Jake's Wake (6 page)

He didn’t ever want to sleep again.

His head throbbed like impacted wisdom teeth, and his ears still rang. The stink of cordite and formaldehyde was like plugs of charred steel wool in his nostrils. But he didn’t have to watch the road, or his mouth, except to put the bottle in it, and then the cigarette, chasing each other.

And in between, he talked.

Meanwhile, the driver reached up and thumbed the dome light on, then checked out the pair of Polaroids in his hand.

The images were crude, overexposed, and tinted pea soup green from the mysterious process that made the prints expose themselves. Crude and harder to find every year, but if you didn’t fuck around with computers and didn’t want some nosy fucker at the photo lab sticking his nose in your business, it was still the only choice for the serious documentary photographer.

The first was a casual portrait of Frankie, eyes crossed and corkscrewed up to take in the hole in his forehead. That his lower jaw, his scalp and most of his face were scraped off long before the coup de grace was essential to really getting what the artist intended, with this particular masterpiece.

“Nice,” said the driver.

It took a bit of squinting and a lot of faith to accept that the second was of Sugar: just as dead, but chopped and smashed like the dregs of a piñata.

“Wow,” said the driver, genuinely touched. “Very nice.”

“Thanks,” said Gray. “I made ’em myself.”

Gray never liked to brag, but he truly relished talking about what he did to Frankie and Sugar. When he confessed the whole soup-to-poop affair, he could relive it from without, stand back and admire the balls and the discipline he’d shown. Oh, if only there were a hundred of him—

The driver did not ask any questions at first, just soaked it up and smiled.

Nobody else understood or accepted the real Gray.

When Jake’s corpse turned up in the desert, Gray was half dead himself, in the bag after a binge. But he reined in his hangover and went to work. The fuckwit sheriff ran the case with bloodhound diligence, but raced off right away on the wrong trail. Esther told them what she’d been told, that he was in retreat at a cabin in Apple
Valley, so they went up there to shake down the meth kitchens and burglars.

Only Gray understood and accepted the real Jake.

So only he knew where to look.

At a shitbox dive bar in San Bernardino, he found a barfly who knew the skank who took Jake home, and liked her well enough to eat only soup for the rest of his life. Why did these losers always play tough until things got permanent?

Gray found Sugar’s condo tossed and empty. Blood seeping up through three layers of hastily dumped throw rugs and trash bags in the family room, the TV still on and tuned to the public access channel.

A short paper chase yielded a multitude of angles. Frankie and Sugar fought a lot. Frankie was a tweaker, a drunk, and an impulsive idiot. Gray figured he came in and stabbed Jake in the back in a white heat, because he’d never have the stones to kill in cold blood.

The state of the place told Gray how he clobbered Sugar, then took the body out to the desert in a drop cloth from the attached garage. Maybe he took Sugar with him, and maybe he left her here.

He picked up the phone and hit redial. The display showed a Riverside number in speed-dial memory—MOM. A bleary, cracked hag’s voice came on the line cursing. “She don’t want to speak to you, you shitbird! You go see the police and turn yourself in, if you’re any kind of man…”

Gray stole a Ford Escort off the street and was in Riverside in half an hour.

In a rickety single-wide trailer in the Viking’s Rest Motor Court, Sugar and her mother, Margie, gargled vodka and fought over the remote until midnight. Gray smoked cigarettes and played angles in his head until the lights went out in the neighbors’ trailers.

When the blaring TV from Margie’s trailer was
the only sound in the sultry night, he cracked a couple amyl nitrate vials under his nose to get into character, and came calling.

The screen door was locked, but he slashed it with his penknife.

Margie was passed out in the back bedroom, snoring to drown out
Celebrity Rehab
. Sugar drowsed on the couch, drooling from her fat, broken lips and swelled-shut eye.

Gray took Margie first, quietly. Pillow over the face to muffle three sharp knocks on the noggin with the butt of his pistol, to streamline the smothering.

Movies were full of shit. People struggled a lot harder in real life, when you tried to take their lives; and in Gray’s vast experience, the less they had to live for, the harder they usually fought.

He was not big enough to contain the rush it gave him, but this was just house keeping. Sugar was only the bait in the trap. He didn’t say how much he ached to undo the beauty that killed his friend. He didn’t have to.

Frankie had tuned her up pretty good, so Gray had to push the envelope to get his point across. It was not the first time he’d enjoyed sloppy seconds off Jake, but the first time he’d closed the deal with a carving knife and a curling iron.

The driver let him spare no details here, until Gray squirmed. “How was she? Did she get wet when you hurt her?”

The whore had tried to lure him in, begging him to take her even as he made cube steak of her face, tried to turn it into something she could control. But he couldn’t be bought off. Fucking would be a sorry substitute for what he had planned.

When he was satisfied, perverse instinct told him to just walk away, leaving the mess for the world to stumble on, and wonder at what monsters walked among them.

But he wasn’t stupid, like Frankie. He knew that you could take your pleasures any way you liked, so long as you took care to cover how it looked.

He had learned this from Jake, who was truly all things to all men.

As wild as he was with Sugar, he was careful not to break any bones. He left a cigarette burning in her outstretched hand, over a puddle of spilled kerosene from a hurricane lantern, and kicked over a couple of candles for coverage. The mellow yellow glow of the spreading flames was just bright enough to compete with the blue bug-zapper light of the TV when Gray got back in his car.

At a rest stop, he changed the license plates on the Escort and cut the old plate into confetti with a pair of tin snips. Up to a point, getting into the mind of one’s prey was a sound tactic, but Gray hated playing with his food. To understand Frankie, you only had to know the ways of a cockroach. Every impulse was equally important to his tiny insect brain. To make him stay put, you just had to turn on the lights.

He texted Frankie on Sugar’s cell phone. In the disgusting babytalk of her previously sent messages—
So sorry baby—U know 1 luv U!1!
—he warned Frankie that the law was out for him, that they were looking for him everywhere, just keeping it off the news to spare Jake’s good name.
CTN—Mom spyz—U bustd my teef u asshol!!! Sit tite Baby—Where R U?

The lovelorn dipshit tried to call sixteen times, but finally broke down and told her voice mail where he was hiding.

Sugarz com 1n6 4 U

It was not just dedication to his fallen friend that made Gray pop eight methedrine with cold coffee and get back on the southbound 15, without an hour’s sleep.
Gray always believed that you put a bad day to bed before you went down yourself, and very high on Gray’s shit list was the republic of Mexico, and everything in it.

(An aside: it would be far easier to ask Gray to make a list of his friends, which he could fit on his thumbnail for easy consultation. The other list, of everything he hated, was life-size, and he lived in it. This was not just bearable, but almost sweet, whenever he could cross an item or two off.)

Frankie was holed up in a motor lodge in Calexico, wrapped up in rancid sheets with a saggy Mexican whore who didn’t wake up when Gray dragged her paramour out of the room by his peroxide locks and dumped him in the trunk of his own car, just before dawn.

So much for true love. Frankie seemed to have overcome his heartbreak just in time to soak up the new one Gray had planned for him, out in the desert.

This last part went on until well after lunchtime, but the driver had only one question.

So much for Frankie.

Only when he ran out of words, and the bile they floated on, did Gray take note of his surroundings. The engine flat-out roared like on a dead straightaway, but they were winding up the switchback road that went up the canyon wall. A terraced wedding cake of a mountain, with ledges just large enough for folks in fancy Spanish-tiled houses to look down on their lesser neighbors.

As they neared their destination, a bolt of pleasure hit him harder than the rotgut in his belly, and sparked warm but shivery jolts of anticipation throughout his exhausted body.

To think he would have left all this behind. Life was sweet, and about to get a lot sweeter.

The shit list he lived in was about to get a lot shorter.

It was Evangeline’s turn up at bat; and no matter what, she was not going to break down, nor was she going to take a drink. Not now, when she was almost free.

And certainly not here, in front of these people.

Just let me get through this
, she prayed, but not to God. No God who couldn’t have spared a lightning bolt for Jake Connaway twenty years ago was worth praying to.

All eyes on her, burning as cold as the fire was hot. Fuck. She should have followed Jasper and Christian out for a smoke.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to spill the beans on Jake.” Esther nodded like her neck needed oiling. She wasn’t even halfway out of Jake’s shadow, even now. “Okay. So what do you want to know?”

“I’m not sure I want to hear anything you have to say.” Emmy just sat, pointed at her, not seeing.

A warming glow of livid bitterness, like a belt of good brandy, kindled in Evangeline’s gut. Fine. Maybe this wouldn’t feel like work, after all.

“I met him when he was still on his first marriage,” she said. “He was in a band then, spending all her money on guitars and blow. Until he found Jesus”—she
pointed a nod at Emmy—“and realized he could make more money off of him.”

Bible Girl started to honk out loud, but Evangeline wasn’t having it.

“Jake’s been doing me for the last fifteen years, all right? Paying me to do it for the last ten, when he wasn’t pimping me out to others. Man’s the sickest motherfucker I’ve ever met.”

“Omigod…” Esther’s voice was like a tire deflating.

“I went from a nice little high school junior to a junkie, to a hooker, to jail, to rehab…”

“I told you!” Mathias piped in.

“…to a nice little job as a secretary.” Faux wistful, as she said it. “To a junkie. To a hooker. All thanks to Saint Jake. And believe me, you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Emmy tried once again to interrupt, but this time no sound would come out.

“There are so many witnesses to his crimes—
so many people
whose lives he screwed up—that my little story’s like a drop in the bucket. But you know why nobody talks? Because either a) they
believed
in him”—she winked at Emmy, because she just couldn’t help it—“and/or b) he had something on their asses. A little incriminating evidence. Or maybe a lot.”

Everyone’s mouths were hanging open, though Esther quickly poured some more scotch into hers. Evangeline understood completely, but that did nothing to subvert her mounting rage. She focused on the ladies, staring hard from one to the other.

“You look all shocked. But I think you know more than you’re letting on. Both of you. And that’s what pisses me off.”

Eddie looked at Esther. Mathias looked at Emmy. Both women looked stricken, and neither could conceal it from their men. Or each other. Or themselves.

“Emmy?” Mathias chafed her arm, but he might as well have been combing spaghetti. Emmy looked, for all the world, as if she’d gone into an ecstasy of prayer; but Evangeline knew what was playing in the Little Chapel of Emmy’s Head…

Less than fifteen seconds had elapsed in real time, since Evangeline dropped the bomb. But as Emmy snapped back, all eyes were upon her.

Including Mathias, who looked stunned to the core.

“I knew it…” muttered Esther.

“I—I…!” Emmy yelped in protestation, then froze.

“Oh, you are so in love with him.” Evangeline rolled her eyes, but it was less judgmental than knowing.

“He told me, over and over,” Esther murmured. “‘I’m not nailing that little girl. It’s all in your head…’”