Sick City (25 page)

She opened it slowly. She stared inside for a moment, barely comprehending. The case was stuffed full of old skin magazines. She lifted a few on the top layer, praying that she would uncover the money underneath. But no, the more magazines she pulled away the more she found.
Barely Legal. Penthouse. Euro Sluts. Juggs. Swank.
She started to scream as she tossed the magazines aside, scream and scream in fury, hopelessness, and frustration. Unbeknown to her, somewhere across town, the ten thousand dollars sat in the trunk of an abandoned Toyota Corolla, tucked away on a shady side street, noticed by no one during all of the chaos unfolding a block away.

Randal woke up, suddenly aware of a pressure on his chest. He surfaced from some half-forgotten dream. Only flashes of it remained. A large black mass, pressing down on him, like some horrible combination of the monster from that Steve McQueen movie
The Blob
and a vast, black, malevolent rubber air bed. He opened his eyes. He was looking at a wet patch in the ceiling in room 314 of the Lamplighter Motel, downtown Las Vegas.

Randal groaned. It felt as if something was trying to burrow out of his skull. Whatever demon was trying to escape, it seemingly was using a rusty dentist's drill to do it. The pain was very sharp and focused entirely behind his right eye. There was another pain, deeper and throbbing. It was in the soles of his feet. Randal wiggled his toes, and the movement made him wince as the pain sharpened and then faded back to a dull ache.

· · ·

There was a noise, steady, like someone sawing wood. He looked down to the source of the weight that bore down on him. He saw a head on his chest, snoring loudly. He was looking at the crown of the head. White skin peeked through thin, matted hair like some kind of bird pushing through the embryonic cocoon of its shell. Membranous and greasy. Long, black hair, with gray steaks. Suddenly his stomach convulsed, as the first images of last night came back to him.

He'd started the evening at a dive called Western Hotel and Casino, playing the three-dollar blackjack tables, waiting for the connection to show. When Jake, a skinny ex-biker with a prosthetic leg, placed his hand on Randal's shoulder, he was already ninety dollars down. They did business in the bathroom—Jake popping off his leg at the knee and pulling out an eight ball of meth and a strip of Xanax, laughing about a mutual friend called Macho who was shot in the ass three days ago outside of a liquor store on Freemont. “He's walking around already,” Jake laughed, “and he said it cleared up his fucking hemorrhoids, too.”

It wasn't always this way. When Randal had fled Los Angeles for Vegas one year ago, he had checked into the Mansion at MGM Grand, using his family's connections and his new American Express Centurion Card as collateral. The trip was meant to be a stop-off—a chance to unwind and plot his escape from America altogether. He was picked up at the airport in a black Rolls-Royce Phantom and taken to a room that—even by the opulent standards his family was used to—seemed grandiose. The bathrooms were bigger than most luxury hotel rooms, the floors heated, the indoor pool always at a perfect temperature. Butlers waited on him hand and foot, and that night he hit the casinos looking for action. He found it, too, winning almost ten thousand dollars playing roulette and meeting a drug dealer who went by the name of Nixon. Nixon appeared at Randal's door within twenty minutes of being paged, wearing a black Armani suit and looking more like a male model than a drug dealer. He was carrying a black leather briefcase containing a mind-blowing array of chemicals and herbs. Ten different strains of marijuana. Pure Colombian cocaine. Tar heroin. China white. Every strain of methamphetamine imaginable—from pink champagne to peanut butter. Pharmaceutical methedrine. Painkillers. Sleepers. Stimulants. Ecstasy. Viagra. Antianxiety pills. Stocking up for the weekend, Randal dropped almost four thousand dollars on drugs alone that first night. And this insane consumption continued into the second, third, fourth, and fifth week. It continued after he decided to downgrade his room to save money. It continued after he was tossed out of the MGM Grand altogether for nonpayment. It continued after Nixon cut him off, and he had to head downtown to check into the Lamplighter, trawling the underbelly of Vegas to find another connection for meth. His plans for moving on from Vegas fell by the wayside, as he found himself sucked back into the petty aggravation of sustaining and maintaining a habit. There were . . . how many escort agencies that wouldn't take his calls now? Three? Four? Randal had vague memories of a blond called Sasha whom he choked into unconsciousness during a sex game. Of a pimp called Charles who broke out some of his teeth when he tried to argue with a hooker who couldn't coax his meth-numbed cock into a climax but still wanted payment. There was no way out anymore. The idea of getting on a plane was alien, terrifying. The drugs had frozen him into inaction.

It had gotten to the stage that Randal didn't check his bank account anymore. He already knew that the news wasn't good. What he had warned himself about since the first day—that one million and change could easily be pissed away by a drug addict in Vegas—was now coming to pass. Every day that the ATM still dispensed cash to him was a little miracle all its own. He'd type in his request, breathless, always expecting a white slip indicating a negative balance. There would be an urge to get down and kiss the ATM, when instead it delivered the forty or so bucks that he requested. But he knew that the money couldn't last more than another week. Randal supposed that he might eventually die in Vegas and was okay with that. He liked the garishness of it. He wondered what Harvey would think when he got the news that his brother had been found dead in a Vegas dive hotel. This thought, at least, still brought him some measure of comfort. It meant he still had some sway in this world. He had the power to disappoint people.

Last night was just another incident in a catalogue of atrocities that kept coming and coming. The more he gambled, the more shitty-ass beer they brought to his table. After a lot of meth, and maybe thirteen or fourteen cans of Schlitz, topped off with flat well whiskey and cokes, he had met a woman at the casino. He could not remember if he had negotiated a price for her or if she had just been so drunk that she actually wanted to sleep with him. One of his last memories of the Western Hotel and Casino was a security guy hammering on the bathroom door and demanding that they get the fuck out of the stall. After that, the images faded into a numb blackness.

Randal slowly pushed the head from off of his chest. He didn't want to wake this woman up. When he finally maneuvered her onto the pillow, he got a glimpse of her face. She looked older than he remembered. Her skin was pitted, scarred, and something else came back to him suddenly. He remembered going down on her, and the yeasty, vinegary taste that had almost made him gag. She was shaved bald down there, and her cunt hung almost inside out between her legs. Randal started to wonder what horrors this pussy had seen, and suddenly his guts lurched again. He burped and tasted tequila.

Tequila. The tequila fumes brought more memories trudging guiltily forward, like shame-faced suspects in a gang rape lineup. That's where they had gone afterward! They had staggered to some backstreet Mexican bar that had a few lonely-looking prostitutes in it. It was dark in there. Empty, too. Juan Gabriel was on the jukebox, singing “Querida.” He had remembered that much. “I love this song,” she had said. It was dark, and she had seemed passable. Petite. Randal looked at the shape of the body in the bed next to him. What had seemed like petite in the bar now seemed borderline dwarfish. Did she even hit the five-feet mark? Her face was half turned away from him, but from what he could see from the shape of her forehead, her bone structure, there was something abnormal about her. Some kind of genetic disorder. He thought back to the bar again. An old man had stood up, and was doing a strange slow-motion dance, his thin wet lips silently mouthing the lyrics, his eyes fluttering behind half-closed lids. She had said, “I have drugs, let's go do them,” and there, under the bathroom's bloodred light, they had locked the door and snorted something that might have been ketamine. Whatever it was had had a strange effect on him, and the rest of his memories seemed to throb with a psychotic glow.

The next memory was a flash of being thrown out of a supermarket and shouting death threats at a manager wearing a polyester shirt. There were threats that the cops would be called. Had he bought condoms? He had no idea. The next memory took place in the hotel.

Randal sat up. The room he stayed in was totally bare, except for the bed. All over the threadbare carpet lay electrical cables, thick, strong, black electrical cables. Where had they come from? There was a backpack on the floor. So, she was wearing a backpack last night. Was she carrying electrical cables around with her? Why would she . . . ? Oh, yes. He remembered now.

“Tie me up,” she had demanded, “tie me up and fuck me!”

Randal had a hazy memory of trying to tie this woman up. Randal had never been much good at knots, and the more he tried to secure her with the cables, the more they had slipped. And she was loud, hectoring. “Jesus Christ, tie me up! Fuck me! Treat me like a bitch!” When he finally had her trussed up, the cables kept coming loose. It had taken almost half an hour, and if it wasn't for the meth, his hard-on would have long since vanished. He remembered taking a long look at her stumpy body, then the short, thick legs, which seemed to narrow down into points like pig trotters, the arms, which were too short for the body, the unnaturally long torso. The large head, sloping forehead, pug nose. Everything about this woman seemed out of proportion to Randal. He thankfully remembered that he had turned off the light next, and everything else unfolded in the forgiving glow of the streetlights outside.

And then he recalled what she said when she was trussed up with those electrical wires.

“I'm getting married this weekend. I wanna have one more night of fun. Fuck me, Mike!”

Randal had almost corrected her and then decided against it. He looked down at his throbbing, chemically induced hard-on. He silently apologized to his dick and then advanced toward the thing on the bed. She was on her belly. Even in the dim yellow light, he could see that her back was a grotesquerie of bumps, blemishes, liver spots, and dead center a large black mole with a single hair sticking out of it.

He remembered sliding his prick into that terrible, meaty hole. She had turned to face him, that little squashed-up nose, those gerbil eyes too far apart, and that huge forehead contorted with rage as she spat, “What the fuck is this? A Nicholas fucking Sparks novel? Are you trying to romance me, cocksucker? I told you, I'm getting married. Fuck me, Mike! Hurt me! Do me nasty!”

Randal started pumping hard into her, his dick totally numb. He was receiving so little sensation from this, he knew it would be hours before he'd be able to come. He started wondering if he could fake an orgasm using the dim light as a cover. It had been done before.

The more he pumped into her, the more she hectored him.
“What the fuck is this? Rape me! Tear me apart!”

As she said this, he became aware of the smell rising from her. Some hideous mix of Bengay and a rank, acidic body odor. He looked over to the windowsill. A half-empty bottle of Olde English sat there. He pulled out, walked over, and brushed a roach from the neck of it. He finished the bottle. It was lukewarm and totally flat. He shivered.

“You fucking faggot!” the girl had screamed. “If I wanted this kind of shit, I'd have fucked my fiancé! You fucking shit sniffer! Cocksucker! Fucking pretty boy shit eater!”

Randal recalled throwing the bottle on the floor and screaming at her. The bottle shattered. Someone started beating against the wall. He advanced on her.

Now he looked over the side of the bed, and there was the broken glass, and a bloody footprint, too. So that explained the pain in his feet. Jesus Christ.

There was more. He'd walked over to her, crunching the glass underfoot. If she wanted it, she was going to get it. His dick jutted toward her like an instrument of destruction. He was going to shut her up, once and for all. He spread her ass cheeks, spat a great phlegmy wad straight into the asshole, and then shoved his way in suddenly and violently. That had done it. She had tried to fling him off, but he grabbed hold of her meaty hips and thrust into her quickly and brutally, and she actually struggled against the constraints, but he held on to her hip with one hand and pressed her face into the pillow with the other, and the relentless meth-induced hammering into the thing on the mattress went on for so long that Randal felt himself coming in and out of it. Days passed. The sun rose and set on the walls. Governments rose and fell. The universe contracted, and all that was meaningful was the pistonlike movement of his cock as it thrust in and out and in and out. Everything was an abstraction. The room. The woman. The emptiness inside of him. All of it dissolved around him, until there was nothing but his prick, and the hole he was shoving it into.

Her screams turned into cries of passion, curses, insults, until, sometime before he himself made it to orgasm, she seemed to have simply passed out altogether. When he'd finally filled her rectum with come, he had flopped next to her on the bed, bathed in stinking chemical sweat, and the blackness that had been threatening him all night finally enveloped him.

That was it. When the full story came back to him, Randal hopped out of the bed, across the bloody pile of glass, and crept toward the bathroom. He shut the door and vomited as quietly as he could into the toilet. When the heaving was over he noticed the smell rising from his crotch. He looked down.

His penis was smeared brown. He touched it. It had mostly solidified, but there was no doubting it—he was covered in shit. He gagged again, and more stomach acid came.

· · ·

Shaking, trying not to breathe through his nose, Randal washed the stuff off of himself the best he could. As he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror. His skin looked gray, ashen. The knocked-out teeth had aged him terribly. He saw his father when he looked in the mirror, all shriveled up, sucked in, and eaten alive from the inside out. He looked at his prick again. He spotted something solid and half digested glued to his flesh. After that, he did not look down until it was all off and the sink was full of muddy-looking water. He crept out of the bathroom and found his clothes, piled up in a corner. He slid his underwear on and then his T-shirt. He picked up his pants. As he picked them up, the wallet, keys, cell phone, and a few dollars in change fell out of the pockets and clattered onto the hardwood floor.