Parts & Wreck

by Mark Henry

  Cramming his feet into his shoes, he glanced back up at Gimble. “I’m not doing that. You’ll have to find someone else.”

  He started for the bar, but the manager was insistent.

  “We’ll delete the last part. You just give them the teepee, and the full extension of your body and we’ll forgo the peepee. Easy as that. It’s a nearly nude show for the ladies so they’ll be happy, I think. How does that sound?”

  Wade’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “No pee? No cider buckets?”

  Gimble waved his hands in the air insistently. “Absolutely not. No liquid of any sort. Promise.”

  Wade considered it a moment and then shook his head. “Not a chance, but they’ll get what they paid for. Don’t worry.”

  He left Gimble in the shadows where the pervert belonged and drifted into the audience and the bar beyond to find Luce.

  …

  “You got him?” he said, surprise blossoming as he stared down into the open trunk.

  “Yeah, I got him, you look surprised.”

  “Well, I was surprised at all the tips I got, so maybe you’re just noticing the residual elation. That’s easy money in there. I didn’t even have to take off my shorts,” Wade cocked a brow. “Like you made me do.”

  “I didn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to do. Though I do have roofies, so I suggest you be open-minded.”

  Wade grinned, an idea on the tip of his tongue.

  Luce, feeling particularly bad ass after her coup, slouched into homegirl. “You got something to say, ese?”

  Wade laughed. “You really surprise me.”

  They’d kept the motel room to take care of the second repo, but when they pulled up to the place, several cops were standing around their coffee cup studded cars, lights flashing. An officer was busy unwinding a streamer of yellow crime scene tape with a cigarette bobbing from his lips.

  Luce turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial until she got a local news radio station. The airwaves were abuzz with the latest Vatican scandal. The kidnapping of a famous touring Bishop. Luce gawped at Wade, who merely shrugged.

  “It’s a tough world out there, Luce.”

  “You think the cops are using our lot to stage a recovery for Sister Mary-Agnes’s favorite roving-eyed priest?”

  “Of course not. This shithole probably has a dead crackhead under every other bed,” Wade said.

  “Which reminds me,” Luce winced, “did you check under ours?”

  Wade rolled his eyes and pulled the car slowly past the motel and around to the rear, into an alley so dark, even experienced drug dealers would shy away.

  Tucking the car between Dumpsters, Wade and Luce gathered up Carlito Ramirez and carried him arms over shoulders like you would your drunk friend and not the guy you were about to steal demon eyes from. They crept through a breezeway that led to the exterior stairs and biding their time, waited for the cops to all look toward a passing car before swiftly taking the stairs and slipping into the room.

  Luce gathered several pillowcases full of ice from the machine and returned to the room, though she wasn’t sure what submersing his body in freezing water would do for the damage they’d be perpetrating on his head. Regardless, at least she didn’t have to depants the guy, merely remove his jacket and shirt, revealing a pretty elaborate gold rosary.

  “Wow!” she said. “Did you see this? It’s beautiful actually.”

  Wade glanced at it absently, nodding. Not really one to notice that kind of thing, she figured. But he did note that she’d removed his shirt and so helped her to wrestle him into the bathtub.

  “This is not going to be pretty,” he warned. “You may want to look away.”

  “No,” Luce said. “I’m in this one hundred percent. What you see, I see. What if something happened to you during the exorcision and I needed to take over. Eventually, I’d like to be trained on the surgery, as well.”

  So much for the moral ambiguity. Luce was all in.

  If the liver guy was planning on killing a shit ton of recovering alcoholics, what would a guy with possessed eyes be capable of? Mustard-gassing screenings of animated family movies? Luce shuddered. She didn’t want to flesh out that list any further. He had to be stopped.

  “How much Rohypnol did you give this guy? He’s not even blistering the walls.”

  When she turned back to the tub, Wade was lurching over the man with a melon baller. Luce flinched but forced herself to at least listen to the wet thunk followed by the sharp pop of glass rolling across tile.

  Glass?

  Luce looked down in shock at what was obviously a glass eye, she fumbled for a grip on the sink and before she’d fully grasped what was rolling toward her, the eye had found a resting place under her foot.

  Crack!

  Luce gasped as she lifted her foot to see the pulverized glass on the tile floor. “That didn’t just happen, did it?”

  Wade’s mouth was agape. Luce merely stared at the pile of shards and then the hole in the guy’s head, then back to the shattered glass. “Not him, then?”

  “You think?” Wade shouted, clearly upset.

  “Anyone could make a mistake,” she said. “And you agreed he looked like the guy. I mean look at him. That’s Carlito!”

  Wade nodded. Indeed the guy looked like their mark. When he turned back to Luce he found her digging in her purse frantically and then finding what she’d been looking for, rinsed it quickly in the sink before shoving it sticky, hard, and round into Wade’s palm.

  “A jawbreaker?” Wade asked, amazed.

  Luce shrugged. “We have to work within our resources. Pop that bad boy in.”

  “But what about germs?”

  “What? I rinsed it!”

  Wade groaned.

  “So, if he’s not Carlito, then who is he?” Luce asked.

  A voice bellowed from behind them. “That’s Bishop Bugenhagen and you’re on To Catch a Perv!”

  Luce turned toward the woman slowly, considering her options. Holding a microphone like a billy club, Polly gripped the frame of the door, her expression exploding with recollection.

  “Holy shit! Lucid Montgomery!” Polly scoffed. “They let you out of the nuthouse finally, huh? Look Aaron, it’s your ex-girlfriend.”

  Aaron tilted the camera away from his face and looked Luce up and down briefly, and with lascivious intent, if Luce was pegging the expression right, before shrugging and returning to shooting the scene.

  Luce crammed her hand back into her purse, certain she had a sharp emery board she could sand Polly’s neck open with. But it was Wade who broke their half of the silence.

  “I think I’m just going to go ahead and pop this back in while you two back off,” Wade said, turning the jawbreaker around in his fingers.

  “Yeah,” Luce agreed. “Back the fuck off.”

  Polly narrowed in on Luce sucking her teeth with anticipation. “Still getting into craziness, I see. And criminal, too, from the looks of it. What is this? Have we stumbled onto the murder of a Vatican official?”

  “It’s you two who’ve stumbled onto something you’re not going to be walking away from huh, Wade?” Luce grinned but when she looked back to Wade for support, he shook his head no, and acted like he had no clue what she was talking about.

  As if to accentuate the point, he popped the rock of candy into the Bishop’s head and wiped off his fingers on a wad of toilet paper.

  “No harm, no foul,” he said, rising from a crouch. “Are these two friends of yours?”

  “No. Not even close.”

  “Old friends from high school.” Polly crossed to Wade with an amazing display of sashay for such a small room. “Luce and I go way back, don’t we, Luce?”

  “We go back,” she agreed. “I wish it was wayer back. Way wayer.”

  “Those aren’t words,” Aaron said with a sneer, camera focusing in on Luce.

  Wade accepted Polly’s hand and in a completely surprising and wonderful turn of events—in Luce’
s perspective, at least, not for Polly—he spun her around and stabbed a needle into her neck. The girl dropped to the floor, the air spilling out of her along with a final few words to Aaron. “Are you getting this?”

  Aaron nodded, seeming to close in on her rapidly relaxing body. From the dark of the room behind the cameraman, a sharp bang issued and a lamp fell beside Luce’s feet near the vanity. Aaron dropped over onto his face, cracking the camera on the way down.

  “Hitch!” Luce cried and then realized her mistake.

  Her imaginary friend had crossed into reality for the second time in her life and this time, from the look Wade was giving her, he may have caught a flash of the source of the lamp.

  Hitch shrugged and gestured for her to keep her mouth shut, so she merely shook her head like she wasn’t sure what was going on, or what Wade hade heard.

  “Who’s Hitch?” Wade said. Tidying up the body situation and scanning through the camera, deleting various incriminating frames before dropping it back beside the unconscious Aaron.

  “It’s a saying!” Luce tossed out. “Like ‘wow’ or ‘tight.’”

  “No,” Wade responded. “Don’t bother.”

  Luce scowled at Hitch who was already retreating into the darkness, knowing better than to continue to piss her off. As she was turning to acquiesce, to agree that he wasn’t hearing things—Luce knew how terrible it was to feel like you’re hearing or seeing things and she didn’t want Wade to think he was crazy.

  Though, from the look on his face, that wasn’t the issue.

  He brushed past her with the shirtless rucksack of the Bishop’s body thrown over his shoulder and, snatching Luce’s arm, dragged her out of the motel room and out onto the balcony. The police had gone, thankfully, but that didn’t slow Wade down, before Luce could protest they were already down the stairs and breezing through the breezeway.

  “Open the trunk!” Wade shouted.

  She did and he tossed the collapsed Catholic into the small space, slamming the lid atop him.

  “We have to hurry!”

  The Porsche took corners at breakneck speed, and Luce ought to know, she was pretty sure the drive was giving her whiplash. She tried to engage Wade, not understanding his fury. She’d only mentioned Hitch’s name once and never before; it’s not like Wade had given her any warning that that was his trigger word, the one that would set him off so ferociously.

  “Are you completely insane?” he asked finally.

  “I try to hide it.”

  “You’re not doing a great job.”

  “Why do you bother asking? It’s not like you don’t know the answer. You have Thorwald’s report!”

  The growing distance between them ate at her, and she was certain if they didn’t speak she would break down, possibly start hearing voices, more than just Hitch, who was crammed behind their seats whispering suggestions to Luce.

  “You should just leave,” Hitch said.

  “I told you this was a mistake,” he said.

  “Remember when it was just you and me without this big thug making those horrible faces at you?”

  “Shut up!” she screamed, fists scrunching her hair from the sides of her head.

  Wade merely shook his head as he launched the car around a curve and pulled into a familiar alley. The one behind the Tiger Lounge. He jettisoned from the car and before she could pinpoint where he was in the darkness, the lid of a Dumpster was flying open and Bishop Bugenhagen was up and over the side.

  “Not a word,” Wade directed as he sat down beside her and drove them back to the Portland Grand.

  Luce wasn’t sure why she continued to follow him, why she fell in step behind him all through the lobby, stood next to him silently in the elevator and sat quietly in the sitting room of the suite as he whispered harsh, muffled words into his cell behind the locked bathroom door.

  She’d decided she needed to see what he knew. What he’d known all along and opened her purse to retrieve the personnel file.

  Inside was an envelope from Thorwald that seemed to contain the answers. A report from a pair of psychiatrists. Back when she was twelve years old and Hitch had begun to appear to her regularly, Luce’s mother had taken her to be evaluated to see if she was, as her mother suspected, as mad as a hatter. The psychiatrists, Doctors Allen and Gerber, ran Luce through a battery of tests, the narrative report of which she now held in her hands.

  She tried to imagine what Wade thought as he read over their descriptions of visual and auditory hallucinations, Luce’s inability to sustain emotional connections, her lack of a moral compass. It was that last one that probably won her the job, but the former that had to have given them pause. Finally, in response to some violent attacks on her peers on the playground the doctors had said this:

  Luce presents with an uncontrollable temper and a nature that fails to employ the necessary restraint to prevent assaultive response to even the most benign of confrontation. She is a danger to others and possibly herself. The trigger for her behavior seems to be a malevolent entity that she calls “Hitch,” whose presence seems to signal a near irreversible loss of impulse control.

  And worse…this:

  Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, Paranoid type.

  Diagnosis: Antisocial Personality Disorder

  Luce tried not to think about the nine months at the private psychiatric hospital. She’d taken the medication that made her feel like a dead person. She’d stopped talking about Hitch entirely and eventually he’d become a dim shadow in her line of sight, never gone entirely but always there in the background, murmuring.

  Murmuring.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wade hit end on the phone, steadied himself, and opened the door. Unprepared for what he found. The suite was a mess, papers everywhere on the floor, couch, and no sign of Luce. He snatched up a clutch to find the report from Thorwald, Luce’s psychiatric evaluation, and his heart surged with pain for her.

  What must she think of how he’d behaved?

  She thought he believed all of this! That he thought she was indeed as crazy as the doctors had documented.

  Wade threw the papers to the ground and ran out into the hall and then to the elevators, stabbing the down button. He scoured the lobby, then the block; he even tracked down the Porsche to see if she’d attempted to drive away. But there was no sign of her.

  Nothing.

  Wade fell against the side of the building holding himself and sliding into a squat. He should have grabbed her then and told her, spilled his guts, and just let it fly. He loved the hell out of her despite their differences and in the face of whatever hell or Sister Mary-Agnes would throw at them.

  He loved her.

  He didn’t think it was possible to feel so shattered. Not again. But Luce’s pain was now his and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Or was there?

  He pulled out the cell phone and got Quince back on the line. “Get a message to the penguin,” he said. “We need to do this now. Assemble them and meet me here.” And then, “She’s gone, Quince.”

  He explained his concerns and hung up the phone.

  After questioning the desk clerk and the parking attendant, who reported seeing a woman fitting Luce’s description pass through in a white van with a television network logo on the side, he bolted for the Porsche.

  It wasn’t much, but a lead was a lead.

  …

  Luce tried not to think about the nine months at the private psychiatric hospital. She’d taken the medication, which made her feel like a dead person. She’d stopped talking about Hitch entirely and eventually he’d become a dim shadow in her line of sight, never gone entirely but always there in the background, murmuring.

  Murmuring.

  She could hear it now and wasn’t surprised to see him scowling angrily from the shadows of the foyer.

  “Hitch?” she called. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He approached becoming more and more solid as he crossed the carpet toward her.
His eyes, normally so cheerful and focused seemed stormy, dark clouds graying his irises. He stared at her intently and then the papers in her hands, a sneer bunching up the corner of his lip.

  “Hitch?” she asked, though her tears garbled even his short name. “I’m not doing too well.”

  He nodded and reaching out his hand, pulled her to her feet. He led her out the door. “He found out you’re crazy, huh? I mean he knew it, but he found out about us, right?”

  Luce nodded.

  Hitch wrapped his arm around her, and for a second she could swear that she felt the weight of it, a solid warmth. “You know what’ll take your mind off all this mess?”

  “What?” she sniffled.

  “An awesome caper. Just like we used to pull off in the old days.”

  Luce thought back. They’d had some good times, no doubt about it. One in particular came on a lucrative trip to Vegas, in which she learned that she had a knack for Texas Hold’em. She couldn’t lose with Hitch circling the table and giving her hints to the other player’s cards. They’d talked about doing a tournament, but in the end she’d convinced herself it was beginner’s luck and kept the money to buy a couch and a year’s supply of jawbreakers.

  “Are you talking about high stakes gambling?”

  “Kind of.” He grinned wildly. “Are you in?”

  Luce glanced back in the direction of the hotel room door. “Yeah. Why not?”

  “Good, let’s go!”

  A narrow corridor led from the basement level of the hotel to an underground parking garage, where, in the far corner, many spaces from where the hotel’s guests thinned sat a white van. Hitch gestured toward the driver door and Luce opened it, slipping behind the wheel.

  “They were bound to find out, Luce,” Hitch said, apparating into the passenger seat. “We weren’t going to be able to keep our relationship quiet forever. They’ll be coming for me soon, so let’s make this last caper count.”

  Luce stared at him, dumbstruck at the words coming out of his mouth. “Are you talking about the report? What does that have to do with anything? You act like they could apprehend you, like you’re a real person.”