Rob Thurman - Trick of the Light

The girl’s forehead wrinkled at the pro bono and I elaborated, “Free.”

“Nothing is free,” she said with prompt suspicion.

“Just come by next weekend and clean out the alley and we’ll call it even.” I finished my tea. “And come by any afternoon and my bar guy Leo will feed Koko. I like dogs.” I leaned across the table and tickled Koko’s belly.

“What about people?” She lowered her head and the brown hair spilled forward, hiding her face.

“People I can take or leave.” I moved to the dog’s chin and it kicked its back legs ecstatically. “But Leo is a softy. If he likes you, he might even feed you too.”

She snorted. “Find my dog for nothing. Free food. You’re a sucker.”

I laughed. No one . . . no one , not in my entire life, had called me a sucker. “Leo will like you all right. He’ll feed you breakfast, lunch, and dinner if you want. It’ll be greasy, but it’ll be food.” I jerked a thumb. “Go out the back through the kitchen. If you happen to see any food lying around, help yourself.”

She hesitated. “Aren’t you going to even ask my name?”

“You don’t know your name. When you figure out what it is, then you can tell me,” I said with a yawn. “And it’s not Alone. That’s no kind of name for anyone. So think on it.”

She vanished almost as quickly as Solomon had, but I doubt he’d taken a loaf of bread and an industrial-sized package of cheese with him. Too bad. He might have found that tastier than eating souls.

The rest of the day I spent napping and popping one more pain pill. They give you weird dreams, those pills. Bright colors, drifting like the wind. I saw Kimano again, but always out of reach. Always moving away. Always leaving me behind. The same as ever they were, only in brighter colors . . . more real, and if I had been just a little faster, I could’ve touched him. Touched his skin. Turned him to see the laughter in his eyes.

Later that night I flushed the rest of the pills down the toilet. Numb my back and claw my heart; it wasn’t a good exchange.

Not at all.

The next morning I went hiking—that would be “hiking” with quotes around it and a good amount of subtext. Leo didn’t want to go with me—he said the limp, shuffle, drag of my hiking boots was giving him flashbacks. I wasn’t sure if those flashbacks were to the last Mummy movie he’d seen or some previous work he’d had at a nursing home as an orderly. Grumbling and bitching aside, he came along in the end. He also brought snacks and a cooler. At least he was good for something, I told him.

“You’ll be begging for that something one day,” he challenged, “and I might not give it to you. Ever think of that, ‘boss’?”

We swapped glances, both responded “Nah,” with a grin, and I started the car. He shrugged and propped his cowboy-booted feet out the window; it was the only way he’d fit in my little racing bug of a car even with the top down. “But there’s no denying you’ve always liked the bad boys. Robin, for example, he couldn’t keep it in his pants if an alligator was undoing the zipper.”

“Oh, come on. You’re exaggerating.” He wasn’t. “And the donkey thing. That was a complete lie.” I was hoping. “Total urban legend.” I turned on a country music station. I didn’t like country music really, but lately the women singers were stomping the hell out of their cheating, lying, no-good men. Blowing up their trucks, setting their houses on fire . . . righteous vengeance. Maybe I should sign up for Eden House. And, lo, we shall smite the sinner with good old country girl ingenuity—all we need are boots and lighter fluid. “And you’re one to talk. You dated that one with the boob job five years ago.” I steadied the wheel with both knees while I held out my hands about two feet in front of me. “They were bigger than the Himalayas. I swear I saw a goat grazing in there, and its shepherd probably suffocated on her perfume.” I dated the bad. Leo dated the bimbos.

He snorted. “Wake me up when we get there.”

In Vegas there are two places: your destination and then the circles of Hell called construction you have to pass through to get there. This time they’d been doing construction under the Spaghetti Bowl, the intersection of I-15 and U.S. 95, for more than a month. Every time I passed through it, I used it as an educational experience to watch the pearification of a man’s ass and to practice the curse words of every language I knew, which, considering how much I’d traveled in my youth, were more than a few. Some days it was entertaining if I didn’t have anyplace better to be. Some days, as I watched an entire line of men sit on a guard-rail and do nothing but swig Gatorade and work on their tans instead of the pavement, it got old.

Today it was old. Very, very old.

Until it wasn’t.

I finally wove my way inch by inch through the orange barrels, and had just snailed my way beneath the shadow of the overpass when the squeal was first heard. Failing brakes, the heart-banging crumple-crunch of metal against asphalt, and in my rearview mirror, the truck tumbling over the side. Its cab’s front wheels caught at the last minute and out of the back catapulted hundreds of cans of red paint. They hit the asphalt, popped their tops, and geysered the scarlet fluid high in the air . . . into a sudden gust of wind that pushed the flood of it sideways. Every still-unmoving, gaping-mouthed “worker” out there was coated in it.

Now wasn’t that lucky?

I put on my brakes and turned for a better look. “Ha!” said the truck driver who’d scrambled to safety. He was pointing down at the workers on the road beneath the overpass. “Take that, you lazy-ass motherfuckers. Next time you hear brakes, I bet you get off that fat ass just like that.” He went on ranting as road worker arms were flung out, dripping red, and blank-eyed bodies shambled through a river of red paint. It was pretty as any picture in those fancy art galleries you’d find in the casinos. I tucked the mental picture away for later savoring as I stepped on the gas again, still watching it all in the mirror until it faded from sight.

Blood from the sky. Who knew laziness would trigger the Apocalypse?

Which put me in the mood for some old, cheesy eighties, heavy metal music, and I listened to that all the way up to the caver’s hovel. When I stopped the car in a cloud of dust, Leo yawned, lifted his hat, and grunted, “I feel very, very angry and in the need of hair spray and a pentacle-studded leather codpiece. Your doing?”

I ignored him and pointed out the shack. “That’s where his body was. I think our best bet is to go into town”—a couple of more shacks and a few mobile homes—“and check out his friends when they come down for supplies.” Today was the day everyone stocked up and caught up. I found that out with a little earlier investigation. But there would be one—one who wouldn’t show up. That would be the one we’d have to go tracking. Jeb had told Hun; he would’ve told someone else. Hun couldn’t be counted as anyone’s best friend and closest and only confidante.

“Too bad your last girlfriend isn’t here. The Amazon. She could’ve piggybacked us into the mountains.” I started the car back toward town.

“She wasn’t an Amazon. She was a nice girl,” he said with a calm that was possibly more annoying than the Amazon had been.

“She was six foot five if she was an inch. She could’ve taken off that belly ring, put it around my neck, and led me about like one of those little yappy dogs.” All right, maybe she’d only been six foot one, but she had been taller than she deserved and her stiletto stripper shoes made her even taller.