Authors: James W. Hall
“I’m happy for you.”
“X has hyperosmia,” Pixie said. “A very rare condition. He smells in high definition like a dog, you know, only unlike a dog, he can actually describe what he smells, put it in words, which is an art form if you ask me. Like how a wine connoisseur talks, you know, a special vocabulary.
“He can smell your breath, tell you what you had for lunch, or you hide something, he’ll walk right over and dig it out of where you put it. I didn’t believe it at first until he showed me. My bra, lipstick, a toothbrush. I hid them, in like two seconds, he found them. He’s freaking amazing.
“And he knew who slept on that motel mattress the night before us. Some long-haul truck driver and a black girl he’d picked up at a truck stop. He could smell the particles they left behind. And traces of the others before the trucker, layers of scent, like archaeology, how long they stayed, if they had sex or not. Most didn’t, in case you were interested.”
“And you believe all that?” Thorn said.
“It’s genetic, from when his mother was pregnant with him, she was heavy into meth. That’s what his doctors think. It corrupted his DNA. It wasn’t so bad when he was a kid, but the older he gets, the more acute it is. Lately it’s really been bothering him, the last month, giving him headaches, all the odors swarming the air all the time.
“He’s studied the science of it to see why he’s like how he is. He’s seen specialists, neurologists, he’s been CAT scanned to see what’s going on inside his brain and what they told him, it’s because his hippocampus and frontal cortex are different, a lot larger. He’s got all these extra neurons in his olfactory bulb. There’s nothing he can do about it, just accept it. Sometimes, all the smells in the air, it can overwhelm him, that’s what he says. You don’t believe in science?”
“Enough,” Cruz said.
“And let me tell you, he inherited his old lady’s cranked-up metabolism too, because X has stamina, I mean serious staying power. Shit, only guy I ever met could outlast me. I’m telling you, some mornings I can barely walk.”
“Stop it,” Cruz said. “Our private lives are private.”
“You’re such a prude.”
“Try to act professionally, Pixie. Just this once.”
“That’s a shitty attitude. Boundaries, repression. Me, I’m into total transparency. Pixie, the permeable membrane. Share everything. It comes into my mind, it’s out of my mouth. Just skips right over my brain. I mean, keeping secrets, shit, it gives you cancer, you never heard that?”
“You’re making an ass of yourself.”
“Where’d you pick up these idiots?” Thorn asked Cruz.
“Drop it, Thorn.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Pixie. “She didn’t pick me up anywhere. I popped out from between her legs. I’m Pixie Cruz, Mommy’s worst nightmare.”
Cruz frowned out her window and her reflection revealed the face of the woman she might become in a decade or two. Sallow skin, sunken cheeks, eyes hollowed out, whittled away to almost nothing.
Pixie said, “Mom lost the daughter she loved, the good girl, white sheep. She’d just as soon I fuck off, disappear somewhere. Isn’t that right, Mom? But she puts up with me because she’s crazy about X because he’ll do shit she doesn’t have the guts for. He’s a badass, a total badass.”
Cruz massaged a temple as if to ease a sudden headache.
“Thank you, Pixie,” she said. “Thank you for never disappointing.”
X got back in the car.
He registered the strained silence, looked back at Pixie, then at Cruz and said, “I miss anything good?”
Thorn leaned over and blew a breath in X’s direction.
“What’d I have for breakfast?”
“Coffee,” he said. “Black. Last night you had a bite of a fried fish sandwich. A couple of french fries with ketchup. At the moment you’ve got acid indigestion.”
“He get it right?” Pixie said.
“Like a speaking dog,” said Thorn.
“See,” Pixie said, “what’d I tell you? He could do Vegas. X-88, the Amazing Sniffer. I could see it. Me in a tight gown, showing some boob, bring people up from the audience on stage. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
“Vegas sucks,” X said. He put the car in gear. “All that phony shit, the canals of Venice, Eiffel Tower. It’s Disney World on Viagra.”
“Well, Branson then,” said Pixie. “There’s lots of venue possibilities. Soon as we finish with this deal, we’ll kick around ideas. You got to cash in on your god-given gifts, share them with the world.”
“And you, Pixie,” Thorn said. “You have any god-given gifts?”
“Damn right, just ask X. He’s experienced a few.”
X’s mouth remade itself into something resembling a grin, but it was a misshapen thing, as if smiling was not in his repertoire. He gunned the big car up the ramp back onto the interstate, mouth spread wide, showing a set of large teeth. X’s head was tilted back a degree or two, listening to Pixie begin what became an hour-long monologue, a grand tour through her sexual history, from losing her virginity at ten to a man selling magazines door to door, to the months she turned tricks in parked cars outside her junior high, then the year she spent in juvie for some bullshit charge of dealing crack, and a few months with a South American coke dealer, living with some other girls in his penthouse on Brickell Avenue, a big-time view of Biscayne Bay, servicing his friends, men and women who were partying at his condo, all the time Pixie was picking up new ways to please a man, a great education, prepping for X-88.
Cruz shut her eyes and rocked her head back against the seat with the exhausted look of one who’d long ago given up trying to regulate her daughter.
Thorn listened for a while, then turned his attention to the distances of the Georgia countryside, the blue sky broadening and deepening in color in the east as the sun pushed higher, watching the lazy, halfhearted flights of egrets and herons, rising from the waterways, elongating their bodies, catching the updrafts like spirits ascending rapturously, puncturing the blue skin of the sky, as if they were reentering the heaven from which they’d descended. And every bird he saw, every wisp of cloud, each leaf tumbling in the breeze reminded him of Flynn, the shadows cast by trees, each ripple etched in the silver marsh spreading eastward toward the sea was Flynn, his only son, lost to him out there in the vastness beyond the limits of sight and touch.
THIRTEEN
HERBERT SHUBERT LIVED IN A
forest west of St. Augustine, a home with no plumbing or power, just sheets of scrap plywood nailed to some trees, formed into a box with a roof made of a blue tarp he’d stolen off a house back near the interstate after a hurricane ripped away all its tiles.
Up at dawn, Herbert was foraging near the asphalt two-lane. That’s what he did with his daylight hours. Scavenging the amazing shit people threw out of their cars. Half-eaten burgers, pizza slices, beer cans with a couple of swallows left, half-smoked cigarettes, sunglasses, shirts, pants, belts, socks, even a wallet once, with cash money and love notes folded up in the pockets.
It was usually kids coming way out in the woods to park and fuck. He’d seen some filthy sex out here. Seen some porno stuff and homo stuff late at night in the glow of the interior lights. Kids trying out their bodies. Making orgasm screams.
Once or twice Herbert had been tempted to mug one. Almost worked up the nerve, but stopped when his mother spoke to him and warned him that he’d surely fuck up and his victims would escape and bring back the cops and throw him in the lockup again, with the gangbangers, spastics, and the howlers. He didn’t want to go back to jail.
For an hour he worked up and down the shoulders of the road, scrounged a few butts, a half-smoked cigar, found a banged-up Zippo lighter with its insides dried out. Toward the end Herbert found a pair of black silk panties that were big enough to fit him. He sniffed them and damn if they hadn’t been worn recently. What must’ve happened, one of the fuckers parked out in the woods probably lost them, or some wild party girl flung them out of a moving car. He stuffed them in his pocket for sometime when he might want to dress up.
On the way back to his shack he crossed the sandy path that ran near his place and saw fresh tire tracks rutted deep in the sand. He stared at them, followed them to where they stopped about a half mile from the road. He hadn’t heard anybody over here last night, no pleasure screams, not a damn human sound, but then he’d drinking the half jug of red wine somebody left at another lover’s lane a mile in the other direction. So that might explain it. Drunk. Sorry he’d missed it. He liked to watch the fucking or just listen.
He poked around where the tire tracks ended. Scrounging for food scraps or beer cans or used condoms. He saved rubbers. Had a nice collection, different colors and sizes he hung around his shack for decoration.
Scrounging in the woods, he heard something. He listened some more then headed off that way into the brush. And a few feet later he heard the snort and snuffle and he knew it was the bear, an old bear that lived way back into the woods. They’d crossed paths a few times, and they got along, you could say, the bear keeping his distance and Herbert keeping his. That snorting bear heard Herbert approaching, treading on sticks and dried leaves, and the bear got up from whatever he was doing and snuffled on out of there, not in a big hurry, but going away, finished with his business.
There was buzzing as he pushed into an opening in the trees, a sandy patch covered in decaying leaves, and there was a dead body circled by flies and wasps and bees and butterflies with shiny blue wings and every other insect Herbert had ever imagined or seen. He wasn’t sure which exactly he was doing now, seeing or imagining. But one of those. It didn’t matter really. The butterflies were a beautiful blue.
The woman seemed real, and about as dead as a woman can get.
He kneeled down beside the stink, horseflies orbiting his head.
He touched her cheek with a fingertip and found it cold. The bear had worked on her face, torn open her mouth and cheeks, and her belly too, ripping her clothes, and it was messy there and wet and the flies were feasting all around where the bear had been.
Herbert decided he wanted to see her snatch, just a look. Nothing sick. He wasn’t going to climb on top of her. He wasn’t one of those creeps, though he’d met a couple in jail, at least that’s what they bragged they’d done, made unholy love. But not Herbert. That wasn’t sane. But just a look, maybe a feel, pluck a few hairs if there were any and take them back to the shack, put them in his stash. Just that. Nothing more.
But then, shit. There she was.
Herbert’s mother said, “Herbie, what do you think you’re doing? The woman’s dead. It’s a sacrilege what you’re thinking. The woman’s immortal soul would be forever damaged.”
Herbert’s mother was like that. Immortal souls were her main line of work. She harped on them. Not happy with Herbert living out in the woods, scrounging like he did, peeping on lovers, but tolerating it. The old woman mainly lay low and didn’t bother him, but he knew she was there all the time because like now, she’d speak to him clear as pie. She’d say the words to steer him from the bad things he was about to do and direct him to the good.
But just a quick look at her snatch was all he wanted. She had blond hair on top and he’d never seen snatch that color. Just a quick look and no touching. That was okay, right?
But then his mother was back.
“You need to report the tragic death of this woman. You need to walk down to that highway, flag down a car, let someone know there’s a body. She’s got loved ones. People care about her just like I care about you, Herbie, and how would you like it if I just disappeared without a trace and you never knew where I was or what happened to me. Not to mention my immortal soul.”
So shit.
Herbert stood up and looked around at the woods.
He knew his mother was dead and the dead didn’t speak. It wasn’t possible. But still, her voice was clear as pie. Clear as warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream on a Sunday afternoon on his twelfth birthday and she made it special for him, special for her only son, just the two of them having a birthday party, Herbie, her child who she watched over so carefully and cooked for and made his every wish come true, as many as she could manage.
“Flag someone down. Report it, Herbie. Do what’s right.”
But she wasn’t real. He knew that. His mother’s voice was in his head. That’s what the docs told him. Not a real voice. Like a dream without the pictures. He could tune it out.
And anyway, all he wanted was a peek. Maybe harvest a few hairs.
After he left Tina’s house, Sugarman went home, lay down on his bed, and tried to sleep for a couple of tormented hours, then paced around his house till he thought it was safe to call Sheffield.
At eight, Sheffield answered, clearly coffeed-up, saying sure, Sugarman was free to drop by, he’d be on the second floor of the motel painting the interior walls. It was a motel he’d inherited from his old man, a bit run-down, but it was smack on the beach, which meant it was worth a shitload more in land value than anything Sheffield could sell it for as a functioning motel even after he finished fixing it up. But, as he told Sugar, Frank wasn’t interested in selling.
Sugar waited through Frank’s ramble, though he’d not asked Frank about the motel. But Frank was on a tear, telling him that by now he’d sunk so much money and so many hours refurbishing the old place, restoring its mom-and-pop charm that he wasn’t going to take any amount of money for the place, not even the five mil he’d been offered last week. What the hell else was Sheffield going to do now that he was fully retired from the FBI, except run the motel, do right by the place where he’d spent the happiest hours of his life back in the day when Miami was actually a very sweet town to grow up in.
Sheffield talking without pause like he was starved for social contact. He didn’t ask Sugar why he’d called, and Sugar didn’t broach the subject because he wanted to see Frank face-to-face in case there was some deception at work in this mess, some interoffice ass-protecting the likes of which Sugarman had experienced often in his years of law enforcement. It could be that Madeline Cruz was working an angle that overlapped with something Frank had going on, then Frank would try to bullshit him about the whole deal, which was why Sugar was making the hour-plus drive up to Miami even though he’d just finished doing a five-hundred-mile round trip to St. Augustine and back.