“Yes.”
“Good. What do you need from me? I have a date.”
“I’m worried about the show,” said Sunny. “I feel like there may have been some foul play with Dirk’s death, now with Lance and everything…well, some people are getting nervous.”
“Should they be nervous, Marty?”
“Well…I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Why did you invite her in here?” He pointed to Sunny but didn’t look at her.
“Just logistics?”
“You were always such a shitty liar. It’s maddening. She’s here so we don’t speak too specifically. ‘Speak not his name, lest you summon him.’ Isn’t that the line from that Piers Anthony book you liked so much?”
“On a Pale Horse.” Marty said this in a whisper. “Your memory is really quite horrifying.”
“Sunny will find out soon, but we can let her in later, if it makes you feel better.” He turned in Sunny’s direction. “And if you’re OK being kept in the dark for a little while longer. All the cards will be on the table soon.”
“I guess I am. Am I in danger?”
“A little, but on the scale of people in the building, you’re pretty low on the list.”
“You make it sound so insulting, but, OK.”
“Trust me. This is one shit list you don’t want to be on. Marty here is at the tippy-top. Isn’t that right, Marty?”
“Stop talking in goddamn riddles. What should I do?”
“You have somewhere you can be the next few nights? Different place each night. Cash only. Friends are cool, too, but have Smed drive or take a cab with cash. We should be out from under this in two days, three max.”
“And?”
“I’ll take care of Sheena and Gill. I may need them. Sheena is a wreck. That’s what you were going to tell her. You were going to tell her that whatever you did back in the good old days it was that was eating her from the inside out was all gonna be cool. It was a coincidence. The threat was locked up safe somewhere, right, Marty?”
“Yes, I suppose. Because we, are safe, aren’t we?”
“Fuck. You really are a moron. Look out there, Marty. You think that’s news she needs, or do you think she’s apprised of the situation? She’s suffered from trichotillomania as long as I’ve known her.”
“Tricta-what?” Sunny looked confused.
“It’s a specialized obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s no more problematic than the fact that you alternate colors on things when you can.”
“The fuck you say?”
“Pull your keys out.” She did. “See anything?”
“There’s a kinda pattern.”
“No. There’s a pattern. If you had an even number of brass and chrome you’d alternate. You have twice as many brass as chrome, so you do two brass and one chrome. It’s not important. Most people in the arts have little tics. Even the trichotillomania isn’t that bad. Except under stress. When people with those compulsions get freaked out, it get way worse. You noticed Sheena’s been keeping a cap on all the time?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s going bald an inch at a time. She’s literally pulling out all her hair. Not much different than Lady M and her blood compulsion in the play. She’ll rattle apart before it becomes a health issue.”
“So what the hell’s happening?” Sunny asked.
“Fuckin’ Sunny.” Al smiled at her. It was the most pleasant smile he could manage. “You just said you’d be OK not knowing for a few days. I’ll let you know. No-bullshit guarantee. There’s just no high side to telling you about all this stuff right now.”
“So don’t ask her to pull herself together?” This from Marty.
“No, Marty, you tremendous fucker. No. Mostly because it won’t help. I know that there were fourteen of you at first and now there are three left. I’m pretty sure Sheena’s figured it out by now, man. Gill knows. I think you’re close. What you don’t know is who is doing this shit. It may be who you suspect. It may be someone else who has taken on some grim work. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need the fuckin’ luggage you guys have been hauling around. I’m looking at times, places, people, style, patterns, and timelines. I’m just crunching a ton of information, and I almost have the answer. Then, well, then I bring someone in dead or alive. I can, because I’m a lawman of sorts. Not just a PI, but you don’t need more than that.”
“So, what do we do?” asked Marty, looking particularly like a weasel.
“Tonight, we call in Gill and Sheena. Let me do the talking. I need to make a call, so I’ll tell them as I leave I need five minutes. Get all of them in, and make them have a drink. Sunny can try my fancy drink tricks. When I come back in, I’ll start calling the shots. Everyone set?” They nodded. Al went through the waiting area. “Hey you two. We’re going a little late. I’m afraid it’s my fault. A bunch of shit went down with concessions. I’m making a two-minute phone call and a three-minute phone call, then I’m back, and we finish our business here. Sunny and Marty have one little thing to discuss, but they’ll come out in a minute or two; then we’ll finish up. Be right back.”
Al walked quickly around the corner and looked at his phone. He’d missed a call from Bud, and he had one voice message. He called the voice message. It was Bud blathering about how he’d made arrangements to go out to Freeport and stay with an old buddy. They were having a public meal with Eric, so everything was going to be hunky-fucking-dory. The upshot was he didn’t need to call Bud tonight. Bud would call if he needed him.
His next chore was to call Edith.
“Hey, baby.” Al was putting on a slightly sexy tone.
“You sound sultry. I was hoping you and I could get sultry later.
“We can, but first I need a favor from you. It’s about a six-point-five on a one-to-ten.”
“What?”
“One of the actors on our list is sort of falling apart and she needs a place to stay for a day or two. Can she crash at your place?”
“Is she weird? Like is she a theatre for politics, feminazi, lesbionic robot from beyond?”
“I have detected no theatre for politics, feminazi, lesbionic robot from beyond vibes from her. I know her from the olden golden times. I can tell you I find her physically repulsive and that she’s a shitty actor.”
“I can buy that. How many nights?”
“Two. Three tops.”
“You’ll have this solved by then?”
It sounded like she’d finished her thought without his help, but he helped anyway. “Yes. Or she’ll be dead. I’m banking on the good guys on this one.”
“I assume I’ll be safe?”
“Safe as houses.”
“Ha. Safe as houses in a safe house.” It was jittery laughter.
“We’ll work out a few more details before we get there. I don’t know if she only eats raw squirrel or bulgur wheat cooked in celery root.”
“People seriously eat that weird?”
“People don’t. Actors do. Stay chilly. Can we come right over, or do we need to burn some time? We could go buy some fermented broccoli froth or something.”
She laughed. Jittery still. “Shit. I got that feeling again. This stuff is fun to play at, but it’s kinda scary when it gets real.”
“This shit just got real.” He made a decent attempt at sounding like a thug gangster. He should. He had up close personal tutelage fairly recently. “OK. Don’t freak out. We’ll be by in a few. I love you.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, he knew he was screwed.
“Whoa! What was that last part?”
“What? I say a lot of stuff like broccoli froth and fermented squirrel. I even said trichotillomania like seven time a few minutes ago.” Silence.
“I love you, too, Deputy Marshal Al Macbeth.”
“Deputy Marshal Al Macbeth. That has a hell of a ring to it. OK, we love each other, and I’ll be home in a couple minutes.”
She giggled “This is weird. I just said I love you to a deputy marshal. I�
�ll just be floating around waiting for you. Bye, now.” She felt disconnected and definitely odd. He could relate.
He got back to the office, and everyone was throwing back drinks in silence. It wasn’t going well. “Sorry I took so long. I’m going to cut to the chase. It’s been a long and weird day. Sunny doesn’t know everything, but once everything gets clear, I’ll let her know as much as I can.
“I came here for legit reasons. I was replacing an actor. I didn’t know his death was the result of a chain of crimes from back when I was still in Chicago. I don’t know the specifics, and I don’t wanna know right now. Here’s what I do know. A bunch of you folks did something to someone. It resulted with the guy killing some people. He did time. He got out and decided to kill all the people he thinks did him wrong. There’s another scenario, and that’s that you guys didn’t do anything, and someone is setting up this guy to take another fall and go back to jail.”
“Back?” asked Sheena. She looked very pale and grabbed a lock of hair poking from under her cap.
“It’s complicated. He has this original group of you cut from fourteen down to three. He’s particular about how he does stuff, so I think we can keep you relatively safe. We could just turn you guys in and see where the chips fall, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t be acceptable to all of you for one reason or another. I don’t want to talk about it right now, because I’m afraid it might make me add to the problem instead of working on an answer. Tonight, Marty has his walking papers and instructions. Best for him not to share them with us. You…” He indicated Sheena, “I have a nice place you can crash. We can go right over or stop and get some food for you. I’d prefer not to go to your apartment and get clothes, but if we’re going to do that, the earlier, the better.”
“I wanna swing by home and get some clothes and toiletries. It’s real close, but it’ll make me feel better.”
“Let me guess. Double Tree?” Al guessed.
“Yeah. They house a lot of folks there.”
“OK. But quick trip, then we get you to your safe place.”
“What about me?” Gill was looking at Al suspiciously for the first time since this afternoon.
“We agreed. You and I need to go talk out our issues. It’s been a long time, but we may be able to salvage a friendship that’s worth it. It deserves a try, at the very least.” As Al was saying this, he saw Gill lighten up. So far, his incredibly complex plan hadn’t tanked. It hadn’t even partially tanked. If Al could have done it without looking like an escapee from the moron circus, he would have patted himself on the back.
Everybody agreed and agreed to be safe. Sunny turned to Al and asked, “I know I’m not invited, but could I come to at least part of the slumber party, too.” Al looked. Sheena was pathetically leaning against Sunny, seeming to pull life force from Sunny through their skins and into her very marrow. He looked into Sunny’s eyes and saw such unconditional love for her fellow human--even a fellow human she didn’t like that well, Al nodded affirmative. “Yippee! Girl slumber parties are the coolest.”
“I’ll be back, ultimately, to spend the night.”
“Yippee! Weird situations are the coolest.” There was an uncomfortable moment, and they all managed to break into real, heartfelt, belly laughter. Al was always perplexed at how simultaneously full of love and cataclysmically fucked-up actors could be.
“OK, let’s do our thing. Stay safe till tomorrow. This will be over in three days or less. I promise. Honest.”
They all headed out, looking like a fledgling field trip to see their first play. But they weren’t going to a play. They were going to a graveyard to uncover a very old, very moldy corpse. In their hearts, they were all hoping they wouldn’t remove the blanket and see their own face staring back at them.
59
Eric was just putting on his fresh clothes. He’d showered once, got out, could still smell diesel, and took another. The second shower was longer, and he used some soap called Goop. It had little pieces of pumice in it, and Eric was pretty sure that extended use of it would make your pecker fall off. It was the very devil on petroleum smells, though, and soon he was feeling clean. There were no dirt smells, which would have been OK, but more importantly, there were no fertilizer or diesel smells. Those were bad smells to have around after Tim McVeigh had fucked up most of Oklahoma City, but he had those items on hand; his bomb-making skills told him that a fertilizer/diesel bomb was the way to go.
When he bought the place with the farm, the place he wanted to buy, there were a few old barrels of fertilizer in the corner. It was ammonium nitrate-based. In the last few years, it had gotten hard to find this old stuff. Eric and his couple of running buddies when they were kids used to make these fertilizer/diesel bombs. They had to be mixed right and packed right, but mostly, they needed a good explosive charge to set them going. What happened was the small explosive got the ammonium nitrate pissed off, and it let out a bunch of oxygen. The oxygen, along with a considerable amount of heat, was released, and when the explosion went “boom,” it really went “boom.”
Eric had taken a drive, dug a ditch between the gates that were still at the old property in Malta, Illinois. It was a trap for later. He had been storing the fertilizer out there, along with a bunch of diesel for farm equipment. He was gonna make one big bomb in one of the fifty-five-gallon drums and set it off when the car with Sheena, Gill, and Al was parked on top of it. He’d use Bud to lure them out there, then blow the cocksuckers up when they thought they were still safe in the car.
Right as Eric got out of the shower, he heard his land line ringing. He got out of the tub and shower combo, barked his shin painfully of the edge of the tub, and got to the phone before it stopped ringing. “Yeah?”
“Hey, Eric, sorry, man. Bad time? You sound annoyed.”
Eric grabbed his throat with his hands from the inside. He used his mind to squeeze it into Midwestern calm. “No, Buddy. I just barked my shin when I ran over to the phone. I must not have let it ring very long. It rang a few times while I jogged in.”
“Oh.” Said Bud sounding full of guy-sympathy, “I fuckin’ hate that. Foot pain is the worst. Stepping on a Hot Wheels car while you are walking to have a midnight pee sucks balls.”
“I’ll bet. Everything still on? Problems?
“Oh, no. I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. I bought a little rye, wanted to know if you needed anything to drink? Non-alcoholic, of course.”
“I’m good. I have Kool-Aid, but I can fix you a drink. Lord above, you must be tired.”
“Oh, yeah. It’ll be fifteen minutes, and I’ll be there. And, hey, thanks for the hospitality.”
“No. Thank you. I’m having fun. See you in a few.”
After they had talked, Eric took a piece of marinated lamb and put it on a grill pan, cooked it in garlic, and voila! A whole meal of smells and no real food. He’d eat when he got Bud settled in.
60
It was monumentally weird. “Beyond surreal” got close. Al was sitting in a room with five other people, and there were way too many connections and relationships to draw them all out.
Al knew that Gill had slept with Sheena. He may have rolled around with Sunny. Al and Gill had done a threesome back in the old days; whenever Al thought of that, the song lyric “It isn’t gay if it’s a three-way” would go through his head. He had almost slept with Sunny. He was having an active relationship with Edith. Edith had a room full of people she didn’t know--except Al--and was wondering what was next.
“Can I speak to you for a sec?” Al asked Edith.
Edith smiled and put her hand up for Al to help her up. She was sitting on some sort of a bean-bag chair. “Absolutely, my dear.”
Al helped her up and led her to the bedroom. “I need to leave with Gill for a while. We might be back. I might be back. I might need some ice for my knuckles.”
“I thought guys like you just head-butted people.” She was smiling and didn’t seem th
e least bit disturbed. She looked like she was at home in this kind of turmoil.
“Sometimes I head-butt, but I think Gill needs to be punched a couple times. Just a couple of good, old-fashioned, closed-handed pops to the body. I can’t break him, but I have to let him know it’s a possibility.”
“Understood, but don’t we already know about the party and what happened to Bannerman?”
“We think we know most of it. I like first-person stories. This is probably going to fuck up our friendship, but I don’t care. I wanna catch whoever’s doing this shit. Bud is out there. He says he has an old friend with him.”
“So he’s safe?”
“Or he’s full of shit. I have no way of knowing, and I don’t have time to hunt it down. If he has someone with him, and Eric is doing all this shit, I think he’ll be OK. I don’t know. I can see both ideas as plausible…”
“But?” She was close and he could smell lavender, longing, and powerful magic.
“My gut says it’s Eric and he’s gonna try to hurt Bud and use him as a honey-pot.”
“A what?”
“A lure. Get me to go save his ass, then frag me when I show up. My bet’s on that.”
“So?” an inch closer.
“So can you find a movie and some popcorn while I hit Gill a few times? We’ll have some laughs afterwards.” At this, Edith laughed so explosively that Al was covered in a mist of spittle.
She wiped at his face, still laughing. “Sorry, babe. Yes. If anything happens, call me, and I’ll save you somehow.”
“That is the vaguest fucking plan I have ever heard.”
“Those are the best kind. That’s what you say, anyway. Sunny and I will keep Sheena from melting down. But, hey?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to say anything to this, as a matter of fact, I don’t want you to. I love you, Al. I think you and I still have healing to do from our past romances, but I love you, and I think we can have something. Just think about it. No matter how things turn out, we’ll be friends, right?”
Hog Butcher: 2nd Edition Page 36
