Whispers in the Night (6 page)

Danika turned to the other barrels and began knocking them over. One after another, curly-haired, tan-skinned heads tumbled out onto the garage floor. Danika looked from one face to the next as more police officers crowded into the garage.

“Are you okay, ma'am? Jesus Christ! Are those real? We need a coroner over here. Somebody call CSU! It's a fucking bloodbath in here! We've got bodies everywhere!”

Danika pried her eyes away from the lifeless faces lying on the garage floor and back up to the garage entrance where the two shadows were still standing there, smirking in superiority, unnoticed by everyone except her and Malik. She looked back down at Malik as what looked like half a dozen cops piled on top of him, twisting his arms behind his back and handcuffing him, their fear making them use more force than necessary as they tried to restrain him. Malik stopped struggling and looked up into her eyes even as her vision started to fade and everything began to go black.

“Why?” she asked him. “How could you do this?”

“I'm sorry, Danika. I didn't want to hurt you. Some wounds don't heal. Some wounds never heal.”

Danika fainted, thinking about scabs that continued to rip open and bleed decades after the wounds that caused them. The girls had called Malik a black scab. In a way, they had been right.

Anthony Beal

A
n ass-kicking in a glass. That's what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub. To my thinking, that's a mighty fanciful name for a dark little shit-kicker's alehouse out in the Baja Desert, but that's what they call the place. Browder could make a weapons-grade cocktail out of fucking amaretto and grenadine. And one sip would knock you to your goddamned knees. Don't know how he done it. Ain't sure I wants to know.

The stool at the north end of the bar near the toilets belonged to Zadora, the seer. Brown, handsome lady of fifty, maybe fifty-five years breathing, always draped in silk rainbows. She had these salt-n'-pepper braids down the middle of her back look like creeping vines. I ain't ever seen a night when she wasn't sitting over there shuffling her damn tarot cards in between sips of Stout. Sometimes, they got drunk enough, rummies would ask her to tell their fortunes. Sometimes, if her glass was empty or she'd done run out of Swisher Sweets, she'd accept a donation of smokes or hooch, and be their patron saint for a spell. Most nights found her doing the same as the rest of Paradise's regulars: chasing their demons to the bottoms of pint glasses and ale bottles, and demanding quick refills, hoping to drown the fuckers for good.

At the room's south end, two stools down from the seat belonging to me, you could walk in here any night and find Old Man Solomon—“Old Man,” Browder calls him, and the guy ain't seen three summers more'n I have—suckin' on fistfuls of stale peanuts and watching for visions in the cups of black coffee he always ordered. Black coffee. S'all he ever ordered anymore. Ain't seen that poor bastard touch a drop of whiskey since the night he claimed he seen his dead wife's face smile up at him from a steaming cup of joe. He ordered it while sitting in this very same pub on that very same stool. Think he makes it his business to occupy that same seat and order the same thing night after night hoping for a second vision. And night after night, I've sat here sucking down bad beer like unwanted medicine and watched Old Man Solomon hobble home disappointed. I feel for the guy, but how you gon' console someone so hell-bent on grieving?

The room's only television had been mounted from the ceiling behind the bar. Only thing ever played on it was some regional news broadcast I ain't never seen before. I don't watch a lot of TV, and I'm not sure whether my TV gets channel sixty-six, but that's the channel the TV's always set on here. You can always recognize folks who ain't never been in here before, 'cause the first thing they ask for after a drink is whether Browder can turn the channel to whatever boxing match or soccer game they know is on. Browder always claims channel sixty-six's the only station the thing can pick up way out here in the desert. First-timers don't always look prepared to believe him when he say that, but Browder's a seven-foot-tall, shaved-headed, Aryan-lookin' motherfucker with a goatee and a faceful of tattoos. He got arms on him look about as thick as a circus strongman's thighs, too, so I ain't never seen nobody even think about arguin' with the dude. He say that's the only channel it pick up, folks just let it go.

Tonight, I'd only been here for about an hour or so before in walked my man, Carter. I didn't know whether Carter was his first name or his last. All I know is from the night we first met each other here, he stuck his hand in mine and told me to call him “Carter,” so that's what I call him. Tonight, he looked strange when he come in, though. Had the look of a man who done just stepped out onto a tree limb and heard a
crack.

I gave him a nod when he looked up and seen me sitting where I always do, but I noticed he ain't come over to me right away. He just stood there blocking the doorway and staring at me real frightened like; look like he was scared he was gon' catch something contagious if he came too close to me, or like I was on fire and he had done soaked his clothes in gasoline 'fore he come in. Felt like a full five minutes before he worked up the nerve to come over and see about having a drink. Some folks might say I shoulda gone over to see what had set him jittering, but instead I stayed on my stool sipping black-labeled salvation the whole time he spent making up his mind whether to piss or go blind. The way I figured it, I hadn't never brought none of my troubles in here and laid 'em at his feet, so I fucking well wasn't volunteering to sort out whatever pile of shit he'd stepped in that was responsible for the look in his eyes. Nice guy, sure, but ask Carter for the time, he'd tell you how to build a fucking clock.

He finally come over and pulled hisself up onto the stool my foot shoved toward him. I ain't ever knowed Carter to throw back anything harder than Stout, but tonight he ordered up a double shot of gin as chaser to a whiskey on the rocks. After that, he just sat there staring down at his size twelves like somebody'd done clued him in on the exact date and time of his death and had told him he was gon' win the lottery the day before it went down.

I asked him how things are going, speaking more out of courtesy than any desire to know what ailed him tonight. I asked this after letting maybe a full minute stretch between us without conversation. When he finally spoke, something in his voice set me questioning whether or not I was a religious man.

“Can I count on you?” he asked me, his eyes still enamored with them gum-soled gunboats hugging his feet. By this point in the evening, I'd poured enough whiskey down my throat to have drowned at least three of my five senses, so it was his turn to sit there with a drunk and gawking old man for a spell.

Browder come along about that time and set Carter's drinks on the bar. By the time he left us, I'd remembered where I kept my tongue.

“Depends on what you want to count on me for,” I told Carter. I ain't never heard nothing resembling good news follow a question the likes of what he was asking me. I knew I damn well better hear his whole tale before pledging him my allegiance.

“I want to know if I can count on you to listen to something I ain't repeated out loud to nobody for fear of the rubber room they'd sling my ass in if I did. I need to know you ain't gon' chalk what I tell you up to my being a drunk in a place that lends itself to all kinds of local legendry.”

I knowed more than a few of the tales people told about this place. In these parts, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody whose cousin's brother's roommate's fuckin' proctologist had a story 'bout something happening to them in this very room. Everything from haunted urinals in the shitter to folks having shared drinks with the Devil in the wee hours of the morning.

The oldest story I know 'bout the Paradise Pub says it's a cursed place, and that that's why Indian Road 7734 what leads out to it don't appear on no map you'll ever lay eyes on. Lot of folks say you can't go looking for the pub, that it don't take nobody inside it that it don't want, but that it reveals itself every once in a blue moon to folks who deserve to be here. They say the ground beneath it was hexed generations ago by Indians living here who was angry over the white man putting so many of their men in early graves and their women in brothels. Don't know if I buy the whole curse bit, but I can see how them Indians would be pissed at having their entire way of life kicked down around their ears. At any rate, Carter seemed to think I was likely to dismiss whatever he was gon' tell me for another such story.

“Well, I'm listening, so go ahead and talk if you need to talk,” I said.

“In a minute,” Carter told me, making his chaser disappear. “First, you see the dude behind me having his fortune read at the other end of the bar?”

I looked past Carter, toward the opposite end of the bar where Zadora sat lighting up another cigarette and turning over tarot cards. The mountain sitting beside her in the army jacket didn't look as old as the socks I had on, but from where I sat, he looked 'bout as wide as Carter and me laid together head to foot.

“I see him. He ain't altogether hard to miss. What about him?”

“Not here. Outside,” Carter said, hinting toward the door.

I didn't relish giving up my stool, but curiosity had a hold of me. I found myself polishing off my glass of melted ice cubes and following him through the pub's only door.

He brought me outside into an airless night so quiet you could hear a rat piss on cotton. I followed him around the back of the building to the shadows, where folks liked to park their cars and fire up doobies in the dark.

“All right,” I said, once we'd backed as far as we could into the blackness. “Everything about you tonight has me figuring you're in some kind of trouble. Am I wrong?”

“You ain't wrong,” he told me, “and I ain't in it by myself. Can't say I'm sorry about that last part, neither.”

“Well, you gon' tell me what it's all about, or not?” I already missed the presence of a sweaty, on-the-rocks tumbler in my palm. My patience was a candle burning at both ends.

“All right, all right. So, that big dude in there letting Zadora's card-shuffling ability hash out his future for him, you've seen him in here before, right?”

I ain't never had much to say to the twenty-something in the army drabs, but I knowed him to be a regular. He hadn't never caused no trouble that I ever seen. Most nights, you'd walk in and find him hugging the wallpaper between the jukebox and the restroom, and burning up clove cigarettes like smoking them was the only thing keeping him alive.

“What about him?” I wanted to know. I won't never forget what Carter said to me in reply. Them words is burned onto my goddamned brain. They'd be burned onto yours too, if you'd been standing in my shoes that night.

“He dead, Lou. I know he dead 'cause I killed him last night.”

All I could do was stand there still trying to decide whether or not religion was a stranger to me, and trying to keep the word “bullshit” from slipping through my lips.

Don't know what made Carter think he was going to drop a bomb like that on me without some kind of clarification to go along with it. He should have damn well known what my next question would be, but the son of a bitch made me ask it anyway.

“The fuck you mean, he dead? How can he be dead when he's in there right now having his fortune told and stinking up the joint with them damn clove cigarettes?”

“I know, man. I know I sound like a lunatic, but you know me, Lou. You know that no matter what I might sound like right now, I ain't crazy. And I'm telling you I killed that son of a bitch.”

I decided then and there that he was crazy. I was standing alone a hundred miles out in the Baja in the dark with a crazy man.

“Well, I'd tell you he don't look so dead to me, and then I suppose we could have an argument, but we won't. Instead, why don't you start over from the beginning?” I would come to regret saying those words.

“Before we do, I got another question for you,” Carter said. His speaking tone had taken on a lunatic's sheen that unnerved me. I didn't know how many more of his questions I was prepared to hear.

He took my hand in his and pressed it between his palms. I don't know whether he was the one shaking or whether it was me, but I could feel the tremors working their way up my wrist in that dark place behind the pub where moonlight didn't dare to reach. They scrabbled up my forearm, and at the rate our conversation was going, they weren't going to stop till they reached my toenails.

“Do you remember the very first time you ever set foot in the Paradise Pub?”

Something dark was bubbling up from inside Carter; something that seemed to take hold of him and didn't seem intent on letting him go any time soon. I'd estimate that I probably outweigh Carter by a solid forty pounds and stand three inches taller than him, but I don't mind admitting that at that moment, he scared the fuck out of me.

What scared me more was that I found his question impossible to answer. Of course, a stubborn bastard like me would die before admitting such a thing, so I tried to rationalize it to myself.

If there's one thing I learned in all my years, it's the number-one reason that hesitation can be a hazard. Hesitation is dangerous 'cause it betrays fear, and sometimes fear is a pheromone. This was one of those times. Carter must have smelled it, the way he lunged in to swallow up the silence as I stood ruminating. “Can't recollect it, can you? Bet you can't. I bet you fuckin' can't!”

It pissed me off that he was right.

“Hell, I been coming here for so long. At our age, there's got to be a million places I drink at where I don't remember the first time I ever went there.”

This seemed admission enough for him. “That's another thing,” he practically shouted, making me shush his ass in the darkness. For a man who'd seemed to have privacy concerns about speaking with me, his mannerisms was growing more conspicuous with every word he said. Sweating like a whore in church, he went on, “You say there's a ton of places you drink at besides this one. So when the last time you been to one of them instead of coming here? Huh? When?”

“Man, what the hell you driving at with these questions?” It was all I could think of to say, since I damned sure couldn't recall having gone anywhere else to drink except Paradise Pub in a month of Sundays. I didn't want him to know my memory was dust, of course. And if he knew the reason why I couldn't recall anything removed from this creepy little alehouse out in the middle of nowhere, I felt terrified all at once of him telling me.

“Lou, just answer the question. Humor me. It'll all come together in a minute, I swear it will. Just bear with me and answer the goddamned question. Do you remember the last time you went anywhere other than here? Last time you had a really good meal? A really satisfying night's sleep?”