Stefan Petrucha - Dead Mann Walking

I had to talk fast, real fast.

“Haze? It’s Mann. Don’t hang up.”

He hung up. I dialed again.

“Look, we both know what you think of me, so before you hang up again, just think for a second that it must be something pretty important. I’d need a damn good reason, right?”

The silence that followed was achingly long, a void in the air like the gaps in my memory. Finally he answered, voice deader than any chak’s. Two words: “Go on.”

I told him some of what I knew, leaving out any mention of Booth. I tried to make it sound like a psycho was involved, that maybe Turgeon, a liveblood, was in danger. When he didn’t cut me off immediately, I slowed down, let him fill in the blanks, but in the end he just said, “So what?”

“Haze, let me have a terminal for an hour, anytime, day or night. One hour. I swear if it doesn’t pan out I’ll lie down and let you kick the shit out of me all day long.”

“I wouldn’t want to get my shoes dirty, you son of a bitch.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Another pause, then: “Sign a confession. Gimme a statement saying you killed her.”

I clamped my mouth so tightly I nearly crushed a molar. One wrong word and I’d lose him. I wanted to tell him I didn’t do it, but between the two of us, how many times had we heard that from a perp? And I didn’t even really remember. I took a different tack.

“A statement from a chak isn’t admissible in court.”

“I know. Call it a souvenir.”

“What about the liveblood? What about Turgeon?”

“That’s why I’m making the offer, on the off chance you didn’t imagine the whole thing. Find something real on him, you can let me know. Right now I’ve gotta take a piss, then have a drink so I can forget we had this conversation. Do we have a deal?”

“Fine.”

“Back entrance, midnight. You get half an hour.” He hung up.

Never has any idiot, alive or dead, been happier to have successfully invited himself into hell.

15

Unfortunately, Ashby insisted on tagging along. He’d gathered from the conversation with Misty that all the excitement had something to do with Frank, and his loyalty to Boyle trumped whatever he saw in Misty. It was as if there was a whole amusement park in his head, and all day long, all the rides were free.

I couldn’t see Booth pulling two late nights in the same week, and I’d just been in and out of the morgue, so I figured it was as safe as it was going to get. I thought about bringing Misty, too, but she was into the packing. Besides, for all I knew there might be outstanding charges against her, and I never knew when the fact that the police didn’t connect us might come in handy. She wasn’t eager to come with, in any case.

With so much business in Fort Hammer conducted long after dark, the buses run late. I used to think the city looked better at night because you can see less of it, but in some places what you don’t see makes it worse. There are spots along those streets where the shadows vibrate like they’re hungry, others where the inky nothing is plain sad.

Around about Eastman Avenue, it gets even darker than that. No one’s bothered to fix the streetlights for years. Block after block, the only light came from the headlights on our bus. What didn’t shine on potholes caught the husks of empty stores and apartment buildings, the spaces between the structural supports all holding a blackness thick as tar.

I was keeping it together pretty well until then. Now I was getting tense, imagining Booth leaping from the dark, clippers in hand. Adding to my sense of vulnerability, the windowpane by our seat was missing. If my nightmare decided to come through, the only thing to stop the blade would be the air.

At last the fluorescents in an all-night gas station appeared, a rectangular moon in a parking-lot sky. My threat level dropped a bit, but when the bus stopped across the street from the gas station, it was Ashby’s turn to get antsy. Apparently he didn’t like it when the bus stopped.

I nudged his shoulder and pointed at the lights, thinking they’d distract him.

Big mistake. He zeroed in on the station’s one customer, so I started watching, too.

“Big boned” is a nice way of saying fat , but there are no fat chakz, and some really do have big bones. This guy’s shoulders were door-wide, so he had to wear oversize clothes. With no meat below the rib cage, though, the T-shirt and denim jacket may as well have been on a hanger. His ride, an old pickup, was full of cans and bottles, stuff he could get a nickel a pop for, if the street people let him near a recycling machine.

He was at the pump, had the nozzle in his hand, but for whatever reason he couldn’t seem to get it into the gas tank. Weirder still, each try was lazier than the last. He didn’t stop trying; he just got slower and slower. I was as fascinated as Ashby, watching him push the nozzle against the side of the truck again and again, wondering if it would ever go in. After a while, it looked like he was missing on purpose.

Clunk . He tried. Clunk . Again.

Then he started talking. No window, so it was easier to hear what he had to say.

“Who gives a fuck?” he said loudly. “Who gives a fuck?”

“A fuck . . . heh-heh,” Ashby parroted.

I had a bad feeling. “Maybe you shouldn’t be looking out there, Ashby.”

I fished in my pockets, hoping to find something shiny he could play with. The only thing I had was my recorder and the bills, and I wasn’t about to hand either over.

The light changed, so I figured we’d be spared the rest of the scene. Only the bus driver didn’t move. He was busy staring at the chak, too.

“Who gives a fuck?” the chak said again.

He stretched the last word. It melted into a familiar tone that matched the rumble of the bus. I knew that tone. One feral coming up. That chak was going down hard. Any minute, he’d be moaning. I had no idea why, but I doubted it was the nozzle. Maybe he’d had the worst day in his unlife, or maybe he’d just had enough.

No reason we had to watch, though.

I called to the driver, “Buddy, light’s green!”

He gave me a dirty look, then went back to staring.

“Light’s green, heh-heh.”

I tried again. “Maybe you want to get out of here?”

“Who gives a . . .” the chak said one last time.

His moaning started in midsentence, low and long, a nice, deep, vibrating bass. Some lesser blues bands, looking for a gimmick, experimented with working moaners into their music, until they realized that the sound could make other chakz go.

The chak had a look on his face. He knew it; he knew he was going. That’s the worst, to feel yourself slipping away. I guess he could have let go gracefully, but instead he pulled the safety back on the nozzle, squeezed, and squirted a stream of pinkish liquid at the gas cap, like he hoped some would seep into the tank.

It splashed on the truck, on the chak, on the ground. The warm air quickly carried the stink to the bus.

“Will you go?” I called again. The bus driver was riveted worse than Ashby.

Still moaning, but not quite gone yet, the chak leaned against the car and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. Once the coffin nail was in his mouth he pulled out a lighter.

After that, it all happened fast. A stringy-haired attendant in the cashier booth, who looked like he belonged in high school, grabbed a double-barreled shotgun and rushed out. The bus driver, suddenly awake, pulled a gun from under his seat and, despite my warnings about how firing a gun with all that gas was just as bad as striking a match, popped open the door and rushed out.

They kept a good distance as they pointed their guns and screamed, “Stop!” at him. Maybe they were thinking they could scare him into dropping the lighter, but they couldn’t. He opened his mouth, teeth cracked and yellow. He didn’t moan. He howled an animal threat, loud enough to make them back off another five feet.