The Barrens & Others

  Aldo D'Amico glared at his wife and removed the ice pack from his face. He had a brutal headache from the bruises and stitches in his scalp. His nose was killing him. Broken in two places. The swelling made him sound like he had a bad cold.

  He wondered for the hundredth time about that punk in the laundry. Had the gook set them up? Aldo wanted to believe it, but it just didn't wash. If he'd been laying for Aldo, he'd have had his store filled with some sort of gook army, not one white guy. But Christ the way that one guy moved! Fast. Like liquid lightning. A butt and a kick and Joey was down and then he'd been on Aldo, his face crazy. No. It hadn't been a set up. Just some stunad punk. But that didn't make it any easier to take.

  "I told you, Maria, no calls!"

  Bad enough he'd be laughed at all over town for being such a gavone to allow some nobody to bust him up and steal his car, and even worse that his balls were on the line for the missing money and shit, so why couldn't Maria follow a simple order? He never should have come home tonight. He'd have been better off at Franny's loft on Greene Street. Franny did what she was told. She damn well better. He paid her rent.

  "But he says he has information on your car."

  Aldo's hand shot out. "Gimme that! Hello!"

  "Mr. D'Amico, sir," said a very deferential voice on the other end. "I'm very sorry about what happened today at that laundry. If I'da known it was someone like you, I wouldn'a caused no trouble. But I didn't know, y'see, an I got this real bad temper, so like I'm sorry–"

  "Where's the car?" Aldo said in a low voice.

  "I got it safe and I wanna return it to you along with the money I took and the, uh, other laundry and the, uh, stuff in the trunk, if you know what I mean and I think you do."

  The little shit was scared. Good. Scared enough to want to give everything back. Even better. Aldo sighed with relief.

  "Where is it?"

  "I'm in it now. Like I'm talkin' on you car phone. But I'm gonna leave it somewhere and tell you where you can find it."

  "Don't do that!" Aldo said quickly.

  His mind raced. Getting the car back was number one priority, but he wanted to get this punk, too. If he didn't even the score, it would be a damn long time before he could hold his head up on the street.

  "Don't leave it anywhere! Someone might rip it off before I get there, and that'll be on your head! We'll meet–"

  "Oh, no! I'm not getting plugged full of holes!"

  Yes, you are, Aldo thought, remembering the punk pointing Joey's magnum in his face.

  "Hey, don't worry about that," Aldo said softly. "You've apologized and you're returning the car. It was an accident. We'll call it even. As a matter of fact, I like the way you move. You made Joey look like he was in slow motion. Actually, you did me a favor. Made me see how bad my security is."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. I could use a guy like you. How'd you like to replace Joey?"

  "Y'mean be your bodyguard? I don't know, Mr. D'Amico."

  "Think about it. We'll talk about it when I see you tonight. Where we gonna meet?"

  "Uuuuh, how about by the Highwater Diner? It's down on–"

  "I know where it is."

  "Yeah, well there's an old abandoned building right next door. How about if I meet you there?"

  "Great. When?"

  "Ten thirty."

  "That's kinda soon–"

  "I know. But I'll feel safer."

  "Hey, don't worry! When Aldo D'Amico gives his word, you can take it to the bank!"

  And I promise you, punk, you're a dead man!

  "Yeah, well, just in case we don't hit it off, I'll be wearing a ski mask. I figure you didn't get a real good look at me in that laundry and I don't want you getting a better one."

  "Have it your way. See you at ten thirty."

  He hung up and called to his wife. "Maria! Get Joey on the phone. Tell him to get over here now!"

  Aldo went to his desk drawer and pulled out his little Jennings .22 automatic. He hefted it. Small, light, and loaded with high velocity longs. It did the job at close range. And Aldo intended to be real close when he used this.

  *

  A little before ten, Jack climbed up to the roof of the Highwater Diner and sat facing the old Borden building. He watched Reilly and five of his boys – the whole crew – arrive shortly afterwards. They entered the building from the rear. Two of them carried large duffel bags. They appeared to have come loaded for bear. Not too long after them came Aldo and three wiseguys. They took up positions outside in the alley below and out of sight on the far side.

  No one, it seemed, wanted to be fashionably late.

  At 10:30 sharp, a lone figure in a dark coat, jeans, and what looked like a knit watch cap strolled along the sidewalk in front of the Highwater. He paused a moment to stare in through the front window. Jack hoped George was out of sight like he had told him to be. The dark figure continued on. When he reached the front of the Borden building, he glanced around, then started toward it. As he approached the gaping front entry, he stretched the cap down over his face. Jack couldn't see the design clearly but it appeared to be a crude copy of the one he'd worn last night. All it took was some orange paint...

  Do you really want to play Repairman Jack tonight, pal?

  For an instant he flirted with the idea of shouting out a warning and aborting the set up. But he called up thoughts of life in a wheelchair due to a falling cement bag, of Levinson's missing toes, of bullets screaming through Gia and Vicky's apartment.

  He kept silent.

  He watched the figure push in through the remains of the front door and disappear inside. In the alley, Aldo and Joey rose from their hiding places and shrugged to each other in the moonlight. Jack knew what Aldo was thinking: Where's my car?

  But they leapt for cover when the gunfire began. It was a brief roar, but very loud and concentrated. Jack picked out the sound of single rounds, bursts from a pair of assault pistols, and at least two, maybe three shotguns, all blasting away simultaneously. Barely more than a single prolonged flash from within. Then silence.

  Slowly, cautiously, Aldo and his boys came out of hiding, whispering, making baffled gestures. One of them was carrying an Uzi, another held a sawed off. Jack watched them slip inside, heard shouts, even picked out the word "car."

  Then all hell broke loose.

  It looked as if a very small, very violent thunderstorm had got itself trapped on the first floor of the old Borden building. The racket was deafening, the flashes through the glassless windows like half a dozen strobe lights going at once. It went on full force for what seemed like twenty minutes but ticked out to slightly less than five on Jack's watch. Then it tapered and died. Finally… quiet. Nothing moved.

  No. Check that. Someone was crawling out a side window and falling into the alley. Jack went down to see.

  Reilly. He was bleeding from his mouth, his nose, and his gut. And he was hurting.

  "Get me a ambulance, man!" he grunted as Jack crouched over him. His voice was barely audible.

  "Right away, Matt," Jack said.

  Reilly looked up at him. His eyes widened. "Am I dead? I mean... we offed you but good in there."

  "You offed the wrong man, Reilly."

  "Who cares...you can have this turf... I'm out of it... just get me a fucking ambulance! Please?"

  Jack stared at him a moment. "Sure," he said.

  Jack got his hands under Reilly's arms and lifted him. The wounded man nearly passed out with the pain of being moved. But he was aware enough to notice that Jack wasn't dragging him toward the street.

  "Hey...where y'takin' me?"

  "Around back."

  Jack could hear the sirens approaching. He quickened his pace toward the rear.

  "Need a doc...need a ambulance."

  "Don't worry," Jack said. "There's one coming now."

  He dumped Reilly in the rearmost section of the Borden building's back alley and left him there.

  "Wait here for your ambulance," he
told him. "It's the same one you called for Wolansky's kid when you ran him down last month."

  Then Jack headed for the Highwater Diner to call Tram and tell George that they didn't need him anymore.

  1989

  Bridesmaid again. Black Wind was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for novel that year. It lost but who can grouse about finishing close behind The Silence of the Lambs? I almost voted for it over my own novel. (Yeah, right.)

  In 1989 my writing switched into high gear. A novel and a half, one novella, a novelette, six short stories, and a comic book script.

  Plus the introduction to John Lennon's "No Flies on Frank." Stephen Jones asked me to do it for his Pan anthology, Dark Voices. I slipped into a Lennonesque voice and knocked it off in about twenty minutes. I had to keep the reins tight or it easily would have run longer than the story. Steve paid me for it with a bottle of champagne.

  I began and finished Sibs in the spring of '89. The genesis of that novel still amazes me. I was down in Baltimore at a Geriatrics update at Johns Hopkins Medical Center; after dinner I sat in my room at the Tremont Plaza, going over the first sixty pages of Reprisal (working title: Lisl) that I'd written during the preceding month. I wasn't happy with them. The whole book needed restructuring. My mind wandered to an idea I'd been kicking around for years but had never quite jelled. Suddenly the final twist occurred to me and the entire novel was all there, spread out before me. I started scribbling down the outline.

  When I got home I put Reprisal aside and jumped into the new book (the working title was Gemini). I finished in 62 days. I've never written like that before or since. Like taking dictation. A gift. Every writer deserves one of those.

  In the spring I finished "Biosphere," a script for Marvel Graphic's Open Space series (it appeared in #2, superbly illustrated by John Ridgway).

  The year also saw the publication of Soft & Others, a collection of 16 stories from my first two decades as a professional writer, ordered chronologically like this book, from my very first sale onward. (Maybe I should have subtitled the collection, "Watch Wilson Learn How To Write.") A lot of readers told me how much they liked the introductory material; a few said they liked the intros better than some of the stories.

  Baen published Dydeetown World (a melding of the novellas "Dydeetown World," "Wires," and "Kids,") with a marvelous cover by Gary Ruddell in the summer. It had started in 1984 as an idea for a short story – five, maybe six thousand words, tops. A quiet little SF tribute to Raymond Chandler whose work has given me such pleasure over the years. I was going to use all the clichés – the down and out private eye, his seedy friends, the tired, seamy city, the bar hang out, the ruthless mobster, the whore with the heart of gold. And I was going to set it in the far future, in a future I had developed for the LaNague Federation science fiction stories (four novels and a handful of shorts) written during the 70's.

  But "Dydeetown Girl" was going to be different. Rather than bright and full of hope like its predecessors, this story was going to be set on the grimy, disillusioned underbelly of that future. I wanted to move through the LaNague future at ground level, take a hard look at the social fall out of the food shortages, the population control measures, the wires into the pleasure centers of the brain – things I'd glossed over or mentioned only in passing before. But despite the downbeat milieu, the story would be about freedom, friendship, and self esteem.

  Beneath its hardboiled voice, its seamy settings, and violent events (Cyber/p-i/sci fi, as Forry Ackerman might call it) were characters trying to maintain – or reestablish – a human connection. The intended short story stretched to novella length by the time it was done, but I think it worked.

  Apparently, a few other folks agreed. After the "Dydeetown Girl" novella snagged a finalist spot for the Nebula Award in 1987, Betsy Mitchell prodded me into writing the sequel novellas "Wires" and "Kids" (oh, those plural nouns) and splicing them together into a single story.

  Although written for adults, the Dydeetown World novel wound up on the American Library Association's list of "Best Books for Young Adults" and on the New York Public Library's recommended list of "Books for the Teen Age."

  One scene in "Dydeetown Girl" involves a tyrannosaurus rex used as a guard animal. That's right: in a story written in 1985 I used a dinosaur cloned from reconstituted fossil DNA, but I tossed it off as background color.

  If only I'd thought to stick a bunch of them in a park…

  foreword to "The Tenth Toe"

  Remember "Ethics," the story I replaced with "Faces" for NIGHT VISIONS 6? This is what happened to it. It became "The Tenth Toe."

  The metamorphosis began on November 14, 1988 at the annual SFWA Editor Publisher reception SFWA in New York (which I was overseeing for the fifth time) when Pat LoBrutto asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to this anthology he and Joe Lansdale were editing for Dark Harvest. They were calling it Razored Saddles. The story could be sf, horror, fantasy, alternate history, anything my little heart desired… as long as it had something to do with the West.

  In a word, cowpunk.

  I said, Seriously, Pat – what's it really about? He said it wasn't a joke. Could I contribute? I said something like, Gee, that sounds really neat, Pat, but I'm awfully busy. Thanks a million for asking, though.

  Avoiding any sudden moves, I backed away, thinking somehow both Pat's and Joe's belts were no longer going through all the loops.

  Cowpunk. Sheesh.

  I forgot all about it, but Pat called me in February while I was working on "A Day in the Life" (the Repairman Jack story for Stalkers) to prod me for that cowpunk story. Joe Lansdale called in March. Same (cattle )prod. I was going strong on SIBS then but promised to do my best to write them a story.

  I was wrung out after finishing SIBS, but I started wondering if maybe some of the plot elements in "Ethics" could be transposed to the West. I've always found Doc Holiday a weird, wild, and enigmatic figure (this is long before Val Kilmer's portrayal in "Tombstone"). You can't make up a character like that. Why not use him as the protagonist? It would require a complete rewrite but, approached with tongue firmly in cheek, it just might work.

  Pat and Joe agreed that it did.

  THE TENTH TOE

  (or: The Beginning of My End)

  by

  Doc Holliday

  (transcribed by F. Paul Wilson)

  I am thirty-five years old and will not see thirty-six.

  I was not always the weak, wheezing, crumbling sack of bones you see before you, a man whose days can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Nor was I always the hard drinking gambler and shootist you read of in the penny dreadfuls. I started out a much more genteel man, a professional man, even a bit of a milquetoast, one might say. But a flawed milquetoast.

  I attended medical school but did not succeed there, so I became a matriculant at a nearby dental school, from which I managed to graduate. I was then a professional man, and proud of it. But I remained flawed – cursed with a larcenous heart. No amount of schooling, be it of the medical, dental, or (I dare say) divinity sort, can extract that stubborn worm. You are born with it, and you die with it, if not from it.

  I am dying from it. It was that young professional man with the larcenous heart who led me to notoriety, and to this premature death from consumption.

  Allow me to explain...

  The first inkling I had of the curse was in the spring of 1878 while I was examining Mrs. Duluth.

  Mrs. Duluth's husband owned the Dodge City General Store and it was obvious (at least to me) that food was not in short supply on her supper table. She was fat. Truthfully, I have been in out houses smaller than this woman. Everything about her was fat. Her face was fat and round like a huge honeydew melon. Her lips were thick and fat. Even her nose and ears were fat.

  "Will this hurt?" she said as she lay back, overflowing my relatively new reclining dental chair. I hoped she wouldn't break its lift mechanism.

  "Not a bit," I told her. "After all, th
is is 1878, not the Dark Ages. We are now blessed with the modern methods of painless dentistry."

  "What do you plan to do?"

  "I'm going to administer some sulfuric ether," I heard myself say. "And when you're unconscious, I'm going to rob you."

  I saw her eyes widen and she must have seen mine do the same. I hadn't meant to say that. True, I had been thinking it, but I'd had no intention of verbalizing it.

  "What...what did you say, Doctor Holliday?"

  "I said I'm going to rob you. Just a little. I'll go through your purse and take some of your money. Not all of it. Just enough to make this exercise worth my while."

  "I really don't think that's very funny, Doctor," she said.

  I gulped and steadied myself with an effort. "Neither do I, Mrs. Duluth." And I meant it. What was coming over me? Why was I saying these things? "A joke. A dentist's joke. Sorry."

  "I should hope so." She seemed somewhat mollified. "Now, about this tooth–"

  "Who cares about that tooth. I'm interested in the third molar there with the big gold filling. I'm going to pop that beauty out and replace it with some garbage metal that looks like gold."

  (What was I saying?)

  "That is quite enough!" she said, rolling out of the chair. She straightened her enormous gingham dress and headed for the door.

  "Mrs. Duluth! Wait! I–"

  "Never mind! I'll find myself another dentist! One I can trust. Like that new fellow across the street!"

  As she went down the steps, she slapped at my shingle, knocking it off one of its hooks. It swung and twisted at a crazy angle until I stepped out and rehung it.

  JOHN HENRY HOLLIDAY, DDS

  Painless Dentistry

  I loved of that sign. It was making me rich. I could have made a good living just from the usual drilling, filling, and pulling of my patient's teeth, but that as not enough for my larcenous heart. I had to be rich! And I was getting rich quickly from the gold I was mining – literally – from my patients' teeth. I'd found an excellent gold-like compound that I substituted for the real thing while they were out cold in the chair. It was nowhere near as good as gold, but no one had caught on yet. I had another couple of years before the replacement fillings started to fall apart.