Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (27 page)

No traffic.

He stomps the pedal and peels out into the deepening gloom. Moments later a red and blue flasher appears in his rearview.

“Damn.”

He pulls to the verge. Lowers the window. Waits.

When Officer Baldwin, Texas State Troopers,  comes up to the driver’s window, Brian hands him his license wrapped in a hundred dollar bill.

The officer looks at the bribe, spits, says:

“Step out of the car, please.”

What the hell’s wrong with this guy?
Brian ponders.
No fuckin’ way, José, am I getting out of my car for some pissant traffic stop.

“Officer, I’m running late,” Brian offers.

“Sir. Didn’t I tell you TO STEP OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR?!!”

How dare you scream at me
, flashes through a part of Brian’s brain. Simultaneously, inexorably, he reaches for the 9mm he keeps under his seat in the event of a disgruntled client.

Before Brian can say
mea culpa
, the officer rips open the driver’s door, hauls Brian from his supple leather interior and slams him to the pavement. A boot grinds into his back; handcuffs sear his wrists. Blood drips from his chin, where it’s split wide on the tarmac.

The officer eases his hand beneath Brian’s seat and draws out the loaded weapon.

“Well, well. I’d say you’re looking at attempted murder, pal,” he says. Drawing back his highly polished boot, he kicks Brian in the groin. The lawyer screams.

24.

Zeke Floodway is in a maudlin mood.

“My wife’s fucking a lawyer,” he tells Reardon Greene.

“Better to fuck one than be one” is Reardon’s laconic reply.

They’re in Reardon’s classic MGB. It farts and bucks through the back streets of Defoeville, as Reardon wends his way to the location of the kitchen job where Zeke’s left his pick-up. A squirrel tail flies from the aerial. Mostly static buzzes from the radio, through which occasionally breaks the throbbing guitar licks and yokel vocals of Dwight Yoakam.

Zeke decides he still loves Lydia. But does that mean he should forgive her without exacting a little family violence to even the score?

“There’s my truck,” he calls out. Reardon pulls over and Zeke makes the arduous climb out of the low-slung passenger seat of the MGB.

“Thanks for the lift,” he says.

“Hey, Zeke. When are you going to start beating your wife?”

“No way, José.” Zeke slaps the fender of the MGB, which gives forth a resounding BONG.

Reardon revs the cheesy English-made engine and spirals off into the dying day in a cloud of burning oil.

Zeke climbs into his pick-up, cranks the engine, and heads for home. He drives with the ironic caution of the well oiled. He’s still thinking about breaking Lydia’s neck, metaphorically speaking.

25.

Warren Jolene flails backward into the kitchen, arms waving helter-skelter like a zombie attack. Blood spritzes everywhere. Fleeting life has almost fled from his leaden eyes. The Saturday night special falls from his waning grip and skids across the floor under the kitchen table.

Like a Shakespearian actor, Warren’s hands keep moving, looking for something, anything, to stop the imminent exit stage left of his sorry-assed soul. They tear through his pockets, disgorging: money clip, stolen wedding band cast in the form of a diamond-eyed serpent, bone-handled pocketknife, small change, a silver locket that belonged to his mother. These objects zigzag across the room as if Warren is upside down on a funhouse ride. But it’s no way, José. No magic bean, no witch’s charm is found to reverse Warren’s pending departure from this life.

He keels over with a thud and lies motionless, except for the blood still pumping from his neck wound. No one gives a shit.

Lydia slumps against the tongue-and-groove dado, low moans escaping her lips as Maud ineffectually offers first aid. It’s a nasty cut on Lydia’s face, one that will leave a long blanched scar.

Alberto hands Maud a damp cloth. For an instant their fingers touch. For Alberto, it’s electric. He wants to believe this is his sister, somehow teleported from the ruins of their home in Baghdad to America. Not just some hallucinatory doppelganger.

Bates, mouth agape in shock and awe, stands in the doorway leading to the front hall.

“Waaaaagh…” Bates is incapable of speech.

At that moment Maurice A. Vende dances into the kitchen. He holds the .357 in one hand. The other is casually tucked around Bobby Troop’s severed head. Maud screams. Bates faints dead away.

M. A. Vende instantly fixates on Maud, a tasty morsel.

“Young miss, give us a kiss. We’ll let you live another day. Another day to run and play.”

Alberto thinks:
This man is totally mad. He means to kill us all
. Then he thinks of his own journey, his own mission of death and he is no longer sure about anything.

M. A. Vende’s mood changes from cloudy to seething black. He drops Troop’s head in the sink and moves toward Maud.

“Little Miss Muffet, tough as a tuffet. We’ll carve you up and boil you down. ’Til skin and bones are all that’s found.”

M. A. Vende’s odd words send drumbeats of dread undulating across Alberto’s nerve endings. Looking down, Alberto sees Warren’s pistol lying on the linoleum.

Somehow Lydia struggles to her feet, standing between Maurice and Maud. “Leave Maud alone,” she says.

Maurice points the .357 at Lydia. “Out of my way, madam,” he says. “My friend here can be very persuasive.”

Alberto ducks beneath the table, retrieves the Saturday night special, aims and fires. A tiny bullet, no bigger than a blue bottle fly, embeds itself in the center of Maurice A. Vende’s brain. Lights out.

26.

Maud and Lydia stare at M. A. Vende, lying motionless on the worn linoleum, a dribble of blood staining his lips like a vampire. Then all eyes turn to Alberto. He sets the gun on the table.

“Oh my God,” Maud says.

Mr. Bates begins to show signs of life. Sitting up. Rubbing his forehead where he hit a table leg on the way down.

“I’ll make a pot of coffee,” Lydia says.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” responds Maud. “Sonny Troop’s head’s in the sink. Let’s go in the parlor and get a drink before my nerves give out.” The parlor is the only room in the house where 80 proof sour mash bourbon and above alcoholic beverages are maintained.

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” questions Lydia.

“No police,” says Alberto.

Overriding his words, Maud says: “What police? Sonny Troop’s dead.”

“Well,” says Lydia. “There’s always Ned Ritter. Or Annabel Lee.”

“Or the state cops,” Maud confirms. “But let’s have a drink first.”

She helps Mr. Bates to his feet. “You okay, Mr. Bates?”

He nods.

Shell-shocked, in single file they leave the kitchen, pass down the shadowy hallway and enter the moody parlor, which faces onto an overgrown woodlot tangled with blackberry creepers. Lydia turns on several table lamps. Dower portraits of Zeke’s ancestors gaze down from the walls, papered in a faded rose pattern. A drinks cart is parked in one corner.

The parlor lights flicker on just as Zeke stops his truck next to Lydia’s Bronco. When he strides around the Bronco, he almost trips over Sonny Troop’s headless corpse.

“Holy shit!”
resonates through his brain like the sounding of a gong in an outhouse. He staggers backward and, leaning against a truck fender, vomits. Exhaustion overwhelms him. He wipes spittle from his mouth; then reaches behind the seat for the tire iron.

Tiptoeing like an idiot across the expanse of gravel, Zeke leaps up the two rotting steps to the front porch. A section of dry-rotted, wood-ant-devoured step crumbles and falls away behind him. He slides cautiously to the side of the front bay window. Back to the crumbling stucco wall, he bends his head sideways to glance through the nearest pane. Lydia, Maud, and Mr. Bates are in the parlor.

What the fuck is Mr. Bates doing here?
is Zeke’s first thought out of the shoot.

The three of them seem to be drinking and talking as if nothing’s wrong. As if there isn’t a headless body lying in the driveway. The presence of Mr. Bates remains disturbing.
Is it evidence,
Zeke wonders for a moment,
of a bizarre ménage a trois?

When he taps on the window, Lydia nearly jumps out of her skin. As he comes into the parlor, Lydia, sobbing, throws herself into his arms.

Maud says: “No way, José, are you going to believe what’s been happenin’ around here…”

When Maud finishes the story of the shootout, she and Zeke and Lydia look around for the stranger. Mr. Bates, having gulped down two stiff drinks, is looking a little queasy. It’s then that Maud realizes that the brave brief-spoken stranger never came into the parlor. She looks over at Mr. Bates and gives him a tiny smile of encouragement.

27.

The stranger, no longer calling himself Alberto, walks quickly up the road. He sees ahead the quivering florescent lights of the gas station where he’d feasted on all the famous American junk food.

When he comes within the cone of gas station lights, he can see the same attendant standing behind the counter. The speakers blare the same gangsta rap. A galaxy of gnats swarms beneath the lights.

The cashier will know about buses to Brownsville,
thinks the stranger.
I’m done with killing. The vision of Azza, or her ghost, is an omen. Like the flight of a dove.

An aging Volvo, its paint faded to a smoky blue-gray, pulls into the gas station.
Dietz, the man behind the wheel, gesticulates through the open window.

“Hey, you,” he says. “You from around here? I’m lookin’ for Sheriff Troop. You know where I can find him?”

The stranger raises his hand and waves. “Sorry.”

Dietz’s eyes bug out. In a flash he’s out of the car and frozen in a shooter’s stance. Blam. Blam, blam. He walks over to where the stranger lies in a heap, an oil stain for a halo, and shoots him one more time in the head. Blam. The station attendant gets the entire thing on videotape.

Jimmy Cuervo rushes up and stands next to Dietz.

“Hope you didn’t shoot the wrong guy.”

Dietz points at the dead man’s hand. At the ring around one finger. The ring Alberto found under Lydia’s kitchen table.

When Dietz moves the hand, the diamond eye of the snake shimmers.

“No fuckin’ way, José.”