The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2) (28 page)

Ellen bolted back up the
steps, fumbling for her keys and nearly dropping them, her fingers shaking so
badly. The simple message might seem trite, a kind of bad joke that everyone
put on postcards before sending them off to friends and family left behind in
less hospitable climes, more boring surroundings. But that wasn’t the case
here. This meant exactly what it said in its most literal and sincere
interpretation. It was a message for her; a message from Jack:
Wish you were
here
.

Ellen managed to work the
lock open then rush inside and over to the telephone. She forgot all about
being late to work or
Serena’s Coffee Shoppe
. Unimportant now. All that
mattered was doing what she should have done weeks ago.

Ellen Monroe stared once
more at the postcard then took a deep breath and dialed.

It was several rings
before anyone answered. “Dr. Frederick Kohler’s Office.”

Ellen recognized Dr. Kohler’s
receptionist: a bit standoffish, no one she would send a Christmas card to. She
never bothered to learn her name and didn’t care to. But she knew the woman’s
voice, and it sounded different this morning, more hesitant.

“This is Ellen Monroe,”
she said, pushing forward while her courage held out. “I need to speak to Dr.
Kohler.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t
possible.”

A hot surge flooded her skin
at the receptionist’s distant tone; impersonal; infuriating. “Well then I need
to leave him a message—”

“Miss Monroe, I can’t …”

That made her pause. It
wasn’t unusual for Kohler’s receptionist to play gatekeeper against the
crazies, but she would never refuse to pass on a message. And she never called her
Miss Monroe like she was the next name on a telemarketer’s call sheet. “Why
not?”

There was a strange
shivering breath of air on the far end of the line before the receptionist
could answer. “Dr. Kohler passed away last night. He was … he was working late
when it happened. It was very … sudden.”

Ellen was speechless.

“Someone from the office
will be in touch with you in a couple days to make arrangements for your ongoing
treatment … just as soon as we know who will be taking on your case. Dr. Chopra
has made himself available in case of an emergency. If you need to speak with
him, I can get you his number.”

Ellen found her voice
from far away, distant and detached. “Uh, no, that’s all right.”

“Someone will be in
touch.” There was an awkward silence, then, “I’m sorry.”

Ellen stared down at the
postcard in her hand, flabbergasted. On the far end of the phone line was a
dead click, and then it was over.

Jack sat on the cement
step behind the café. His laptop had undergone a metamorphosis since the
morning, its design subconsciously altered, streamlined so it could move more
easily from place to place, allowing him to take advantage of the morning shade
behind the kitchen with its view of the junkyard. A bottle of Pepsi stood
within arm’s reach, sweating a dark ring upon the concrete. Just to the right
of the door was a large Dumpster, the dark blue paint flaked with rust and
discolored with spilled and crusted residue. And just around the corner from
that, the ice machine hummed tirelessly.

But that was not what
Jack was listening to.

The lid on the Dumpster
would no longer stay closed. Once or twice, he saw an enormous scorpion’s tail
emerging from beneath the garbage bags and loose trash like a shark’s fin
cresting the water’s surface, dark crimson, the stinger fat and armored and
darkening at the tip to jet-black. He had noticed leathery wings within the
Dumpster also—they were nearly hidden by the shadows and the mounded trash, but
he had noticed them: dragon’s wings. And of course, there was the sound, that
low growl that might have been an enormous purring, the low rumble of a well-tuned
engine, waiting.

Sometime in the last few
days, a manticore had slipped from the junkyard and taken up residence in the
Dumpster.

He didn’t have time to
deal with it. The pieces were coming together, and he was gathering them up as
fast as his fingers could strike the keys. It never came evenly; that would be
too simple: just pieces and chunks, ill-sized and inconvenient, the time and
place, the way and the means always a matter of its own choosing. His craft was
gathering the pieces and setting them down. He did not create the Word; he
merely conveyed it.

The tale always took on a
life of its own.

*     *     *

Arnold Prosser eased the garbage hauler
to a stop, the right turn signal and four-ways blinking methodically,
purposefully,
unmistakably
. And still, despite his efforts to the
contrary, an annoyed motorist was now parked behind his truck, unable or
unwilling to go around him.

Arnold Prosser looked in
the sideview mirror at the woman in the sedan parked tight to the hauler’s
rear: old and dried-up, vain pretences of appearance. She glowered at him, but
he didn’t think she could see him watching her, her angry expression, the
greater and more elaborate efforts at make-up and hair-dye meant to fill
wrinkles and cover gray, lies about the time that trampled her looks, made her
sallow, made her less appealing than her vanity permitted. Had she been able to
see him, she would see his bored expression, the way he looked down upon her,
something so far beneath him as to be insect-like,
microbial
. But she
didn’t see him.

Few truly saw Arnold
Prosser except when he wanted them to. And none lived to pass on the warning.

Staring at her, the
annoyed, impertinent woman trapped within her practical sedan—it could easily
be crushed into something no thicker than a mattress and loaded into the back
of his hauler, driver and all—he wondered if she actually expected him to
forego his work and skip his pick-up because it inconvenienced her. Stupid and
self-absorbed, vanity was her shield against a world that stopped caring about
her long ago. Prosser watched her ridiculous expressions of impatience: eyes
rolling, gasping and sighing and blowing huffs of breath as though playing to
an audience not there to appreciate her performance.
And the Oscar goes to …

He rolled down his window
and reached out, motioning her to come around.

She failed to notice, or,
if she did, refused to act upon it. She blustered obscenities that he read on
her lips from the sideview mirror while she sat safely in the air-conditioned
confines of her practical little sedan.

If she had only had the
good sense to go around him in the first place—a garbage truck makes numerous,
routine stops; everyone knows that—she would not be in this predicament. Arnold
Prosser did not begrudge this woman her stupidity, but, by the same token, made
no allowances for it.

Dropping the hauler into
reverse, he released the brake and let the truck roll backwards, beeping a loud
warning as it did so.

Not unexpectedly, the
sedan’s horn let out a sudden, desperate wail. In his sideview mirror, Prosser
saw the woman, body rigid, eyes white, arms straight out as her fingers locked
upon the wheel in a death grip. The blood had run from her face, leaving her
make-up like the accouterment of a poorly done cadaver, the work of a dust bowl
mortician doing a job on the cheap.

Arnold
again applied the brake, reached out
the window and motioned a little more firmly for her to come around. At least
now he had her attention.

There was a moment’s
indecision while the woman scraped together the pieces of a fractured reality
then the sedan punched into reverse, a sudden jerk that nearly put its bumper
into the fender of a nearby parked car. Tires chirped as she threw the vehicle
back into drive and sped around the hauler, making some kind of obscene gesture
at him with a trembling hand, her lips stuttering crude words he knew but could
not actually hear for the closed windows.

Arnold Prosser waved back
pleasantly.

Arnold Prosser liked
nothing more than an orderly universe. He was a practical man with practical
needs, neither flexible nor fluid. For Arnold Prosser, there was a time for all
seasons, and a season for all things: a time to sew and a time to reap, a time
to be born and a time to die. He never thought it was that much to ask; the
least one could expect of the universe, in fact. Consistency and orderliness
were the hallmarks of perfection, and, by his observations, the universe strove
towards harmony.

Not that Arnold Prosser
would ever utter anything so plainly sissified.

He backed the hauler down
the narrow alley, giving no attention to the brick wall bare inches from
scraping off his side mirror; he knew exactly what he was doing. The hauler
tipped and rocked its way down the alley on a combination of bad springs and old
shocks, turned the corner, and lined up to the apartment building’s Dumpster.

Here Arnold Prosser threw
the truck into park and stepped down from the cab, a stocky man in a dark blue
coverall, enormous work boots stained and darkened from misuse and a black
baseball cap with the patch torn off; Arnold Prosser owed fealty to no one. And
because it was late August, and still very warm, he had the sleeves of his
coveralls rolled up to expose thick, hairy forearms. He was short, balding,
eyes dark and shifting. He knew he did not present a fantastic case; women
dismissed him out of hand if given even half the opportunity. If not, they
found him inescapable. He cared for neither.

There was a relative sort
of peace about him, a karmic sense of responsibility. Some things had to be
done and Arnold Prosser was the one who did them. He made sure that things got
taken care of, that the universe pressed forward in its strive for perfection,
and that what the universe cast aside along the way be disposed of in an
orderly fashion.

It wasn’t really all that
much to ask.

He drew a deep, satisfied
breath, nostrils flared to the odors of morning tinged with decay and rot, the
sharp stink of festering food scraps, the curdled drizzle of some
unidentifiable ooze leaking from the corners and rust holes of this Dumpster,
any
Dumpster,
anyplace
where the past was abandoned while others waited for
it to disappear. And eventually it would disappear, spirited away by maggots
and blow flies and crows and, yes, by Arnold Prosser.

Because there was an
order to the universe, and that order demanded obeisance.

Arnold Prosser marched up
to the Dumpster and flung back the lids, looking inside.

An eyeless face stared
back at him, the dark crust of blood about the empty sockets and mouth rendered
it a clownish caricature, a child’s crude efforts, the desperate work of a
lunatic artist fighting the palsy of hallucination-inhibiting drugs.

Prosser cracked a grin.
“Matty Cho,” he whispered, a distinctly British accent. “Pegged you right as a
short-timer, didn’t I?” His face darkened, mood shifting from satisfaction to
irritation. “But not this short, Matty. And who the fuck decided to pull out
yer eyes?”

Arnold Prosser hauled the
corpse from the Dumpster, scooping it up under the armpits and dragging it over
the lip of the container. He tossed the body aside and started rooting through
the Dumpster for Marco Guitierrez, grabbing a thick handful of the dead man’s
coat and pulling the corpse free of the sodden garbage bags and discarded
refuse. He pitched the corpse headfirst to the asphalt where it landed with a
dull
thwack
. Marco was past pain now, and he long ago dispensed with
anything resembling dignity; a luxury difficult to maintain when you were
chicken-hawking for your next fix. Besides, someone had already lumped them
both up pretty hard, if he was any judge.

And he was.

“I don’t mind tellin’ you
boys I’m a might bit annoyed by this.” Arnold slammed the Dumpster lids shut.
“I don’t like unscheduled pick-ups and I don’t like messes. I don’t expect you
two do much either, but I don’t really care about that. Nothin’ personal. And
you two have both made quite a mess, let me tell you.”

Neither corpse responded,
a fact Arnold Prosser chose to interpret as rapt attention.

“Neither o’ you is
supposed to be dead yet,” Prosser declared, lifting Cho’s corpse up over his
shoulder with the ease of a laundry sack. He walked the body to the back end of
the hauler and threw a lever, raising the enormous back hatch. The hydraulics
hummed loudly, the hatch gaping like a great metal jaw getting ready to shovel
in an enormous load of food and swallow it whole. It always made Prosser think
of a bulldog with a serious underbite, and that usually made him smile.

But not today.

“That’s the bitch of it,
Matty ol’ horse. Someone punched your ticket
early
. You were probably
too stupid to just get the fuck out of his way.”

The whine of hydraulics
stopped, and Prosser dumped Matty into the back of the hauler alongside the
bodies of Lucas Bertram and Jonathan Sodenhardt, retrieved earlier from
Benwil’s Junkyard. “So who’d you piss off, Matty? Huh? Who did this to you?”

Arnold Prosser seized
Matty’s collar and hauled his limp body up sharply, looking straight into the
expressionless face, the hollowed sockets, the slack jaw. “Who the fuck ate
your eyes, you miserable scrape o’ shit off the world’s shoe?” he demanded
angrily.

Prosser shook the silent
corpse a final time, then pitched it back with the other two, dead by similar
means, all of them missing their eyes, missing their dreams, missing no small
portion of their souls. Arnold turned away sharply and went to retrieve the
other corpse from the ground beside the Dumpster, hoisting it as easily as a
rag-doll. He brought it back to the hauler and threw it in, limbs flopping, a
puppet
sans
strings, its performing days over forever. “And you, you
sorry sack o’ crap. Didn’t have nothing anybody wanted, did ya? Nothin’ in that
sad kettle o’ mush for a brain that anybody could possibly use?”

Arnold Prosser did not
expect an answer. Not from the corpses, anyway. Their story was told. All that
remained was for someone to go around and collect up the empties, gather the
books off the library tables and place them back on the shelves where they
could gather dust and be forgotten. There was nothing more in them. No more
answers not already given.

Prosser lifted Marco’s
limp feet, placed his nose to the worn soles of the dead man’s shoes, and
inhaled deeply. But there was nothing left. Small traces, scents of things not
entirely right, but not enough.

Still, Prosser thought as
he threw the lever and closed the lid on the truck, there were questions.
Questions that needed answers. Answers that he would need before he could let
this matter go. Someone was messing with the order of the universe, and Prosser
did not intend to allow the infraction to go unanswered. It was not so much a
matter of the four derelicts being killed or mutilated. Death was an
inevitability, and for these four, preferable perhaps. It was the timing that
concerned him. The timing had been upset, and Prosser wanted very much to know
by whom.

These four were not
slated to die. Not yet, anyway. He didn’t much care for the fickle workings of
Fate, but he respected it. Fate respected order, respected a sense of precision
and craft and overall harmony that Arnold Prosser appreciated and found
beautiful. Fate had yielded up Dr. Frederick Kohler; it was simply his time.
Prosser appreciated that. Ol’ Freddy had finally let himself be overcome by, of
all things, himself. Some people were their own worst enemy. He would stop by
the morgue later this morning for the pick up.