The Sleep Police

by Jay Bonansinga

  “Sure.”

  Joe heard the click of a hold button and then another stretch of silence. C’mon, Andrews, don’t leave me out here hanging by my balls, I gotta do this, I gotta do it now—

  “Slugger?”

  “Hey, Tom.”

  “What’s going on? Jesus—I haven’t done any fumigating for weeks. All I know, there’s a bug on my kitchen phone.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Tom—I got a simple problem, needs taking care of.”

  “Whattya mean—you got a problem?”

  “I mean, I got a problem.”

  “Don’t you just take care of these things yourself?”

  “This won’t work that way.”

  “What are you talking about? Aren’t I supposed to come to you?”

  “Not this time.”

  “I thought you were the button man. I’m just a lowly lawyer, for Chrissake; I’m not The Outfit I don’t give orders.”

  It was true. Andrews was one of the myriad intermediaries who passed along contracts, money, or general news on hits. He had been working with Joe for several years now, and Joe trusted him about as well as one person could trust another in the killing game. Andrews’s store front Wilber, Michaels and Associates was a notorious old lefty law office on the west side. Specialized in ACLU stuff, tenants rights cases, 1st Amendment crap. Had a direct pipeline to various underworld splinter groups. Tom Andrews was one of the few closet liberals left who had a taste for the underworld, and Joe had always enjoyed doing business with him.

  Joe gripped the receiver tighter. “This is a special situation, Tom.”

  “Special situation? Whattya mean?”

  “Truth is, it’s kinda unusual, Tom that’s why I called you.”

  “Listen, Sluggo I’m pretty comfortable that this phone is clean as a whistle, and I’m too tired to play the Man from Uncle, so if you need something special, why don’t you just tell me what it is?”

  “Fact is, Tommy, I do need somebody to get whacked.”

  “Who is it then? Who’s the target?”

  Just tell him, for God’s sake, just say it. “The target’s me, Tommy. Yours truly.”

  There was a blip of silence, and then a low titter on the other end as Tom Andrews chuckled at one of the better jokes he had heard all week.

  “I’m not joking, Tommy.”

  The chuckling wilted. “Wait a minute, you’re serious? You’re serious about this?”

  Joe smiled to himself, a humorless smile. “If you’ll excuse the pun, Tommy, I’m dead serious.”

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  ANIMAL RITES

  Stirring awake, Daddy Norbert found himself tied to a moldy Lazy Boy in the tool shed out back of the garage. Head felt like a rusty nail had been driven into it. Something sticky was digging into his belly. Would have rubbed his pus-bleary eyes, but he found his big calloused mitts hog-tied to the springs beneath him.

  “Whylmmmphrump?” Daddy’s query was sabotaged by stupid lips.

  “Good!” The voice popped out of the shadows like a firecracker. “You’re comin’ awake.”

  “lllliihhsh?” Although Daddy’s mouth was still asleep, his eyes were sharpening, beginning to make out a faint figure before him.

  “Takes it a spell to wear off,” the voice said.

  Daddy Norbert blinked. “Lizzy... ? That you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “The hell is going on?!”

  Stone silence.

  Daddy Norbert blinked some more, and started putting things together. His teenage stepdaughter Lizabeth must have slipped him a mickey back at the house and dragged him out here to the tool shed. Girl was seriously wrong in the head. Been that way ever since her mama died. Getting skinnier and skinnier, messin’ with that faggotty colored boy up to Little Rock.

  Now the girl must’ve gone stark raving screwy. Crouching in the shadows across from Daddy, fiddling with something that sounded like a tin cup with a nail in it. Girl was crazy as a cross-eyed loon.

  “Almost ready,” the voice finally said. “Just hold your horses.”

  “What in the wide friggin’ world of sports is going on?!”

  “Be still.”

  “What did you slip me, girl?”

  “Called Tranxene. It’s temporary, so just shut up and sit still for a minute.”

  “Don’t you sass me!”

  Skinny little bitch didn’t even react, just kept on working with that rattling box of metal. Daddy’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. He could see strips of old duct tape wrapped around his massive girth. Something leather was holding his head in place like blinders on a plough horse. Smelled like wet dog fur.

  Daddy swallowed hard. “Lizzy why you doin’ this?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Whattya mean, secret?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her all of a sudden. His bowels were beginning to burn, his mouth going dry as wheat meal. It was dawning on him, this girl could very easily hurt him. Maybe hurt him a lot. “I’m sorry for what I did to you and your mama. You hear me? I’m tellin’ ya how sorry I am.”

  No answer.

  “Lizzy?”

  She switched on the light.

  The sudden glare of an old aluminum scoop light exploded across the shed. Blinking fitfully, Daddy saw the shriveled carcasses splayed across his work bench to his left. His future projects. Parts of a rabbit, a young fox, the hind end of a bobcat. Rusty traps were arrayed across the walls. Behind him, mounted on a shim of hardwood, a deer looked on, its lifeless eyes glimmering.

  Daddy looked down at Lizzy and drew in a sudden breath.

  She was on the floor, securing one of Daddy’s favorite guns, a custom Roberts rifle, into a weird contraption of metal and wood. Looked like a spring loaded skeet shooter. The rattling sound that Daddy had heard must’ve been the bullet. Lizzy was loading a .219 Zipper into the gun’s chamber. The Zipper was Daddy’s favorite brand. A 90-grain, heavy powder compression load, the bullet would take down an adult Elk bull at two hundred yards.

  The barrel of the rifle had a bead drawn right smack dab on Daddy.

  “Now hold on, child!” Daddy Norbert started breathing hard, fighting his restraints, electric current shooting up his spine. Fear made his sphincter contract. “Yyyyyyyyyyyou ain’t gonna shoot me just simmer down now!”

  “There,” Lizzy said softly to herself, finishing the load as though she had just put a cake in the oven. She stood up and gazed at Daddy emotionlessly, her eyes rimmed in dark circles. She looked like a person who had just come home from a funeral. Drained and wrung out. She was holding a jury-rigged triggering device the pull-string from an old push mower. It was tethered to the Roberts. Underneath Lizzy’s sleeveless blouse, a tank top had the letters P.E.T.A. imprinted on it. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

  Daddy had never seen that before.

  “Taste it?” she calmly asked him. “The fear?”

  “Let-let-let-let-lllet go of that thing,” Daddy stammered, “we can talk this out.”

  “Like the deer?” She bored her gaze into him. “You talk things over with the deer?”

  “Wwwwwwaitwaitwaitwait! Just tell me wwwwwwwwhat you want me to do? You want me to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry!

  Awright? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Lizzy didn’t answer. Instead, she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and began mouthing a secret litany. Daddy Norbert started to say something else, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the objects in her other hand. Lizzy was grasping a handful of objects twined together with string. Sprigs of herbs or weeds or some other kind of nonsense that her Jamaican boyfriend had probably given her. Strands of hair, human hair maybe. A silk ribbon, a bookmark from Lizzy’s old Concordance bible, and some other strands of unidentifiable fabric. But none of it currently seemed as important, or made as much of an impression on Daddy Norbe
rt, as the tiny black objects hanging from the bottom of the thing.

  The broken beads of her dead mother’s rosary.

  “Hold the phone!” Daddy Norbert barked at her. “You ain’t mad about no deer! You’re still steamed about your goddamned ma! For God’s sake, it ain’t my fault she up and died! Already told you a million times, I’m sorry I hit her! You’d think I planted the goddamn cancer in her goddamn cervix myself! It weren’t my fault! Now Lizzy, just stop it! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!”

  Lizzy kept gazing at him.

  “YOU SKINNY LITTLE HALFPINT, PUT THAT GUN AWAY ‘FORE I GIVE YOU ANOTHER WHOOPIN’!!”

  Lizzy gripped the cable and smiled. Her face was a rictus of pain. “This is for you, great white hunter,” she uttered. It sounded rehearsed.

  Then she pulled the cable.

  “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

  Eyes slamming shut, Daddy Norbert winced. Matter of fact, he winced so hard a little squirt of shit spurted from his anus. He thought he heard the pop. The sharp blast of the hammer hitting the pin, and the bones shattering in his face. But he must’ve imagined it. Actually, he felt nothing. Just the warmth in the seat of his pants and the painful throb of his heart.

  He opened his eyes.

  At first, he figured the gun must’ve misfired. There was a thin veil of smoke rising in the light, and Daddy thought he smelled the oily aroma of gunpowder. Lizzy was backing toward the door, her gaze still riveted to the man. What the hell was going on? Why was she looking at him like that?

  “For you... “ she whispered as she slipped through the door and into the cool Arkansas night.

  “What the?” Daddy looked down at the gun and studied it for another moment. The black hole of its barrel was staring at him, the smoke diffusing, the silence like a block of ice over Daddy’s head. Daddy blinked again and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. All at once, he realized just how lucky he really was. “I’ll be a sonoffabitch,” he muttered, grinning to himself in spite of his frayed nerves. “Twenty-three years in the woods, and not one dud, and tonight the god damned thing decides to misfire!”

  He began to giggle.

  “I’ll be a swivel-hipped sonoffabitch! Goddamned misfire! GOD DAMNED MISS-FUCKING-FIRE!! WHOOPTY-DO AND FUCK ME BLUE!!”

  Daddy laughed and laughed and laughed, and then he looked down at the gun.

  His laughter died.

  Something had appeared in the mouth of the barrel. Something round. Just barely poking out, the light shining off it like a tiny planet. At first, Daddy wondered if it was an obstruction, an odd fragment of metal that had gotten wedged in there during his last hunting trip. The thing looked familiar, the blue steel gleam winking in the dim light.

  The .219 calibre Zipper.

  “Holy fuckin’ shit,” Daddy uttered, staring at the bullet peeking out of the barrel. He’d heard stories of freak misfires, bullets getting lodged in barrels and such. But he never really believed them. Always figured it was whiskey talk, nothing more.

  Grin widening, he closed his eyes. “Sweet Jesus, Lord in heaven, I realize I ain’t been to church in a month of Sundays, but I wanna thank y’all just the same.”

  A chill breeze wafted in through the half-ajar door, and it cooled the beads of sweat on Daddy’s forehead. He opened his eyes, grinning like an idiot. He could smell the surrounding farms, the sorghum, manure and wet hay. The odors never smelled so good to Daddy Norbert. He was alive, and that was all that mattered. Next step was to figure out how to get out of this fucking chair. Glancing down at the rifle, he took one last gander at the bullet.

  His smile faded.

  The bullet had moved, just a tad. Matter of fact, if Daddy Norbert was any less familiar with the shape of the Zipper’s casing, he might have not even noticed. But there it was, poking out of the barrel, one, maybe two additional inches of casing. Daddy swallowed air. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, op’kil illusion or whatever you call it. He studied the muzzle of the Roberts and felt his heart flip-flop in his chest.

  The bullet was half way out the barrel.

  “Gotta have that damn thing checked.” He chuckled softly. “Ain’t that a kick.”

  Daddy stared at the rifle. If he didn’t know better, he could have sworn the bullet had moved some more. Moved with the subtle steadiness of a clock. ‘Course, that was impossible. That was damn near mad hatter crazy. He took a breath and tried to rip his arms free. The rope held tight. His fingers were going numb, and he could feel the mess in his pants, burning his butt crack, stinking to high heaven.

  “Wait’ll I get my hands on that skinny little — !

  All at once, Daddy Norbert noticed the bullet was protruding nearly all the way out of the barrel now. Defying gravity. He blinked, and he blinked, and he blinked some more, and he still saw it. With his very own watery eyes. The Zipper was sticking almost clean out of the muzzle. Daddy wondered if a strange pocket of air had gotten trapped in the muzzle behind it... or something like that. Didn’t really matter though, because the bullet was going to clear the lip of the barrel any second now and fall to the floor.

  Except it didn’t fall.

  “What the fuck?”

  Daddy gawked. Damn bullet hung in midair in front of the muzzle like a moth in aspic. No visible means of support. And Daddy got to thinking all of a sudden, thinking about Lizzy and that shit she was holding in her hand a minute ago and how she had that screwy look in her eye. Something cold and hard started turning in Daddy’s gut. Chills rolled up his back, and the tiny hairs stood at attention along the back of his neck. The duct tape was digging into his belly. His head throbbed against its restraint. The worst part wasn’t the fact that the bullet was frozen in space, which was pretty goddamned impossible if you thought about it for a second. Wasn’t even the fact that it seemed to be slowly yet steadily inching forward.

  The worst part was that it was heading straight for Daddy Norbert.

  He frowned. The bullet was out of the muzzle by several inches now, moving through the space between the gun and Daddy with the inexorable slowness of a sundial. It looked like a tiny grey stain in the air. Impossible. Goddamned impossible, but here it came. A two hundred calibre magic trick. Maybe six feet, seven at the most, between the bullet and Daddy. At this rate, it would take the bullet at least ten minutes to reach him. Then what?

  Stupid thing would probably bump Daddy’s nose and plummet to the floor like some second-rate levitation trick, like some throw-off from the Amazing El Moldo.

  “Piece of shit parlor trick!” Daddy giggled again, his voice stretched thin. “Can’t scare me with some cheap dime store gag!”

  The bullet continued coming.

  A scalding tear of sweat ran down Daddy Norbert’s forehead and pooled in his eye. It burned. Daddy blinked, and cursed, and strained against the leather head restraints. He shook furiously against the tape. It was no use. Lizzy had done a bang up job on the bondage.

  Daddy’s cursing sputtered and died.

  “This ain’t possible,” he uttered, his gaze glued to the bullet.

  Daddy Norbert had never really believed in magic before.

  Growing up dirt poor in the Ozark Mountains, he’d certainly run across his share of hokum. One old gal who lived behind the Norbert’s pig farm was rumored to be a witch, but Daddy never believed it. Occasionally there’d be a gypsy clan who’d pass through the neighboring town. Some said it was gypsies that brought the drought of ‘49 to Pinkneyville. But Daddy never bought any of that hoodoo shit. Daddy Norbert was a simple hillbilly boy who grew up into a simple hillbilly man. Never got much of an education. Stayed out of trouble most of his adult life. Sure, he slapped his women around a little bit; he wasn’t proud of it. But Jesus God, did he deserve this?

  The bullet kept coming, crossing the half way mark now, hanging in the air just as horrible as you please.

  Something snapped inside Daddy Norbert, as sure as a guillotine in his brain. Fear. It stole his breath and flowed cool through his veins. Stu
ng his eyes. Made his fists clench up like vices until blood started soaking the ropes.

  He’d been up against many a rough scrape in his day. Tangled with the Mueller boys down to Quincy. Got caught cheating at Anaconda on a river boat casino. Fought three cops on the side of the road once, got away with a single broken rib and a chipped tooth. But this was different, way over the edge; because all of a sudden Daddy realized this was what his own daddy used to call bad juju.

  The bullet crept closer.

  “Okay, okay, okay, okay” Daddy started breathing deeply, trying to settle down, trying to convince himself it was all a trick, and that everything was going to be okay... but there was that shiny grey stain in the air coming right at him. And the leather binding holding his head in place. And the terrible certainty that Lizzy and her colored buck had planned this thing especially for Daddy. And that the bullet’s destination was somewhere in the vicinity of Daddy Norbert’s forehead, just above his left eye. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, calm down, okay, get it together, calm down, calm down.”

  Daddy Norbert blinked.

  Something sparked around the armature of the bullet. Sudden veins of light, erupting outward like the afterimage of a photographer’s bulb. Faint lines mapping the darkness. A ghostly image curling around the zipper like a heat ray mirage cured in whiskey misted eyes —

  (— years ago, drooling drunk, his rough hands on pale flesh, wedging himself inside a young girl’s thighs, forcing himself into her, again and again, the sound of her smothered cries —)

  “Wwwwhhha?!”

  Daddy slammed his eyes closed.

  The realization was like a claw hammer to his forehead.

  Visions. He remembered his grand-mammy having visions of the end of the world, talking to Jesus in her sleep, and all of a sudden Daddy Norbert realized this was one of those kinds of visions. Daddy Norbert was having a vision of the end of the world. He was a sinner, he had done wretched things and now this was his very own reckoning day.