Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (10 page)

twelve bucks a foot.

The workers here weren't building the mall, they were tearing it down. Somebody had finally bought the land, I guess. I

directed Falconer to pul up off the side of the work site, near a row of blue plastic booths that contained chemical toilets

for the laborers. Port-A-Pottys.

"Okay," I said, leaning back in the leather seat.

"What?"

"Just watch the shitters, Detective Falconer. Just watch the shitters and prepare to be amazed."

There were three of them set up. In the next fifteen minutes two workers came and went, uneventful y. We sat in the

porsche, not talking, watching the shitters.

Final y Falconer said, casual y, "You know if I find out you're fucking with me, stalling me here so you can chuckle about it with your friends later, I'm gonna nail your ass for obstructing an investigation."

"There. That guy. With the beard."

A 40-ish guy with a ragged goatee and a beer gut strode up to the first Port-A-Potty, limping like he was favoring his left

leg. He stepped in and closed the door.

I said, "Don't take your eyes off it. I mean it, don't even glance away. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good. Now we wait."

A minute passed. Falconer said, "You said you work at a video store, right?"

"I'm a manager."

"Ever been to school?"

"I had a semester of college. Dropped out because I couldn't take the bullshit."

"You seem like a smart guy. You never wanted more outta your life?"

"Is now the time to be having this conversation?"

We both were staring straight ahead. No movement from the shitter.

"You don't like having this conversation, do you? I mean, I look at this town, boarded up stores and this moldy old

shopping mall-"

"-It's a rough time, man. Some factories closed down, people aren't working."

"Okay, whatever. What I'm saying is there's whole stretches of town where I swear there are more stray dogs than people.

The average person here seems to be 60 years old. I'm from a town like this, an old coal mining town that died when

environmentalists decided the coal had too much sulfur in it to be used. It was just like this, the jobs moved away and the

only people left were the ones who didn't have the means to escape. The rest, they go off to school, get careers, don't

come back. It's a sort of opposite Darwinism, the only people left are the losers and the failures and old guys shuffling

around their trailers with their cats. And here you are. Smart guy, maybe a big ego guy, workin' the counter at a video

store. Serving
those
people."

"So, what?"

"Guy with an imagination like yours, I gotta think you'd be pretty desperate for ways to make your life more exciting.

Maybe fantasizing a little bit? Maybe a part of your brain slips a gear, you start dreaming up dragons for you and your

buddy to slay? Tel me, did you stop seeing ghosts and demons when you were on Zyprexa?"

"No. And I didn't lose my magical ability to make John have the exact same hallucinations as me."

"Yeah, about that. John, he's got that band, right? Going around playing garages and basements. And a Class Clown

type, cops around here say he got arrested trying to hook a fart machine on the governor. One guy told a story, said John

got up to speak at a friend's funeral and had this huge dildo down his pants, up there cryin' and he's got this huge bulge in

his pants the whole time-"

"-That's out of context. Kurt would have loved that if he'd been alive to see it."

"What I'm saying is he's an attention addict. And now, he takes your crazy stories and blogs them and people eat it up.

Got all these lonely web junkies to start treating you like rock stars. So maybe, just maybe John is-"

"-He's still in the shitter, by the way."

Falconer glanced quickly down at his watch, then back.

"It's been nine minutes."

"He's not coming out."

"Probably ate a lot of cheese. You know the transition from real life to hal ucination is completely seamless, right?"

"I'm tel in' you, detective. We can sit here all day, he's not comin' out of there. But we don't even gotta wait that long. Few minutes from now, somebody else is gonna go in there. They're gonna open the door and you're gonna see it's empty. Mr.

Beard will be nowhere."

"And you know this how?"

"Because I've seen it happen before. John and I are out here al the time."

We fell silent. Three minutes. Five.

I said, "Look, go up there and knock on the door. As long as he's been in there, he's probably passed out or something at

the very least."

Five more minutes. Without a word, Falconer threw open his door and walked toward the shitter. I followed, struggling to

waddle out of the low-slung porsche. Freaking thing had to sit six inches off the ground. You had to do a full sit-up to get

out.

By the time I made it to my feet, Falconer had already ducked across the barrier of yellow construction tape and was

walking up to the door of the blue shit booth. He rapped on the door. Nobody answered.

He did it again, this time saying something through the door. Nothing. He did it again.

By now three or four guys had stopped working and were staring. Falconer talked to a guy and gestured toward the Port-

A-Potty, presumably asking somebody to come open it. The guy followed Falconer back, worked a mechanism on the

door, popped it open.

I stepped up beside Falconer. The door swung open. And inside was...

TA DA!

...Nobody.

Falconer looked at me, eyes narrowed, his brain going a mile a minute. A kid trying to figure out the magician's trick.

From behind him the worker said, "Them doors get stuck sometimes. You swing 'em closed real hard and that latch can

fall shut."

Falconer pointed over my shoulder and growled, "Go wait in the car."

I did, hearing my back pop as I curled myself into a car that probably cost twice what my house did. I sat for several

minutes and watched Falconer question construction workers, probably asking them about a coworker with a goatee and

a limp. Their blank expressions told the story.

Falconer had left the keys in the car and I twisted the ignition so I could turn on the radio. He had a CD in. Some kind of

jazz. I turned it off.

He gathered three guys together and they moved the Port-A-Potty, Falconer scraping around the gravel underneath with

his boot, like he thought he'd find a trap door there. He argued with the guys some more.

Ten minutes later he stomped back to the car, throwing himself into the driver's seat so hard it shook the porsche on its

suspension. He turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. He cranked the wheel and hit the gas and a cloud of dust

chased us from the construction site.

"Tell me where he went," commanded Falconer.

"Your guess is as good as mine. John and I got his binoculars and watched the site for three weeks when they started

construction. The whole thing seemed suspicious."

"What? Why?"

"It's a long story. I'll tel you later. Things happen at that mall. Anyway, we waited for somethin' weird and we found it. One of the three toilets, the person who went inside never came out. Blind luck John happened to notice that. We had a plan,

were gonna come in at night, plant a little wireless camera inside there, see if we could catch anything but, you know. We

didn't want to have to watch hours of sweaty guys pissing and shitting."

"Bullshit. Bul shit. Everybody's playin' games with me here. As soon as I walked into the police station, conversations got real quiet when I walked by. There's subjects you bring up about this town and nobody says nothin', everybody just casts

little glances at each other. What in the glass fuck is going on in this fucking town? Tel me. And don't give me ooga-

booga bullshit, demons and shit. Tell me what's real y going on."

"I don't know. I don't even know where to start."

"What happened to that bearded guy?"

"He broke through the fifth wall."

Falconer didn't answer, just let out an angry chuckle with a slow shake of his head. The speedometer on the porsche

crept past 60, then 70. He came up on a creeping pickup truck and whipped around it, back in his own lane in less than

two seconds.

I said, "Listen to me. These are coherent sentences here. There are doors al over this town that don't go anywhere. You

step through, you don't come out the other side. And they move, they're never in the same place. There are people

walking around this town that know about them, that use them. And sometimes, things come out."

"Things."

"Yeah, things. Dead people. Things that were never people. Things that look like people but aren't."

"Show me."

"I can't. You wouldn't be able to see them."

"Fuck you. Fuck you and your delusional bul shit."

"You saw the guy disappear, right? That ain't possible. Not in this universe. Can we agree on that?"

"You drugged me, that's what you did. Same as you did to Franky."

"Go get a tox screen on yourself. I'll wait. Of course when they come back and say you're clean, your first thought will be to wonder if those results are not also part of the delusion. And so on."

Welcome to the party, fucker.

"No, I'll tell you exactly what's gonna happen. I'm gonna sit down and devote about sixty minutes' worth of thought to it,

and then it'll hit me, the truth. How you did that trick back there, the nature of the little scam you're running. It'll come clear to me, like the truth always does. And when it does I'll laugh out loud, be embarrassed for exactly thirty seconds and then

I'll remember that I'm the best at what I do and I drive a porsche and you're a pathetic, small little liar. You make yourself

feel smart by fooling people and then smirk yourself to sleep at night, sleeping next to a dusty little fan in the summer

because you can't afford to run the air."

"If that happens, if you see right through al this shit and figure it out, give me a call. Explain it to me. Because that'll be a weight off my shoulders forever and ever. You tell me a way that all this makes sense and I'll fall to my knees and cry

tears of joy."

"You're good, I'll give you that. You sel it well."

I involuntarily leaned forward in my seat as Falconer hit the brakes. He turned hard off the highway, heading toward my

house it looked like. Driving it like he stole it.

I said, "I have to be at work at two. I'm closing tonight. Am I free to do that? Or are you charging me with something?"

"Tell me what happened to Franky. Your version. Never mind that I won't believe you, I wanna know what you think

happened when viewed through the lenses of your Crazy Goggles."

"A thing showed up in my house, a big bug the size of an expensive lobster. It bit me. It went for my face. Franky showed

up. The thing crawled in his mouth. Not by accident, either. It went right for it. John and I got him to the hospital, but

apparently nothing could be done because the moment that thing was in him, Franky was no longer Franky."

The car slid to a stop, tires mashing down wet leaves at the edge of my lawn. Without a word, Falconer ejected himself

from the car and slammed the door in my face, walking up onto my porch. I followed.

He said, "Let me in. You've agreed to let me search this place."

"I have?"

"Yep. You're about to invite me in."

"You already searched it."

"I didn't know what I was looking for then."

"Do you now? What do you think you're going to find in here, detective?"

"Answers."

I slid in my house key and turned the doorknob, held it. I faced Falconer.

"Okay, detective. Come on in. Tear the place apart. Cut open my mattress, sniff the little baggie of weed in my closet,

crawl around under the floors. Take as long as you want. Then bring in an army and tear apart this town. Shine a spotlight

into every shadow, peek behind every bush. Do it here, and in the next town over, and then the rest of the state. Fan out

an army of men with flashlights and move shoulder-to shoulder across this country until you've studied and catalogued

every square inch of the USA, and then the world. You go right ahead. Because if you could somehow put every single

last corner of this universe under the microscope, right now, you stil wouldn't find the bearded guy who went into that

shitter."

I pushed the door open an inch, then faced him again.

"And you wouldn't find Franky Burgess, either. Because I'm thinking that thing that took over Franky wanted to go back

home. And I'm thinking nobody will ever see Franky again."

I turned away from the detective. I pushed open the door, took one step inside, and came face to face with Franky

Burgess.

Franky opened his mouth. A thin stream of liquid squirted out as a greeting.

I had the thought to throw up an arm to shield my face from whatever it was, but before the muscles could twitch into

action there was a
BANG
and a blue-ish flash. I felt the ground hit me in the back. I stared at the sky, ears ringing,

vaguely realizing that the stuff Franky was spitting had combusted in mid-air with enough force to knock me on my ass.

I rol ed over, heard Falconer shouting police words at Franky, Falconer with an enormous stainless automatic in both

hands. I couldn't help but notice how perfectly not-wounded Franky looked. Also, he seemed to have gained 30 pounds.

Franky took a step toward Falconer and two gunshots shattered the air, back to back.

Franky was unfazed. He jumped, flew forward through the air like Michael Jordan, and threw a forearm across Falconer's