Liquid Fear

by Nicholson, Scott

  “Well, enough about you.” Anita flashed a smile that always earned instant absolution, no matter the degree of rudeness. “Anyway, it took me six months to start trusting her, and then she has the nerve to go and die on me.”

  “She died on her other patients, too.”

  “And that’s my problem how?”

  “Never mind.” Wendy glanced at the clock. Ten was fast approaching, and she had to prep for her nooner. “I’ve got to get to class.”

  “Some people never leave college. And at your age—”

  “I know, but college was God’s way of bringing us together. The School of Hard Knocks.”

  “Or Fuck U. That’s U like in university.”

  The sarcasm, like most, contained a good bit of truth. Anita had served as a model in one of Wendy’s graduate studio art classes, stripping off her clothes for a dozen people without batting a luscious eyelash.

  After the session, Anita had remarked that Wendy’s rendering, though obviously exaggerated and not all that flattering, had captured her personality better than any of the more technically exact illustrations. Perhaps because Wendy instinctively appreciated the sensual radiance Anita projected.

  An uneasy friendship was formed, and it had lasted through a shared apartment, a traumatic clinical trial, different sexual attitudes, and now one hell of a heart-clogging breakfast.

  “Don’t you want to hear what my psychiatrist’s psychiatrist told me?” Anita said.

  “Shrink a shrink and pretty soon you get down to nothing.” Wendy put her pinky to her lips and thumb to her ear in the international sign language for “Call me.” She reached for the bill, which was stuck to the table by a dot of syrup.

  “No, really. I need to say this.”

  “Okay. But make it fast. The next generation of Pablo Picassos and Frida Kahlos are waiting.”

  “The pills I was on, the samples my psychiatrist gave me for free so the diagnosis would stay off my insurance?”

  The topic bugged Wendy, but she couldn’t pinpoint the cause. “Yeah. New class of antidepressants. I thought we’d learned our lesson about untested drugs.”

  Anita lowered her voice and became guarded. “We need to talk about that, because I’m starting to remember.”

  Wendy squeezed her fork until the metal cut into her palm. “That was a different lifetime, Nita. That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.”

  “I know we’re supposed to remember it that one way, but what if it happened the other way?”

  “It could have happened a million ways,” Wendy said. “The lesson is not to play around with drugs.”

  “Oh, so now we get all moral?”

  Wendy was about to explode, to tell Anita to shut the hell up, and the rage was a warning sign. You could bury the past, but the stench had a way of rising through the cracks. But the best way to forget was to change the subject. “So tell me about this new drug they gave you.”

  Anita nodded. “Supposed to treat my stress, anxiety, depression, and all the rest of it. I’ve been on it for two weeks.”

  “And it seems to be working.” Wendy eyed the half-full cup of coffee and weighed the need for an extra boost of caffeine against the additional destruction of taste buds.

  “Sure. I’ve even gained a few pounds.” Anita slapped at her lean thighs under the table. “But dig this—my new psychiatrist said she can’t find any record of a written prescription. She has no idea what it is.”

  Billy Ray Cyrus’s cornfield yodel faded and the late breakfast crowd filled the void with chatter and rattling tableware. “Maybe it’s a generic,” Wendy said, alarm bells clanging in her head. “Drug companies sometimes give their cheaper versions names that make them sound fancy. I’ll bet the records just got screwed up.”

  With the volume in the room dropping, Anita hunched forward and lowered her voice. “The pills may not be legit.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Monkey House trials.” Wendy used the term despite her promise to never utter it again, upon pain of death or madness. “So stop getting paranoid. Briggs is finished and none of that ever happened.”

  “I know.” Anita chopped at her waffle, scooting piles of limp whipped cream and strawberry sauce across the grid. “Well, anyway, the new shrink told me to stop taking them and to bring her a sample so she could turn it in to the authorities.”

  “Yeah, like we could ever trust ‘authority’ again.”

  “I told her I’d run out the day my shrink died. Seemed sort of fitting.”

  “So you have some left?”

  “Sure. Six pills.”

  “A shrink was giving you illegal drugs?”

  “Well, she’d been acting weird for the last few weeks. A couple of times she said stuff that sounded fatalistic. You know, like, ‘Live in the moment, because the past lives forever.’”

  It sounded like the kind of crap Briggs used to say. “Sounds like generic shop talk to me. If a shrink can’t dish out the feel-good platitudes, then who can?”

  Anita looked around the restaurant. Her sunglasses flashed in the greasy fluorescent light. The entire breakfast, Anita had been acting shifty, as if fearing someone would approach her table and ask for an autograph.

  Not that the consumers of her films would have much chance of recognizing her. Her hair was now its natural light brown instead of blonde, and she’d had her boobs deflated down a cup size from their heyday.

  Besides, Chapel Hill was a sophisticated university town, not a place where people expected to encounter a porn queen in a bacon-and-eggs joint.

  Wendy followed Anita’s gaze. An unkempt man sat at the counter near the register, talking loudly to himself while the wait staff aggressively ignored him.

  “I’m kind of worried,” Anita said. “The pills worked great, but I stopped them. They reminded me of the stuff we took during the trials.”

  “Did the new psychiatrist give you something else?”

  “Effexor. Started Saturday. She said it might take a month before the effect kicks in. I could go nuts before then.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Wendy’s eyelid twitched. A dark shadow crept from the corner of her memory, but it vanished when she turned her mind’s eye toward it.

  “We talked about it yesterday.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “You don’t remember?” Anita’s grin was frozen in the mask of one who wasn’t sure if she was the butt of a joke. “Jeez, maybe you’re the one who needs drugs. You’re getting senile.”

  “I plead post-traumatic stress disorder,” Wendy said, disturbed by Anita’s delusions.

  “Well, I get crazy when I don’t take it. Almost like the monsters are waiting in the dark, and when the medicine goes away, they all come crawling out of their holes.”

  Wendy noted a crease had formed in Anita’s forehead, the only vivid mark of time or distress on her perfect skin. Wendy had first drawn Anita’s caricature after the long-ago modeling session, when the two had roomed together for a semester.

  Anita Molkesky, or “Anita Mann” as she had been known in the trade, had experienced little change to her most prominent facial features. The full lips, rounded chin, and thin nose made her face bottom-heavy, and though she was attractive in every measure, Wendy’s exaggerating black marker had helped shape Anita’s self-image, and she was forever complaining about her “micro-nose.”

  “You’re not going to take my advice anyway,” Wendy said.

  “Sure I will, if I happen to agree with it.”

  Sassy country rock erupted, Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Wendy tested the coffee once more. Still awful. “Okay, then—”

  “Holy fucking salami,” Anita said, staring through the plate-glass window.

  While mired in the lurid straight-to-video world of Los Angeles, Anita claimed to have seen everything twice, including midgets copulating with canines. But the shock in her voice was enough to cause Wendy to follow her friend’s g
aze.

  A blue sedan streaked toward the restaurant across the parking lot as if shot from a monstrous cannon, tires throwing smoke. Its roaring engine and squealing wheels drowned out the jukebox, and conversation in the waffle house died except for the monologue of the self-absorbed schizophrenic.

  The sedan was gathering speed, aimed straight for the front window. It miraculously dodged a parked SUV and closed the gap, now less than thirty feet away.

  Someone screamed, and Wendy grabbed Anita’s buckskin jacket by its elbow fringe and pulled her from the booth.

  Their waitress, a mousy-looking chain-smoker, screamed out, “Bobby!”

  The cook came bounding over the counter, his mottled apron flapping across the schizophrenic’s face. Anita’s retreat splashed cold coffee on Wendy’s leg.

  She wondered which of her fellow instructors would cover her noon class, because she had a feeling she was going to be late. Then the plate glass exploded.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The fog lifted, though Roland’s eyeballs still felt like wads of cotton. His heartbeat galloped.

  He thumbed other cards from the stack. A Visa, with “David Underwood” in raised print, sporting an approval date from two years earlier. A card from AAA promising lodging discounts and emergency roadside assistance for David Underwood. A donor card from the American Red Cross, B positive.

  At least we both have the same blood type in case I need a transfusion from myself.

  A Blockbuster membership card and a Higher Grounds coffee club card, with three more cup images to be punched before he received a free refill, completed the stack.

  Vertigo weaved its gossamer threads around him, and he sat on the bed before his legs turned to sand. He examined his driver’s license again.

  No, not MY driver’s license. David’s. And why does that name sound familiar?

  The listed address was a place Roland had lived in while enrolled at the University of North Carolina over a decade ago. The crummy off-campus apartment had been beset by cockroaches, rats, and a refrigerator that didn’t adequately chill the beer, and Roland had broken his lease after three months.

  If the license was a fake, it was convincing. With the advent of the Department of Homeland Security and increased scrutiny of illegal aliens, the fake-ID business was booming, the cash flow allowing forgers to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Assuming someone knew the right people, a bogus driver’s license could be turned around in less than an hour.

  The only problem with that scenario was that Roland had no close friends, much less one who would go to such lengths for a practical joke. Maybe Dick the Jarhead, his first twelve-step sponsor, who had traded in the bottle for a brand of aggressive humor that constantly bordered on violence.

  But Dick had died last year from a cerebral hemorrhage. His wacky mind ended up doing him in after all.

  A glance at the clock showed fifteen minutes before checkout.

  Screw it. Won’t be the first unsolved mystery of my life.

  He crammed the cards back in the wallet and wobbled across the room to the chair that held his jacket.

  A search of the pockets turned up nothing but lint and a set of car keys. The keys, at least, looked familiar, belonging to the Ford Escort he remembered renting in Louisville, Kentucky. Nearly a week ago.

  A week? Without a calendar, he couldn’t be sure of anything. Even the alarm clock might be lying. After all, in a world where your name could change, or someone with a different name could steal your face while you slept, nothing was certain.

  Too bad I can’t do a switcheroo with my debt. Wonder if David has a hot girlfriend?

  He wobbled to the window by the door and looked out. He was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The skyline might have been Cincinnati’s, but it was too generically midtown American to tell it from that of Huntington, Muncie, Plattsburgh, or Roanoke.

  A beauty salon across the street was in need of new vinyl letters. Its sign read “air Empor um.”

  Maybe I should drop off a business card. Score some points with Harry Grimes. Show I’m the go-getter type, even on a hangover.

  A Marathon gas station, gray-walled warehouses, a chemical silo of some sort, and several urban condominium complexes lined the block. A blue Escort sat out front, presumably his ride.

  So where the hell is MY license?

  He dug into the wallet again, searching the opposite fold. He turned up a business card bearing David Underwood’s name and a cell phone number from an area code he didn’t recognize. The card bore a conservative but elegant C placed within a bordered rectangle. It was the logo for Carolina Sign Supply.

  So “David” had the same employer as Roland, which made a practical joke easier to rig. Except that theory had no legs because no one knew Roland was in Cincinnati, much less which motel room he’d be staying in.

  Aside from Harry and his deep-seated need to be of service to a fellow addict, Roland had remained aloof from his coworkers. Because he traveled and serviced his own regional accounts, he wasn’t part of a “team,” and he only checked in at headquarters for the monthly sales meetings. Most of his employer contact was via phone and e-mail.

  Laptop?

  He looked under the bed. Nothing but dust bunnies big enough to mate.

  “Maybe David has it,” he said, thinking it would be funnier if he said it aloud. Instead, utterance gave the words a palpability and weight that made the statement not only plausible but menacing.

  Six minutes until checkout and his head was still throbbing, mouth still dry, tongue like a dirty sock. He was thrusting the fabricated business card back into its sleeve when he saw glossy paper beneath. He shuffled through the few cards, looking for photographs that would give David Underwood context or maybe clarify the faint tingle of familiarity the name evoked.

  Did David have a family? Roland had never had time for children, though Wendy had once gone off the pill, back when she still held out hope that she could cure him solely through the power of love.

  Fortunately, considering the ultimate outcome, the seed hadn’t taken root, and the separation agreement had been nothing more than dollars and cents instead of a Solomon-like cleaving of flesh.

  Stop it right there. You can’t even remember your own name, and you’re wishing you could BREED? More little Roland Doyles or David Underwoods or whoever the fuck I am, running around playing their own brands of the Blame Game?

  Three minutes to dress, pound on the front desk, and get to the bottom of this mess. The anger lit its pissed-off-villager torches inside his chest, ready to storm the castle of his head and build a bonfire.

  Self-righteous indignation was an emotion that alcoholics could not afford to acknowledge, let alone embrace.

  Anger, hell. In a few minutes, he’d be in a rage. And damned if it wasn’t going to feel good. The Blame Game had a new contestant.

  He grabbed his jacket on the way to the bathroom, hoping he’d brought his shaving kit. He was eager to brush his teeth and rid his taste buds of the horrible, sticky residue of last night’s indulgence.

  He could worry about contrition and guilt later. The twelve-steppers had stacks and stacks of white chips for that. God was built of forgiveness, and God probably knew the difference between Roland and David. He could start the day with a clean face, if not a clear head.

  He nudged the bathroom door the rest of the way open.

  A woman lay sprawled on the ceramic-tiled floor. She wore a peach fleece bathrobe, parted to reveal the snowy flesh of her thighs. One arm dangled over the rim of the tub, its hand smooth, graceful, and young. Raven hair splayed across her shoulders, obscuring her face.

  Judging from the angle of her neck and the coagulating pool of blood beneath her, she was quite dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The collision was much more dramatic than Martin Kleingarten had planned.

  The clatter of the broken glass cascading along the sidewalk and the length of the sedan was satisfying, and t
he snapping of a steel mullion reminded him of the time he’d been forced to break a bookie’s fingers for dipping into the till.

  That was small-time mob work, steady pay but little chance for career development, and Kleingarten’s new employers had a flair for the creative. That suited Kleingarten, although the risks were a little higher. What was life without a few risks?

  The sedan plowed through the interior of the restaurant and smashed the counter, breaking it from the floor and slamming it against the grill. Hot fryer oil, which had leaped in rancid arcs with the impact, rained down on the screaming customers, and those who hadn’t been lacerated with glass shards had suffered nickel-sized burns on their flesh.

  One old lady, hair tinted with blue rinse, tried to raise herself on her walker, but one of its legs had been twisted in the wreck and the walker collapsed, sending her sprawling with a shriek that stood out even in the cacophony that erupted in the moments after the “accident.”

  The short-order cook in the filthy apron yanked open the crumpled door of the sedan. Kleingarten smiled, the swell of his cheeks pushing up on the lenses of the binoculars. The cook’s mouth stopped in mid tirade and dropped in surprise.

  No driver.

  Kleingarten, who had boosted his first car at the age of eleven, could easily have started the sedan with the key, aimed the steering wheel, and let the good times roll. The American Disabilities Act required three handicapped parking spaces near the front door, none of which were currently occupied, so he’d had a large window of opportunity. To make it more of a challenge, he’d hot-wired the vehicle and left the key in his pocket, leaning a brick on the accelerator.

  He swung his binoculars to the left. The Chinese woman appeared to be unhurt and was busy helping up the blue-haired lady. Good. His instructions had been to leave both women scared, and they’d been sitting far enough from the window that they were out of danger.

  Kleingarten twisted the lenses to focus on the Slant. Wendy Leng. Why are my friends so interested in you?

  Her eyes had the classic Oriental shape, but her hair was brown instead of raven-black. Her teeth were small and she had a mole on her right cheek. Her eyes were light brown, unusual for an Asian, so Kleingarten figured her for a half-breed. As if “breed” meant anything these days, the way everybody fucked outside their own kind.