Jake's Wake (17 page)

Jasper would know what to do. Christian tried not to cry. Jasper always knew what to do…

Jake’s face lit up as Emmy and Gray came in the back door. Emmy choked on her tongue, eyes swarming with hope and fear.

“There you are, my shining star! You just wait right there.”

All this hostility, all this doubt from the peanut gallery, was draining him dry. Right now, he needed what only Emmy could give.

Jake swooped in on her, taking Emmy by the arm, steering her back toward the inner sanctum.

Gray waggled his gun at Eddie from across the room, but put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, stopping him. “Jake,” he mumbled out the corner of his mouth. “We gotta talk, man. This is…”

“This is not the time.”

His beady eyes pinged the warning tone in Jake’s voice, but he jerked on Jake’s arm in frustration. “Jake…”

The lights flickered hard, and the walls began to rumble, as if a big cargo plane passed low overhead, or a subway car was burrowing beneath them. For a moment, the wild glare of the fireplace was the only light, but Jake could have sworn he saw the gleam of a brighter fire pouring out of his own eyes, spilling over Gray’s crumpled expression, and the blank slate of Emmy’s undone, empty face.

“Don’t make me doubt you now. You take care of your shit. I’ll take care of mine.”

Gray shuddered and took his hand back like it was
scorched, turned and crossed toward Eddie with the gun cocked like he was going to brain the wetback.

Jake smiled like a bashful newlywed groom and yoked her neck in the crook of his arm.

As fast as her little legs could keep up, Jake and Emmy headed back down the hall.

Jake walked fast, half dragging her along. Emmy moved like in a dream, trying to awaken.

“Jake, please, you have to stop…this is all wrong…”

Jake’s tone was soothing, but his words crashed together in her head, like a roomful of Devil’s advocates fighting for the mic. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m back, aren’t I? Just like the Good Book said, praise Jesus. Praise Jesus!”

Stopping and folding her in arms like amorous pythons, he tenderly kissed the top of her head.

“Yes,” she whimpered. “Praise Jesus.”

“Right. And right now I need you to make me look good for the cameras. Cuz God knows I gotta look good for the cameras. Jesus would want it that way.”

She nodded, but he was already sweeping her along to the door.

They entered the studio.

Jake turned on the lights, dazzling her for a moment. When she stopped blinking, her eyes fixed on the towering cross parked in front of the green screen, and the all-too-familiar figure hanging from it.

Sweet, gentle, patient, faithful Mathias.

Scourged, mutilated, eyeless Mathias.

Emmy screamed.

“I know, I know.” Jake took hold of and massaged her shoulders. “It looks bad. But that’s only his body…”

Emmy went into shock, turning to ice water inside and leaking out of her shoes.

Jake held her up in his kneading hands. “Now…come on…you’re not gonna do me any good like that…”

Jake whipped her around and slapped her. The flush of outraged blood brought the semblance of life back into her face. She blinked, tears streaming, awakening to it all over again.

“There you are. Now shut up and listen, and don’t you worry about him. He’s gone on to meet his maker. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what he got. Now you just gotta take care of me, the way you’ve always done. Take care of the Church of Everlasting Life…”

Emmy was speechless, skydiving into his bottomless eyes.

“You still believe in me, don’t you?”

Emmy thought about miracles and demons, and all the subtle things she ignored, and all the shocking things she buried, that had tried to show her what Jake Connaway really was. No demon could have made her fall so hard; no Devil could have twisted the love of Christ into his own sick image. What possessed Jake, seething inside the decaying shell of his corpse, had always been there.

Now it was all that was left.

Eyes locked on Jake’s, Emmy involuntarily started shaking her head.

In the holding cell, Evangeline was now at Emmy’s place by the window. She could see Jake and Emmy’s shadows entangled on the curtain blocking the studio’s sliding glass doors. “That poor little girl.”

Esther’s unfocused voice cracked, every syllable a whining plea for booze. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

Evangeline turned to look at her clueless cell mate…just as Esther’s soggy, stricken visage burst out of the darkness in seizures of red and blue light.

Behind Evangeline, headlights cut through the gloom of the weed-choked parking lot.

“Look!” Esther cried, rushing over and crowding her beside the barred window.

A car crawled onto the property after someone had opened the gate, rolling its roof lights as it passed by, heading around the back of the house.

A cop car.

Evangeline screamed, “Omigod! HELP!”

She started banging on the window. Esther joined her, banging on the bars with her empty flask.

But the wicked wind wailed and threw their cries back in their teeth, stealing away their screams as the cop car pulled out of sight behind the house, and switched off its lights.

Brooding wasn’t normally an unwelcome pastime for Gray, but with the way the night was dragging on—the load of bullshit house keeping, the hour wasted overseeing this shiftless beaner on his chores—he’d had plenty of time to chew on it. Had taken refuge in it, to forget about the other shit that seemed to be trying to drive him over the edge.

Like the starving castaways in that old Bugs Bunny cartoon, whenever Gray looked at the sneaky little Mexican, he saw him slowly transform: not into a hamburger or a hot dog, but into something Gray longed even more desperately to consume.

He’d finally put together why it was that if Eddie looked him in the eye one more time, he was going to have to cut his face off and feed it to him.

Gray lurked in the doorway as Eddie put the door in place. It looked fine if you shut it, but the putty holding the upper hinge in place was still soft, and the door tilted and dragged on the porch if you opened it wide. Close enough for government work, but since they were camping out here…

Eddie looked around and fixed him with those sad, hangdog eyes, asking for it, giving away nothing.

It wasn’t the race thing. Gray had a closetful of prejudices about the Hispanic race, but he hated them no more nor less than any other race, including his own, which was six layers of rootless American mutt.

It was his fucking eyes; and God damn, but sitting around dwelling on it, he’d had time to make the connection to memory, or drag imagination into the present.

Jake and Gray used to have all kinds of fun in Mexico.

Nobody knew Jake there, but they felt his mojo, and they treated him like a god, so long as he kept tipping. Gray swam along in his wake, bored by most of the action, but always ready to laugh at the absurdity of it all. What they lacked in wealth, taste, and refinement, the Mexicans more than made up for with their eagerness to make clowns and beasts of themselves for pocket change.

Mexicali was the only place Jake could let it all hang out like the old days, the small-time rock-star days, when they ran the string of whores in Palm Springs, of which Evangeline was the only survivor.

The last time they went down there, two years ago, they were still shitfaced at daybreak when they pulled out of the gravel lot of the Casa Delicias, where Jake always left the whores crying his name, and Gray just left them crying.

Jake had a doggy bag sucking his dick for the ride home, and the bitch had a cigarette lit in her claws as she worked Jake’s cock with her tongue while he tried to steer his brand-new Hummer H2 without spilling the fifth of fine agave tequila they shared.

She burned him; the cherry must have broken off her smoke and fallen under his scrotum in his boxers, because he went berserk. Dumped the tequila in his lap and kicked the toothless skank out of it. Gray was not glad to have her crawl over him, kicking them both like a
jackrabbit with her sandals, which had Goodyear whitewall tires for soles.

The Hummer swerved across the main drag, spooking chickens and chicle-peddling urchins, and sideswiped a line of parked cars.

The Hummer H2 may have been a fat-ass pussy yuppie bastardization of kickass military hardware, but it coasted down the line without stalling, ripping doors and crumpling frames on Detroit’s and Tokyo’s finest like a .30-06 rifle bullet through a line of beer cans.

Jake slewed to a stop sideways on the main drag. Gray looked for cops and saw nobody but a hot dog vendor (“Now with more dogs!”) out on the street. The
federales
all knew him down here, respected him as a Gold Circle Club visitor, but most of the cars had California and Arizona plates.

Jake looked around for only the blink of an eye before he put on his shades, threw the H2 into Drive, and cocked that smile Gray had learned to love.

“I’m not letting this shit ruin my day,” he said.

Jake threw the whore out by her hair, peeled out, and made a run for the border.

They left Mexicali on a side road to a checkpoint where the two customs guys could be counted on to wave them through. Big fans of the show, and of the whores they often dropped off.
You can’t take them with you
, they always said,
but we’ll always hold them for you…

Everybody knew how the game was supposed to be played, except for this one dumb, fucking
patrulero
.

Not four miles from the border, this shitty old white Datsun sedan came dusting up to their bumper. Jake waved him on to pass, but floored it.

The sedan flipped on a pitiful single blue light, and a siren that might have been a cranky parrot with a bullhorn.

Jake ran another two miles before he decided,
fuck it
, and pulled over.

“How much cash you got?” he asked.

Gray patted himself down and found only two hundred, the dregs of an eight ball of crank and a glass pipe. “Fuck this guy. We gave at the office.”

Then this bowlegged old taco-bender came scraping up to the Hummer like Slowpoke Rodriguez’s granddad. Gray could barely see his sweat-stained brown
béisbol
cap over the driver’s-side windowsill as Jake haggled with him.

The highway patrolman explained in choppy English that they were speeding, and he heard they had some trouble in Mexicali, and they needed to come back to sort it out.

Jake offered him a pig-choking wad of cash and told him, in serviceable Spanish, that it would be best for everyone if they could not be caught before they crossed the border, and were never seen in these parts again.

Gray got out of the Hummer, dropping into fine, chalky dust up to his shoelaces, like powdered bone. Unzipping and digging his shrunken cock out to piss, he wondered for about the thousandth time since Friday why they came down to Mexico.

The Founding Fathers were no dummies when they drew the line right here. Everything south of the border was rotten from the ground up.

Gray came around the hood of the huge SUV at a casual stroll, but the highway patrolman didn’t even look at him. He just kept chewing Jake’s ear off in that sorry-as-hell, hangdog tone. They would have to come back to Mexicali, no matter how much
mordida
they gave him. He was terribly sorry. He knew the legal system in Mexico was corrupt, but somebody had to pick up the pieces, and they’d been caught red-handed making a mess, and most of the victims were their fellow Americans, and
didn’t they feel bad, coming down here, and behaving in such a way as to give Americans a bad name?

Gray came within arm’s reach of the old
patrulero
before he even took any notice, but Gray stopped dead when the highway cop looked at him.

Those eyes. So sad and tired and red rimmed, caked with dust…

They knew what he was going to do. They didn’t care. They’d seen this stupid fucking movie so many times that they didn’t even blame him for what was about to happen. They almost wanted it…

Gray unstuck himself from the tar pit in those eyes and wound up with the empty tequila bottle, cracking it across the beaner’s sunburned forehead so hard the bottom flew off across the road. The old man dropped like he’d been waiting for the cue, curled up on his left side on the cracked blacktop.

Jake clapped and hooted, fired up the H2, but Gray couldn’t just walk away.

That motherfucker looked at him like he was a germ, a mindless thing destined to offer him a communion he’d come to pray for. It was funny, for a second.
Losers commit suicide by cop. Cops commit suicide by Gray.

But the geek didn’t just want to get killed. He just knew how it would all play out—maybe because some higher power would reward his meek acceptance of death in the middle of the road he wasted his life guarding, or maybe because it would just be as neat an end to his meaningless life as any.

Whatever the philosophy behind it, Gray wasn’t any-body’s puppet. If the guy wanted to die, Gray would let him do it himself…after he saw himself in the mirror.

Gray finally jumped in the Hummer and tossed the bottleneck out into the desert. The
patrulero
was still breathing when they left. Gray only cut off his ears and most of his nose, and stuffed them in his mouth.

Five minutes later, at the border, they’d been having problems with the phones all morning, and only a skeleton staff out on the road to take Jake’s cash with their eyes closed.

They were as good as their word on one thing. They never went back to Mexicali. Jake went down a couple times by himself, and nothing happened, but Gray couldn’t go anywhere, from Tijuana to Matamoros, without seeing the
patrulero.

Not that the geek was out there, of course. Even if he survived long enough to be found and was stitched back together by the Aztec witch doctors, he doubted the fucker was still out on patrol.