Rot (10 page)

The boy wheeled and disappeared.

Leaving his beer unfinished, Kyle pushed away from the bar and ran to the doorway. He reached the sidewalk in time to see the boy dart into an alley several doors away. With no time to cross the street and get the Jeep turned around, Kyle pounded after him.

The alley was an obstacle course of trash cans, cartons, broken packing crates, makeshift bedrolls. A rat scuttled from a clutter of cans as Kyle crashed through them. The Gypsy boy, fleet as a deer, vanished down the next street. Breathing hard, Kyle reached the far end of the alley. He ran down the sidewalk in the direction the boy had gone, but slowed as he saw the many dark doorways and air shafts, with another alley ahead.

He jogged to a stop. What the hell was he chasing the kid for, anyway? Just a crazy impulse. He fucking sure didn’t need more grief from the Gypsy. With hands jammed in his pockets he plodded back in the direction from which he had come.

In a second floor room of the building on Judson Street Lloyd Gerstner tilted a pint bottle of Jim Beam to his mouth. He swallowed, coughed, and held the bottle up at eye level to gauge how much was left. Half an inch. Not enough to save. He tossed it off and let go a fiery belch. He wiped his lips with the back of one hand and set the bottle down unsteadily on the cracked glass top of the bureau. His image looked back at him from the mirror — square-faced, heavy-jowled, pig-eyed, unshaven. And scared.

Yes, dammit, scared. Lloyd Gerstner, who would back down a tavern full of farmers, lift a cow off the ground, and bend a fireplace poker in his bare hands was scared shitless. Well, who the fuck wouldn’t be worried after what happened to his brothers? Fabian skewered like a belly-hooked bluegill, Jesse strangled with his own belt while he shit his pants. Anybody who wasn’t scared after that was a damn fool.

Lloyd looked around sourly at the room he rented for a price that could get you a damn nice apartment back home. A real dump. Nobody in his right mind would stay in this crappy flophouse on the crappiest street in Chicago without a damn good reason.

Wanting to stay alive, Lloyd figured, was a damn good reason. Which didn’t make it any easier to stay here. After two weeks he knew every flower in the motheaten rug, every crack in the ceiling, every cobweb in the unreachable corners, and every leak in the stinking toilet. His little three-room apartment over Buck Hutchinson’s garage in Elkhorn City was no Taj Mahal, but alongside this shithole it looked pretty damn good.

He walked to the bathroom, urinated, spat into the toilet, flushed it. He jiggled the handle so the stupid thing wouldn’t run forever. He went back to the other room, flattened himself against the wall to peek through the window at Judson Street below. The usual hoods and winos and junkies wandered aimlessly along the sidewalk. Automobile traffic was minimal. Nobody with any sense drove down Judson Street.

He was getting hungry. He was going to have to go out soon to get some food. There was a little stand three blocks away where the guy sold hot dogs you could eat without puking. Lloyd was always careful to go in the daylight. Even then he kept looking behind him. The local hoods weren’t going to bother a big guy like Lloyd Gerstner, but it wasn’t the local hoods he was worried about.

That was the hell of it. He didn’t know
what
he was afraid of. But there sure as fuck was somebody or something out there that had it in for the Gerstner brothers. Two down and one to go. He was alone now, with nobody to help him.

The idea of asking for help was a riot. The sheriff back in Elkhorn City would never lift a finger to help one of the Gerstners. Neither would anybody else. If they took a vote of the citizens, they’d probably go in favor of whoever was killing Gerstners. No, his only hope was to run.

Lloyd sat down to pull on his socks. They were the same crusty sweat socks he had worn since moving in. After he got a look at Jesse’s body he’d bailed out of town without much thought to packing. He shoved his feet into the old sneakers that were stiff with some kind of crud he’d stepped in. Lloyd had never been much of a dresser, not like the dapper Jesse, but now he gave even less of a shit what clothes he put on. Somebody was out to kill him, that was the only thing that made any difference in Lloyd Gerstner’s drunken world. Some sonofabitch had done his two brothers, and Lloyd had not the least doubt that he was next on the list.

Somebody rapped softly on the door. The sudden sound startled him like a rattle of gunfire.

“Whozzat?”

“Pizza delivery.” The voice was muffled. He couldn’t tell whether it was male or female.

“I didn’t order no pizza.”

“I got this address. This room number.”

“You messed up. This is the wrong place.”

“It’s paid for, and I gotta deliver it. Sausage and mushroom, thick crust.”

Saliva flowed into Lloyd’s mouth. Shit, he was hungry and the thing was paid for, and he didn’t much want to go out. His eyes narrowed slyly.

“Leave it outside the door.”

“You got it.”

There was scuffing sound as of something being placed on the floor out in the hall, and footsteps receding and fading away. Lloyd placed his ear to the wood panel, held his breath and listened.

Silence.

He opened the door.

Nothing on the bare wood except dirt in the cracks. Nobody down the hall toward the stairway. In the other direction … oh,
shit!

“Hello Lloyd.”

The voice was like rusty nails pulling out of rotten wood. The body was a pile of rags. The face … oh, God, the face was something out of hell. The skin was swollen and cracked. Greasy spikes of reddish hair hung down out of a goofy cap with Marlboro on it. The eyes were dark little points of fire deep in shadowed caves of flesh.

“Remember me?”

“No!”

But he did. God help him, he did remember. Marianne Avery, cute as a newborn colt and perky as a squirrel had somehow turned into this hideous moldering hag. And the stink of her!

He took a backward step into the room and reached for the door.

“Don’t.”

From somewhere in the folds of her grimy clothing she produced a gun. Just a little tiny gun, but real. Lloyd pulled his hand away from the door and backed into the room as she gestured with the revolver. She came in and kicked the door shut behind her.

“Sit down, Lloyd. We’ve got things to talk about.”

Lloyd began to regain some of his lost confidence. Hell, it was just a woman, sicker than shit from the look of her, with a little bitty popgun.

“Sit,” she said again.

“Like hell I will,” he said.

Marianne sighted down the short barrel of the .22 and shot him in the knee.

Lloyd screamed and clutched at the wound. Blood leaked out between his fingers. He stumbled back until he hit the soiled bed and sat down hard.

“That’s better. Now shut up or I’ll shoot off the other knee.”

She was crazy. Sick with some terrible disease and crazy as a coot. Lloyd clamped his jaws together, though he continued to moan at the fiery pain of his shattered knee. He knew this building well enough to know that sounds like screams and gunshots were routinely ignored. If he could just hold together, maybe he would get a chance to grab this nut case and throw her out the window.

“I want you to lie back on the bed now, Lloyd.” The tone was level and reasonable, but the rasp of the voice gave the order a sinister urgency.

Lloyd did as he was told. From somewhere in the heap of rags she wore the crone pulled out a roll of a metallic duct tape.

“Now spread your arms up over your head and take hold of the bedstead.”

“Wait a minute — ”

She leveled the pistol.

“Okay, okay,” he said quickly, and obeyed. He gripped the cold metal bars on each side hard to take his mind off the pain in his shattered knee.

“That’s a good boy.”

She laid the gun down on the night stand and began taping his left wrist to the bedstead. This was the opportunity he was waiting for. Lloyd rolled toward her and grasped a bony arm with his free right hand. She squeezed with impossible strength until the bones of his forearm crackled. When he cried out she flung his damaged arm back to the other side of the bed.

“Don’t try that again or I’ll really hurt you.”

Lloyd Gerstner, 240 pounds of bully who had intimidated grown men since he was 10 years old, lay back on the crumpled sheets and let this stinking crone tape his wrists and his ankles to the corners of the bed so he lay spreadeagled and helpless.

“W-what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have some fun with you, Lloyd, just like you did with me that night in your van. Remember?”

She reached across his body and almost tenderly unzipped the fly of his Wrangler jeans. She slipped cold fingers inside and brought out his penis, limp and thick as a hunk of tow rope.

“Remember what you made me do with this, Lloyd? You made me kiss the dirty end of it. You made me put it in my mouth.” She squeezed him. He tried to close his eyes, but there was a terrible fascination in what was happening to him, and he had to watch.

Marianne reached again into the folds of her garments. This time she pulled out a heavy bladed skinning knife. “Now it’s your turn to kiss it, Lloyd. Kiss it goodbye.”

She pulled his shriveled member taut and brought the blade of the knife to its root.

“Oh, no, Jesus, no!” He was screaming now, screaming for someone, anyone, to help him. Nobody did.

Marianne smiled, showing scaly teeth and a black maw. She kept her eyes on Lloyd’s face as she began to saw back and forth with the blade.

The pain was like nothing he had ever imagined. Lloyd Gerstner babbled in a language only the gods would understand. He begged for deliverance, unconsciousness, death. The gods did not answer him for a long, long time.

• • •

Ten blocks away from the rooming house where Lloyd Gerstner screamed away his life, a tall, lean man with shadowed eyes in a dark face sat in a back booth of Czerny’s Authentic Hungarian Restaurant. By the pale light of a sputtering candle he studied the faces of a deck of cards as he laid them out one by one in an intricate pattern.

At the front of the restaurant the door burst open and the Gypsy boy ran in past the huge woman who tended the cash register. He ran to the back booth and stopped short. He shifted impatiently from foot to foot as he waited for the man to finish with the cards.

“What is it?” he said when at last he looked up.

“He is here, the yellow-haired one who helped me on the street.”

The Gypsy looked long at his son before he spoke. “Here? That is not good.”

“I saw him. He tried to follow me, but I got away.”

Dorando gathered the cards, shuffled them, cut the stack twice toward himself. He picked them up in reverse order and laid out four cards in a square. Immediately he slapped the deck down on the tabletop and rose.

“There is work for me tonight. I want you to stay here with Mama Czerny.”

The boy looked up into the somber eyes of his father and nodded. He watched the tall Gypsy stride out the door.

Kyle stumbled back through the garbage-choked alleys and the sooty streets, not really caring where he was headed. What could he have been thinking of chasing the Gypsy boy through these strange Chicago streets? His mind was not working right. What would he have done if he had caught the kid? What was there to say? A waste of energy. A waste of his life.

Somehow he made it back to the street with the Salamander Lounge. Down the block his Jeep sat on the opposite side of the street. A chunky youth wearing a Chicago Bulls jacket worked with a lug wrench on one of the 5-spoke alloy wheels. The right side door was open, and a pair of Air Jordans waggled over the sidewalk as their owner busied himself on the interior. A tall juvenile with Geri-Curled hair, also in a Bulls jacket, stood in front of the Jeep with his arms folded.

A fury totally out of proportion to the situation boiled up inside Kyle. He broke into a run. The tall boy and the one working at the wheel looked up at his approach.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The tall youth surveyed him coolly. “Hey, man, this your Jeep?”

“You Goddamn right it’s mine.”

The squat youth stood up holding the lug wrench. The boy lying across the front seat backed out. He was holding the cassette deck. Wires dangled from the deck like severed tendons.

The boy holding the wrench and the one with the deck looked to the tall one.

“Man here say this his Jeep. That right, man?”

“Put it back.”

“Say what?”

“Put the deck back in the car.”

The tall one struck a pose with his hands raised in mock alarm. “Whoa, you hear what the man say?”

The boy with the cassette deck spoke up. “I hear him, but I don’t believe him.”

The other one smacked one end of the lug wrench against his broad palm.

“Hey, man, my boys don’t think this really your Jeep. What you think we should do?”

“Put the deck back in the car,” Kyle said levelly.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll kill you.”

Kyle planted his feet and tensed for their attack. He was ready, eager even, for physical combat. For so long he had been so helpless that he craved battle, even though he recognized his chances of surviving here against three of them in unfriendly territory were not good. He had nothing to look forward to anyway.

The tall youth watched him soberly while the others shifted to either side of him. The one still holding the tape deck looked to the leader for a signal. The silent youth with the lug wrench raised it to shoulder level and took a step toward Kyle.

He felt a wild intoxication beyond anything he had ever achieved on artificial stimulants. His nerve ends tingled with anticipation of the coming clash. He looked from side to side, meeting the eyes of each of the three youths.

“Come on,” he said. “You want some of me, come on and get it.”

The boy with the wrench took another step toward him. The tall one motioned him back with a hand signal. He took a deep look into Kyle’s eyes.

“Chill, man. We don’t want nothin’ you got.” To the stocky one he said, “Put the deck back.”

“Say what?”

“Do it.”

“Put it back?”

“Yeah.”

The youth obeyed, setting the loose tape deck gently on the front seat of the jeep, leaving the door ajar. At another signal from the leader, the three of them backed slowly away from Kyle. When they reached the corner they began laughing and punching each other, and disappeared up the cross street.

Kyle felt let down. Deflated. He had probably come within five seconds of being killed, but he was disappointed. He had been robbed of the power to control his destiny. He kicked the door of the Jeep closed and shuffled across the street to the Salamander Lounge.

The sad collection of customers had not changed. They might have been wax figures in some depressing display. The bartender gave no sign of recognition.

“Something?”

“Beer. No, whiskey.”

“Want to make up your mind?”

“Whiskey. Double.” Kyle had never been a drinker of hard liquor, but in recent weeks had changed in many ways.

“Any special brand?”

“Whatever you’re pouring.”

“Four dollars.”

Kyle fished through his pocket, found two bills, a ten and a twenty. He laid the twenty on the bar. The bartender picked it up, held it into the light, then brought the change and a generous double shot of cheap blended whiskey.

Kyle swallowed and closed his eyes as the liquor hit his empty stomach. He breathed deeply, imaging he could feel the alcohol coursing through his veins to his brain. There was a quiet ringing in his ears. He opened his eyes to see the bartender watching him. The man exhaled through his nose and sidled away down the bar.

After his second double whiskey, Kyle thought he was going to be sick. He stumbled back to the men’s room and leaned over the brown-streaked toilet. His stomach lurched and he tasted bile, but the wave of nausea passed. He splashed water on his face and used the filthy roller towel to dry it.

When he dropped the towel the Kyle Brubaker who looked back at him from the mirror was far different from the carefree college boy from the beaches of California. This Kyle Brubaker was older. A lot older. There were purplish smears under his eyes and creases from the flare of his nostrils to the corners of his downturned mouth. His tangled blond hair had not recently known a comb. He needed a shave.

“You’re a mess,” Kyle told his image.

The reflection did not respond.

He wandered back out and reclaimed his barstool. He signaled for a refill. The bartender extracted four dollars from the change lying on the bar and poured him another.

A toothless old woman with the smooth skin of a girl came in through the door. She surveyed the customers and walked over to Kyle. She tugged his arm for attention.

“Help a person out, dear? I got no place to stay.”

“Go away,” he muttered.

The woman sighed, turned from him, and started toward the door.

Kyle looked after her. “Wait a minute.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

Warily the woman came back. Kyle pulled the crumpled ten from the bills on the bar and handed it to her. She took it and checked the denomination in surprise.

“Good luck to
you
, friend,” she said, and hurried out with the bill before he could change his mind.

Kyle finished his third drink. His head pounded behind his eyeballs. He had to squint to keep things from slipping out of his range of vision. His thinking grew sluggish. Good. That’s what he wanted. No thinking. He beckoned to the bartender.

“Hello, lover.”

The familiar hoarse whisper rasped his nerves like sandpaper.

“Lonesome?”

“You found me.”

“I told you I would.”

He stared at her, fascinated in spite of himself by something that seemed to be wriggling under the flesh of her cheek. “You won’t go away, will you?”

“One more favor, honey. Do one more thing for me and that’s it. I won’t need you any more.”

A tiny hope flickered, then died in alcohol haze and despair.

“I don’t believe you.”

The bartender came over. “Something for your …”

Marianne turned her ruined face toward the man and he stopped in mid sentence.

“Nothing,” Kyle said.

The bartender left them hastily.

“I promise, lover,” said Marianne. “One more favor and it’s over.”

“You
promise?”
Kyle’s bitter laugh turned into a cough. He spat into his handkerchief.

“Try me. What have you got to lose?”

“Now? There’s nothing left to lose.”

“So you see?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Drive me back to Bischoff.”

“What for?”

“It’s my home.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to go back there.”

“I do now.”

She started to smile at him but her mouth would not work right. She reached in with a thumb and forefinger and grasped one of her molars. A little twist and the tooth came out in her fingers. She held it up for him to inspect, blackish fluid dripping from the double root.

Across from them the bartender grunted and looked away. Kyle saw the shabby waxwork customers were alert now, staring at the moldering Marianne and the tooth she had just pulled from her mouth.

He scooped up the money remaining on the bar. “Let’s get out of here.”

With Marianne walking jerkily at his side he crossed to the Jeep. From the corner the three boys in the Bulls jackets watched silently.

Kyle got in and tossed the loose tape deck into the back. Marianne flopped into the seat beside him. The smell was bad, but the whiskey clouded his senses enough so he could stand it.

“You found the other brother? Lloyd?”

“I found him.”

“Did you … did you? …”

“I cut his cock off and made him eat it.”

Kyle groaned.

“He didn’t like the taste of it any more than I did. He died trying to spit it out.”

“Oh, Jesus, Marianne …”

“You didn’t see what he and his brothers did to me in the van that night. What he made me do.”

“So you killed them. You killed them all.”

“At least they’re really dead. They don’t have to walk around with parts falling off.” She pinched the edge of the blackened gash on the underside of her forearm and pulled. The flesh came away in a ragged strip half an inch wide. The meat underneath was black and oozing.

Kyle turned his head away. He knocked the Jeep’s door open just in time to vomit out onto the street. He retched and puked until nothing but a thin yellow bile came up. When he sank back behind the wheel he was pale and sweating.

Marianne looked at him. One of her eyeballs rotated slowly, sickeningly down so he was left looking at a bulging, bloodshot white.

“If you’re through, can we go now?”

Angrily Kyle fired the engine, smacked the stick into gear, and took off with a shriek of rubber.