“Un. Fucking. Believable,” I said in disgust.
I had decided to be aggressive at the pig roast to provoke some kind of incriminating response from the mad Reverend. Well, I certainly succeeded in provoking a response. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem all that incriminating ...
“You’refaming us!” the Nazi cried. “We know you were at Nashron with that pussy Nolen! We know that you’re pushing his buttons!”
“Huh?”
He laughed and cried and sneered all at once. “Wh-what kind of fucking fool do you take me for, man? If you’re not the one who planted all that shit, then who else could it fucking be?”
“That’s what the Bonjours are paying me to find out.”
“No! Bullshit! Bullshit!”
I paused at this. One of the worst things you can do to some people— apart from being wronged by them—is to witness them in a moment of abject weakness. Nill was pretty much a human craps table at this point. I had to be sure I had all my bets covered before rolling.
“Listen up, Reverend,” I said with a marvelling smile. “We have three ways we can play this. In the first, you shoot Molly and I shoot you in a place where it takes a long time to die, because afterward, I shit you not, I will make you scream enough to shame the entire white race. In the second, I simply shoot you, in the mouth if I can manage it, in the hope of knocking out your motor cortex, and so save Molly. In the third, you simply set the gun down, and me and Molly here leave ...”
“Yeah?” He cried. His screech echoed through the tin-pot hollows. It’s always embarrassing when men cover weak hearts with crazed voices. “How—how can I trust you?”
I shrugged. “Because I’m a chronic weed smoker ... I’m too much of a slacker to dig graves. And I get too paranoid to cope with all the police bullshit. Afraid that I’ll fuck up. Afraid they’ll find my weed.”
All true.
“Buh-because you smoke weed?”
So far we had exchanged all these words around the fact of my gun pointed at his face and his gun held to Molly’s cheek. I’ve lived a good chunk of my life in the company of guns, and yet I will never get over the way they seem to vanish in the course of this or that. Here’s this thing, this tool that has been exquisitely designed and manufactured to bring about brain death in large mammals, and in the course of joking or negotiating or simply pissing away the time, we completely forget this mortal truth, wave them around like fucking Xbox controllers.
“Look,” I said, allowing more than a little impatience to leak into my tone. I realized that I had simply assumed all of Nill’s cronies were dead. “If we both fold our hands, split the pot, then we both get to rewind the clock. I don’t have to answer for your dead buddies. You don’t have to answer for abducting Molls here. We leave, you bury your flock, tell the rest of the congregation that they left to avoid the media attention, whatever. Sometimes people move away. Sometimes you never hear from them again ... “
Especially junkies. Hard to keep tabs on junkies. But I didn’t need to say this because Nill was telling himself the same thing already. His balls had slipped out of his boxers—no doubt about that. He was dangling.
Debating.
“Hard to shoot a porno with good intentions,” I said. “Show us some wood, brother.”
Everyone breathed real hard.
You spend your whole life building this persona, this no-shit-no- way-no-how illusion that you somehow manage to cling to even as you talk Jesus or push those grocery carts across the parking lot. Then you bump into me. There’s nothing like someone who really doesn’t give a fuck to remind you how dearly—how desperately—you love your skin.
His crazy-ass eyes wide and shining, Reverend Nill stepped back from Molls.
He stood naked at that instant, in his own eyes as much as mine. I have no doubt the spin-doctoring would be quick in coming, that he would mythologize everything that had happened this night, that he would remind himself he had buried dead men in secret places. But for the moment, he stood utterly revealed: a fool clinging to all he genuinely owned, his skin colour and his hate. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think of tagging him.
Molly slumped to her knees.
We left him there, alone and shirtless in the pale fire of his one light. Molly held me, held me tight, as we stumbled through the dark. She did not cry. At some point Nill began ranting behind us, or reciting actually, crying out a guttural German I’m sure he didn’t understand—some old speech I remembered from the History Channel. Hitler at Nuremberg.
The empty factory roared in reply, roared with the absence of collective will. Hydradyne. Makers of whatever.
He was still shouting as we stepped out into the night.
We had no wheels, so we had no choice but to walk the ruined service road to Highway 3.
At some point my legs failed me. I skidded to the weeded dirt, to my knees.
I could hear her voice. Despite the tsunami of crashing memory ...
Like calls to like, you see, when it comes to the mind. I had killed three men tonight—bad enough. But over the years I had killed others, and so there I was, killing them, killing all ofthem, all over again. Fawk.
“Disciple? Are you crying? Disciple? It’s okay. I’m okay!”
She didn’t understand.
It ain’t easy, being an abattoir.
Once we reached the highway, I called a cab and we began walking back toward town to meet it. The thought that Dead Jennifer had walked precisely these steps occurred to me, but the noise of recent events made the observation inaudible. The cabbie, some local fat-ass, said nothing, though I’m pretty sure he noticed everything—the gash on Molly’s forehead, certainly. But I wasn’t worried. Cabbies have a way of saying nothing. Too jaded to be surprised, just like me.
Our argument didn’t start until we found ourselves at the motel.
“Look,” I finally said. “The question you need to ask is whether you want to send me to the can for fifteen to twenty ...” I have some pretty savage instincts when it comes to self-preservation. I admit I suffered a dark thought or two for a moment, watching her balance my future against her sense of violation.
“But Nill—”
“Didn’t. Harm. A soul.”
“But—”
“You’re thinking in common sense terms: I saved your life, so I gotta be good. But the authorities won’t give a flying fuck why I killed those guys. All they’ll care about is the who. As far as they’re concerned, I’m the murderer. How? How? Because I’m the one who violated the state’s monopoly on deadly force.”
It all came down to turf.
She gawked at me with a look halfway between astonishment and indigestion. “What happened to you?” she cried. The stress had caught up to her by now, and she was crying freely. “How does someone get so, so ... fucking cynical ?”
The blood had started to flow from the cut on her forehead.
“They remember,” I said, daubing her brow with a tissue. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
As it turned out, the nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away, in a town called Innis. We took my Golf because she said she wasn’t sure if her car insurance would cover me. Can you believe it?
I took a roundabout way, stopped on one of the bridges, tossed my beloved Colt into the river. What a pisser.
“Why do you drive this piece of shit?” she asked as I climbed back in.
“Because I’m a loser,” I snapped back. “Ruly-truly.”
I get prickly about my car.
I began talking about the case, as a distraction as much as anything else—the way couples with rotten relationships find common purpose in slagging the friends they both despise. In a sense, the two of us found ourselves on opposite ends of the incentive spectrum. Everything had gone swimmingly for Molly—even her abduction would find its lucrative way into print somehow, I imagined. In the space of a weekend she had become the go-to girl for what was becoming America’s latest media crime fetish. I thought
of the economic consequences. A million bottles of shampoo sold. Ten thousand Toyotas. Wild swings of market share ... one, maybe even two points—who knew? Enough for Buffett to start unloading shares of Gillette ...
The more I considered it, the more it seemed that everybody was making out like a bandit except me. I was even out my gun. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is finding an unregistered .45 automatic? How fucking expensive?
Her elbow propped against the door, Molly leaned into the towel she held pressed against her head. She had that struggling-to-stay-awake look you see on the faces of so many critical incident survivors.
“So if it isn’t Nill ...” she said, gazing into nowhere.
“Who knows. Could have been one of his cronies, like I said.” This was my secret hope, but I was dubious.
“But then why would they help him abduct me?” she asked. “I mean, if the idea was to get Nill to self-destruct, you’d think they would’ve found some way to bail ...”
I glimpsed Tim, his tears blue-green with reflected dashboard light. Did he have a role to play in all of this?
Nah.
“Maybe it was this Leighton guy he mentioned,” I said. “Or the Mexicans.”
Always easy to blame the Mexicans.
“Or Baars,” she said.
“Or someone who thinks they’re helping Baars.”
I glimpsed Stevie, watching me from behind the world reflected across plate glass.
“What do you mean?” she said, turning to study my profile.
“Tim told me that Nill and Baars had a sit-down. Well, what if one of the Framers thinks Baars made a mistake giving Ruddick to the Thirds? You know, like a Starfleet versus the Klingons thing ...”
She almost laughed.
We tunnelled through the Pennsylvania dark. I found myself hating my poor little Golf. I hated the look of it. I hated the sour-milk smell of it. No power steering. No air conditioning. It even had manual windows, for fuck’s sake. I hated the fact that I was embarrassed that Molly had to sit in it. Tin fucking can.
Fucking Nazi car, that’s what it was.
So that pretty much summed up my situation. No leads. No gun.
Three more souls on my conscience (I had this fucked-up image of Nill braining Fucknut and Dipshit to make sure they were dead-dead). And a total shit-box for a car.
God hated me, the thin-skinned prick.
Oh well ... At least I had saved the babe.
Finding the hospital took some doing. I navigated the maze, wondering how heart-attack sufferers ever made it to the Emergency doors alive.
“I’ll just drop you off here,” I said, braking in front.
“It’s okay,” she replied, in the thoughtless way of couples, actually.
“I’m quite capable of walking from the parking lot.”
She looked at me in vague alarm when I didn’t release the brake.
“Sorry, Molls. Disciple doesn’t do health care facilities.”
Feminine Dismay slackened her expression. Another old friend.
“But ... but how am I supposed to get home?”
“You have a credit card, don’t you?”
“Yeah ...”
“I’ll catch you back at the motel, then.”
Cold, huh? But like I told Molly, me and hospitals do not mix. I got my reasons—specific reasons. But even in general, they’re anathema to people like me. Delivering babies on the top floor, stacking bodies in the basement. Hospitals are the one place where death and birth meet, where the human circuit, you might say, is closed.
Where only earnest voices have the wind to speak.
Track Thirteen
THE BUZZ KILLERS
Monday ...
Knuckles on aluminum. Knocking. Persistent knocking, wandering into consciousness from the edges.
If I hadn’t known it was her, I probably would’ve just rolled over to the other side of the bed, planted my face in the cool pillow. Only cops were prick enough to roust you out of bed this early in the morning.
But it was Molls, of course, looking at once perky and exhausted in the morning light. Traffic roared behind her. “They kept me overnight for observation.”
“Perverts,” I replied, grinning.
It took her a moment, but she got the joke. So much had happened that it seemed weeks ago, that night she caught me staring at her in the dark.
“I should be pissed,” she said. “I kept asking myself what kind of guy saves the girl just to dump her off at Emergency.”
“And?” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes.
“And I decided ... well ... I don’t know what I decided.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“As soon as you grow a backbone, I’m through.”
A breath of laughing air. She stepped across the threshold, no longer needing to be invited. Her arms clung. Her kisses came hot and hard.
We lay in bed, beneath the warm glow of the sun smouldering through the discoloured curtains. Our smell filled the room, salty and mellow. Her head on my shoulder, she had been describing her short stay in the Meaford County Hospital, and the enormous 1,342-dollar-and-61-cent bill she had charged against her MasterCard—just to find out she hadn’t suffered a concussion. When I asked her whether she still wanted to press charges against Nill, she waved the thought away, saying that it would give her a stake in her story, compromise her journalistic independence.
Not because it could land me in the can or anything.
“Things are ramping up, Disciple ... seriously ramping up. As big as the JonBenet Ramsey circus ...”
“So what are you doing here with me?”
Something crept into her eyes. “Because we need to figure ... to figure this out.”
“We have plenty of time to sort things, Molls.”
She bent her face down, away from my scrutiny. “What if we don’t have time?” she said strangely. “What if ...”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She was little more than a mop of red hair against my shoulder.
She turned, climbed my chest to better match my gaze, let go an oh-my sigh. “I think ... I think I’m falling for you.”
Fawk ...
I tried not to swallow, but it was too late. “Don’t say that.”
“Say what? That I’ve never met a man like you? That I ... I love you?”
Owich. Can you believe this shit?
“No.No, Molls. You can’t love me.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I’m not safe ...” I tend to become vague in exchanges like these. To leave room for future bullshit rationales, I suspect.
“But isn’t love about risks?”
“No. Not at all. If you can’t feel safe with the person you love, you spend your whole life on the run.”
Can you believe it? Instead of pulling out a can of whup-ass, I opened a club pack of Oprah.
Why do I do this? Why do I always make things so hard? For me. For them. Lying is always so much easier—so much safer. And yet I really only do it when things don’t matter.
What the fuck’s my problem?
“But I feel safe,” she said. “I really do.” A goofy little laugh, as short as a hiccup. Her left hand had settled on my chest. The pad of her ring finger pressed across my right nipple. “I’m not sure I’ve ever felt safer.”
“That’s because you only see a sliver of me,” I said. “The part that resembles something human.”
The whole of life, it sometimes seems, is just one long slow pan out, watching the details we’re born to slowly shrink into an ever-expanding vista. More, always more, scrolling in from unseen edges of our ...
Frame. Huh.
“Well,” she said, “I like what I see.”
I licked my lips. Did my best to hold her gaze. “That’ll change. Believe me. You’ll glimpse the monster soon enough ... “
My dick lay as cold as a fish fillet against my thigh. Man, I hate that.
“Disciple ... You’
re not a monster.”
Oh yes I am.
“You should get going,” I said brusquely. Fucked-up word, brusquely. Makes you want to clear your throat.
I paused—hesitated, more like. She felt so warm, so inviting, a gold- windowed cottage stranded in a winter world. I needed her at that moment. I needed the sanctuary men find in feminine pity, the safety of retreating into angelic intentions. I can be such a suck sometimes.
Suddenly I was up, sweeping my gauchies up to my waist.
Love.
What a buzz kill.
I suppose she would have left either way: the Framers had scheduled a press conference at 2 p.m. that afternoon, something she simply could not miss. But it was better that she left hurt.
I lied, told her I would mosey on by later. And this brought back her words from several minutes before.
“What ifwe don’t have time? What if...”
I ignored them, banished them with a blink. I’m continually doing that, it seems, brushing away flakes of the past. I kissed her longer and deeper than I intended.
The click of the door behind her delivered her words again, this time with even fiercer clarity.
“What ifwe don’t have time? What if...”
Fear, I realized. She had spoken these words, not with the anxiety of uncertain relationships, but with real mortal fear ...
Epiphanies are fucked-up things. I had this friend, Cochrane, whom I used to train with a few years back. We called him Three- Ball because he busted so many nuts at the gym we figured he had to have a spare. Anyway, he comes in this one afternoon saying that he had an “epiphany” the previous night, that he had—you guessed it— found Jesus. So I argued with him, pointed out how people the world over have these profound, life-changing experiences, finding whatever, everything from Krishna to Elvis. “I know you feel all special, all saved and shit, but feeling that way is common as dirt, Three-Ball. It’s you, not Jesus. You’ve saved yourself.”
“But I know,” he replied, saying what they all say. “I know that I know!”
Sad story, really. He suffered from bipolar depression, stopped taking his medication. “There’s no pill for the devil,” he told me. He electrocuted himself in his bathtub on October 4, 2005. Another shitty day.