Red Delicious(33)

"Well," he said, "I should get going."

"Why? What's up?" I asked, and cleared my throat.

"Nothing," he said, backpedaling, and he smiled at me. "Nothing at all. Sorry again about the light. Anyway, you take it easy. That cough sounds ugly. Better get out of the cold. Get something warm inside you."

"Yeah," I agreed. "That's what I should do."

"Take it easy, man," he said.

He would have walked away, and likely as not, our paths would never have crossed again. I'm sure that's what he was thinking. But I was on him immediately, one hand clamped tight over his mouth. Can't have screamers. He made the usual futile effort at a struggle, the way they all fight before they realize how strong I am.

I didn't apologize. I didn't say anything at all. What would have been the point? And I sure as fuck wasn't gentle. There were rhododendrons growing at the edge of the sidewalk, and I hurled him through them, slamming his body down beneath the shadow of a huge oak tree. He clawed at my eyes, so I growled my scary growl and punched him in the gut hard enough I probably ruptured his spleen or liver or something else essential. He stopped fighting, and I did what I do.

There was no mercy.

If he had an erection, if he came about four heartbeats before he died, I neither knew nor cared. I crouched there in the frost, beneath that ancient tree, and I sucked and gnawed and worried at his corpse until there was nothing left to take. Then I went on about my way, my mind busy with too many other thoughts to care about his being found. I'm usually pretty good about cleaning up after myself, but, once again, I was sloppy and indifferent.

True story.

More or less.

A billion shades of gray.

But I'm emphatically not trying to shock. Hell, I couldn't care less if you're horrified or revolted. Just trying to keep it honest. Just trying to tell it like it was and is and will be until the end of my days.

Cross my heart and hope to die.

• • •

So, after dinner, after stopping by my apartment (door still propped open after Rizzo's attack, window still shot out, etc.) for a shower and a change out of my bloody clothes, I retraced my steps across the Providence River. By nine P.M., I was in the alley that led to the back of the delicatessen on Atwells. I assumed the Maidstones hadn't pulled up stakes for another safe house. They hadn't called to tell me they had, and since I figured Amity figured she had her hooks in me, I figured they'd have let me know. And Drusneth had given me back my phone after letting me out of that cage, so I'd have gotten the call. Or text. Whatever.

I was out of the alley and halfway to the door leading to the upstairs rooms when I heard someone call my name from the shadows a heap of cardboard and crusty snow. Really, it wasn't so much someone calling out my name, more like what, I suppose, is meant by a sussuration. That soft, below a whisper, like if a voice could be the rustle of wind.

I stopped and stared at the boxes.

My name again, my name as October leaves blowing across an empty parking lot. I didn't recognize the voice.

"You gonna speak up and come the hell out of there, or am I coming in after you? I'm not in the best of moods, so I'd suggest option number one."

At first no answer, only the rumble of traffic out on Atwells and the wind between the buildings.

"Patience," I said. "Not what I got just now."

The sound of those flattened boxes shifting about, and then a paler shadow stood up, rising from its bed of darker shadows. I didn't have to ask who it was, though the smell hit me just before I recognized the face. It was Lenore. Lenore, who I'd killed the day before by slamming her into a wall like a goddamn rag doll. I also didn't have to ask how she was up and moving about. But she told me anyhow.

"Berenice," she said, and I could tell from her voice that her tongue had begun to swell. "She's the one who cared about me. She brought me back."

Jesus Christ on a hobby horse.

"Smells like she did bang up job," I said.

The shadow stepped out into the streetlight. Her face was white as fresh mozzarella. Her eyes were vacant, rheumy, like the eyes of a dead fish. Her hair, matted and hanging in scraggly tendrils about her face. She was naked, except for a black fur coat, surely stripped from the cadavers of fake minks.

"Berenice," she said again, "she isn't half as skilled as her sister. It's the best she could do. She apologized."

"Fuck all," I said. "Did she dump you out here in the trash after turning the resurrection trick?"

"No," said Lenore, but then offered no explanation for why she was out there with the deli's trash. "We have to talk," she mumbled, instead.

"Dead girl, we don't have to do jack shit. I'm in league with the ladies upstairs, not you."

"You'll want to. They can't give you what you need, Siobhan Quinn."

"Do not call me Siobhan."

"They have no idea how to find the unicorn."

I glanced north at Spruce Street, and at the interstate and train tracks beyond. The Xmas-tree blur of headlights rushed to and fro.

"But you do? You, the zombified gofer? I should believe that why?"

I looked back at her. Her lips were like streaks of blue chalk. Berenice really wasn't much of a necromancer.

"Yes," she said. "I have it. I've had it for weeks."

I laughed. See, here we've come upon what people who spend too much time thinking about books call a deus ex machina, the god from the machine. You know, when the solution of a story's conundrum just seems to spring out of nowhere rather from the "logical" consequences of a narrative. See, not quite as ignorant as you might think. I'm not sure precisely why this particular plot device ticks off the book nerds.

Go ahead. Stop reading. Feel free to "throw the book across the room." That's your prerogative, and I say again, it sure as shit won't hurt my feelings.

Anyway, I'm straying, digressing again, and that sort of thing also pisses off more than a few readers. Point is, like a bolt from the blue, here was Lenore, who I'd killed but who hadn't stayed dead, telling me not only that she knew where the dildo was, but that she'd had it all along.

"Bullshit," I said.

"I'm telling you the truth. What do I have to gain by lying?"

I looked up at the windows. There was a light burning. "I can probably think of half a dozen things, you give me a few minutes. So you betrayed Berenice?"                       
       
           



       

She hesitated, then replied, "I'm not proud of it. But I've never really had shit, not really, and I held that much power, and-"

"Fine," I interrupted. Power corrupts, we always hurt the ones we love, et cetera. I got the picture. "You say you have it, then time we play show-and-tell, dead girl."

"I don't have it with me," she mumbled around her puffy tongue, with her already decomposing vocal cords.

"You know, Berenice didn't exactly do you a favor, hauling you back like that. Another few days-"

"I know," she said. "I know that perfectly well. But I also know she meant well."

The best goddamn intentions of mice and men and stupid women who don't have the good sense to let the dead stay dead. I wanted to punch Berenice Maidstone in the face, but not for dragging the goth chick back-just for being such a ham-fisted idiot.

"You're saying it's real."

She sorta shuffled a step nearer. "I am."

"And you got your hands on it how?"

She hesitated, let those blank fishy eyes stray to the asphalt between our feet. "Your boss' guy, Lashly, I took it off him."

Okay. Hold the goddamn presses, right?

"You what?"

"I know Amity led you to believe she killed him, but-"

"She didn't come right out and say it."

"She didn't deny it, either. She insinuated."

I laughed and shook my head. "Right, but by then you were already dead, so-"

"Berenice told me."

"Of course she did. Fine, okay, you're telling me that, somehow or another, Shaker Lashly found this piece of junk right off the bat, but you got wise to him-because, I guess, the Maidstones might have had you following him-and you shot him, took the dildo, and dumped his corpse in the river. But you didn't take it back to the dreadful duo. You kept it for yourself. This is what you're telling me."

"Yeah."

"You know," I sighed, and it was a very loud and very exasperated sigh. I took out a cigarette but didn't light it. One day, I was gonna kill that bouncer motherfucker stole my Zippo. "You know, I don't believe even the tiniest crumb of your story. I don't know what you're playing at, but I ought'a chop you up in itty-bitty fucking undead pieces just for wasting my time."

Thing is, I was beginning to believe her, even if I wasn't sure why.

"I can take you-"

"First, how about you tell me how you got hold of it?"

Lenore swayed, and I reached out-just instinct, I guess-and kept her from falling.

"Thank you," she said.

"How did you get it, Lenore?"

She licked at her cyanotic lips with the tip of her distended tongue. "Lashly, he took it off Samuel, the bogle from up in Salem, up in Marblehead."

Yeah, that's what she said: Salem Sam.