Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  Pet was a sweetheart, though, and even if she slept all day and hallucinated all night, she was good people. If the hippie heart was to be found, she had it cornered. I needed clothes, she went scavenging and brought back brocaded vests, silk pants, rich, colored scarves. I got hungry, she disappeared and returned loaded down with a feast extraordinaire, everything from pizza to chicken soup and sardines, to plums so purple and ripe they made your mouth run water just to look at them. I don’t know how she did it, but she knew how to supply our two rooms with everything but electricity. And she was working on that.

  Sweeping long dishwater blond hair from her sleepy, hooded, brown eyes she said, “Babe, I got connections. We’ll have a free line into the power company by week’s end.”

  Pet came from San Diego. “That pit of vipers. Sailor lech types and Chicano macho types. You can have it.”

  She was going nowhere. “This is the best place on earth. This is where God settled in.”

  I tentatively put forth the traitorous notion that we were floating through life and maybe should rejoin the establishment, get a job, get a real apartment, make some honest cash.

  Pet gave me a pained look and took up her place on the three stacked mattresses that lay on the floor. “Get smart, babe. You don’t want straight time. It’s slow poison and you know it.”

  At that point I wasn’t sure she was right. Poison, yeah, it was out there in three-piece suits and nappy haircuts, but wasn’t there a middle ground somewhere? Couldn’t you play the game and still win? Stealing from the electric company wasn’t my idea of making remarkable social progress.

  That was the day and the dying conversation we were having when Bobby showed up.

  He loomed in the open doorway, grinning an evil, twisted smile. “Found you,” he said quietly.

  “Friend of yours?” Pet asked. “He’s pretty.”

  So she thought so too. But she didn’t know Bobby Tremain.

  He wore faded jeans and a ripped black tee-shirt. The cast was gone, but he leaned a little sideways against the door as if the leg was still a problem.

  “Hello, Bobby. Goodbye, Bobby.”

  “You won’t get rid of me so easy this time. I came for my car.”

  “You come for revenge. I know you, Bobby.”

  “Hey now, cool out,” Pet said, climbing off the mattresses and going to where Bobby leaned. “Whatchu wanna fight for, babe? How about a few tokes, get you mellowed out?”

  “You get away from me, you pothead,” he said.

  Pet held up both hands. “Hey, fine. Sae la vie, man, and all that good shit, you know what I mean?”

  “My car,” he repeated, his gaze boring into me.

  “I had to sell it, Bobby. So get another one.” Saying this did not give me the satisfaction I thought it would.

  He moved past Pet and limped across the room. He stood much too close and I could smell the danger coming off him like a cologne too heavily splashed on the skin. I couldn’t look him in the eye. A trill of fear finger-walked up my spine. I didn’t remember him being this big, this overwhelming. Maybe the cast had made him seem vulnerable. Without it, he was gargantuan, a nightmare, a reject from one of my last doped out visions of cats and bells and Pepsi cans that said things like, “Pardon me while I kiss the sky.” He blocked the light from the grimy windows. I backed away, slowly, oh so carefully.

  “Leave me alone, Bobby.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  I sucked in my breath because I knew this was the truth, the unvarnished, absolute truth. Grandma hadn’t told me pretty boys might be homicidal. But then how would she know?

  Pet laughed nervously. “Listen, man, that’s a little stringent for somebody taking your car, don’t you think? What if I see if I can get you another car? I might be able to do that if you’re sweet.”

  Bobby turned faster than I thought he would be able to. “Sweet, my dimpled ass! Now you get outta my face, you understand? This ain’t got nothing to do with you, but if you want, I’ll just make this a twosome. Two for the price of one, are you getting my drift, little honey?”

  Pet changed color. She was creamy California sun beige and turned white as cottage cheese. Her small mouth pinched down tight as a lid on a catsup bottle. Her eyes blazed with more formidable emotion than I’d ever seen from her before. I didn’t know if she was impressing Bobby, but she sure as hell impressed me. This was warrior territory and Pet had on her paint.

  “Out,” she commanded, pointing to the door. “You get out.”

  Bobby threw me a dark glance before limping past her to the hall entry. “Later, baby.”

  When the front entrance door slammed, I was finally able to breathe, but not too easily.

  “Hell, where’d that freakzoid come from? That the one you left in Reno?”

  “That’s him. He wanted to shoot a cop. I think we better believe his threats.”

  “And what? Decamp my place? Move in with some heads? Uh uh, he don’t scare me that bad. I’ve run into bad and he ain’t it.”

  “Pet, I don’t think you understand. Bobby’s the devil. He’s after me and if you get in the way, he’ll get us both. You heard him.”

  “I heard him, the sonofabitch, but he won’t make me run.” She drew her skinny self up and stalked to the mattresses. She reverently took up a dope pipe from the scratched bedside table and tapped crumpled fragrant leaves into it.

  “Maybe you better go,” she said after she had the pipe glowing, the smoke sucked into her lungs. She closed her eyes.

  “If I leave and he comes looking, he’ll hurt you, Pet. I swear he will.”

  “You let me worry about Pretty Boy. I got friends, you know, who’ll watch out for me. But I think you oughta go. You been wanting to cut out anyway. This is the perfect time, babe.”

  She was right, of course. I had to get away. If I wasn’t around maybe he would come for me, leave Pet alone. But what if he didn’t? How would I live with that?

  “I’ll take off tomorrow,” I said, sighing. I pushed aside the tie-dyed curtains over the stained sink. “Right now I’ll make some tea. I can’t stop shaking, he’s so goddamned big . . .”

  “Bucket’s upstairs,” Pet said dreamily. “Upstairs is the bucket. Right by the toilet, where it is, you know, that’s where the water is, in the bucket, the fucking bucket’s big as the fucking toilet bowl, holds plenty . . .”

  “Yeah, Pet. I know. Go to sleep.”

  And she did. Sweetheart Petunia of the blond-brown hair, the heart of gold, the soul of a warrior, the friend in need, the space cadet who know how to live free . . . almost free.

  Pet slept the rest of the day, as was her custom, and woke around ten p.m. to go tooling the street while I packed my meager belongings.

  She returned at midnight babbling about electricity and how the current flows, man, how it surrounds you everywhere in a city. “It’s in the wires,” she said, her eyes darting around the peeling walls. “And there’s wires everywhere.”

  I agreed as to how there were a lot of wires, yes, but it was nothing to get uptight about and what had she taken, exactly? It didn’t seem to be sitting too well with her whatever it was.

  “Oh,” she waved a hand around the air, “just a little sumpthin special, sumpthin I think I’m gonna like . . . umm-mhmmm . . . like pretty fucking good . . .

  “One of these days I’m gonna FLY, sweet honeychile mine!” She leapt into the air, transported into a jet-glide fantasy. It took me an hour to get her down and onto the mattress. She tossed and turned in the dark and made me hold her while she shook with cataclysmic episodes of sudden trembling.

  So small. Only three years older than me, Pet seemed much younger, more innocent and trusting than I had ever been. Which was saying a great deal considering the mess I’d made of my heretofore young years.

  I held onto her for dear life and thought about what would happen to her when I left on the morrow. Here I thought she’d been protecting me, providing me with a way to live, wh
en all the while it was I who had been her pillar, her Gibraltar. This was not the first time I’d coached Pet through the throes of a drug-induced delirium. Before it was just something I did without thinking about it. It was what we all did for one another. But if I weren’t here who was going to hold on to Pet and keep her from flying so high the clouds would forever claim her?

  Well, I’d make her go with me, that’s what I’d do. I’d kidnap her if I had to, get her out of this madhouse, away from the free-floating anxieties and the paranoid dream world. Away from the singing wires and the pills and the tabs of stuff and the smoke, away from the Bobby Tremains.

  Pet stopped convulsing and snored peacefully, her mouth open and smelling of an apple she must have snatched from a food-vendor earlier. I drowsed, but held onto Pet’s hand to give us both security in the black quiet hours before dawn. I didn’t like those hours, especially on nights Pet needed watching.

  At first I thought I was dreaming when I heard a door creaking on its un-oiled hinges. Bobby’s silky voice (“I’m back.”) brought me partially awake. I sat up in bed, trying to untangle the Indian woven spread from around my legs, fighting with the material, fighting off the deep sleep trance that had hold of my mind.

  “What . . . ? Who’s there? That you, Bobby?”

  Pet slept on. I gripped her right arm and buried my nails in her tender flesh. She did not respond. Whatever she’d taken was enough to put her out for the longterm. Oh Pet. Oh Pet, please wake up. Jesus, Pet, don’t crap out on me now . . .

  “She can’t help you.”

  I could see him as deeper shadow sneaking across the room, hunched, lurching sideways, something in his hands, something with a long handle, a baseball bat, an axe, something bad, real bad.

  “Bobby . . .”

  “You took my fucking car.”

  Halfway across the room.

  “Bobby, I’ll pay you back.”

  “You dumped me in fucking Reno.”

  Three-fourths of the way across the room.

  “Bobby, c’mon, you gotta listen to me, I was crazy about you, don’t you know that, don’t you know how you treated me?”

  Halted.

  What was the handled thing? How bad was it? If I threw up my arms, could I stop the damage?

  “You break my fucking heart,” he said.

  “Bobby, you don’t want to do this. You’re just mad, I admit you’ve got reason to be mad,” I lied breathlessly. “But didn’t I get you out of the hospital, out of Louisville? Didn’t I help you escape prison? Didn’t I? Doesn’t that count?”

  “It took me two months to track you down,” he said. His voice was just all wrong, all wrong. I’d never heard him sound so calm, so utterly insanely calm. Tundra would double freeze from this voice.

  I shook Pet violently. She groaned and turned onto her back. Oh Pet, oh Pet, why did you get drugged out tonight ?

  “I’m sorry, Bobby, honest I am. If I had it to do over again, I’d never take your car.”

  “And leave me stranded. Had to sneak out of that goddamned room. Had to panhandle like some fucking hippie buddy of yours to get coffee money. Had to hitchhike outta Reno. Had to walk in the fucking rain and wind in Sacramento. You want to make up for that?”

  “Yeah, Bobby, I do. I mean I will, just tell me what I can do, okay? We don’t have to be enemies. We don’t, we just don’t.”

  At the foot of the mattresses.

  Baseball bat. That’s what it was. He was going to bash my head in, that’s what he was going to do. Fuck me, Bobby Tremain was Death and grimmer by far than the Reaper could ever hope to be.

  “Bobby . . .”

  “Get outta the bed.”

  “Sure, sure, right away.” I scrambled from beneath the covers and judged my chances of getting around him and to the open door. They weren’t good. They were so bad to be nearly nonexistent. Bobby Was just too big, he took up too much room, his arms were too long, the bat too heavy, the world too goddamned unfair. I was going to die for paying back in kind? I was going to end up a bloody mass of brain and teeth in a Haight-Ashbury condemned apartment house? While Pet slept oblivious and woke to find her drug dreams have invaded the real world? In Bobby’s inelegant parlance, what kind of shit was this?

  It’s hard to believe it when you’re about to die. You try to think of anything, but that. You do little calculations of your chances and weigh them in your favor. You pray, I don’t care if God left you high and dry when you were in the cradle. You think up great excuses, beautifully exaggerated lies, and make yourself believe they’re working. Because if they aren’t, the alternative isn’t even thinkable.

  Bobby came toward me and I squeezed shut my eyes against him. He was Raw Hide and Bloody Bones from my Alabama childhood, he was the Swamp Thing, he was Frankenstein’s monster and the faceless intruder who came to people asleep in their safe homes. He was a force of Nature against which there is no recompense.

  “No, Bobby, please.”

  He gently moved me aside so he could stand next to the side of the bed I’d just vacated. His touch made me jangle and jump like a rabbit in a cage. “Bobby. . . don’t . . .”

  “I won’t,” he said softly and then lifted the long spear of dark in both hands and crushed Pet’s skull with one fast heavy downward stroke. “JESUSJESUSOHMYGODNONONONO!”

  I was behind him and I had his arms and he was off balance and toppling, we were both falling and the floor came up, smacked us hard, and I screamed in his ear, screamed and screamed in his filthy, horrible, inhuman ear. We rolled, I scratched at his face, at his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his neck, his chest, his arms. I screamed and he screamed and the night bloomed napalm lights as he struck me and I struck back hard as I could, hard as I knew how, hard as my frenzy allowed. The bat skittered under the bed, the bloody weapon was lost, and Bobby was scooting for it, frantic to have possession again, so he could bash me, so he could do to me what he’d done to a poor, sleeping, totally innocent dreamer. His legs flailed to free himself from the lock I had on his body, and I heard it crack the way you hear thunder erupting on the edge of a blast of ozone from a bank of storm clouds. His leg, broken again, shattered I hoped, splintered to a million pieces, like . . . like . . . Pet. . . like . . . Pet . . . shattered, splintered, broken.

  Smashed. Beyond redemption.

  Hit him, hit him, that’s all I could think, hit him until he stops, until he vanishes, until he’s gone, until he’s dead, dead, dead and gone.

  Three street loungers, guys hopped up on something or other, stumbled into the foyer led on by our screaming. They tottered into the melee, only sober enough to take Bobby from my fury and hold him while the police came for him and the ambulance came for what was left of Pet.

  “Man,” one of my rescuers kept saying. “Man, this is shit-for-brains, this is bad, dude, this is sick and revolting, you sonofa-bitch, how’d you think you could do this, don’t cry, you fucking whiner, we don’t care if your leg hurts, we hope it hurts, by God, we hope it fucking kills you, man!” Then he kicked him. And kicked him some more before the cops showed.

  Well, it didn’t kill him. Left him further maimed, but it was the state who killed pretty Bobby Tremain. Not literally. He died in a prison riot, shot right through his gorgeous heart, was the report. Sometimes, like really, there’s a little justice out there in the lousy establishment, you know what I’m telling you?

  I heard in later years Jerry married a jockey and set up his own television repair shop in Cairo, Illinois.

  I drove through Louisville recently to show my teenage girls where I had lived and worked on Chestnut Street. The hospital had been razed to the ground. Only the cement steps remained leading up to a flat grassy expanse open to the sky. The sleazy apartment house was gone too and in its place stood a one story modern office building. Even the detention center was gone. It was as if none of it had ever been, as if 1967 had been but a fantasy. But lots of people from that year feel that way. You ask them, find out.

  �
��I met a boy in that hospital,” I told my daughters as we drove slowly past what had been and was no more. “He was the prettiest thing, but . . .”

  “Boys aren’t pretty, Mom. Boys are handsome or good-looking or cute. Girls are pretty.”

  They have a lot to learn, my young feisty children. But I doubt if warnings will do a bit of good. At least that has been me and my grandmother’s educated experience.

  You can’t persuade a girl to stay away from a pretty boy. You can’t tell a woman there aren’t any heavensent angels walking this mean earth.

  Secrets

  by Gary Lovisi

  Gary Lovisi is a new writer who has worked for years publishing Paperback Parade, which is the one of the crime field’s best historical publications . . . giving readers an in-depth look at the evolution of the paperback novel down through the decades. Now Gary plans to start writing some books of his own. This story is a very good start.

  First published in 1993.

  Some things are never meant to be seen, never meant to be understood. When Stacey, our precocious five-year-old daughter came in the house from playing outside in the backyard and told me what had happened to Tommy Bracken’s parents across the fence, I didn’t know what to think.

  “They’re dead, Daddy. Tommy told me he killed them,” Stacey said, with a kind of grim determination you never see in a child.

  The police came soon afterwards and there was the usual investigation and reporters. The bodies of Tommy’s mother and father were carried out in bags. A scene I’ll never forget. I can only imagine the horror Stacey was feeling at the time.

  Tommy Bracken was taken away by the Social Service people. He was so . . . unconcerned. It was incredible. Tommy had always been a good kid, a little wild, but no real problem and certainly not capable of anything like killing his parents. He was only six years old! There could be no reason for it. How could he have done it? He was Stacey’s best friend. They played together every day. They shared secrets.