“No.”
“Mind if I do?” He waited for an answer.
“Darryl,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind if you ate the lighter.”
“I guess not.” He shook a cigarette loose, placed it between his lips, and put the package back. Then he fired the Zippo and inhaled. “Uncle Jason’s,” he said, showing me the lighter before he dropped it into the pouch. “Who’s got the tags?”
“I told you-”
He waggled the gun. “It’s noisy out there. I could shoot you and no one would hear a thing, except for our fat friend here. Empty your pants pockets.”
“There aren’t any,” I said. “Donald Duck doesn’t carry stuff around.”
“Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants, so let’s not pretend to be purists. Lift your shirt and turn around.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to do but obey. The air felt cold on my stomach and back.
When I was facing him again, he said, “Open the shirt at the neck. The first four buttons. Pull it open.”
“You won’t get out of here,” I said, “unless you go out the back door now.”
He put the gun against Mickey Snell’s belly and pushed it in. “No one will hear a shot through all this fat,” he said. “I could pull the trigger just for fun. Open the shirt, like I told you.”
I showed him my neck and chest, and he sighed. “You’re making this difficult. Help the kid out, and I’ll be out of here. No one will get hurt.”
“Until the next time,” I said.
He drummed the back of his heels against the desk, the first sign of impatience. “I’m finished. I thought there would be a mystery or something when they died, something special. I thought I would feel something. Just like I thought faggots were different. But they’re not. They’re just like everyone else. They live stupid, disgusting lives and they die messy. When they’re dead, they’re dead. Nothing to get excited about, nothing interesting there at all. Just another shitty life and a lot of blood and bones.”
The noise outside was dying down. “You mean that?”
“What? That I’m finished? Sure I do. I want a life, a job, kids.” He smiled at me. “I’ve got a girlfriend now. I can’t go on with this. I get home, she asks me what I did today, and I’m supposed to say, ‘I killed a queer’? I want to go back-back somewhere-and be a person.” He turned his head toward the door as though he’d heard something and then brought it back around to me. “I don’t want to be crazy anymore.”
“And you’re telling me you won’t hurt anybody here if I help you get the tags.”
“Nope. Honest Injun.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m surprised. People usually do. It doesn’t matter, though. I could just shoot you here and go get them myself.”
The thought had crossed my mind, too. “There’s a room full of people in costume out there. You think I know which one’s got them.”
“And you’re denying it. Is that smart?”
“I’m not sure who’s got them,” I said. “That’s the truth. I know who’s got the gold replicas, but I’m not sure who has the real ones.”
“I used to like science in school,” Darryl Wilder said, as though we were trading youthful confidences. “Let’s go out there and try a few hypotheses. We go up to likely people and you ask them for the tags. Sooner or later, one of them will give them to you, and I’m gone. Simple.”
“What if somebody stumbles over Bruce Wayne back there?”
The heels again, bouncing against the side of the desk. “Then people will get hurt,” he said. “The longer we sit here, the more likely that is. If I have to shoot somebody for that reason, you’re going to blame yourself.”
Spurrier and his cops, Henry and the Seven Dwarfs were out there. My options in here seemed to be limited to getting shot. “Let’s go,” I said.
“You’re going to be good?”
“We’ll get the tags, and then I’ll walk you to the door.”
“That’s exactly what you’ll do, or there are going to be a lot of dead drag queens at your party.”
“I hear you.” I went to the door and unlatched it. “I guess you want to be behind me.”
“Wait,” he said. “I didn’t give you your message yet.”
I leaned against the wall. “No. You didn’t.”
“Max said you should get married. That’s hard to believe, one fruitcake telling another to tie the old knot, but that’s what he said. It was just about the last thing he said. Said you’re one of those people who need love too much to let it into their lives, whatever that means, but the time has come. God, he talked a lot.”
The wall felt cool against my cheek. “Is that it?”
“No. He said the girl won’t wait forever.” He thumped the desk again. “That right? Is there really a girl?”
“Yes.”
“And are you thinking about it? Tying the old knot?”
“I suppose so.”
He laughed lightly, the laugh I’d heard when he was Ed Pfester. “A little resistance there? Boy, do I know how you feel. I’ve got this weensy little problem with love, too. But I’m trying to get past it, just like you. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
“I figured you lived alone.”
“Oh, I do. But it’s time-you know, you can get trapped in a pattern, and you don’t even know it’s there. Did you ever look at your life and wonder where it came from? It’s like, whoosh, suddenly there you are, and you don’t even know why you’re living where you’re living. You know what I’m talking about. I can sense it.”
“Don’t try it, Darryl.”
A beat. “Try what?”
“This is what you do, isn’t it?”
“Skip it,” he said harshly.
“You cozy right up to them, Young Mr. Vulnerable, with all the same problems they have. You’re an early edition of them, aren’t you? A chance to unmake the mistakes they made in their own lives.”
“Let’s get the hell out there,” he said furiously.
“I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re pretty good.”
“The girlie,” he said. “Just think about the precious little girlie. She’s not going to want you to come home with your guts in your pockets.” I heard him ease himself off the desk. “I’ll be right next to you, close enough to pick the spot where it’ll hurt longest before you die. And then, of course, a lot of other people will die, too.”
“No one has to die.”
“Put on your mask, Simeon. And don’t tempt me.”
He followed me through the door, but before he could come up beside me we practically collided with Spurrier. Spurrier had his Big Bad Wolf mask shoved back on his head and one hand over his mouth. He looked fevered and disoriented.
“Hey, Ike,” I said.
Spurrier barely registered us. “Ooolp,” he said, barreling through the door to the men’s room. I watched one of my hopes disappear.
“Cop?” Wilder asked. A cheer went up from the ballroom.
“Yes,” I said helplessly. Spurrier vomited violently in the bathroom.
“Cops are like women. They shouldn’t drink. Are all the cops dressed out of Disney?”
“No. It’s a coincidence.”
“How are they dressed?”
“As cops.” The cheering rose and peaked. “Sounds like your friends are in trouble.”
“Cretins,” he said. “Keep moving.”
He threw his left arm over my shoulder and we came out of the hallway and into the cavernous space of the Paragon Ballroom. Wilder stopped near Bernadette’s font, and I stopped with him. Hanks, Christy, and Henry were on the stage, but the space in front of it was empty. Literally everyone else had their backs to us, focused on the doorway.
The crowd broke open, and one of the skinheads emerged, bleeding from the head and trying to break into a run. He covered less than a yard before he was tackled from behind by a guitar-toting mariachi and Joel Farfman’s beefy Tonto, who dragged him back into the thick of the melee. He got kicked by a remarkable assortment of shoes before he vanished from sight.
There was nobody near us.
Wilder registered it a split second after I did and began to withdraw his arm from my shoulders, but I grabbed his wrist in both hands, pulled it down, and stuck out my hip. I lifted him from the floor as he tried frantically to free the gun from the cape, and brought him around my hip, and he was down, slamming his shoulder against the base of the font, and I raised my foot to kick his gun hand, but he rolled away from me and came up on one knee, the gun pointed at my middle again, and I stopped cold, involuntarily sucking in my midsection. I was aware of a movement on the stage behind him, and Darryl Wilder screwed up his mouth and spat at me, swiveled on his knees, raised the automatic with both hands, and shot Ferris Hanks twice.