The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  He had grabbed her head to rub her face to and fro around his swelling erection. Sand her down a bit, first.

  People had wanted nothing but to take from him, all his life. Emilio had spent nearly forty years en guarde against those who would take from him.

  The track lighting in the red bedroom was fed by a rheostat. Jamaica had dialed it low and lit candles, which lent an altar aspect to the room's kingsized waterbed. As she reached for the headboard controls her knee had bumped the comforter and the bed's surface undulated amoebically.

  When Emilio gave things, he wanted it to be noticed. He wanted his gifts to be appreciated, for the recipients and onlookers to compliment his taste and laud his generosity. When people did not wait for Emilio to be generous with toys or favors and took from him Emilio's balls got frosty.

  When Jamaica rose to share the taste of his own cock via a kiss, Emilio had gone for his straight razor. The ball-and-socket link of the neck chain had been engineered for him by a Little Havana jeweler who thrived by customizing trinkets for coke royalty. It separated when Emilio yanked downward, making a pocketknife click. The platinum razor, opening on its original oiled hinge, made no sound at all.

  Her hand rose to clasp his forearm gently. A grip that could be interpreted as a lightly whorish come-on… and could also bring her hand to bear for defense if the knife action got funny. His heartbeat shot blood through his brain and back down to maintain the stiffness below decks. This Jamaica bitch was sharp.

  His thumb had remained on the trigger-like stud that levered the blade free. Their eyes talked. He snapped his hand upward and halved her chemise a quarter-inch from her flesh. After drawing a quick breath, she told him he was good with that thing, and after panting a bit himself, Emilio agreed.

  Cruz had taken from Emilio. Stolen something. It wasn't the petty embezzlement, small change skimmed by the bottom feeders. That was given in any enterprise which employed runners smart enough to avoid street busts. Emilio squandered a lot of folding green on purpose, just to prove money meant nothing to him. His frivolity was casual enough to suggest the poverty of his youth. He flung the cash around, yes - but Emilio knew where every cent got flung.

  Cruz had stolen Chiquita, taken her without permission and broken her without excuse or replacement. Stung by his guilt, he had fled to Chicago instead of asking forgiveness and attempting redress. It had been simple enough to barbecue the story out of the other coke droids at the fatal penthouse party. They'd all watched Chiqui take her plunge. And Cruz had not stuck around to pay proper obeisance. A little slapping around and yelling, a bit of work with the razor and all would have been settled. Cruz would have perhaps gained a dueling scar as a permanent dermal record of his fuckup.

  Problem was, with Emilio, you could never be sure of just how angry he might get, and to precisely what depth, terminal or not, he might opt to cut. Enter Rosie, the answer man. Exit Cruz, via Eastern Airlines, first class.

  This had become a matter of principle and executive discipline. No intramural turmoil could be allowed to slide. Emilio had enough dragons to battle as things were. Some carpet-calling could be run down personally. This gave him a sense of keeping his core smarts honed, of not losing touch with the streets that had given him so much.

  It had been a slow week, unfortunately for Cruz. Rosie's replacement was a white guy named Riff who knew how to man the terminals and oversee product flow while Emilio carved a chunk of R&R. Emilio bought out the entire first class section of the flight, so as not to be pestered by tourists or idiots. He'd tipped the first class stewardess a century note and she'd given him a Chicago phone number, written beneath her name, Stef, on a card. Emilio had felt boyishly lavish and had come off the flight in a good mood that Bauhaus had done nothing to dispel.

  While he admired and enjoyed Jamaica, Emilio kept a running tab of his northward trip. In his mind, Cruz's name was on the bill.

  Jamaica was moist and tight and well-schooled and paid not to say no. A touch of bondage, a tot of anal hijinks, a dab of Noxzema, two or three drops of hash oil. A few bruises and a squirt of blood - hers - and Emilio was ready for naptime.

  He awoke all at once, hearing sirens.

  In his dream, he had been slapping her face. Telling her that in case of virus he would spend a year hunting her, then an hour cutting her throat. Then he would use her blood as lube to jerk off while she died. That was cool. It always scared the hell out of them.

  In the dream, Emilio had jump-cut to Cruz and seen him quaking in terror. Wounded, confused, panicked and bleeding, his entire body trying to run, his mind befogged with the dumb animal comprehension of impending death. Emilio had made the dream beg for his mercy. Grovel before you bite the big one, that your leavetalang from this world should mean even less. Your epitaph shall read GROVELER. WEASEL. COWARD. SCUM.

  So, so fine. The anger was righteous, religiously pure. An excellent system of corpse disposal awaited, or so Bauhaus guaranteed, should Emilio care to leave enough behind for bagging. Bauhaus - always the thoughtful host.

  But the wake-up was as rough as usual, Emilio's heartbeat revving to redline, bringing him to the surface alert and ready to kick ass, take names and do business. The sound of the police siren had tripped his internal danger flags. His body jerked, causing a sloshing within the big balloon that constituted the waterbed.

  Emilio only slept four hour hauls at best. His physician had diagnosed bad sleeping habits. Irregular and too-rich meals. Substance abuse and too many stimulants. In the checkup printout it had all been tallied under the exotic designation aberrant lifestyle. Emilio was proud of that. Such a status suggested he was the boss of his own life. He desired to always be diagnosed that way.

  Long ago he'd quit cigarettes just like that. He'd have to alter his sleep mode next. As much as crank kept him keyed, he'd slam to sleep if he was in one position long enough, which was one reason he was a pacer, a foot-tapper. Force him to sit still and he'd drop off… but only for those four hours.

  He had to change that. He did not wish to die a young but very successful man.

  His body tried to execute its reflex sit-up but did not make it a third of the way. At first he thought his body had blown some internal gasket untimely, to betray him between checkups.

  Then he saw, he felt.

  Emilio was securely lashed to the posters of the waterbed frame with the Ace bandages from Jamaica 's bag. Hand and foot. The knots were no joke. Jamaica was not in the room. Her jacket was gone.

  Emilio started yelling, in competition with the still-howling police siren outside.

  … the kilo don't drop the kilo…

  The ligaments in Cruz's neck popped audibly when he jerked up his head. No sirens. He thought he heard sirens. Dream hazard signs, most likely. The real world rushed in to re-catalogue his injuries, and pain brought him around like a volume knob being twisted to high-end.

  The kilo snugged between his legs and chest was intact. His eyes watched it slide off as he awoke. It hit the crooked floor of the jammed elevator with a floursack crackle and coughed out a blurt of white powder, about eight thousand dollars' worth. Then Cruz's aches started singing.

  He did not panic. He swept the coke into his hand and scooped most back. Several dispatches of flake were sped up to Brain Central. Then he tried to work up some spit so he could rinse his nose, which was bleeding anew.

  Fuck it. Let it bleed, as the song goes.

  Already he'd done enough blow to jump hurdles and black out, though he blamed his wounds and lack of sleep. He did recall that while down he'd experienced some sort of wispy nightmare about Emilio. Not recommended. All those evil scenarios, in explicit detail, showing how Emilio's platinum shaver would skin off hunks. Rated X for violence. A couple of years back, Cruz would not have been admitted without an adult guardian.

  Kenilworth 's Elevator from Hell had gone totally out of its gourd. Dim light seeped through from what Cruz estimated to be one of the basement hallways. The psychedelic, forty
-five-degree crack he had sought to widen by jumping up and down was now large enough to squeeze through. There were no elevators doors, merely an erratic rent in the foundation concrete. He saw a wet floor. Pools tossed back the greenish light. The light in the car was sputtering but alive.

  Elevator crash. That would explain it.

  Or perhaps this was another hidden level, even bigger. Maybe the tunnels where Fergus the super hones his troll skills and collected toejam.

  Time. Was Jamaica on her second or third cup of coffee over at the Bottomless Cup, getting impatient?

  Just a bit more incentive, before he stashed the brick. He knocked back coke misted with his own blood. At least it went down wet.

  He felt for balance with his unencumbered arm after zipping up the kilo. When he opened his hand the slash of scab across his palm broke and new blood emerged to glisten. He could form a fist but not open his hand flat. Good enough for shooting. He eased out and immediately slipped on the slick stone floor. He was right-side up now, and that was befuddling. His cleated boots helped him not to fall and he hugged the nearest wall.

  Not water, on the floor. More like the putrescent goop he'd seen in the old Jew-hater's apartment. Or the gunk secreted by the baby monster… which he was not so sure he had actually seen with his eyes. Not now. Probably just the drugs.

  Just say yeee-hah. Wasn't that what drugs were for? To fuck with your head and give you public license to be a butt hair. The drugs were there to blame. I did what? Wow, I musta beenfuuuucked up.

  He decided to trail the back of his hand against the wall to keep from falling down, and, head bowed, he carefully negotiated the passage. The odd glow reminded him of some bad fish he'd gotten once from a Pompano Beach vendor, a sunbrowned guy with a portable steam table who sold little paper cups of cooked whitefish. Tasty, but when Cruz had taken the cup into a bathroom he noticed that the fish acted like a blacklight poster. He cupped his eyes, watched the meat radiate a calm blue glow, and two hours later he was barfing chunky white foam. He hated throwing up; hadn't done it since the flight north. All control was thieved from you, plus you lost your lunch (which might have been expensive and delicious), plus it felt like twenty good rabbit punches to the lungs, plus you got to taste your own bile and the acrid sewage dripping down from your palate for hours. Thrills.

  The mellow illumination in the corridor was just like Cruz's mystery fish, only green. It brought back all the bad associations. He burped and tasted stomach acid. He wasn't hungry - that be the Real Thang again, killing his appetite -but knew he should probably stoke in some food soon, perhaps at the greasy spoon when he met Jamaica. The thought of food made him burp again.

  Something standing at the terminus of the corridor burped back at him, just as Cruz was willing himself not to vomit.

  As belches went, it was more ambitious, a clogged mortar blast that reverberated against all the concrete down here. It was followed by a congested laugh, then the iron-lung wheeze of labored respiration.

  Cruz's head cleared and he clawed out the Sig Sauer. A human-shaped silhouette blocked light about ten feet ahead, hair sticking out wild and cowlicked. The upper torso was outlined by a heavy biker jacket. Cruz saw the slim shadow of an open switchblade in one gloved hand.

  He could see a speck of moisture drip from the tip of the knife.

  'Have to. Leave.' The shadowman's voice was rusty, ruined, hoarse. The words were spaces with effort and mauled phlegmatically, as though a foreign phrasebook was being recited from a tubercular deathbed.

  Cruz stayed on stand-down where he was. No strain. Gun beats knife the way rock breaks scissors.

  When the stranger took a shuffling forward step, Cruz thumbed back the hammer and felt his hand continue bleeding. Damn.

  The next step moved the stranger into the light. Cruz's spine iced up and bells rang in his head.

  Eyes glinted toward him. More than two, stuck in places in the face that were all wrong.

  The thing's free hand opened and grew a straight razor. Cruz saw it to be the razor he'd last seen in the bathtub of 107, dappled in dry blood. The switch in the opposite hand had a white bone handle. The razor made a slithering wet noise that indicated it was emerging from flesh, not from coatsleeve. The edge shined and dripped.

  The front of the leather jacket was shredded and knotted. A baby-sized arm protruded from the center of the mesh and helped hold everything in concert.

  Another step forward. Cruz raised the gun.

  Now he could see the butchered meat of the face, a suppurating, bloody jigsaw of too many parts. Skull shone through. The thing smiled at him.

  At least two of the eyes in its face were Jonathan's.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Just like the Mummy - slow but inexorable - Bash trudged his Toyota truck toward Garrison and Kentmore Streets in the monster face of the storm. Blowing snow belabored the windshield and caked against the wipers, a slushy dybbuk sent to hamper his progress.

  He should not be doing this. He should be happy. He should not be making waves.

  Chains in front, deep-cleated snow tires lugged onto his rear axle, and he was crawling. There were times when the climate around Chicago really sucked. And blew. Simultaneously.

  Bash was not a happy puppy. Not normally given to introspection, he had wallowed in same for two days now and watched the fountains of his rosy future turn to soggy asswipe. All his life Bash had been a genius at talking people into things. Jonathan had bought the Chicago gig on his say-so. And Jonathan had fallen for all the ways Bash had rationalized selling out, a logical, nay, wonderful game plan for turning into his own worst nightmare - a genuine Gold Card carrying Butt Dude. And Jonathan had not slapped him upside the head. Jonathan had said okay friend o' mine - anything that makes you happy.

  Happy crappy.

  A white meteor crashed into the windshield on the cab's passenger side and rewarded Bash's perseverance with a cobweb of cracks in the safety glass. Goddamnit it to hell. Now the storm was heaving missiles at him. Visibility was nothing. It was like trying to penetrate a mountaintop foehn or a total whiteout at sea. An avalanche from the sky descended to bury and batter while the wind currents did their most devilish to rock the truck, even flip it into a snowbound building or icebank.

  At not more than five per, he rolled slowly up behind a municipal plowing rig, a broad, low-slung Trackmaster on treads, the kind used to clear ice runways in the Arctic. Its strobes and yellow flashers flared harshly off all the blinding white. It was not moving.

  Once Jonathan had (ailed to campaign against Bash's impending wedlock to the lair Camela, Bash had felt soiled, as if he had just put a fast one over on an amigo. His justifications lacked obvious blown stitches - this was to become a good and useful shared life. Yet he felt the misgivings sometimes felt by criminals who slip through legal loopholes and think, You're as guilty as a tomcat with a dead bird in its mouth, but you may go free because you are LEGALLY correct.

  It had taken Camela a scant three days to raise the topic of how large their brood was going to be. Plans had to be fomented. How many miniature Bashes could the universe at large withstand? She was trying, and throwing honest effort toward correcting their relationship for the future good of both of them, but now Bash perceived a clear ceiling on just how long she would make that effort. While she had a lucid concept of just where it terminated - along with her unusually good manners, of late - Bash had not been supplied with clues to the agenda.

  He was being steered, however pleasantly. Bash detested having his reins yanked.

  Jonathan would no doubt see it as a betrayal. What the poor, solitary son of a bitch needed right now was friends, and Bash had wasted their last dinner together getting roasted and off-loading Butt Person bilge. Stout fellow, that Bash, always covering his own ass.

  And this morning, Jonathan had not shown for work. He had stayed under the entire weekened without so much as a phone call. Bash was hoping it was merely the ferocity of the blizzard. Capra had sa
nctioned a day off for all employees of Rapid O'Graphics, and morning toasts had been hoisted. Bash begged off early to venture into the storm and seek out Jonathan. He had lied to Camela, telling her that he would meet her back at Capra's. Camela's desire to avoid getting fresh snow in her perm did the rest.

  There were purging aspects to this quest that Bash's mind could not ignore. What he really wanted to do was herd Jonathan over to that coffee shop on Weedwine for some caffeine meditation. And talk, laced with true things, for a change.

  White chuffs of exhaust blatted from the Trackmaster pipes but still it straddled the road, unmoving, impossible to pass. To Bash's left, where he should have been able to make out parked cars and a building wall, he could only register a slope of chalky colorlessness. White was the utter absence of color, he'd read.

  He draped his hurricane hood, zipped up and dismounted. His boots sank through about a foot of snowfall before stopping. Moving like a diver through turbid water, he waded past the rear gate of the Toyota and saw the top third of a corner signpost protruding from the snowpack. He rocked it to jar the snow loose, and read that he was one block from the Garrison Street entrance to Kenilworth Arms.

  There was nobody manning the Trackmaster. It idled against the tilt of the storm, vacant. So far this had been a winter of some weirdness and much insanity; some of the city's municipal plow operators were dogging triple shifts and occasionally flipping out. One had begun shoving parked cars into Lake Michigan to butt them out of his way. Another, just a week ago, had steamrolled over a citizen in his Porsche, mashing both to bloody tinfoil.

  He backed the truck up to clear it from the rearward path of the Trackmaster, should it opt to embark on a backward path of destruction. Velvet Elvis 'Hot Damn Tamale' was half-done on the dash's CD player and Bash terminated it. He hoped the Bottomless Cup was still open in blow like this. He hoped the storm did not implode his fractured windshield.