Business is business.
“What you think, Duane? Are you hungry, buddy?”
Duane hadn’t said anything since the Night Owl. Helliard figured he was asleep, so a couple miles back he’d thrown a blanket over him. It seemed a good idea to keep the flies off of him.
Helliard eased his Mercury into the drive thru lane. It wouldn’t do no good, walking in all dirty and bloody like he was. It was better to just pull up to the window and order a half-dozen burgers and whatever they had to drink.
He pulled in close. They didn’t have any speaker system, just a sliding screen, like the kind he’d had in his bedroom window as a boy. There was just enough room for a bag full of burgers, and maybe a shake.
“What’ll it be, sweetie?”
The waitress looked old enough to have blown Moses. A big head of bleach-blonde hair that she’d found in her grandmother’s medicine cabinet. A pink eye patch over her left eye, with a big red heart embroidered upon it.
Helliard wondered how she’d lost the eye.
Maybe a knitting needle accident, or else she de-visioned herself in a fit of sudden depression, cheap gin, and dollar store nail scissors.
“Half-dozen burgers,” he answered her back. “Cook them light, mind you. I like them damn near raw.”
“They’ll be mooing, sweetie.”
“Got any beer?”
“Just root. This ain’t no tavern.”
“Give me two Cokes. None of that Pepsi, mind you. I’d just as soon drink piss.”
“You got it, sweetie.”
He drummed the side of his fist against the dash while he waited. He didn’t like the way she called him sweetie, all high and nasal, like she had a nose full of snot.
“Here you go, sweetie.”
She leaned through the sliding window to hand him the burger bag.
Duane reached up to grab the bag from her. As he reached, he tangled with Duane’s blanket, and it slid to the car seat.
That’s when she started screaming.
“Kill the bitch,” Duane crackled bluely.
She screamed like a garlic-soaked dill pickle had just been jammed up her ass. Her screaming was way worse than the way she said "sweetie." Helliard pulled Big Fuck and popped a bullet right through the money chute. He aimed for her eye patch, but the bullet caught her beneath the chin and opened the top of her skull on the way out. The wound looked like an oil well going gusher, the way the blood and stuff shot up.
He heard someone yelling inside the restaurant.
An honest-to-huskies Mountie stepped out of the restaurant. He had his hand half on his pistol, like he wasn’t sure whether or not he was going to use it. He was a big boy, close to six-three.
It was funny that way, how Mounties were usually so tall.
Helliard liked it that way.
Tall made for more of a target.
He opened the car door, stepped out with Big Fuck in his hand and got down to work.
* 3 *
Police Chief Wilfred Potter awoke to the stink of rotten meat and spoiled groceries, seeping up from beneath the floorboards.
The stink was nothing new.
He raised himself from the couch. It was over three weeks since he’d slept in his own bed. He just couldn’t seem to settle into sleeping in it, since Emma had left.
“Damn it,” he swore. “Why the hell did you do it?”
Maybe he should talk to her again.
Hell.
He grabbed the couch by the leg and upended it in a fit of fury. The couch smashed the wall plaster and a painting of a pot full of daisies.
Damn it.
Emma had bought that damn daisy painting at a church rummage sale.
She loved the damn thing.
He leaned his head back like a baying wolf.
“WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK?”
No answer. There never was. He grabbed his pack of Player’s. He bit the filter off a cigarette. He clicked the lighter, three times fast.
There was nothing but sparks.
Damn it.
He stuffed the lighter back into his pocket before rummaging through the overturned couch until he’d found a half-empty book of matches. Then he lit the cigarette, squatting there, perched on the edge of the overturned couch.
“Yeah, I know, Emma,” he said aloud. “I ought to give these damn things up before they kill me.”
Fuck it.
He had this urge to light up the whole pack. To cram them down his throat, all smoking and hot, chewing them up, filter and all. That’d give him cancer quick, wouldn’t it?
Fuck it.
He chucked the matches next to the ashtray.
“I’m too tough to die and too stupid to quit,” he decided. “That’s my goddamn problem.”
The smoke curled like a snake about his head and chest. He guided it with his hands, catching the smoke and making washing motions with it. He had seen the M’ikmaq Indians do this with sweetgrass to wash away the darkness. The smoke moved away, as if it could taste the secret he hid in his heart.
He smoked the cigarette down to the butt and hacked up a wad of chewy phlegm – which he spat upon the rug. It was calico, so no one would notice. He pinched the cigarette butt between his thumb and index and pinged it across the room, aiming for the big black fireman’s helmet, hung above the fireplace.
He was five when the fireman had given him that helmet. He remembered the stink of rubber, the smell of the burning house. He remembered the fire that took his father and mother in their sleep. His sister, too. He’d been the only one to make it out alive. He’d damn near died, and would have if the fireman hadn’t dragged him out and pumped life back into his lungs with the gift of his own breath.
Wilfred drank a toast to the helmet, every winter on his birthday. He kept a bottle of ten-year scotch on the mantle for that purpose. Some nights he dreamed of the fireman. Some nights the fireman wore the face of Wilfred’s father. Some nights he wore a burning skull.
Some nights the face that the fireman wore was Wilfred’s own.
BA-RING!
The telephone screamed like a damned banshee.
He grabbed it by the second ring, grateful for the distraction.
“H’lo,” he said.
“Ain’t got time to good morning you, Chief Wilfred,” Wendy Joe Joel said. “Clavis is at it again.”
It figures.
“He at the church again?” Wilfred asked.
“You know it,” Wendy Joe Joel replied. “I reckon he’s a diehard Baptist. Do you want to check it out, or do you want me to let Earl know?”
“Naw. The old pudge-ball has worked his shift. It’s my turn at the plow, I guess. I’ll drive by on the church and pull him down just as gently as I can. Is there anything else happening?”
“There’s a big fire out county way. The Night Owl at the crossroad. Old man Delrosa was killed. Shot dead along with his grandson Joe on the counter.”
“Old Richie Delrosa? Damn it.”
“Friend of yours?”
Wilfred heard the concern in her voice. That wouldn’t do. He had to keep this whole thing professional.
“Not particularly,” he said. “Do they got any idea who did it?”
“Got an APB for a red Mercury the perps might be driving.”
“Perps?”
She wouldn’t bite, damn it.
He’d hoped for a little gentle kidding.
“What do you want me to do about this, Chief?”
“Not much to do. Too far away from Crossfall to worry about. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the Mercury, but them assholes have most likely perped the hell out of here and are long gone by now. They’re most likely headed down to Yarmouth and the ferry to Maine. You got anything else?”
“Nope.”
“Good enough. I best get Clavis before he gives himself lockjaw on a rusty nail.”
A thought pestered him like a single nagging horsefly.
“Who called in the report on Clavis?” he a
sked
“Marvin Pusser. He was out on his route.”
“He delivering on weekends again? Goddamn it. We’ll be hearing from Lily on this, just as sure as shit draws little blue flies. “
He hung up.
He took a long, deep breath.
He walked to the basement door.
He opened the door and walked down.
He stepped past the rotting meat. The popsicles, melted down to sticks. The pork chops. He reached the freezer and opened it up. He shivered at the blast of frozen air, staring down at the body lying in the freezer.
“Morning, Emma,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
Emma, being dead, said nothing.
CHAPTER 6
Lily Sees Something Blue
* 1 *
Lily Milton stood before three full-length mirrors screwed onto the bathroom walls of her trailer. She didn’t like her trailer. She didn’t like the aluminum of it, or the way it refused to rust or change. She didn’t like the way it breathed at night, like a harmonica playing itself.
It was too damn closed-in for her liking.
There were windows all around her. It felt like she was living in a damn peep show. She didn’t like that feeling. It was kind of funny, her being bothered by that after all those years of people staring.
You’d think she’d be used to being looked at, the way she used to be.
Three mirrors wide.
She hadn’t used the third mirror for three years now. Her fasting and walking were whittling her down. She left the mirror up to remind her how far she could sink, if she let herself go.
It was one of Lily’s three quiet secrets.
It wasn’t much of a secret, as secrets went. There wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t know Lily was once large enough to give Captain Ahab a reason to live for. The fact was, she’d once weighed in at close to six hundred pounds.
A lot of that weight was paint. Nearly eighty percent of her body was covered in tattoos. The Great Wall of China, surrounded by a half dozen samurai and three long dragons, wound from her left shoulder down to the small of her back. Her left arm was given to a gangly Quixote and Sancho Panza charging gamely at three skeletal windmills. Her breasts bore a pair of veiny octopi dragging down a four-masted schooner on her left and an aircraft carrier on her right. The other arm carried Adam and Eve uprooted from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
This was Lily’s world, her geography, and her landmarks. Planted between each monument were a half-thousand designs ranging from a Cree Indian in full wardress to a tiny Statue of Liberty. Once they had been everything to her, but her world had folded its tent.
Now she was shrinking.
The great collapsing universe, that was Lily Milton, all right.
For half her life, Lily toured with the Eastern Dream Traveling Carnival and Freak Show. She was their star act, now retired, these six years past. She remembered the way the crowds had stared at her, like she was a goddess. It was the one part of the carnival she truly missed.
Her tattoos were a gift from her lover, Raoul. Sweet tiny Raoul, a sideshow dwarf, not bigger than a nubbin, born with a man-sized prick and a heart as large as a circus tent. She could still feel him, climbing atop her like a flea in heat and filling her the way no man ever before him would.
Even the tattoos were a sign of his love.
It took him nearly ten years to paint the canvas of her flesh. He had vowed to cover her body completely and to one day see her picture immortalized as a six-page centerfold in the Guinness Book of Records.
A chicken bone had ended it, her crossroads a forked tang of calcium and gristle caught in little Raoul’s throat. Lily had reacted without thought; inadvertently Heimliching Raoul to death, breaking one of his ribs and driving it like an ivory stake into his tiny beautiful heart.
This was Lily’s second darkest secret.
What she’d done with him after was her third secret.
The chicken hadn’t filled her and she was scared that there’d be trouble with the law if they found his body. So she disposed of the body as quietly as possible. It had taken three bottles of Southern Cross Barbecue Sauce, and a premium-sized bag of charcoal, but she’d choked the last of him down.
Since killing and eating Raoul, she had lost all taste for public life. She’d retired from the carnival. She had parked her trailer in the first town she came to. She blamed the fat for his death, and had vowed to lose it.
It was funny, in a way. She’d grown fat for him. To give him more canvas to paint. Now he was gone, though she carried his memory. A tiny white crucifix, carved from his pelvic bone. She wore it like a promise about her soft girdled neck.
Her weight was vanishing, as well. She’d vowed that the grave they dug for her when she finally walked over that river Jordan that she would be no larger than Raoul. In fact, it was her deepest hope to diet down to nothing. She hoped to find him under all that fat, like a baby waiting to be reborn.
She hadn’t counted on the stretching of her skin. It had never quite found its original shape. Her epidermis sagged like a tattered sail cloth. She stayed inside, for fear a gust of wind might sail her off like a runaway kite.
The room began to swim.
Hell.
A vision was coming in.
She closed her eyes and let it take her.
They usually came by night, but there were no rules to this gift of hers.
She relaxed. She felt a great weight about her and atop her, surrounding and smothering her. She saw cool blue dread hanging over Crossfall and drifting towards her trailer, like a giant blue amoeba. She saw a pair of stilts, scissoring towards her.
Her eyelids flew open.
She caught a glimpse of pale blue eyes, staring through the window at her.
This was no vision.
She knew who it was, damn him.
She grabbed her favorite Smurf printed beach blanket and headed straight for the door – a great blue whale carrying herself on the momentum of her huge cosmic tsunamic force.
* 2 *
Marvin Pusser was built way past thin. His skin sucked close to the bone and stayed there. He’d been born with lots of teeth, for grinning; lots of eye, for staring; and a pinched in nose, just perfect for poking into other people’s business.
And right now he was thinking about poking it into Lily Milton.
Now there was a hell of a woman.
Big and bouncy, just the way he liked them. Fat women were a treat, so greedy, so goddamn grateful. They’d do anything for a man who showed half an interest.
Marvin liked those odds.
Lily was Crossfall’s biggest mystery. She used to be a circus freak and the closest thing to a town celebrity. Marvin imagined sitting in the tavern and bragging to the boys – “Old Lily? Hell yes, I bagged her. That fat old nympho.”
They’d sit up and take notice then, wouldn’t they?
What’d it be like, he wondered, sleeping with a woman whose ass was as large as a good-sized couch? And the mouth on her? Christ. A mouth like that, old Marvin could climb right in and she’d gobble him up from the waist on down.
Damn.
He strutted towards her trailer, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin king.
He didn’t have any real mail for her. He hardly ever did. Who the hell would write her, anyway? Weight Watchers? As far as he knew she was alone in the world.
Easy pickings.
He carried a handful of two-week-old flyers, for camouflage. Why not? There was no other need for the flyers. Nobody in Crossfall had any money.
“Postal business,” he’d say. “Lily, I’m here on postal business.”
He’d impress her all to hell with his importance.
He thought about getting into Lily’s drawers. He played with his cock through his pockets to stand it up. Only it was tired from all his walking.
To hell with it. It’d be ready when he needed it, once old Lily got that greedy mouth wrapped around it. Hell, bet she’d be happy
to suck it all day long, if he let her.
He tiptoed to the door. He just needed a peek or two to get in the mood. He peered through a crack of window curtain. He liked the way that always felt, like peeking through pussy-lips, all tight and secret.
Damn.
There she was, standing in front of those three mirrors, probably playing with herself.
What else would the old cow be up to?
Just look at those tits. Saggy, sure, but that just made them all the easier to fiddle with. She had a big old turkey wattle, like half a dozen collars folded around her neck. He bet those wattles would accordion right around his tally whacker. It’d be just like sliding into one of them soft-ribbed French safes.
Damn.
He looked a little harder.
What the hell was she wearing?
It looked like a dress, but it hung way too close, like she was wrapped up in butcher paper.
He felt confused. He’d never caught her naked like this before. He’d always thought of her like everyone else in Crossfall did, the way she’d looked when she’d first settled in – as large and fat as a pregnant hippo.
Fuck.
It was skin. Loose skin.
Hell.
Old Lily had been dieting.
Damn.
Dieting was good news. Dieting meant she was unhappy with herself. Hell yes. And an unhappy woman was thankful for any kind of attention.
Easy pickings.
He chuckled to himself. He was laughing right out loud when Lily opened her front door wearing nothing but a Smurf beach blanket. She opened her mouth and shrieked like a fire siren in overdrive.
“Morning Lily,” Marvin said cheerily. “Mail call.”
“It’s Sunday, Marvin,” she said after she’d stopped shrieking. “Just what the hell are you delivering on Sunday, for?”
“It’s easier on the back if I space my week out an extra day,” he said, with a grin. “You’ve got to know what it’s like, carrying loads of extra weight.”
He waggled his dick at her through the fabric of his pants.
Then he giggled.
It was the giggle did it more than anything else. Lily hauled off and hit him with the side of her fist. Marvin fell like a cheap sock. He hit the ground hard. His letter pouch opened. Scraps of useless mail spilled in the dirt.
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