the nice man his head back, there’s a sweetheart!”
Reno Floyd smiled, put his hands in his pockets and walked off. So The Blob and Irena were getting married. He never saw that one coming.
What a heart-warming story. For today, the Big Uneasy had found its soul. It was all Reno Floyd dared hope that someday it might get a little choosier.