Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Like I said: okay. Let’s drop it.”

Black shrugged.

“Well, did you do it?”

“Of course I did.” Black pointed at the ear. “Let’s do business, Junior.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Okay. No need to get testy.” Black looked away, at the map. God, he hated this guy. He didn’t care if Whistler had made the cover of Newsweek. That wasn’t anything to him. After all, hadn’t Newsweek put Max Headroom on the cover once? Hadn’t they run that silly story, IS GOD DEAD?

Maybe Time had done that one. Black thought about it but couldn’t remember, and he decided that it didn’t much matter.

Junior took a ziplock bag and a pair of tweezers out of his coat pocket and made a big production of bagging the ear. “We’ll run tests on this, you know. My lab people have Father’s complete medical records, and we’ll know if you’re trying to pull anything.”

“I fulfilled our contract,” Black said simply. “I brought the ear to prove that, per your instructions. It was a fairly easy job, except that it took me a week to find your father. He was staying in a beachfront condo at the tip of Baja, all alone, unless you want to count those mummies that were stacked in the bedroom closet. Anyway, I did him and buried his body at the end of a road that no cop will ever bother with. If you want to know the details, he went pretty easy. I came up from behind and stabbed him just above the first vertebra. He gasped a little bit. Then he started mewling… sounded more like a newborn babe than an eighty-five-year-old master of occult sciences. It didn’t last more than a second or two, but — ”

“That’s enough.”

“No, it’s not. It might be for you, but it’s not for me. If you want me to shut up about it, pay me.” Black grinned. “That’ll shut me up.”

“Come out to the limo.”

“No. That thing looks like a hearse.” Black pretended to scratch his back; his fingers closed on the hilt of the knife. “You put the money in my Toy. I trust you, Junior.”

“Have it your way, Mr. Black.” Whistler left the shack.

Black closed his eyes and used his ears, listening through the wind. He believed you could learn a lot by listening, especially if you knew what to listen for. He heard a car door opening. He was sure that it was a door, not the trunk, and that made him happy; Whistler was the kind of guy who would hide a gun in the trunk if he had one.

The door closed easily, smoothly. Junior was nice and relaxed. Then Black heard a long creak as Whistler opened the door of the Toy.

An instant later he heard a rusty slam.

Black chuckled. “Temper, temper.”

Black was surprised when Whistler returned to the shack.

“I’ve been thinking,” Whistler began. “I could use a man like you on a permanent basis. I’m sure you can appreciate that mine is an organization on the move. With my father out of the way and me at the helm, we’ll be more than just another cult. We’ll be an accepted religion.” He slapped a magazine down on the desk. “Just take a look.”

Newsweek. Black glanced at Junior’s picture above the blurb that read, THE NEW HEDONISM.

Black slid the magazine toward Whistler. “Look, I’m not much of a joiner. You bought me once. You can buy me again, should the need arise. I only work when I need the money.” He smiled. “Besides, I want to see how things develop. I wouldn’t want to make too many commitments with the end of the world so close at hand.”

Whistler laughed.

Black said, “You don’t believe any of it, do you?”

“What?”

“All that stuff your old man preached. All that stuff about a new satanic age coming on the heels of his death. Satan rising from the ruin of Diabolos Whistler’s corpse like Jesus born of Mary. The end of the Christian era and the beginning of — ”

“You’ve been doing your homework, Mr. Black.”

“Hanging around airports, you have plenty of time to read. You run into all sorts of interesting folks selling all sorts of interesting pamphlets.”

“Very funny.” Whistler snatched up the magazine and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Look, this is a job to me. Some people put on suits and ties and run corporations. They tell their stockholders what the chumps want to hear. I put on a black leather jacket and run a religion.”

“But you don’t pay taxes.”

“Come, come, Mr. Black. Neither do the corporations.”

“But your father — ”

Whistler cut him off with a sigh. “My father didn’t have much business sense. He was wasting our money, frittering it away on archaeological expeditions and medieval manuscripts without the slightest concern for the bottom line. Our operation was poised upon the brink of a sinkhole called debt, and my father was determined to shove us over the edge.”

“And now he won’t have the chance.”

“Now he’ll be my ace in the hole. People love a good mystery. They still talk about Ambrose Bierce disappearing into the Mexican desert, don’t they? They even speculate about Jim Morrison… ”

Black yawned. “Morrison died choking on his own vomit in a bathtub in Paris. Your old man died with six inches of steel jammed through his neck.”

Whistler’s breaths came short and hard through flared nostrils. Finally, he said, “You think about my offer. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

“Right. Rodeo Drive.”

“Wrong, Mr. Black. You watch for me on the financial page.”

Whistler left the shack. Black let him go, wondering how long the kid would last. He thought about how nice it would be to milk Junior for some extra green, but he doubted that either of them would be around long enough for that. As it was, Black felt lucky to be paid for this job.

Black closed his eyes. “You go find a lab and play with your ear,” he said. ‘You see if you still think it’s important in a day or two.”

A car door slammed. A sound you could recognize if you knew what to listen for: an angry man hurrying on a treadmill to nowhere.

Headlight beams washed over the grimy window.

Black opened the desk drawer and stared down at a lump of leathery red flesh that came to a twisted point.

When Black severed Whistler Senior’s ear out on that Baja backroad, it looked like any other human ear. But when he arrived at the cemetery shack and removed the ear from the false bottom of his suitcase, he realized what it had become.

The prospector returned to the shack at almost the same moment, thirsty for Brown Derby beer and surprised as hell to see a rusty rice-rocket parked in front of his current digs. Black slipped the ear into the drawer just as the old-timer stepped through the doorway with a big, “ Howdy, stranger. ” Then he listened to the prospector’s story, the old one about milking silver from an abandoned mine up in the mountains.

Mine, hell. One look at the prospector’s flimsy shovel told Black what kind of mining this guy was doing. He’d heard about scavengers who hit abandoned cemeteries, but he’d never run into one. He’d never been eager to mix with that kind of man.

Funny, doing what he did for a living and feeling like that.

So Black let the prospector gab and drink Brown Derby beer. After a while, Black told the old guy that he had an ice chest fall of Anchor Steam out in the Toy’s trunk. Said that he was bringing it in from San Francisco for a buddy, but what the hell. The prospector went for it with a nod and a wrinkled grin — Black imagined that it was the same grin the old guy wore when he hit pay dirt.

In the heat, in the blowing sand, Black stabbed the prospector just above the first vertebra and watched him crumple like a puppet shorn of strings.