But suddenly she froze in the middle of the driveway, looking first at her brother, then Raymer, then Jerome again. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Dear God, please don’t.”
Don’t what? Raymer thought, but when he looked down he saw what must have upset her so. At some point, without realizing it, he’d apparently taken the remote out of his pocket so he could use its sharp edge to dig at the infected wound. The device was wet and sticky with fresh blood, and the pain was simply breathtaking. Apparently Jerome also wanted him to quit, because he’d taken his gun out and was pointing it at him. “No more,” he said, his eyes wide with terrible determination. “I can’t bear it.”
“Don’t, Jerome,” Charice was saying. She’d come closer but was still outside the garage.
Jerome had begun to tremble, the gun in his hand shaking visibly. Raymer understood the situation was serious — pointing a loaded firearm at another human being always was — but he still had to suppress a powerful urge to giggle, recalling Jerome’s favorite pose, copied from the Goldfinger movie poster, where 007, his long-barreled pistol pointed skyward, left hand cradling his right elbow, was the epitome of suave confidence in the face of danger.
“I told you!” Jerome was saying to his sister. “Didn’t I tell you he knew? He’s known all along!”
Known what? Raymer thought, but the garage door was descending again, in response, yes, to the bloody remote in his hand, just as it had been doing since he arrived. Stunned that this could be so, he watched the door motor closed and then turned guiltily back to Jerome, as if he were the one with some serious explaining to do. After a moment the light went out, leaving Raymer and Becka’s lover alone in the unfathomable dark.
“We were so in love,” Jerome said. “You have no idea.”
Congratulations, said Dougie. Well played.
Something with No Name
ROY WAITED FOR full dark before returning to town and stuck to the back roads. By now every cop in Schuyler County had to be on the lookout for Cora’s turd-bucket. His plan was to park on a dead-end street a couple blocks from Sully’s place, but then he remembered the service road through Sans Souci Park that ended at a small maintenance lot out back of the hotel. There, Roy figured, the car might sit unnoticed for a week or more. Not that he really gave a shit. After tonight he wouldn’t have any further use for it.
The old hotel loomed massively in the dark when Roy pulled in, and for a few minutes he just sat there, listening to the engine cool and staring at the fucking thing. He couldn’t help it. The place just messed with his head and always had. Close to three hundred rooms, it had. Back before the springs ran dry, the hotel was always full of rich morons coming from all over to “take the waters.” But really, how could that be? Sure, that was back before TV, when nobody had fuck all to do, but Roy still couldn’t fathom it. If it were beer bubbling up out of the ground, maybe, but water? “Yeah, but you got to remember,” Bullwhip explained when he told him about all this shit. “People crazy, and that’s a fact. Want what everybody else wants, even if it don’t make no sense. Take tulips…”
That was how it always went with Bullwhip. One minute you were talking about one thing, and before you knew it the subject was tulips. The man knew all kinds of worthless crap. Most of the time you couldn’t tell whether he was pulling your leg or talking for true. But according to him, there’d been this stretch over in Europe when everybody went crazy for tulips. Like there was anything you could do with a fucking tulip. Suddenly they all had to have some, and that made them expensive. People swapped gold and silver for tulips. “No fuckin’ way,” Roy had objected, but Bullwhip was adamant. “Read up on it,” he said, as if you could go to the prison library and find a fucking book about tulips.
Still, it did make you think. If you could make all these Europeans want tulips — people who couldn’t even agree on what fucking language to talk in — then maybe you could sell them water. Invent some crazy-ass story about how this was special water that would cure whatever the fuck ailed you. People wanted to believe shit. Take God. It was obvious to Roy that God was all bullshit. If you were God and you wanted people to believe in you, it just stood to reason you’d show your face every now and then. Instill some goddamn fear. Get people to toe the fucking line. Otherwise, everybody who wasn’t completely stupid would draw the same conclusion. Roy found himself wondering if Bullwhip believed in God. If he was still there in the lockup, he could ask him before long.
Staring at the place, he felt, in addition to incredulity, something akin to nostalgia. For an all-too-brief period, the Sans Souci had been his principal source of income, a sweet deal while it lasted. This guy he knew, Garth, had been hired as a night watchman during one of the hotel’s renovations. “You wouldn’t believe all the shit comin’ in there every fuckin’ day,” he told Roy one afternoon when they were both drunk. Brand-new furniture and fancy mirrors and televisions and stereo systems, arriving faster than they could be inventoried, just sitting there stacked in the original boxes. “Careless,” Roy had observed. “Somebody could rip it all off, and they wouldn’t even notice.” Garth was basically a pussy and refused to participate in actual theft, but for a share of the profits he thought maybe he could manage to forget to lock up the service entrance. Just be smart, was all he asked. Don’t take too much, and not all of the same shit. A TV or two, but not six. Couple videocassette players. A few paintings, maybe, if Roy saw any he liked. If anybody thought stuff was fucking vanishing, Garth would hear about it, and they’d lay low for a spell.
Which was how they played it there at the beginning, Roy carting away no more than would fit easily in his van. But after a month or two, with no alarms going off, he thought they needed to revise the strategy. Because who the fuck was Garth to say how they’d do it? He wasn’t the one taking all the chances. Every time Roy slipped in that back door he risked somebody seeing his van parked where it shouldn’t be. Why not aim for one big final score? He considered proposing this new tactic to Garth, then thought twice. Better to just make an executive decision.
“How it always goes,” Bullwhip chuckled when Roy recounted the sad tale. How in fact somebody had noticed that shit coming in the front door was going out the back. How they were waiting for him the night he pulled up with the rented U-Haul. How they hadn’t said a fucking word to Garth, since he was their number one suspect. “Human nature,” Bullwhip elaborated. “People greedy. Don’t know when to stop. Don’t know how. It’s stupid.” Normally Roy didn’t like being called stupid, but Bullwhip always seemed to include himself when reflecting upon human frailty. Besides, Roy hadn’t told him the whole truth. Greed had played a role, all right, but the real problem was urine. The hotel’s hundreds of rooms were mostly locked, but every so often Roy would come upon one that wasn’t. The suites boasted king-size beds with mountains of white pillows piled high on pristine white comforters that proved irresistible to Roy pretty much every single time. He knew it was dumb but just couldn’t help himself. Unzipping, he’d arc his stream at the center of the mattress until a bright yellow puddle formed there, after which he felt empty and at peace. Why was leaving your mark so satisfying? That’s what this whole business with Sully was about. Squaring things. Leaving your mark. Making sure people knew you’d been there. That you were just as alive as them.