“So are we checked in or what?” X-88 said.
“Just need a credit card,” she said.
“I don’t do plastic. I’m cash only.”
An older gentleman with a rolling suitcase entered the lobby. White hair, hunched shoulders, closing in on seventy. Rumpled seersucker suit.
“We’ll be just a second more, sir,” the clerk told the old man. “So, X? Can I call you that?”
“It’s my name.”
The clerk swiped the electronic keys through the magnetic machine while X counted out the bills for one night at the Comfort Inn.
“You mind my asking how you came by it?”
“He picked it up at Raiford,” Pixie said. “You know, the state prison.”
“Oh, you were a bad boy. Did some time.”
“What do you care?”
Pixie said, “Growing up, he had a normal name, but he hated it, hated the family that gave it to him. X-88 came to him while he was locked up.”
“You guys in a gang?” the clerk said. “Crips, Bloods, like that.”
“Fuck the Crips,” X said. “Bunch of degenerates.”
“So what are you?”
Pixie said, “We’re straight-edgers, hardline vegans.”
“Really? Like what? You beat up meat eaters?”
“Sometimes.”
“Man, you’ve made my day. Pixie and X-88, hardline vegans.”
“Yeah?” X said. “And what’s your name?”
The old man standing behind them huffed. He came around to the counter and planted a hand on it.
“You mind having this personal chat after you’ve checked me in?”
“Be just a minute more, sir. I’m not quite finished with these guests.”
“You were telling us your name,” Pixie said. Challenging her, claws out, the way she got when a woman circled too close.
“My name,” the clerk said, “is Varla.”
“Varla,” Pixie said, doing a dry spit like she had a hair on her tongue.
“Named after a Harlem chanteuse,” she said. “A notorious pansexual.”
“What the hell is that?” X said. “She was into kitchenware?”
The clerk smiled at X.
“My namesake was into anything and anybody that struck her fancy.”
The motel clerk reached up to brush her bangs away from her eyes. Molecules of her morning shampoo broke loose. Nutmeg and honeysuckle.
“Hey, come on,” the old man said. “I just drove six hundred miles. I’m a priority member with a reservation and I want to get in my goddamn room.”
X-88 turned to the man.
“Mister,” X said. “You ever been subjected to great bodily harm?”
The man took a few seconds to absorb the nut-crushing presence of X-88, then he sighed, shrank back, picked up a brochure of local amusements from the counter, and started paging through it.
Varla handed X the keys in a paper folder, counted out his change.
“In case you’re interested,” Varla said, “I get off at nine.”
“You talking to me or Pixie?” X said.
Varla smiled, her voice going husky and slow.
“I believe I’m talking to both of you.”
He and Pixie got in the car and moved it to the parking spot outside their room. Number 112, first floor, on the far end away from the interstate. Pixie was quiet, fuming. Chin tucked, eyes mooning like a child who’d been slighted by a playmate.
“You didn’t need to tell her anything about us,” X-88 said.
“She made me mad.”
“We can’t be leaving a trail, people remembering us.”
“I know, I know. But the way you were looking at her.”
“What am I supposed to do, wear a blindfold around pretty girls?”
“You thought she was pretty?”
“And you told her all that about my name, the vegan stuff.”
“She pissed me off, I couldn’t help it. She was making fun of us.”
“I’m used to it,” he said. “Doesn’t bother me. I’m proud of my name.”
He parked, took the suitcases and overnight stuff out of the backseat. Carried them inside. Pixie tagging along.
X-88. Yeah, it was true. He’d acquired it during his five-year sleepover at Florida State Prison. And Pixie was just repeating what he’d told her. He hated his family, hated the name they chose for him. So shortly after he arrived at Raiford and started hanging with the straight-edge crowd, that new name came to him one night lying awake.
The letter X was the edger insignia, they tattooed Xs on their chests or arms or anywhere they could reach. Started in the punk-music scene, where Xs were marked on the backs of the hands of underage drinkers so the bartender wouldn’t serve them. X becoming a badge of honor for abstainers.
88, that was his personal choice. He picked it because it was rugged, an upper-quartile number but nothing fancy. A big, strong, muscled-up, B-plus, a better-than-average blue-collar digit.
Before Raiford he’d never heard of edgers, but he connected right off. All white guys, most with some high school, and some, like X-88, had a year or two of community college. They were hardass punks who’d sworn off booze, drugs, meat, and meat by-products, and the other debased practices of the modern world.
On X’s cell block, the king badass of the edgers was Manny Obrero. Older guy, doing a thirty-year stretch for moving tons of coke, the guy had wallowed in drugs for years, anything a man could snort, swallow, shoot in your veins, or fuck, he’d done it, and he claimed prison was the best thing that ever happened to him. Showed him the light. He got converted to the straight-edge abstainer way of life. Living pure. No poisons, no promiscuity, no caffeine, no cigarettes, no animal or dairy. Push-ups, weights, get strong. And Manny took on X’s education, became his mentor, showing him how it was done. How to stay solid and uncontaminated. He learned to despise the indulgent drunks and junkies and the carnivores, “the meat people,” Obrero called them. Worst of them all. Carnivores put guiltless animals in cages, cramming them, ten, twenty, thirty to a coop like they did to men at Raiford. Making them shit where they ate. Humans were meant to be free-range creatures like chickens and cows and pigs. It was the carnivores fucking up the metabolism of the earth. All those assholes hooked on bloody red meat and meat by-products and cheese and eggs.
X-88 fell right in. Read the pamphlets, got converted. Truth was, he’d been looking for something like them for years though he hadn’t known it. He thought he was a diehard loner, a nonbeliever. But no, he liked Obrero, liked his no-bullshit approach. Old enough to be X-88’s dad, Obrero treated X as an equal, appointed him second in command of his wing of straight-edgers. It fell to X to execute discipline, bust heads, break fingers, and in special cases take their rivals and enemies into the showers and mop closets and empty cells and step them across to the other side.
Seven guys he’d wasted in Raiford. Never got caught. Got good at it. Even started to see it as an art form, the unique method Obrero taught him.
When X-88’s stretch was up, Obrero sat him down. Told him he knew a woman who could use his help, and she could help X-88 readjust to the straight life. Woman used to be Obrero’s wife, now she was out there hunting down a killer. Would X look her up, would X, only if he felt like it, help her out, maybe also look after Obrero’s little girl. And one more thing, look after the bankroll Obrero left with his wife, over two million in cash. Watch over all of that till Obrero got back, mother, daughter, and money, and when Obrero was free, then he and X would partner up for real. Kick some serious ass.
X-88 was honored. He promised Manny all that, swore a blood oath, and here he was a year later in St. Augustine, Florida, not more than an hour east from Raiford, putting everything Manny taught him into action.
He slid the credit card key into the door lock and pushed it open, then stood there a minute and sniffed the putrid air. Turned around and looked.
Goddamn if there wasn’t a hamburger joint across the pa
rking lot, cars lined up at the drive-through. Its stink carrying on the breeze. Fried grease, dead meat sizzling. There it sat, a beef and pork and chicken dispensary, right next to their motel, like an evil enticement calling out X-88’s name.
They went inside, set down their stuff. X went into the bathroom, splashed some water on his face while Pixie fiddled with the crappy TV.
“Time I did the deed,” X said from the bathroom doorway, drying his face with a towel. “I’ll drive around till it gets dark, look for a place.”
“Can I come?”
“I’ll handle it. Catch up on your TV shows.”
“That girl,” Pixie said. “You really think she was pretty?”
“I’m not going to lie to you.”
“You want her?”
“Hell, yes. I want every woman, even the ugly ones. I’m a fucking man. You got any doubt about that?”
Pixie watched the TV, the six o’clock news coming out of Orlando.
“She’s off at nine,” Pixie said. “I’ll get her if that’s what you want. I’ve slept with plenty of girls. Girls are fine. Softer, sweeter.”
“Is that what you want, a three-way?”
“I got everything I want right now.”
“Nobody’s got everything. We all want shit. Till the day we die.”
“Not me,” Pixie said. “I’m content how I am, with you, doing what we’re doing, going where we’re going, our goals, our togetherness. That’s enough for me.”
X-88 didn’t feel like getting bogged down in one of Pixie’s weepy loyalty tests. He’d told her from the start she was welcome to be his girl, but nothing was permanent. He’d protect her, take her places, buy her shit. But when it was over, which it would be one day soon, it was over. Take it or leave it. Those were the terms.
“I want you to love me,” Pixie said. “Before one of us dies, if it’s only for a few minutes. That’s what I want. A taste of true love.”
They’d been over this ground so many times, X had nothing left to say.
“This shouldn’t take more than an hour.”
“You’re not going to kiss me good-bye?”
“An hour I’ll be back. You need a kiss to get you through an hour?”
“I do. I need a kiss.”
He gave her one, quick and dry, but afterward her chin was still tucked, eyes mooning, not looking at him.
“Maybe you should call the front desk,” X said. “Ask that Varla to come sleep with you. See how she is, maybe if you hit it off, you two could live happily ever after. St. Augustine isn’t such a bad place, it’s got an ocean, a beach, an old fort.”
“Aw, come on. Don’t do this. You feeling bad, X? Your head hurting again? Is that why you’re saying this? The migraine thing. You need some tofu, baby, some good vegetable protein.”
“I’m fine, Pixie. But baby, I’m not going to lie. That midnight train’s rolling into the station. Pretty soon you’ve got to pick some place to get off, today, tomorrow, the next day, the way it’s going inside me now, the way my head is, this ride isn’t going to last much longer.”
SIX
FIRST X DROVE OVER TO the burger joint and got in the drive-through lane. At the speaker he ordered three regular hamburgers, plain, no sauce, no cheese, no lettuce, none of that shit, nothing but burger and bun, paid at the window, and drove forward to pick them up. The black kid in the window said, “Wow, nobody orders plain regular burgers.”
“I just did,” X said.
The kid shrugged and handed him the bag, smiling.
“I say something funny?” said X.
The boy shrugged again, the smile on his lips melting away.
“What you’re doing here, kid, purveying slaughtered animals by the millions, that’s some seriously sick shit. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yet here you are, still purveying, and giving your customers scornful, smartass grins.”
“I didn’t mean nothing, sir.”
“You know where those cows and pigs and chickens come from you’re cooking in your deep fat fryers and your griddles? You know the grim life they lead? Do those creatures ever see the sun, boy, feel its heat on their hide? They ever smell the natural grasses they were meant to eat? They live their lives in pens and cages, they can’t turn around, their legs collapse under their weight. They chew off each other’s tails out of boredom. You know that?”
An older woman moved behind the boy, put a hand on his shoulder.
“There some kind of problem here, Anthony?”
He shook his head at his boss.
“Is there a problem, sir?” she said to X-88, bending forward to see him.
“Your business is an abomination. Do you consider that a problem?”
X-88 didn’t wait for an answer. He rolled out of the drive-through and eased across the parking lot.
Turning onto the highway, he stripped the burgers from their buns, rolled down his window, tossed the bread and paper sack out the window, and stacked the three warm patties on the passenger seat. Sickening smell.
A mile down the road he saw right away that Twelve Mile Swamp wasn’t going to work. He’d been picturing a wild, deserted marsh where human flesh decomposed fast. Instead it was a state park, high fenced, with all its entrance roads blocked with gates and guardhouses.
So X-88 circled back and cruised past the cluster of motels and fast food joints and kept heading west onto the narrowing two-lane, leaving behind the 7-Elevens and gas stations and stoplights, the glow of civilization, driving out into the piney woods that covered most of Florida when you got fifteen miles inland from the coast.
A few sandy roads sprouted off the main highway. Hardly any traffic. A house or two, then not even that. Just dark woods and empty sky. No moon, no scattering of stars.
Brights on, X-88 drove another mile into the wilderness, chose a side road, pulled off, bumped over potholes and rocks and lumps that scraped the undercarriage, went about a half mile as the road tapered, branches brushing both sides of the car. No mailboxes or house lights through the trees. He’d have to back all the way out, but overall it felt right.
He shut off the ignition, cut the lights, lowered the windows. Listened to the crickets celebrating the darkness, the whir of insects, a distant car passing on the lonesome highway. He sat for a while staring out the windshield into the night until he heard a muffled thud that woke him from his daze.
He left the parking lights on, picked up the three patties, and got out, went to the trunk. He stuffed the meat into his trouser pocket, then opened the trunk and stepped back. You couldn’t be too careful with a woman like this. But the gag had held and the flex cuffs were still locked around her wrists and ankles.
“I’m going to let you out. Don’t fight me. I’ll get rough if you do. That’s not what I want. Do you understand?”
She stared at him. Unbelieving. X-88 patted her arm, what he meant as a reassuring gesture, but she cringed.
“Do you understand what I just said?”
She stayed frozen.
“I regret you had to spend so much time in the trunk. There was no way to avoid that. You’re probably dehydrated, dizzy, confused.”
She grumbled something rude through the gag. Still not trusting him.
“Okay, here we go. I’m going to stand you up.”
He cradled her body, lifted her over the lip of the trunk and set her on her feet on the sandy roadway. Holding her steady until the wobble had gone from her legs. Little woman, mussy blond hair cut short. He couldn’t see her face that well in the light from the trunk. But he’d gotten a good look at it before when he hauled her out of the stolen car. She was in her fifties, showing some road wear. A pugnacious attitude. Smart mouth.
“Now let me get this off.”
He unknotted the gag, squatted down, flicked out his knife blade, and freed her ankles. She was breathing hard, still swaying.
“I’ll cut loose your wrists, but first we come to an understandi
ng.”
“Like what?” Her voice hoarse and breathless.
Something rustled in the woods, an animal moving through the brush. X looked toward the sound, made out a clumsy shadow and caught its scent. Woodsmoke and musk clinging to its fur, the pungent tang of spoiled garbage. When he was a kid he’d smelled the same scent at a roadside zoo. Black bear.
A needle-sharp ping stabbed him in the frontal lobe. He breathed his way past the pain and shifted back to the woman, put his knife in his pocket.
“Why’re you doing this?” the woman said. “What did I do wrong?”
“Not a thing.”
“You work with Cruz, I met you in Key Largo.”
“Now see, that right there is the entire issue. You met me, you saw me, and you recognized me. That, Tina, is the reason we’re out here right now.”
She couldn’t speak for a moment, swallowing. Looked X-88 in the face, then stumbled backward, bumped the car fender, nowhere to run.
Again he got a whiff of the bear. Crushed grass in its coat, its teeth moldy and rotten. An old fellow, not long left either.
“Tell me what you want. Money?”
X was looking off at the woods. Enduring this out of respect for the victim. If she wanted to prolong her last moment, try to bargain her way out of this, who was he to deprive her of a little extra time?
“I’m not motivated by money.”
Her wild eyes roved his face.
“Christ almighty. She double-crossed me.”
X-88 sighed.
“What’s your name? Tell me your name.”
“Not relevant.”
This was a woman used to talking her way out of things.
“Look, I did what she asked me to. Everything, exactly the way she said. I dropped that postcard in Sugarman’s mailbox, it got them going like she wanted, and there at the gas station she pulls out her badge, and I make a run, steal that car, that green car, and she said that would be the end of it. I drive to Key Largo, leave the car in a lot somewhere, walk home. She never mentioned you forcing me off the road, grabbing me, holding me hostage.”
The Big Finish Page 5
