Max Collins - No Cure for Death

I lost patience sucking and bit down on the Lifesaver. I chewed it up and swallowed. I had kind of a raw taste in my mouth, combination of sour, from not brushing my teeth for a decade or so, and sweet, from chewed-up Lifesaver. I got up to get a drink of water.

Even though I hadn’t been sleeping, it took me a moment to get my balance. I stretched my back, felt the spinal knuckles pop, and suddenly was very awake, even more awake than is usual in my occasional insomniac turns. I decided I was awake enough to have more than a glass of water, ready for a glass of orange juice, maybe. I made my way to the kitchenette, my eyes so well-adjusted to the dark I stubbed not a single toe, and opened up the icebox and got out a bottle of Pabst.

I went over to the couch and sat staring at my front door, drinking my Pabst, feet on the coffee table, feeling, about halfway through my beer, tired for the first time that night. My eyes were getting fuzzy and the lids were drooping and I almost thought for a second I could see the door knob moving. Turning.

Well, boy, when inanimate objects start moving around, then you know you’re falling asleep, or already asleep and dreaming, and I was about to let my lids slide all the way shut when the door opened, all the way, and I was awake again.

I didn’t move.

It was dark. Whoever it was wouldn’t expect me to be up, wide awake, eyes in tune with the darkness.

He was big. The outline of him as he stood in the doorway was huge, shoulders almost touching the frame of the door. But I couldn’t see who it was, it was just a massive black form in the door, the light very bright around the shape, from the streetlamps and the piece of moon now out from behind the clouds.

I stayed motionless. I was sure he didn’t see me. He was putting something in his pocket now, the skeleton key he’d used to get in, maybe, or maybe some gizmo he’d picked the lock with.

One thing I knew: it wasn’t John, or even Brennan, or anybody else friendly or semi-friendly who might be playing a practical joke. He was too big even for Brennan, too wide, and the slow, methodical way he moved had no humor in it at all, just deadly, serious business.

He stepped inside and shut the door gently behind him and lifted a hand with a long-shafted flashlight in it. He switched on the flash and aimed it over toward where the living room trails into the hall that leads into the bedroom.

I slipped my feet down off the coffee table. Like I was balancing an egg on each toe.

He directed the flash down the hall, moving toward there himself, his free hand balled into a fist that was like a rock he was getting ready to pound into somebody’s head.

I threw the beer bottle at him and caught him on the ear.

He fell against the wall and slid down, the flash rolling out of his grasp, and I jumped through the darkness at him and caught a knee in my stomach. I tumbled away and smacked into the coffee table and then crawled off to catch my breath, but I could hear him scrambling around behind me.

He wasn’t used to the dark like I was, and he didn’t know where the light switch was, to do something about it. I hustled off on my hands and knees toward the kitchenette while he was rustling around after the flashlight, which had gotten switched off when he fumbled it.

Then the beam of the flash started cutting through the room’s darkness like the searching strokes of a knife. I huddled in the corner of the kitchenette, my mind stuttering. I edged my hand up the woodwork and over into the sink and my fingers found a glass, and then the skillet, still greasy from the American fries. I brought both skillet and glass, carefully, soundlessly, out of the sink and down to me, clutching them to me like treasure. I hefted the skillet; it wasn’t as heavy as I would’ve liked, but it was iron and it would do. I watched the probing beam of light, then aimed as best I could and pitched the glass at him and knocked the flash from his hand, then crouched with the iron pan in hand and waited for him to come after me.

Light filled the room.

Rita stood at the mouth of the hall, her hand on the light switch. She presented quite a sight: a beautiful naked brown girl with tousled black hair and brown nipples and…

And he was a big white guy and he stood and looked at her with his mouth hanging open.

In that second he gave me, I crowned him from behind with the skillet.

For a big man, he went down fast, hitting his cheekbone as he fell, and it wasn’t necessary to clobber him again. Rita came rushing over, questions tumbling out of her, but I snapped an order at her, telling her to get me a tie out of my closet, and she jiggled out after it and back with it in four seconds flat. I quickly bound his hands behind him, but there was nothing to worry about: he wasn’t anywhere near conscious yet.

I flipped him over. Well, he was too heavy to flip, really, alone anyway: I needed Rita’s help to do it, as out of breath as I was.

“What’s this all about, Mal?” she wanted to know. She was so startled by all of this she wasn’t bothering to cover up; I was so startled I wasn’t bothering to look.

“I’m not sure myself,” I said. “But it’s safe to say this guy wanted to do some damage.”

Then, as an afterthought, I searched him quickly and found a small, compact automatic. Blue metal, pearl-handled, it looked like the kind of thing women sometimes carry in purses. I balanced it in my palm.

Rita looked at the gun and swallowed. “What are you gonna do now?”

“I’m going to call my friend John and get him and his hard-ass stepfather over here. I’ll be damned if that sonofabitch Brennan is going to ignore this. ”

“Should I get some clothes on?”

I grinned. “Well, it’d make John’s day if you didn’t, but I don’t think Brennan’s ready for it,”

She grinned back and covered herself rather demurely, like September Morn, but I wasn’t completely buying it. “You swing a mean skillet,” she said.

“You swing a mean… go get in your clothes.”

I went over to the phone and dialed.

John answered, groggily.

“Thanksgiving’s over,” I said. “Drag Brennan out of bed and get him over here. Somebody just broke into my place and I had to hit him with a skillet.”

“Huh?”

I told him again and he got it this time. I added that though I hadn’t hit the guy hard enough to kill him or anything, I’d done a good enough job that a doctor would probably be a wise thing to bring along.

“Who is it? That black guy with one eye?”

“Hardly.”

“Well, then, who the hell is he? You ever see him before?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking over at the still slumbering housebreaker. He was wearing a yellow sweater and mustard bell-bottoms. “His name is Davis.”

I stood outside the hospital room and leaned back against the wall; its tile surface was cold on my neck. Down the hall a few feet, by the elevator, Brennan was shuffling around the small waiting area, giving the “No Smoking” sign a dirty look each time he passed. He kept turning the brim of his Stetson in his hands like a piece of evidence he couldn’t make anything out of. Then he wandered over to one of the windows opposite the elevator and stared out at the morning blackness.

I left him alone. Went over and sat on a couch. I was just too damn tired to play the I-told-you-so-I-told-you-so game. And Brennan was boiling, anyway-why get him any angrier? It was hard to tell whether his irritation was because of my digging into this when it was none of my business, or if it was just because nobody is crazy about getting rousted out of bed in the wee morning hours. And, as he pointed out a number of times, I really should’ve called the Port City police instead of him.