Aloha From Hell (11 page)

She lifts her head, still eyeing me.

“How do you know that?”

She gnaws on her thumb. Her fingernails have all been chewed down to the quick. There’s plaster dust on her fingertips.

“It’s just a trick I do. I know things about people. Like how all the money you say you don’t have is stuffed in a hiding place in the wall.”

The look she gives me is halfway between anger and dumb wonder.

“When did you come in my house?”

“I’ve never been here before. That was just to show you that lying isn’t going to get you anywhere fun.”

“If you want the money, take it. I’m sick. I can’t stop you.”

“I don’t want your money. I just want a name or two.”

“What name?”

“Before we get to that, did you sell Akira to Hunter Sentenza?”

She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees, jacked up and exhausted at the same time.

“I didn’t sell it to him. I gave it to him. We’re like, you know, friends. We’re going to get clean together.”

I look at her. Her brain is vibrating so fast I can’t read her. I go another way.

“Why not? You’ve got yourself a nice rich-boy client who was going to pay for your treatment. What was the plan? You take a walk your second day in and pocket whatever refund money you can con out of the clinic?”

She shakes her head and her straw-dry hair sways around her cheeks.

“It’s not like that. Hunter and me are friends. We’re going to do it together. For real this time.”

“Then you haven’t heard about him.ȏonut him.1D;

She sits up. Alert and for the first time somewhat focused.

“Something happened to Hunter?”

“He’s missing. It was that last dose of Akira. His brain threw a rod. He jumped through a window and now he’s missing.”

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

She covers her face with her hands. That was dumb. Never tell meth heads the truth. The whole reason they’re high is they’re severely reality-phobic. I snap my fingers in front of Carolyn’s face. Lightly slap her arms.

“Come back to earth, Carolyn. We need you. Hunter needs you.”

“Will he be okay?”

“I don’t know. It depends entirely on what you can tell me. I need the name of your supplier.”

“Why do you need that? Why aren’t you out looking for him?”

“Do you know where to start looking?”

“No.”

“Neither do we. What we do know is that Hunter used Akira without any problems and then all of a sudden he went psychobilly. I have a bad feeling that maybe there was something wrong with that last batch. Hunter’s reaction wasn’t a regular OD. It was real specific, so I want to know what was in there, who put it in there, and why.”

She sits up and shakes her head. Draws her hands close to her body.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Yes, you can. You’re Hunter’s friend and you want him found so the two of you can get better together.”

“I can’t.”

I scoot forward on the chair and lean close to Carolyn. She freezes, trying to keep her eyes from meeting mine.

“Or maybe you’re not Hunter’s friend and you gave him a hot shot. Is that what you did, Carolyn? Did someone give you a special dose of Akira just for Hunter?”

Stop digging, boys, we struck oil.

Carolyn’s brain is still humming like a tuning fork, but at least she’s focused on something now. It’s there in her eyes. She’s beating herself silly trying to make all the contradictions and lies in her life add up to something sane. She really believes she’s Hunter’s friend, but the meth fog she livdiv fog shes in lets her justify giving Hunter drugs she knew were bad because someone up the food chain promised her more drugs or more money or the chance to settle a long-standing debt. Whatever her reasons, she feels guilty as hell. The addict self-pity tears start pumping out of her red and bruised eyes. I want to smack her to see if it snaps her brain back into gear, but I just pat her lightly on the shoulder. I keep my voice low, like I’m speaking to a child.

“Who gave you the special Akira?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Sure you can. Just give me a name, I’ll go, and you can get back to turning your brain to fish food.”

“Fuck you.”

She practically spits the words. Her whole body changes. She was a limp jellyfish a second ago and now she’s ready to put her fist through the wall. We’re on to the next step in this soap opera. She’s not thinking like a tame little user now. She’s moved into dealer mode. Hard-core. Defiant.

“Do you believe in magic, Carolyn?”

“Get out of my house, faggot.”

“I don’t mean kid-party magic. I mean the real thing. Witches on brooms. Love potions. Hexes and demons. Do you believe in that?”

“You know, one phone call and you’ll be smoked before you get back to Hollywood.”

I run through some ideas. There are a lot of scary things I learned in the arena, but I only used them on Hellions and Lurkers. Ninety-nine percent of what I learned I’ve never tried on a civilian and I don’t particularly want to because I’m pretty sure they’d go off like a gerbil in a microwave.

Her hands are shaking from the drugs, but she’s past scared and is deep into gangster territory.

She puts on her best Scarface sneer and says, “You just going to sit there staring at me? I know you. Pussies like you talk and talk, but you won’t do anything. You don’t know the kind of people I know. They have balls.”

She sniffs and wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her hand.

I take out Mason’s lighter, thumb it open, and spark a flame. Her eyes flicker to mine and then zero in on the lighter.

“I’d like to show you a magic trick. Would you like to see a magic trick, Carolyn?”

She gets up. I grab her arm. She twists and tries to sucker punch me. Puts her whole body into it. I don’t try to stop her. I’m faster than any civilian, so she’s moving in exquisite slo-mo. When she’s a few inches from mfonnches faking contact, I lean back slightly and let her fist sail past. Grab the wrist and twist so her arm bends out like a chicken wing and every muscle and tendon in her shoulder feels like it’s going to snap. Carolyn goes down face-first onto the sofa and rolls herself into a little ball, squeezing her aching shoulder. I wait. Eventually, she sits up. There’s a half-finished cigarette in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa. She takes it, puts it between her lips, and starts looking around for matches. I’m still holding the lighter. I hold the flame out to her. She leans forward. I pull the lighter back and she follows a few inches. When she realizes I’m fucking with her, she stops and gives me a dirty look.

I say, “Let me get that for you for real.”

There’s one thing you have to remember about threats: when you make one, mean it. This is especially true with addicts. Their brains aren’t designed to absorb new information and they’re used to being slapped and stomped, so that doesn’t scare them anymore. If you need to impress upon an addict the gravity of their situation, you need to make a threat that doesn’t seem like a threat, but more like God pissing on them from a mountaintop.

I hold the lighter to my hand and my skin bursts into flames. Fire is fire and this isn’t fun hoodoo, but I can stand the pain long enough to make my point.

Carolyn jumps back at the sight of my burning mitt. I play it up. Let the meat cook black until it flakes, and crispy skin drifts onto the carpet. I could let it get down to the bone, but I really don’t want to do that. I move my hand toward Carolyn. She presses herself against the back of the sofa, trying to put as much distance as she can between us. I touch the tip of a finger to her cigarette until it glows.

“This is what I meant by magic. I know worse tricks than this, but let’s focus on this one for the moment. What do you think would happen if I held you with this hand and used you to mop up this messy, messy house? Does that sound like fun? I think it would hurt. Maybe as much as it hurt Hunter when that shit you gave him turned him into a demon’s chew toy. I’m going to ask you one more time, and if you fuck with me, things are going to get drastic. Who gave you the Akira for Hunter?”

“Cale,” she says.

She takes a long breath after she says it. Rubs the sores on her arms. She wants to pick at them, but she knows I don’t like that.

“Cale what?”

She shrugs.

“I don’t know. Just Cale.” She nods at my still-burning hand. “I’ve seen him do weird shit like that, too. Like magic and shit.”

“Where can I find Cale?”

“Downtown. At Dead Set. It’s a club on Traction Avenue near Hewitt. You can’t miss it. At night they show old zombie movies on the side of the building.Iuilding01D;

“What’s Cale look like?”

“Tall. Skinny. He wears big boots to look taller and he wears one of those, like, Nazi-officer trench coats. His hair is bleached all white and there’s like these runes or some kind of voodoo shit tattooed on the sides of his head.”

I whisper some Hellion and the flames on my hand flutter and disappear. There’s most of a flat can of beer on the floor next to the sofa. I pour it over my aching hand. The beer bubbles and steams away. I hand Carolyn the empty can. She clutches it to herself like it’s a holy relic. I wipe the beer off my hand on the sofa and get up.

“Remember what I said, Carolyn. Go see a doctor about your blood pressure. You’re about to lose your supplier, so your job is going to evaporate. The good news is that Cale won’t be asking for any of that money you have in the wall. Take it and use it to clean yourself up. Dying isn’t the worst thing in the world, but dying because you’re stupid is.”

I head out the front door. I’m halfway across the doomed lawn when I hear Carolyn yell something. I go back to the house. Behind the bright mesh of the screen door Carolyn looks like a ghost child.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She leans forward so that her face is almost touching the screen and whispers, “Tell Hunter I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . you know.”

I nod.

“Sure. I’ll tell him.”

WHEN
I
GET
back to the hotel, I find Candy in the room and Kasabian holding forth on Terrence Malick’s
Badlands
.

“See, what Malick did wasn’t tell us the story of a couple of kids on a cross-country murder spree, but to tell us a dream about it. Like the whole thing is a shared fantasy in the kids’ heads and ours, which, from what I’ve heard, is pretty close to what it was like for Charlie Starkweather to kill all those people.”

She smiles up at me from the foot of the bed as I come in.

“Hey there. I’m getting Film 101 from your boss.”

“My boss?”

“That’s what he said.”

I look at Kasabian.

He says, “What do you know about accounting, insurance, inventory control, and, you know, running a video store besides watching movies all day?”

“Not much.”

“Then I’m the boss.”

I sit down next to Candy.

“You can’t argue with that logic,” she says.

“I could, but it would end in tears and divorce lawyers, and I can’t stand paperwork.”

Candy leans gently into me so our shoulders are touching.

I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and hand it to her.

“Why don’t you get us another room where we can talk? If the night manager gets weird, use my name and give him too much money. He’ll set you up.”

She bounces off the bed onto her feet and goes to the door. On her way out she blows Kasabian a kiss.

“I’ll be back for your master class on Monte Hellman.”

He beams at her as she leaves.

“Now that’s the kind of girl you shoplift beer for.”

He whizzes around on his skateboard to face me.

“Good thing you got here when you did. I was going to rock her world with some surfboard moves. She would have been mine.”

“You’re the boss and I don’t surf. You could probably have her in Mexico by now with a preacher and a cut-up fishnet stocking for a wedding veil and a donkey for the witness.”

“
Badlands
was probably too cerebral for a first date. I should have gone with something sexy and scary like
Suspiria
. Next time.”

“Sure. Next time.”

I start to say something about delusions of grandeur, but keep my mouth shut. I haven’t seen Kasabian this happy in probably ever.

I’m out of cigarettes. I reach into the nightstand and get a fresh pack of Maledictions. There aren’t too many packs left. Kasabian’s happy. He doesn’t need to know that. I light two and stick one between Kasabian’s lips.

“I need you to look up something for me in the
Codex
.”

“That sounds like work. Didn’t you see the sign? I’m closed for the evening.”

“You may be the boss, but I pay the beer bills a

Kasabian puffs on his cigarette and frowns. His little legs take the Malediction out of his mouth and tap ashes onto the floor.