Whispers in the Night (8 page)

When I didn't answer, he told me, “You know what I mean. There's nothing to be gained by playing dumb, am I right?”

I watched Carter from my stool where he stood laughing and chatting up some dude in a leather biker jacket. I noticed Carter wasn't drinking beer tonight. Hadn't heard him order nothing but cola all night. I wondered what that was about.

“Nobody's playing with you, old man,” I said. Damn Browder had
me
calling Solomon “old” now.

“Have it your way,” he said, returning his attention to the cup of coffee set before him. “A word to the wise is sufficient, or so it's said.”

“If you've got something to say to me, then say it,” I told him. I wasn't about to be baited.

“I'm saying that I know what it is to want someone to stop the world so you can get off. But the devil of it is that once the world stops for you, it's hell to start up again. Can't be done, most times.”

“That what happened to you? Is that what happened to all of us here?” I asked him.

He shrugged, retreating. “I can only speak for myself. We tell our own tales here, Lou. It is ‘Lou,' isn't it?” His eyes followed Browder to the far end of the bar.

I nodded as a terrible dawning burned my mind.

Old Man Solomon leaned close to me and whispered, “A word to the wise. The coffee here isn't the best by any means, but there aren't any demons in the pot.”

I would have settled for knowledge of where the hell I was and what the story was with the place. I didn't feel ready to know everything Carter apparently knew. He was getting too damn bold, and I didn't like it. The way he saw it, he told me, it was all he could do not to lose his last few shreds of sanity. The way I saw it, his last shred of sanity flew over the cuckoo's nest the minute he killed his first victim. The topic had evolved into one of those things that friends who want to stay friends just don't talk about.

I reminded myself he wasn't a friend anymore as a crash rang out. Carter had emptied his drinking glass and busted it over the head of the biker he was talking to. The bandanna-clad man went down and didn't move. Blood like burgundy sauce spread over the floorboards to halo his head. No one reacted.

“Carter, man, what the fuck you think you doing?” I shouted at him, getting to my feet.

Fixing me in place with a look I ain't never seen on a man who had more than ten seconds of life left in him, he answered, “I'm learning in death how to live.”

I replied, “I don't know about Indian curses or what in hell's going on round here, but ain't nobody dead except maybe for that dude lying at your feet.” I don't know what made me think he'd buy what I was selling.
I
didn't even buy it.

“Sometimes, Lou, dying is the highest, truest form of living. I've often wondered whether the dead imitate the living, whether everybody we've ever loved and lost are still kicking around somewhere, carrying out the same habits and mannerisms they did when they was alive. I know now that they do, 'cause I'm one of them. And like it or not, so's you.”

He'd finally struck me speechless. All I could do was gape at him and wonder whether it hurt to go insane.

“Let me teach you how to live,” he told me.

Time slowed down as he remembered the pistol in his belt, swung it up fluidly to align it with my right eye socket, and blasted away the rear portion of my skull.

 

 

An ass-kicking in a glass. That's what you got on any night Browder was pouring drinks at Paradise Pub. But I'd had enough for tonight. I was headed home.

Climbing into my car, I recalled a conversation I'd had with the seer. I'd figured on finding someone other than crazy fucking Carter to talk to tonight. I figured on that not long after heading into the men's room to take a whiz and finding him crouching in the room's only stall with his dick embedded in the frothing, gore-caked eye socket of some sweaty redhead prone to selling blow jobs in that very same bathroom after she'd had a couple of highballs.

If you coulda seen the grin on that fucker's face when he looked up and seen me watching him, you'd know why I left early tonight.

Drive home seemed to take twice as long as usual. Night driving around these parts always felt like driving through a mausoleum. Desert was so damn sterile and soundless. It sucked to be the poor bastard driving through the Baja at night with a busted car stereo. Music tended to kill some of the monotony of my drive, which varied between forty minutes and an hour, depending on road conditions. Tonight, when I turned the stereo on, I found Nick Cave wailin' “Your Funeral . . . My Trial” at me like I'd pissed him off. Since my choices seemed to be that or static, I let him yell at me while I drove.

And drove.

I knowed something was wrong after missing the exit that I usually take to get home. When I say I missed it, I don't mean I'd passed it. I knowed I hadn't. What I mean is that it wasn't where I knowed it was supposed to be. I'd half convinced myself that I must have fell asleep at the wheel and passed right by the son of a bitch until I caught sight of a little glimmer on the horizon. Figuring it might be a gas station or a sheriff's depot where I could catch my bearings and figure out where I'd made my mistake, I made up my mind to pull over when I reached it.

And the nearer I got to it, the more convinced I grew that ol' Nick was ridin' with me, and that I'd indeed made my way onto his shit list for reasons as yet unknown to me.

I was coming up on the Paradise Pub.

 

 

“You can't tell me you ain't curious,” Carter told me, seating himself beside me once I'd come back inside. On the TV, photographs of people who'd died in some drunk driving accident flickered. Their vacant eyes set me trembling. A nice-looking black couple, a mildly overweight but gorgeous Latina, and her brother. None of them had survived.

“I can't tell you nothing if you done already made up your mind that you ain't listening,” came my reply.

“It won't let you leave, Lou. Remember those stories about a curse on the land that we always thought was bullshit? Well, I think it's time we wrap our brains around the fact that they ain't.”

I ordered up a cup of black coffee, prompting Browder to eye me for a curiosity before going to get it. The coffee machine sat at the other end of the bar near Zadora's stool. Overhead, coverage of the car accident continued to unfold.

“Looks like the place will be seeing some new faces soon enough,” she told Browder, tipping her chin at the screen in a gesture that I didn't understand, but would soon come to. He said something in reply that I couldn't hear because Carter spoke to me at the same moment.

“I'll let you kill me if you want, Lou. I'll sit still for it one time. You gotta experience it.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I spat, succeeding only in making him laugh till his eyes watered.

“I wish I could, man. Goddamn if I don't,” he said.

 

 

“I can't believe you're fucking serious,” Carter told me the next night, climbing into the passenger seat with me. I couldn't believe he was actually coming along. Don't know what had made me invite him anyway. He seemed all too content here.

“Oh, I'm heart-attack serious,” I told him, firing up my car's engine. “We are shaking this fucking mob scene tonight.”

I turned the car onto 7734, heading opposite the direction I'd traveled in some nights ago. If I couldn't find my way home, then I'd get us back to Route 2 and consider my options once we got there.

“You think we can just motor out of hell like a couple of bored tourists? Don't you understand that we're
home
? We're home, Lou.”

Not five minutes on the road and he was getting on my nerves already. “If you buy that, then what the fuck did you say yes for when I invited you?”

“I came along so I could prove to your ignorant ass that the reason we can't leave is that we're right where we belong,” he told me. “Now stop the car.”

The muzzle of his Diamondback kissed the side of my throat.

“I ain't gon' ask you but one time,” he said, leaning on the gun, making its presence painful against my neck.

I was sick of a lot of things in that moment, but mostly of him. “Fuck you and that gun. You claim you've already shot me in the face and killed me a few nights ago. What more you think you gon' do to me?”

“Pull the fuck over or we'll kick off every night for the rest of fucking eternity with me putting a bullet up your ass. They won't ‘kill' you, but they'll hurt like a bastard. Every. Fucking. Night.”

Our bluffs waltzed with each other for another second before mine got sumo heaved off the table. I pulled to the side of the road. “Satisfied?” I asked him, making a mental note to bust his ass later and pray the old memory would hang on to it.

“Almost,” he said, grinning like a death's-head with only the dashboard lights to illuminate his features. “Get out.”

I stepped out of the car.

He leveled the gun on my groin and shot me.

“You'll thank me for this, brother,” he told me before driving away smiling and leaving me writhing around on the roadside. If the scent of my blood released into the air didn't set the creatures he'd talked about on me, then the piece of hollering I was putting on surely would.

And did.

The nightmare creatures from Carter's tale came out of the darkness of the night as if woven from it. Black hulking things with leather for skin and hellfire in their throats.

The creatures filled my ears with sound as they exposed my entrails to moonlight and fed on them. Bones cracking like glass rods. Bear traps snapping shut. Screams of the dead.

An ass-kicking the following night behind a pub in a moonlit desert. That's what Carter got 'cause that's what he deserved.

When I came to myself, I was standing over Carter with blood on my fists and in my hair that didn't belong to me. I dropped to my knees, bringing my two-hundred-thirty-odd pounds down hard in the pit of his stomach. My hands found his throat. My thumbs dug into his larynx as I squeezed. I did this without knowing the reason for it, but something in his smirk refused to let me feel bad about it. Every breath I drew convinced me further that the bastard had it coming and that if I ever remembered what he'd done to deserve this, then he'd
really
be in some trouble.

“I'm proud of you, brother man,” he gurgled, smiling before going limp in my arms.

It should have bothered me that I'd just murdered the murderer who I'd chastised for being what I had become. Instead, I felt great.

God help me, I felt fucking great.

 

 

“All right, you convinced me,” I told him the next night when he sauntered into the pub smiling “I told you so's” at me. “I want to give it a try. I want to kill somebody tonight.”

“Hot damn, now you're talking, Lou,” he laughed, clapping me on the back as Browder set a couple of lagers in front of us. I thanked Browder, but I didn't drink the bitch. I wasn't drinking nothing else in this fucking place until I tested out a theory. I hoped Carter would polish his off, though, since the round was on me. If my plan worked like I hoped it would, it was the last round I'd be buying for quite some time.

“Yeah. I mean, there ain't shit else to do up in this motherfucker, so I'll play it your way for a while,” I said, hoping he was buying my line of bull and wouldn't smell the shit on my breath until it was too late.

“It grabs hold of you, don't it?” Carter said. “Told you I knew what I was talkin' about.”

I lifted my glass in salute.

“Let me hold your pistol a minute,” I murmured, locking my eyes on a patron across the room who I knew Carter would take for my mark. He practically leered at me as he handed it over, eager to see me walk the walk.

Sucker.

I stood up, turned to face the bar and its bottled demons, and made a wish.

I trained the gun on the bottles behind the bar. I opened up on the top shelf stuff first. The blue label. The gold label. The imported spirits. Colored flasks burst into sparkle dust, slopped expensive vodkas and brandies all over the counter, the floor, the ice bins. Fractured bottle fragments leapt into the air. The sickening sweetness of rums and tequilas and liqueurs wafted around me as each pull of the trigger blew apart the bottles that housed them, raining glass shards over every inch of floor and countertop.

I'd succeeded in getting Browder's attention. He rushed toward me with graveyards for eyes.