“Great idea, Charlie. You want some water?”
“You’re a good guy, Ray. Did I ever tell you that? Even if you are serial-killing desperate Filipinas on your vacation.”
“What?”
Nurse Betsy came to the window. “Asher!” she called.
Ray looked pleadingly at her through the window—a few seconds later she was coming through the door with a wheelchair.
“How’s Painless doing?” she said.
“Oh my God, he’s incredibly irritating,” Ray said.
“You didn’t take your medicine, did you?”
“I don’t like drugs.”
“Who’s the nurse here, Ray? It’s the circle of meds, not just the patient, but everyone around him. Haven’t you seen The Lion King?”
“That’s not in The Lion King. That’s the circle of life.”
“Really? I’ve been singing that song wrong the whole time? Wow, I guess I don’t like that movie after all. Help me get Painless into the chair. We’ll have him home by breakfast.”
“We got here at dinnertime,” Ray said.
“See how you are when you’re off your meds?”
Charlie had a foam walking cast and crutches when he got home from the hospital. The painkillers had worn off to a level where he was no longer painless. His head was throbbing like tiny twin aliens were going to burst out of his temples. Mrs. Korjev came out of his apartment and cornered him in the hallway.
“Charlie Asher, I am having bone to pick with you. Last night am I seeing my little Sophie run by my apartment naked and soapy like bear, pulling giant black dogs around singing ‘not in butt’? In old country we have word for that, Charlie Asher. Word is nasty. I still have number for child service from days when my boys were boys.”
“Soapy like bear?”
“Don’t change subject. Is nasty.”
“Yes, it is. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I was shot and wasn’t thinking straight.”
“You are shot?”
“In the leg. It’s only a flesh wound.” Charlie had waited his entire life to say those words and he felt very macho at that moment. “I don’t know who shot me. It’s a mystery. They dropped a rug on me, too.” The rug diminished the machismo somewhat. He vowed not to mention it henceforth.
“You come in. Have breakfast. Sophie will not eat toast Vladlena make. She say is raw and have toast germs.”
“That’s my girl,” Charlie said.
Charlie was no sooner in the door and on his way to rescue his daughter from toast-borne pathogens, when Mohammed grabbed the tip of one of his crutches in his mouth and dragged a hopping Charlie into the bedroom.
“Hi, Daddy,” Sophie said as her father went hopping by. “No skipping in the house,” she added.
Mohammed head-butted the hapless Beta Male to his date book. There were two names there under today’s date, which wasn’t that unusual. What was unusual was that they were the names that had appeared before: Esther Johnson and Irena Posokovanovich—the two soul vessels he’d missed.
He sat down on the bed and tried to rub the pain aliens back into his temples. How to even start? Would these names keep coming back until he got the soul vessels? That hadn’t happened with the fuck puppet. What was different here? Things were obviously getting worse—now they were shooting at him.
Charlie picked up the phone and dialed Ray Macy’s number.
It took Ray four days to come back to Charlie with the report. He had the information in three, but he’d wanted to be absolutely sure that all the painkillers had worn off and Charlie wasn’t going to be crazy anymore—going on all night about being the big death, “with a capital D.” Ray also felt a little guilty because he’d been holding out on Charlie about breaking some rules in the store.
They met in the back room on a Wednesday morning, before the store opened. Charlie had made coffee and taken a seat at the desk so he could prop his foot up. Ray sat on some boxes of books.
“Okay, shoot,” Charlie said.
“Well, first, I found three more crossbow bolts. Two had barbed-steel tips like the one that went through your leg, and one had a titanium spike. That one was stuck in the pneumatic closer on the back door.”
“Don’t care, Ray. What about the two women?”
“Charlie, someone shot you with a deadly weapon. You don’t care?”
“Correct. Don’t care. It’s a mystery. Know what I like about mysteries? They’re mysterious.”
Ray was wearing a Giants cap and he flipped it around backwards for emphasis. If he’d been wearing glasses he would have whipped those off, but he wasn’t, so he squinted like he had. “I’m sorry, Charlie, but someone wanted you and the dogs out of the house at the same time. They threw that rug on you from the rooftop across the alley, then, when you were pinned down and the dogs were outside, they shot the closer on the door so it would slam shut. They sabotaged the back door’s lock and glued the front doors shut, probably before they even started with the rug, then they slid down a line to the hall window, slipped between the bars, and—well, then it’s unclear.”
Charlie sighed. “You’re not going to tell me about the two women until you finish this, are you?”
“It was highly organized. This wasn’t a random assault.”
“The hall window upstairs has bars on it, Ray. No one can get in. No one got in.”
“Well, that’s where it gets a little crazy. You see, I don’t think it was a human intruder.”
“You don’t?” Charlie actually seemed to be paying attention now.
“In order to get through those bars, an intruder would have to be under two feet tall, and less than, say, thirty pounds. I’m thinking a monkey.”
Charlie put down his coffee so hard that a java geyser jumped out of the cup onto some papers on the desk. “You think that I was shot by a highly organized monkey?”
“Don’t be that way—”
“Who then slid down a wire, broke into the building, and did what? Made off with fruit?”
“You should have heard some of the stupid shit you were saying the other night at the hospital, and did I make fun of you?”
“I was on drugs, Ray.”
“Well, there’s no other explanation.” To Ray’s Beta Male imagination, the monkey explanation seemed completely reasonable—except for lack of motive. But you know monkeys, they’ll fling poo at you just for the hell of it, so who’s to say—
“The explanation is that it’s a mystery,” Charlie said. “I appreciate your trying to bring this…this furry bastard to justice, Ray, but I need to know about the two women.”
Ray nodded, defeated. He should have just shut up until he’d figured out why someone would want to get a monkey into Charlie’s apartment. “People can train monkeys, you know. Do you have any valuable jewelry in your apartment?”
“You know,” Charlie said, scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling as if remembering. “There was a small car parked across from the shop all day on Vallejo. And when I looked the next day, there was a pile of banana peels, like someone had been staking the place out. Someone who ate bananas.”
“What kind of car was it?” Ray said, his notepad ready.
“I’m not sure, but it was red, and definitely monkey size.”
Ray looked up from his notes. “Really?”
Charlie paused, as if thinking carefully about his answer. “Yes,” he said, very sincerely. “Monkey size.”