Bad Luck City - Matt Phillips
Page 9
Behind him, Evers tilted his head from one shoulder to the other. “It’s the next stage in my pursuit of truth, Palmer—that’s what it is. Do you remember how we talked about truth?”
“This isn’t anything but sick,” I said.
Evers kept talking. “I want to paint a living organ, Palmer. A heart. I want to paint a beating heart; there is no deeper truth than that, a heart pumping blood into its host.”
Blood rushed to my face and I felt a rush of adrenaline pour into me. I plowed into Richie and scrambled for Evers, lunged toward him. My own voice sounded foreign: “You sick bastard! You sick–fucking–bastard!”
Before I could reach Evers, a fist crashed into my ear. Another blow crunched against my skull and I fell to my knees.
“Shut up, Palmer,” Evers said and turned back to the blank canvas. “Nobody asked you.”
I looked up and watched as a blue–gloved hand swung through the light; between thumb and index finger was a shiny silver scalpel.
***
Frankie dragged me from the room. All the fight seemed to drain from me then, and I let myself be thrown against the wall. Richie stayed behind—I heard the door click. Frankie—his pistol in one hand—stood over me while the other guard stared at his cellphone.
I tried to think of ways to stop what was happening.
Nothing came to me. I closed my eyes.
Just as I was about to stand, as I was summoning all my strength to fight, there was a clang from outside. Another came, and this time it was louder. “Somebody knocking,” said the guard with the cellphone. He shoved the phone into his pocket and glanced at Frankie.
Frankie looked back at the white door and then pointed his gun at me. “Get up, Palmer,” he said. “You come with me.”
***
The clangs bounced toward us as we walked down the hallway—somebody was pounding on the door. I said, “Who do you think it is?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
I felt the gun poke at my back. “Who else knows?”
“Nobody knows. Not a damn soul.”
The gun let off for a second and then reappeared against the base of my skull.
Frankie said, “Maybe it’s a friend of yours, huh?”
“I have no friends.”
“Yeah? We’ll see then, won’t we? Open the door, Palmer.”
The gun drifted away from my head. I turned slowly to look at Frankie. He lifted the gun, pointed it at the space between my eyes. I turned back to the door and placed my hand on the lever—I twisted it.
I threw myself against the wall and got lucky. As the door swung inward, a quick round—muffled by a silencer—plowed into Frankie’s neck. He collapsed quickly and struggled on the floor like a swatted insect. Amos, the taxi driver, stepped past me and stood over the struggling man. “Don’t point a gun at me,” he said. “It pisses me off.”
***
Amos shot the other guard in the stomach as we walked into the loading bay. The man toppled over and then tried to sit up and aim his gun, but Amos was on him by then and plowed the butt of his pistol into the guy’s plump forehead.
It wasn’t pretty, but it avoided a gunfight.
Amos turned to me and said, “I almost waited too long.” He bent and picked up the guard’s unfired gun, handed it to me. The injured man’s chest heaved, stuttered, slowed and stopped. Blood pooled beneath his torso. Amos moved his lips against themselves. And then he said, “Some people bleed harder than others.”
***
When the white door swung open, I was standing against the wall with the pistol in my hand. Richie poked his own gun out and then moved through the doorway. I placed the pistol against his skin–bare head. Sweat ran across his temples as he tilted his eyes toward me. I said, “Drop the gun and turn around.”
“What the fuck?”
“Drop it before—”
“How did this happen?” He turned toward me, lifted his gun.
I squeezed the trigger and the pistol jumped in my hand.
I moved inside and felt vomit rise in my throat—it took all my willpower to force it back down into my stomach. There was a blue cloth covering Chelsea’s torso region and the man in blue—the surgeon, I supposed—had his hands deep in her chest cavity, the blue gloves covered with blood. Evers was at his easel, and the canvas was covered with shades of red, though the painting had no discernible form. I lifted the pistol at the surgeon and said, “You put her back together, right now.”
His eyes moved from Chelsea to me, and then he swung his head toward Evers, who kept splashing a shade of red across the canvas. The surgeon’s eyes pivoted back to me.
I moved toward him so my hand was aloft above Chelsea. I tried not to look down at her closed eyes and expressionless face. “Sew her up, you sonofabitch. I’m telling you to do it.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Evers turn and brush his hands together. He said, “The girl is dead, Palmer—she didn’t last very long.”
My throat clenched and the vomit forced itself into my mouth, dripped over my lips. The muscles along my stomach spasmed and my head began to ache. From behind me, I heard Amos gasping. I didn’t know what else to do; I fired the pistol and the surgeon fell back against the wall, slid to the floor. I placed one hand on Chelsea’s lukewarm forehead. For a long time, it could have been ten minutes or an hour, I stood there and touched my sister.
Chapter Eighteen
I poured two glasses of bourbon, except this time I was sitting behind the desk. I picked up my dad’s .38 revolver and tapped the stock on the rim of a glass. “This gun belonged to my father,” I said.
Stan Evers grimaced in the chair across from me. He lifted his glass of bourbon with an unsteady right hand. He sipped twice and then held the glass against his cheek. “Have you ever used it, the gun? Before today, I mean?”
“Once. Yesterday, in fact.”
“Do whatever you want to me. I deserve it.”
“Why Chelsea?” I lifted my bourbon and gulped it down, poured myself another. I held the revolver in my right hand, kept it trained on Evers.
“Richie knew her. He said she was healthy, that I might like her.”
“She was one of his girls?”
“Yeah—more or less. He had a lot of girls. The ones willing to do extra… If it meant extra money.”
I downed my second swallow of bourbon, poured myself a third dosage. “You know,” I said. “Your paintings are shitty—just horrible.”
Evers closed his eyes. He cleared his throat and said, “Maybe you’re right, Palmer. But I don’t lie to myself. I don’t look in the mirror and say the world needs to be fair and just. I don’t believe in it.” Evers held a fist in the air and shook it. “This,” he said, “this is all that works in this world. It’s all that’ll ever work. I was trying to paint the truth, that’s all.”
“They didn’t deserve it, what you did to them.”
He nodded at me. “No, they didn’t.”
“Take one more sip,” I said. “It’s the last one you’ll get.”
Evers took a sip and let it burn his mouth. He swished it around and gurgled. He put the glass down on the desk. I watched while he straightened his posture, planted his feet against the ground. “I’ll see you on the other side, Palmer.” he said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
I raised the Colt .38 and closed one eye. My finger wrapped around the trigger. “That’s right,” I said, “we’ll be seeing each other in hell.” I squeezed the trigger and the blast filled the office like waves crashing on a distant shore.
Chapter Nineteen
Amos slid the taxi through morning traffic. He rolled at the speed limit and we passed the slow awakenings of urban life; working people waited at a bus stop, a few cabbies shot the shit outside a donut shop, a delivery driver wheeled cases of beer into a liquor store.
I leaned back in my seat and took a deep breath.
I found her—Chelsea Losse. I thought back to the moment Mathis slid the manila
envelope across the table to me. I thought of the moment I saw Chelsea’s face for the first time. I touched one side of my blazer. The picture was still there. I slid it out and turned it over in my hands. There she was, my sister, with her dark hair and green eyes, a young woman with a lifetime before her. But not any longer—she was dead.
I closed my eyes.
The ghost of my father appeared. He shrugged a coat onto his shoulders, fingered the crisp–knotted tie at his neck. He slid a Colt .38 Detective Special into his waistband. “Remember, Sim,” he said, “shooting a man is like knocking over his king before the game is over. It’s only right under certain circumstances.” My father angled his chin in the smoky light and sipped from a clear glass with brown liquid. He peered down at me and grinned. “You know, your momma was a country girl, you believe that?”
I reached toward my father’s face. “Where is she?”
My dad knelt and his grin disappeared. “She left, pal,” he said. “But don’t you worry. It’s us two and we got the code to keep us.”
“The code,” I say, “we got the code.”
“What’s that?” Amos said.
I opened my eyes and shifted in my seat. With one hand, I touched my face. It was still plump and tender from Richie’s fists. “The code,” I said, “something that tells us how to act, what we can and shouldn’t do.” I pointed my thumb toward the rear of the taxi. “Shoot a man and you knock over his king, end his game early.”
“I can understand that,” Amos said. He swung a right and pulled to the curb outside my apartment. “Well, this is you.” He draped his arm over the seat and I caught a glimpse of his tattoo again: ‘USMC.’
“You helped me,” I said. “Thanks for that.”
Amos nodded. “Let’s keep it between us two. That’s all I ask.”
I paid my fare and never saw him again.
***
That afternoon, after I’d slept for a few hours, I let myself into the newsroom at the Mid–City Caller. I sat down at my desk and settled my hands on the keyboard. I’d decided to write a story about Chelsea Losse. I had to leave some details out, but I did the best I could, wrote all I’d learned about my sister—my long lost sister.
This is how the story began:
‘There are those of us, in this city, who live like ghosts. Chelsea Losse—sister, daughter, working girl—was one of those. She was born into a family of thieves…’
The End
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