Kick, Page 9

  “Wuzup, Kev? Damn, bitch, why you all wet?” he said, standing up to give a tiresome high five that morphed into a little tippy-finger tug thing at the end like I’d seen in numerous movies about “the hood.”

  I told him I fell in the water. I was too tired for this. Just looking at the jittery, grinning fool was enough to knock me down, right there.

  Lots of laughing and “you dumb motherfucker” and “motherfucker fell in the water” and “damn motherfucker” and thereabouts for a while, really enjoying himself, before he caught on that I wasn’t joining in.

  “I need a nap,” I said, and pushed past him to the door.

  “Hey man, this place kinda small—it get bigger inside?”

  “See for yourself,” I said, and went in.

  Whoever-He-Was just followed along—a little too closely, with all the respect for personal space of freshly cut flatulence.

  “Man, I can’t believe you stole this shit. What he like, a fag or something? Fucker likes flowers, don’t he? Whachu got to eat?” He opened the refrigerator, then made a sound of disgust. “Man, you need some food in this bitch.”

  From the mouths of dipshits.

  And then I wondered what he meant by “stole this shit.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m really tired—”

  “Holy shit, look at that puzzle! When you start doing puzzles, yo?”

  “Hey, don’t touch it.”

  He touched it. He took one of the sides apart, fast as that. I reached over and pulled his hand away.

  “I said leave it alone.” Carefully, I reconnected the ends. “I’m working on it.”

  “What’s up with you? You’re acting like, all responsible and shit. You got a new girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, your mother,” I said.

  “Man, whatever.”

  He hadn’t liked that. But it seemed to calm him down.

  “Why don’t you come by later?” I said. “Maybe bring some food. Also, I’m broke, so if you have any cash, I could use it.” My whole purpose for letting him in the house, frankly.

  “I’m broke too—Mr. York, you know? Where you get those shoes?”

  “Stole ’em off a college boy, looked just like you.”

  I wasn’t positive the shoes came from the mugging, but I had to protect my street cred.

  “For real?” he said. “Damn, they tight. You ain’t get his wallet?”

  “Nope, I ain’t.”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I gotta see Mr. York. I’d say come with me but you all tired and shit. Whatever. I be back. Don’t know about no food, but I might got some glass—friend of mine.”

  “Wonderful. Just bring the food, you keep the glass.”

  More meth. The country was drowning in it.

  “Shit man, you sick or something? Maybe you should go to sleep. Prolly got AIDS or something, right? Sleeping in a fag house. Right?”

  He wanted me to laugh, so I did, confirming the loss of the last little drop of my self-respect.

  “Don’t forget the food, I’m all out,” I said when he stepped outside. Repetition is essential when you’re dealing with guys like him.

  “You always waste your money,” he said. “Least you fixed the bodies this time.”

  I watched him head up the road toward the beach and pondered what he said. Clearly, he knew something about the murders. With my head starting to hurt again and the guy already out of sight, I threw a guilty glance skyward and locked up. Then I went back and crashed on the old woman’s bed.

  ***

  I woke up with a dry mouth and a splitting headache. But no, that’s a cliché and a weak one at that. How’s this: I woke up missing a brain and something like a quasar exploding a billion times a second two inches behind my eyes. And a dry mouth.

  “Ugh—goddamn junkies,” I said, quietly, on my way to the shower.

  The shower helped, a little. After I got dressed, I ate the last of the spaghetti and threw the empty box away.

  In the garage, only a shadow of the stench from the night before still lingered. The fishing rods were tangled and the fittings, rusted. One of them looked better than the others, so I grabbed it, defrosted about half the pack of shrimp in a bowl of warm water and visited the small pier to try my luck.

  The reel—an old Zepco—wouldn’t pay the line out when I clicked the button, so I opened it up and ran it out manually. It reeled in fine, it just wouldn’t zoom out the way it was designed. Later, after selling pictures of the whale I planned to catch, I’d buy me something better.

  The hook was a big sucker with lots of little barbs on the sides to keep it from coming out of the fish. I managed to get an entire piece of shrimp impaled on it and then flung it out by hand about fifteen feet, which I judged to be where the really big ones liked to congregate. Less than a minute later, I had my first bite. Not a big bite, and the hook didn’t take when I tugged it back. I waited a little and then reeled it back in. Sure enough, the hook was bare. I tried again and lost my bait in even less time.

  “Dammit,” I said, not helping the situation, but defining it nicely.

  I tried again, and this time I caught something—mostly on a technicality. Reeling it in, it felt made of lead, it pulled so hard. When it broke the water it fell off the hook and flopped around on the pier, almost flipping back in. Frantically, I grabbed for it, trying not to let it spike me with its incredibly spiny back. “Spiny,” that’s the word for it, and tiny as hell. A little thing, smaller than my palm. How it pulled so hard I had no idea—maybe had a bunch of spiny little friends helping it. Disgusted and a little ashamed, I dropped it over the side. If they were all this small I’d run out of shrimp in no time. It could be I needed to cast out farther, but that’d never happen with my current reel. And the ones in the garage were even worse.

  Not wanting to be a quitter, I gave it another fifteen minutes, which effectively cleaned out my remaining shrimp in the process. I decided the other three quarters in the freezer would stay there until I found a better rod or became so desperate from starvation that I had to cook it. Which gave me maybe twenty-four hours. I just hoped Kevin wasn’t hypoglycemic, or that his speed crash didn’t affect his blood sugar, because then I wouldn’t just eat those nasty shrimp I’d probably eat the slimy box it came in too.

  Defeated for now, my hands smelling like raw shrimp and the little fish I’d caught, I returned to the house to watch TV, drink water and nap through the remainder of my detox on what had turned out to be a bad trip, indeed.

  Chapter 14

  Because I have no goals in life or expectations, there aren’t many things that worry me. Not even mall Santas. But this had turned into one of the few things this side of the Great Wherever that I’ve come to dread: a bad trip. Bad trips aren’t fun. Whenever I enter a body that’s more torture than relief, that’s a bad trip. Like the time I hitched a ride in a killer serving time in prison—already convicted, but the Great Whomever clearly thought that wasn’t enough. Then there are the times I’ve come back in bodies so deeply addicted to drugs I either had to get high or spend a week sealed in a living hell. I’ll let you guess how I chose. I suppose I should have been thankful Kevin wasn’t as far gone as that, but with my head pounding I wasn’t in a gracious mood.

  When I woke up it was dark outside. Ignoring my growing hunger, I turned on the ten-year-old TV I found in the living room. At least it had cable. I left it on as background noise and browsed through the house. There were old novels that people had left behind and several photo albums that various guests had added to over the years. To my irritation, I discovered picture after picture of people of all ages holding up remarkably large fish at the end of the same pier out back. I couldn’t even blame my rod anymore because it was featured in most of the shots.

  At some point I sat down to work on the puzzle. At first I felt self-conscious about it. I told myself I was completing it for them, and then realized I meant it. I couldn’t bring them back to life, but I could continue
their work.

  As the night deepened, my hunger grew unbearable, distracting me to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between the four different shades of cloudy-pink roses I was struggling with. Also, the more I concentrated on something, the more the drugs I wasn’t getting on a regular basis left me sweating and weak.

  By midnight, Kevin’s lack of food careened wildly into his need for speed, spinning into the other lane and slaughtering the remainder of my self-control. No, I didn’t try to eat that nasty shrimp. Instead, I left the house, locked the door for some reason and then stepped beyond the car beneath some small trees. To my right loomed a large complex of maybe eight condos fused together like an enormous vacation molecule. The house immediately in front of me was lit and had four cars out front. Probably packed with vacationers, still awake, yammering about all the great food they’d had that day and how big their turds would be in the morning. Over on the left was a large, two-story white house, dark from this angle. I couldn’t tell if there were any cars parked there because I was facing the back. I hated that it was white—even without much light, I’d show up easily skulking along next to it. The good news was if I approached from the back, the only ones who might see me were the folks with all the cars, and probably only if they came outside.

  I weighed my options. I could wait till the house in front of me turned down for the night or I could head over now before exhaustion sent me limping back to bed.

  “There’s always jail,” I said.

  They’d feed me, that’s for sure. But then the couple buried in the backyard wouldn’t be avenged. What Kevin had done was too evil to risk letting the legal system bungle his trial. There’s always someone on a jury who thinks “reasonable doubt” includes anything a defense attorney can articulate without bursting out laughing. Jail was out.

  I crouched down and gave each sneaker five deliberate pumps of air. This was it, no turning back now if I wanted to eat. I walked across the open yard, looking for all the world like someone who always strolled between houses in the middle of the night. The day after a violent assault just down the street. That had happened at around the same time.

  I pretended not to notice the security lights all turning on at once, blinding me and scaring me to death in the same instant. Nothing to see here people, happens all the time.

  There was a back door at ground level, straight ahead, almost certainly locked. I gave it a try and sure enough the knob didn’t turn—but the door pushed inward anyway. The jamb had been previously splintered away, with nothing holding the door closed except the snug-fitting frame. Not believing my good fortune, I stepped inside—and discovered luck had nothing to do with it. It was like the previous night all over again: the smell of murder. The putrid odor of decomposing flesh was stronger on entering than it had been at the bungalow, but not as bad as the garage where I found the McHughs.

  “Dammit Kevin,” I said. “It’s not looking too good for you, is it?”

  I stood in a dark room—a storage area of some sort. Lots of boat equipment on and around a workbench, with ropes and hoses and beach umbrellas and other fun-in-the-sun clutter stacked in the corner. I figured the equipment went along with the powerboat docked outside.

  An inner door opened easily beneath a curved staircase wrapping a classy-looking foyer that would have been blinding in the afternoon. Two oval mirrors adorned opposing walls, reflecting the room again and again into the seeming of a corridor arching toward infinity. A thick, tightly woven carpet curled up to a wide disk of polished granite centered before the front door. Some craftsman had inlaid an exquisite compass into the granite, all in brass, in a design you might find on a nautical map. An appropriately sized crystal chandelier refracted the cleverly recessed lighting so that it seemed to glow with an inner fire.

  On the outside, the house had seemed ordinary enough. Nothing that would have suggested such loveliness within.

  I finished off the first floor and moved to the second, admiring as I went. I’ve never been one for paintings, but the owner had put a lot of thought into this collection. Majestic sailing scenes, at times becalmed, at times caught by stylized tempests too primal and terrifying to have ever posed for an artist’s brush. Despite my hunger, I looked at them all.

  The kitchen didn’t have all new appliances, but the ones I found looked used and in good shape. The selection of cookware seemed made up of as many sets as there were pots and pans. Something told me I wouldn’t find a closet stacked with unused bread makers, waffle irons, ice cream makers and turkey fryers. Whoever lived here liked cooking, not just the idea of cooking.

  All four bedrooms were well-furnished and tastefully adorned. It was as if the owner wanted to contain the grandness of the foyer so that the rest of the house could go on with the business of providing comfortable habitation. It angered me when I found a body stuffed in the closet of one of the guest bedrooms. Another old man—the one from the third wallet. This was totally senseless. If I used a lot of imagination, I could see the resemblance to the younger man in some of the pictures in the living room. There had also been pictures of a woman in many of the shots, sometimes posing with him in the cockpit of a large, complicated-looking sailboat.

  I retraced through the other bedrooms and found her stuffed amidst the clutter of a different closet. The air-conditioning was cranked low, which explained why the stench hadn’t peaked to the intolerable range. I wondered if Kevin had popped it down or if the owners liked it that way. I was willing to bet the latter. Everything I’d seen from the little worm suggested a callous disregard for decency, as well as a lack of concern for personal welfare. How no one had caught him yet mystified me. With the right jury, he might get the death penalty. Well, maybe. But only after years of milking the state of food, shelter and legal assistance.

  With a twinge of guilt, I left the woman’s body there and returned to the kitchen to scavenge.

  The fridge was stocked deep with eggs and juice and fruit and leftovers and condiments and everything you’d expect in a house occupied by the owners—not vacationers. Vacationers liked to eat out.

  I washed my hands, made a sandwich and poured a glass of milk. Even with the smell, I had no trouble keeping it down.

  Standing in the dead couple’s kitchen chewing my sandwich, I realized I couldn’t cart all their food back to the bungalow. It’d take multiple trips. Too many opportunities to get caught, especially lit-up against the backdrop of the white house. Food was nice, but I really needed money if I wanted to have any fun on this trip. I also needed a fleet of freezers, apparently, or a backhoe for a mass grave.

  Kevin was a real twist. A monster like him could get caught tomorrow, sure. Or he could go on for years, house by house, destroying whole families at a time until one of his mistakes finally undid him. Or maybe he’d never get caught. Plenty of serial killers never did. I’d seen variations on this theme before, but nothing so systematic. Break-ins were normal. Murders too. The break-in/murder/occupation scenarios never spilled beyond the one house.

  I recalled the parting words of his obnoxious friend: “Least you fixed the bodies this time.” If I saw him again, maybe I’d ask him about it.

  Rooting through the house looking for cash, I found a wallet and a purse with the paper money and credit cards missing. I also stumbled across a cider jug filled with change right out in the open, big and heavy with a healthy mix of silver in it. Easily over a hundred dollars’ worth. In recent years, more and more grocery stores had coin counters that could add it all up and spit out a redeemable receipt. I didn’t remember seeing one on my trip to the store, but I hadn’t really been looking.

  Happy for the positive turn, I put the jug in a cooler I found and loaded it the rest of the way with milk, cold cuts, bread, condiments and an unopened package of cookies. Then I carried it downstairs and set it on the floor by the back door.

  I debated on what to do with the bodies. Yesterday, digging the grave, there hadn’t been security lights illuminati
ng me while I worked. Even without them, I just didn’t have the energy to dig any more graves. I ended up dragging the bodies to two of the house’s full bathrooms, where I laid them out in the bathtubs. Afterward, dizzy and panting from too much physical labor, I grabbed the cooler and slipped back to the bungalow. Nobody called out and I didn’t see anyone, but then that’s not how it’d go down if I were spotted. No, in about ten minutes the fuzz would show up to drag me off to the pokey. Maybe a bit longer if they were anything like the police in Memphis.

  After a half hour spent peeking out various windows, I decided I was safe. I considered pushing my luck and going back to the white house for fishing rods and tackle but decided I’d rather lie on the couch and watch TV.

  Somewhere in the middle of a science show on how the universe was made, I fell asleep. If they said why it was made it must have been somewhere near the end.

  Chapter 15

  The next morning, my third day as Kevin, the dipshit with the Oedipus complex woke me up by ringing the doorbell repeatedly for five minutes straight.

  “What’s up motherfucker?” he said, stepping past me and jerking open my now modestly stocked fridge. “Finally got some damn food.”

  “Hey, that’s mine,” I said, grabbing a package of roast beef from him.

  “Oh, I see how it is—you want me to bring you stuff but you don’t wanna share.”

  “Did you bring me something?”

  “No.”

  I put the food back and shut the door, then leaned with my back against it.

  “But,” he said, “Mr. York said he found something sweet. Says it could pay our way to Mexico or Canada or some shit. Wants to see you later about it. Also told me to ask why you ain’t call him every day like he said to. So…”

  “So…?”

  He shrugged and looked at me sideways.

  “Why you ain’t call him every day like he said?”

  This Mr. York expected certain things from Kevin. He also had sway over Dipshit, making him his errand boy. I wondered what kind of person could hold the respect of animals like that. From a distance, no less.