R.Scott Bakker: Disciple of the dog

I took a roundabout way, stopped on one of the bridges, tossed my beloved Colt into the river. What a pisser.

“Why do you drive this piece of shit?” she asked as I climbed back in.

“Because I’m a loser,” I snapped back. “Ruly-truly.”

I get prickly about my car.

I began talking about the case, as a distraction as much as anything else-the way couples with rotten relationships find common purpose in slagging the friends they both despise. In a sense, the two of us found ourselves on opposite ends of the incentive spectrum. Everything had gone swimmingly for Molly-even her abduction would find its lucrative way into print somehow, I imagined. In the space of a weekend she had become the go-to girl for what was becoming America’s latest media crime fetish. I thought of the economic consequences. A million bottles of shampoo sold. Ten thousand Toyotas. Wild swings of market share… one, maybe even two points-who knew? Enough for Buffett to start unloading shares of Gillette…

The more I considered it, the more it seemed that everybody was making out like a bandit except me. I was even out my gun. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is finding an unregistered.45 automatic? How fucking expensive?

Her elbow propped against the door, Molly leaned into the towel she held pressed against her head. She had that struggling-to-stay-awake look you see on the faces of so many critical incident survivors.

“So if it isn’t Nill…” she said, gazing into nowhere.

“Who knows. Could have been one of his cronies, like I said.” This was my secret hope, but I was dubious.

“But then why would they help him abduct me?” she asked. “I mean, if the idea was to get Nill to self-destruct, you’d think they would’ve found some way to bail…”

I glimpsed Tim, his tears blue-green with reflected dashboard light. Did he have a role to play in all of this?

Nah.

“Maybe it was this Leighton guy he mentioned,” I said. “Or the Mexicans.”

Always easy to blame the Mexicans.

“Or Baars,” she said.

“Or someone who thinks they’re helping Baars.”

I glimpsed Stevie, watching me from behind the world reflected across plate glass.

“What do you mean?” she said, turning to study my profile.

“Tim told me that Nill and Baars had a sit-down. Well, what if one of the Framers thinks Baars made a mistake giving Ruddick to the Thirds? You know, like a Starfleet versus the Klingons thing…”

She almost laughed.

We tunnelled through the Pennsylvania dark. I found myself hating my poor little Golf. I hated the look of it. I hated the sour-milk smell of it. No power steering. No air conditioning. It even had manual windows, for fuck’s sake. I hated the fact that I was embarrassed that Molly had to sit in it. Tin fucking can.

Fucking Nazi car, that’s what it was.

So that pretty much summed up my situation. No leads. No gun.

Three more souls on my conscience (I had this fucked-up image of Nill braining Fucknut and Dipshit to make sure they were dead-dead). And a total shit-box for a car.

God hated me, the thin-skinned prick.

Oh well… At least I had saved the babe. Finding the hospital took some doing. I navigated the maze, wondering how heart-attack sufferers ever made it to the Emergency doors alive.

“I’ll just drop you off here,” I said, braking in front.

“It’s okay,” she replied, in the thoughtless way of couples, actually.

“I’m quite capable of walking from the parking lot.”

She looked at me in vague alarm when I didn’t release the brake.

“Sorry, Molls. Disciple doesn’t do health care facilities.”

Feminine Dismay slackened her expression. Another old friend.

“But… but how am I supposed to get home?”

“You have a credit card, don’t you?”

“Yeah…”

“I’ll catch you back at the motel, then.”

Cold, huh? But like I told Molly, me and hospitals do not mix. I got my reasons-specific reasons. But even in general, they’re anathema to people like me. Delivering babies on the top floor, stacking bodies in the basement. Hospitals are the one place where death and birth meet, where the human circuit, you might say, is closed.

Where only earnest voices have the wind to speak. Track Thirteen

Monday… Knuckles on aluminum. Knocking. Persistent knocking, wandering into consciousness from the edges.

If I hadn’t known it was her, I probably would’ve just rolled over to the other side of the bed, planted my face in the cool pillow. Only cops were prick enough to roust you out of bed this early in the morning.

But it was Molls, of course, looking at once perky and exhausted in the morning light. Traffic roared behind her. “They kept me overnight for observation.”

“Perverts,” I replied, grinning.

It took her a moment, but she got the joke. So much had happened that it seemed weeks ago, that night she caught me staring at her in the dark.

“I should be pissed,” she said. “I kept asking myself what kind of guy saves the girl just to dump her off at Emergency.”

“And?” I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes.

“And I decided… well… I don’t know what I decided.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“As soon as you grow a backbone, I’m through.”

A breath of laughing air. She stepped across the threshold, no longer needing to be invited. Her arms clung. Her kisses came hot and hard. We lay in bed, beneath the warm glow of the sun smouldering through the discoloured curtains. Our smell filled the room, salty and mellow. Her head on my shoulder, she had been describing her short stay in the Meaford County Hospital, and the enormous 1,342-dollar-and-61-cent bill she had charged against her MasterCard-just to find out she hadn’t suffered a concussion. When I asked her whether she still wanted to press charges against Nill, she waved the thought away, saying that it would give her a stake in her story, compromise her journalistic independence.

Not because it could land me in the can or anything.

“Things are ramping up, Disciple… seriously ramping up. As big as the JonBenet Ramsey circus…”

“So what are you doing here with me?”

Something crept into her eyes. “Because we need to figure… to figure this out.”

“We have plenty of time to sort things, Molls.”

She bent her face down, away from my scrutiny. “What if we don’t have time?” she said strangely. “What if…”

“What do you mean?” I asked. She was little more than a mop of red hair against my shoulder.

She turned, climbed my chest to better match my gaze, let go an oh-my sigh. “I think… I think I’m falling for you.”

Fawk…

I tried not to swallow, but it was too late. “Don’t say that.”

“Say what? That I’ve never met a man like you? That I… I love you?”

Owich. Can you believe this shit?

“No.No, Molls. You can’t love me.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because I’m not safe…” I tend to become vague in exchanges like these. To leave room for future bullshit rationales, I suspect.

“But isn’t love about risks?”

“No. Not at all. If you can’t feel safe with the person you love, you spend your whole life on the run.”

Can you believe it? Instead of pulling out a can of whup-ass, I opened a club pack of Oprah.

Why do I do this? Why do I always make things so hard? For me. For them. Lying is always so much easier-so much safer. And yet I really only do it when things don’t matter.

What the fuck’s my problem?

“But I feel safe,” she said. “I really do.” A goofy little laugh, as short as a hiccup. Her left hand had settled on my chest. The pad of her ring finger pressed across my right nipple. “I’m not sure I’ve ever felt safer.”