Norman Partridge - The Ten-Ounce Siesta

. . and Jack remembered how to breathe. .

. . and he spun away from Tony Katt, leaving the champion hanging on the ropes. .

The heavyweight was tangled up. He dropped to one knee, then pawed his way up the ropes until he was on his feet again. Jack needed the break. He still couldn’t feel his left arm, but he wasn’t going to need it. He had spotted his opening. As long as he could catch his breath-

Katt’s trainer came through the door with a couple of sparring partners. The old guy nearly had a coronary. “Tony!” he yelled. “What the hell are you doing!”

Katt waved him off and turned toward Jack. The heavyweight’s hands were down. He didn’t raise them right away. Instead, he launched into that chump move, banging his gloves together for the fifth time in as many minutes.

In just a second he’d smile that stupid smile.

It was a robotic move. Predictable as it was necessary, like a kid winding up a toy soldier before sending it into battle.

This time. Jack was ready for it. As Katt’s lips twisted upward. Jack banged a hard right against the champion’s skull.

Once. Twice. Three times.

bambambam!

Blood geysered from the champion’s nose. The lower half of his face was draped in red, and the upper half was all startled eyes.

The Tiger went down hard, his lips contorted in pain.

His trainer’s expression was worse. After all, Tony Katt was supposed to defend his title in three weeks. If his nose were broken, none of his corner men would be getting a check anytime soon.

“Oh, Jesus!” The trainer moaned. “Oh, Jesus!”

The baddest man on the planet writhed on the canvas. He wasn’t smiling now. Jack watched him. He didn’t smile, either. No one in the gym smiled.

Except for the man on Tony Katt’s left shoulder.

Colonel Harlan Sanders.

He wore a chicken-eating grin.

Harold kissed Eden long and deep. “How does it feel to almost be rich, sugar?”

“It feels good,” she whispered, “to be in love.”

They stood next to the bed in Eden’s room. Over Harold’s shoulder, through the pillbox window’s open lead shutters, Eden watched heat waves undulating off the belly of the desert. Outside it was hot, even for the Mojave. A real scorcher.

And it was a scorcher inside, too, in this cool room lined with thick cement walls.

Eden’s fingers drifted over the tattooed SS lightning bolts on Harold’s neck, across his hairless chest, down his white belly. A thick purple scar puckered low on his left side, a permanent reminder of the bullet Harold had taken for his friend while they were in prison.

Eden knelt and kissed the scar tenderly. When they had the ransom money and things cooled down, Harold was going to introduce her to Tony Katt. She couldn’t wait to meet him. Not because he was heavyweight champion, but because he was the person Harold cared about most in the world.

Next to Eden, of course.

Her tongue darted between her lips, and she teased the rough purple circle on Harold’s side with a slow lick as her long black hair brushed his thigh.

“Oh, baby,” Harold said, and more than once.

Eden smiled up at him. “Looks like I didn’t wear you out, after all.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Guess I’ll have to try again.”

“Guess you will.”

Harold closed his eyes. His fingers drifted through Eden’s black hair, knotting at last into a fist as he pulled her closer. Eden was glad they were alone, glad Daddy wasn’t in the next room listening at the heat register, glad Mama wasn’t peeking through the pillbox window. This was the way she wanted Harold, all to herself. Just the two of them. No interruptions. No distractions-

The question flashed in her mind quite suddenly. “Where’s the Chihuahua?”

Harold sighed. “I couldn’t get the mutt to eat anything. Your daddy took it out to the chapel. Said he had some herbs or something that would give it an appetite.”

Eden trembled. Kneeling before her lover, staring straight at him-

“The snake,” she said. “The snake.”

From the distance it was just a tumbledown shack abandoned by a silver miner who had shuffled off into eternity many moons ago. But if you got a little closer you noticed the crudely fashioned sign that hung between two bleached-white steer skulls just above the weather-beaten door. Letters made of rattlesnake hide seemed to writhe on a background of black enamel that had blistered in the desert sun:

HELL’S HALF ACRE CHURCH OF SATAN

DEKE LYNCH, PASTOR AND PROPHET

AND THE DEVIL’S LEFT HAND

Inside the chapel. Daddy Deke stood before the altar, dressed in his old frock coat and the top hat with the snakeskin band. Trickles of heat slashed cracks and knotholes in the three wooden walls, offset by a cool breath of air rising from the abandoned mine shaft that pitted the dirt wall at the rear of the structure.

Cool air, but Daddy Deke knew that there was fire down below. He had seen it in a strychnine vision, and his strychnine visions always proved true. The mine shaft led straight to hell. Daddy had walked those tunnels in his dreams. He’d seen the black river flowing. . Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the gates. . the whole nine yards.

Deke knew that his vision of hell was a tough one to swallow. Men, by their very natures, were a skeptical lot. But so was Deke Lynch. He had trouble believing in some things until he saw them for himself. Like demons, for instance. He was skeptical about them right up until the moment he summoned one for himself. Summoned it from the black pit that yawned behind him and watched it stalk off into the desert night leaving nothing in its wake but the sour stink of sulfur.

Of course, some folks said that a man who handled rattlesnakes and drank strychnine was liable to see all sorts of things. Deke figured it this way: if a man couldn’t believe his own eyes, what in hell could he believe?

Once Deke saw something, he believed it. But there were still a few things he had to see about.

Like this Chihuahua being worth half a million bucks, for instance. Deke had a real problem with that one. And he figured he was going to keep on having a problem with it until someone showed him all that money.

One thing Deke was sure of-if the Chihuahua died, he would never see that money at all. He couldn’t let that happen, because he sure could use that cash. Score a half a million and he could do a whole lot. Maybe start spreading Satan’s word again. Get hisself a television ministry, do it that way. Nobody had made much of a splash with Satanism since that Diabolos Whistler fellow had died down in Mexico a couple of years ago. The country was ripe for a fresh dose of the Devil. Deke could feel it in his bones.

Wheezing miserably, the Chihuahua looked up at Deke from its place on the altar. A full bowl of Alpo rested untouched before the little critter.

Deke closed his copy of The Necronomicon and scratched his head. The incantation hadn’t worked.

“Maybe you should try it again,” Mama suggested. She knelt before the altar, taking little sips of strychnine from a silver chalice. “Or maybe it wasn’t written to work on a dog. Maybe you gotta change it around a little.”

“No,” Deke said. “I don’t believe that would work. Mama. And even if it would, I ain’t got no idea how to say Chihuahua in Latin.”

Mama’s dark skin gleamed like a freshly polished cowboy boot, the way it always did when she drank poison. She had been drinking strychnine for thirty-two years, and she hadn’t been sick a single day. Plus she’d been snakebit forty-six times. Mama never got sick from that, either. She trusted in Satan, and Satan looked out for her. Her faith had always been strong.