Collateral(33)

“Do you feel nauseous?” I ask.

“No.” Michael looks grim with the small amount of light slipping in under the doorway throwing his face into shadows. His whole head looks like that of a skull: eye sockets drowning in darkness, cheeks gaunt and hollowed out. “I feel like murdering somebody,” he grinds out.

I had the good sense to be intimidated by Michael when I first met him, but in this moment I can see how he would be truly terrifying if you found yourself on his bad side. “You and I both, buddy. But we’re trapped in here.”

Michael’s face distorts in a rictus of rage. I think he’s going to jump up and start beating at the walls, set on smashing them apart with his bare hands, but then Lacey shuffles across the bare concrete floor, twists herself over so that her back’s to Michael, and nestles herself into him. His whole demeanor changes in the blink of an eye.

“What you been doing, kid? Huh?” he whispers to her, wrapping his arm protectively around the girl. Lacey doesn’t answer. She closes her eyes and falls asleep. I don’t sleep. The mere thought of it is laughable. All I can think about is Zeth and whatever the hell Charlie is doing to him. It can’t be good. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.











“You want salt? They never put enough salt in the fucking food.” Charlie slides a saltshaker toward me; I catch it before it can go flying off the end of the polished oak table. The pasta O’Shannessey slapped unceremoniously in front of me, scowling the whole time, is over-salted if anything. I haven’t eaten any of it; I can just smell the overload of sodium. After the movie theater, Charlie had me hauled up two flights of stairs to what must once have been the main lobby of the place. The furniture has been ripped out. Nothing but the matted old carpet, worn threadbare in places by the feet of many thousands of people, and the concession stand remain. The place still smells faintly sweet, mixed in with the staleness of dust, age and time.

“Doctors say the radiotherapy’s killed my taste buds,” Charlie advises me, as he winds some of the pasta around his fork and stuffs it into his mouth. “They’re full of shit, though. There are a few things left I can still taste. Garlic. Scotch.” He smirks at me. “Pussy. So long as I can still taste scotch and pussy, I don’t give a fuck about everything else.”

Charlie’s mention of radiotherapy confirms my suspicions—he’s sick. He’s not just sick. He’s dying. “How long you got left?” I shove the plate away from me, my stomach twisting.

“Told me I had two months,” Charlie says, grinning at me. “Five months ago.”

“Commiserations.”

“Ha!” he thrusts his fork in my direction, splattering sauce onto the tabletop. “You could give two shits if I live or die, my boy. But it’s nice that you pretend, right?”

“Oh, I definitely give a shit. When you’re dead, Charlie, I’m gonna fucking dance on your grave.”

“And what makes you think you aren’t gonna be in the ground long before me?”

He has a point there. I just send him a hateful look down the table. If it weren’t for the fact that O’Shannessey and Sammy both have guns trained on me, I’d lunge right across the table and drown the motherfucker in his Alfredo Pomdero. I want to see the old man choke.

“Why here, Charlie? Why the hell have you brought us here?”

Charlie glances up from his meal, chewing with his mouth open. “The movie theater?” His eyes travel up to the ceiling, as though observing the decaying opulence and seeing something entirely different. “Your mother used to come with the Duchess here every Saturday for a matinee. They thought they lived in the fucking forties, those two. I thought for a little while the Duchess was cheating on me. I ’ad ’er followed just to make sure she was keeping her fucking knees together, and they told me she was coming ’ere to watch Casa-fucking-blanca and old Rita Hayworth movies. Only place in Seattle that used to play that shit at the time. And that silly bitch, she pissed me off one day, so I bought the place and ’ad it closed down. Kitchen still works, though.” He winks at me—the wink of an insane bastard. “It’s big and it’s quiet in here. The building’s been ’ere so long, people ’ave forgotten it even exists. It’s part of the landscape. People see it without actually seeing it. That makes it the perfect kind of place to lay low when you need to.”

Hiding in plain sight. I have no idea where we are geographically—still in Seattle?—but I’m guessing it’s somewhere blatantly obvious.