Violet blinked away tears, watching Wade’s silhouette pumping at his cock. God help him, he was hard and whacking off at the impossible replay of his cruelty, but he was sobbing, too.
“Oh, Vi, baby,” he choked, “I’m so sorry—”
His hand froze on his dick and dropped it like it shocked him. “What the fuck…” he grumbled as he stared at a new scene.
The soundtrack regressed, sax flatulence, junkie-funk guitar and canned moans seeping through the wall.
“What did you see?” a woman rasped, lighting a cigarette.
“Nothing, mama,” a boy mumbled, and Wade’s broken whisper echoed him. Popcorn popped on a stove.
“He wants to watch TV, so you make yourself scarce.”
“But mama, it’s Monday Night Football night—”
She cuffed him across the right ear with her silver Cricket lighter clenched in her fist. He yelped and ducked away. The Jiffy Pop’s pregnancy came to term, swelling foil belly splitting open to ooze steamy popcorn kernels into the hungry stove flames. He rolled away from her kicking legs and ducked for the door.
“What the fuck, Ruth?” a bleary man’s voice came from the bedroom.
“You want to be his Daddy? You want the duty? No? Then shut the fuck up!”
The ghostly cathode light went murky as the screen before Wade became a mirror. The music changed, too, subsiding into a deep bed of whispers and moans, soft, edgeless cries as of a dozen girl-girl scenes playing at once.
Wade leaned forward to feed the slot more quarters, cursing his reflection in subsonic hisses, when Violet spooked and jumped back from the peephole.
On the screen, she thought she’d seen herself peeping through the wall, as if the camera in the booth had x-ray vision. But when she went back to the hole, her heart pounded as she saw that Wade wasn’t alone in the booth, and what was in there with him looked nothing like her at all.
Zoe grasped her shoulders, held her up to the hole. “This has to happen, sweetie,” she murmured in Violet’s ear. “He wants it, he needs it… and so do you.”
She looked again, daring it to be real, but it was still there, more there than ever. On the screen, someone rose up behind Wade, but she knew this was a trick, because nothing blocked her view. Wade stared into the screen, transfixed.
All she could tell was that it was a woman. She stood taller than Wade so that the screen cut off her head, but her alabaster body was so enormous as to defy the physics of the booth. Absurdly voluptuous breasts dwarfed Wade’s head, while her elephantine belly smashed and overflowed around his skinny, shuddering form. Her gyrating hips rutted against the walls and blocked the door. Her arms floated up and stretched out to the screen, shockingly dainty little hands reaching up to the thin film of glass that separated her from the flesh-and-blood Wade, all but claiming his stupefied TV ghost.
“Please, mama,” he wheezed, “please take me—”
On the screen, Wade closed his eyes and went limp as the arms closed over him.
In the booth, something rose up between Wade and the screen. It bloomed and swelled and enveloped him, the glow of the screen shimmering through its molten form as it filled out and became a liquid replica of the headless woman.
As it grew, Violet saw rancid white slime oozing out of every seam in the booth, all the spilt seed of a million meat-beatings conjuring itself out of the walls like ectoplasm at a séance, and congealing in #9 to form the Magna Mater.
Violet bit back a scream.
The liquid mother-thing took Wade in its arms and cradled his head. His sobs broke into seizures that she smothered in her mammoth breasts. She guided a dripping nipple to his mouth and he locked onto it for all he was worth, sucking convulsively like a newborn.
The milk soothed him, and he subsided in her arms, anguished cries subsiding, deflated into a fetal ball. His limbs sagged bonelessly as his belly filled.
Violet groaned and tried not to vomit. The thing grew still larger and rolled over Wade, oblivious, delirious, at the teat. His clothes peeled back, shredded, melted away. The thing rolled up onto the bench and settled down around him, his rigid cock swallowed by slithering mouths of fluid flesh.
He moaned loudly around the monster teat, but the thing flowed through his fingers and rearranged itself so breasts and belly lolled backwards, and he sat facing the oleaginous grotto of a sopping, cavernous vagina.
Wade uttered a piercing infant’s whine and leaned back from the maw. Her cyclopean thighs clenched him and drew him in deeper, like food going down an esophagus into a bottomless stomach. Finally, Wade gave in and put his face into the gaping, flowery mouth of her sex.
Violet’s revulsion spilled out over her lips, and she threw up on the box of domination supplies between her feet. Through her tears, through hot flashes of an oncoming faint, she could not stop looking.
As the thing lowered itself onto him, Wade leaned face-first into her, and she parted, unhinged, like the mouth of a python to kiss, then devour him. The puffy, prehensile labia closed over his whole head, then flexed and strained to gobble up his shoulders, chest and abdomen.
Violet shoved Zoe back, ran to the booths. Lupe stood before #9, but stepped back when she saw Violet coming fists-first to save her husband. Violet grabbed the skeleton key from around Lupe’s neck and jammed it into the door. The Occupied light still glowed above, but she could hear nothing inside—no music, no moaning, no Wade. She threw open the door and lunged inside with her fists cocked, but the booth was empty.
“No! No, goddamit, Wade! Where are you, baby?” She whirled on Lupe and the approaching Zoe. “Bring him back, you bitch! How dare you judge him—”
“We don’t judge, here, sweetie,” Zoe said. “We just help them get where they need to go. Take another look.”
Violet looked inside the booth again, eyes straining in the dim half-light. All she saw was a pile of rags on the bench—Wade’s clothes. They were no dirtier than when he came staggering in, but they were all torn and wet and wound up into a tight, owl-turd bundle that stirred as she came closer. Stirred and gave a tiny cry.
“Her people come for the ones nobody claims,” Zoe whispered in her ear. “Why don’t you go home early, sweetie? He’s beautiful, now, and he needs you.”
Violet stumbled and bumped into the remaining saloon door on her way out. She didn’t even notice Crayonne holding the front door open for her as she wandered out into the night cradling her newborn baby.
When the time came for a serious inventory of the soul, some people prefer a secluded beach, the woods, or the relative isolation of a city rooftop; but for Leo Knobloch, there was no place more conducive to deep rumination than the trunk of a strange car.
When Leo “Lo-Ball” Knobloch woke up in the trunk of a car, most who knew him would say it was the start of a good day, because at least he’d slept indoors. Then they would wonder aloud where said car might be found, and ask you how much money Lo-Ball owes you.
But they—and you—would be shit out of luck, because said car was moving fast with no witnesses, and Lo-Ball had, as usual, not a cent on his person.
He also had no idea how he came to be in the car. He felt like he’d slept with his head in a paint shaker, but he didn’t remember drinking. Knobloch only drank when he was winning, and since Lady Fortuna was perpetually on the rag for him lately, it was a safe bet he wasn’t hung over.
A tender joy buzzer on his mostly hairless dome told him someone had sapped him. Probing it with the plaster cast on his right hand did neither his head nor his broken fingers any good. Whoever hit him must now be escorting him somewhere, most likely for an audience with one of his legion of debtors.
Or maybe he’d just pissed someone off. Always a dark horse on the outside rail, pure cussed bad luck had stalked Leo Knobloch since the day of his birth, when he caught herpes from his mother coming out of her chute (and passed it onto the nurse who weighed him), and his father botched cutting the umbilical and severed his own thumb. Born under every k
nown astrological system’s baddest of bad signs, Leo was a veteran professional gambler, though the only real money he’d ever won had come from trading on the fear he inspired as a legendary loser.
Leo felt around the hot, sparsely carpeted floor of the trunk for his lucky hat, which had fallen onto his head out of the gray, rainy sky at Disneyland (having blown off the head of a forty-two year old man, also named Leo, who suffered a fatal heart attack while riding the Matterhorn), but it was nowhere to be found.
Surely, if they left it behind, these bastards could not be professionals. Even if you had no regard for the cherished personal possessions of others, you had to at least try not to leave evidence around. His name was already embroidered on the brim, but he suspected the fickle camp hat with Grumpy, the sourpuss dwarf from Snow White on the front, was already luck-wrangling for another bum, somewhere.
Likewise, his lucky toupee, which was also missing. He won it off the head of a Vietnamese grocer in a low-ball poker game at a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Reno, and though his own native hair was curlier and several shades lighter than the original owner’s, he wore it everywhere, especially at the pai gow parlors where he ran his bread-winning grift. Asians took luck seriously, and the sight of a shabby quiloc waggling his sandy brown eyebrows at you with the trophy-scalp of a fellow celestial draped on his skull was enough to make any pragmatic gambler toss him a few chips to go away, even if they didn’t know his reputation.
But everyone in this town who turned cards, threw dice, played ponies or made books for a living knew Leo Knobloch, and they hated him like cancer. Locked out of every legitimate gambling venue—and welcomed with knives and baseball bats at all the rest—Leo had to hunt for action.
He slowly reclaimed bits of the morning as he tried to calm down. He got up and looked at the calendar. It was a fancy one, from the current year, and everything. Eliza was selling them for her school to raise money for a bake sale or something. Every month was a different scene of dogs playing poker by some nut named Cassius Coolidge. This month’s picture was his favorite.
A gentlemanly poker game on a train, and a tubby, little Boston terrier—a runt who rolls on his back before other dogs even notice him—yelps with astonishment as he flops down the quartet of aces in his paw. The dogs in the aisles have their hats and umbrellas, but everyone turns to stare at the runt as he breaks a lifetime losing streak just as his train pulls into the station.
Next, he took Eliza to school. They had to go out the back window of the motel and beat it to his car around the block, because the place was condemned, and the doors were all boarded up. They stopped at McDonald’s for hotcakes and juice, and he dropped her off in record time—only fifteen minutes late. And no hassles with traffic, since all the buses and the other parents’ cars had already beat it.
Eliza was in a mood because of the tardiness, and because Mom had taken off with no forwarding address, again. Not that either of them had clapped eyes on her in almost five years, but the occasional cash-stuffed cards helped soften the blow.
He kissed her and told her not to worry, rubbed her red hair for luck—diplomatically avoiding the clump of fossilized gum wadded into her auburn curls because it fell off the bedpost in the night and onto her pillow—and nudged her out the door. Then he went to the nearest 7-11 and bought a lottery ticket. He scratched it and stuck it in his lucky hat, then went hunting.
In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to challenge the Afghani cab drivers outside the zoo to a backgammon tournament, but hindsight was 20-20, and nobody else would let him in the door. He knew it was stupid to go out and gamble at all, since he could no longer play the bad luck troll for chips, and he had only a hundred to last the month.
Anyone else would say it was stupid, but nobody who ever lived had been run over by the wheel of fortune like Leo had. Life had only ever given him just enough to stagger on, but he never gave up hope. He had always played not just for the rush, but to break the bad streak like the spine of a snake. When he got shut out of the pai gow parlors, the rationale took on the colors of salvation. He would not float along on the riptide of bad hands the bitch goddess saw fit to deal him; he would throw his last chips into her crooked teeth and force a sea change, or die trying.
And he would pick himself up and try again, as soon as these dice-loading Pashtun bastards let him out of this trunk.
He’d seen a show once, where a kidnapping victim in a trunk pulled the wires out of the taillights and used them to send an SOS, which got a cop to pull the car over. Knobloch didn’t know Morse code, but he figured any kind of frenetic pattern would alert someone that something was amiss. Lord knew, he couldn’t drive a mile without a cop pulling him over for a busted taillight.
Once he pulled the wires out, he couldn’t get them back into the socket to make the light flicker. He curled up to turn around and try the other one, when the taxi hit something.
Then something hit the taxi. And then something else.
Knobloch flew up against the roof of the trunk hard enough to pop it open. He hovered above the scene just long enough to get a memorable snapshot of the action, as the terribly unlikely response to his cry for help unfolded to punish all in the area.
The cab had been rear-ended by a huge old Cadillac, a gigantic battleship that drove them hard into a pickup truck belonging to a wildcatter exterminator, and knock loose a salvo of big green tanks of chemicals, which tumbled like torpedoes through the windshield of the cab and disgorged their pressurized contents into the bearded faces of his captors.
The billowing silver insecticide clouds gushed out the open windows and smashed windshield, shrouding the cabbies’ death-twitches in a languorous mystique, like a Vegas magic show.
The exterminator stumbled out of his truck with his hand a brimming cup of blood clamped to his mouth. He never saw the car coming the other way through the intersection until it scooped him up on its hood and carried him away on a wave of screams and screeching tires.
Behind the wheel of the Cadillac, Knobloch could see only the blue beehive of a wig and two knots of knuckles throttling the steering wheel behind the airbag.
And then, his moment of grace expired, he tumbled onto the hood of the Cadillac, banging his knee painfully and tearing his slacks, but otherwise none the worse for wear. He wrapped his shirt over his mouth and plugged his nose to reach in and grab his lucky hat off the dashboard of the cab. Hotcha, his toupee was still inside it.
He heard sirens.
His leg tingled when he walked away. When he rubbed his thigh, an unfamiliar bulge in his pocket gave him pause. He limped down the street to a drive-up coffee kiosk and redeemed an expired coupon for a free espresso while cars piled up and honked behind him, but nowhere near as bad as the traffic jam forming around the taxi. It took him a few more minutes and most of the tepid coffee before he realized the bulge in his pants was a cell phone, and it was ringing.
He dug the unfamiliar phone out and unfolded it awkwardly with his splinted hand.
“Daddy, I love you…”
“I love you too, honey…”
“But you’re so effing stupid, sometimes…”
He didn’t correct her language. He was too preoccupied by the brittle edge of an echo chasing her brave, shaken voice. She was on a speaker-phone.
“Honey, what happened? I know it’s not a holiday again. Was it a field trip?”
“No, Daddy… it’s a staff development day. There’s no school…”
“Oh damn it, how many of those do they have this year? What kind of holiday is that, anyway? Jesus, sweetie, I’m sorry. I don’t have my car right now, but… um…” Looking around, he tipped his lucky hat to the cabbies. “Daddy will come get you. I don’t think I can call a cab, right now. Where are you, baby?”
“Daddy, you better come quick…”
Eliza was snatched away. A passing motorist tossed out cold coffee that splashed his crotch; a second screamed obscenities, and a third driver took careful note
of Leo’s outlandish appearance, which memory he would recount in detail to police after murdering his wife and blaming an intruder.
“This can still have a happy ending, Leo.” The deeply accented voice twisted his name into liao, the Malaysian word for loser. “Do you have my money?”
Suddenly, everything made sense. “I have everything you’ll ever get out of me, right here, Tony.” He tried to make his voice into a weapon, but it cracked like a Saltine.
“I hope you were not stupid enough to give the cabdrivers my money.”
“They got paid, alright.” Up the street, the strobes and flashing red lights had swallowed the accident. Scrubbing bubbles. “Put Eliza back on.”
“She is safe with me and Dr. Kwak. You can have her, when I have what you owe the house, and you out of town.”
“Put her on. I need to calm down.”
Musical laughter tinkled in his ear, like splashes of piss. “You do not dictate terms to the house, Mr. Knob—”
The red paramedic lights pinwheeled and warped until Leo saw the world through a flashing red filter. He walked in tight circles, arm pumping out so spastically, it was all he could do, not to swing at passersby. What would he do? What could he do? They had Eliza. He, as always, had nothing.
“Where are you?”
“The cab would have brought you here.”
“You’re at your place, right?”
“Come and pay me, or you will have your bush most grievously whacked.” A moment of muffled mumbling, and then Tony Sherpa added, “And I trust you have your lucky hat.”
If you were a recreational gambler who paid his debts and stayed out of the cutthroat card rooms on the east side of town, chances are you would never breathe the same air as Dr. Kwak. Nobody who formally met Dr. Kwak wanted to talk about it.
But it was not always thus. He was once a respectable man. A real doctor, before he came to the States. Imagine emigrating from Korea to practice medicine in America, only to find out your name phonetically told people you were a fraud and a cheat. Pride would not let him change his name, and he soon found another use for his talents. He certainly knew his way around the human body, anyway. The first time he shook hands with Leo, he deftly broke two of his fingers right out on the casino floor. He leaned into his ear and whispered, “Our money. One week. And you never play here, anymore.”
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 10
