David Wong - John Dies at the End

I actually couldn’t name the actor the black guy reminded me of, so I stuck with Morgan Freeman. Though now that I looked at him he bore almost no resemblance. This man was heavier, with round cheeks, a goatee and a shaved head. I couldn’t remember what he said his name was. His white partner had a crew cut with a mustache. Almost a G. Gordon Liddy, a cookie-cutter cop from central casting. I couldn’t help but think how much cooler he would look if he would just shave his head like his partner. Morgan should say something to him about that.

“John is talking?” I asked. “Really?”

“Don’t worry, man. Since you’re both gonna tell the unvarnished truth, you don’t gotta worry about your stories matching, do you? We’re all friendly here. I ain’t here to make you piss in a cup, or to lean on you about all that mess that happened your last year in school with that Hitchcock kid.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with-”

“No, no. Don’t even bother. That’s what I’m sayin’, I’m not here to accuse you of nothin’ at all. Just tell me what you did last night.”

I had a knee-jerk impulse to lie, but realized at the last second that I hadn’t actually done anything illegal. Not as far as I knew. Sounding guilty anyway, I said, “Went to a party out by the lake. I came home just after midnight. I was asleep by two.”

“You sure about that? You sure you didn’t go over to the One Ball Inn down on Grand Avenue for a nightcap?”

“What’s a nightcap?”

“Your buddies were all there.”

Well, officer, I really only have the one friend…

“No, I had work this morning. As you know. I went straight home.”

I knew I should be talking about the Jamaican. Only my knee-jerk impulse to never volunteer anything to the cops was holding me back. That was stupid. Robert Marley should be sitting here, not me. He was the one handing out the black voodoo oil that seems to have put a crack in the universe. That’s got to be a felony, right?

I thought about that shit, moving, out of the syringe like a worm. Then I thought of that substance being inside John, and shivered.

“You feelin’ okay?”

I heard myself say, “Uh huh.”

As I said it, a strange, jittery energy rose up inside me, radiating from the chest out.

The syringe.

In my pocket.

Biting my leg.

The spot of blood.

Moving. Inside John. Inside me.

All of a sudden everything was too bright, like somebody turned up the saturation on all the colors in the room. Everything came into high focus, a high-def signal. I spotted a moth on the opposite wall, and noticed a small tear in one of its wings. I heard a guy talking on his cell, and realized he was on the sidewalk outside the building.

What the fuck?

I looked the detective in the eye. I was startled to find I could see his next question coming before he even spoke it, word-for-word…

Have you heard the name…

“Have you heard the name Nathan Curry? Guy your age, parents own a body shop here in town?”

My heart was hammering. I muttered, “No.”

How about Shelby Winder?

“How about Shelby Winder? Heavy girl, senior at East Side High? Ring a bell?”

“No. Sorry.”

Clarity lit up my mind like a sunrise. Everything was obvious now, all the walls of the maze turned to glass. I immediately knew two things: this list of people had all been at the party last night…

And they were all now dead or heading there.

Now how do I know that? How do I know any of this? Magic?

You know damn well why. That black shit John took made blood contact with you. Now you’re getting high, partner.

He asked, “What about Jennifer Lopez?”

“Oh. Yeah. I know her.”

“Not the actress, now, but-”

“I know. I saw her last night. Is she okay?”

“Arkeym Gibbs?”

“No. Wait, yeah. Big guy, right? Black? I don’t know him, but he was the only black guy in my high school…”

I trailed off, studied the detective’s face. No, this was not another day at the office for this guy. He’s seen things, the kind of things that sit in the brain, like a tumor, poisoning everything around it. I saw all through him, just like that.

He’s got two kids, two beautiful daughters. He’s suddenly very, very worried about the world they’ll grow up in. He’s Catholic, wears a gold cross around his neck. But today he’s taken it off, put it in his pocket. He keeps sticking his hand down there and rubbing it between his fingers. He thinks the end of the world is coming.

It’s not that I could read the cop’s mind. I couldn’t. I just read his face. We all can tell by the look in somebody’s eyes that they don’t think our joke is funny or that they don’t like what they’re eating or whatever. It was just like that. The information was there, presented in the subtle play of facial muscles from microsecond to microsecond.

He read off more names. Justin White, Fred something, a couple others. I didn’t recognize any of them and told him so. The last name on the list was Jim Sullivan.

So Cucumber was right to worry .

I didn’t tell Morgan I knew the name. In the years since I’ve wondered how many lives could have been saved if I had.

“You’re not outta school even three years. You went to high school with most of these people, East Side. But you only knew the one girl?”

“I kind of kept to myself.”

“And then you got shipped off to the other school-”

“Look, I’m not saying anything else until you tell me whether Jennifer is dead or alive. That ain’t confidential information and I deserve to know.”

Don’t bother. He doesn’t know.

“We don’t know. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why I got six hours of overtime already today. At least nine people were at the One Ball at closing time, twelve hours ago. Four of them are missing. Your friend is here.”

He paused, probably for effect.

“The rest are dead.”

It’s funny. Up until that point, despite all the evidence that had been provided to the contrary, it had never hit home how much trouble I was really in. I thought about John, again wondering if I had killed him by not rushing him to the ER.

I turned and looked at myself in the one-way mirror. The image was distorted, the other cop out of range at the back of the room. What was left was just me and Morgan, the clean-cut protector of the people, standing tall over the slumped, unshaven kid in a battered video store T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wadded up on a car floorboard for two days. Good guy and bad guy. Trash man and trash.

“What about Justin Feingold and the guys John was with?” I asked. “Kelly and-”

“They’re fine. I’ve already talked to ’em, the whole band. They went home before the party moved on. Which brings us to my next question. Your friend is the only known survivor of the One Ball Inn and-now don’t take offense at this-but he ain’t lookin’ too healthy right about now. Did he say anything this morning at work? Maybe while you guys were putting away the last night’s porno returns?”

The white cop across the room stepped forward, put his hands on his hips. Waiting for an answer. Morgan left his gaze on me, calmly waited for me to fill the tense silence. Old interrogation trick.

“John called me last night, talking crazy, clearly out of it. Paranoia, hallucinations, the whole bit. This would have been around five A.M. I came over. He was acting, well, crazy. Seein’ things. But otherwise okay. Conscious, you know. Not, like, puking or convulsing or anything. I calmed him down, we went and got some food. That was that. We went to work.”