More Stories from the Twilight Zone (50 page)

Matter of luck is all, and tonight mine run out.

Or not.

Because, hey, here comes the off-ramp finally, and my lead SUV is turning right onto it, and the limo is following, and—

—
wham, bang, smash,
as the trailing SUV slows down and starts making the turn, a garbage truck comes up alongside it on the left
and smashes it into the guardrail, and I recognize the snot-green and piss-yellow colors of Earth Angels, Nickie the Dickie's carting company. It's his guys, or what's left of them—

—and a red Cadillac Esplanade van is now on my limo's back bumper—

—and there's another Earth Angels garbage truck at the bottom of the off-ramp—

—and an RPG launcher sticking out of its death seat window—

—and its grenade is launched—

—and my lead SUV explodes, showering my Mercedes with metal and flaming gas and blood and guts, and guys are piling out of the Esplanade with Glocks and M-16s and—

 

“And?”

“Where the hell am I?”

I wake up someplace else, sitting in a chair sweating in front of some plainclothes cop's desk, and he's giving me this fish-eyed stare and—

No, wait a minute, he's a shrink, not a cop, and there's no murder rap to pin me on, I never killed anyone, just like I keep telling him, just like I keep telling Maggie, I've . . . I've just been sitting here
dreaming
that damn dream again while I was
awake
and spilling my guts to this guy . . .

“Wha . . . wha . . . what happen?”

Me and the shrink both say the same dumb thing at the same time.

He's still waving his pencil back and forth, only in his own face double or triple time like some old lady trying to brush off mosquitoes with a fan, and staring at me like he's trying to avoid crapping in his pants and afraid he's not gonna make it.

I'm staring at him staring at me and waving the thing like he was and getting pissed off.

Real pissed off.

“You hypnotized me!” I yell at him.

He cringes back like I just gave him a big breath of wino halitosis. “It's a standard recall technique . . .” he stammers.

“You're at least supposed to ask my permission, ain't you!”

“It worked, now didn't it?”

“Worked
how,
you son of a bitch?”

“What we call
catharsis.
I hypnotize you so you're telling me everything while you're reliving the memory in a dream state, and telling it unblocks the guilty memory that's been giving you these nightmares into your waking consciousness, and that should—”

“
What are you talking about?
I don't have no Mercedes limo! I don't have a string of upscale whorehouses! I don't have a fancy compound out on the Island! I never even heard of no Nickie the Dickie! And how many times I gotta tell all of you I haven't killed anyone yet!”

Yet?

“Yet?”

He says it anyway, but he don't have to, I heard myself say it. But what the hell did I mean?

The shrink gives me the strangest look, like I'm some fascinating bug under a microscope, but a germ that can give him the Turd Flu or AIDS or some other fatal disease. “But . . . but you really are . . . you're really a gangster,
aren't
you?”

Well, what can I say to that? The son of a bitch hypnotized me into more or less admitting it. And just maybe he can help me figure all this out, so . . .

“What if I am?” I grunt belligerently. Makes me want to stroke the piece in my shoulder holster like in the dream, but of course in the real world I'm never packing.

“The wicked flee where no man pursueth . . .”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Let's say for the sake of argument that you
are
a gangster . . .”

“Let's say for the same sake of argument that the business that I'm in ain't like in the movies, let's say it's like I got a McDonald's franchise. I don't kill the cows or chop up the meat, I just sell . . . stuff and services . . . to my customers and pay their cut to the franchisers upstairs . . . and mind my own business . . .”

“Okay, so you run whatever . . . whatever . . .”

“
Rackets
is okay. For the sake of argument.”

“So you run your . . . rackets, just doing your business, and you don't—”

“Even order anything much worse than a little roughing up when necessary. Not even a knee-capping. Well, hardly ever. Let alone
kill anyone!
”

“So you're
afraid
to kill anyone?”

“You sayin' I ain't got the balls to do it if I have to?” I yell at him.

He cringes back from me.

“I mean you don't
want
to kill anyone—”

“Of course I don't! Who wants to get involved in a hit? The homicide squad's usually not on the take, a murder-one conviction's not a hot career move, and it's a capital offense now, ain't it, not three-to-five with time off for greasing the parole board.”

“So you're not
afraid
to do it if you have to, but you don't
want
to—”

“Just good business.”

“But you'll do it if you
have
to?”

I gotta think about it. But considering what the consequences would be if I turned down the contract, not for very long.

Not for very long? I
already
been thinking about it.

In these damn dreams.

I'm not having
guilty
dreams for what I never done yet, they're like
rehearsals
for what I'm maybe gonna have to get done right if and when that's the way the dice come up. I'm always about to get
nailed or worse because of some detail or something gets screwed up, now ain't I?

“So I gotta get it right for once to make them stop!” I find myself proclaiming, like there's a lightbulb over my head and I just found the Lost Chord.

“The dreams?”

“Yeah, of course, Doc, what else? I
told
you I never killed anybody yet, I'm not
guilty
of anything . . . well, anyway not no capital felony. They ain't your blocked memories or cathartic enema, they're not about my
past,
they're dreams of my
future—”

“Your possible
futures! Prescient
dreams of a kind—there's plenty of that in the literature, but not like this . . . they're . . . they're a set of alternate future scenarios!” He looks like he's practically creaming in his pants for some reason.

“Yeah, yeah, like my
maybe
futures, if I can't avoid it. At least I gotta know I'll get it right if it's ever got to happen—”

“And if you get it right in a dream—”

“The dreams go away.”

I'm practically creaming in my pants myself. “I got it, Doc. Hypnotize me again. But this time you give me one of those . . . what do you call it, hypnotic suggestions. To know I'm dreaming and not wake up until I know I'm home free, I can't get nailed.”

“Do I have your permission to—”

“I just told you—”

“—to try to
communicate
with you, can I try to make it interactive, can I write it up for publication? If this works, it could make me the next Oliver Sacks.”

“
What
kinda sex? Whatever! Just do it!”

 

I'm a
cop.

The worst kind of cop, a vice squad creep accustomed to screwin' freebies from the same junkie skanks I run through the
revolving door when their pimps forget to grease my paw with the weekly payoff, the vice equivalent of old-time beat cops grabbing apples off fruit stands.

But I been going a mile too far, lots of miles in fact, taking whatever smack the hookers I been screwing are caught holding, selling it to those I encounter
not
holding and feeling the pain. Stealing the goods from the hookers the street dealers sold it to, and then using the very same heroin to steal their customers in the bargain.

And lately I been shaking down pimps and street dealers directly, taking both goods and proceeds, whichever I find them holding, and even forcing them to buy back their own inventory from me at inflated wholesale prices.

What are they gonna do, call the cops?

The cops is us.

I'm standing in an alley full of garbage cans and bum piss puddles over the corpse of a skuzzy pimp and sometime small-time smack dealer with a rap sheet long as an elephant's trunk, got what was coming to him, lying here in his own blood with his pockets turned inside out and his throat cut in an unprofessional manner and the broken bottle lying there right upside his head.

Standing beside me in a trench coat and a fedora with its brim pulled down over his face like Bogart as he eyeballs the scene with me is a homicide lieutenant.

“You know this guy?” he asks me.

Well, what can I say? Everybody on the vice squad knows who everyone else is running so I'm not gonna get away with denying that one.

“Yeah. One of my snitches.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Are you kidding? A penny-ante pimp well-known for dealing smack to his own five-dollar junkie whores doesn't exactly lack
for people like to see him dead or ready to cut his throat for the next fix if necessary, so we don't lack for the usual suspects.”

“But things aren't always what we think they seem, now are they?” says the homicide dick, looking up at me.

Damn strange thing for him to say. Strange-looking homicide lieutenant. Wire-rim hippie glasses, graying ponytail down behind his head. Don't go at all with the Dick Tracy outfit.

And I know this guy from somewhere else . . . don't I? And
he's
looking at
me
as if he knows things about me better than I know them myself.

And somehow I know that I'm not going to get away with lying to this guy.

But I know I gotta try anyway.

Because
I
killed the scumbag.

What was I supposed to do?

My own goddamn snitch turns out to be an Internal Affairs undercover running a number on me! It's enough to have Mahatma Gandhi reaching for his revolver! Okay, everyone knows there ain't no honor among thieves, but looks like there ain't even honor left among crooked cops. I mean, this son of a bitch's cover's long since made him one of the bad boys, Internal Affairs or not.

He arranges a meet in this crummy alley we used, or one like it, to make sure we keep things private, tells me he's got a tip for a juicy bust. He's there when I arrive, dancing back and forth nervously like he always does, but he's wearing wire-rim glasses, which he never has before, and the eyes behind them aren't the usual weaselly jump and glitter, but cold and hard like greased steel ball bearings.

And since I last seen him, which can't be more than a couple weeks ago, he's gone bald on top of his head to halfway back, and somehow managed to grow a long gray ponytail.

“So?”

“So I got a hot tip for you,” he says, giving me a look like a hungry cat about to sink his fangs into a canary. “A significant bust.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“You,”
he says, whipping a little .38 snubnose out of his flasher raincoat pocket and pointing it one-handed at my gut in an unprofessional manner so's he can whip out a badge and shove it into my face at the same time.

“What the—”

“You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

The rat's reading me my Miranda, and I don't have to look at his badge to know it's Internal Affairs.

“You think
you're
gonna get away with popping
me?
” I snarl at him. “I got as much on you as you got on me, they put me on the stand and I'll sing your song, and it's gonna be ‘Melancholy Baby,' you rat-fink bastard!”

He gives me this smug little smile, the kind you want to punch out right away, and I know I gotta make some kinda move to take him out before he even says it.

“Go ahead, asshole, rat out my cover. You really think what I've been doing on the side hasn't been authorized by my captain?”

Well, of course I'm not that stupid. I am screwed. I am looking at fifteen years' minimum on the Rockefeller Law alone, and that's the least of it. And vice cops in the joint have worse things to worry about than serving out a long stretch, like living long enough to do it.

He shoves the badge back in his coat pocket, fishes out the plastic cuffs, motions with his pistol for me to hold out my hands. I hesitate.

“Do it!” And he signals with his gun again.

I give him a sad ya-got-me shrug, move in closer, slowly stretching out my arms to let him cuff me—

—as I kick him with all my might square in the balls.

He folds, hunching over, and reaching down two-handed without thinking like any guy would to cradle his yowling nuts—

Dropping the gun in the process.

I scoop it up, grab him by the ponytail, and yank him as upright as a slimeball like him can get, shove the pistol right in his face.

“Now what, wiseguy?” I snarl.

“Now what yourself, asshole?” he comes back at me. “You gonna shoot an Internal Affairs cover? Murder one, Joe. Murder one plus for killing a cop.”

He's right, of course. I gotta think fast.

Well, maybe not that fast, I've got the gun on him, and he ain't going nowhere in the next thirty seconds, now is he?

Cold and clear. Got time to get it right this time.

I gotta off this rodent. I can't let him out of this alley.

But I gotta cover myself. I gotta be able to have it pinned on someone else.

Hey, no problem! I realize.

I can just pin it on more suspects than homicide can know what to do with and they'll give up trying to sort 'em all out, not worth the effort, Captain; lots of scurve coulda offed this creep, junkies without the money for a fix, one of his hookers high as a kite. Right, it's a wonder he lasted this long, we really give a crap . . . ?