Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

"Oh, gee, isn't that sensitive," she laughed. "Get real. You don't want to understand the dead any more than we want to understand you. There's plenty of what I guess you'd call common ground though." Her eyes went to my pants. "Isn't that what this is all about?"

She was putting it right on the line. I wondered why the living so rarely did that. Why we always played these goddamn games.

"I hear you," I said. "You call it."

The next piece of octopus she picked off Neal's plate she seemed to swallow whole.

"Okay. Who's going home with me?"

The question was for all three of us but she directed it straight at me. Those eyes again. A beautiful, perfect dead girl's eyes.

"Who wants to know what it's really like…to do it with someone like me?"

I finished my drink and called for the tab. "She's not beating around the bush," I said, sounding a whole lot more confident than I felt. "Gentlemen? Neal?"

He shook his head. "I'm a married man, boys. No can do.”

“John?"

His face went blank. You could practically hear his brain ticking off the countless possibilities, all the pros and cons. Then he stood up. "I'm there," he said.

We paid and followed her to the street.

It was hot that day but the night seemed hotter still. The streets were more crowded than usual, a forced march of barhoppers searching out liquid relief.

"If you don't mind my asking," I said, "how did you…?"

"Die?" The question didn't faze her. "Brain tumor. Simple."

I wanted to ask her more. It was common wisdom that it was the brain that mobilized the dead and that destroying it was how you put them down for good. So it stood to reason that any damage there, like a tumor, would at least cause some dysfunction. But she was functioning perfectly. I wondered why.

I didn't ask, though. Too clinical, too damn anti-erotic. And we were moving along at the fast pace she set for us like a couple of slightly woozy dogs trotting behind their mistress.

Booze, beauty and forbidden sex. It'll make a dog of you every time. "Can you believe we're actually doing this?" I whispered to John.

He shot me a look and a grin. "Well, yeah!"

"I dunno…something's not right."

"Hey. You're the one who's always mouthing off about how the dead should have equal rights. So what about equal shtupping rights? She wants some action, we're the guys who're gonna give it to her. And she's the one who asked for it. So what's the problem?"

It made sense, I guess.

He nudged me. "And if she gets froggy? Relax." He flipped up the front of his shirt and I saw the snubnose stuck in his belt.

"Come on, guys," she called over her shoulder. Her voice lilting like a song. "I mean, exactly who's dead here?"

She lived in a split row house up on 89th and Amsterdam. Welfare housing. Not exactly a total dump but pretty damn close. Her high heels tapped up the stairs. You could smell piss faintly in the dimly-lit stairwell — did the dead still piss? — and half-erased graffiti swirls decorated the walls. Nothing to deter us. Not when you could look up and see that Class-A butt riding up and down in those jeans. We were beyond the point of no return now. That primordial toggle in the male brain had been switched to the on position for the duration.

She unlocked triple deadbolts. It looked like somebody'd smeared shit on the door. I hoped it was just more bad graffiti. Then she opened the door and switched on the lights and stepped inside. For a moment we just stood there.

"You gotta be shitting me," John said.

Inside it looked like the Presidential Suite at the St. Regis. Whatever that might look like. Russet wall-to-wall carpet, long sable couches, finely crafted Hepplewhite furniture and one of those fifty-inch-screen tube TV’s in the corner. Some pretty high-end art hung from the walls and the curtains could've been Byzantine tapestries.

We stepped inside.

"Some joint," John said.

Our hostess didn't respond. She just stood there appraising us while we moved into the room and looked around. I finally stated the obvious question.

"I thought that…that the dead lived on public assistance.”

“Only because that's all that people like you will allow us.”

“Come again?"

"Hey! What's this 'people like you' bullshit? You invited us here, remember?" said John.

"True. I don't have to appreciate your politics though, do I?"

"No, you don't. Though my buddy here's a liberal Democrat. But how about you cool it with the big bitch attitude, okay? Be nice."

She nodded, smiling. "Okay. Back to the subject. You wanted to know how I can afford all this, right?"

"Yeah."

She slipped the tank top up over her head. Underneath she was naked.

And perfect.

"What do you think?" she said.

John groaned. "Ah, I should've known. A fuckin' hooker. Hey, are we fuckin' morons or what?"

"That's not the deal," I told her. I was seriously pissed off. "You came on to us and all we did was go along. We don't pay for it."

"You will tonight," she said.

She slipped a big semi-auto out from behind the phone stand by the door in less time than it takes me to swallow. The gun had a long black can on the end of it. A silencer.

She pointed it at John. "And Johnny," she said, "don't even think about pulling that little pea-shooter in your belt. Between your shirt and your beer-gut that thing's been harder to miss than what passes for your dick. Thumb and forefinger, champ. Take it out and drop it on the floor. Slow." John hesitated. She cocked her gun.

"If you don't, I'll punch so many holes in you you'll whistle when the wind blows. Count of three, tough guy. One, two…"

He parted the shirt, reached down and dropped the gun to the floor. "Now wallets. Toss 'em over here by my feet."

We did that too. You didn't have to have a doctorate from M.I.T. to figure out now how she'd furnished her apartment. She wasn't a whore, she was an armed robber, luring guys to her apartment and then ripping them off.

A dead armed robber.

And we knew what she looked like. And we knew where she lived. She wasn't letting us out of here alive.

John looked at me and I looked at him. And I thought we were saying something a whole lot like goodbye when she fired the shot into his chest. The silenced report sounded like a single light clap of hands. He went down like a wall of mason blocks. She'd hit him directly in the heart, blood arcing a yard up out of the bullet hole.

I watched the arc dwindle. To nothing.

"I hope you sad fucks have some decent credit cards."

Now the gun was on me. She was enjoying this. Her nipples were as long as thumbnails. I wondered if she'd always been this way or if the tumor had turned her vicious.

"Listen," I said. I was shaking. "We can work this out somehow. We can…"

"Shut up." She fired two more rounds into the side of John's head. The side of his skull blew off and brains like old clotted oatmeal flecked with red were suddenly all over the floor.

I understood the russet carpet.

"Wouldn't want him to come back. Would we? The world's a better place without that drunken troll."

All I could do was stand there expecting to die in seconds. I couldn't move. I felt stupid and slightly sad, like I'd lost an old friend. And not John, either.

"So now me?" I managed to say. "Just like that?"

She laughed. "You mean, 'after all we've had together?' Not necessarily."

She was holding the gun almost lazily — like you'd hold a phone receiver you weren't exactly going to use right away. But there was a good ten feet between us. If I went for it I'd be dead on the floor right next to John.

"You can't get out," she said. "The door locks automatically, the windows are barred and you can yell and scream all you want to but let me tell you, the neighbors won't complain."