by T. Braddy
“Drive,” he said.
We’d stopped lengthwise on the centerline of the street, straddling both lanes, and I thought I heard police sirens in the distance but wasn’t sure. Fitz had jammed the barrel of his handgun into the soft, fleshy part of my neck.
I was in bad shape. I was seeing things. People on the road. Hearing things, too. The intro fiddle for the song “Jole Blon” had begun to saw through my head, and I couldn’t seem to force it back into the depths of my subconscious.
Nevertheless, I tapped the gas, and down the road we went. Herkily-jerkily was how we progressed, but the trees straggling past told me we were headed somewhere.
“I want to take you on a sort of ghost tour through this town,” he said. “I’ve heard you’re a half-assed ghost whisperer. Got the spirit shakes pretty bad, don’t you? See, that’s interesting. It’s different. Your man Bellerose back there, he was a fraud. Started rumors about being a rootworker to scare folks. You, though, you got the real mojo, don’t you?”
I stopped at a red light. To the left, a cop car began to turn. I thought about tearing ass through the light, just to see what this old boy would do.
Hard steel against my temple cut my thoughts in half. “Don’t,” he said. “I see him. You pull a stunt, and I kill you and I kill him. I leave with the money, and everybody blames you. Rolson McKane’s name goes down as shit, and then everybody forgets you. Shut down your goddamned mental Olympics, and drink the fucking bourbon.”
I slipped the bottle into my lap and twisted the cap with one hand as I drove – ever so gently – with the other. The smell was immediate and agreeable, like walking into an old leather store.
I brought the bottle to my lips and swigged. Six months, erased in a gulp. In that moment, the word ‘regret’ had been erased from my lexicon. Just another word without meaning, like trying to think of a color’s sound.
My throat and my guts burned, and I felt a simulacrum of inner peace launched by this act. It wasn’t true peace, nor was it particularly joyous, but my faulty brain was tricking me into thinking that it was both of those things.
“That’s good,” he said. “Keep going. Don’t stop ‘til you hit bottom.”
We passed an old cemetery, and I heard things. Soft sounds, like the swell of strings underneath a sappy romance, but they were unmistakably, undeniably there. No images or hallucinations, but the sounds were enough to send my skin wiggling around on my body.
I’d been in the presence of the dead more than a few times since making the trek from Savannah, but this time – right now – it was different. I felt a newfound power I hadn’t experienced before, not since leaving the Junction. It was the difference between seeing a tiger behind the bars of a cage and encountering one in the wilderness, charging directly for you.
“Drink it, McKane.”
I took another pull on the bottle and brought it away, coughing.
“You’re out of practice.”
“Thought I was out of the game completely.”
“Fuck-ups like you are never completely out. Don’t kid yourself – it was going to happen, sooner or later. Turn left up here.”
My mind reeled, and I thought I heard – no, I did hear – the gentle jangle of old slide guitar somewhere off into the distance, a tune not unlike Blind Willie McTell might have played somewhere near this very spot.
“You hear that?” I asked.
Fitz said nothing.
“Because I hear something.”
The sound of a high-tension cable snapping. Fingers across a dirty chalkboard. fork tines on a dinner plate. It was someone playing Hell’s soundtrack, and I had been granted access to a pre-release party.
“Your fucking ears doth deceive you,” Fitz said, “or is this the manifestation of the crazy? Is this what I’ve been looking forward to?”
I pretended to be oblivious.
The sound of otherworldly blues brought me back home, standing in the doorway of an old, abandoned juke joint, and for a moment the whole of the world was clear. Everything made sense. This wasn’t about me being a victim, a hero. About digging into the past for my own sake. Wasn’t about my ex-wife or her infidelities, either. It was about me making things right. A balance somewhere in the cosmic order of things had been knocked askew.
“How can I make this right?” I asked, gathering information from the dwindling island of my sober mind.
“I already told you,” Fitz replied. “You got fuck-all for options here. Listen to to me, maybe. That’s what you can do. Follow my commands and then die a painful death so nobody else has to. Your bitch of an ex-wife put you in this position. Think of it like this: she stays up in Atlanta, dies a whore’s death, and you have nothing to worry about. You’re home free, son.”
He laughed, content with the irony rolled up in what he was saying.
Then he continued: “Instead, she had to go and steal money. Not just money. That implies she stole a stack of bills. Ho-ho, no. A whole fucking suitcase full of money. Ends up in your possession, and you cut and run with it. Make your home in a new city. Don’t even have the sense god gave a shit weasel. Ever think of changing your name? Where the fuck did your parents even come up with that?”
“It’s a family name,” I managed.
“Stupid family, too.”
“Yeah. Well.”
I drank from the bottle of whiskey. Didn’t need any help or commands, this time around.
The first bottle died on the next pull. I licked the rim.
“There’s more where that came from.”
Another bottle out from under the seat. My chest burned. My throat burned. Fire that could only be quenched with more fire.
It was a struggle staying lucid, staying upright, and staying on the road. The Beam was beginning to push me into all directions at once, and I had to fight to stay centered.
Hard not to like the feeling, though.
“You ever read that old comic about Batman and Commissioner Gordon? One where he has the roller coasters and Gordon’s daughter paralyzed?”
I shook my head. “Missed that one.”
I bumped the curb with one passenger side tire. The car wobbled for a moment and then returned to its place in the right-hand lane. I barely felt connected to the steering wheel, didn’t know if what I was doing had any effect whatsoever.
“You don’t read comics?”
Again, a shake of the head.
“Reckon I read mostly mysteries.”
“Oh, man, I’ve got to tell you, you’re wrong as you are stupid. This one’s got a piece of me right there in it. Read it when I was a kid, and it never left me. Figured you’d have read it, just so’s you could see why it is that I am doing this to you.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
He never smiled, but this was probably when he was closest to that. “Because I can. Because it’s my nature. I have no long-harbored beef with you or the bitch you married. She stole some money. So what? Bankers steal money, and I don’t go around murdering their husbands, do I? No, I’m just programmed to kill people, and so I lucked into the right profession, I guess. All of the rest of it – the torture – is just the icing to me. And your downfall is my greatest accomplishment.”
I favored my hand, readjusted it, hoping the damned thing wouldn’t hurt as badly as it had before. Didn’t work. The pain sent white stripes across my field of vision. Thought I was going to wreck, maybe slide into the oncoming lane and end it all.
“And Batman, what’s he–” I began, but a sudden burp knocked the rest of the words back in me.
“Joker, he don’t need a reason to be who he is, do what he does. People don’t wonder, ‘Yeah, what’s his motivation?’ He doesn’t need one.”
“He’s a cartoon.”
“What?”
His uneven stare had a salutary effect on me, shutting me up. Only momentarily, though; I forgot all about his anger and decided to answer him anyway.
“The Joker’s a silly fucking cart
oon,” I said. “He don’t need motive because kids only need a fucking bad guy. You’re a bad, bad guy.”
He glared even harder.
“Oh, fucking shoot me,” I said with half-forced indifference. “You’re going to kill me anyway. You don’t want me to ruin Saturday morning cartoons for you, get on with it.”
The butt of the pistol whirled around in his hand, and the butt caught me square in the jaw. I swerved, sending us into the median. We barely missed a moss-covered oak and righted ourselves, just before a cop passed us by.
Fitz didn’t so much as check the rearview.
He plucked the Beam from the console between us, took a drink. Passed it back to me, motioned for me to drink. I didn’t have any problem with that.
“You feel it yet?” he asked.
I nodded. I did. I had a pretty good buzz going. Hangover worthy. Greasy Chinese food worthy.
“Again,” he said.
“No, I’m good,” I said. “I think I’m drunk.”
“I don’t care if you’re drunk. I want to see some high-level ghost action from you. See if you’re the crazy asshole everyone in your hometown says, or if you have this particular ability.”
“How– how did you find out?”
Deuce was the only person I knew of who knew, and he’d never tell anyone, let alone this jagoff.
The hint of a smile crossed Limba Fitz’s cracked mouth. “You’ve got more loose ends than a frayed t-shirt, McKane. You don’t think I’d just track you down without doing my homework, did you?”
“What did you do?”
“You did some detective work back in your shit-splat of a hometown. Already forgotten about the woman you helped? For free, I might add?”
“Janita.”
“Bingo, my man. Right fucking on.”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I did. Paid her a visit one morning, after I found out you had ducked out on me.”
“I didn’t know you were looking for me.”
“Still, can’t you imagine how shocked I was? I figured you’d live your whole life in that cesspool before dying alone and drunk. I had plans, Rolson. For you. All set into place. You and that broke-leg bitch and her dusty old voodoo doll of an uncle. Your old father-in-law and his sad wife. The whole lot of them. Vanessa – yeah, yeah – she was the beginning, man. Just the start of what I was going to do. Turn here.”
We turned onto a darkened, tree-lined road, a road that could have been any other in Savannah.
“But then you went off your meds or something and tracked down that hick politician and his pillow-biting son, and things went kablooey. I’m very rarely surprised, but I’ve got to tell you, I was. That’s when I decided to double down. Had to find a way to finish up this business.”
I took another slug from the bottle.
The slide guitar had slowly transformed into a sort of acoustic symphony. There was a thumping drum rhythm. A bouncing upright bass. A choir of voices completed the ensemble, though it wasn’t music they were interested in.
They wanted revenge. Redemption in its baldest form. Whereas those who’d tried to reach me before asked, these voices demanded. A harsher, more vituperative tone accompanied their requests. Each person felt cheated out of life, and so they felt justified in hounding me for a half-assed solution to their problems. Wouldn’t make them happy. Wouldn’t make them live. Wouldn’t bring them back from the dead. Just would give them the satisfaction of somebody listening.
Problem was, I was tired of listening. Helping Emmitt Laveau had ended with a half-dozen people in the ground, maybe more. If I continued this charade, who knew how many more would end up in a similar position?
But there was a mitigating factor here, something that made me want to keep the line of communication wide open between the world of the living and the world of the undead.
I tested it out, focusing my drunken attention on a single action, and when it worked, I had to force my smile to subside.
By sheer force of drunken will, I had managed to turn the voices down, to get them to hush.
Drink more, I thought. Work that old muscle again, and maybe you can–
The car came out of nowhere. For a second, it looked ghostly, some kind of supernatural, otherworldly automobile, but the impact was going to be very, very real. It was a Camaro, brand-new, with pitch-black windows that made it look as though it were driven by nobody at all.
I slammed on the brakes and swerved left, but the inevitability of the next moments had already been set into action. I grabbed the door handle with my left hand and clenched the steering with my right, but even that wouldn’t make much of a difference in what was to come.
We clipped the front quarter panel and spun around before toppling over onto one side. Sky became ground, and ground became dangerously close to my face. Sparks and fire and the sound of Hell collapsing accompanied this little unexpected trip. The force sent us rolling over onto the top, and we skidded for fifty or a hundred feet before coming to a metal-crunching stop in a nearby parking lot.
Cliché as it was to think, the silence was deafening. My ears ached. In the absence of fiberglass on blacktop at a forty-mile-per-hour clip, everything got the volume turned way down. Even the approaching sirens, which had, until the moment of impact, been curiously loud in my head, had turned into a muffled whine, a baby crying in the upstairs apartment.
I searched the car for my erstwhile compadre.
Fitz was bleeding but lucid. I looked at his hands, both of them, before coming to the conclusion that he was momentarily gunless. It was my opportunity. I unbuckled my seatbelt and dropped unceremoniously to the ground, landing on the car’s crumpled roof. The monster in the passenger seat reached for me, getting a good hold of my shirt, but I fought. I wasn’t about to let this slip through my fingers, or what remained of them.
I twisted toward the driver’s side window and got enough distance from Fitz. When he reached out a second time, I kicked him with what remained of my strength. I connected with his mouth, and he slipped into something approaching unconsciousness. His jaw hung at an odd angle, and I hoped desperately that it was broken and not just dislocated.
Burt I didn’t have time to find out. I made my escape.
At some point, while using my good hand to drag myself sluggishly forward through the rubble, I was ripped free and pulled onto the concrete and glass surrounding Fitz’s car.
I did my best approximation of a smile.
“Deuce, how did you find me?”
Deuce didn’t return my toothless grin. “I heard gunfire. Figured it had to be you.”
“Hah,” I said. The pain kept me from doing much more than that. I was swimming between the barrier that divides life from death.
“We don’t have time to catch up,” he said. “Something tells me Travis Bickle in there won’t stay unconscious for long.”
“He doesn’t get to decide where this ends,” I said, crawling back toward the car, digging for a pistol on the ground beneath my weakened hands.
Something appeared in my blurry vision. A gun. Not a gun; my gun. My .45.
“Where it always is,” Deuce said.
I took it and raised it, aiming at a wavy, indistinct mass in the car. I tried not to be intimidated by the approaching sirens. It wouldn’t be easy to disappear into the Savannah night, especially if I pulled the trigger.
But I did anyway. I unloaded a clip in the approximate position of Limba Fitz’s body, and then I let my best friend help me limp away from the crime scene.
twentieth chapter
Low-hanging trees and manicured bushes kept us hidden in the minutes following Deuce’s suicidal intervention. Cops appeared out of nowhere and went in all directions. It might have been funny, were I not the subject of this little manhunt. I tried to thank him, but the words came in heaps of nigh-unintelligible garbage, so I left it all where it fell.
“You’ve got to stop putting yourself in situations where I have to save you,�
�� Deuce said. “I almost wasn’t here, you old bastard. Not calling me back almost got you killed. You hear me?”
I nodded. I felt bad. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I held on by the thinnest of threads.
“Time,” I managed. My hand wasn’t so bad, but my mouth was in intolerable shape. I didn’t want to imagine how many teeth I had lost. “Needed to clean up.”
“You did a hell of a job of that. Looks like you’re cleaning up Savannah, one civilian at a time.”
That almost pushed me over the edge. I glared.
Deuce, to his credit, seemed to understand.
“I know you didn’t mean to fall off the wagon,” he said. “Hell, I barely got to see you on it. Tell you what: we make it out of this alive, I’ll treat you to an ice cold Coca-Cola.”
I shook my head.
“Beer?”
I nodded. “Cold.”
“Deal.”
That drove me forward, the opportunity to sit on a duct-taped barstool and watch SportsCenter with Deuce. I couldn’t help but wonder what I was actually getting out of hiding from him, but that was a question I’d have to answer for myself at another time.
“Something tells me your probation officer won’t like this new development,” he said.
“Won’t see me again,” I managed. I had plenty else to say, but all that came out were slobbery syllables approximating human language.
However, my vision was beginning to clear, as was the world. I was drunk, sure, but Deuce had caught me at the right time, right before I got into the hazy gray mode, where I realized what I was doing but didn’t give a shit.
“I guess not,” Deuce replied. “Tell you what, though. I won’t tell anybody. We’ve got some work to do, my friend, and it ain’t got nothing to do with your bullshit business here in Savannah, which it appears you entirely fucked up pretty well here tonight.”
“Toss the match and walk away,” I said. “That’s my tattoo.”
I slid up one sleeve, revealing a blank arm, and Deuce burst into incredulous laughter. It was good to see the big man laugh. Towards the end back in Lumber Junction, he had become as lugubrious a soul as I had, throwing furtive glances at nearby exits, as though somebody he didn’t want to see might be showing up.
