A Mutual Friend

by Layla Wolfe

  “You think this was the kid,” whispered Twinkletoes, “we found in the dumpster?”

  Anton and I shared looks of despair. We knew it was the kid. Why Barclay had taken the kid away was beyond us. Figuring out that guy’s reasoning was a lesson in futility.

  Bumping into each other with increasing uncertainty, we continued back to the hallway, trying not to step on some bloody footprints in case the cops needed them. In the hallway, flat on his back and unmolested, was good ol’ Jason, shot through the head. He looked almost peaceful, his eyes open and glassy. We knew the next sight would be the worst.

  In fact, Anton pressed a hand against my chest. “King, you don’t need to come into the bedroom.”

  “Yes, I do. I’ve already seen it. I’ve seen her. I know what to expect.”

  “I don’t,” protested Twinkletoes.

  Anton didn’t let the Bent Zealot off the hook. “No, you have to come. I need a backup witness.”

  “We’re all coming,” I said, and shoved the men before me.

  The six-year-old kid, like his mom’s friend Jason, had been shot through the head and was otherwise untouched. He lay on his side with his hands tucked under his face as though he’d been sleeping when shot, which could’ve been true, as he wore pajamas.

  Jessica, though. Jessica. It was hard to believe this had been a person.

  Her throat was slashed so deeply she’d almost been decapitated, her head tilted back at an impossible angle. She seemed to wear the expression she’d had in death, a look of utter horror, as though she’d been screaming during her final breath. She’d been cut from stem to stern, starting near her heart, cut in a jagged and vicious manner, all the way down to her pelvic bone. Intestines had been ripped out and laid in a pile next to her like a giant, slimy brain. Various organs—heart, liver, kidneys—all seemed to be missing. Her entire body had a flat one-dimensional look to it, especially since her legs were posed, spread wide open to reveal a probable rape, a definite sodomy with a knife handle protruding from her anus.

  The dog jumped on the bed. He sniffed the kid, but sauntered to Jessica and began lapping blood from her face. That was when I noticed her right eyeball had been halfway pried from its socket.

  “Oh, God!” choked Twinkletoes. “There is seriously nothing to see here, guys. We got to find Barclay, tell Guido where he is, and fucking be done with it. Better yet, let’s tell the harbormaster, let her be the one who deals with the pigs.”

  Those were all excellent ideas, especially when I noticed a yogurt cup on the nightstand still half-full of blood. We made as if to leave the bedroom, but Barclay had other ideas.

  He must’ve been sleeping in another room of the house. He was a disgusting mess of a Halloween costume by now, reeking of every possible bodily fluid. Shirtless, he carried a knife like a bloodstained maniac straight out of Apocalypse Now. He had obviously smeared his face, head, and chest with blood.

  “Hey guys,” he said, cheery at first. “What’re you doing here? Did Beelzebub tell you where to go?”

  We looked at each other, unsure how to answer. But Barclay’s mood changed as fast as words could fly, and he took several sidesteps to grab the yogurt cup. “Have you been drinking my blood? Are you here to horn in on my bodies? You know that someone took my pulmonary artery and I need this blood!”

  “Listen, Barclay—" Anton started to say. But the next thing I knew, Barclay was behind me, smearing my back with his smelly blood no doubt, and his filthy knife was to my throat.

  “My head keeps changing shape!” shouted Barclay. “I need this blood! You guys go get your own blood.”

  Normally, I probably could’ve taken the youth. I could’ve kneecapped him before he had a chance to slice my neck. I could’ve wrapped my fingers around his wrists and thrown him over my back, on a good day. Most days had been good days since smoking Turk’s weed, but today was different. Barclay had the added strength of an inhuman devil coursing through his limbs, and his armlock around my neck was solid.

  “We—we don’t want your blood, Barclay,” I tried to say.

  To my surprise, Anton drew a plastic flask from his back pocket. He offered it to Barclay like someone offering a rabid dog a piece of meat, trying to lure him away. “Look, Barclay. Holy water.”

  Already Barclay’s hand holding the knife trembled. “What’re you gonna do with that?” he asked, less infernal and more scared boy.

  “Well,” said Anton casually, “if I sprinkle it on you, Beelzebub goes away. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You don’t like being inhabited by that thing. You’ve told me on many occasions you wish he’d just go away. Stop telling you what to do.”

  I could almost feel Barclay’s lip tremble. “I want you to help me disappear from this world with decency.”

  Anton nodded. “I can do that. You are God’s child, don’t ever forget that, Barclay. Let’s just go home.”

  “Go home,” agreed Barclay, at last lowering his knife.

  I felt we should’ve done something, like zip-tied his wrists at least, before calling Guido to come and get him. It was unforgiveable he’d killed these innocent people, and he needed to be locked up. Hell, he’d nearly killed me.

  But Anton stepped up to him, unscrewing the plastic top of the flask. “You’ll be glad you did this, Barclay.”

  Without notice, Barclay grabbed the flask from Anton and chugged from it. Man, he really wanted to be rid of Beelzebub.

  “No, no!” cried Anton.

  Twinkletoes shrugged. “Let him. It’s only water.”

  Anton slapped himself on the forehead. “No, no, you don’t understand. That really is holy water.”

  “So?” repeated Twinkletoes. “Just water a couple words’ve been said over.”

  Anton explained to everyone present. “The Church doesn’t believe demons have the power to destroy a human soul. Those belong to God. Beelzebub will always lose out to God.”

  I put my hand on Anton’s bicep. “Whatever works, though, right? Look.”

  Barclay had finished the bottle. The hand holding it now hung limp at his side. He stared straight ahead vacantly, oddly enough, at the mess that had been Jessica. It seemed to have zero impact on him now.

  I was able to easily slip the knife from his hand, and I kicked it under the bed. “Cumon, Barclay. Let’s go home. Right, Anton?”

  “Sure, sure,” agreed my lover, easing his bloody plastic bottle from Barclay’s fingers. I doubted he wanted the empty bottle anymore but leaving it there would’ve confused the entire crime scene.

  For some reason, karma no doubt, it was left up to me to march the unwitting Barclay out of the death house. He kept muttering, “Help me disappear from this world with decency. Help me disappear from this world with decency.”

  He also said, “This place is pandemonium. This is pandemonium.” Anton later told me that was an invention of Milton in Paradise Lost. He invented the name for the capital of Hell, and it meant something like “all-demon-place.”

  Yes, Barclay was right. This was definitely pandemonium.

  Anton came up alongside me, the little red and white dog in his arms, and said in a low tone, “I’ll go tell Vera at the harbormaster to keep an eye out, and Twinkletoes can call Turk to tell him we’ll be on his boat.”

  “All of us? Flannery and Lily?”

  “There are two private cabins. Course, Flannery can always move in with Lily and Merwin, it’s up to them. But for now I think they should be witnesses. Twinkletoes can go home to Rough and Ready. He’s completed his mission for the Zealots, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, hell yeah,” I agreed. “More than enough. This is our mission now, and we need to see it through.”

  We did. We could literally see the front door of the Nichols from Turk’s boat. The next day, we were on the boat when the pigs raided the Nichols due to Twinkletoe’s tip to Guido. According to Vera, they apprehended Barclay as he was leaving his putrid office, a box of bloody rags and clothing in his arms. I was s
urprised that he tried to run, but it wasn’t hard handcuffing him once he tripped on a slimy piece of brain.

  A cop asked rhetorically what he thought would be an appropriate punishment for his crimes. Barclay said, “Torture.”

  They found the .22 we’d made sure to place in Barclay’s room that matched the killings. On his sleeping bag was a plate holding a piece of human brain. In the fateful fridge was a half-gallon milk carton with indeterminate organs inside. Intestines, a heart, and a kidney that later turned out to match Jessica’s were sitting next to the milk carton, waiting to be served up. And, of course, the blood-soaked blender we’d left behind on purpose.

  Vera said the most frightening thing of all was a wall calendar in the reception area. The word “today” was written on the date of Jessica’s murder.

  “But even more frightening,” said Vera, as though recounting a horror tale around a campfire, “were the forty-four future dates Barclay wrote on the calendar.”

  The five of us looked at each other and nodded with a deep, secret knowledge. We knew. We had no doubt he would’ve carried those out if not for us.

  That night, the Bent Zealots held a party on Turk’s boat to celebrate our mission. That was when, after about a zillion beers, I finally gave Turk his heroin and explained the entire misunderstanding.

  X

  T

  urk rubbed his short beard. “I’m just completely blown away by what you accomplished, Father Antonio.” He looked around the table at the other bikers. “I’m sorry. I just can’t stop calling this gentleman Father Antonio. That’s just how it is.”

  “I like doing it, too,” agreed Twinkletoes, who seemed to be disappearing inside his stiff “cut,” or vest. “I know you renounced your vows and all that. But I’ve seen up close and personal your power. I’ve seen what you’re capable of. I’ve seen how you don’t waver in the face of being scratched by a demon, or that time the devil smashed Thalhammer’s friend with a bowling ball. Nothing bothers you.”

  I said, “Well, your modern parapsychology doesn’t take into account the supernatural. My form of demonology concerns itself only with supernatural events. I come in with religious objects and provoke them, then all hell breaks loose. You’ve got to go beyond what the science TV shows to get answers.”

  “How’d it go in Colorado Springs?” asked Lock.

  That had been my last job. I’d just returned from there. “Well, it was complicated.” I took a photo from the inside pocket of my own cut and reached out to share it with Lock. “This boy had no eyes. That’s a signpost of the demonic. Whenever a demon manifests, there’s always something a bit ‘off’—something a bit stilted or abnormal about its appearance. Another problem was his entire family treated it like a joke. This poor kid was handcuffed to his bedposts, but his family kept cracking jokes. Then one day a saber tooth cat skull flew at the father’s head and the canine tooth embedded in his skull.”

  “Ppph,” said Rover, a very cynical man. “Typical. Just typical.”

  “Yeah,” goofed Hobie Cleminshaw. “I hate it when you get a tiger tooth stuck in your skull.”

  I smiled, but the whole thing had been very draining. “Writing appeared on his walls, even disembodied voices speaking. Objects levitating all over the place. Little fires would start spontaneously, curtains going up in flames. Just ungodly screams. The mother finally had to leave to stay at a spa, laughing so hard she was crying.”

  “Damn,” said Turk. “I know I couldn’t deal with your job. It’s hard enough running a motorcycle club. But your job seems harder.”

  Twinkletoes was looking at the photo of the boy with no eyes. “Well, it’s great to have you back, Father. I’m glad you’ll be staying with me in my new house.”

  Everyone, it seemed, lived in that midcentury area of Rough and Ready, tract houses with soaring plate glass windows and beautiful brick fireplaces. I owned almost no earthly possessions, just a few childish memories on postcards and a stuffed animal. I had no bed, bureau, or chair. I was starting from scratch again at age forty-two. Rover was the only one who didn’t live in Rough and Ready—he was a real mystery, that guy, seeming to live somewhere downtown. And Dr. Moog seemed to live in a neighborhood more befitting his exalted station, maybe in a house with bigger plate glass windows. But he did own that yurt in the mountains at Screwbean Spring where people partied.

  Moog spoke now. “I want to report that the jury has found Barclay Samples sane enough to know that he’d done wrong. The trial started two days ago. He’s got six counts of murder in the first degree they have to decide on.”

  Everyone murmured. It was pretty damned obvious Barclay was fully responsible for each and every murder, and Twinkletoes couldn’t resist saying so.

  “In that last house, his footprints and handprints were everywhere!” We hadn’t been able to admit we’d gone inside the house, not wanting to get caught up in a trial testifying against a former brother. But the intel we’d dripped to Guido had been more than enough for the pigs to amass a giant cache of evidence against Barclay—including that brain on a plate in the Nichols Building, and an arm later found in a file cabinet. The knife I’d kicked under Jessica’s bed was loaded with DNA. I didn’t agree Barclay was sane enough to know he’d done wrong. Every time he saw us, dripping with blood and guts, he’d act like we were there to go paintballing.

  Moog continued. “The prison doctor found out Barclay actually does have iron deficiency anemia. Eating liver, whether human or not, would benefit his health. I doubt Barclay was aware of this. He was acting on gut instinct.”

  Dust Bunny, a geologist, twittered under his breath. “Gut instinct.”

  Rover, Twinkletoes, and even I laughed along with him. You had to admit, it was pretty funny.

  Then Brick Mantooth stuck his head in the door to the “chapel.”

  “Hey, Antonio,” he said, dispensing with anything priestly, “Kenna just told me the ladies’ room toilet is overflowing. Someone musta stuck a tampax down the toilet. Can you fix it?”

  What little I knew of plumbing I’d learned in the ghettos of New York, so I figured I could handle the ladies’ restroom of a gay MC where barely anyone ever wandered. Even Lily still used the men’s, having not finished with that aspect of her sex reassignment.

  Besides, I was a Prospect. The patch on my cut said so. I still wore the Limp Bizkit T-shirt, although I now had money to purchase my own white ones. But the club had given me this cut as part of my induction, and it was my job to do the lowly chores no one else wanted to do. Brick and Merwin were no longer Prospects. My joining had elevated them to full patch holder status.

  I got up, and Turk said, “Yeah, thanks for your report, Father. I’m always interested in keeping on top of your career. We’ve got to rethink our rules about protecting all members. I guess sometimes even mutual friends can get out of hand, if they’re psychopaths.”

  “Possessed by demons. It’s fascinating,” said Mayo Snodgrass. I’d never been able to forgive him for slobbering all over the love of my life.

  Kenna talked to me while I plunged her toilet. “I don’t know who would’ve been dumb enough to put a tampax down a toilet. Everyone knows nowadays you just don’t do that.”

  “Maybe Stella Brazzle,” I suggested, “or one of the other sweetbutts. Todd!”

  The little white pomsky I’d rescued from Jessica’s death house came trotting into the bathroom, chipper. He usually hung around the bar area with Korg, the Bernese Mountain Dog belonging to Turk and Lock. Kenna swept up the little fluffy guy in her arms. She adored dogs, and apparently lost gay men. A visiting hang-around of the Zealots, a strange former sheepherder named Galileo, had spruced up Todd. He’d washed off all the blood and given him a puffy haircut with a lion’s tail and mane. Twinkletoes gladly took care of Todd when I was off on a case. We’d had him scanned for a microchip that told us his name was Duke. We thought that was asinine, so we renamed him Todd.

  The toilet flushed, so I set to washing my han
ds. Kenna said casually, “Oh, and Flannery needs your help out front.”

  Flannery was replacing the knob to the front door. After his Marine days, apparently he’d done work as a locksmith among other things. He’d tended bar, been a prison guard, patrolled the border, driven a truck, and was even a mailman. The guy was way handier than me, but then again, I was the Prospect. I had to do the dirty jobs. As a priest, I’d learned humility from books, but now I was learning it up close and personal. I kissed Todd on his little nose and left the bathroom.

  “Oh, hey, buddy,” said Flannery as I approached through the bar. He’d moved in with Lily, Merwin Bigwater, and Brick Mantooth, two straight youths who’d apparently been saved from being slaves in a meth-making trailer on the edge of the Rez. Lily explained to me they’d literally been chained in this trailer before the sergeant-at-arms Anson Dineyazzie and Ormond had rescued them. Being gay wasn’t a strict requirement for the Bent Zealots, so they had prospected. But now Flannery had a job leaning right making straight green installing windows for a mom and pop company, he wanted to get his own place with Lily. He presented her all over Lake Havasu as a woman, and so she was.

  He said, “I need you to get on the other side of this door and tell me if this plate is straight.”

  I shrugged. Couldn’t he tell that himself? “Sure. Step aside.”

  He continued, “Tell me if the mounting screws are straight.”

  Kenna and Todd slipped through the door behind me. “He needs to pee,” she explained.

  Why was everyone acting so weird? “Yup,” I said, “looks straight to me.”

  When I turned around to watch Kenna and Todd wander off, I was struck clean to the core. There, sitting astride a new Ducati bike, was King Statesboro. My love. My life.

  He grinned sunnily at me, slipping his lid over the handlebar. Removing his shades, he dazzled me with his star-blue eyes. I was struck so dumb and numb I couldn’t have moved my pinkie. He, too, wore his cut with its Prospect patch. He’d been washing floors and dishes with me until he’d been forced to LA to deal with his dying father.