Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (22 page)

“Wait a minute.” I held up two hands, my heels digging at the brown wrapping paper surface, trying to push away from Dr. Joe’s immediate vicinity. “You could hurt somebody with that. How about you just shoot some water up my nose? Flood the fucker out of there!”

Dr. Joe edged toward me, scalpel held at shoulder height. I scrunched backward until I was squatting like a Mexican peasant on the pillow end of the examination table.

“Miss Soledad,” Dr. Joe called out. “Please to assist with unruly patient.”

Next moment Soledad, wearing the bloodthirsty smile of a cannibal at a beachside cookout, swooped toward me grabbing one ankle and trying to pull me back flat on the table.

Fuck this!
raged through me brain. My other foot shot forward in a wild kick, catching Soledad in the neck. She gagged. GAAAAAAA! And fell sideways.

Leaping past Dr. Joe, I scooped up my clothes and made for the exit.

“You pay for this!” yelled Dr. Joe behind me. “I call cops.”

Riding down in the elevator, my brain fizzed and popped like a defective string of firecrackers. But by the time the doors opened onto the lobby, I’d reached the following conclusions: Dr. Joe was one of them, an alien mastermind. His plan was to incapacitate me by severing my prefrontal cortex, turning me into a zombie. Zombified and a prisoner in his offices, the flesh-eating space aliens could feed on my brain at their leisure, copulating and reproducing until the signal to infiltrate was beamed from the mother ship.

Or maybe I’d been drinking a bit too much lately.

Regardless, I’d escaped Dr. Joe’s clutches by the skin of my teeth. But the little black bugfucker was still resident somewhere in my sinuses. I knew what I had to do. I had to drown the thing.

Still carrying my bundle of cloths and boots I scampered across the lobby and leaped into my El Camino resting on an expired meter. The police officer who had just slipped a ticket under the wiper blade followed me with hostile eyes.

“Hey, pal, you can’t run around naked like that.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Gotta go.”

I tore away from the curb, narrowly missing a UPS truck, and aimed for the storm-swollen Brazos six blocks away. In seconds I parked on the verge, ran with reckless abandon down the riverbank and threw myself into the muddy current.

As I sank into the thick chocolate-colored stream, too late I remembered I’d never learned to swim. The swirling waters closed over my head and darkness fell.

The next thing I remembered was a downward jerking pressure on my chest, repeated again and again. Water trickled from my mouth. When my eyes fluttered open, I gazed upon the face of an angel. Soft honey-colored skin, cheeks like passing clouds, a brow as placid as a bayou backwater, tapered nose leading to lips holding the promise of a ripe mango, eyes blue and storm-tossed, all this curtained by golden shoulder-length tresses. And, lest I forget, a pair of hooters to rival the great pyramids of Egypt.

Even as I accepted this dream, this heavenly vision, she leaned down, placed her mouth over mine and blew bursts of air down my esophagus.

When she drew back to a sitting position and resumed pumping on my chest, I saw the thing, sleek, charcoal black, and sinister as an arachnid refugee from the pits of Hell, resting on the soft curve of skin just above her lips. For a moment it clung to the

blonde fuzz that edged those lips; then sprinted up one of her nostrils.

At the same moment the emergency medical tech saw that my eyes were open. She smiled.

“Welcome back from the dead.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

It was her problem now.

No Way, José

1.

The pick-up bounces over a curb and comes to a jolting halt.
I’m ready to die
, the man who calls himself Alberto thinks.
For, as it is written, this life is but a sport and a pastime.
Sitting in the truck bed, back to the wind, he lifts his head and, after a moment of meditation, opens his eyes.

They’re parked next to a gas pump in the shade of a metal awning. The oblong shadow cast by the awning covers a row of eight gas pumps, except for the last, which is in the blazing sunlight. A sign reads: Czech Stop.

Is this a security checkpoint?
Alberto wonders. His fingers begin to tingle.

Should he make a dash for the hedgerow?
And then…the bullets ripping his flesh. The end.

In fact, it’s just a gas and kolaches stop-and-go along the Interstate, the nearby town having been settled by Czechs a hundred years back.

The driver, Bill Cody, sloe-eyed and rough-hewn, clambers out of the cab and gets the gas flowing into his tank. His fingers find a toothpick in the flap pocket of his cowboy shirt and he plunges it between two teeth.

“Better get somethin’ ta drink,” he drawls at Alberto. “Still got a couple more hours ta Dallas.”

Alberto’s lips are as dry as a seven-year drought. He tries to speak. At last:

“Dallas still two hours?”

Bill wrinkles his forehead.

“Where’dja say you were from?”

“Corpse us Christi.”

Bill’s frown deepens. “No fuckin’ way, José. Not with that accent. You’re a God damn illegal. And not from south of the border.”

The nozzle clicks off, and Bill hooks it back in the pump and twists the gas cap shut. He walks across the tarmac to the cinderblock store, offering, among other delicacies, beer, soda pop, bags of deep fried pork rinds, and a dozen or so varieties of kolaches.

Alberto stares after him, trying to parse out the meaning of Bill’s words.

Inside, Bill pays for the gas, a 16-ounce Dr. Pepper, and a bag of rinds. He isn’t a big kolaches fan. Waiting for his change, he thinks:
Shit, they don’t pay me enough to worry about illegals on my day off.

At the last moment he grabs a bottle of water for the hitchhiker.

They’re back on the Interstate, moving at about 75 m.p.h., when the right front tire disintegrates. The pick-up swerves onto the verge, then swings sideways the other way into a passing semi. Alberto, gripping his nylon carryall, flies over the tailgate into a honeysuckle bush. The 18-wheeler, gouts of black smoke spewing from its brakes, shimmies back and forth, catching a fender of the spinning pick-up on the rebound. Ahead, the driver of a monster RV glances into her rearview and panics, wildly twisting the steering wheel. Out of control, the RV clips a road sign, then flips sideways a dozen times down an embankment. No survivors.

When the dust settles, the pick-up is topsy-turvy at the bottom of the same embankment. The steering wheel pins Bill Cody like a moth in a specimen box. With seven broken ribs, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, and serious liver and spleen damage, the prognosis ain’t great.

Gasoline, leaking from a rupture to the intake pipe, pools next to Bill’s open window.

Alberto leans down and looks in Bill’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Alberto says. “But you know who I am.”

Bill doesn’t say anything, but his eyes fill with murder.

Alberto lights a match. Cupping it in his hands, he squats down, holding it toward the puddle of gas. When he drops it, flames leap in a
dance macabre
.

In protest a pair of ravens take flight from the power line above.

Alberto climbs from the ditch to the service road. Just ahead a single blacktop lane runs perpendicular into the countryside. In no time Alberto is lost from sight down that Texas capillary.

2.

Lydia Floodway wrenches the old Bronco into gear. It shoots out of the driveway like a bat from Hell. Or maybe a pterodactyl. A comet’s tail of pea gravel spews behind.

As they turn up Grandview, Zeke, Jr., in the backseat, thrusts his hand sideways, pushing his fingers under his sister Maud’s bare thigh.

“PERVERT!” she screams and digs her nails into his hand.

“Ow!”

“Leave your sister alone, Zeke, Jr.”

Under cover of the seatback, Maud gives him the finger.

“Mom. She just cursed me,” he says.

“Maud. Don’t be throwin’ gasoline on the fire.”

Maud is sixteen going on twenty-six. Maud is jailbait.

Zeke, Jr., is fourteen. He’s drilled a spy hole through the shared wall separating their bedrooms, so he can watch his sister undress. Maud is well aware of the hole. Zeke, Jr., wants to be a cop when he grows up.

The Bronco’s oversized wheels scrunch on gravel. A chain-link fence separates Taylor Street from the playground, where Mr. Bates, the science teacher, surveys the scene of potential mayhem with tungsten-hardened eyes. Glancing street-ward at the arrival of the Floodways, he nods at Lydia. He’d once made a pass at her at the annual Founders Barbecue. No way, José.

Zeke, Jr., and Maud exit through opposite doors.

“Allison’ll pick you up at three,” calls Lydia.

Maud stops and squints back at her mom. “Don’t you remember? I’m going over to Jane’s. To study for the history test.”

“Oh. Right.”

Zeke, Jr., is already in the playground, his arms locked in a wrestler’s tussle with his pal Andy, their heads bent close together, feet shuffling for position in the dirt.

Lydia drives away from the school; then a hundred yards further on pulls over next to the Seventh Day Adventist hall to light a cigarette. She puffs desultorily, thinking about Brian Beetle, the lawyer.

When he’s naked he looks like any other man, she decides. With his stupid dick pointing at the ceiling. Nothing special just because he’s a lawyer. Afterward he lies there on the damp sheets, watching her dress. It’s creepy, him looking at her like that, his eyes heavy from sex.

Maybe I should end it
, she thinks.

A wild itch runs helter-skelter across her crotch. She scratches herself vigorously.

Time to get to work. On that note she throws the smoldering butt out the window, stomps on the gas and swings into the street without looking. Luke Riley’s pick-up swerves to avoid the Bronco, his horn blaring.

“Look out, you crazy bitch!” Luke hollers as he accelerates down the quiet residential street. By the time he gets to Main, he’s doing sixty. Runs right through the red light.

Pointlessly, Lydia flicks him off.

3.

These days Dietz mostly doesn’t give a shit.

In less than twenty-four hours, he and the Dallas PD will part company for good. Early retirement it says in the paperwork. His attorney worked it out, after the video of Dietz, or someone who looked exactly like him, beating the crap out of a homeless junkie aired on the ten o’clock news.

He has a place already picked out in Ft. Lauderdale. Big enough for him and his mom. And a security job with a cruise line.

Except now even the future is pretty much fucked.

Because Dietz’s mother’s as dead as a dodo. Lying in a pool of blood with a letter opener sticking out of her eyeball.

Detective Larry Santos, slim and dark as a cheroot, kneels by the body. He moves the head from side to side.

“Right through the brain,” he says.

“Huh,” Dietz says. “Didn’t have much of a brain left.”

He sighs. His haunted eyes gape from a booze-swollen face. Gray stubble sprinkles his cheeks like fake fairy dust.

A hundred-watt bulb in a shade-less ceiling fixture floods the room with acid light, exposing the thrift store dreariness of a nowhere life. Charlie Frampton, another homicide Detective, strides in from the kitchen.

“Your mom keep money in the house?” he asks.

“Whatever she had woulda been in a marmalade jar in the cupboard next to the stove,” Dietz replies.

“Looks like they found it.” Frampton says. He holds up a triangular shard of pottery bearing the letters Mar.

Detective Santos gives a low whistle.

“Look at that,” he says. “They cut off her finger.” He points to where the ring finger of Dietz’s mom’s left hand is missing, except for a bloody stump. “Must have been after a ring.”

Frampton leans over to look, hands resting on his thighs.

Dietz slams his fist into the wall, making an indentation in the plaster. Blood oozes along his split knuckles.

“Damn! Fuck!”

He squeezes his eyes closed to hide the tears that suddenly cloud his vision.

“Bastards. I’ll fuckin’ cut their nuts off.”

Frampton comes over and wraps a beefy arm around Dietz’s shoulder. “Take it easy, man. We’ll get ’em.”

“It was my dad’s wedding ring,” Dietz says. “He won it at a poker game. Mom started wearing it after he died.”

“Anything special about it?” asked Frampton.

“It’s a rattlesnake’s head with a two-caret diamond eye.”

“We’ll get it back,” Santos says. He walks outside and stands on the falling down porch breathing in the damp night air. Some forensics guys come up the front walk, nod to Santos, and disappear inside.

Dietz comes up behind him.

“Larry,” he says. “My mom didn’t deserve to die that way.”

“Nobody does.”

“When you get them, I want…I want to interview them. Alone.”

“No way, José.”

“You owe me.”

“That was a long time ago.”

They each stare in a different direction into the night. The glow of the city illuminates rolling banks of clouds, the remnants of an earlier thunderstorm.

“Your mom have a car?” asks Santos.

“’89 Chrysler Le Baron. Burns oil like a motherfucker. But she loved the fact it was a convertible. Made her feel young.”

“Looks like they ripped it off.” Santos gestures at the empty driveway. “Which means they’re probably headed out a town.”

“Sombitches won’t get far in that. Over a 150,000 miles on that baby. On her last legs. Mom only used her to go to the grocery and the liquor mart.”

“Give me the license plate number. We’ll put out an APB.”

“I hope it fuckin’ blows up.”

4.

Brian Beetle places his thumb and index finger alligator-clip-wise around Lydia Floodway’s protruding nipple and squeezes.

“Ow!” Lydia jerks free and bounds out of the bed.