Sick City

by Tony O'Neill

  Pat stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and leaned back against the cool bricks. He watched the streets, watched the people choking the sidewalks. Halfway up the block some fucking spic had rigged up a shopping cart with a butane heater and one of those aluminum trays so she could sell some unappetizing-looking fried meat. Same kinda shit his ex-wife useta eat. All the bits of the pig they shoulda tossed, fried up and served with some fucking bananas.

  Pat checked his watch. The motherfuckers were late.

  ——————

  Coming down Alvarado toward Yoshinoya, Jeffrey could feel the sweat beginning to trickle down his back. His T-shirt was soaked and clung to his skin. The crack had totally fucked him up. His heart pounded against his ribs, like a starved rat trying to escape a garbage can. It seemed that only moments ago they had been in the car, finishing off the rest of the rock, yet a chasm of drug need was already yawning open inside of him. The faces he saw on the street seemed to glow with malevolence. Everybody looked like an undercover cop.

  “Jesus Christ,” Randal said, glancing over to his partner, “you’re sweating like a pig. Calm down.”

  “I don’t fucking like this,” Jeffrey said, almost staggering up the street with the bag in his arms. “Something’s wrong. I can feel it in my gut. Something is really wrong here.”

  “Come on, man. It’s the coke. Take a deep breath. We’re cool.”

  “No! I’m telling you, something doesn’t feel right. Why wasn’t Spider answering his phone this morning? Huh?”

  “Because he’s a fucking speed freak. You’re being paranoid. It’s too late to start all of this shit. We’re here. Let’s just get this over with.”

  They were half a block away from Yoshinoya now. Jeffrey’s eyes darted around the place. He could hear sirens occasionally drowning out the sound of his pounding heart. He felt his guts loosen, the urge to shit his pants growing. Oh, Christ. He stopped walking.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “Here.”

  He shoved the bag into Randal’s arms.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “I’m serious. I’m too tweaked to deal with this now. I’m too fucked up.”

  Randal shoved the bag back into Jeffrey’s arms.

  “You need to fucking quit it, man. You’re gonna fuck everything up. I need you here! This is your fucking tape. Your fucking contact! What do you mean you can’t do it?”

  “Let’s just go back to the collector. Give Stevie his cut. Forget about this. I got a real bad feeling.”

  Jeffrey sniffed. He felt pathetic, overwhelmed. He had lost his nerve, and there was no going back now. His coke paranoia could no longer be reined in.“Do you even know what ten percent of three million is? Do you? Is your bad feeling a three-hundred-fucking-thousand-dollar bad feeling? Not to mention the twenty-five fucking grand he’s going to take just for writing down that motherfucker’s phone number? You’re really gonna walk away now and just give away three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars because you have a bad feeling?”Jeffrey shoved the bag back to Randal. Now, as their voices got louder, people were beginning to give them a wide berth. As the shouting and the screaming continued, eyes started to turn to the two crazy crackheads screaming about three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars and playing pass the parcel with a canvas bag.

  And it continued, back and forth, right up until the explosion happened only feet away from where they were arguing. The boom, as the propane heater rigged up in the shopping cart full of chicharrones overheated and exploded, caused the entire block to freeze for a moment. A twelve-foot-high column of sooty black and orange flame shot up into the desert sky, and burning pork rinds vomited over the sidewalk. Jeffrey howled in terror and barreled into Randal, sending the two of them tumbling to the ground, the bag containing the film forgotten for a moment as it too hit the sidewalk.

  ——————

  Pat saw several things at once. He saw the column of flame shoot into the air. He saw motherfuckers hit the ground, thinking that a drive-by was taking place. He saw the woman who had been tending the cart running out into the traffic of Alvarado Street with her hair on fire, causing an Oldsmobile to swerve to avoid her, mount the sidewalk, and come crashing through the window of a botanica. But first and foremost he saw the faggot, lying on the sidewalk, next to the bag.

  Throwing his cigarette to the ground, Pat pulled the gun from his waistband and took off, heading straight for the chaos. As he picked up speed, he saw the entire world cropped down to its bare essentials. The chaos around him, the people fleeing the flames, and the shattering glass became invisible. A woman who didn’t clear out of his way fast enough was shoulder charged and sent sprawling to the ground, where she was trampled by the people running behind her. There was nothing else in the entire universe but the weight of the gun in his hand, the faggot sprawled out on the sidewalk, and the three-million-dollar bag that lay there, totally unattended for a moment.

  ——————

  “What the FUCK?”

  “Hurry up, man!”

  As they rounded the corner in the aftermath of the explosion, Jesus and Angel saw a scene of utter chaos. A woman was lying in the middle of the street, surrounded by cars, her hair and clothes dancing with Halloween oranges and Christmas reds. Somebody was standing over her, trying to put out the flames with his jacket. A few steps away some kid was filming the scene on his cell phone. Halfway down the block, the sidewalk was covered in shattered glass, and the back end of an Oldsmobile was sticking out of a storefront. Jesus had frozen in his tracks.

  “Fuck this, man!” he screamed.

  Angel grabbed him by the arm. “Come ON, motherfucker! Now!”

  But Jesus pulled his arm away and started backpedaling. “I ain’t goin’ back to jail, homie! Fuck this!”

  Angel was about to tell that stupid motherfucker that he would shoot him himself if he didn’t stop acting like a pussy, but it was too late. Losing whatever nerve he had left, Jesus took off running away from the scene. Angel watched him go and then looked back toward the chaos on Alvarado Street.

  “Fuck,” Angel said to no one in particular. He took off running straight for the action.

  ——————

  “Jeffrey? Jeffrey? Are you okay?”

  Randal felt his partner on top of him. He looked to his left. The sidewalk was covered in broken glass and burnt chunks of pork rind. He shook Jeffrey again. Jeffrey coughed and said, “Yeah. I’m cool. I think I’m okay. . . .”

  Jeffrey rolled off of Randal and lay on the sidewalk for a moment. Screams. Alarms ringing. What the fuck was going on? Suddenly the sunlight against his eyelids vanished, as something blocked it out completely. He opened his eyes. Someone was standing over him. Someone familiar.

  “Oh, shit,” Jeffrey breathed.

  Randal sat up. He looked up at Pat, standing there with the bag dangling from his left hand, and in the right, a gun pointed at Jeffrey.

  “Tough break, faggot,” Pat said.

  There was a moment of shocked silence. Jeffrey started trembling.

  “Don’t kill me,” Jeffrey said. “Whoever the fuck you are . . . just please don’t kill me.”

  “Too late.”

  Randal looked at Pat’s face. What he saw terrified him. All around him were screams and flames, pandemonium. But Pat was darkly calm, his face untroubled by what was going on. The eyes were voids, killers’ eyes; the only life in there seemed to be the flames and the chaos that reflected on their dark lenses.

  Randal tried to move, but his muscles were frozen in the face of death. He recognized something in those eyes. Randal realized that he was staring into the eyes; of something primal, prehistoric. Something that could eat him alive if it decided it was worth the trouble. Randal knew that killing him and Jeffrey both would be of as little consequence as scraping gum from the sole of his shoe. Pat cocked the trigger.

  Jeffrey closed his eyes.

  It was all fucking over.

  He expected
that his life might flash before his eyes, but it didn’t. The last coherent thought was a fleeting regret for stealing twenty pounds from his mother’s purse when he was nine. Then, with a boom, Pat’s face seemingly exploded from the inside out. The whole skull looked to expand and distort for a fraction of a second before it erupted like an overripe watermelon, spraying Randal and Jeffrey in stinking black blood and the jellied contents of Pat’s head. All that was left intact was the lower jaw, and the half-mouth flapped open for a second as if to express surprise, tongue waggling wildly, probing the air, before Pat fell to his knees and flopped lifeless on the sidewalk.

  · · ·

  As they sat there, dumbfounded, the young kid who had walked up behind Pat and blown his face off cursed in Spanish, then reached down to the bloody mess on the sidewalk. He grabbed the chain from around his neck. It came away with a tug, and as quickly as he had appeared, the kid took off, running for the warren of backstreets that surrounded the park.

  Randal looked over to Jeffrey. They were both covered in the contents of Pat’s skull. They looked to the bag, which lay there with Pat’s fingers still curled around the strap, splattered red but undamaged. Randal tried to say something, but nothing would come.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Jeffrey whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  They got to their feet and looked around. People were running in all directions. Sirens were approaching, but the entire street was blocked with traffic. Somewhere off in the distance, a woman was crying and screaming in Spanish, and just ahead of them, a man staggered out of the car that had gone through the window, his face crimson and soaked through with blood, and collapsed on the sidewalk after a few steps.

  As casually as possible, Randal picked up the bag and they began to walk away. Nobody paid them any mind. The farther they walked, the faster they walked. By the time they made it to Fifth Street, they were running. Jumping in the car, they slammed the doors after them, and Randal took off with a screech.

  “What the fuck are we going to do?” Randal said.

  “We’re gonna call the collector. I’m done, man. I’m done. My fucking nerves are shot.”

  They drove in silence for a moment.

  “Do we have any stuff back at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “Good. I think we fucking deserve it. Don’t you?”

  ——————

  When Trina called Pat’s cell for the second time and it went straight to voice mail, a cold panic took hold of her. She looked at the clock again. Motherfucker! It should have been all over by now. Where the fuck was he? What was going on?

  She went over to the briefcase they had taken from Tyler. Of course, it was still locked. After she had realized that fucking Pat had reset the combination on it, she had been too scared to ask him what it was. But he had left it here, hadn’t he? That showed that he trusted her. She lifted it. It felt heavy. The locks themselves looked weak, though. She figured that she could easily jimmy it open. But then what? If—WHEN—Pat returned, he’d see what she had done.

  She tried the phone again. Straight to voice mail.

  What if he isn’t coming back? a small, nagging voice inside of her asked. What if he’s been busted?

  Her mind turned this over and over while she paced the room, her stomach knotting, cold sweat forming in beads on her forehead. She thought of Pat leaving LA without her, abandoning her, striking out alone with the tape.

  But he wouldn’t! He wouldn’t leave the money behind! He wouldn’t. . . . She looked over at the case one more time.

  · · ·

  Fuck it!

  She hunted around and found one of Pat’s screwdrivers. She took a deep breath and used it to lever one of the locks open. It popped easily. She tried the next. Crack. The case was unlocked.

  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.

  EPILOGUE

  One

  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.