“They were just roosting,” Frankie felt confident. “Eatin’ donuts and reading the funny papers. They’ll go back on patrol soon. Let’s just kill some time, drive around a while.”
“Frankie, we got a fuckin’ torso in a suitcase in the back seat. I’d kind of like to get rid of it as soon as fuckin’ possible, know what I mean?”
Frankie nodded, seeing the logic. “Fuck, you got any Demerol, Nick? I’m all out and I need a bang.”
“Wait till we get back to the compound. And you better
pray
that Vinch believes our story ’cos if he don’t you’re gonna need a shitload of Demerol for when that kooky doctor starts doing the job on you.”
“Fuck. I
definitely
need a hit.”
Nick pulled a u-turn, a sudden endeavor occurring to him.
“Where we going now? Those cops ain’t left the canal yet.”
“The Kwik-Mart,” Nick answered. “For Wet-Naps.”
“Wet-Naps? We goin’ for ribs?”
Nick frowned. “No, we ain’t goin’ for ribs. We—or, I mean
you
—gotta wipe down everything we touched.” Nick pointed to his head. “Think, Frankie. That suitcase has our prints all over it, and so does Spooky.”
“Fuck.” Frankie seemed disgruntled. “I don’t wanna wipe fingerprints off her fuckin’ corpse with Wet-Naps.”
“I don’t give a fuck
what
you don’t want. You got us into this mess, so you’re gonna do the job. I ain’t spendin’ the rest of my life on Riker’s with some guy named Luther usin’ my asshole for a place to party. I can’t believe how bad you fucked this up.”
“It wasn’t my fault, Nick.” Frankie was pouting now. “She asked for it. She shouldn’t oughta have said those things to me.”
Nick pulled a Demerol tab from his pocket, showed it to his cohort. “You wipe down the bitch’s body and then you can take your bang.”
“Hey, thanks!”
The front of the Kwik-Mart shimmered in neon. There were only a few vehicles in the parking lot: a mint-condition ’68 350 small-block Camaro that had been oddly spray-painted black, an old red pickup truck, and a gold Dodge Colt with a P.I.L. sticker in the back window. Nick and Frankie loped inside, Frankie beginning to sweat out some early withdrawal. “Shit, yeah!” Nick bellowed in the store. The man behind the counter, who wore a turban and bore a suspicious resemblance to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, jumped an inch off the floor at Nick’s celebratory outburst. What was Nick celebrating? There was a little television behind the counter, the Yankees game on, and somebody named Giambi just hit a grand slam. The score was now 15 to 1.
And it was only the sixth inning.
“I
knew
that big boat anchor was good for somethin’!” Nick railed happily. Frankie shrugged, wishing for a mainline. They bought Wet-Naps and big coffees, and as they headed back toward the Caddy, Nick said, “You know, Frankie, I’ve got a really good vibe about tonight, even after all the shit that happened with Spooky.” He shook his head hopefully. “When the Yankees beat the shit out of Baltimore, great things happen.”
“Uh, yeah,” Frankie replied, scratching himself. “I need to take a bang.”
Nick dropped his coffee when he reached to open the car door. It splashed all over his shoes.
“Nick,” Frankie asked. “What’choo drop your coffee for?”
Nick didn’t answer. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted, toppling to the pavement.
Frankie looked into the back seat and noted at once that the suitcase was gone.
««—»»
“—two grand slams in the bottom of the ninth inning against the generally automatic Mariano Rivera,” the tinny voice announced. “Yes, folks, it’s a record-setting comeback as the Baltimore Orioles beat the New York Yankees, 16 to 15!”
Callused fingers, tinged in green light, snapped the old Philco radio off. Spooky wasn’t dead, by the way. This might seem beyond belief, but in truth she hadn’t actually broken her neck against the edge of the coffee table, nor had she suffered any manner of vertebral fracture or spinal-cord-transection. The impact had merely pinched her seventh and eighth cervical nerves, resulting in a reduced heart and respiratory rate and temporary neuromuscular paralysis. The tourniquets had prevented death from blood-loss. Hence, Spooky was alive.
And not in a very good mood when she regained consciousness.
Those motherfuckin’ tube-steaks,
she thought.
Goombah morons can’t do any-fuckin’-thing right.
She lay in the front footwell of a vehicle whose suspension springs creaked mercilessly over the back road’s potholes and dips. At first Spooky couldn’t see—er, well, she could see enough to note that her legs had been summarily amputated, but that was about it. Above her, she made out faint green light, which she presumed were dashboard lights, but her vision was still too blurry to see the driver.
The driver, incidentally, was possessed of a very complex belief in providence. Twice a year he made these aimless drives all the way up the east coast and all the way back, not to visit relatives or to see sights, but simply to
be
. To contemplate himself. It proved a very self-actualizing experience. He’d merely pulled over at the Kwik-Mart, purchased a bag of Beechnut chewing tobacco, and had been walking back out of the store when—
poof!
—the inclination had struck him to look into the back of that big Cadillac. He’d seen the suitcase there and had simply taken it. It was providence, see?
Providence had told him to do that.
“Why, hey there,” the driver said when he noticed the head on the torso moving. “How you feelin’?”
“What kind of a dick for-brains question is that, you old fuck?” the torso replied in the softest voice. “I’ve been armless for eleven motherfuckin’ years and tonight the mafia-version of Laurel and Hardy cut my legs off in a motherfuckin’ Howard Johnsons. How the fuck do you
think
I feel?”
“I understand your plight, hon, and there really ain’t no cause fer profanation. Not now. See, I’se savin’ you from yer travails. Gettin’ diseases, smokin’ the drugs, gettin’ cornholed by fellas…it’s the negertive forces’a the universe that’s has caused you to veer from the blesséd path that yer supposed to take. I’se’ll help you, missy—help you git’cherself back on the path.”
“Huh?” Spooky said.
“Jus’ you wait’n see, child,” the driver said, his grizzled face eerie and green in the dash lights. He looked down at her through the darkness. “What’cher name, darlin’?”
“Spooky,” Spooky said.
“Well, I’se pleased as punch ta meet’cha, Spooky.” The driver smiled. “My name’s Lud.”
— | — | —
THE DRITIPHILIST
“I have this…problem,” he admitted.
“Believe me, everyone who’s ever sat in that chair has a problem,” related Dr. Marsha Untermann. “Not a typical problem but a grievous one. A problem so incalculable—and so
aberrant
—that it rocks the imagination.” The woman’s gaze thinned. A long elegant finger traced a graceful chin. “You’re here for a reason—your own rehabilitation. You’re scared. You’re scared that I might find your ‘problem’ so deviant or absolutely appalling that I will insist that you leave my office at once and never come back.”
Nougat-brown eyes leveled at him.
“Yes,” he croaked. “I’m…very afraid of that.”
“Because if that happens, you’ll have nowhere to go?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You probably think that there is no one else in the world like you. That’s why you’ve refrained from seeking help in the past, correct?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Untermann leaned back in the chair behind her desk. She smiled as thinly as her gaze. “Then your fears are without foundation. I do not turn patients away, however foul their problems—or their crimes—may seem. It’s my job. I do my job. And I think I can safely say that this ‘problem’ of yours?” She lit a long cigarette and shook her head. “I’ve heard
much
worse.”
The smoke spewed from her lips like a ghostly fluid. Her eyes opened wider, inquisitive, coldly promising.
“Tell me about this problem of yours,” she said.
««—»»
Barrows’ suit cost more than the average resident of Seattle earned in a month. As an investment banker for Jenkins, Harris, & Luce, he could afford it. He could afford the Aston Martin Zagato with the turbo’d 5.3-liter V8, he could afford the Movado gold watch, and he could afford the waterfront penthouse suite on Alaskan Avenue.
One thing he could not afford, however, was to allow anyone of import to see him—
Well…
Better to put it this way. If Barrows made $500,000 in one year—
that
was a bum year. Investment banking involved a certain alchemy of which Barrows possessed the cabalistic necromancer’s wand. Objectively, his profession entailed moving clients’ money from one bank to another, which sounded simple. In truth, though, knowing where and when to move the money, and for how long, was what made his clients and himself preposterously wealthy. In other words, William Barrows had a reputation to maintain, a reputation upon which his financial solvency depended.
Already out of place in the Armani suit, he walked slowly down the sidewalk past the county courthouse on Third Avenue, right alongside the bums and drug addicts wandering in their plight to a stinking nowhere. Yet Barrows scarcely saw them. He walked steadily onward, his eyes roving the sidewalk’s cement for…
His heart jumped when he heard the sound…
The sound of a man clearing his throat and expectorating loudly.
The ever-familiar
splat
on the sidewalk came next, and next after that came Barrows’ nearly full erection. Up ahead, he saw it. A derelict in filthy beard and rotten clothes had coughed up a wad of phlegm from his homeless-roughened lungs, and spat it on the sidewalk.
Oh, God,
Barrows thought just as a normal man would think upon entering the bedroom of a beautiful woman for the first time, or watching that risky bond fund skyrocket and split.
Barrows caught the glint: a lumpen gem. It lay there waiting for him, freshly green, savory and mystical. Barrows’ Guccis clicked up and stopped, and now he was standing there, feet apart, over the treasure.
He was discreetly protecting it from haphazard trample.
For someone to walk on it would be vandalism. It would be yanking the needle from an addict’s vein and cruelly emptying the syringe out the window. Barrows was
guarding
it, in other words, while at the same time trying to appear normal.
He glanced at his watch, frowned like a Straussberg method actor waiting for a bus; he was Hitchcock in a phone booth. He had to be careful. He could not allow himself to be seen doing what he was about to do.
He waited, calmly tapping his foot. Eventually the pedestrian traffic broke: no one coming down the block from either side.
Oh, God…
Like magic, then, Barrows produced the two index cards from his suit pockets. He knelt very quickly, scooped up the lump of phlegm in the cards, then turned and walked briskly back up the sidewalk.
He ducked behind one of the courthouse’s high brick pillars. No one was there.
Thank you, God…
Then he licked the hock of phlegm off the card, sucked it around in his mouth like a delectable raw oyster, and swallowed it whole.
He closed his eyes, stood as if paralyzed. He felt the still-warm phlegm sink to his gut, and then he signed in bliss, similar to the bliss felt by a crack addict after the first hit of the day off the pipe.
This was Barrows’ rush—not cocaine, not heroin, not sex nor drink nor gambling.
It was phlegm.
Hence was his plight, the macabre curse which had held him captive for most of his adult life. Barrows was a phlegm-eater.
««—»»
He couldn’t help it, and he never knew why.
This is so wrong,
he thought every time he scraped up a lump and ate it. What seemed even more wrong was what followed after he swallowed: a titan sexual surge. Most times he was able to contain himself until he got home, other times no. Other times he’d slink into a urine-fetid alley or between a high bank of bushes, to vigorously masturbate.
Seeing phlegm on the street lit a oracular fire in him. It nearly stripped him of all sanity, of everything that could be called healthy.
Barrows had to have it.
He had to eat it.
Picture a person stumbling across the desert. This person has not drunk water in days. Suddenly that person, close to death, happens upon a clear cold babbling brook…
To Barrows, the babbling brook was sputum. The dirtier the better. The more catastrophically disgusting, the more he’d need it. Homeless bums were best, the people literally rotting in the alleys, hacking up clumps of respiratory discharge from soiled and emphysematic lungs. Virtual
wads
of congestion. Sometimes the chunks were coppery with blood, or uniquely textured by bits of cancerous lung tissue. Sometimes the clumps contained mysterious grit.