CHAPTER 9
The Bratwurst Prophecy
IT WAS RONALD McDonald’s eyes that haunted me.
I had gotten hungry for bratwurst and had been walking toward the entrance of one of the four McDonald’s franchises in Undisclosed (if you think it’s weird getting a bratwurst from a McDonald’s, then you’re not from the Midwest). I glanced at the cartoon clown logo in the window and let out a scream.
Just a little scream, and a manly one. But I still frightened one little girl on the sidewalk so badly that she screamed, too.
I couldn’t help it. It was one of those clear plastic static signs, pressed to the inside of the glass with the cartoon image filling most of that pane. The cloud of red hair, the size sixty red shoes, the yellow suit, and the, well . . .
I reached out and brushed my fingers over the glass.
The image is so perfectly drawn, I thought. So vivid.
Other late-night customers brushed past me and cast quick, stealthy glances my way, looking at the crazy man with the beard stubble and the ruffled dark hair. But they didn’t see what I saw, I was sure of that.
No, they saw the happy clown with his arms spread wide, one leg cocked at a forty-five-degree angle with one red floppy clown shoe tipped up into the air, big smile spread across his red-and-white face, welcoming paying customers into his burger factory. I remembered it from the last hundred times I had been here.
What I saw at the moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly open, as if cut with a dull utility razor. He was—how can I put this delicately? In this perfectly rendered and shaded cartoon he was using his own white-gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth.
Detailed. Yes. It was very, very detailed.
But it was those eyes that got me. His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a terror about to boil over into madness. Tears streaked his face, sweat beaded his forehead. Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed to be put out of his misery. Those eyes told a story, not just of a man eating himself, but of a man being forced to eat himself.
And only I saw it.
I closed my eyes, looked again. Still there. Not shimmering like a mirage in the desert or some blur out the corner of your eye. It just clung to the window in its brazen thereness, real right down to the little plastic corners peeling up from the glass.
I turned away, tried to clear my head, to concentrate. Then I spun back at the image. There. For just a split second, I saw the normal logo, the way everybody else saw it. Happy corporate clown. Then it blurred back to the corrupted version again. This time there was text.
The usual MCDONALD’S—I’M LOVIN’ IT! slogan was replaced by a jumble of crazed red letters saying,
MCWONGALD’S—SHIT LUNCH TURDWOMAN
Some would have doubted their sanity at this point, but by now the part of my mind that issued doubts about my sanity had melted from overuse. I went back to my car and just drove around town for several hours, my appetite gone.
It had my fucking name in it. McWongald’s. What the fuck.
They haunt minds.
Someone was talking to me, from that other side. I pictured floating black figures and eyes like cigarette embers. I pictured a single blue eye in the darkness. I felt sick.
My orbit around the town finally degraded and I crash-landed at John’s apartment. I told him the McWongald’s story, hoping he’d say something like, “That’s some weird shit” and start untangling two controllers from one of his many game consoles. Instead, he said, “Get up.”
I stood and realized I had been sitting on a stack of three cardboard boxes. He opened the flaps on one to reveal that it was full of hardback books.
“Wait, what’s all that?”
“Dr. Marconi’s book.”
“You have a hundred and fifty copies of it?”
“Oh, right. You don’t remember. In Vegas, we were walking out the back and Marconi makes some comment about how we should read his book. You were all ‘fuck you old man’ and I said sure. Then I grabbed a dolly and wheeled out a whole stack. Just staring at him coldly the whole time I was wheeling them backward out the door. Daring that fucker to stop me.”
“Why?”
“They were free, Dave. Anyway, he says something in here . . .” John flipped pages. “It’s around the beginning somewhere. I don’t see it right now—maybe it was in a different book—but anyway he says that when you read the Bible, the Devil looks back at you through the pages.”
“What, like his Bible was possessed? Holy shit, he must have been the worst priest ever.”
“No. He says when you’re dealing with any kind of supernatural beings, Gods and Devils and angels, you tend to think about them like hurricanes or earthquakes, some kind of mindless force of nature. But if they’re real, then they have minds. They know your name. So even reading about the Devil tips him off, he knows instantly he’s being read about and that you’re somebody he may have to deal with. And I’m thinking what you did in Vegas went way, way beyond that.”
“What ‘I’ did? What about us? We were both there.”
“Yeah but I cut my hair since then. They probably think that was a different guy.”
I closed my eyes and collapsed onto John’s futon. I said, “The thing. The wig monster. Does it still come around?”
“No, haven’t seen it in months. Except about three weeks ago I was eating a corn dog, the thing appeared, snatched it out of my hand, and disappeared again. Never saw it after that.”
“No more of this. Okay? It’s over. No more chasing after this stuff. They’ve set up camp inside my head, John. It’s gone too far.”
John’s mouth said, “Okay” but his eyes said, What makes you think you can just walk away?
“Let’s order a pizza.”
THE PIZZA TASTED like rotten eggs. Just to me, not to John. The rest of that week, every meal smelled like formaldehyde or paint thinner. I decided it was them, messing with me. Punching random buttons in my brain. When they got bored with that, they switched senses. I would hear my name as I drifted off to sleep, as if spoken six inches from my ear. Over and over again.
Molly started to get agitated, growling at things in the darkness, prowling around our bed at all hours of the night as if keeping watch. Early one morning she woke me up, pressing her wet nose against my elbow. I went to let her outside, and she went sprinting down the street. She didn’t look back.
Not long after that, they—whoever “they” were—tried something new. The radio. I would hear entire songs changed, twisted. I got dancey and lighthearted beats under lyrics about prison rape or incest and, once, a version of “Stairway to Heaven” with my name edited in throughout. This new version that blared over the speakers of a busy shopping mall (though only I heard it, of course) was a list of all my chronic sins and vices, a musical rundown of all the reasons I, David Wong, was destined for Hell. It got to me, I admit. Even if their version of “Stairway” barely rhymed. What rhymes with masturbation?
I slowly came to the realization that these shadowy beings had the crude sense of humor of fourteen-year-olds.
That’s when things started to disintegrate between me and Jen. Our entire relationship had been a process of slow disintegration, I think. She knew something was up, mainly because there were so many more ’80s power ballads around the house than usual. She pestered me until I came clean and told her what was going on.
She nodded and said she understood, then left to go to her friend Amber’s house, ostensibly to help out with Amber’s new baby. She seemed to have taken all of her clothes with her, though, and didn’t come back that night. I sat there, depressed, thinking about coming home to the silent house night after night. Without even Molly for company.
On an evening a few weeks later, I was driving home from work with one thought cycling through my brain: I would go to the grocery store, buy a pie, and just eat the whole thing. In one sitting. A whole pie.
My radio was playing a supernaturally reworked version of an ’80s song by some Duran Duran soundalike band. It was the one with the word “Africa” in the chorus, and this version had been twisted into some kind of a racist diatribe against blacks. I tried to block it out, turning my attention to the call. Toto, that was the band’s name.
My cell phone rang.
Shocked, as always, that I had actually left it on, I fished around inside my jacket for the chirping thing. Caller ID showed John’s number. I punched the button and said:
“No.”
“Dave, glad I caught you. I just got a call from my uncle. He’s asked us to come in on a case. Like consultants.”
“Your uncle? The exotic dancer? Exactly what kind of ‘consulting’ would we be doing?”
“No, no, Uncle Drake. The cop. They got weirdness and they want us to come look at it. The crime scene is at Eight-eighteen West Twenty-third Street. By the mall.”
This stopped me. The cops called us? What, they got a ghost they want us to check out? Like we’re fucking Scooby-Doo?
“No. We talked about this. I’m going home to eat a pie.”
“I think they found Molly.”
“What?”
Molly? What, did she steal another car?
“Come get me. See you in a few.”
“I’m not going, John. I—”
I was talking to a dead phone.
I cursed and rubbed my forehead. The radio sang its bigotry in perfect ’80s pop harmony.
Let’s send ’em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica . . .
I reached down to the knob, to find the radio was already off.
Here we fucking go.
I PICKED UP John at his building, since it turned out his supernatural powers couldn’t stop the bank from repossessing his motorcycle.
We turned onto 23rd Street, a lineup of perfect new houses with trendy coffee-cream-colored siding and a shiny SUV in each driveway. Finding the house was easy—it was the one with the swirling red-and-blue cop lights out front, the collected cop cars making it look like the ship from Close Encounters had landed there.
One guy tells us to turn back, and we go, I thought as we pulled up a block away from the commotion. Any one of those guys says “boo” and we turn around and never come back here.
We passed a blue Jeep in the driveway, license plate STRMQQ 1. John studied it, frowning a little. Four cops stood out on the front lawn, looking unsure, like they all needed each other’s armed company right now. Eight eyes landed on us.
“Don’t worry,” John said to them. “We’re here.”
Each cop was individually pissed off by that, I could see, and it was only the arrival of John’s uncle Drake that spared us the confrontation with these guys who clearly had no idea who we were. Drake was a big guy, with a uniform that stretched and bulged around the middle. He sported an uneven mustache that I think he grew to cover a scar on his upper lip.
“Hey, Johnny. I really appreciate you comin’ by like this.”
He gave John a hard, manly handshake.
“So what’s goin’ on?”
“Do you, uh, know whose house this is?”
“Strom Cuzewon?” John offered.
A moment of confused silence from Drake.
“Um, no. It’s Ken Phillipe, the Channel Five weather guy.”
“Oh,” said John, seeming unsatisfied. I glanced back at the plates, STRMQQ 1.
“The Qs are supposed to look like a pair of eyes,” I informed John. “The license plate means ‘Storm Watcher.’ ”
John looked at the plates, then back at me, then at the plates again. I noticed for the first time that the big bay window into the living room of the house had been bashed in, the curtains behind it rustling in the breeze. Finally John said, “So somebody killed the weather guy?”
Drake grunted. “Sorta. Damnedest thing you ever saw.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“We ain’t been inside the house yet. There’s this, dog.” To me he said, “John here said he thought it sounded like yours.”
I couldn’t see around the bay window curtains, so I walked up to the front door and peered into the decorative little window, into the living room. A girl sat on an overstuffed leather couch, maybe a few years younger than me, silken auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. Little wisps of bangs drifted down over her smooth forehead, just above her gorgeous almond eyes. She wore cutoff sweatshorts and had the most perfect pair of tanned thighs I have ever seen. I felt my hand instinctively go up to straighten my hair and I was suddenly horribly aware of every physical flaw on my body. Every ounce of fat, the little scar on my cheek.
If I looked like that, I would wear shorts in October, too. I’d quit my job and spend all day at home, gently caressing myself. Did I shave today?
On the floor next to the couch was a bloody dead person.
“That’s the weather guy?” I asked.
“Yeah,” confirmed Drake.
“Do you see the girl sitting on the couch?”
“Look, buddy, I told ya we’ve tried to get to her in there, but the dog . . .”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I just wanted to know if you could see her.”
“That’s Krissy Lovelace, their neighbor. She’s been sitting like that since we got here, frozen. We even tried to signal to her but she won’t respond. Like she’s just blanked out.”
“So she killed him?”
“No, his throat was torn out. By the dog. It’s still in there. That’s the problem. Every time we try to get in, it—”
“Damn,” I interrupted. “It’s too bad this city doesn’t have a special department to, you know, control animals. Oh, wait. We do. It’s called Animal Control. Do you want their number?”
“Wait a second,” said John. “You’re saying Molly did that?” He turned to me. “Dave, we sat there and poked at Molly with a stick for exactly twenty-three minutes that one time before she even growled. She couldn’t do that to a man.”
“No,” Drake said. “You still don’t understand. My guys won’t even go in and I don’t blame ’em. It’s somethin’ . . . unnatural.”
I peered in again. “Well, I don’t see a dog. And I’m not seeing why we can’t just—”
Molly came into view. It was her all right, the rusty coat of an Irish retriever or whatever she was, now shampooed and combed to perfection. Her new owner apparently groomed her more than I had. This combination of girl and dog could make a good living as models in the dog-supply industry.
The only other thing that was different about Molly was the blood staining her muzzle and the fact that she was floating three feet off the floor.
Molly’s legs were stiff below her as she moved, buzzing slowly across the room as if on a track and hung by invisible threads. When Molly came near the door she turned her head my way and in a clear but guttural voice said, “I serve none but Korrok.”
Molly continued to float around the room like a shaggy little blimp.
Here. We. Go. Again.
I TURNED FROM the door. John had this look on his face like this was all routine. Ah, yes, a floating-dog scenario. We have the parts in the truck.
Drake said, “A neighbor saw it, said Krissy was just walking the dog along the street out there and all of a sudden the thing takes off. The damned thing breaks its leash and races across the lawn like it was fired from a cannon. It then jumps through the plate-glass window. She said the dog jumped into the air and tore out Phillipe’s throat in half a second. I guess Ms. Lovelace ran inside after it, started bawling and then she just shut down. Too much for her. I kinda feel like doing that myself. Not the bawling part, mind you.”
I said, “Wait. Did you hear what the dog said just now?”
“Said? She barked . . .”
“Ah. Okay. And when you look at the dog right now, she’s . . .”
“Floatin’ a few feet off the floor.”
You’d think the fact that other people could witness the weirdness would have comforted me. It didn’t. It meant the rules had changed already.
“John and I need to have a word about this. We’ll, uh, be right back.”
On the way back to my car, I said, “We’re driving away as fast as we can. Right to the bakery counter at the grocery store.”
“Dave, those guys could see her. All the cops. They saw her floatin’ around and doing supernatural shit. That’s new.”
“That’s new? Why is she floating at all, John?”
“Gotta be the sauce, right? She got more of it than any of us. I was always amazed she survived. Maybe, you know, they got to her finally.”
“After all this time? None of this makes sense.”
“Did you hear what she said?”
“She said, ‘I serve none but Korrok.’”
Speaking that meaningless word made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, though I couldn’t pin down why. My mind almost made a connection, then abruptly steered clear of it nearly hard enough to make the train of thought go flying out of my ear.
“You sure?” said John. “I thought she said, ‘I serve none but to rock.’ I was about to agree with her.”
“Whatever, John.”
“So who’s Korrok?”
“Don’t know.”
And keeping it that way is making my brain’s denial gland work overtime.
“You still got the mints in your car?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
John dug around in the glove compartment and pulled out a little roll of candies somebody had mailed to me a while back. Crazy people mail me things. Most of it I throw on a shelf in my toolshed and forget.
We went back to the front door of the house, and I shook one of the candies out into my palm. I very slowly turned the knob and pushed the door in, just enough to lean my head and my right arm through.
Molly the Hoverdog was about ten feet away, behind the couch and her incredibly hot new owner. I held out the candy, which immediately caught Molly’s attention.
I tossed the candy on the floor and quickly ducked back out. Molly floated over to it, tilted in midair until her snout was just over the white morsel. She lapped it up.
For a moment, nothing. John was about to supply the “it’s not working” when, with a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children.
A couple of cops behind us cheered. Drake walked up. “What the hell was that?”
John answered for me. “It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but . . .” John shrugged, businesslike. These things happen sometimes.
Drake said, “Fine. Now let’s get one thing clear. I don’t want to hear any more about this after tonight. This gets written up as a dog attack. Somebody’ll be here later to clean up the scene and there’ll be a funeral and all of these here men will go home to their wives and try to act like the world ain’t gone crazy.”
I said, “Yeah that’s probably for the best—”
Drake’s head snapped toward me.
“Shut up. I ain’t done.”
Back to John he said, “Between you and me, I need to know some things. That was your dog, right?”
“Well, Dave’s dog. But she’s belonged to several people . . .”
“Hey. Look in there. He’s dead. You understand me? Now, you and I both know, things . . . happen around here. In this town. Always have. My daddy wore this uniform before me, he told me stories. But I ain’t never seen anything like that.”
John put up his hands defensively and said, “Neither have we.”
“But the last time things got weird, you were there. With the party and all those kids that died, the detective that left and never came back. Don’t be playin’ games with me. If you know somethin’, tell me. Tell me so I can prepare for it.”
John said, “We don’t know the situation. Not yet.”
On the word “yet” I had the urge to punch John in the kidneys.
“But let us take a shot at the girl.” We all glanced toward Krissy, still frozen on the sofa. “Before the psychiatrist gets here or whoever you bring in to reboot people like her.”
Drake stared John down, then decided to roll the dice. “You got two minutes.”
“Great.” John ducked through the front door. Drake reached out and grabbed his elbow.
“Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“This the end of the world?”
He said it in the earnest, stiff-jawed manner of a middle-aged man asking the doc if it’s cancer. It scared the fuck out of me.
John said, “We’ll give you a call if we find out.”
John went to the couch, but I couldn’t resist stopping by the red, six-foot circle of dog mush.
I found Molly’s collar near her head. The bloodstained tag:
I’m Molly.
Please return me to . . .
“Good-bye, Molly,” I muttered. “Of all the dogs I’ve known in my life, I’ve never seen a better driver.”
Just before I turned away, I noticed something else. Out of the pile of dog salsa stuck one of the paws, straight up into the air. On the foot, on the pad where the palm would be on a human hand, was a marking, like a tattoo.
It was a little black symbol, something like the mathematical symbol for pi. I pointed this out to John, who suggested I take the severed paw home for further study. I decided it wasn’t that important. Maybe something the breeder put on there, I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed it before but how often do you look at a dog’s feet?
Krissy Lovelace wouldn’t make eye contact with us and she wouldn’t respond to our voices, but we did get her to her feet and led her outside. We took her to the backyard, saying generic, soothing words to her the whole way.
Once we were out of sight of the cops, John put his hands on Krissy’s shoulders and turned her to face him. He held up his smoldering cigarette.
“Miss? You see this? You start talkin’ or I’m gonna burn you with it.”
No response.
“Ma’am,” I offered. “I’d do what he says. I’m a good guy, a reasonable guy, but my friend here? He’s a wild man. And once he gets goin’ I can’t stop him. Now wouldn’t you rather talk to me?”
Nothing.
John jammed the lit cigarette into the back of her hand with a pssssst sound.
She yelped and yanked her hand back, shaking it madly. “What the heck are you doing?” she screeched.
“Ma’am, we got a serious situation here,” John said, in a voice devoid of sympathy. “We got a dead guy and maybe a lot worse on the horizon if you can’t help us. Now I’m real sorry you saw what you saw but we ain’t got time for you to curl up into some psychological shell. Help us and you can just repress the memory later.”
She looked around for a moment, bewildered. Then:
“Molly!” she gasped. “Molly attacked Ken!”
“Yes, we know,” I said. “But we don’t get why—”
“And you say he died?”
“It’s—yes, he died. It’s a strange thing and we need you to tell us—”
“I’m gonna puke.” She leaned over. “Can I go to jail for this? Because it was my dog? Can they charge me with murder?”
“No. I—look, I don’t know. But we need to—”
“Miss,” John interrupted. “We have reason to believe your dog was possessed by some kind of Hell demon. Has Molly ever spoken to you before?”
Pause.
“Who are you guys?”
“Just answer the question. Please,” John said. “Has there ever been any levitation?”
“What? No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog was dabbling in the occult while you had her it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”
“What? No, no. I’ve only had her for a few weeks, she showed up at my house and I went to return her to the address on her tag but the owner was this weird girl and she told me to keep her. I was just walking her and we ran into Danny Wexler.”
She said that name like we should know it, like it was a mutual friend or something. She saw the look of nonrecognition on our faces and said, “The Channel Five sports guy. I . . . know him. He goes to my church. He pulled up alongside the road, like he was gonna stop at Ken Phillipe’s house because, you know, they work together. He gets out and he pets Molly and then he drives off. Just like that.”
I glanced at John, then turned to her.
“Ma’am—”
“Please stop calling me that. You sound like a cop when you do it. Call me Krissy.”
“Krissy,” I said, “tell me exactly what Wexler said to you. Word for word.”
“I don’t think he said much of anything. Just, ‘pretty dog you got there.’ Then he drove away. A second later Molly went nuts.”
“After he touched her?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just to pet her, though.”
I flashed back to the beer truck, John touching Molly and waking up with a jolt, his soul jumping from her to him like a spark of static electricity.
“And he didn’t say anything else?” I asked. “Didn’t use the word ‘Korrok’ or anything like that?”
“Um, no, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”
“Okay.” I turned to walk away.
“Wait!” said Krissy. “There’s something else. When Danny drove up, he was wearing a mask. Or it looked like it, all black. But he must have taken it off because when he pulled up it was off. But I know I saw it. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Could you see any of his face? When he had the mask on?”
“No, but . . . it was dark. Why would he do that? Is Molly okay? Do you think they’ll take her to the pound?”
“Uh, if you go around and talk to the police, they’ll explain everything.”
As I walked away, John thanked Krissy for her cooperation and let her know that we would contact her if any more leads developed. He hurried to catch up with me and said, “Fuck! Dave! The shadow people. She saw a fucking shadow people . . . person.”
“The what people?”
“You know goddamned well. Those things, the men made of shadow we saw in Vegas. They’re here. Or at least one of them is. I’ve seen them, Dave. I’ve seen them around.”
“No, they’re not and no, you haven’t.”
When our butts landed in my car a minute later, John lit up another cigarette and asked, “Okay, what now?”
THE THING ABOUT video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. So say you’re playing against the computer team, you’re down by one and let’s say you take a last-second shot to win the game. It’s the same program you’re playing against that decides whether or not the digital ball goes through the digital hoop on that final shot. So it can arbitrarily make you lose or arbitrarily let you win. The whole thing is bullshit.
But we were playing anyway, on my sofa. John was Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and I was the Chicago Bulls, led by Pierre Manslapper (you can name your own players if you want). It was an hour after the thing with Molly and the dead weather guy.
“So,” John said, glancing at his watch. “You think the cops talked to Wexler?”
“Who?”
“Danny Wexler, the sports guy? Because of the thing with the weather guy getting killed?”
“The weather guy was killed by Molly. That’s how it’ll go down, dog attack. Case closed. And Molly is dead so . . .”
“You’re being stupid, you know that? You think we should call Marconi?”
I shrugged. “You do what you want. Hey, did you know that the number-one all-time rated show in Korea was the premiere of that ’80s show Joanie Loves Chachi? It turns out that in Korean, ‘chachi’ means ‘penis.’”
John paused the game.
“It’s after ten. I wanna flip over, see if the news has got anything about it.”
He did, before I could object, and I was immediately reminded of why I hated local newscasts. We sat through a lengthy tribute to the departed Ken Phillipe, showing old video clips of the idiot standing knee-deep in rushing floodwater while wind pummeled his microphone, another shot of a shaky camera trying to track a tornado on the horizon while Ken shouted his report.
They transitioned from that to a scandal at a local nursing home where dishwashers rinsed bedpans and dinner plates in the same load, then to a house fire that wouldn’t have made the newscast at all had their crew not arrived in time to get video of the pretty flames. Then they got to sports and I admit, that part was . . . different.
The first thing that was strange was when they cut to the two-shot of Danny Wexler and the anchor, Danny’s face was black. I saw immediately why Krissy thought he was wearing a mask earlier. At first glance it would look like he had on a black ski mask, one without the eyeholes.
But when they cut to the closer one-shot of his head, you could see the effect went way beyond that; Danny Wexler appeared to be a statue carved from solid shadow. Only John and I saw this, of course, because the other anchors didn’t react in horror. Or at least, not until Danny Wexler opened his mouth:
“I’m Danny Wexler and this is Channel Five sports! The [Undisclosed] football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did. Here’s Hornets quarterback Mikey Wolford, flopping that right arm around like a retard while he tries to pass to a teammate that apparently only he can see. Aaaaand, it’s intercepted. Nice pass, ’tard! Now here’s Spartans fullback Derrick Simpson, pumping those nigger thighs down the field like pistons on a machine designed for cotton picking. Ooh, nice tackle attempt there, Freddy Mason! I bet you could tackle that fullback if he was made of dick, couldn’t you, Freddy? But, he’s not, so final score, forty-one to seventeen. May every Spartan die with a turd on his lips. All hail Korrok.”
Danny didn’t get to read any more highlights, as the newscast abruptly switched back to a visibly shaken anchorwoman, who announced they would be right back. Commercial.
John clicked off the TV and I let out a long, resigned sigh. Without a word, we put on our jackets and walked out the door. We stopped by my toolshed.
THE MORBIDLY OBESE security guard at the Channel 5 building told us Wexler had left early. We almost gave up at that point, but got a huge break in the case when John thought to look up Wexler’s home address in the phone book.
After getting lost, briefly, we pulled into the lot of Wexler’s building and found a Buick with the license plate 5 SPRTS, which, after some debate, we decided must stand for Channel 5 sports and that it must be his.
“You still got the mints?” John asked as we strode up to the four-story apartment building. “You knock on the door and when Wexler answers, you cram some mints down his throat.”
“If he’s acting normal, we don’t do anything. Just find out what he knows. About Molly and, you know, everything else that’s happening. If it’s something we can fix with a mint then fine. If not, then we leave Dr. Marconi a voice mail and drive until we find a town that doesn’t keep showing up in books with titles like True Tales of the Bizarre. Marconi can come down and do a whole show on it for all I care. Write another book.”
I had my old-school ghetto blaster; John was carrying a satchel containing several items he collected from my toolshed. We didn’t have any holy water. Where do you even get it? Off the Internet?
We positioned ourselves on either side of the door to Wexler’s third-floor apartment. I set down the stereo, facing its speakers toward the closed door. John unzipped the satchel and pulled out a weapon he had made, a Bible wrapped around the end of a baseball bat with electrician’s tape. He brought it up to the ready. I pushed “play.”
The smooth-yet-screechy sound of Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You’ve Got ’til it’s Gone” filled the hall.
We let it play for the duration of the song, one guy down the hall poking his head out of a door in confusion and then closing it quickly at the sight of John and his bat. Wexler’s door remained closed.
We shut off the stereo, listened. Nothing from the other side of the door. I tried the knob. Unlocked. I gestured to John and he ducked inside, Bible bat at the ready. My gesture had meant, “Wait, we should reconsider this.”
I followed John in, reluctantly. I left the door open behind me.
Wide open.
Lights on, but nobody home. The television was on and I jumped when I saw it was me and John on the screen. Then I noticed a tripod and camcorder facing us from across the room, aimed at the sofa in front of us. It was apparently positioned to tape whoever was sitting there, the TV set to show the live feed. The sofa was empty now.
We split up and quickly searched all five rooms of the small apartment, but the place had an empty feeling to it and my heart had slowed down by the time I peered in the last doorway. Nobody here.
The place was neat but cramped. Furniture too close to the TV, a kitchen table that would have to be pulled away from the wall if you wanted to seat more than two people. Movie posters in the bedroom. Bachelor pad.
“DAVE! IN HERE!”
I ran. I found John lying prone on the floor of the bedroom.
“JOHN! WHAT—”
At the sight of me he sat up and thrust both hands out. In one hand he held a large, folded envelope, ragged where it had been torn open. In the other hand he held a small, silver canister.
Just like mine.
He said, “Under the bed.”
I let out a long breath and said, “Oh holy mother of fuck.”
“Yeah.”
I sat on the bed. I shook my head slowly and said, “Man, we can’t go through this again.”