PIKE

by Benjamin Whitmer

  “Please stop,” Rory croaks.

  Pike wheels the truck into a restaurant parking lot. The building’s whitewashed and stained all over with black snow-water and dirt. The sign says Bar & Grill, nothing else. “One burger,” Pike says. “But I swear to God, if you fart one more time I’ll beat you to death with my bare hands.”

  CHAPTER 26

  ~ Like I ain’t fit to eat with normal folks?~

  The door rings open into a dark, dingy, windowless room with no grill to be seen. Nor customers. Behind the bar, a bone-thin, balding and bespectacled bartender in a Motley Crue T-shirt watches them. “You got any food?” Pike says.

  “We got food.” He nods at a door at the back of the bar. “Got three Mexicans in the kitchen.”

  “We don’t eat Mexicans.”

  The bartender looks at him. “They do the cooking. That’s what I meant.”

  “Well, give me three burgers. And some fries. Can I get it to go?”

  The bartender’s writing his order down. He looks up. “Sure.”

  Pike turns to Rory. “Take this little fucker to the bathroom and don’t let him out until he’s clean.”

  “I’m right here,” Bogie says. “You ain’t got to talk about me in the third person. Motherfucker.”

  Rory grips him by the back of his neck and shoves him down the bar towards the sign at the back of the bar. “Them bathrooms are for customers only,” the bartender says in a creaky voice, peering at Pike over his hooknose, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

  Pike drops a bill on the counter. “One of the burgers is his.”

  The bartender purses his lips and picks up the bill. “I’ll tell the Mexicans to get on your order.”

  “Fine. You got a payphone?”

  The bartender returns Pike’s change, his lips squirming like night-crawlers in the hot sun. “Outside the front door.”

  Pike steps outside and stands in front of the pay phone. He stands for a minute, lighting a cigarette and watching traffic waffle throughthe dirty snow. Then he rolls his shoulders and grins a lean grin, the cigarette smoke playing in the winter wind, rising like a dissipating halo over his head. He picks up the pay phone and dials. A one-eared cat slinks around the side of the restaurant and sidles up to Pike, mewling. Pike gives it the toe of his cowboy boot.

  “Yeah?” Jack answers.

  “This is Pike.”

  “Where the hell you been, Pike? I was out at the job site.”

  “Cincinnati. We’re taking the week off.”

  “What’s in Cincinnati?”

  The cat tries again. Persistency being one of the few virtues Pike admires, he hunkers down and scratches it between the ears. “You might be able to help me answer that.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m looking for a cop. I know the name of his partner. Derrick Krieger.”

  “The Derrick Krieger that’s moved in over at Cotton’s place? After shooting that black boy up there?”

  Pike had been hoping Jack might know a little less. “That’s my boy.”

  “What are you getting yourself into?”

  “Nothing I can very much help.”

  “Is it about Wendy?”

  Pike lets his lungs empty of smoke. “Yep.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me about it?”

  “You don’t want me to. Not yet, at least.”

  Pause. “It may take me a little while. You got a number where I can reach you?”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  Jack hangs up.

  Pike stands and grinds his cigarette out under the heel of his boot, the cat mewling. He opens the door just as Bogie returns from the bathroom, the scum skimmed out of his whiskers and a good portion of the dogshit and blood troweled off his jeans and wet down.

  The bartender looks at Bogie. Then looks down at the bar. Then looks at Bogie again. Then he deliberately opens the waist-high door in the bar and walks steadily to the bathroom door.

  “Motherfucker,” Bogie says, watching his back. “I oughtta spit in your mouth.”

  Rory slaps him on the back of the head. “Shut up.”

  The bartender opens the bathroom door and stands there. Very still. For a very long time.

  Then he closes the door, his lips mottled red and white with disgust. “Joseph,” he calls.

  A Mexican kid with a black eyes and a long ponytail sticks his head out of a dingy door next to the bathrooms.

  “This bathroom’s gonna need to be cleaned up.”

  “Fuck you,” Bogie says.

  The bartender looks at him blankly.

  “You heard me,” Bogie says. “You gotta come back in here and tell everyone how bad the bathroom needs cleaning after I use it? Like I’m some kind of dirty motherfucker? Like I ain’t fit to eat with normal folks?”

  “Joseph, call the police,” the bartender says.

  Joseph’s got one foot and a mop bucket through the door. He sets the bucket down tiredly and turns around. Bogie leaps at the bartender and whistles a wild roundhouse right crunching into his nose. “Call the police!” the bartender trills, his voice cracking.

  Rory moves to grab Bogie, but Pike drops a forearm across his chest, staying him. Bogie sinks another wild right into the bartender’s nose, then kicks his spindly legs out from under him and jumps on his chest, jamming his fists into his face. Pike lights another cigarette, his gray eyes wrinkled with a smile that has yet to reach his mouth. Joseph had already reached the bathroom. He sighs and turns around and walks very slowly back towards the door to the kitchen. Another Mexican kid passes him, and without even looking at the tangle of fists and spittle-laced blood that is the bartender and Bogie, holds a greasy paper bag of food to Pike. “Gracias,” Pike says, and takes it.

  “Llamé a policia,” Joseph calls out from the kitchen. “Estarán aqui pronto.”

  Pike lifts Bogie bodily off the bartender and carries him out the door, flailing and spitting like an enraged kitten.

  CHAPTER 27

  ~ I’m looking for somebody that might convince me of it.~

  Dana’s mother’s house is a white Victorian trimmed in blue, with a golden weathercock atop its tallest spire and a welcome mat that looks suspiciously unused. It’s the same immaculately maintained house as every other house on the street. Even the snow seems cleaner on this side of town. Pike thumbs his glasses up his nose, bangs the cold brass knocker on the door. After a minute, the door cracks against the security chain and a brown eye appears, made monstrous by a pair of chunky glasses. “What do you want?” a woman’s voice scrapes out.

  “I need to speak with Dana. She’s a friend of my daughter.”

  The door slams shut.

  “I can wait,” Pike says to the door. “As long as I need to. And sooner or later the neighbors will wonder who the hell I am. They’ll definitely wonder about the two I brung with me.”

  The door cracks again and the eye reappears, gazing over Pike’s shoulder at the truck. Rory’s lounged back in his seat, his face still beat purple and yellow from the last fight night, his muddy boots up on the dash. Bogie’s reenacting his tussle with the bartender, screaming, spitting, his fists flying. Rory can’t take anymore, draws a baggie of pills out of his sweatshirt pocket and palms a handful of them into his mouth.

  Pike lights a Pall Mall, smiles kindly at her. “Wouldn’t want my neighbors seeing them outside of my house.”

  The door creaks open slowly. She’s holding a cigarette in an ivory cigarette holder, her face narrow and tapered, like a thin wedge she’s spent her whole life trying to insert into other peoples’ lives. “Dana’s not here.”

  “Then I’ll talk to you.”

  She doesn’t make any attempt to hide her irritation. “You have five minutes.” She turns and Pike follows her in.

  It’s the kind of living room setup upper middle class women buy on a payment plan to prove they’re upper middle class. Wallpapered in gold gilt and cream and stuffed with matching furnitur
e, the cherry varnished end tables stacked with photographs of poodles, dozens of them. Somewhere buried in the poodles, a glimpse of a much younger Dana. “You compete?” Pike asks.

  The woman sits gingerly in a high-backed chair that matches the couch. “We are two toys and a standard, and we have each won ribbons this year.” She looks at Pike like he’s an insect that’s narrowly escaped squashing and isn’t worth a second try. “Mr.?”

  “Pike.”

  “Mr. Pike, you don’t look like the sort who’s particularly interested in poodles.”

  “Just being friendly,” Pike answers. “Mrs.?”

  “Jennings.” She cocks her head at him and peers through her thick glasses. “But you should know that, if your daughter was a friend of Dana’s.”

  “My daughter and I weren’t close.”

  “Ah.” Mrs. Jennings grinds her cigarette out in a gold-flecked glass ashtray on the coffee table, affixes a new one in her holder. “Is your daughter in the same profession as mine?”

  “As of last week she ain’t. She’s dead.”

  The woman’s eyebrows arch unsympathetically. “My condolences.”

  “She’s been working at it a long time.”

  “So what is it you want from Dana?”

  “Sarah’s death was ruled an overdose. I’m looking for somebody that might convince me of it.”

  “Aha,” she says. “You know, when Dana began her run of terror I used to lie awake nights, looking for somebody to blame her behavior on. Of course, there was no one. She was never molested. Her father never touched her. And I never abused her or mistreated her in any way. Of course.” She blows a thin cord of smoke towards the ceiling. “She is what she is. When she dies, it will be a death resulting from what she was. Do you understand?”

  “When did you see her last?”

  The woman sweeps her cigarette over brittle breastbone. “She was here a week or so ago. She was sober, briefly, and swore to remain so. I let her spend the night, then caught her rifling through my purse in the morning. I threw her out.”

  “Did she seem like she was in trouble? Spooked?”

  “She seemed more anxious than normal, but truly, I have no idea. Whatever she is these days it’s not anything I recognize. Nor anything I want to.”

  “You have a spare picture of her? I’m gonna need to find her.”

  Mrs. Jennings sticks her hand into the stack of poodle pictures and pulls out the photograph of her daughter. She hands it to Pike. “Keep it.”

  Pike slides the picture out of the frame and slips it in his breast pocket without looking at it. “You said she stayed here recently. Where?”

  “She has a room upstairs.”

  “Any chance I could see it?”

  She snorts.

  Pike nods. “And you have no idea at all where she might be?”

  “She’s a junky and a whore, Mr. Pike. She’s wherever you find junkies and whores.” She stands to see him out, her gargantuan eyes wavering in the cigarette smoke like a heat mirage. “I don’t happen to know where that is, nor do I care.”

  CHAPTER 28

  ~ Not without compensation.~

  There’s a hint of smoke behind Pike’s eyes as he come out of the house, like the bare beginning of a fire a hundred miles back in a thick Appalachian forest. He stands outside the truck and lights a cigarette as if to draw off some of his own heat, then swings into the driver’s seat and turns on the radio.

  “Can we please please listen to something besides country music?” Bogies whines. “Fucking please?”

  “No,” Pike says.

  “Please? Goddamn I hate this shit. Stories about losers. I wanna hear a song about a motherfucker who gets the girl. Who doesn’t fuck up his life.”

  “Wouldn’t ring true to you anyhow,” says Rory.

  “Fuck you. Like this shit rings true. Fucking Pancho and Lefty. Outlaws. This shit ain’t true.”

  “Sure it is. And you’re living it, outlaw.”

  “Fuck you.”

  They hit a stoplight next to an East side wine store. A couple exits the store, the man in loafers, holding a bottle, his mate in high heels, walking crablike, giggling in his ear. Both of them afternoon tipsy, taking the bottle somewhere they can be alone together. The man catches Pike’s eyes and stiffens, sobering visibly. He takes the woman by her arm, leads her at an increased pace down the sidewalk.

  The light changes and Pike hits the gas. Rory clears his throat. “So what’d we find out?” he asks.

  “We found out she’s a junky,” Pike says. “We found out she’s a whore. Two bits of information we pretty much had nailed.” Bogiechortles from between them. “What’s funny?” Pike says, in a voice that tugs Rory’s breath in.

  “Junky whores ain’t hard to find,” Bogie says. “I know all about them.”

  “I figured that. Consider yourself drafted.”

  Bogie crosses his arms. “Not without compensation, I ain’t.”

  Something black and malignant passes over Pike’s brow.

  “I mean it. I ain’t no nigger. I don’t work for free.”

  Pike’s hand twitches like it has a mind of its own and Rory tenses, but he only reaches for his cigarettes in his breast pocket. “I’ll give you twenty bucks a day.”

  “And necessaries. I need my necessaries, too.” Bogie sets his jaw imperiously. “Y’all can start right now.”

  CHAPTER 29

  ~ It makes you want to claw at the sidewalks.~

  Pike follows Bogie’s instructions, brings the truck to rest on the corner of a downtown side street off Main. The sun’s crawled over the city horizon, leaving a grayish coating of light behind it like a slug’s trail. Rory rolls down his window to get a better look at the city and the winter wind slashes ravenously into the cab.

  “That hotel right there.” Bogie points down Main at a six-story redbrick with huge bay windows and a front door that could serve a barn. It’s the kind of hotel that had once spelled out luxury to the street below, but not anymore. Now the window ledges wander in crumbling slope and the brick’s crusted with mold and pigeon shit. Now the Fort Washington sign in dirty yellow plastic reads only that there’s no better times coming.

  Bogie pops the door open and scoots out of the truck heading for the hotel, then stops when Pike and Rory follow his lead. “Well, goddamn it,” Bogie says to them. “Ain’t no one gonna sell to me with you two country peckerwoods hanging around.”

  “Not my problem,” Pike says. “I sure as hell ain’t handing you my money and letting you walk away.”

  Bogie shakes his head mournfully, starts towards the hotel’s front entrance.

  Rory sticks his hands in the front pockets of his sweatshirt and follows, head hunched down. Even as cold as it is, there are people out. Hustling the sidewalks, their hands shoved in their pockets. Smoking cigarettes outside of the bars, stamping their feet to keep warm. Rory pulls his sweatshirt hood over his head. Fuck cities. He’s already sick of being herded. The streetlights and the shop signs. The buttons you have to push before you walk. The busses whisking past, clunking toa stop, doors whooshing open, discharging people, moving in jerks and halts, shocks and collisions. It’s electric, it grinds at your soul, it makes you want to claw at the sidewalks. Rory’s whole body angles towards Nanticote as he walks.

  Then he thinks of Wendy. And he sets his jaw and trudges after Pike.

  An intrepid hooker in a mini-skirt and greasy long underwear stands before the glossy black storefront of a piano repair shop. Bogie’s half turned to holler at her when Pike grabs him by the back of the neck and forces him on a straight line to the hotel. “Goddamn it,” Bogie says. “What if that had been Dana?”

  “Was it?”

  “No. Fuck it. She was leech bait anyhow.”

  Rory looks at him. “Leech bait?”

  “Leech bait. It’s in Thailand or wherever the fuck. When they get a hooker that’s too used up to sell to the whorehouse they tie the bitch up and dunk her a big old
vat full of leech infested water. Just when she’s about to nod off, they pull her out and peel the leeches off. Then they sell ‘em in the market to all them poor motherfuckers they got starving over there. That’s why I’m glad to be an American.”

  Rory just looks at him. He can’t even raise his hand to slap him on the back of the head. “Please shut the fuck up,” he says, and they enter the hotel.

  The clerk has a face like a crushed windshield. He’s sitting behind an ironwork security screen, watching TV. The lobby’s clean, surprisingly clean. The maroon carpet’s frayed, but there isn’t a stain on it, and a four-bulb chandelier radiates a low watt light that creeps into every nook and cranny, scaring off any dirt.

  “We need a room,” Pike says.

  The clerk leans toward them like a stack of kindling toppling. “Not here you don’t,” he says, jigsawed segments of skin and muscle in his face moving in conflicting directions as he speaks. He looks to have survived some terrific catastrophe and been stitched back together with baling twine.

  “You’ve got vacancies,” Pike says.

  “I don’t need any trouble. And you’re trouble if I’ve ever seen it.”

  “No trouble at all.” Pike pulls a roll of bills out of his pocket. He makes a show of them. “How much?”

  The clerk hesitates, eyeing the money. Then he points at a sign spelling out the rates. “And there’ll be a deposit,” he says. He stares singularly at Pike, his left eye dribbling a long streak of water down his cheek. “A fifty dollar security deposit. I got doubles, I got no triples.”

  Pike peels bills. “We’ll take a double for a week.”

  The clerk angles around to the room keys, never letting go of the desk. “Five-thirteen.” He tosses the key on the desk.

  “And send Melinda up,” Bogie says, licking his lips as Pike picks the key off the desk.

  CHAPTER 30

  ~ Smiling a sad smile that twists cruel.~