Yeah. It’s like that for me. Pretty sure Betty didn’t know all of it. She’d never have asked me. She wasn’t one of the cruel ones. If she’d known, she’d have either kept poking around until someone scraped her up off the pavement, or she’d have eaten her pain like a piece of poison, knowing full well that it would kill her one of these days. Sooner than her time.
I waited for something from Jimmy. A sign, a sense of what he wanted. If he needed revenge of some kind, then it would be up to me to make a call. I’d given my word to his aunt, but all I promised in words was to look into it. I hadn’t promised to go any deeper than that.
No, I’d made that promise to myself.
God damn it.
Jimmy turned and looked past me, and I followed his gaze to see two figures approach a small metal utility door on the side of the building. Two girls. Maybe minors or maybe emaciated adults. Put them both together and I outweigh them by eighty pounds. As the door opened I caught a brief image of a man’s face in the doorway. Older, not wasted, shaved head, dark eyes, hard mouth. He also wore a hoodie, but he looked clean and fit.
Without turning to Jimmy, I said, “Dill?”
I didn’t need him to answer. It’s why Jimmy was here right now.
We watched the two girls go inside. Dill leaned out and looked around. He saw me. I don’t look like a cop. I don’t even look like an undercover cop. I’m big, square, ugly, and anyone can tell there’s something not right about me. People like Betty see one kind of thing. People like Dill see something else. He gave me five full seconds of a hard, flat stare, and then he closed the metal door.
“You know those girls?” I asked Jimmy.
His hood moved indecisively. Could have been a nod, could have been a shake. Not sure it mattered. He knew Dill. He knew something about Dill that made him willing to risk coming to me.
And that put us both out on the edge of the cliff.
I had three options. One was go home, watch some TV shit with the sound turned up and drink myself to sleep. Typical day for me.
Option two was go over to Patty Cake’s and give her the vial. Let her do her thing. Light the fuse.
Or…
Or, maybe this wasn’t that complicated. Maybe it didn’t have to be.
I looked around at the buildings here in the projects. There’s not a lot of life here and there’s fuck-all when it comes to grace, or hope, or luck.
Except every once in a while.
I looked at the vial, held it up so that I could see those little Christmas lights through the curved glass. They made the flakes of dried blood look like dust. Jimmy came around and stood in front of me. I could still see the lights through him. Ghosts, you know?
I held the vial out to him and he frowned at me, not getting it. Then, he tentatively reached out his hand, palm upward. I dropped the vial. It fell through his hand, hit the ground, and cracked apart.
“This one’s on the house,” I told him as I began walking toward the building. Then I paused and turned to look at him. “Your Aunt Betty never gave up on you, kid. Never. Use that. Let it pull you in.”
He said nothing.
I nodded and kept walking.
The door was metal but the lock was Mickey Mouse. I jimmied it open and I stepped inside. It smelled like shit and piss and bad decisions. Nothing unexpected.
I stood at the bottom of the fire stairs and listened. I could hear some voices talking. Muffled, wordless noise from several stories up. I began to climb. I’m big but I learned long ago to move quietly when getting shot wasn’t on my Day-planner. Rubber-soled shoes and some skills acquired in places that were even worse than this.
The lookout guy on the second floor didn’t even know I was there. He was too busy texting on his cell. Had no clue at all I was there until I hooked an arm around his throat, braced my other hand against the back of his head and squeezed. There are two versions of that choke. With the judo version you put the guy out in about eight seconds—sixteen if you cut off only one of the carotids—and then you lower him down and let him sleep it off. The jujutsu version is a lot older and less civilized. With that version you quiet him with the choke, and then you shift your arm and use the long forearm bones like a paper cutter to crush the windpipe and the hyoid bone.
I didn’t know this cat. He might have been every bit as bad as Dill or he might have been some kid who couldn’t find work and this looked easy. Whatever. No reason to kill him. So he got the judo choke.
People try to fight it, but if it’s done right and you mean it, they’ve got to be pretty well trained to get out. He wasn’t. He was meat and muscle and then he was a slack weight. I laid him down, patted his pockets and found a cheap nine mil and a knife. Took those. Debated stomping on his knee to make sure he wasn’t going to be an issue later. Didn’t.
Moved up the stairs.
The second guard was on the fifth-floor landing. He did hear me coming and tried real hard to do something about it. A lot of street kids are tough and experienced, but there’s street tough and there’s Special Forces tough. I wasn’t always a big city skip tracer, and I’d fought tougher men than these on four continents. He managed to get his gun out of his waistband, but I took it away from him and pistol-whipped him into two years’ worth of orthodontia. He spun around, spitting bloody teeth, and went right down. I caught him and gave him a little shove so he’d go all bumpity-bump down the stairs. Should not have pulled a gun on me.
Dill’s voice came yelling out of one of the rooms down the hall.
“The fuck was that, Gogo?”
When Gogo didn’t answer, Dill came out of the room with one arm wrapped around a girl’s throat and a pistol in his other hand. She was naked from the waist up. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. Almost no tits, ribs showing, some sores on her that let me know she’d been sucking rock for at least a couple of years. Probably came here with her friend to blow Dill and his goons in exchange for a pipe.
That’s some sad, sad shit right there.
Dill had his arm resting on the girl’s shoulder to steady his aim, but I was a shadow in a dark hallway.
“Gogo…?” he called.
“Gogo’s off the clock,” I said and fired the gun I’d taken from the kid downstairs. The girl was a stick figure, Dill was a bull. She didn’t offer protection worth a damn. My bullet caught Dill in the hip and the impact of lead hitting all that bone jerked him backward and spun him. Most shots won’t do that. Most pass right through, but the hip’s a nice, solid target. He screamed and the girl screamed and his gun went off. She fell into a ball, screeching, slapping at her body because she probably thought she’d been shot. The other girl, still inside the room, started screaming, too. But Dill screamed louder than both of them. He tried to shoot again, but by now I was running. I kicked his wrist and then stomped it flat onto the floor. I liked how that felt so I did it again until bones broke and the gun went flying. Then I knelt on him, my knee on his chest, my left hand braced against the wall, the barrel of the stolen gun jammed against his forehead.
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” I said and tapped him hard with the barrel on each word. He did shut up, but the screams were boiling right behind his gritted teeth. I turned to the screaming girl. “Get dressed and get the fuck out of here.”
She was hysterical and probably out of her mind even before this, but she still had her animal instincts. She was up and running in a second. Topless. Without her friend.
I bellowed for the other girl to get out, and she ran past me. A little older, but just as wasted. I saw that she had her friend’s shirt clutched in one small fist. That tiny bit of courtesy, that little display of presence of mind, was somehow touching. I listened for them as they pounded down the stairs.
That left me and Dill.
“You got one chance, asshole,” I said. “Tell me about the kid.”
“What… kid…?” he gasped.
“Jimmy,” I said, though I thought he already knew. “He said there was something wrong with the gr
it.”
“No… it’s—”
I banged his forehead with the gun butt. “No, no. I’m not a cop, I’m not wearing a wire and this isn’t a time to get cute. What’s wrong with the grit?”
When he didn’t answer fast enough I swung the gun back and hit him in what was left of his hip. More screaming. It took a little more effort to calm him down this time.
“What was wrong with the grit?” I asked when he was able to hear me.
He said two words. Not a real explanation, but enough of one. “Bad… cook.”
“Why’d you sell it if it was bad? Your fucking customers are dying, dumbass.”
Dill looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Always more where they came from.”
It was enough. It was too much, really. It showed the scope of what he was as a person, just as it told me exactly how much the penal system would ever fix him. Or rehabilitate him.
It made me feel old and tired.
It made me feel sick.
It made me wish that I could do one thing to him that would stop this kind of thing from happening everywhere. But that was just plain stupid. Who was I? God?
I felt a coldness in the hall and turned to see Jimmy standing there. Silent and bloody. He didn’t say anything to me. Probably wouldn’t if he could. All he did was watch me as I dragged Dill into the room where he’d been having sex with the girls. There was a soiled mattress on the floor, a chair, a gym bag open and a pipe sitting on a folding chair.
If I was into the drama of it, I’d have made Dill smoke a whole bowl of the tainted shit he was selling. But Jimmy was watching me and somehow I don’t think he was mean enough to want that. The kid had been willing to join me in purgatory to save other junkies like him from dying. Heroism comes in some funny damn shapes and sizes.
Instead I hauled Dill to his feet and chucked the son of a bitch out the window. Five floors down. I didn’t lean out to watch him hit. I’m a motherfucker but I’m not a sick motherfucker.
I walked out into the hall right behind Jimmy, but as I left the room somehow Jimmy was already down the far end and vanishing into the fire stairs. I stood for a moment and watched him go. There was no way to catch up to him. Not anymore. He was going somewhere else. In happier moments I like to think that maybe when it’s Betty’s time to go—decades from now, I hope—a clean and healthy Jimmy will be waiting for her.
I’d love to sell that to myself. Booze helps.
The truth is that aside from seeing ghosts like him, and the ghosts that haunt me, I have no fucking idea what’s on the other side. Maybe the only thing on the other side of that big light is a big black nothing. I’ve talked to a lot of strange people along the way. Mystics, you might call them. Everybody has a theory, but none of us know. Not for sure.
Not really.
I took my time getting out of there. No doubt someone had seen Dill fall, or heard him. And maybe someone would make a call, but police response in this part of town was always reluctant, always slow.
The air was colder than it had been a few minutes ago, and there was a tingle to it. I felt something on my cheek and when I brushed it away I realized it was a snowflake. I looked up to see a few flakes drifting down on the night breeze.
Corny as shit.
I shoved my hands in my pockets, took a deep breath of the night sky, turned and headed home. The ghosts would still be there, but at least there wouldn’t be a new one.
That’s something, right?
DARK HILL RUN
by
KASEY LANSDALE AND JOE R. LANSDALE
Johnny ran fast, and it ran faster, catching up rapidly. There was barely enough time between labored breaths for him to reach into his coat pocket and pour salt into his hair and onto his clothes. He hoped he wasn’t providing seasoning.
As he passed a wide store window, slightly dark, but reflective, he saw his reflection in it, saw the street lights and cars at the curb, but the one who was following him did not appear in the glass.
No reason it would.
It wasn’t human.
He could feel the warm breath on his neck, the reek of the rotting dead flesh, and there was a slight brush at his salt-covered coat collar, a sizzling sound and a puff of smoke, and still he ran, trembling, making good time along the oddly abandoned sidewalk, moving rapidly uphill.
* * *
Johnny wanted to quit smoking. That’s how it began.
“I know a hypnotist. Well, he’s also a therapist,” Darla said.
They were sitting in a café off one of the less busy city streets, but still, horns were honking, people were yelling and talking, sirens constantly blared and the beat of traffic helicopters flying overhead was disconcerting. Johnny, being from a small town, had never gotten accustomed to that. But you couldn’t work as a book editor in a small community. He missed the simple backstreets and the skyline and the pinpricks of stars against the black velvet sky, the silence of a summer night. He was glad he had been able to buy an old home here in the city, nestled next to what had once been a country trail, the Camino Real, over a hundred years ago. His house and those on his street, Dark Hill Run, were the last of a forgotten era, when drovers hustled cows along what was then a dusty trail to the market that had existed at the bottom of the hill.
He had arrived a few years before the gentrification of the neighborhood, before the wealthy had moved in and turned old businesses into new boutiques and coffee shops frequented by self-important hipsters.
Darla pushed her short brown hair behind one ear, and said, “He’s hypnotized a number of people into stopping smoking, including me.”
“You never smoked that much,” Johnny said.
“No, but one a day is one too many. You smoke three packs a day. You won’t be long for this world you keep that up.”
“I’m a runner. Run through this city dodging people, climbing hills, you get pretty strong.”
“You can improve yourself, but you can’t beat the nicotine in the end by just blowing it out. You have to quit.”
“Dang it,” Johnny said, and grinned. “I knew that part would come up. It makes me want a cigarette.”
“I got his card,” Darla said, and pulled a wallet from her purse and opened it and took out the card. “I was just about to clean this thing out. I keep all manner of cards until I don’t even remember why I took them in the first place.”
Johnny looked at the card.
“You want to quit,” Darla said. “This is your guy. Doctor Anderson. He’s not fancy, but he gets the job done. Of course, on Tuesday I dance like a chicken and on Thursday I bark like a dog.”
“That’s funny,” Johnny said. “But, not really.”
* * *
Johnny left Darla with her promising to drop by and see him sometime in the week after work, and thought about the therapist she had suggested.
On the street outside the entryway of Dr. Anderson’s building, staring at the doctor’s name on the door, Johnny paused to light a cigarette. He looked at his watch. Good. It was still early. He could have two.
He smoked one slowly, the other more quickly, coughed out some smoke, and trekked past a homeless man wearing a bright red jacket and a big fluffy lint-filled beard, bounded up some steps, and headed inside.
When the elevator opened the office was small and there was a reception desk but no receptionist. Behind the desk there was a pebbled glass window and a door next to it. The door was mostly pebbled glass as well.
Johnny decided to beard the lion in his den. Provided the lion was home.
He tapped on the pebbled glass door. There was the sound of a chair scooting on tile, and then the door opened.
The man standing there was short and fat and bald. He had on a suit with wide lapels that had to go back to the seventies, and wore a tie with a hula girl on it. He looked himself to be in his seventies.
“Do you have an appointment?” Dr. Anderson asked.
“No. Sorry. Actually, I came here to make one, but your
receptionist is out—”
“She’s been out for ten years. I’m mostly retired. I was thinking you might have an appointment and I had forgotten. I was thinking of taking the day off.”
“May I make an appointment?”
“Consider yourself appointed right now, you got the time.”
Johnny nodded and came inside. Dr. Anderson left the door open and sat down behind his cluttered desk. There was a worn couch, and Johnny sat there. He glanced about. All manner of odd knick-knacks were positioned on shelves about the room and on Dr. Anderson’s desk. Looked like the kind of stuff children give their grandma, things they can buy cheap to fulfill a birthday or grandmother’s day debt. There was one wall of bookshelves and they were filled to overflowing.
“You’re here to quit smoking,” Dr. Anderson said.
“How’d you guess?”
“That’s about all I do. I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader, Mr…”
“Johnny Cole.”
“How bad do you want to quit?”
“Bad. Yet, I don’t know how much smoking is bothering me. I’m a runner. I can’t tell the cigarettes are slowing me at all.”
“You’re young. They catch up. Lots of things catch up to you as you age, and sometimes before you age. We lie to ourselves a lot.”
“A lady I know, Darla Snider, used you to stop smoking.”
“Ah.”
He tilted back slightly in his chair, mentally scanning through his rolodex. “Well, in Ms. Snider’s case, she smoked one or two cigarettes a day and was ready to quit on her own. She wasn’t really a problem case. Frankly, she’d have quit without me. But you?”
“Three packs a day.”
“That’s a lot of cigarettes, but if you really want to quit, I can help. Sometimes, you quit smoking you have other problems. Overeating. I’m an example. I can’t hypnotize myself, but I was once hypnotized to quit smoking by someone else. It worked. I’ve been hypnotized to lose weight. That didn’t work. So even I know there are limitations. You see, I wanted to quit smoking, but I didn’t want to quit eating, and to modify a behavior based on an existing necessity is much harder. Eating is a necessity. Smoking is not. Some other problems here and there might pop up. Our psyches deplore a vacuum, so we give ourselves problems. It can be like whack-a-mole. Solve this one, there’s a new one. Solve that one, and so on. What I specialize in is stopping smoking.”
Dark Cities Page 17
