The Skunge (23 page)

She twisted the tip of the knife into her flesh, boring through skin until she felt an electric shock of pleasure so sharp it hurt. She levered the blade to pry up a writhing gossamer thread of the Skunge. She held it up under the light, watching it shiver and coil around the tip of the knife. Colors ran up and down its length, blurring together to form hues she had never seen before. She pulled it, watching it emerge. It felt like she was sewing her own skin, pulling a stitch tight, the raw tissue underneath bunching up pulling taut. She ripped the thread free and held it up to the light. The thread curled, wriggling while depending from her index finger. It tightened around her finger for a moment, then went limp. She smiled.

She cut more. She had missed the feeling, that clean, sharp feeling of the blade as it split her skin, releasing her tension, her anger, whatever else coiling up inside her. She missed the ritual: the cadence of cut, burn, and blot.

With every burning line of pain, her mind cleared. But not enough; never enough. She kept cutting.

Minutes passed like hours. The flexible bullet of pain and pleasure rocketed around her skull, reverberating and gaining speed.

She rolled her arm over, looking at the branching blue highway of her Cephalic vein. It would be as easy as breathing. Just ease the tip of the Bowie in, usher the blood, and let it wash everything away. That's what the letting of blood was for, after all: to cleanse the body of infection.

Some animal instinct pricked up its ears inside her. Footsteps approaching, moving up the walk to the front door. She rose to her feet, the knife clutched in her hand, and moved toward the sound. The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door.

She thought it would be Maas, or at least one of his paid killers. Like the animal he was, mere pain wouldn't stop him from finishing the kill. The victim: her psyche, her body, her soul.

The knob turned, and she gripped the knife tighter.

Oh no, not you. Please, no.

When Arneson walked in, she raised the knife to stab him, and stopped. She couldn't—at least not without then turning the knife on herself. And that, she had decided, was not the way her story would end.

She dropped the knife, and wrapped her arms around him. She said nothing, because she didn't have to. He wasn't here to kill her for Maas—he didn't have to say that, either.

"We have to leave. Now." He looked her over, examining the cut over her eye, the damage to her hand. "I have a kit in my trunk. Get packed, and get ready to leave."

All at once she was furious with him; his gruff certainty and his sticky politeness and his goddamned insufferable
fucking
eyes that said that everything was going to be OK. She withdrew her arms and clutched them around herself. She needed something from him—a promise.

"I'm not going."

"Listen, babe, we have to. And we have to do it now."

"Do we have somewhere to go?"

He hesitated, as if weighing what he had said against a great many more things he could say. "The Skunge is getting worse. The system is going to start showing cracks pretty soon, and when it breaks, the bad news is going to be a flood. We are right in the way of the worst of it. I have a place."

She stepped to him and took his face in her hands. She held his eyes with hers, searching them, and hoped would know if she saw the truth. "Are you going to keep me safe?" she asked.

His eyes were steady. "Yes."

"I don't believe you."

He stared into her eyes. Stared into her. "Let me tell you a story," he said.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

He spoke. She sat, listening, while he paced.

"She was beautiful. I mean, really, really gorgeous. But other than that first attraction, none of that matters after a while. She fit together with me, from the first time we met. Nicole. She is, in a way, how I ended up here.

"I was a bad guy, in the old days. I mean, I made myself believe that I was really a decent guy who just kept getting in scrapes…but it wasn't true. You can't really fool yourself.

"Anyway, I grew up fast, and I grew up mean. I didn't know my mother, but I knew too much of my dad. He was a small-time dealer, a drunk, and when I was ten, I'm pretty sure he killed my older brother. Davey went out one night, to 'help out with something', and he never came back. In a lot of ways, neither did dad—he was like a floating shipwreck after that. The government tried to take me away, but I kept running back, and eventually they just gave up.

"Then I left school, and started helping out on Dad's runs. I was the muscle for him. I was only fourteen or so, and I could get into places he couldn't. He'd send me to middle schools to drop or collect. One time a teacher got wise to me and tried to hold me there to call the cops, and I broke his arm. We left that town behind the next day, but it wasn't more than a couple weeks we settled into a new town. My dad, he was like a parasite; if the host dies, he'd just attach himself to a new one and start sucking the juice.

"I felt bad when I had to beat up kids younger than me. Felt so bad that to punish myself, I'd go out to bars at night and pick fights with whoever I thought could take me. I took beatings so bad that I pissed blood for days. One time I was in a coma for a week. As soon as I woke up, I busted out of there.

"And so on and so on. I was living rough, trying to keep me and my dad's heads above water. I did things that I can never tell another soul. If there was a God, he would have turned his face away in disgust.

"And all the while, I told myself I was a decent guy, helping out his dad. Life was life; take what you want, but you eat what you take.

"Then I met Nicole.

"We were in different places, but it didn't matter. We met, and we got together, and nothing could have stopped that. Nothing could have stopped what followed, either, but I spent years trying to prove otherwise.

"We got married a year after we first met. I didn't want to change. Sure, I wanted to get out of the drug business. But there was always one more job, nothing big, just one more. I tried to get out, I really did. I picked up shifts as a security guard, working nights, keeping straight. She was a pharmacist, so we both worked nights and spent our days together. Days in the Mojave desert are long and bright. We had the light, at least for a while. Then she confessed. To get through school, she had been a dancer. She had worked clubs in Vegas, Reno, San Francisco. She danced at night, and went to classes during the day. She had taken stuff—speed— to help her get through it. She had been hooked, but that was in the past.

"But I wondered. God help me, I wondered why she suddenly felt the need to confess." Arneson brought out a cigarette and took a long moment puffing it alight.

"She was using again. Dipping into the pharmacy's stuff, selling a couple scrip pads to buy off the street when she almost got caught stealing from her work. I was worried, but she was a smart girl. Too smart to get hooked again.

"Then I did another one last job for dad. In the course of it, I heard a name. Her name. She was in trouble, after she refused to sell to a local pimp named Dixon. I knew she was in deep, so I went after him.

"Dixon was a big-time dealer in the area; he was to my father what you are to a cockroach. I knew I would have to kill him. Guys like him, they never stopped.

"When I found him, he had the point of a stiletto up the the throat of a four year-old.

"The kid was bawling. I was looking at him, and all I could see was myself. A victim of circumstances. Would this kid grow up to be a decent person? I didn't know—but I wouldn't have placed a dollar on it.

"Dixon was high, and confused. He might have thought I was a cop, or someone he knew. I found out later that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Terminal. When I showed up, he went wild. He started raving about how the world was trying to get him, how his every waking moment was plagued by ghosts, and how he was so tired of it. For all I know, it was all true.

"He stuck that little baby right through the throat with his blade. Stuck him, then dropped him on the floor like a bag of garbage.

"He guessed I would go for the kid; but I went for him instead. I got him, and I hurt him. Bad.

"I took one of his eyes, both ears, most of his fingers. I ended up throwing him off the roof. Later on, the cops said they'd never seen a look of fear like that on anyone's face. I could have told them the same about the look on that little kid's face. The horror. The fear, the pain, the terror.

"The kid turned out OK, physically. He never spoke above a whisper, but otherwise, he was OK. On the outside, anyway. He got lucky.

"But what I didn't know was Dixon wasn't the big fish in our local pool. There was another. Jamerson Shook.

"I ended up in the county slam, waiting on arraignment. I had nothing to look forward to but a stretch in the pen. All I wanted to do was do my time and get back to Nic.

"A couple of suits showed up. They told me a story.

"Nicole had been driving to work. I saw her a lot; she was clean at the time, and working hard at it. Going to meetings, all of that. And Shook, that cowardly shitbag, he sent someone after her, just to punish me. He wanted her to hurt, and me to know that she suffered.

"She fought hard. I looked at the files later, and she had killed one of the guys. She took out the eye on another.

"But there were too many. They took her. Took her, tortured her, and killed her. Dumped her in a patch of woods.

"The men in suits offered me a deal. Not a very good one, but better than the alternative. As fucked up as I was about Nic, I would have only ended up bleeding out in a dusty prison-yard, a sharpened toothbrush in my guts.

"So I went to work for the men in suits. The only difference between what I did for them and what I did for my father was this time I didn't pretend I was a good guy. I was just a janitor. Cleaning messes no one else could touch without getting their hands dirty. I traveled, and I saw the country, and I killed men and women. In Texas I killed a preacher who had his own demons. In North Carolina, the son of a connected politician. He liked to mess with kids. The son, I mean, I don't know what the father did. I hope one day to visit him and find that out too. In New York, I cut out the tongue of a crooked guy who knew too much. At least they told me he was crooked. I didn't ask questions.

"In Seattle I caught up with Shook, and I made him pay.

"After that, I was no good for a while. Maas was considered a relatively easy case. Work my way in, help Maas eliminate his competition, then clean up Maas. And everyone involved in the operation."

Silence hung in the air.

"Would you have killed me, too?" Her eyes were still closed.

Arneson lit a cigarette, and the smoke made a circle above his head. He was quiet, until she spoke again.

"Tell me the rest."

"I have this dream. Nightmare, I guess I would call it.

"She's getting ready to pull out of the driveway, and I look out the window and see her coffee cup on the roof. She was always doing stuff like that. I run out to stop her from pulling out of the driveway. We have a laugh.
Oh Nic, you'd forget your head if you didn't pin it to your coat, har-de-har
. But in the end, in the dream, I let her go.

"Then the police arrive, and their faces are long and yellow. They tell me that my wife, my dear sweet Nicole who snored and made really good spaghetti
carbonara
and got defensive when she thought I was making fun of her—"

He was quiet another minute, and this time she said nothing. When he spoke again, his voice had regained its firmness.

"She was dead. Nicole died. She got run off the road by a nobody drug addict in a Toyota pickup. Some zero hired by Dixon to make an example of me. She was dead, and so was the baby inside of her."

"I love you," she said.

"I love you," he said. He ran the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes. "And up until a few weeks ago, I would have thought the worst part was this: every time I had that dream, I would get closer and closer to being able to stop her. To warn her. Make her get out of the car.

"But I didn't want her to get out of the car. I didn't want to stop her—I wanted to go with her. To go along for the ride. All the way."

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Arneson stepped out the front door and stopped. "Shit."

There was Sonch, standing in front of a black SUV pulled up in front of Sugar's
casita
. Meat-heads in tracksuits stood in a loose semi-circle around the vehicle, each equipped with a pistol that looked like toys in their enormous hands.

"Yo, Arneson. How's it hangin'?" Sonch called.

"About six o'clock, Sonch; how about you?"

"Long and to the left. Can't complain." Sonch scratched one unshaven cheek. "Well, except for this one thing: I got thrown out of my own home town by a guy I thought was my friend. A few towns away, I get pulled over by some dumbshit county cop who's got a bullet sheet with my name and face on it. A bullet sheet that says I killed some little good-for-nothing shit. A little shit named Pedro Rodriguez." Sonch reached behind his back and pulled out police-issue 9mm. "I was real curious about how that came to be, so I had to convince the cop to tell me. It didn't take long." He smiled like a ghoul. "So there's that. Can you believe that shit?"