Seven Deadly Pleasures (14 page)

The light turned green and Evan hit the gas. He screeched across Lancaster Avenue, bumped into the parking lot, took up two spaces on a slant, and jumped out of his car like a plainclothes cop in a TV movie. Still, the moment he passed through the doors of the store his courage withered. He was going to blurt out that there had been a murder up on the second floor, but he had not planned for the change in atmosphere. The dark sky and wet streets lost their mystery in here under the fluorescents. It was like watching old "Twilight Zone" episodes in the living room with the lights off, then having Mom come in, flick on the overheads, and start grilling you about fourth-period calculus.

Up one of the rows there was an elderly man wearing an arm cast that was dirty and yellowed at the edges where his fingers poked through. He had a brown scarf around his neck with one end almost brushing the floor as he bent over to check out the laxatives. There was a fat African American woman in a caramel-colored pants suit waiting in front of the photo counter. She had blue eye shadow and heavy triangular earrings that kept jangling back and forth while she spoke through her teeth in an angry grin to a bow-legged teen who wore new-creased blue jeans low enough so you could see the shape of his butt through an old pair of black running shorts. There was a small grouping of mainline moms over by the pharmacy having an animated conversation in a blur of jogging spandex, ponytails, raised sunglasses, and freckled cleavage.

There were two counter girls up front in blue smocks with name tags, but the shorter one with all the face piercings was counting her drawer. The plainer one with the mild acne and auburn hair tucked behind her ears was managing a line five customers deep.

What was Evan supposed to say?

Couldn't you get in trouble for bringing out the cops for what seemed like a prank?

He walked toward the middle of the store and noticed that his wet sneaker was squeaking and squelching a bit on the hard white floor. The blonde woman with the cowboy boots was squatted down, sifting through the Clairol, Redken, and Essensity products on a low shelf. Evan noticed that she had pretty fingernails, half blue and half white, with silvery trim.

"Hey," he said.

She pushed up and balanced the thin steel handles of the shopping basket on her forearm. She had nice eyes and heavy mascara. Her nose was a bit too big, but she had that hourglass thing going for her. Evan suddenly wondered if there was any blood left on his upper lip. In all the excitement he had never checked in the rearview.

"So tell me you didn't hear someone pounding on the window out there," he said.

"What?"

"When you got out of your car. You dropped something and someone was banging on the second-floor window. You're telling me you didn't hear anything?"

She stopped chewing her gum for a second and put all her weight on one leg. With her free hand, she took a long, braided lock of hair and tossed it behind her shoulder.

"Fucking stalker."

She brushed past and Evan felt his face redden up. He balled his fists and moved to the back of the store. They had only really used about a third of the ground floor. There was new drywall in the rear by the auto parts, and a thin hallway that led to a locked door with a steel keypad on it. Evan peered through. There was the old Barnes and Noble first-floor bathroom, some blue chairs, a microwave, and a row of temporary lockers. If there was a stairway it was not in this sightline. And Evan could not remember where it had been anyway.

He strode back to the front of the store and approached the counter. The girl counting bills didn't even look up.

"I'm closed."

The stud in her eyebrow looked like real diamond. Her hair was tied back and thrust through a leather Concho, or whatever you called that oval piece with the stick running through it. She had some brown moles at the peak of her forehead that were going to look really hideous when she crossed the age of fifty or so.

"How can I get upstairs?" He bent down a bit. "Hello?"

"You can't."

"I left my jacket up there."

"No ya didn't."

"Yeah, I did. Yesterday—"

"It's locked and they knocked out the stairway. Ya got to take the elevator and it's out of service."

She looked up and cocked her head. She had a wide face and dimples. The nose piece was subtle but the two ball-studs through the upper lip were just a bit too much. She smiled a little.

"Watcha want, anyway?"

Evan was suddenly attracted to her and he did not understand it in the least. He sensed that she sensed this and he looked away, past her shoulder. His eyes settled on a folding chair, set behind her to the right beneath the cigarette display. There was a green jumpsuit laid across it and on the floor was a big fire hat with frizzy orange hair stapled to the brim. She turned to look where he was looking, her eyes staying with his as long as possible. When she turned back she had her mouth opened slightly. She was curling her tongue around the silver stud that was pierced through it.

"It's a return," she said. "The kid said it was too baggy."

Evan went up on his toes and leaned across a bit. The suit was nowhere near big enough to have fit the thing he saw in the window. And this hat had a golden label on the front that said "Engine 52." The one he had seen was blank.

"Can I see that?" Evan said.

"Sure."

But as she turned he changed his mind. The momentary pull she'd had on him was gone, and he didn't want his fingerprints on that thing on the chair. He walked toward the glass doors and looked along the ceiling for surveillance cameras. He didn't see any and it did not really matter. The guy did not come in through the front entrance and he probably wasn't even up there anymore. If the counter worker was unaware of an access point, the escape would be just as invisible as the entry. There was probably a ladder back by a cutout behind some piping near an old emergency exit or something.

Even if the thing cleaned off the window and took the kid's body with him there had to be some trace of DNA left up there. He'd get in his car, call the police on his cell, and anonymously report what he had seen. Then he would have done his duty. He'd just ignore the question of why the kid was up there in the first place. He'd just leave out the part about the eyes on the sides of the head and the moving teeth. He'd let the professionals figure that garbage out for themselves.

But he never called the police.

He swerved back onto Lancaster Avenue, went around an old bat in a Volkswagen going about three miles an hour and got stuck in the turning lane two blocks down. Just before hitting the last digit in 911, something made him glance to the left.

What he saw in the dark windows of the building across the street was not of this earth.

It was a violent infestation.

It defied rational definition and made his skin crawl.

The huge glass windows were sectioned off by three-by-three white square frames. Through them, Evan could see that the "things" vertically filled the first four to five feet of the space from the floor up and went wall to wall about fifty feet across. They were man-sized and swarming over and across and underneath and between each other. Evan had once seen news footage of rats that had overrun a section of a downtown junkyard, crawling across the bodies of their mates, and this was the same plague on a larger scale. The movement was a constant and violent blur of bright satin colors, arms intertwined and writhing through legs mixed in with flashes of red painted smiles, and stretched balloon pants. There were ball noses and squirting joke flowers and bowler hats being crushed and popping back into shape and French berets slipping in and out of the cracks along with white gloved fingers and leggings with stripes on them all knotted up and wriggling between and around wristlets with bells, neck frills, gaudy vests, and ruffled-up cummerbunds.

There were people walking on the sidewalk in front and no one was noticing.

Evan jerked the wheel to the right, hit the gas, and sped away down the avenue. He knew he wasn't crazy. If he had gone insane he wouldn't recognize all the normal stuff. He'd be in fairytale la-la land, dribbling on his shirt, picking at his hair, and believing he was someone like Gandhi, or King Henry the Eighth, or Marilyn Monroe.

This was something different.

There was a tear in the fabric here and the virus was getting in.

The face of Rudi DiDomenico flashed into his mind. Rudi was a counter customer who came in with a batch of homemade wine every year around Easter. He was short and always wore overalls and flannel even in the summertime. Rudi drove a van with a model of a huge bug on top of it. They called it the roach-wagon. Rudi was an exterminator, and Evan had worked out a deal with him where the guy bought his twenty-four-inch straight shank carbide bits in bulk for just a thirty-five percent markup twice a year.

Rudi had once said that the key to stopping an infestation was to find the "point of entry."

Evan raced through the intersection at City Line Avenue and sped back toward West Philly. He wouldn't be home for a good while.

By the time he opened the front gate and pulled it shut behind him it was almost dark. Mr. Jarvis had given him the alarm code for the sake of emergencies, but that was a year and a half ago. He hoped the boss hadn't changed the combination.

He walked past the red bay doors and rounded the corner of the building. The steel door to the shop had a small glass window with diamond wire inside it. There was no light coming through it, and the overhead halogen in the back parking area was off. Good. Sometimes Joey Sanantonio liked to stay late and tinker with his vintage Camaro out under the corrugated overhang so he could save money on garage space. Tonight he had cut out at closing with the rest of them.

Evan took a last look around. There were dark row houses behind the building and a high back wall made of cinderblock with razor twine curled in at the top. A dirt plot choked with weeds and occupied by a couple of arrow boards they tried to rent to PennDOT every now and again sat to the left, and the power station across from the front lot was dark and quiet for all but a nearly inaudible hum. He could smell someone burning trash. He opened the door, disarmed the alarm, and turned on the back office light by the head mechanic's work area. The dull glow made long shadows come off the plastic invoice trays, the red repair bins stacked in steel racks anchored to the wall, the calendar with the girl in blue jean shorts and work boots posing in front of a miter saw, the row of bench tools neatly arranged on the wooden slab. He reached over for the Metabo four-and-a-half-inch grinder and flipped it over. It had an eighth-inch cutting wheel on it. OK. So now he would have to go into the first aisle and get a grinding wheel as well as the other stuff. He grabbed a flashlight and went out into the warehouse.

When he returned to the bench he set down a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade, a four-and-a-half-inch grinding wheel, some rivets, a handful of number twelve self-drilling screws, and a fourteen-inch diamond blade still in the cardboard. He unpacked it. He put it in the bench vice. He reached across for the mallet and a file with a thin end on it. He started knocking off the segments. They were only good for concrete. When he had a bare edge, he put on a pair of goggles and plugged in the grinder.

After burning up three abrasive wheels and trashing seven jigsaw blades, he was ready for welding. He went out by the forklifts and approached the scrap pile to the side of a pallet of generators. He found a length of two-inch-wide pipe that was about five and a half feet long. He brought it to the shop and got back to work.

By the time Evan pulled up in front of his apartment the moon was at its highest point, and some DJ was talking about how you could do late night radio in your underwear with a fifth of Jack Daniels by your elbow without management ever knowing it. Evan shut off the car, gathered his stuff, and went up the short stairway. He entered his small foyer and left the lights off. He didn't need them anymore.

***

"Hey, ma."

"Why ain't you at work? It's eight o'clock in the morning."

"I called out. I had to take care of some things. Did I wake you?"

"I was doing a crossword puzzle. What kind of things?"

"Shopping."

"What, do you need money?"

"No, ma. I'm good."

"What's that mean, you're good? You want to talk to your father?"

"What's he doing home?"

"His back went out again."

"Naw, that's OK. Tell him not to believe everything he hears."

"What's that mean?"

"I love ya, ma."

"What?"

"Dad needs new glasses. Last time I was over I saw him squinting at everything."

"Hey, are you sick or something?"

"Bye, ma."

Evan Leonard Shaw looked around his apartment. He hadn't slept. He didn't remember not sleeping, but had no recollection of lying down. He had no recollection of anything.

His fingers were aching.

His tubes, solvents, hog's hair brushes, and pallets were littered across the black dining room table that he bought two years ago at IKEA. The red canvas director's chairs that went with the long black table were shoved in his coat closet along with his down comforter, his four pillows, five trophies (one back from his nine-year-old little league team, The Angels), and thirty-seven novels that had recently shared space with the trophies on the set of inlaid shelves by the fake fireplace. There was paint on the bed sheets. Lengthwise, there was now a pair of eyes, a bulb nose, and a grin. The forehead was cut off by the rectangular limitation, but the tongue was continued down the side of the bed so it could spill out onto the carpet.