The Stickmen (3 page)

Garrett was appalled by her insensitivity.
“I guess you didn’t hear me. D.C. Jail? Me—in it? It’s not for
human beings, honey, believe me. It’s like that
Oz
show on
cable. Christ, you should see the
creatures
in there. One of
them tried to—”

Jessica stopped and briskly spun around, her
shiny red hair aswirl. “Stop trying to make me feel sorry for you
’cos you had to spend the night in jail!” she shouted, fire in her
jade-green eyes. She grabbed Garrett’s shoulders and shook him like
a baby rattle. “What am I? Your personal bail bondman? Damn it,
Harlan! This is the second time I’ve had to bail you out of jail.
It cost me $500 this time!”

“I’ll pay you back,” Garrett peeped.

“That’s what you said last time, Harlan!
I’ve got bills too, and half of them are yours anyway!”

Garrett caught his composure, calming down.
He tried to see it from her point of view…and began to see her
point. Whenever he was unemployed, it was always Jessica who helped
him out.
And I’m unemployed a lot,
he admitted. He sighed
and gently touched her cheek.

“This time I
will
pay you back, baby,
I promise. Things could be worse, you know. At least I still got my
job with the Psi-Com Journal…”

««—»»

The letter felt like a sheet of dead skin in
his hands:

THE PSI-COM JOURNAL

A Subsidiary of the Wentner Publishing
Group

200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Dear Mr. Garrett:

Per our conversation, your complete lack of
ethics while under our employ have been deemed wholly unacceptable.
Therefore, you may consider this letter an official notification of
your termination.

Glen Boyd

Editor and Chief

Aw, man,
Garrett thought, staring at
the letter he’d just opened in his apartment. Wearing only his
boxer shorts, he walked back from the mailshot and fell back into
his disheveled bed.
Kick me some more, God, will Ya? Why
not?

He crumpled up the letter, and when he
tossed it at the waste basket…it missed. The shower hissed behind
him from his mop-closet-sized bathroom.

“Who need the friggin’ Psi-Com Journal
anyway?” he voiced aloud to himself. “I’m too good for those
stuck-up jive neckbones.”

When he reached up for his cigarettes, his
hand padded across his computer-laden desk and a clogged ashtray;
finally, it knocked over several empty beers cans. Eventually he
found his pack of generics but when he tried to light one, the
lighter wouldn’t work.

Disgusted, Garret got back out of bed,
hunting for matches amongst the piles of books on his desk.
Roswell Dead Witnesses, KGB Citations of Spontaneous Human
Combustion, MK-ULTRA Then And Now, Crash Perimeters and Grids:
Classified!
and the like. Here, in the midst of Garrett’s
professional bibles, he found a matchbook from the 1720 Club, his
favorite strip bar.

The matchbook was empty.

Can’t pay my bills, can’t keep a job…can’t
even light a friggin’ cigarette…

He stretched before the wide balcony window,
scratching his butocks through the blue boxer shorts. He didn’t
hear the bathroom door click open.

“Doing what you do best, I see.”

Garrett’s gaze snapped around, and there
stood Jessica, wet-haired from the shower, a towel draped around
her.

“What?”

“Standing in your shorts, scratching your
ass.”

Garrett slipped his hands out of his boxers.
He winked at her. “Yeah, but you
like
my ass. You’ve told me
so.”

“You don’t get it, do you? A relationship is
a two-way street, Harlan. It just seems the more I put into this,
the less I get.” Jessica huffed, brazenly dropping the towel, then
pulling her clothes back on. “I can’t hack it anymore, Harlan.
Every time

you get something good in your life, you
blow it. Christ, I’m surprised you still have the freelance job
with
The Psi-Com Journal.

Garrett felt like a toddler caught with full
pants. But he couldn’t lie to her. “I just got fired…”

“What! When?”

“Just now,” he admitted. “When I got the
mail.”

Jessica momentarily froze in disbelief, one
stocking dangling from her hand. “You’re
serious,
aren’t
you? My God, Harlan! It just gets worse and worse!”

Garrett tossed a nonchalant hand. “What,
Psi-Com
fires me? So what? I can do better than that tabloid
roll of toilet paper any day.”

Jessica, still half naked, looked fit to
explode. “Harlan, you just lost your job and you act like it’s
nothing! Jeeze, you’ve been fired from
MUFON, The SETI Sentinel,
The Watchman—”

“Rags, all rags—”

“You’ve been arrested seven times—”

“Six times, thank you, and they were all bum
raps, just like last night. All I was doing was what investigative
journalists are supposed to do. I was investigating.”

“You call it investigating, but the police
call it something else—breaking and entering!” Jessica railed. Now
she’d at least gotten her stockings and skirt back on. “I mean, for
God’s sake, Harlan, I’ve tried my best to support you through all
this but I can’t take anymore! You’ve got to join the real world,
get a real job, and get off all this UFO paranormal psychic
phenomena trance-channeling spontaneous combustion past-life
regressive hypnosis Uri Geller spoon-bending
bullshit!
”

“Hey, Uri Geller really can bend spoons,”
Garrett defended. “I saw him do it at the Seattle Convention Center
in ‘93. He also blanked some floppy disks just by looking at them;
I positively verified the erasures with my laptop. He says the
Russians hired him to do it to D-O-D couriers on commercial air
flights. I believe him.”

Jessica stormed about the unkempt apartment,
fully dressed now, but looking for her shoes. “Everything’s a joke
to you, isn’t it? It almost seems like you go out of your way to
make things worse for yourself! You get a scholarship to MIT grad
school and
quit!
You get job offers from IBM, Compaq,
Packard Bell, and Microsoft—and you
turn them down!
Then you
get a chance at a solid career in the Air Force, and you get
kicked out!
”

Garrett finally found a Bic and lit his
cigarette. He shrugged at Jessica’s rather loud observations. It
was all true, but what did that matter. “Can I help it they can’t
take a joke?”

“A
joke?
Reading classified security
files is a
joke?
You’re lucky they didn’t throw you in a
military prison for twenty years!”

“Hey, no prison on earth can hold me, baby,”
he tried to make light of it.

Jessica wasn’t hearing it. “I work my tail
off at the hospital, swing-shifts, double-shifts, thinking it’s all
for
something, for
us,
for our
life
together—and all you do is drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and make
jokes!”

“All right,” Garrett agreed. “I’ll cut down
on the jokes—”

Jessica, now dressed and her shoes on,
snatched up her purse in an escalating rage. “No wonder your wife
divorced you! She ought to get a medal for putting up with you for
that long! Well, I’m sure as hell not going to make the same
mistake she did—”

Next, Jessica stared Garrett down, glaring.
Then she—

“No!” Garrett yelled.

—took her engagement ring off her finger and
threw it at him.

“Jessica! Come on!” Garrett exclaimed.
“Let’s not get carried away here. Look, I’m really sorry about you
having to bail me out of jail. But don’t you understand? I got set
up. Some government entity is bugging me again!”

The ring bounced across the dingy carpet and
wound up under the couch. “Oh, give me a break. Every time you
screw up you blame it on some ridiculous government
conspiracy!”

Garrett roused to take exception. “Come on,
honey. You remember when I found these…” He removed a small
cuff-link box from his desk.
I’ll show her,
he thought with
a sly smile. He flipped open the cheaply hinged,
patent-leather-covered box which once housed a set of dime-store
cufflink.

Now it housed something that looked like
four tiny pinheads.

“They’re
pinheads,
Harlan,” Jessica
insisted. “Are you too dim to remember? You’ve shown me that crock
of crap before.”

“They’re not pinheads, baby. I had them
tested at the Harrison Lab at University of Maryland. They’re
quarter-wavelength 400-512 megahertz wireless audio sensors.
Discreet microphones by any other name.” Garrett nodded in
assurance, displaying the small box. “This is high-tech stuff. The
guy at U of M told me they look just like the latest CIA models
that cost
thirty grand apiece.
”

“They’re
pinheads,
and that’s what
you’re
becoming in this Big Brother fantasy

land of yours!” she yelled looking for her
keys.

“No, no, you don’t understand. They’re
bi-passive microphones, honey, planted in here to keep tabs on me.
Look how small they are! Can you imagine the advanced state of
technology?” Garrett, oblivious, went on to explain, “See, baby, a
VLF signal from a remote listening post is the actual power source
for the mikes. Then the signal produces what’s called a
carrier-current loop which cycles the voice transmissions back to
the eavesdroppers. See, once the mikes are no longer passive, an
oscillographic sensor detects the magnetic field in their pick-up
elements and—”

“SHUT UP!” Jessica shouted, bug-eyed.

Silence collapsed onto the room.

“I’m through—get it?” Jessica railed. “I’ve
got no more time to invest in a relationship that hasn’t been going
anywhere since the first day it started!”

Garrett forgot about the microphones.
“Honey, please. Look, I promise that from

now on—”

“Save it. I’m not buying that line of
bullshit ever again.” Jessica’s ample bosom rose and fell as she
caught her breath. “Read my lips, Harlan. It’s
over.
I’m out
of here—forever. Goodbye!”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me—”

“Another chance?” A laugh blurted from her
lips. “I’ve been doing that for a year, and I’m sick of it! I’m
making a
fool
of myself thinking that we can ever have a
normal relationship. My time would be better spent ramming my head
into a brick wall. At least the goddamn brick wall would be more
receptive to my needs than you.”

Am I paranoid, or is this not going
very
well? Garrett posed to himself. One thing he did know,
however: he loved her. She was
so
beautiful, and…she washed
dishes. He stood bewildered, scratching his butt, a cigarette
dangling from his lips.

“Because I’ve finally seen the light,” she
added, mockingly slapping her forehead. “After all this time, I’ve
finally been able to see the truth behind this
farce
of a
relationship.” Her gorgeous green eyes blazed, angry pinpoints of
green fire. “You know what you’re going to be doing five years from
now, ten? Huh, Harlan?”

“Uh…”

“The same damn thing you’re doing right now!
Standing in this rat-hole apartment with your hands in your shorts
scratching your ass!”

At last, shoes on feet and purse in hand,
Jessica turned in a pissed-off blur, stormed out of the apartment,
and slammed the door behind her so hard, Garrett’s framed
autographed photo of renowned ufologist Kevin D. Randall popped off
its nail in the foyer and shattered.

Garrett stared after her boisterous exit,
open-mouthed.

“Ain’t love grand?” he said aloud.

Eventually, in his shock, he turned around,
caught a glimpse of his boxer-short-clad self in the wall mirror,
scratching his butt.
Great.
He quickly pulled his hands out
from the back of his shorts, then distractedly wandered to the
window and looked out.

“Harlan E. Garrett, take heart,” he told
himself. “Today’s been a bad day, that’s true. You lost your job
and you lost your beautiful girlfriend—”

Sunlight blared in the window. Not a cloud
in the sky.

“—but things could be a lot worse, couldn’t
they?” Garrett nodded a philosophically positivistic agreement to
himself. He shrugged limply.

“It could be raining, right?”

««—»»

Torrential rain poured down on the car’s
windshield, the wipers thunking rapidly back and forth. The sudden
rainstorm had been a bit of a surprise, the turning black in
moments and cracking open like an egg. Thunder rumbled. Lightning
whiplashed blue-white tendrils in the murky darkness overhead.

But the driver of the rental car was
unperturbed. His entire life had been a storm. He
liked
storms.

Through the deluge, the green road-sign with
white letters appeared in the bright halogen headlights:

WELCOME TO WASHINGTON D.C. under which
someone has crudely spray-painted in scarlet REDSKINS SUCK!

The driver’s black-gloved hands gripped the
wheel a bit more tightly. The leather creaked. He didn’t know the
Washington Redskins from a redskin peanut, and didn’t care;
football seemed a silly sport of misguided, structured violence.
When legs were irreparably shattered with multiple fractures or
when men broke their necks and were left quadriplegic, the
spectators didn’t care. They just kept watching. They wanted more,
and figured permanently disabling injuries were part of the risk
when these athletes signed their seven-figure contracts.

But the driver had much better ways of
disabling people, much more expeditious ways. Professional sports
merely seemed to license half-measures. The gladiators of Rome
didn’t, and neither did he. There was no gray area in the
philosophy of violence.