“Do you ever do your own detective work?”
“Yes,” Pookie said. “I can detect cock-knockers. Wait … I detect one sitting across the table from me now. Sure you don’t want some cake?”
“No,” Bryan said. “I don’t want cake. I want to find out what’s going on.”
Pookie nodded slowly. “We’ll get this figured out, Bryan. The dream thing doesn’t make any sense, and I know that’s messing with you, but I need you to try and relax so your brain works right.”
“I don’t want to relax.”
“Come on, trust Doctor Chang. Did you feel better after seeing your dad?”
Yeah, I actually felt sane again.
“No,” Bryan said. “I didn’t.”
“L-L-W-T-L. Look, man, if there’s a cover-up, and the chief of frickin’ police is involved, then you know we need to move carefully. Patience, Daniel-san.”
Patience? Easy for Pookie to say. And yet patience was exactly what they needed — Bryan was a hunter. If he lost his shit now, he might spook the prey.
Someone was responsible for all of this.
Bryan wouldn’t rest until he found out who that was.
Hector’s Revenge
Aggie James picked up the Tupperware container that had been tossed his way. It hurt to do even that. His body ached. He needed a hit. Something. Anything. Drying out sucked.
He opened the container and smelled it. His trembling stomach rejoiced at the scent of the brown stew filled with carrots, potatoes and thick chunks of some stringy meat.
The old lady had come with her cart again. They hadn’t drawn his chain all the way back this time. He could move enough to reach the food. That made him potentially dangerous, he supposed, but the old lady didn’t seem to worry about him. She came close, leaned in, then sniffed.
This time her scarf was pink with big red spots. She wore a brown skirt instead of gray, but the sweater and shoes were the same.
“This stew looks good,” Aggie said. “What’s in it?”
She stopped sniffing him long enough to look him in the eye. “Is good for you. Eat.”
She had spoken to him. It was the first English he’d heard in days. “Lady, what’s your name?”
“Hillary.”
She reached into her cart and threw a sandwich to the Chinaman wearing the Super Bowl XXI shirt. He caught it and ripped open the brown paper. He said something that sounded like shay-shay, then shoved a big bite into his mouth as he crawled forward on his knees until his chain pulled taut.
“Please,” he said to Hillary as he chewed. “I no talk. I leave. Please. Please.”
His sandwich looked like egg salad. The man was terrified. He had tears in his eyes, yet he still crammed the food into his mouth, chewed and swallowed as fast as he could. Aggie recognized that behavior all too well — if you didn’t know when or where your next meal might come from, or if someone was going to kick your ass and take your food away, you ate as much as you could as fast as you could.
“Please,” the Chinaman said.
Hillary just stared at him.
What a group they were: Aggie the bum, Hector the Mexican and the hungry Chinaman. Hector had two sandwiches lying in front of him. He hadn’t touched them. Hillary had come twice since the masked men had taken his wife. Hector didn’t move a lot anymore, just lay there in a fetal ball. Aggie couldn’t blame the guy — wife and kid, gone.
And you know exactly what that feels like.
“Please-please,” the Chinaman said to Hillary. He shoved the last of the sandwich into his mouth, then pushed his fingers and palms together, like he was praying. “I no talk. Please!”
Hillary rattled off a sharp, short phrase of what sounded like that chinky-chong talk, and the Chinaman shrank away. He fell to his ass, then back-crawled until he hit the white wall.
“Damn, Hillary,” Aggie said. “What did you say to him?”
“I told him I’ll bring egg rolls next time,” Hillary said without looking away from the man.
“You’ve got egg rolls?”
She looked at Aggie again. “You don’t seem as scared as he does. Why?”
Aggie shrugged. “Doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere unless you let me go. Besides, I got nothing to live for. I’m pretty scared, I guess. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.”
And maybe you’ve been trying to kill yourself for years, but you don’t have the balls to do it right.
“There are different ways of dying,” she said. “Some worse than others. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”
Aggie shrugged again. “What’s gonna happen is what’s gonna happen. Maybe I’m a little” — he paused as a shiver ripped him from toes to nose — “a little preoccupied right now.”
“You’re already feeling better, I can …”
Her voice trailed off, but somehow Aggie knew that she’d been about to say: you’re feeling better, I can smell it. Had the Mexican woman smelled better, too?
Aggie decided to stop thinking about that. He didn’t want to know if he was right.
“I’d be better still if I could get my medicine,” he said. “How about it, lady? Can I get my medicine I had on me when I came in?”
“No.”
“But I need my medicine. I’m sick.”
Hillary shook her head. “You don’t need it, or you won’t soon. We’ve had many like you here before. You’ll be fine in another day or two.”
Aggie had dried out before. Sure, the shakes would be gone, as would the shits and the pukes, but he’d be far from fine. Losing the shakes didn’t help you forget — the smack did.
“I need it,” Aggie said.
Hillary smiled. “Perhaps in a few days, this need will be the least of your problems.”
The white jail-cell door swung open with its grinding, metallic squeak. Six white-robed men came in, hoods pulled up over monster masks — Wolf-Face, Pig-Face, Hello Kitty, a bug and a demon-face. The last one through wore the black-skinned, red-lined face of Darth Maul.
Wolf-Face carried the pole with the hook. Demon-Face held the remote control.
The Chinaman stared and muttered rapid-fire words that Aggie didn’t understand. The guy had been unconscious when they brought him in — this was his first time seeing the freak show.
The white-robed men closed in on Hector.
Hector didn’t move. He remained in a fetal position.
Demon-Face pressed a button on the remote. The chains started to clank. Aggie hustled back to the wall, scooping up his chain as he went. He rested his neck against the hole, letting the chain play through his fingers so it wouldn’t loop his foot or anything like that.
The Chinaman was freaked, but not so freaked he didn’t mimic Aggie’s actions.
Hector’s chain pulled tight, started dragging him, and still he didn’t react. The monster-faced men closed in. Even as he slid, four sets of hands grabbed at his arms and legs. The wooden pole descended, its metal hook reaching for his collar.
Then Hector’s chain rang with a strange new clank.
It stopped retracting.
Aggie looked to the hole that led into the wall. There, his chain was balled into some kind of a knot large enough that it wouldn’t fit through the stainless-steel flange.
The monster-faced men looked too, their black-gloved hands stopping in midmotion around the Mexican’s hands and feet. In the brief, still silence that filled the white room, Hector spoke.
“Ahora es su turno cabrones.”
His hand shot out under a white robe, grabbed a foot and yanked. Pig-Face went down hard, feet pulled out from under him like some cartoon character walking into one of those rope traps, his head thonking audibly off the floor’s white stones.
He tricked ’em. He was just playin’ possum.
Hector moved like a pissed-off street cat fighting a pack of small, slow dogs. He shook off their grip and with the same motion was on his feet. He kicked out, planting his foot hard into the stomach of B
ug-Face. Bug-Face let out a grunt, then dropped.
Two men down in less than a second.
“Hit ’em!” Aggie screamed. “Hit ’em!”
Hello Kitty grabbed Hector’s left arm as Darth Maul pulled a lead pipe out of his sleeve and swung it in a low, horizontal arc, aiming for Hector’s knee. The Mexican twisted at the last second, like those guys in that Ultimate Fighting stuff, bending his knee away from the pipe and taking the hit in the crook of his leg. His face wrinkled up — that hit hurt, but not as bad as if it had taken him in the kneecap.
Goddamn but that beaner was fast.
Hector reached out with his free right hand and ripped the wood pole out of Wolf-Face’s hands. Darth Maul brought the pipe back for another knee shot, but the Mexican jabbed the stick’s butt into Maul’s latex mask. Darth Maul let out a scream the likes of which Aggie had never heard — high-pitched and clicky. Black-gloved hands shot inside the hood as Maul fell to the ground, little feet kicking.
The Mexican put the end of the stick on the white floor, then drove his foot through the shaft, snapping it in half and leaving him holding a long, jagged shard of white wood.
Hector snarled. He jammed that shard right under the Hello Kitty mask.
Blood sprayed.
From the floor, Pig-Face grabbed Hector’s feet. Wolf-Face dove in and wrapped his white-robed arms around Hector’s chest. Demon-Face snagged the lead pipe off the floor — it went up fast, then came down faster in a vicious arc ending on the Mexican’s head.
Hector sagged. He disappeared beneath a flurry of white robes, punching black fists, kicking feet and a swinging pipe that did not stop.
Aggie couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop seeing, couldn’t stop hearing. Over and over again, the repeated whiff-gong-crack of the pipe coming down on the Hector’s shins, his knees, his feet, his hands. Each time the metal met flesh and bone, it was answered with a cry of agony.
Hector stopped moving, but the beating continued.
Infinite moments later, Wolf-Face and Pig-Face grabbed the Mexican’s shattered hands and dragged him out of the room. Blood-soaked pajamas left long red smears against the white floor.
Two more white-robed men appeared: the Joker and Jason Voorhees. They helped Pig-Face and Bug-Face drag away the still-twitching Hello Kitty and the unmoving Darth Maul.
Hello Kitty’s blood ran a zigzag curving path between the cobblestones’ low points until it drained into the same hole Aggie and the others used to shit and piss.
Hillary calmly rolled her Safeway shopping cart out the door. The wheels still squeaked, but only a little. She stopped and looked back at Aggie. “An ouvrier will come mop this up soon,” she said.
She shut the cage door behind her. Silence filled the bright room, broken only by the soft whimpers of the Chinaman.
Hector had fought like a motherfucker with nothing to lose. Aggie James also had nothing to lose, but he couldn’t fight for shit.
When the masked men came for him, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop them.
Blue Balls
People were going to start talking.
For the second night in a row, Pookie had to help Bryan to his apartment. The guy was beyond sick. How he’d managed to put on a good soldier face during the meetings with Biz-Nass and Zou was beyond Pookie’s ability to relate.
Three days of this sickness, yet Pookie still felt fine. Those flu shots came in handy.
“I feel like crap,” Bryan said. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to dream anymore.”
Dreaming might be a necessary evil, because sleep was exactly what Bryan needed. The guy couldn’t keep going without rest. That kind of thing wore a body down.
So does jumping eight feet into the air, huh, Pooks?
No, Pookie wasn’t going to rehash that crap again. What he’d thought he saw couldn’t be, and that was that — just heat-of-the-moment memories playing tricks on him.
Pookie leaned Bryan against the hallway wall while he opened Bryan’s door. “Clauser, you’re a real rocket scientist, you know that?”
“Why?”
Pookie helped him inside. “Because you’ve got a fat Chinese dude with a Chicago accent taking care of you, when you could have a hot little brunette medical examiner giving you a sponge bath instead.”
“Really, Pooks? You want to ride my ass about Robin now?”
“You and Robin are made for each other,” Pookie said. “It’s like math.”
“You hate math.”
“My hate doesn’t make it any less accurate. And remember my grandfather’s advice: you can fuck your math teacher, but you can’t fuck math.”
Bryan fell onto his bed, lay there for a second, then started sitting up. “I don’t think your grampa said that.”
“Well, someone did. Maybe it was me.”
“I’m so surprised.”
Bryan slid off the bed. His knees wobbled and he almost fell.
“Bryan, go to sleep.”
He shook his head. “I told you, I’m not sleeping. I can’t, Pooks.”
If Bryan didn’t get some serious rest, the dreams and Marie’s Children and the murders wouldn’t really matter to him anymore — he’d die from exhaustion. Pookie had to talk him down.
“Tell you what,” Pookie said. “Your bad dreams usually come in the wee hours of the morning. I’ll wake you up at midnight.”
Bryan stared out from sunken, bloodshot eyes. His dark-red beard had been borderline unkempt three days ago. Now he was starting to look like Charlie Manson; not a good image, considering.
“Midnight? You promise?”
“Yeah,” Pookie said. “And I’m staying right here. Just don’t walk in your sleep and try to get some, because we both know you’ve been after me for years.”
Pookie eased Bryan back onto the bed. A sweaty head hit a cool pillow. Pookie had cast his lot with his partner. He would ride this out to the end.
“I got your back, brother,” Pookie said. “I won’t fail you.”
Bryan didn’t answer.
“Bryan?”
A snore. He was already asleep.
Pookie turned off the light, stepped into the box-strewn hall and closed the bedroom door. Another night on his friend’s couch. Pookie hadn’t slept on couches this much since he’d been married.
He turned on Bryan’s TV and watched a little local news. Jay Parlar’s death led. The anchor looked so upset. And the street reporter outside of Jay’s place, yeah, she looked real somber as well. Reporters were fucking vampires that lived off the blood of others.
Pookie turned off the TV. He took off his jacket. Might as well get comfortable. He pulled his notepad from his jacket pocket.
Things were crazy, his partner was a total mess and there might very well be a murderous conspiracy afoot in the San Francisco Police Department, but that didn’t mean Pookie could just ignore his other vital duties.
“Blue Balls, Blue Balls, take me away. In Hollywood, everything works out just fine for the cops.”
He started scribbling notes for his series bible, hoping the work would let him tune everything out, at least for a little while.
Roberta
Rex drew.
Alex Panos this time. No axes, no chain saws, and no monsters. Just Alex.
Alex, and Rex.
It felt good to draw it. Rex felt his dick stiffen as he sketched a look of pain in Alex’s eyes.
The pencil flew, a skritch-scratching sound so fast it was a constant hiss. Shapes formed — circles, ovals and cylinders that became faces, chests, arms and legs.
Curves became blood.
Yeah, yeah it was good it was good.
Rex’s breaths came faster, shallower. His face felt hot. His heartbeat hammered inside his head. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to get turned on by this, but he didn’t care anymore. The blood and pain and death spun him up and now he knew why the boys at school talked about porn all the time.
More lines. Rex grabbed a colored pencil. A
lex’s severed hand took shape, flash-frozen in a spray of red. Rex drew with his right hand. His left hand reached down, unzipped his pants and slid inside.
This would be his best drawing yet. His best drawing ever.
Moments went by and time vanished. Rex saw only lines to be drawn and shapes to be made.
His bedroom door opened, breaking the trance.
Rex’s head snapped up.
There stood Roberta. She was already holding the belt. Her gaze slid down, her forehead furrowed. Rex looked down as well — his little, hard dick was in his hand.
Oh no.
“The school called me,” Roberta said. She stepped into his room, slammed the door shut behind her.
Rex was trapped.
“They said you skipped school, again. So I came to teach you better, and what do I find? I find you being a nasty boy. Dirty, nasty, touching yourself.”
“But Mom, I—”
“Don’t you call me mom! You’re no son of mine, you nasty, nasty thing!”
Rex looked down and started to zip up when he heard a crack sound and felt the sting across his left cheek. He sucked in a half-breath of surprise. His hand touched his face. The skin hurt.
“That’s right,” Roberta said, the belt dangling from her right hand. “I’ll teach you to be a dirty, sinning boy in my house.”
The belt snapped out again. Rex ducked away but tripped on his desk stool. He and the stool fell — the back of his head thonked against the floor.
“Don’t you duck, you sinner! You take what’s coming to you!”
He tried to get up. His arms and legs seemed to move in slow motion.
Crack across his forehead, then on his nose; he brought his arms up in front of his face.
“Dirty!”
Crack on his shoulder, a deep stinging.
“Nasty!”
Rex grabbed the overturned stool, tried to use it to help him scramble to his feet.
Crack across his back, the flash of pain so bad he cried out.
“I’ll teach you, you worthless little—”
Rex stood and swung, did both things so fast he didn’t even know what he was doing. There was a sound like a bat hitting a softball, then he heard something crash on the floor.