The Collected Horrors of Tim Wellman (5 page)

No matter what I was expecting, I didn't find
it. The room was as bland and normal as any other cheap-assed hotel
in that part of town. There was a bed with coarse cotton sheets, an
old upholstered chair, probably bright blue at one time before a
million cigarettes yellowed it to a dull green. There was an old
beat-up veneered table sitting at an angle in the corner with a
black and white TV playing some old Bogart movie when the reception
was clear; when it wasn't, a porn movie piped in from the main
office vied for screen time. An old battered dresser completed the
suite.

I fingered through a few dresses draped across
the bed, far too posh and expensive for such a shit hole. A pair of
sexy see-thru panties and a bra apparently belonging to the same
owner, plotted a perfect dinner date for someone, but I guessed
that was now going to be table for one. I started to look around
the room, but I whirled around instinctively, and without thought
or intention, my gun was in my hand and aimed. She seemed even more
startled than I was, but then I wasn't naked.

"You gonna shoot me?" she said. She knew I
wasn't and continued to walk to the bed and pulled on her panties.
"Getting so a girl can't take a shower around here without getting
something big and hard pointed at her."

I got the joke but I didn't laugh. "You rooming
with another girl, dollface?" I said. "About your size but
prettier."

"Dollface?" she said. The way she smirked
annoyed me. "Why not just call me a
dame
and compliment me
on my nice
gams
?"

"I would if they were good enough to mention," I
said.

She laughed out loud and nodded her head. "I
like you," she said. She picked up her bra and put her arms through
the straps and turned her back to me. "Do me, will ya?"

I gave the straps a tug and snapped the clasps
together and watched her pull her dress over her head and let it
fall down her body. "You look better in clothes," I said.

"Everyone does except porn stars and teenagers,"
she said. She walked to the mirror over the old dresser and fluffed
up her still-damp hair. "So, ya gonna tell me why you broke in
here?"

"I didn't break in," I said and dangled the key
on my finger. She looked at my reflection in the mirror. "You know
Susan?"

I started to tell her we'd met, but that wasn't
completely true. "What's she to you?" I wasn't giving anything up
until I knew who the woman was and just how much she knew about the
monsters
. But at least I had a name to put to the broken
corpse.

"We were lovers," she said. "Shock you?"

"I stopped being shocked when I learned the
truth about Santa Claus," I said.

"Well, we
were
lovers," she continued.
"She found some boyfriend a couple months ago, after that she cut
me off." She finally seemed satisfied with her hair and turned back
around. "My name is Karen, by the way. What's yours?"

"Tommy," I said. "Tommy Marlin."

"Well, Tommy Marlin, you still haven't told me
why you're standing here in a not-so-innocent girl's hotel room
playing with your... gun."

"You watch Susan leave earlier?"

"No, not past the door," she said. "I was
sleeping off an afternoon cocktail. We're supposed to leave this
dump tomorrow. Susan said her man was funding us, sending us up to
Vermont to a big country house he has up there, so we were
celebrating a little early."

I nodded. I didn't particularly care whether I
hurt her or not, but I was having trouble blurting out what had
happened to Susan. "Susan is dead." It was easier than I
thought.

Karen rushed me and grabbed the lapels of my
jacket. "Dead?!" Her eyes were wide in disbelief and mine were
watering from the remains of alcohol on her breath. I don't like
strangers getting too close to me and out of instinct I pushed her
back and she stumbled and fell across the bed. She rubbed her lips
with the back of her hand, checking for blood even though I never
went near her lips. Must have been used to being shoved around.
"Dead? But how?"

"Jumped off the Cole building over on 53rd and
Wilmont," I said. "Sorry."

She started crying and hid her face in a pillow.
I used the time to look around the room. There was a book of
matches on top of the TV, Top Heavy Club; neither girl would have
qualified. I glanced at her, still sobbing, and decided I had
enough time to rifle through the dresser drawers... part of a candy
bar, a stub from movie. As I turned around, she was sitting on the
edge of the bed, staring at me. "She wouldn't have jumped."

"I saw it, she was alone, she jumped," I said. I
took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She refused. I
lit one up and took a long drag. "You know anything about
monsters
?"

She looked at me, her face as cold as stone, and
then slowly nodded. "She said her new man had been talking some
weird shit like that," she said. "
Monsters
. We both laughed
at the thought at first, but then Susan said she saw one following
her. Then one day she just stopped talking about them but I could
tell she was still worried."

"After she made her big hit debut on the street,
one of the things grabbed her up before she could make a curtain
call," I said. "Cops emptied their guns into the son of a bitch
until their hands got tired. Didn't phase it at all."

She stood up and opened the only drawer I hadn't
had the chance to check and pulled out a small address book. "Her
man's number is in here. Steve Saunders." She thumbed through till
she found it and picked up the filthy old phone and dialed the
number. She waited. There was no answer. "Let me try this other
number." She got the same result.

"He work at the Top Heavy Club?" I said,
twirling the matchbook between my fingers like a two-bit coin.

"Yep," she said. "Owns the joint." She grabbed
her purse from the dresser and walked toward the door. "I need some
answers."

I nodded. I didn't need answers, but I
wanted
answers. I followed her out the door.

***

The place was a dump. I wasn't sure how they
could afford to give away free matches. But whatever money they
were making, they sure as hell weren't spending it on pretty
dancers; they reminded me of my mother. Karen grabbed my hand and
pushed her way through the crowd and got us to a door in the back
wall behind the stage. I had decided she was an okay gal and was
pretty sure she was too dumb to be deceptive. "This is his office,"
she said. She knocked and when there was no answer, she pounded on
the door with her fist.

"I ain't seen him come in tonight," someone said
from behind us. We both turned and looked up. He was a big guy, the
kind of frame that usually balances a tiny little brain on top, but
he didn't seem threatening. "Ya can go on in if ya wants, though,
Karen."

"Thanks Vance," she said. I nodded, not caring
to make solid eye-contact. She turned the handle and we both went
through the door and closed it behind us.

It was a normal enough office with an old desk
full of papers, a couple of gray metal filing cabinets, and a badly
stained sofa. It wasn't really what I was expecting, though I
wasn't sure exactly what I
was
expecting... a doorway to
hell, maybe, well-marked with a neon sign.

"Not here," I said.

"He's always here at night," she said. "He says
if he's not here these bitches will steal 'im blind." She walked to
his desk and picked up the phone and dialed the numbers again.
There was still no answer. She looked at me and cocked her head.
"How do I know Susan is really dead?"

"Because I told you," I said.

"That ain't enough," she said. She plopped down
on the sofa and lifted her legs up into a reclining position. "And
you ain't jack-shit to me and I just bit on the first worm ya
dangled in front of me."

I pulled a cigarette from my pack with my lips
and picked up a pack of matches from the desk. "I know what I saw,"
I said as I struck the match. "You can believe whatever you want to
believe." I held my pack toward her. "Sure you don't want a smoke,
dollface?"

She reached out and dug a filter king out with
her long fingernails and I tossed the matches on her stomach.
"Thanks."

I nodded my head toward the door. "You ever
think about how much that big oaf looks like a monster?"

She took a long draw. "I ain't never seen one of
the things, remember?"

"That's right," I said. "If you hadn't been
drunk you could have looked out the door and seen a van full of
them," I said. "Susan got in that van."

"How do you know that?" she said. She sat up and
put her feet back on the floor.

"That bum outside your room..."

"Johnny?"

"Yeah. Johnny saw them," I said. "And saw her
get in with them."

Karen sat silently for a moment, staring at the
floor. She took another draw and flicked the ashes on the floor and
rubbed them out with her shoe. "So, she went with them?"

I nodded. "Like they were bosom buddies," I
said.

"She got a call right before she left," Karen
said. "She acted like it was nothing, but I could tell it spooked
her."

"You remember the phone number in your
room?"

"Yeah, 555-5654," she said.

I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed,
not the hotel room number, but a friend I knew I could wrangle a
favor from. "Detective Johnson, please." I waited for the police
station switchboard to connect me. "Terrence? It's me. Listen, I
need a favor. Yeah, I know. By the way, how is that little whore
you got holed up out on Route 27? Ya need to invite me to her
eighteenth birthday party. I thought so. I need you to run down a
call for me. Yeah. Someone called 555-5654 about four or five hours
ago; I need to know who. Yeah, okay. Call me back... number here is
555-4327. Yeah." I hung up and looked at a few of the photos on the
walls. Not my type, really, too artsy. Naked women should be
photographed in direct light.

"Hey, what's your angle on this, anyway?" she
said. She pointed to a photograph. "Needs a shave."

I nodded. "I don't have an angle. Just an
innocent bystander who saw something that was never supposed to be
seen." I looked down at her, a good foot shorter than me. "I like
stories with neat and tidy endings."

"That simple?"

"Yep."

"You fall in love with her?"

The question cut me to the quick because I had
asked myself that same thing several times throughout the evening.
Why else would I give a shit about her or anything else. I could be
home drowning in a brandy snifter instead of going from one seedy
shithole to another, searching for something that, even if I found
it, wouldn't make the ending any better. "What if I did?"

She shrugged. "Don't mean nothin' to me," she
said. "Everyone else she ever come in contact with did too."

"Including you?" I said.

She nodded. "Me more than anyone."

The phone rang and broke the moment and I walked
across the room and answered it. "Yeah? Oh, okay. Yeah, I see." I
picked up a pencil and scribbled the address down on a piece of
paper. "Okay, thanks Terrence. Your secret is still safe with me,
pal. Yeah. See ya."

She stood behind me and looked around my arm.
"That's Steve's address," she said. "I ain't never been there, but
I seen the address enough."

"So, he called Susan," I said. I had another
piece of the puzzle to put in the bag but not enough to pour it out
on the table and start assembling it yet. But then help
arrived.

The door burst open and a little guy with
slicked back hair and greasy face, but a too-expensive suit and
shoes, sauntered in. Karen jumped as if she had seen a ghost, then
ran over to him and grabbed his arms. "Steve! We been looking for
you!"

He looked over at me, paused for a moment, and
then nodded. I nodded back. "A new boyfriend?" he said.

"Steve," there's horrible news. Susan is..."

"Susan is what?" Susan was not dead; she just
walked into the room.

"Susan?!" Karen jumped off the floor with
excitement and then grabbed her up in her arms and swung her
around. "You were supposed..." She suddenly let go and turned and
pointed at me. "You liar!" She stomped over to me and took a swing
but I was able to duck out of the way. "You fuckin' liar!"

"Hey, what's going on?" Steve said.

"He said Susan was dead!" Karen yelled. "He
said... said he saw her jump off a building."

"Is that so?" Steve said. I watched as Susan, or
whoever the woman was, walked past the desk and stood facing the
wall. I was beginning to lose my crush on her. She wasn't looking
at the pictures, I could tell. She simply seemed to be hiding her
face from me and Karen. Steve looked at me. "Did you see anything
else?"

I nodded. "I saw the
monster
." There was
no reason to lie, I had witnesses and I knew what I had seen. I had
touched her
dead
body.

Steve nodded. "I see."

"I wish you hadn't decided to butt in," Susan
said. She seemed to begin crying; I could see her shaking.

"Hey, Susie Q!" Karen said. "What's wrong baby?"
She ran across the room toward Susan, but Steve punched her square
in the face, dropping her to the floor immediately. And then for
good measure he kicked her in the stomach, flipping her over on her
back. She was out cold.

"What you saw was a game," Steve said.
"Something we have to play."

"People always rise from the dead in your game?"
I said. I figured my life was measured in minutes, now, at most. I
wasn't scared, really, you can't be scared when you have no other
options. Fear comes when you have choices.

"If it's played correctly," he said. "She ran, I
recovered. As much as possible, anyway." He reached back and stuck
his arm out the door and motioned. The big brute and a couple of
others at least equal in size showed up and stood behind Steve and
he took a pair of gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on.
"Human is a matter of grays, not black and white." The last thing I
remember was him lunging toward me and the skin of the big guys
turning red.