by S. A. Hunt
Twelve steps to go. “God help me.”
Halfway up, he had developed a system; he leaned to his left, bracing himself against the banister screwed to the wall, and lifted himself with his left leg, holding his right out stiff to the side. Instead of stepping up with it, he humped it up on the left. By the time he had reached the top, his left thigh was on fire and sweat was running down his temples. He stood at the top of the stairs to survey Fish’s apartment.
Superhero posters hung at tasteful intervals—Avengers, Hulk, and Spider-Man movie promotionals, artsy minimalist pieces, and comic-book panels so big the individual colors pointillized into sprays of primary-color dots and bold fronds of sharp white lettering. BOOM! BANG! POW!
A large flatscreen television stood on a low-slung entertainment center with a small collection of video-game consoles. No sofa. Nowhere to sit, really, except for a beanbag chair right in front of the TV. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a treadmill on the opposite side of the room, but it faced the wall, running up under a computer desk with a MacBook on it. It was a standing desk; the woodgrain surface came up to Joel’s chest, standing on a sturdy telescoping frame.
He hadn’t been up there since his brother had bought the place, he realized with shame. Really ought to visit more often, and not under duress like this.
The kitchen was a spartan nook on the other side of a Formica breakfast bar, everything done up in 1960s greens and whites. A window above the sink overlooked Broad Avenue, the daylight shooting razorblades into his eyes. He went to the fridge, drank straight out of a carton of orange juice to wash the taste of sleep out of his mouth, then went into the bathroom to piss.
Something darted into the bathroom while he was standing in front of the toilet. Fisher’s cat, Selina, meowed, curling around his ankle.
“What up, cat.”
He flushed, washed his hands, took another few swigs from the orange juice in the fridge, and flopped down in the beanbag chair to rest. A long, groaning sigh rolled out of him and he wiggled himself deeper into the Styrofoam peanuts.
A remote control lay on the floor next to the beanbag. He aimed it at the TV and pressed the Power button, but the TV didn’t come on. Instead, the treadmill behind him growled to life and slowly climbed to jogging speed.
Perplexed, he got up and searched the desk. A control panel that looked like something from a Houston space terminal was mounted to the back of the desktop. He stopped the treadmill.
Selina jumped up onto the entertainment center as he limped over to the TV and turned it on with the power button. The eight o’ clock morning news filled the screen with the pitted high-def face of an anchorman, and the cat sat in front of it, stretching luxuriously and throwing out one leg so she could sit and run her tongue down her haunch.
“Well.” Joel scowled. “I didn’t wanna see the screen anyway.”
A shiver passed through the cat, some weird shudder rolling up her back. Selina hunkered down, her eyes darting around the room as if she’d heard a mouse behind the baseboards, but she didn’t get down and start hunting. Then she stiffened, sitting pretty as if she’d suddenly remembered where she was, and proceeded to glare daggers at Joel’s face. The anchorman talked into the cat’s back, her tail curling back and forth under his nose. “Sources say that the driver was not intoxicated, but a police investigation is still ongoing in this case. We’ll return to this to give you details as they emerge.”
Joel sat back down in the beanbag and stared right back at the cat. “The hell you looking at?”
Selina meowed.
“Get down. Boo. Giddown. Hiss.”
The cat scowled at him, if such a thing was possible.
Since the cat had decided to park her hairy ass in front of the TV, Joel occupied himself by looking at the buttons on the treadmill remote. There were a hell of a lot of buttons for a machine that did precisely one thing. It was almost as intricate as the TV remote, with buttons for speed and incline, as well as a tiny LCD screen with a line graph for peaks and valleys and a menu for running different types of cardio sessions. I’ll have to come back up here and see if Fish’ll let me use his treadmill. It’d be cheaper than the gym, that’s for sure. He turned the treadmill back on and revved it up as high as it would go. The sheet of texturized rubber scrolled across the platform with a high, whining burr. Damn. You fall on that and it’s all over for yo ass. He pressed the Power button, which stopped the belt.
Selina padded into the kitchen and leapt up onto the counter. She found a light switch on the wall by the microwave and pawed at it.
“Eww, hey, get down,” Joel called from the living room. He hated when cats got on kitchen counters. They kicked around in their litter boxes, shoveling up sand and shit with their paws, and the thought of preparing food on Fish’s counters where the cat was walking around with her shitty feet sent a chill down Joel’s spine.
“What you doin’, cat?”
She managed to flip the light switch and the sink growled loudly. She’d activated the garbage disposal. Joel stretched to look over the bar, struggled up out of the beanbag chair and stood up.
Just in time to see the cat slink under the faucet and shove her own face into the sink drain.
GGRRRRRRROOOOWWNT!
Blood sprayed up out of the sink, spattering a fine mist across the kitchen ceiling.
A shock of amazed adrenaline whipped through Joel’s body.
The grinder inside the garbage disposal bogged down like a truck in deep mud, snarling low as it chewed Selina’s skull into pulp. The cat went apeshit, flailing around, spinning, beating herself against the inside of the basin, making that scribbly-fussy Donald Duck quacking sound.
Snapping out of his startled trance, Joel ran into the kitchen nook (almost slipping on blood) and turned off the disposal.
He stood there in a stunned silence, his hands laced on top of his head.
Eventually, he found the power of speech again. “What the actual fuck. Jesus Christ, what the hell just happened,” and then the logical conclusion was “Fish is going to kill me.”
Joel pushed the treadmill remote into his pocket and picked up Selina’s limp, headless body by the tail. He scanned the nook, looking for the garbage. It was in a tall cabinet in the corner. He put the dead cat in the bin. Then he felt terrible putting the cat in the garbage, but it was making a hell of a mess, so he dug a fresh bag out of a bag under the sink and put the cat in that.
“Why did you do that, cat?” Joel asked the garbage bag in an accusing, astonished hiss, shaking it. “Why did you do that?”
Clenching and unclenching his fists, he stood at the sink shaking in excited fright, his eyes alternating between the window in front of him and the sink full of blood. He ran the water and used the sprayer hose to knock most of it down into the drain, but there were clumps of hair and … gristle stuck in the toothed rubber gasket that kept silverware out of the grinder.
Silverware, but not cats.
A drop of blood fell off the ceiling and tapped the counter. Joel hobbled into the bathroom to vomit. It was a good puke, a projectile gush hard enough to make his thigh throb. Day-Glo green and stank of Thunderbird and orange juice. Blue and yellow make green Ziploc seal. He spat and flushed the toilet, lingering over the bowl, hunched forward with his hands on his knees. Why in the name of God did I just see a house cat commit suicide? He took a dirty towel out of the hamper and wiped the blood off his head and shaking hands with it. A crazy idea came out of left field: she coulda come to me, I would’ve talked her down, come on, cat, you got so much to live for, and he barked out crazed, disbelieving laughter.
Bloody footprints led into the bathroom, ground into the carpet and plastered on the linoleum.
“Ah, damn.” Joel wet the towel and lowered himself onto his hands and knees with a grunt of pain, using the towel to scrub at the red prints. “Jesus. Jesus, I don’t know what I done, but I need you to give me a break now. I’mma need you to gimme the wheel back and
let me drive for a minute.”
When the toilet finally finished refilling itself with a noisy sigh, Joel heard voices through the vent under the sink. The radio in the shop had stopped.
Fish. “No, I haven’t seen him all day.”
Light glimmering on the ceiling caught his attention and his head tilted back. Joel sat on his haunches, shooting straight up like a meerkat.
“Are you sure?”
The frenetic blue flashers of a police car were strobing through the bathroom window. He got up and stood on the edge of the bathtub, looking through the casement window behind the shower, his heart thumping. For three insane seconds, he was convinced the law had come to arrest him for killing Fish’s cat, and then the reality of the night before came crashing down around him.
A Blackfield City Police cruiser was parked in the diagonal slot-parking in front of the comic shop.
Bowker had found him.
“Yeah, not a peep.” Fish’s voice wafted up from the heat register. “I talked to him last night on the phone … sounded like he’d been drinking. He’s probably still passed out at his mama’s house. What did he do?”
Joel very nearly pissed his pants. He briefly thought about going back to scrubbing the blood off the floor, but decided to close the door and hide in the bathroom. He threw the bloody towel in the hamper and pressed his back against the wall. “You got to be kidding me,” he murmured to himself, eyeballing the ceiling for guidance. “How did this Rosco P. Coltrane–lookin’ motherfucker find me?”
“We been to his house,” said the other voice. It was familiar, but it didn’t sound like Bowker. Where have I heard that voice before? “He ain’t there, sir. This is the next logical place to look.”
How did they know he and Fish were brothers? I mean, there’s the fact we both got the same last name, but come on, lots of people have the same last name. It was quite a jump of logic, even for Joel’s paranoid state of mind. Maybe they talked to Miguel. That’s it. Oh, I gotta have a talk with him … if I get out of here in one piece.
“I hate to have to tell ya, but you’re wasting your time. He and me, we’re kinda on the outs these days. You know … family stuff. He hasn’t been here in months. Are you going to answer my question? What did my brother do?”
The police officer grunted. “Family stuff. Yeah, I can understand that. Well, last night, your brother assaulted a police officer. Put a load of buckshot in his vest, almost killed him. Tried to kill him.”
Kenway. “That doesn’t sound like the Joel I know.”
“Maybe you don’t know your brother as well as you think you do.” The officer paused for a beat and said, “… So, what are you doing here? According to the hours of business up there on the door, it don’t look like the shop’s open yet. But here you are.”
“I come down here to hang out every weekend and most evenings,” said Kenway. “It gets awful quiet at my place when it’s nobody but me.”
“Today’s Sunday. You don’t go to church?”
“I’m not really a churchgoing man, Mr. Euchiss.”
Euchiss … Euchiss … Joel tried to place the name. It wasn’t one he’d heard before. “That’s a surprise, down here in the South,” said the cop. “You don’t believe in God?”
“Honestly, that is a can of worms I’d rather not open this early in the morning.”
“So, what d’you do?”
“I’m a sign-maker and a painter.”
“Ah.… Well! You there, you must be the proprietor of this fine establishment. D’you mind if I take a look around?”
“Don’t you need a search warrant for that?” asked Fisher.
“Not if I have probable cause. Do I have probable cause?”
Fish hesitated a little too long. “… No.”
“Your lips are saying no, but your eyes are saying yes.” Euchiss started toward the back of the comic shop. “Other officers may not appreciate pushback, but you know what? I like a challenge. Victory is so much sweeter if you’ve had to fight for it.”
“Adapt and overcome,” said Fish, repeating his life mantra.
“I like that. Mind if I borrow it?”
“Go right ahead.”
“This shouldn’t take long. I’m sure I don’t need an escort. You two can hang out here. I’ll be right back.”
“I’m pretty sure you need a warrant,” said Kenway.
“I’m pretty sure you need to shut your mouth.”
A half-minute later, Euchiss’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs. Before his arduous climb, Joel had forgotten to close the stairwell door. Dammit. “Looks like somebody’s been sitting in here, sippin’ on a cup of coffee. There’s a blanket in here too. Whoever it was, they was sleepin’ on the futon.”
“Somebody ate my porridge,” said the baby bear.
Fish said, “The heat works best in that little back room, so I like to sit in there with my blanket and watch the news when I get up.”
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t take your word on that, Mr. Ellis.” Euchiss chuckled. The thumping of shoes on the stairs told Joel the cop was coming up. He got back down on his hands and knees and looked under the door as a head and shoulders rose up from behind the banister.
What he saw trailed fingers of ice down his spine. That same shock of red hair … that narrow, corded neck and arrowhead jawline … those beady black eyes.
It was B1GR3D. Red was a cop.
15
Ain’t no way out of there, pizza-man. “Oh lord, oh heavenly God,” Joel whispered under his breath, his face pressed against the blood-smeared tiles. His heart was going Mach 3. He could feel it in his neck and hands. “You got to be shitting me.”
(call me the Serpent)
Euchiss paused at the top of the stairs. “What in all the hell happened up here?”
(that’s what the papers back in New York used to call me)
“What?” called Fish.
“Is this your mess, Mr. Ellis?”
“Mess? What are you talking about?”
The cop stepped cautiously into the kitchen nook. “There’s blood and hair all over the kitchen, man! It looks like somebody tried to mulch a raccoon in the garbage disposal.”
Fish charged into the apartment, thundering up the stairs and into the living room.
“What the hell?”
“That’s what I’m sayin’, Mr. Ellis. You might want to work on your taxidermy skills if you’re gonna—”
Euchiss went silent. Joel’s heart thumped hard like the 1812 Overture, throbbing in his temples. Cautiously, the cop crossed the room, and Joel heard the soft plastic slurp of vinyl against gunmetal. The footprints on the carpet. The footprints leading into the bathroom. He saw them. “I know you’re in there, buddy,” said the cop. Standing directly across from the bathroom door. “You might as well come on out. There ain’t nowhere for you to go.”
“Joel!” squawked Fish. He was shouting, raw-voiced, on the verge of tears. “Why you kill my cat? The hell is wrong with you?”
Reluctant at first to let Red/Euchiss hear his voice, Joel hesitated, his hands floating up alongside his face out of pure instinct. “—I didn’t, I didn’t do that! The cat did it! I was sittin’ in the beanbag, watchin’ TV when—”
“You tryna tell me Selina turned the garbage disposal on all by herself? And stuck her own head in it?”
“Y-yeah!”
“Do you understand how fucking crazy that sounds?”
“Yeah.” Joel’s throat burned with fear and guilt. Everything seemed unreal, glossy and false, like the bathroom’s tiles were going to break off and go spinning into a black void, leaving him adrift in a cosmos of lies.
“You need to come on out of there,” said Euchiss. “Don’t make me open that door myself. You ain’t gonna like it when I do.”
On his hands and knees again, Joel peeked under the door. The stitches in his leg pulled painfully, the agony blunted by the Tylenol. Directly in front of the bathroom was the treadmill, som
e six or seven feet away. Euchiss had stepped up onto it—to provide better footing than the carpet, to give Joel room to come out of the bathroom, to give himself distance to fire his pistol, Joel didn’t know … but it gave him an idea. He took the treadmill remote out of his pocket and got up on one knee, grasping the doorknob.
Aiming the remote under the door, he screwed up his nerve and pressed the Start button.
Zerp! The treadmill belt, already turned up as high as it would go, whipped the cop’s feet out from under him. Joel flung open the bathroom door to see Euchiss’s head smack against the edge of the desk.
Bursting out of the bathroom, Joel leapt the treadmill, vaulted the banister and landed halfway down the stairs, popping a couple of stitches. Hellfire raced up his leg, but he ignored it, jumping again straight down to the bottom and darting through the open door. Juked to the right to get out of the videotape room. Sprinted across the comic shop toward daylight.
Lieutenant Bowker turned around in surprise, reaching up to pinch the cigarette in his mouth.
Joel froze, his heart dropping into his stomach.
“Good morning!” the officer said cheerfully, throwing down the Marlboro butt and shoving him in one fluid motion, bouncing his head off the doorframe. Lightning flashed behind Joel’s eyes and then he was facedown on the sidewalk, rough grit sandpapering his naked chest. “Nice to see you again, boy.” Bowker wrenched his arms up behind his back, zip-tying his wrists together. The officer turned him on his side and allowed him to get his feet underneath him. “You thought you was gonna get away?”
Sunshine cut the brisk October air like a hot knife, turning the cement into a griddle. The pain in his thigh was extravagant, bright as a cattle-brand, and it eclipsed the world.
Looking up and down the street, Joel saw a few people on the sidewalk stop to rubberneck. Of course, they were all white. “Go ahead and look, assholes,” he said under his breath. “Look at me in these cuffs. You like it, don’t you?” Salt tainted his mouth and he licked at it, found blood from a busted lip. Twisting, he tried to stomp Bowker’s knee, but the cop threw his ass out like a cabaret dancer, scooting out of range.
