The Best Bad Dream (23 page)

“You got that right,” Johnny said.

“‘Ceptin’ women, I bet,” Marty said.

“Women? No problem. I take what I want from ‘em, and ditch ‘em. End of story!”

“Really?” Marty said. “What about children? You ever have any kids, John?”

“Nah. Well, let me amend that: maybe, but I walked right out on ‘em. Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye.”

“So you have no children and no wife?”

“I got me,” Johnny said. “Me and my wits.”

“Must be lonely, John,” Marty said, missing an easy shot. “Don’t you worry about getting old and being all alone?”

Johnny chalked his cue.

“Tell you the truth, Mart—no offense—but before I’d get as old and fucked up as you and your council in there, man, I’d take a handful of Vikes, drink a half gallon of vodka, and kiss this sad world good-bye.”

“You might change your mind, son, when you get up to our ages. People all sound brave when they’re young. But when you see that
cold hand of death coming for you, most folks will do anything rather than shake it.”

Johnny made a nice cushion shot and looked hard at Marty Millwood.

“Let me tell you, Mart. I’ve seen enough of this world, and when my time comes I’ll spit right in death’s ugly old face. Now can we lose the inquisition here and play some pool?”

“By all means, John,” Marty said. “I meant no offense, son.”

“None taken,” Johnny said. “Now rack ‘em up, Martburger.”

They played five more games and though Marty had a good run in the first one, he was no match for Johnny, who was red hot. There was no beating him. He made banks, impossible combinations, and had total control of the cue ball. Every lie he got was better than the last, and most of his shots were easy ones.

By the end of the night he had won over two thousand dollars of Marty’s money.

Marty looked ancient, dilapidated, crushed. Which is just how Johnny liked the old goat.

“Time to pay up, Martini,” Johnny said.

Marty nodded.

“Yep,” he said. “I am plumb tuckered out.”

Johnny laughed. Marty was finished. In fact, all of those old farts in the other room were finished, too. He was the king. That was one of the best things about picking on old people. What could they do about it? Nada. He could go right into the other room this second and start smashing their old bones apart and what could they possibly do? Nothing whatsoever.

They were the deadsters and he was their king.

He saw Marty go to the end of the room and move aside a cornball painting of an Indian on a pinto horse looking into the sun. Behind the picture was a safe. How interesting. Johnny cruised down to that end of the room and looked over Marty’s shoulder.

The safe was filled with money, tons and tons of money. Big stacks of bills. Why, the money he’d just won from Marty was nothing compared to this. And it was there for the taking!

Marty turned with a few paltry bills in his trembling old hand.

“Here you are, son,” he said. “Twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“How generous of you,” Johnny said. “But I think I’ll have a little more, if it’s all the same to you?”

“What do you mean, John?” Marty asked, in a shocked falsetto.

“I mean all of it,” Johnny said. “I’m taking every cent in the safe. And here’s the deal: if you say one word to the cops I’ll come back here and strip the skin off you and the fair Millie. You dig?”

Johnny was using his toughest, lowest, most terrifying voice, the one that worked on oldsters all over California and Arizona. It was easy to scare the living shit out of the deadsters, because they were already afraid of everything anyway. Crime, war, terrorism, hurricanes, snakes, spiders, heart attacks, dogs, cats, worms, snails. They were helpless and they knew it. A guy like Marty Millwood had no shot against a jungle cat like the cooking Johnny Z.

So how come the old dude wasn’t shaking in fear, wetting himself, crapping his pants?

Instead, Marty did something that sent a chill through what was left of Johnny’s immortal soul.

He smiled. A small, subtle grin.

What the hell? Why?

“What’s so fucking funny, Marty?”

“Nothing. It’s more ironic than funny.”

“Yeah, well, fuck your irony. You take off that smoking jacket and wrap all the money in it. Then we’re going to march right through the front room and I’m outta here. And don’t think you can call a cop to hunt me down before I get back to you. Because even if they catch me and lock me up, I have plenty of friends who will finish the job for me. Get it?”

“Oh, yessir,” said Marty, in a mocking way. “I get it, all right.”

But Johnny
didn’t
get it. Why was this old turd laughing at him when he was cleaning him out? Ah, who cared? The old guy was just trying to pretend he wasn’t bothered, to save face. That had to be it. In a few minutes Johnny would be gone like a cool breeze.

Marty Millwood turned back around, smiled a little wider, and sprayed something horrible into Johnny’s face. God, it burned so bad. His eyeballs were on fire. He groped forward and screamed, “My eyes. You son of a bitch!”

Then he felt a bony old knee crush his testicles and he fell to the floor, screaming.

“You bastard. I’ll kill you.”

“Good night, John,” Marty said. He smashed Johnny on the head with the cue ball. Things got very hazy and he tried to stand up but he couldn’t quite pull it off. Behind Marty he could see the door opening and all the guests streaming in to look down at him.

“Help me,” he said. “Help . . .”

But from the little he could still see, not one of them had a helpful look on his or her face.

He tried to get up again but this time Millie picked up the eight ball and bashed him in the head. Her shot was even harder than Marty’s.

“One for good luck, creep,” she said.

Johnny Z felt an explosion in his head, heard some old folks chuckling, and fell back onto the rug into darkness.

Chapter Thirty-two

Phil was feeling really good. Really, really good. The champagne had made him sort of . . . no, not
sort of,
but definitively, hahaha, ecstatic . . .

Hahahaha.

He actually heard the sound in his head like there was a bubble in his brain with the cartoon word “hahahahaha,” and what was really far out was that he, Phil (that would be him, Phil, Philly, Philster, his own self), could see the bubble that was attached to his brain by an invisible string and which now floated above his head. Was that amazing or what?

“Happy floating bubble,” he said to Annie.

She looked at him and smiled. Such a sweet smile. Of course, she had no idea what he was talking about because he had failed to finish his complete thought.

Suddenly that seemed hysterically funny to him, too. The concept of complete thought seemed highly silly in the extreme.

He thought of a giant professor in the sky who was marking him down, like one of his old teachers in college, for failing to deliver a complete thought.

He wanted somehow to convey this idea to Annie but she had taken him somewhere in the back of the condo, into a third room that seemed much bigger than he had first thought it was.

This was an odd room to be in because the party was happening out in the other rooms . . . haha . . . so, maybe, Phil thought, she was going to give him a little sex right here.

But, now he saw he was wrong. There was another woman here in the new room, and she was standing with a man over in the corner and they were laughing it up. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right.

She, the woman, whose back was to him, was laughing it up, giggling in a high-pitched way, and suddenly Philly got a terrible case of the horrors.

Shit! No way! It couldn’t be! But as he walked (stumbled, actually) forward, he realized that yes, sirree-bob-a-rootie there was no doubt that the giggling, hysterical woman whose back was to him was none other than his wife, Dee Dee. He knew that back, and he knew that dyed blonde hair, and he especially knew that high-pitched giggle.

And it occurred to him that she was drinking from a fluted glass the same as he was.

Wasn’t that odd?

Champagne. Cold, bubbling, sparkly champagne.

And she was just as ecstatically loaded as he was.

And she was just as unsteady on her feet.

And now she was turning to see who was approaching her here in the back room.

This back room with no windows. It seemed more like a storeroom than part of a condo.

Now Dee Dee was looking at him and her mouth was open in some kind of mixture of embarrassment and horror, and she was saying, “Oh, no. How did you get here?”

And he felt the same thing but with a monster dose of shame, too.

“I was just about to say the same . . .” But he couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. He couldn’t do the complete thought but somehow
that wasn’t amusing anymore, nor was cute, button-nosed Annie’s witty, youthful grin.

No, it wasn’t what you would call an affectionate or amused grin. More like a predatory grin, a “Gotcha” grin.

Definitely a “Gotcha” grin, and he was feeling really dizzy.

Phil wanted to cry out to the other people at the party, but then he had a nearly complete thought, which was, No, the other party-goers weren’t going to help. Not at all. Because they weren’t really partygoers at all, were they?

Because they were actors somehow, hired by someone, like the old people who had been staring at him with the knowing smile, and none of them were going to help him or Dee Dee one bit.

In short, Phil thought, as he fell into a trancelike sleep, he had been played, and so had Dee Dee, and wasn’t it funny that as he fell off the shelf of consciousness, he suddenly felt an old, familiar love for his wife blooming in his very stoned soul.

Chapter Thirty-three

Jack and Oscar awoke in a locked cell, their arms and legs bound by chains. Both of them had massive headaches.

The room was cold and dark but when Jack’s eyes finally adjusted he realized they were in a basement cell of some kind. There was a shaft of light coming through a barred window on the door.

“Oscar, you okay?”

“Never better, hombre. You got any idea where we are?”

“Hell, or just down the block from it.”

Jack blinked and looked at the wall. He saw a patch of greenish-blue stone. Turquoise. The same color of dust he’d seen on the great hog and on Tommy. An old turquoise mine.

From outside they heard a roar, like men watching a boxing match.

“What the hell?”

“I think the show is about to begin, Osc. We need to get out of these chains fast. You happen to bring a skeleton key with you?”

“No,” Oscar said. “I left that at home with my decoder ring.”

“Shit,” Jack said. “We need to check this place out.”

Chained together, they shuffled their way across the room, tripping over a couple of cots and the charming open latrine.

“The only weapon we have is the bed. If we could pull it apart we could use the legs to beat the guards’ heads in.”

They both pulled on the steel legs. They didn’t budge.

“Son of a bitch is welded together.”

“You gotta give it to the boys,” Oscar said. “This is a well-made house of horrors. We could be fucked this time, hombre.”

Jack smiled in the dark and to Oscar his shining teeth looked like the keys to an open accordion.

“Before you write your will, I have another idea.”

Outside, the huge, black-masked guard, Hans, waited by their door. His orders were not to let anything happen to them until he had word from the higher-ups.

Hans stood with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out.

“Fuckers,” he said to himself, over and over again.

He shut his eyes and imagined all sorts of novel ways to kill the two chained-up fuckers inside the cell.

Then he heard a scream, a cry of pain.

And the words, “He’s dead! Dead!”

Oh, no. If one of the guys was actually dead . . . shit. Lucky would hold him responsible for it and crack his head with a ball-peen hammer!

He got his keys, ran inside, and saw the Mexican guy standing next to the white guy, who was balled up on the floor. His tongue was sticking out of his mouth at a grotesque angle.

“He’s dead,” the Mexican guy said. “He tried to get away and I told him to stay put. But we fought and he’s strangled by my chains.”

“What the fuck? You killed your partner?”

“Not on purpose. It was an accident. Look.”

“Bullshit. This is some kind of trick.”

“I’m telling you, dude. And in case you don’t know it, we’re FBI. You kill an FBI agent and you end up with the serious lethal inject.”

“Okay, I’ll check. But stand back,” Hans said. He held his nine-millimeter Glock out in front of him as he moved toward Jack.

“We have a problem,” Oscar said. “I can’t stand back.”

“Of course you can stand back,” Hans said. “And you better do it, too. Waaaay back.”

“Senor, there is nothing I would rather do than stand back,” Oscar said. “But since you chained us together and he’s lying there dead I can only kneel back a couple of inches. ‘Cause if I stand back I drag him with me, and then we are over there but still together.”

Hans thought that if the Mexican fucker didn’t stop explaining why he couldn’t stand back he would kill him right now.

“Of course, if you wanted to unchain me, then I could stand back, anywhere you wanted. I could stand back over there, or over there, or over there. The whole world of “standing back” would have endless possibilities, but since I am chained . . .”

“All right,” Hans screamed. “Shut the fuck up. You can stay here, but I don’t want you hovering over me. So kneel down.”

“I will not hover,” Oscar said.

“Fuckin’ A you won’t. A hovering prisoner will soon be a dead one.”

Hans moved forward cautiously and then knelt down next to the prone figure, still aiming his gun at Oscar but now from the side.

He looked down at Jack’s bent neck and saw scrape marks on it.

“How the fuck did you do this?” he asked.

“It was most unfortunate. He and I got into a little wrestling match . . . Here, I’ll show you.”