Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (11 page)

The sun?

But no, it was still cloudy out.

Ah, Kevin didn’t get his medicine today.

Now I knew I was screwed. Strung-out and floating in shark-infested waters hundreds of feet from shore. I would have laughed but I felt physically sick. I worried I might puke up some of that sauceless spaghetti, and then I worried whether sharks liked spaghetti—and then yeah, I guess I did laugh a little at that.

I did my best to head back in but only succeeded in staying more or less afloat. It was still better than drowning. It felt like an eternity before the kind-hearted lifeguard arrived on a jet ski and pulled me aboard. Back on the shore, no amount of
I’m fine
would suit him, so eventually I picked up my towel, keys and shoes and left. An ambulance was on the way, he said, but I left. The lifeguard followed me clear to the edge of the street, yammering the entire time, but I left him there, twisting between his duty to watch the other swimmers and his concern about losing his job over a lawsuit. Only later did it occur to me how bad I’d have felt if he’d been needed by some drowning child while chasing me around the beach.

When I got back to the bungalow, I found someone sitting on the wooden step-up to the front door listening to an mp3 player. A very pale, skinny white guy. Young, tattooed, and scraggly enough to make Kevin look downright preppy. He had on blue shorts, flip-flops and a red tank-top with a big number 10 on it. I wondered what it stood for. The number of times he’d flunked kindergarten? The number of tattoos up and down his arms and neck? The weight in ounces of the drugs he’d ingested since waking up?

“Wuzup, Kev? Damn, bitch, why you all wet?” he said, standing up to give me a tiresome high five that morphed into a little tippy-finger tug thing at the end like I’d seen in numerous movies about “the hood.”

I told him I fell in the water. I was too tired for this. Just looking at the jittery, grinning fool was enough to knock me down, right there.

Lots of laughing and “you dumb motherfucker” and “motherfucker fell in the water” and “damn motherfucker” and thereabouts for a while, really enjoying himself, before he caught on that I wasn’t joining in.

“I need a nap,” I said, and pushed past him to the door.

“Hey man, this place kinda small—it get bigger inside?”

“See for yourself,” I said, and went in.

Whoever-He-Was just followed along—a little too closely, with all the respect for personal space of freshly cut flatulence.

“Man, I can’t believe you stole this shit. What he like, a fag or something? Fucker likes flowers, don’t he? Whachu got to eat?” He opened the refrigerator, then made a sound of disgust. “Man, you need some food in this bitch.”

From the mouths of dipshits.

And then I wondered what he meant by “stole this shit.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m really tired—”

“Holy shit, look at that puzzle! When you start doing puzzles, yo?”

“Hey, don’t touch it.”

He touched it. He took one of the sides apart, fast as that. I reached over and pulled his hand away.

“I said leave it alone.” Carefully, I reconnected the ends. “I’m working on it.”

“What’s up with you? You’re acting like, all
responsible
and shit. You got a new girlfriend?”

“Yeah, your mother,” I said.

“Man, whatever.”

He hadn’t liked that. But it seemed to calm him down.

“Why don’t you come by later?” I said. “Maybe bring some food. Also, I’m broke, so if you have any cash, I could use it.” My whole purpose for letting him in the house, frankly.

“I’m broke too—Mr. York, you know? Where you get those shoes?”

“Stole ’em off a college boy, looked just like you.”

I wasn’t positive the shoes came from the mugging, but I had to protect my street cred.

“For real?” he said. “Damn, they tight. You ain’t get his wallet?”

“Nope, I ain’t.”

He shook his head.

“Well, I gotta see Mr. York. I’d say come with me but you all
tired
and shit. Whatever. I be back. Don’t know about no food, but I might got some glass—friend of mine.”

“Wonderful. Just bring the food, you keep the glass.”

More meth. The country was drowning in it.

“Shit man, you sick or something? Maybe you
should
go to sleep. Prolly got AIDS or something, right? Sleeping in a fag house. Right?”

He wanted me to laugh, so I did, confirming the loss of the last little drop of my self-respect.

“Don’t forget the food, I’m all out,” I said when he stepped outside. Repetition is essential when you’re dealing with guys like him.

“You always waste your money,” he said. “Least you fixed the bodies this time.”

I watched him head up the road toward the beach and pondered what he’d said. Clearly, he knew something about the murders. With my head starting to hurt again and the guy already out of sight, I threw a guilty glance skyward and locked up. Then I went back and crashed on the old woman’s bed.

***

I woke up with a dry mouth and a splitting headache. But no, that’s a cliché and a weak one at that. How’s this: I woke up missing a brain and something like a quasar exploding a billion times a second two inches behind my eyes.
And
a dry mouth.

“Ugh—goddamn junkies,” I said, quietly, on my way to the shower.

The shower helped a little. After I got dressed, I ate the last of the spaghetti and threw the empty box away.

In the garage, only a shadow of the stench from the night before still lingered. The fishing rods were tangled and the fittings were rusted. One of them looked better than the others, so I grabbed it, defrosted about half the pack of shrimp in a bowl of warm water, and visited the small pier to try my luck.

The reel—an old Zepco—wouldn’t pay the line out when I clicked the button, so I opened it up and ran it out manually. It reeled in fine, it just wouldn’t zoom out the way it was designed. Later, after selling pictures of the whale I planned to catch, I’d buy me something better.

The hook was a big sucker with lots of little barbs on the sides to keep it from coming out of the fish. I managed to get an entire piece of shrimp impaled on it and then flung it out by hand about fifteen feet, which I judged to be where the really big ones liked to congregate. Less than a minute later, I had my first bite. Not a big bite, and the hook didn’t take when I tugged it back. I waited a little and then reeled it back in. Sure enough, the hook was bare. I tried again and lost my bait in even less time.

“Dammit,” I said, not helping the situation, but defining it nicely.

I tried again, and this time I caught something—mostly on a technicality. Reeling it in, it felt made of lead, it pulled so hard. When it broke the water it fell off the hook and flopped around on the pier, almost flipping back in. Frantically, I grabbed for it, trying not to let it spike me with its incredibly spiny back. “Spiny,” that’s the word for it, and tiny as hell. A little thing, smaller than my palm. How it pulled so hard I had no idea—maybe had a bunch of spiny little friends helping it. Disgusted and a little ashamed, I dropped it over the side. If they were all this small I’d run out of shrimp in no time. It could be I needed to cast out farther, but that’d never happen with my current reel. And the ones in the garage were even worse.

Not wanting to be a quitter, I gave it another fifteen minutes, which effectively cleaned out my remaining shrimp in the process. I decided the other half in the freezer would stay there until I found a better rod or became so desperate from starvation that I had to cook it. Which gave me maybe twenty-four hours. I just hoped Kevin wasn’t hypoglycemic, or that his speed crash didn’t affect his blood sugar, because then I wouldn’t just eat those nasty shrimp I’d probably eat the slimy box it came in, too.

Defeated for now, my hands smelling like raw shrimp and the little fish I’d caught, I returned to the house to watch TV, drink water and nap through the remainder of my detox on what had turned out to be a bad trip indeed.

Chapter 14

Because I have no goals in life or expectations, there aren’t many things that worry me. Not even mall Santas. But this had turned into one of the few things this side of the Great Wherever that I’ve come to dread: a bad trip. Bad trips aren’t fun. Whenever I enter a body that’s more torture than relief, that’s a bad trip. Like the time I’d hitched a ride in a killer serving time in prison—already convicted, but the Great Whomever clearly thought that wasn’t enough. Then there were the times I’d come back in bodies so deeply addicted to drugs I either had to get high or spend a week sealed in a living hell. I’ll let you guess how I chose. I suppose I should have been thankful Kevin wasn’t as far gone as that, but with my head pounding I wasn’t in a gracious mood.

When I woke up it was dark outside. Ignoring my growing hunger, I turned on the ten-year-old TV I found in the living room. At least it had cable. I left it on as background noise and browsed through the house. There were old novels that people had left behind and several photo albums that various guests had added to over the years. To my irritation, I discovered picture after picture of people of all ages holding up remarkably large fish at the end of the same pier out back. I couldn’t even blame my rod anymore because it was featured in most of the shots.

At some point I sat down to work on the puzzle. At first I felt self-conscious about it. I told myself I was completing it for them, and then realized I meant it. I couldn’t bring them back to life, but I could continue their work.

As the night deepened, my hunger grew unbearable, distracting me to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between the four different shades of cloudy-pink roses I was struggling with. Also, the more I concentrated on something, the more the drugs I wasn’t getting on a regular basis left me sweating and weak.

By midnight, Kevin’s lack of food careened wildly into his need for speed, spinning into the other lane and slaughtering the remainder of my self-control. No, I didn’t try to eat that nasty shrimp. Instead, I left the house, locked the door for some reason and then stepped beyond the car beneath some small trees. To my right loomed a large complex of maybe eight condos fused together like an enormous vacation molecule. The house immediately in front of me was lit and had four cars out front. Probably packed with vacationers, still awake, yammering about all the great food they’d had that day and how big their turds would be in the morning. Over on the left was a large, two-story white house, dark from this angle. I couldn’t tell if there were any cars parked there because I was facing the back. I hated that it was white—even without much light, I’d show up easily skulking along next to it. The good news was if I approached from the back, the only ones who might see me were the folks with all the cars, and probably only if they came outside.

I weighed my options. I could wait till the house in front of me turned down for the night or I could head over now before exhaustion sent me limping back to bed.

“There’s always jail,” I said.

They’d feed me, that’s for sure. But then the couple buried in the backyard wouldn’t be avenged. What Kevin had done was too evil to risk letting the legal system bungle his trial. There’s always someone on a jury who thinks “reasonable doubt” includes anything a defense attorney can articulate without bursting out laughing. Jail was out.

I crouched down and gave each sneaker five deliberate pumps of air. This was it, no turning back if I wanted to eat. I walked across the open yard, looking for all the world like someone who always strolled between houses in the middle of the night. The day after a violent assault just down the street. That had happened at around the same time.

I pretended not to notice the security lights all turning on at once, blinding me and scaring me to death in the same instant. Nothing to see here people, happens all the time.

There was a back door at ground level, straight ahead, almost certainly locked. I gave it a try and sure enough the knob didn’t turn—but the door pushed inward anyway. The jamb had been previously splintered away, with nothing holding the door closed except the snug-fitting frame. Not believing my good fortune, I stepped inside—and discovered luck had nothing to do with it. It was like the previous night all over again: the smell of murder. The putrid odor of decomposing flesh was stronger on entering than it had been at the bungalow, but not as bad as the garage where I found the McHughs.

“Dammit Kevin,” I said. “It’s not looking too good for you, is it?”

I stood in a dark room—a storage area of some sort. Lots of boat equipment on and around a workbench, with ropes and hoses and beach umbrellas and other fun-in-the-sun clutter stacked in the corner. I figured the equipment went along with the powerboat docked outside.

An inner door opened easily beneath a curved staircase wrapping a classy-looking foyer that would have been blinding in the afternoon. Two oval mirrors adorned opposing walls, reflecting the room again and again into the seeming of a corridor arching toward infinity. A thick, tightly woven carpet curled up to a wide disk of polished granite centered before the front door. Some craftsman had inlaid an exquisite compass into the granite, all in brass, in a design you might find on a nautical map. An appropriately sized crystal chandelier refracted the cleverly recessed lighting so that it seemed to glow with an inner fire.

On the outside, the house had seemed ordinary enough. Nothing that would have suggested such loveliness within.

I finished off the first floor and moved to the second, admiring as I went. I’ve never been one for paintings, but the owner had put a lot of thought into this collection. Majestic sailing scenes, at times becalmed, at times caught by stylized tempests too primal and terrifying to have ever posed for an artist’s brush. Despite my hunger, I looked at them all.

The kitchen didn’t have all new appliances, but the ones I found looked used and in good shape. The selection of cookware seemed made up of as many sets as there were pots and pans. Something told me I wouldn’t find a closet stacked with unused bread makers, waffle irons, ice cream makers and turkey fryers. Whoever lived here liked cooking, not just the idea of cooking.