Plainclothes Naked (42 page)

Manny took a deep breath and heard the click. The one you don’t want to hear. Two seconds later, the door blew off its hinges in a blast of wood and plaster that left him sprawled on the floor. The shot set Lipton off on a shriek-fit.

Zank fired again and the sofa exploded, burying the Brit beneath a mound of dust and plywood and chunks of foam with green plaid still attached. The shrieking stopped. Manny opened his eyes and blinked through the smoke at a pair of naked legs, the left one slashed at the hip on a diagonal. He rolled sideways just in time to miss the blast Tony aimed at his head. The floor went away beside him, leaving a splintered hole, and Manny saw a room below, its walls refrigerator white, criss crossed with shelves stacked with dusty cartons. Some had burst, spilling lumpen mold. Others were intact, bearing the unmistakable Smiling Sausage logo of Bundthouse Farms.
That’s the smell,
he thought, in the middle of everything. Whoever converted the Bundt house plant into an apartment building had skipped the meatlocker, leaving a lifetime supply of links and patties to rot in their boxes.

Tony’s manic warble brought Manny back. “I’m a little teapot!” he sang, rubbing his exposed gonads as he raised his fat-barreled weapon. Manny snatched up a dead Iron City and threw it, distracting him long enough to jerk left and get off a shot on the fly. The bullet caught Zank high on the hip and spun him around. The impact shattered the bone and sheared off a chunk of flesh, so it looked like something had started to gnaw his buttock and changed its mind after it got a taste.

Tony gave a howl that sounded more joyous than painful. He fired as his legs went and Manny felt something gouge his hand. He looked down and saw a raw chicken leg on the carpet. Then he saw the ragged wound at his wrist and realized the chicken leg was his thumb. Manny clamped his good hand over the gushing nub, protecting it from sausage germs. Then he scooped his thumb off the foul carpet and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

Somewhere Lipton was wailing again. Zank screamed “Round and

stout!” and got off another shot. This one knocked Manny onto his back. His head dangled over the splintered hole in the floor. His right side felt basted in liquid warmth. He couldn’t breathe. The stench from the sausage vault was mind-altering. It seemed to rise up in a solid waft.

“
Meatlocker of Death
,” Manny muttered. To stay calm, inside moments of bad savagery, he sometimes pretended he was in a movie, that whatever he was trying to live through without losing his shit was not even real. He’d close his eyes and repeat, like a minor prayer, “
I can go home whenever I want.
” Sometimes that worked, but not now. Not when he was thumbless and gut-shot. When five feet away, dragging his shattered limb like a foreign object, Zank was crawling toward him, cackling as he dug the muzzle of his Colt Python .357 into the carpet for traction.

“Tina bo bina,” Zank giggled. “Where you want me to shoot your boyfriend? I’m takin’ requests.”

Manny clung to the hope that Tina wasn’t even there. That Zank was so tweaked he was babbling to phantoms. He discovered he couldn’t stand and tried to push himself off the carpet, to free his gun. But the pain in his stomach glued him to the floor. He couldn’t roll off his own weapon. Even crawling was impossible. He watched, with a kind of detached wonder, as the man who was going to kill him dragged himself closer, his eyes like balls of rotten jelly, forming what could only be kisses with his purple lips. His sing-song taunts sounded at the end of a long tunnel.

“Say good night, donkey-dong. . . . Ass-fuck an angel for me!”

Zank tottered a foot away. Near enough for his sticky breath to stain Manny’s face. He grunted happily and walked the .357 in front of him, like a mountaineer planting a spike. When he got close enough, he raised the gun off the carpet. A trio of muzzles fluttered before Manny’s eyes, circling each other. Pain was making him see triple. Or maybe it was blood loss. If he looked down, he could see the brown puddle spreading underneath his middle. Brown meant liver. That much he knew. But he didn’t feel it if he stayed still. What really hurt, insanely, was the thumb in his pocket.

“Baby, come here! Look at his face,” Zank cried, his voice a giddy

rasp. “This here’s a brave cowboy.” He smiled through his spoiled tomato mouth. “Tina, where are you, baby? I’m gonna count to three.”

That’s when Manny saw her, stepping silently through the door, cuffed at the wrists, her straight razor open in front of her.

“One!”

Manny forced his eyes straight ahead. If Zank noticed him looking, the next bullet might be Tina’s.

“Two!”

“Hey Tony,” Manny called, though the effort seemed to press some pain lever in his middle. “Hey Tony, I know about the Boy Scouts.”

Tony’s smile froze. He held the gun where it was. “You what?”

“I saw your juvenile file.” Every word was a fist in his viscera, but he had to keep talking, to keep Zank from turning around. “I—
shit
—I know it’s illegal, but I got a friend who works at the court. That’s”—
keep fucking going
—“that’s really a shame about what happened.” If he could talk without breathing, he’d be okay. “Your daddy being the Scout leader and all, that had to be embarrassing, huh? What were you—
fuck!
—ten or eleven?”

“Shut up!” Tony hollered.
“Shut the fuck up!”

Tina was across the room, moving closer.

Manny made his interrogation face: the wrinkled brow, the faux concern. “That’s why you killed him, right? You were embarrassed? I don’t blame you. My daddy was a weeny-wagger and a pedophile I’d probably do the same as you. I—” Manny gasped once, fighting the pain buzz-sawing his guts—“I mean, that had to fuck up summer camp, huh?”

Zank flinched. Manny willed the words out of his mouth.

“It’s okay, man. It’s not genetic. You’re a normal guy! It’s not like your dad getting caught trying to fuck one of your little scout friends means
you’re
messed up. Even if he fucked
you
once in a while, you’re totally cool, right? You”—
hang the fuck on
—“you worked it through, right?”

Zank ripped a ripe scab off his earlobe. A dozen expressions careened over his features simultaneously. Two steps behind him, Tina raised the straight razor, clutched in her cuffed hands. She dropped to a crouch and her eyes met Manny’s over Zank’s head. She bit her lip,

ready to strike, when suddenly, like a peroxide jack-in-the-box, Lipton popped up screaming from under the exploded sofa.

“You lied to me, Tony! We had a deal!”

Zank was so stunned he barely moved, even when Lipton produced the tiny derringer.

“You were never going to call about the picture, were you?
Were you?
You were just making carnival with me!”

Lipton closed his eyes to squeeze off a shot, and Tony watched like it was happening on TV. After the bang, a small flower of blood appeared on his shoulder. He regarded it with mild curiosity, then plucked out the bullet and flicked it away like a dead fly.

Lipton struggled to reload, his hands shaking violently. With a weary sigh, Zank hoisted the muscular Colt Python and waved it at his wanna-be assassin. He called to him in a pleasant voice, just a couple of friends talking death over the back fence.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Lipton. Some people fuck, some people get fucked. It’s just nature, buddy. Nothin’ personal.”

Lipton lifted his eyes in time to catch Zank fire the shot that splat tered his face off the window behind him. For one wobbly second he continued to stand, spraying blood from the neck, as though no one had let his body know it was dead. Then his left arm twitched north, in reflexive good-bye. His knees folded beneath him and his torso tum bled forward onto the floor.

“Twenty-two,” Zank said, to no one in particular, “I pick my
teeth

with a fucking twenty-two.”

“You’re a sick piece of shit,” Tina said quietly.

A grisly smile lit up Tony’s face. “Sweetheart, you came back!” He swung around, delighted, and the girl of his dreams dissected his Adam’s apple. Tony’s throat opened into a pink yawn, and before the blood started to gush she slashed him again. Tony made a sound like a guffaw. He lifted his gaze to hers with something that might have been love, might have been relief, then looked at the gun as it fell from his hand onto the spongy carpet.

Zank angled himself back toward Manny, coughing out a wad of tarry scarlet as he tried to speak. “
Pipe
...
pocket . . . one hit. . . .”

Manny and Tony locked eyes, and Manny understood. Or thought he did. The killer knew he was dead and wanted to go out with a rush.

Deep down, Manny knew, if someone had a gun to his head, and offered him the chance for world peace or a bang of heroin before he pulled the trigger, he’d probably go for the heroin. Staring down the barrel, all bets were off.... Strip everything away, and that’s what this moment came down to: one dope fiend cadging a high off another one. While Zank gurgled, Manny turned to Tina. Her face was a blank,

whether from shock or anger he couldn’t tell. So he went ahead.

With the four fingers of his mangled hand, Manny tapped Zank’s chest, plucked the glass pipe out of his pocket, and worked it between the killer’s trembling lips. Then he reached back down for the lighter. With no thumb, it was tricky. But after three tries he got a flame. He lifted it to the tip of the pipe, where a rock was already planted. Which proved, in retrospect, to be the single most stupid act of his entire life.

Zank sucked hard, and a puff of smoke escaped the bloody little mouth Tina’d made in his throat. That’s what Manny was staring at— that puff of throat-smoke—when Tony, mustering the last strength he owned to have some fun on the planet, launched himself forward and jammed the hot tip of the pipe in Manny’s right eye.

Manny screamed, then Zank’s head hit the carpet and he expired, face-first, his crack pipe still jammed between his bloody teeth.

After that things got foggy. Tina seemed to loom over him, looking more Faye Dunaway-ish than ever, and Manny thought he heard her call him an asshole before he passed out in her arms.

BONDAGE.
‌

That’s the first thing he thought when he came to. I’ve gone to hell, and it turns out Satan’s into S & M.

When he was alive, he never told anybody he believed in Satan. But now that he was dead, it didn’t matter. Manny felt the restraints: the straps on his ankles, the clamp at his throat, what seemed like steel claws over his wrists and a manacle all the way around his waist, and knew he’d either been drop-kicked into hell or Maximum Security. Maybe there wasn’t any dif ference. He’d seen the Devil once, staring out of his own eyes in the rearview mirror of the car he was living in when he kicked heroin. It occurred to him that he needed to tell Tina about that. Not only because it would explain the codeine—instead of hitting himself in

the head with a sledgehammer, he’d switched to a rubber mallet—but because it could help explain life as a cop.

Darkness pressed down on Manny’s eyes like damp cotton, and he realized that he’d never seen the Big Picture until now. Until waking up dead, in this bondage parlor, stinking of starch and disinfectant, and waiting for the blanket of narcotics to lift and let him feel the scream ing pain he knew, in some grim corner of his psyche, was roiling underneath it.

Now it all seemed obvious. The only world more hellish and revolt ing than a heroin addict’s was a policeman’s. The difference was, as a junkie, hell was your home address. As a cop, you occupied other peo ple’s nightmares. Which made your own reality—the desolation and solitude, in Manny’s case, he’d been hanging on to with white knuck les since crawling off the hard stuff—more endurable by comparison. That was the beauty part: The policeman was his own perp. On per manent lockdown in the Big House of fear-driven weirdness and gain ful employment. With the key rotting in his pocket....

It took getting gut-shot and mangled, half-blinded and burned, to make him remember who he was. In the aftermath, a single thought ricocheted off the back of his eyeballs:
I am too fucking scared to be alive
. The truth was mortifying.

ENOUGH!
he moaned. All these words lodged like metal shards in the pulp of his brain. And all he wanted was something to rip them out.

A cool hand
brushed Manny’s brow and he wondered if he’d been talk ing out loud. Then the hand moved down, and he heard the sound of tape being ripped off skin before he realized the skin was his. His left eye blinked through the blur. The hand dabbed at it gently. In a few seconds the fuzziness cleared, and she was there. Her hair pinned up and her lithe body poured into a white nurse’s uniform.

“
Tina
... .”

“That’s Nurse Tina to you.”

“How long have you. . . .” He let his voice trail off and she smiled. “I decided I needed a new job after you were admitted. Just a coin cidence. You’ve been in the hospital a week. They kept the patch on

your good eye until they did what they could for the other one.”

“So then?”

“So the doctor said they do wonders with glass. But, personally, I think you’ll look hotter than shit in a black patch.”

“Jesus!”

He managed to raise his head, and saw that he hadn’t dreamt the restraints. He was strapped to the bed frame by his bandaged left hand and his healthy right. What felt like a fat gauze belt bound his stomach, and his ankles were strapped with the same worn leather as his hands. One tube ran somewhere under the blanket he didn’t want to think about. Another drained from his chest.

Tina let him take in his shattered body, then said, matter-of factly, “It could have been worse. They’ve got your thumb on ice. You totaled some ribs. And a gang of bone slivers lodged in your lungs.”

“Tell me later.... What’s with the restraints? Is this the prison wing?”

“Not yet. You were throwing yourself around a lot, which wasn’t good. Bad dreams. You have to stay still or you’ll never heal.”