He looked up, pursed his lips. I couldn’t decide if he was a good or bad liar.
“Why are you so willing to stick your neck out for me, George?” I asked.
“I like you,” he said. “But I also like the side of right. The law, it’s not always right.”
“You’re a dying breed, George.” I said. But as soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back.
“Nahhh, just dying,” he said. “From this point out, I follow my heart. ‘Sides, the money is good and I have to sock away all the bucks I can for my son, his wife and my granddaughter.”
“You already make good money.”
“Like I said, I go with my heart. Probably would do it even if you didn’t pay me. But like I said, no matter what you bring me in on, no matter what favor it is, the bitch has to be right, or I won’t play the game.”
“Thanks,” I said, gazing into his eyes.
He smiled.
But as I turned for the door, he stopped me.
“Your hands,” he said. “You want me to take a look at them?”
I felt my throat close up.
“I tripped and fell is all,” I said.
“Sure thing,” George said.
A strange guilt weighed heavily upon my shoulders as I trudged back down the corridor towards the freight elevator.
- - -
Stocky agent stands, paces the flowery room while staring at the carpeted floor.
“Let’s change the subject for minute,” he says. “Go back in time to October, 1999.”
Coming from a G-man, the mere mention of the month and year makes my skin crawl.
“What about it?” I ask.
“According to your testimony, that’s the night you had your … how do you refer to it? … . your accident.”
I reach up with my left hand, pull back my left earlobe, expose the button-sized scar.
“This what you want to see?”
“Take it easy, Divine. We’re just talking here.”
I feel my eyes do this crazy roll inside their sockets, as though triggered by a sudden jolt of electricity or pain. Almost automatically, I pull another cigarette from the pack, shove it in between tingling index and middle finger, fire it up.
“I don’t see the connection between my accident and Scarlet Montana’s death.”
The stocky agent steps back over to the table, sits back down.
“I get to decide the questions, remember?”
“I’m a cop, remember?”
“Okay, I get it,” he says. “But what I want to know is, what drives a man to suicide?”
“What drives anybody to suicide?”
“Bankruptcy, clinical depression, terminal disease … bad fucking marriage.”
In my head, I picture my wife … the way I used to picture her to the point of obsession: fucking Mitch Cain. That one vision is what drove me over the edge, caused me to place the barrel of that .22 to my temple, pull the trigger. It was the answer they were searching for—the parallel they were trying to make between me and Scarlet Montana. The failed marriage leading to suicide. I might have acknowledged the connection, even offered him up a little credit where credit was due. But then all this was personal. That in mind, I wasn’t about to give them shit.
I breathe in and out, try my best to keep head and heart even keel.
I tell him, “If Scarlet committed suicide, I’m sure she had her reasons.”
“Just like you had your reasons.”
“Yeah, just like that.”
Stocky agent throws a look at his partner standing in the corner like, Can you believe this guy?
The agent sits back in his chair, lets out a breath.
He says, “Let me ask one more thing. Guess for me the odds of a man shooting himself in the head—point blank—and surviving?”
I smoke and think for a bit, as if it’s necessary.
“Ten million to one. Maybe a billion to one.”
“More like a one-hundred billion to one if you were to ask me,” stocky agent exclaimed. “Fucking no-way impossible scenario.”
I stamp out the cigarette, exhale a waft of gray-blue smoke.
“So what’s your point?”
“What’s the likelihood of a woman cutting the shit out of herself, not to mention her own neck, then disposing of the weapon after the deed?”
I laugh. I can’t help myself. “Impossible,” I say. “But weirder things have happened. Am I right?”
“Just take a look in the mirror, Divine,” Stocky agent giggles. “Take a real good look at the king of fucked-up weird.”
34
BY THE TIME HE arrived home, Jake Montana could hardly stand up.
The bourbon that swam inside his brain was toxic, poisoning. But it was also heaven on earth. No way was he going to face that house on his own. No way was he going to look into the face of death and not have his best friend Jack Daniels to watch his back.
Trudging up the stairs, he felt the weight of the universe pressing down upon gargantuan size forty-eight shoulders. Heart beat not in his chest, but in the back of his throat. If this had been an old Twilight Zone rerun, the camera, as though being projected out of Jake’s own eyes, would have followed his every step up the staircase, pulse pounding like a bass drum for the entire viewing audience to hear. When finally he got to the top of the staircase, the thump-thump-thumping would reach dramatic, if not chaotic, crescendo. Until an arm reached out, opened the bedroom door. When the light came on the audience would see a blood-stained bed and wall; a strip of yellow “Crime Scene” ribbon surrounding it.
Stepping into the room, Jake swallowed something hard and bitter.
He felt nauseas. But not sick.
He slinked his way into the room with all the enthusiasm of a condemned murderer stepping into a gas chamber. He approached the chest of drawers, opened the top drawer, reached into the underwear, pulled out a matching black bra and thong underwear. Closing the drawer, he then opened the adjoining drawer, pulled out a simple black sweater. Behind him was Scarlet’s closet. He moved over to it, picked out a black skirt and to go with it, a pair of black leather slip-ons.
“She’ll look pretty in this,” he whispered to himself.
Bringing the clothes up to his face, he breathed in his now-departed wife’s scent.
For only the second time in what felt like forever felt his eyes welling up; he felt the tears running down his cheeks.
He found himself staring at the bed and in his mind, he replayed the violence that must have occurred there. His imagination sped into overdrive. He saw himself with a knife in his hand. He saw the murder not as it happened, but as it might have happened. He knew what he was capable of, especially when he was drunk. Scarlet knew what he was capable of.
“My Christ in heaven,” he sobbed. “Please don’t let it be true.”
35
I SAW THE SHADOW of a figure standing in the driveway, even before I made the right turn onto Hope Lane.
A sole silhouette standing beside the house.
Here’s what I did: I cut the engine on the funeral coach, killed the lights, rolled quietly to a stop.
I got out of the car, Browning in hand, cut across the wet lawn to the slate steps that paralleled most of the split-level’s front facade. Making my way down to the drive, I glanced over my right shoulder with the expectation of finding a blue Toyota Landcruiser parked out front.
But I couldn’t see a thing.
No Landcruiser anyway.
Pressing my shoulder up against the corner of the house, I took a deep breath and exhaled. Then, with pistol aimed directly ahead, I stepped out of the shadows.
I shouted, “Down on the ground.”
“Please don’t shoot,” came the unexpected plea of a woman. “Please, please, I just came here to talk.”
The motion sensitive spotlight mounted to the stone wall above the garage had picked up our movement. It was now brightly illuminated.
She was one of the Psychic Fai
r women. The short one with the long gray hair and fifty extra pounds of beads wrapped around her neck. She was dressed in a long flowery skirt and a matching blouse, all of which were soaked with rainwater.
I pulled up my pistol, returned it to my shoulder holster, safety on.
“Good way to get yourself killed,” I said, my heart rate only now beginning to slow. “But what am I saying? You people are immortal.”
I sensed her trying to work up a smile. But it didn’t seem to take.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I thought that if I talked to you, face to face, I could somehow get it off my chest.”
“Get what off your chest?”
“Why Scarlet murdered herself.”
36
WE WERE SITTING AT the kitchen table, she sipping a cup of Lipton tea, me slow sipping a glass of Jack. She’d dried herself with a towel in the bathroom off the kitchen. The way her long gray hair draped her puffy pale face made her look quite sad. Her psychic name was Suma, but her real name was Natalie. So she explained.
“I knew if I said anything when you showed up at our meeting, I would have been in big trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
She pressed her lips together.
“Just … trouble. Maybe tossed from the group.”
“I get the feeling your master is anything but a live-and-let-live kind of hippie.”
She tried to smile. But again it was useless.
She said, “Yes, the master Reverend is controlling. But he is not the reason why I am here.”
“Why are you here?” I asked, taking another taste of the whiskey.
She sipped her tea, sat back in her chair.
“She had no family, you know,” Suma-slash-Natalie said. “Scarlet Montana. She had no family. For the past twelve months, we had been her family. She liked to tell us that.”
I thought about it. I was well aware that Scarlet’s parents had died when she was young; that she had no siblings. But in my heart, I knew Suma was not referring to that kind of immediate family.
“She was learning a lot about herself,” the pleasant but shy woman continued. “About her inner self. Her dreams were becoming more and more vivid, more luminous, full of flying and astral images. But then, that was also her problem.”
I asked her to be more specific.
“While she never spoke up about it to the class, I knew that she was being plagued by nightmares.”
I poured some more whiskey. She said, “You see, Mr. Divine, for some people it can take an entire lifetime to reach the point that Scarlet reached in just one year. The point where one becomes so in touch with their subconscious soul, that they can actually control their dreams.”
“I guess I haven’t reached that point,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve never tried. But for some people, the separation of the soul from its body is the pinnacle of the mystical pyramid.” She paused for a beat, gazing into her tea. “Of course, that kind of power carries with it some risks.”
“What risks?”
“As heavenly as the vivid dream state can be, so too can it turn hellish.”
“Scarlet’s dreams weren’t heavenly, I take it.”
“While they would start out beautifully and wonderfully, they would almost always regress into a nightmare in which several shadow-like figures would appear. The way she told it to me, these figures would carry her paralyzed body away to an unknown place. They would strap her down, slice her open. She would experience this dream night after night. It would be so vivid, so real, it was like she was living her own death over and over again.”
I sat back, tried to imagine what it would be like having to survive that kind of nightmare, night after night. Evil, demon-like figures pinning me down, cutting me up.
“As far as you know, she never tried to seek out professional help?”
“Scarlet was determined to work through the nightmares. Face them head on, show the black figures in her subconscious that she was not afraid of them. Once she succeeded, they would disappear and forever stop taunting her. No psychologist on earth could have assisted her with that. For Scarlet, her war with the demons had to be fought battle by battle, and only by her and her alone.” Suma finished her tea. I offered to make some more. But she didn’t want any more tea.
What she wanted was Jack.
I poured a shot into her teacup.
She downed it in one swift pull.
The psychic teetotaler meets the barfly.
“I’m not being entirely truthful,” she confessed, grabbing hold of the bottleneck, helping herself to another shot. “Scarlet did seek out help. Not good help, but something to help her cope all the same.” I asked her to tell me about it.
“I caught her in the bathroom one night at the church. I walked into a stall. She was snorting the stuff right off the toilet tank through a rolled-up dollar bill.”
“Snorting,” I said like a question.
“It was a brown powder.”
“Heroin,” I said, without raising my voice. “You’re sure you saw her snorting heroin?”
“Like I said, it was a powder and it was definitely brown.”
My stomach cramped up.
At that point a brick could have slammed me upside the head and it would not have shocked me more than I already was.
I thought, if Scarlet was snorting heroin—if this woman was telling the truth—then it was becoming plainly obvious that I had no clue who the real Scarlet Montana was. I relied on my somewhat damaged gray matter to produce a vivid image and pictured my sometime lover leaning over a toilet tank, her lush red hair veiling her face while she sucked brown shit up into her nostrils using a rolled-up dollar bill for a straw. Sitting there at the kitchen table I ran the image over and over again in my brain. But no matter how many times I played it, rewound it, paused it, I could not get used to it.
But then, I thought about something else: if it could be proven that she had been desperate enough to snort heroin, then it was yet another bit of evidence that would lend itself well to the suicide theory. Still, I was refusing to believe it.
I asked, “You any idea where she might have scored the drugs?”
She drank her shot. Again, just one swift pull. I offered her a third, but she declined.
“Sometimes there was a man who would show up after the meetings,” she said. “A funny looking man with white skin. Whiter than white skin. He would come pick her up and together they would drive off.”
The kitchen chair, I thought it slid out from under me.
I envisioned my secret Albino admirer.
I asked, “Did this man by any chance drive a big four-by-four S.U.V.—a Toyota Landcruiser maybe?”
Her cheeks were a bit flushed from the whiskey. They looked a lot healthier than when she had first walked into my kitchen from out of the rain.
“A Landcrusier like all the soccer moms drive,” she said. “Definitely.”
I bit my lip, stood up.
“Anything else you want to tell me?”
She stood. Together we headed for the front door.
“Nothing. Only that it makes me very sad that Scarlet is gone.”
“Don’t you believe that she is still alive?” I asked. “Walking around in another’s body?”
She grinned out of the corner of her mouth.
“Oh, that’s just the stuff we like to believe on Monday nights. The Psychic Fair might be good for the soul, but it doesn’t make you immortal, Mr. Divine. Nor does it pay the bills. It’s simply a salve, not a remedy.” A sweet smile. “Like a glass of whiskey on a rainy spring night.”
“I guess Scarlet could be the proof of that,” I said.
I asked her if she’d like me to drive her home. Or at least allow me to call her a cab.
She said she preferred to walk in the rain. Something about cleansing the mind. I didn’t argue.
But before she walked out, I stopped her long enough to ask her one more thing.
/> “Why are you so convinced that Scarlet killed herself?”
“Because she was very sweet and she would never hurt anybody,” she explained. “But she was very, very sad.”
“It could be that someone wanted her dead,” I said.
“Why on earth would anyone want to hurt her?”
In my mind I saw Jake Montana; I saw Mitch Cain; I saw the black shadows that stabbed her, night after night. Maybe they had their reasons for killing her. Because Scarlet might have known something and was about to use it against them. It would have been motivation enough. It was a motivation stronger than any I could have harbored.
I said, “Maybe it’s true what they say about nice people finishing last.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I have this feeling that Scarlet Montana was never even in the race.”
She took my hand then. Without asking. She just took my hand in hers and, like the Reverend had done earlier, gave it the once over with wide open eyes.
I asked, “You see anything to dispute your fearless leader’s assessment?”
She bit down on her lip, let go of my hand.
“It’s late,” she said. “And all those scratches. It’s very difficult to see anything.”
“But you do see something,” I pressed.
This time when she smiled, it stuck.
I let Suma out. Or was it Natalie?
She turned, looked into my face with wide, moist eyes.
“Divine,” she said. “It’s such a pretty name.”
“It’s just a name,” I said.
She wished me inner peace.
I told her all I wanted was a good night’s sleep.
“One day, Mr. Divine,” she whispered, “we’ll have all the sleep we ever wished for.”
37
SEATED ON THE EDGE of his bed inside his empty bedroom. Jake focused his eyes on the door that led out into the hall. In his right hand he gripped a .38 Smith & Wesson service revolver. Turning the barrel so that it aimed up and directly at his face, he opened his mouth and slowly took the barrel in.
The gunmetal tasted acrid and metallic against his tongue and teeth.
It was cold.
The pointy sight scratched the roof of his mouth. For a fleeting moment, he thought he might gag.
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