Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 2

by G. Wayne Miller

  When Sweetie graduates from college, he thinks, I’ll give her a bottle of her own. That, and a brand-new car. A red Mustang would be nice, if they’re still making them.

  On Tuesday he stops by the office. Nothing much is doing. He leaves before noon. When he gets home, there’s a car in the drive. A fancy blue Saab. Jesus fuck Mary! It’s her! The bitch! What the hell’s she want?

  Why didn’t she call? And where is she, anyway? She’s not in her car. She’s not in the yard. She must be inside. Tony runs to the door and goes in.

  Louise is in the kitchen. The phone is still in her hand. She looks like she’s suddenly taken ill. Her face is ashen and she is shaking so badly Tony can feel it through the soles of his feet, halfway across the floor.

  “The police are on their way,” is all she says.

  What does that mean, Tony wonders. Then it hits him. Oh Jesus. She’s found Sweetie. Must have been rummaging around down cellar for some of her old clothes or the TV she left behind. Must have let herself in with her key. Why didn’t he have the locks changed, the way he kept intending to? Why has he been so stupid? Why didn’t he know the bitch was bound to mess things up? How could he have been so careless?

  Instinctively, his right hand creeps under his jacket. Thank God he’s packing his pistol. This could get nasty.

  “You didn’t . . touch her, did you?” Tony says. His voice is hysterical. He’s all tight again. “You didn’t break the glass, did you? Answer me, Louise. Answer me!”

  He steps toward her. She screams. She brushes past him. She runs out the door. He doesn’t care. His only concern is Sweetie. The harm that bitch might have done. An image of Sweetie on the concrete floor explodes across his mind; he sees broken glass and a giant pool of water. How that would hurt! What shape that would leave his dear Sweetie in!

  But nothing’s been touched. The pump’s still running. The tank’s intact. Sweetie’s happy and content, just like when he left her. He pries the hood off and reaches in for her.

  “Oh, Sweetie,” he says.

  He starts to cry. Everything suddenly has changed. Tony understands that. Tony’s very sensitive like that

  Funny, isn’t it, the way the mind works?

  You’d think a guy would have blotted almost ever thing about his ex from the old memory bank, but quite the opposite’s been true for Tony. He remembers every little detail, the clothes she wore on such and such a evening, the salad dressing she prefers, her Social Security number, the name of her hairdresser, the inscription on her engagement ring, her favorite characters on her favorite show, Saturday Night Live. He remembers the perfume she was wearing the night they met. He remembers their first phone conversation, their first date, the name of the place where they spent their honeymoon: Dante’s Retreat, located in one of the prettiest, most out-of-the-way parts of the whole Northeast.

  “Pocono Pines,” he says to the 411 operator. “Dante’s Retreat.”

  He listens, hangs up, dials.

  “And do you still have water beds?” he says. “Good What about air conditioning? Super! Great! One more question: is it central air or individual units? Outstanding!”

  Individual units, he thinks. I could loop a coil through it and back to Sweetie as easy as pie.

  “Yes, I would like to reserve a room,” he says. “Need an ice machine, if possible, please. The name’s Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Warren Smith. We’ll be staying at least week.”

  Before he closes the trunk, he opens the lid of the cooler. The ice is packed carefully around Sweetie. She’s got her Raggedy Ann. She’s got her blankie.

  “We can’t stay,” he says, “because mean and nasty people are coming to try and take you away. Daddy could never allow that to happen to his precious Sweetie. Not in a million years.”

  It’s not only Sweetie who’s in the trunk. He’s got his power drill and toolbox and some leftover plastic and his rifle and ammunition.

  He smiles, thinking about how he bought the rifle hot and purchased the ammunition a little here, a little there, to make it all but impossible to trace back to him. Those bastards with their computers—Tony Simeone can play their game! Yessiree Bob!

  He closes the trunk. He gets in his car. He double-checks his wallet to make sure he has the MasterCard. He double-checks his revolver. He starts the engine. He backs out of the drive. He turns left on River Road. As he starts over the crest of the hill, he hears sirens. In his rearview, he catches a glimpse of flashing red lights. Cruisers. There must be six or seven of them. They’re all turning into his drive.

  “You just close your eyes now and rest, Sweetie,” he says. “We’ve got a very long drive ahead of us.”

  Honey Love

  That howl — that terrible howl that pierces your skull — I know what that is. That’s Honey love. She’s found me again — or where I was until moments ago, when her clawing at the front door shattered my sleep. I don’t pretend to know how she tracked me down, what clues there might have been this time for her to follow. What matters is I had a room next to the fire escape, and I got out.

  There it is again that howl, followed by a scream that is terminated mid-lung. That’s Honey Love’s latest victim. I can tell you she won’t stop, not yet. She’ll go room to room, strangling as many of these drifters as she can, decapitating them with that incredible strength, hoping one of them is me. I see lights coming on. I hear yelling. Soon, there will be police sirens and the squeal of tires and the crack of large-bore handguns — so laughingly futile against Honey Love. I’ll be gone before then. Slipped away into midnight, my only possessions the clothes on my back.

  But for now, I am spellbound.

  It is a warm September night. The sky is star-filled and there’s a teaser of a breeze, not at all unpleasant. I am in the park that abuts this boarding house, and I am safe, at least momentarily. I am curious how many she will kill tonight, and I am curious to know the reaction of the police here in Baltimore, but mostly I am curious about how Honey Love looks. So many months — so many dead - and I’ve yet to see her. I’ve read the newspapers, of course, seen the body bags and the puzzled detectives on TV, but I’ve yet to see her. Not since we had her that night in Gene Endeavors Ltd., the firm Freddy Fiorello owned.

  If you need a beginning, it was the day Freddy called to say the doctors had finally diagnosed his wife. I was Freddy’s financial vice president, so I knew his wife had been having medical problems. No one suspected multiple sclerosis, but there it was, as grim and untouchable as a bullet in the spine. There was a chance she’d survive for years, the doctors said, and there was an equal chance she’d go quickly, but either way her demise would be irreversible and torturous. Freddy was crying by the time he hung up the telephone.

  Connie Fiorello — he always called her Honey — was only 28, a dozen years his junior. She was smart, funny, attractive in a Scandinavian way — the sort of woman every man wants for his wife, I guess. I was the one who introduced them. I was dating Honey’s older sister, had been for years. Honey and Freddy hit it off immediately. After six months of a giddy courtship, they married .Now they were going to settle down and have a family. The good life. Suddenly, everything was a nightmare.

  As the disease progressed, and it progressed with a speed that amazed even the doctors, Honey became obsessed. She wanted to die. Wanted out of all the doctors, the medications, the hospitalizations — desperately wanted out of what she soon was: an incontinent, wasted, 85-pound skeleton who couldn’t so much as raise a glass of water to her lips. I think it was then, when use of a spoon was beyond her, that she asked Freddy to euthanize her. She would gladly commit suicide, she said, but that, too, was beyond her by then. That was the supreme cruelty of her predicament, she confided to me. How utterly, despicably dependent she’d become.

  Freddy was flabbergasted.

  When the shock had worn off, and he saw she was serious — saw this wasn’t some bizarre joke — he refused. Religion had nothing to do with it, nor did fear of the law. Freddy was
hopelessly in love. In a lifetime of women, he’d never had one like her. Never would again. And he was an optimist. He believed that somehow a cure would be found, that the final breakthrough would come just in the nick of time, that next Labor Day it would be Honey’s miraculous recovery they’d be spotlighting on the Telethon, her photo and incredible story all over TMZ.

  Freddy’s decision didn’t surprise me; no, I’d have done the same thing in his shoes. What was so shocking was Honey’s reaction. At first, disbelief. Then anger. Finally, an emotion I hesitate to call hatred — but what other word is there? She could still talk during that period, if only barely, and the depth of her new feeling for Freddy still brings a shiver.

  Honey’s disease claimed her one morning in April. She was in a private hospital by then, a ritzy place in a fashionable Manhattan neighborhood that was costing a grand a day. Freddy wasn’t with her. He was at the firm. He took the call in my office. Honey was gone, the voice on the other end of the line said. Gone peacefully while she napped. Freddy cried, then left without saying a word. There was no wake. The funeral and burial were private. I thought I understood.

  Freddy didn’t mention her for weeks. He threw himself into his work, and Gene Endeavors turned a profit for the first time in its four-year history, and after a while I had almost convinced myself that he’d gotten over her.

  But of course he hadn’t. One night — it was in July, two months after she died — I was at his place for dinner. Over scotch, we were discussing another of his activities: running cocaine from Miami to New York. That was how he made his real money, you see: smuggling. Freddy was Mob. I guess you could say I was, too, although I wasn’t into it anywhere near as deep as Freddy; I only laundered the money, making it squeaky clean, which is how offshore banks like it. The rest was his show. Gene Endeavors was a front. I think that’s why the trial made such big headlines. Once upon a time, vending machines were your standard Mob fronts — now here was this 21st-Century gene-engineering firm laundering money from coke. It made great copy.

  That night, Freddy outlined his plan to... I hesitate to say bring Honey back. I can’t say I hadn’t seen it coming all those weeks he never mentioned her, my instincts told me something had to be going on inside his head. Still, it wasn’t until there in his living room — his voice a detached, Arctic-cold thing that I realized how crazy Honey’s death had made him.

  “I can’t go along with that,” I said when he’d finished.

  But I could.

  And I did.

  You might think he’d have wanted to try cloning her, but he didn’t. He knew about other cloning attempts — one particularly famous case from Europe made the rounds of the celebrity sites a few years back — and he knew about some top-secret projects, including one financed by the CIA, that were close to success. He would have gone for a project of his own except for one pressing consideration: time. It would have been years to raise a clone, had we succeeded. Freddy didn’t have that kind of time.

  No, his plan was to splice tissue from his dead wife’s brain into the brain of a living woman who physically resembled Honey. His dream was that Honey’s genetic characteristics would take root in their new host, and that her intelligence, her wonderful sense of humor — all those traits he so loved — would blossom through the wonders of science. I know it was a hare-brained scheme, a madman’s dream. I knew then it didn’t have a ghost of a chance of succeeding. But money talks. It was one of the ancient philosophers, I believe, who said that there are no limits to what a man will do, providing the price is right. That philosopher was correct. But the bottom line was how dangerously unbalanced Freddy had become. There was no way of predicting his reaction if I’d said no. And had I tried to stop him — I honestly believe my life would have been at risk.

  So I made the necessary arrangements. I lined up the neurosurgeon, Dr. Gunther Reinhard, an Austrian physician whose works have been published in a dozen languages, and who, like everyone, has his price. I secured the confidential cooperation of Gene Endeavor’s research director: Richard McMaster, a humorless but frightfully intelligent young man whose name someday was going to be before a Nobel Prize jury. You may wonder how we’d been able to lure him away from Harvard, where he was an associate professor. The answer’s no mystery. Despite being a front, Gene Endeavors was professional. It held several promising patents, had a growing reputation in a very crowded field.

  We selected Honey’s sister to be the host.

  It wasn’t only Barbara’s physical resemblance, but the coincidence of her already having 50 percent of Honey’s genes — and a personality much like her sister’s. I was blown away by his choice — before she dumped me, Barbara and I had come this close to marrying — but I didn’t protest. Couldn’t. Freddy had never liked being contradicted. He liked it even less after Honey died.

  Early the night of the procedure — that’s what he insisted on calling it, “the procedure” — a couple of Freddy’s dirty-work boys, two overweight, sunglassed gentlemen I’d never seen, snatched Barbara from her West Side apartment. They delivered her, bound and gagged, in the trunk of a black Lincoln. In through the back door she was carried, to a freight elevator, and on up to the top floor, where I’d put together a makeshift surgical suite.

  I should note that both Reinhard and McMaster had confided to me how ridiculous they considered Freddy’s scheme — how, from a scientific point of view, it had zero chance of succeeding. That wasn’t the point. The point was we were being paid to put on a show, and like good actors, we went along. It was Reinhard’s idea to incorporate radioisotopes into the procedure; he guessed correctly how much that would impress Freddy. McMaster contributed the chemicals. I don’t remember their names, only that they had Latin roots and a half dozen syllables apiece.

  Before Reinhard put Barbara under, my eyes locked with hers. I’m not sure what registered in mine — sympathy, shame, a wisp of memory — but what was in hers was unmistakable. Fear, but only on the surface. Deeper, there was hatred — the same searing hatred Connie had for Freddy her final days. I looked away quickly, then retreated to a corner, where I remained until Reinhard was done.

  I shall spare you the clinical details of the procedure; suffice it to say it was long and bloody. The blood didn’t bother me.

  But the tissue implant did. It was a sliver of Honey’s brain, cross-sectioned from the organ by Freddy himself. Understand, even before he buried his wife, Freddy was looking ahead. He’d chosen an undertaker carefully, and that undertaker had obliged him by removing Honey’s brain and preserving it in a five-gallon pickle jar. The sight of it floating in there, lumpy and grey, made me nauseous. When Freddy reached in for it, a loving look on his face, I almost lost it.

  Surgery lasted five hours, the post-op radiation show another two. She emerged, bandaged but breathing, at 4:30 a.m. Freddy stood over her, stroking her brow, whispering “Honey Love, Honey Love,” over and over. Reinhard said it would be two hours before the anesthesia wore off, weeks before we could assess the psychological outcome. Cosmetically, you could tell immediately he was a professional. I know there’s the assumption that these kinds of shenanigans have to end in horrible disfigurement — call it the Frankenstein Syndrome — but Honey Love wasn’t mutilated. The shave, the incision, the skull cut, the stitch-up — all done with finesse. When her hair grew back, there wouldn’t be a trace of what had happened to her. She’d be the same knockout blond as ever.

  Freddy’s plan was to let her recover just enough to leave the country. Their destination was to be one of those Caribbean islands where the natives know not to ask suspicious-looking Americans questions. There, Freddy and Honey would resume their fairy tale. I know how mad it was, but you must understand this was no longer a man playing with a full deck. Not even a quarter of a deck.

  Freddy never got the chance. The sun was just coming up over the East River when Honey Love went into cardiac arrest — or what we assumed was cardiac arrest. I’d been expecting something like that,
and so had Reinhard and McMaster. I think they were surprised it took so long. Reinhard tried unsuccessfully to revive her. She was dead. There was no question of that: no blood pressure, no pulse, flat lines on the EKG and EEG machines.

  Dead.

  As a door nail.

  It was going on noon when we were finally able to tear Freddy away from the corpse. We were going to return that night, when darkness would give us cover to get her body safely out of the building and back into the Lincoln. Freddy’s dirty-work boys were going to take it from there. I assumed East River and concrete.

  Except there was no body that night.

  Honey Love was gone.

  What we found, instead, was destruction the lights smashed, every machine busted, scalpels bent — bent, like Uri Geller forks. The walls looked like a jackhammer had been taken to them; studs were splintered and plaster was everywhere. Blood was sprayed all over. The brain jar was broken, and the organ — I swear I am not making this up — had a piece bitten out of it.

  In light of later events, I can’t speculate what had happened. Maybe Reinhard came back and did something. Maybe God decided to punish us for what we had done. Standing there that night, we had no idea. Perhaps it was some kind of weird prank, we thought; perhaps her body had been stolen by punks on dope. For days, I lived in fear of the police inspector’s knock. Naturally, no one told Freddy. Reinhard took his cash and caught a flight back to Europe. McMaster went into a blue funk. A month later, he took his old job at Harvard. A week after that, his body turned up on a road outside Boston. A jogger found his head, bloodied and battered, in a gully. McMaster must’ve talked. That’s what I figured then.

  The indictments were handed down in August.

  They had nothing to do with Honey Love; they concerned Freddy’s drug-running activities.

  Racketeering. Possession with intent to distribute. On and on. I knew the second they came down the feds had him, and had him good. I was charged, too, with being an accessory, but my charges were piddling compared to his.