Skullcrack City (5 page)

So I looked him right in his unreadable all-black dead doll eyes and I whipped out my dick.

Hindsight would like to mark this moment with a special sticker reading, “All Is Lost.”

Then we’re both looking down and laughing. There’s a little embarrassment in the air, because it was cold and we were both staring at my penis, but the predominant tone was shock and recognition.

“Oh, man—you fucked up your homeboy something fierce. Jesus. Shit’s like a hockey stick.”

Port stepped forward, curious. “Dude, you broke your dick’s neck. Daaaamn. If you threw that thing it would come right back to you.”

Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird.

But those twelve seconds of busted-up dick made all the difference. It was as if I’d inserted a magical key into their minds and unlocked all the trust in the world. They were going to let me buy.

Hell, Port even stayed with us in huddle formation so I could safely pull my wallet without being scoped. And the big bearded guy told me his name was Egbert. I knew Port and Egbert probably weren’t their real names, but some childish part of my mind instantly catalogued them as “P & E: My Buddies.”

And I’m guessing some part of their minds instantly catalogued me as “Customer: Bent Dick Guy.” Still, I had a hard time not smiling on the way home.

The blocks back disappeared like nothing. I raced to my apartment with six Hex pills in my pocket and anticipation as an engine.

The night was vibrating with new potential, the beautiful after-haze of adrenaline and bad ideas fully embraced. Ugly thoughts crept in, forcing me to write off a growing list of concerning data: My old dealer gone mad and roaming the sewers; Egbert’s hand—notably short on its middle and ring fingers—reaching out to me with three tiny pill baggies; gas-masked kids dodging conscious thought like a plague; a trafficked tranny more concerned with evading cops than finding love.

Tried to pay it no mind. Externalities.

And then I’d made it home. Confirmed Deckard was passed out under his lamp. He slept with an enviable peacefulness and resolve.

On the opposite end of the spectrum: Me, giddy, a pile of pills singing my name from the coffee table. I forced restraint, grabbing a beer and a carton of leftover kung pao. Flipped on the news and it was more bad buzz.

“…a second murder in the beleaguered Street of Flowers district. Police have confirmed that both have been listed as homicides, and that the second case shares the same cause of death. Official details have yet to be released, but we spoke with the neighbor who found the body from today’s murder. A warning to our viewers—what you’re about to hear is very graphic.”

A street kid was on my screen. Did he have strap marks along his jaw from gassing, like the gutterpunk version of pillow face? The kid had shock in his eyes, but he was excited to be on TV, maybe hoping for some compensation.

“I found his body and I thought, you know, corner [bleep], typical. Maybe he tried to step somewhere he shouldn’t. But then I noticed the top of his head was just
missing
, like dude who got him used a shotgun. But the weird part was, no brains. They should have been all over the place. You know. BLADOW! PSSSHHH! Brains everywhere. But there was nothing coming from his head. [Bleep] was empty.”

I couldn’t have grabbed the remote fast enough. I turned off the screen and immediately set to forgetting what I’d just watched.

You’ve seen that kid before, when he was even younger. With Hungarian.

No. Fuck that. Nope.

I had my Hex score. I had bankers to bust, secrets to sell. It was time to get focused.

It was time to bring down an empire.

The first pill tasted distinctly of human blood, but I chose to write off the flavor as a mix of ocean water and barbecue sauce.

Not that a pharmaceutical, even one as black market as Hex, should taste like any of those things, but that was the mojo in these pills. So the first wave was alien, a mouth filled with blood, and I flinched thinking I’d been busted in the chops. Then the second wave rolled in, throwing shivers across every inch of my body like an all-skin orgasm, followed by the sound rush, a beautiful child screaming from the depths of a corrugated metal well, and my eyes were painted silver and my fingers trailed melted aluminum tendrils and EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

The feeling was like this: Imagine your legs are spring loaded. Imagine every breath you pull is processed at maximum efficiency, pumping pure light to your extremities. Everything is vital. Everything is important. None of it can hurt you. A thought translates to action before you have time to remember the thought. If you were at a baseball game and engaged in deep philosophical conversation with a beautiful girl and you heard the crowd roar, you’d be able to tell by the shifting streams of audience noise that the ball was headed your way. And you might catch that home run ball without ever turning away from the truth you were imparting. Everything is possible.

The reality was like this: You clean your kitchen. You drink a gallon of water because you can feel it moving through you all the way down to your stomach. You jerk off, a sacrifice to the newly unearthed Goddesses of
Big Booty (Vol. 3)
. You light candles to unknot the spunk and turtle smells that suddenly rope in your senses. You clean your bathroom. You jerk off again and it shouldn’t but your scar tissue feels so good. You realize you didn’t pack your Top Secret bank investigation notebook in your briefcase, but urgency and movement erase panic. You admire your turtle, quietly. You clean your bedroom. You clean your garbage disposal interior without flipping the switch at the fuse box. You wish you had robotic prosthetic hands, an end to the weakness of the flesh. You jerk off until the morning sun peeks in through your drapes, murders your mechanical hypnosis. You try to ignore the heavy weight on your left shoulder, the warm breath of a snorting animal on your ear, soft black earth crumbling from its paw to your skin.

The weekend disappeared. I didn’t even make it to work the next Monday. Called in sick with plans for an epic blackout sleep session. The cowboy on the phone played it cool. Told me, “Take ’er easy, bud, and we’ll see ya when we see ya.”

I was certain, though, that the empire was trembling.

The terrible loop began on a Tuesday and didn’t end until the day I saw a skullcracker swallow the brain of a bank-hired assassin.

I’ll try to explain how I got from here to there, but even now the memories are a series of frenzied fragments, a Hex-infused panic parade of questionable content. The subjectivity of anyone’s recollections is already suspect. When you add Hexadrine into the mix, in greater and greater quantities, “reality” becomes a punch line.

Work began in earnest, and it felt great. Discipline. Empowerment. Hundreds of loan files cracked and scanned for corruption. Real progress on my mission.

The Hex gave me the laser focus I’d desired. My eyes became X-Acto knives, stripping the truth from purposefully obfuscated underwriting docs. Glowing silver threads appeared, underlining passages of interest. Our portfolio for a medical supplies conglomerate developed a shimmering, smoking aura which smelled like a burned-out electric socket and throbbed with my heartbeat: Delta MedWorks sat atop the surgical tool empire, a three-eyed goat with a rib-spreading device for a mouth.

Plus: Found a barely used men’s bathroom on the fifth floor of the bank building, perfect for satisfying my most persistent urge. Only two employees—one male, one female—were on the whole floor, processing just enough state-subsidized small business loans to allow us to put the words “Equal Opportunity” in our marketing. Within three days of likely less-than-casual observation I’d charted the guy’s bathroom timing, and knew when to turn it into my Hex Stroke Session Chamber. For every contact number in my phone, there were twelve film files featuring well-oiled ass. Sometimes I could close my eyes and still see the outline of heart-shaped booty in an eternal cycle of rise and fall, a retina burn more beautiful than any sun. I carried a small spritzer of air-freshener to cover the smell of atomized Astroglide.

I amped up security in my office, stacking the Delta MedWorks loan file wall to a height of four feet around the periphery of my desk, making it difficult for them to tell if I was present at all. I’d made a small cabin, my usurious Unabomber enclave. Felt safer. Theorized my visual absence comforted them. Perhaps they’d grow complacent and slip up.

I had them on the ropes.

Of course, if you change “on the ropes” to “watching me with ever-greater concern” then you’re probably closer to the heart of it.

My first notebook filled in two days. I didn’t trust my briefcase since the bank had purchased it for me, so I had to sneak out my secret file tucked into the back of my khaki pants. Sweat caused the ink to smear on the first page, but I was able to interpret what remained. Besides, most of the first page was just a list of my favorite foods and where I’d first eaten them (e.g. shrimp burrito with sweet whiskey sauce/country jamboree in Montana). The investigation had gotten off to a rough start.

Not anymore—now I was playing the world’s greatest game of bank fraud Tetris, and everything fit no matter how fast the pieces fell.

Delta MedWorks was the black heart at the center of this beast. I could feel it. They had subsidiary arms in medical testing, pharmaceutical distribution, prosthetics, dietary supplements, and something called bioballistics. Their subsidiaries had national supply chains under them, and it took me two days of net searches—at home only—to link them to a series of elder care facilities launched during the heyday of The Great Loss (which the Boomers, of course, had themselves named before perishing en masse).

Most of our clients had only one loan officer assigned. Delta had twenty-five lenders in offices across the country. With each, Delta was their sole client. Word was they all drove vintage Jaguars, received shortly after the Delta-SynthroTec merger closed successfully. Unless those Jags cost thirty bucks, that’s a gift well outside federal guidelines. But the car thing, however transparent, however traceable those sale records would probably be, wasn’t the silver bullet I needed. It was closer to Business As Usual—
C’mon, pal, these guys work sixty hour weeks for the company, taking care of our largest client, and you want to begrudge them a nice car for their commute?

No, I needed a Bank Destroyer. A foundation crumbling bunker busting violation they couldn’t justify.

Delta MedWorks had to be the key. Its convolutions and intricacies would have stymied me in the past, but now I was jacked in.

Jacked up.

Fucked up.

Thirsty all the time.

Talking to Deckard in three hour shifts at night, running down theories while he slept under a flickering heat lamp.

Upon waking, Deckard would blink slowly with heavy lids, just like a human. He was a good friend. A great friend! I bought him extra feeder fish to let him know I loved him.

Mom called every Sunday. I didn’t pick up. She’d
know
—every conversation on Hex is a series of shouted interruptions, followed by an apology, followed by an interruption, ad infinitum. She had enough to worry about. I’d call soon, once the Delta MedWorks Scandal had been packaged and sold to a rival bank. I’d tell her about the new job, promotions, but not exactly what I was doing. Couldn’t put her at risk.

Deckard knew my grand plans. I told him one night, after singing him a song about whales which I remembered from attending Science Camp Kiwanilong when I was eight.

“So, what do you think, Deck?”

And I looked in his enclosure and he had shed a single, milky tear. Was it the beauty of my song? The brilliance of my plan?

I discovered later that it was a defense mechanism—his body shedding excess salt from all the extra feeder fish I was giving him—but at the time it felt very important.