Animals. Part 18

And right now, it is time to move on.

The feelings didn't diminish as he walked in the door. The achingly familiar smells: wood, smoke and beer, the fragrant perfume and funky sweat moved him to his core. Someone had slapped "The Alabama Song" on the jukebox; somehow Jim Morrison singing about finding the next whiskey bar made the moment perversely complete.

Chameleon's on a Monday night wasn't nearly as packed as the weekend shows-there was no band and no cover charge, no Red standing watch at the door, no Jane on hand with a smile or a sly observation to share-but they still had a sizable crowd. Very few people he knew, but that was okay, too. Fewer speeches to make.

Jules was already motioning him forward with a wiggle of one finger. Nora was sitting near him at the bar; she turned at Syd's approach. He sensed a weird compet.i.tion between them, as he ambled up.

The long-necked Rolling Rock appeared in Syd's hand before he even took his seat. "Happy birthday, man," Jules said. He raised his iced tea in toast. Syd said thanks and clinked his bottle with Jules's gla.s.s, then turned to Nora. She had two double shots set up. When she slid one over to him, he toasted with her as well, then engaged her in a quick sloppy soul-kiss that tasted of caramel and bourbon.

Then she asked him if he was going to tell Jules. Of course, Jules said, "Tell me what?" Which put Syd in the awkward position of having to leap right into his explanation, without any setup or anything. Which kind of p.i.s.sed him off.

It didn't help that Jules wasn't exactly supportive, either. It was like trying to tell Tommy and Budd about the wolf, only a hundred times worse; like showing someone the most beautiful work of art you could possibly create, only to have him ask you if you'd ever really considered that career in locksmithing.

Jules had a million irritating questions: irritating mostly because Syd didn't have any solid answers. Do you know where you're going? No. Do you know what you're going to do with your s.h.i.t? No. Do you have any money saved up? No. Do you have any idea how you're going to survive on the road? Well, no. Did you already quit your job? Well, yes! And, hey, so long as you're at it, why not just ask if I still remember the difference between my a.s.s, my elbow, and a hole in the ground?

Nora interrupted to order another round. There were a couple of other customers queuing up for the firewater of their choice. Jules excused himself for a minute, leaving Syd's little outburst to dangle in midair.

"This is what you can expect," Nora said under her breath, "from people who just don't f.u.c.king get it." And Syd, p.i.s.sed as he was, was inclined to agree.

So by the time Jules got back with their drinks, Syd had built up a considerable head of steam. He didn't even wait for the next interrogatory round; he just launched into a little preemptive strike of his own. He had some questions he wanted to ask, if Jules didn't mind horribly.

Like, for example, hadn't Jules done the very same thing at one point in his life? Yes, sort of. And didn't he now spend many a night waxing nostalgic about those very same bygone days? Yes, but . . . Syd interrupted then, asked so exactly what in h.e.l.l did Jules have against people taking a little calculated risk with their lives. Not a thing, Jules said, as long as it looks like they know what they're doing. Syd's anger spiked and redlined. Was he implying that Syd didn't know what he was doing?

I don't know, said Jules. Do you think you know what you're doing?

And that was when Syd lost it.

"You know what I think?" he spat, sneering, "I think you're jealous!" The anger was as irrational as it was all-encompa.s.sing: a lifetime of frustration, lubed by alcohol, unstoppable in its fury. "I think you went out and tried to stake your claim in the world, and it just chewed you up and spat you back. I think you shot your wad, and now you don't want anyone else to even get a chance.

"I think," he hissed, "that if anything this intense ever happened in the whole of your measly, pathetic life, you'd know what the f.u.c.k you were talking about.

"But it hasn't, and you don't, and that's about all there is to it."

The s.p.a.ce around them went dead silent, save for the white-noise wash of dead air. Syd's anger retracted as quickly as it had come on, leaving him embarra.s.sed and weirdly defiant in its wake. His brain went condo to accommodate the multiple voices in his skull, slamming up against the wall of att.i.tude he'd just thrown up: screaming are you out of your f.u.c.king MIND?; mumbling I can't believe I just said that; peripherally aware that others had begun to stare or back away, catching the emotional gist, if not the actual riff he'd just unleashed. He felt a dozen pairs of prying eyes upon him, heard a dozen whispers slither like snakes down his spine. Nora, too, was watching him: her gaze alert, alarmed.

And as for Jules . . .

Jules never took his eyes off Syd. And Syd could tell from the look in those eyes that he'd hit some genuine tender spots, the kind only old friends can ever really touch. Syd and Jules had logged a lot of time together, confessed their fears and dreams and a mult.i.tude of sins in the privacy of friendship. Syd had just taken aim from that privileged position and emptied both barrels point-blank in his best friend's face. The past regrets. The futures that never panned out. The hopes abandoned in the wake of a youth that was gone forever.

He'd nailed it all.

But instead of decking him or inviting him to take a f.u.c.king hike, Jules just shook his head. And when he spoke, his voice was low and soft, gently lethal. He spoke to Syd alone.

"Man, when you wake up from this-and you will wake up-you're gonna remember this conversation. And it's gonna make you feel real stupid.

"But that's life," he concluded. "You do what you gotta do."

Syd desperately wanted to say he was sorry, that he took it all back, he didn't mean to hurt him, that this was an important move and it would mean a lot to have Jules's blessing.

What came out instead was, "If you were a real friend, you'd back me on this."

"If I backed you on this," Jules sighed, "I wouldn't be a real friend."

At which point, Nora scooped up Syd's hand before he could even begin to respond, saying come with me and dragging him off through the crowd. Her manner was urgent, uncompromising. Syd looked back at Jules as they went. The big man's eyes stayed on him until the crowd closed ranks, severing the connection.

As they hit the dance floor, Syd was still reeling. The pain was back, w.a.n.ging through his brain. Were they gonna dance now? He didn't really feel like dancing.

But instead she led him down the hallway to the bathrooms. Or was it the back door she was leading him to? No, the women's room, its door banging open as she entered, pulling him in behind her. He asked her what she thought she was doing. She told him to shut up.

There was no one else in the bathroom. The stall in the back was empty. She threw the door open, pushed Syd in. His mouth opened with a question. She filled it with her tongue, and her hands went down quickly to undo his belt.

No one else can do this, she whispered, jerking his pants down. No one else understands. Taking him in hand. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. She squeezed him for emphasis, kissed his neck. There's only one thing that matters.

Then she was moving, down and down and down, to take him into her mouth. He leaned back against the wall, the reek of air fresheners and raw l.u.s.t intermingling with the spinning in his head and the burning in his loins.

You and I, she said.

And then sucked his vessel dry.

Vic knew it the second he pulled onto the Mt. Haversford Road.

Up to that point he'd been starting to get a little annoyed. He'd tracked Nora all the way into Pittsburgh, where he'd scored a copy of Pennsylvania Musician, found the names of the local clubs. Vic hated cities; way too easy to mask her trail in the swarming concrete jungles. Sure enough, he'd lost it altogether sometime late Sat.u.r.day, which forced him into the aggravating position of spending all of Sunday covering the same ground over and over, just hoping to get lucky.

And then just today as he was heading out of town and flipping across the radio dial, searching for tunes, he caught the tail end of a late news wrap-up. He missed the first part, but that didn't matter: the little bit that he caught was more than enough. The part that talked about the mutilated remains of an unidentified adult white male found this morning in the warehouse district of Monville.

Vic cackled. Gee, he thought, wonder who did that? He checked his map, found Monville, and realized that the b.i.t.c.h had actually tricked him: kept him thinking she was heading east, when in reality she'd doubled back to the west.

An official access only crossover appeared before him and he whipped across it in a cloud of dust, nudging up to ninety as his anger stoked to a fine burn. Tricked him. How could it be? Either she was getting smarter, or he was slipping.

Vic thought about it, ultimately rejected both possibilities. This was just a new wrinkle in the game, is all. Fine. Great, actually: it upped the ante, put a keener edge on the hunt.

Besides, he thought, Nora wasn't the only dog that could learn new tricks.

He chilled out a bit once he got south of the city, resisted the urge to just burn up the highway all the way to Monville. No sense in getting sloppy, especially if she was getting cagey on him. He spent the next few hours checking out the dozens of dives that dotted the western Pennsylvania outback.

And then about forty-five minutes ago, he hit on a twisty little two-lane blacktop snaking through the mountains, and there it was: after days of sniffing cold leads, that unmistakable scent. She'd been here, all right, and recently. She was lubed. And something else, too.

She had company. . . .

Vic came upon the little blinking neon sign at nine forty-five, and smiled. It was secluded, tucked up in boonies, with woods and mountains all around. Even the name was perfect.

He wheeled into the big gravel lot, took stock of the number of cars, noted that it was pretty crowded. That was not so good. But there was a nice inconspicuous spot on the far end that had a clear sight line to the front door. Vic pulled in and shut the engine off, then reached under the seat and pulled out Billy Hessler's long-lost bag of crank.

Two king-sized lines later, he threw the door open, stuck one long black-booted leg out into the night.

Her scent was heavy in the air as he made his way to the entrance. It mingled with the drugs in his system, made the bloodl.u.s.t rise and burble inside.

By the time he entered, he felt ready for anything.

It started just after she'd finished with Syd, booted him out of the bathroom, made him wait in the hall. "I have to pee," she told him. "Alone." It was all she had to say. The s.e.x had rendered him malleable, so much Play-Doh with a b.o.n.e.r. She shut the door behind him, turned back toward the stall.

And that was when it hit her. Hard.

There was no spotting to warn of its onslaught. There was only pain: sudden and shocking, excruciating enough to double her over before she could reach the toilet.

Oh no, she thought. Oh G.o.d no . . .

By the time she got her skirt up and her panties down, she was already spattering the cold, grimy tile.

NO! her mind shrieked, as if she could will herself to turn back the tide. She thrust her hands between her legs, trying to block the flow. NO NO NO!!!

But there was no stopping it, and no denying the implications. Even before the first red drops gave way to the flood, the fear grew huge inside her. Tearing straight through doubt to certainty. Erasing any question, and every last speck of hope.

There was no life taking shape in there: no baby in the making, no little recombinant Syd-and-Nora Jr. knitting itself into substance within her. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

At least not anymore.

And then the deluge came: thick rivulets of defeat, flooding her with pain and loss as they sputtered and sluiced from her inner workings. Nora began to mewl, then moan, then sob, as her last chance and worst nightmare lay spinning on the surface of the rippling pool. It formed a little curlicue, like a question mark.

Nora caught a glimpse. That was all that it took. She cried and cried for a full five minutes, careening through anguish and grief to hysteria and back. Until there were no tears left, nor any point to them.

Then the first wave subsided, and the numbness set in: cloaking her in a smothering black veil of grief. The pain became a dull, cramping pulse.

This doesn't mean anything, she told herself desperately, the words a tiny floodwall of hope against a tidal wave of madness. This doesn't mean s.h.i.t. We've got plenty of time to try again. Plenty of time.

Just as soon as we get out of here . . .

She coughed, forcing out one last thickening freshet, and realized in that second that she didn't even have any G.o.dd.a.m.ned tampons-she hadn't thought to bring any, hadn't thought she'd need any. It was the capping absurdity. Nora wound up stuffing a wad of toilet tissue in her panties to stanch the flow, then stood and flushed on her way out of the stall. Her failure swished down the pipes and away, never to be seen again.

Syd was right there when she emerged, of course: sucking emphatically at his unfiltered smoke, kicking up a little nimbus that encircled his head as he waited in the hallway. Doing just as he was told.

Good boy, she was tempted to say. Good doggy . . .

But then her knees began to buckle, and her head began to spin, and before she could catch herself he was there: holding her close as she fought down the darkness, the second wave of sorrow crashing over her now, threatening to unleash the tears and the terror that she couldn't allow him to see.

"We gotta get out of here. . . ." she whimpered at last, appalled by the weakness in her voice.

"Shhhh," he whispered, smoothing her hair with one strong and gentle hand. "Shhhhh."

And she allowed herself to be comforted, while she waited for her strength to return. It would only be a minute. Just a minute. That's all. Then they could be on their way, kissing this p.i.s.shole dive and this p.i.s.shole town one last good-bye.

Just another minute, she told herself. And then I'll be just fine. . . .

Higher education had never been a priority for Jules O'Donnell. He'd never gone to college-barely made it through high school, in fact-and his bartending certificate was the fanciest piece of paper he'd ever aspired to own.

But if the school of hard knocks gave out degrees, Jules was a certified master. Twenty years behind a bar was nothing if not educational, an in-depth field study of the lexicon of human moves. In the wanderl.u.s.t of his misspent youth he'd swabbed counters and tended taps in everything from the poshest Frisco fern-bar to the skeeviest Long Island t.i.tty-joint, even tried his hand at the cruise-ship circuit for a year or two in his late twenties before returning home to these peaceful green hills.

His major, without a doubt, was in animal politics. Mating rituals were a specialty: Jules could lay winning odds on the success or failure of a proposed coupling before the ice melted or the head was off the first draft. He'd heard every pickup line and snappy comeback a million times; his big toothy grin had presided over the shots that launched a thousand bachelor parties, and his sympathetic nods had accompanied the beers that drowned ten thousand sorrow-drenched separations. Jules had been the impartial observer of hirings and firings, of births and deaths, of pickups and breakups from coast to coast to coast, and his knowledge was immense.

But of all his time-tested and finely honed skills, the one he counted on the most was the one that whispered trouble coming. Which was why his eyes instinctively went to the door a split second before it creaked open.

And the dark man came in.

It wasn't just his physical presence, which wasn't so much ma.s.sive as radiating ma.s.s: like a psychic projection of size beyond his form. It wasn't the macho body English or the earring or the black-leather bada.s.s biker accoutrements: all were standard issue in these parts. Nor was it the fiercely smirking slash that lined one side of his face: Jules had seen good-looking guys with scars before.

No, it was the way the testosterone count seemed to go up the second the stronger crossed the threshold: air molecules charging like iron filings in a magnetic field, polarizing the gender lines across the room. It was the fact that every male that came within range looked, then looked away-instantly and unconsciously intimidated into a big-dog-meets-little-dog territorial imperative-while every female the stranger pa.s.sed looked, then looked again: a purely instinctual attraction-reaction that did split-second biological end runs around the higher concepts of love and loyalty and fidelity.

It was the realization that the stranger not only seemed to expect the reaction, he enjoyed it.

And most disturbing of all, it was the creeping sense of deja vu: the gut knowledge that he'd only ever seen one other person who could so polarize a room just by walking into it, and she was even now making a very good friend behave in some very strange ways. Jules wished Janey were here to provide him with a reality-check, or Red were on hand, should his instincts prove accurate.

But alas, Janey was off tonight, and Red only worked the weekends. That left Jules, two waitresses and the night cook, holding the line against an uncharacteristically heavy Monday night. The business was like that: sometimes you saw the crowd coming-on a weekend or St. Paddy's Day or a Super Bowl Sunday-and you were ready for them; sometimes you counted on them and they didn't show, lured elsewhere by the promise of two-for-one drinks or a wet T-shirt contest.

And sometimes-like tonight, for instance-they just appeared, completely unexpected and in droves, presumably driven by the same forces that sent lemmings careening off cliffs.

As for what drove the dark man . . .

Jules rinsed and racked gla.s.ses, sixth-sense alarms clanging at the back of his skull, as the stranger stopped and sniffed the air like he was sifting it for clues. Everything about him conveyed a sense of malign purpose, like some renegade amba.s.sador of bad will on a merciless mission. They made the most fleeting of eye contact, just enough for each to register the other, and then Jules looked away: began wiping the counter as the stranger moved through the crowd, parting the throng like Moses on a Red Sea stroll. The wiping motion brought Jules to the center of the bar, within easy reach of the Mossberg Persuader twelve-gauge he kept stashed behind the ice chest.

And then, in a move both completely calculated and utterly natural, the dark man turned, sidling up to the shadowy far end of the bar, to take the proverbial catbird seat: his back to the wall, his eyes commanding virtually the whole of the room at a glance. Jules watched without watching, instantly understood the subtle dynamics of the play. To serve him, Jules would have to step out of reach of the gun.

The dark man smiled as Jules looked up, and Jules knew that he knew. And that it amused him.

Jules sighed. There was no other way to play it. He moved down the bar, shifted into his most accommodating demeanor. His smile, when it came, was all business. Only the twinkle in his eyes conveyed the underlying message. My bar. My rules.

Don't f.u.c.k with me.

"Howdy," he said. "What'll ya have?" Bringing the rag up to swab within an inch of the dark man's elbows. As the stranger's eyes dropped to register the intrusion, the rag disappeared and a fresh napkin took its place. We live to serve. Be nice.

The dark man looked up, smiled. His eyes projected a practiced indifference, but his pupils were huge, the light that shone behind them like black fire. "Double shot of tequila," he said, leaning on one palm. "If you don't mind."

"You got it," Jules answered, laying down a gla.s.s and grabbing a bottle from the speed rack. He poured expertly, filling the gla.s.s to the marker line with one hand while scooping up a slice of lime from the garnish bin with the other. He replaced the bottle and came back up with a salt shaker, set it by the gla.s.s. "New in town?" he asked, meaning when are you leaving?

"Oh, just pa.s.sin' through," the stranger replied, meaning none of your f.u.c.king business. He tipped the shaker, made a little mound of salt appear on the crook of his thumb and forefinger. Then he downed the shot in a gulp, licked the salt, and bit the pulp clear from the rind.

He had no sooner dropped the rind to the napkin than Jules had cleared it away, erasing all traces of the transaction. "Enjoy your stay," he said, meaning leaving so soon? "That'll be four bucks."

"Why don't you go ahead and set me up again," Vic said, meaning why don't you blow me. He fished a twenty out of his pocket. "And, uh, keep the change."

Vic smiled at the ox serving him, kept right on smiling as the big dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d did as he was told. Son of a b.i.t.c.h had gotten on his nerves practically from the minute he walked in the door, the way he eyeball-f.u.c.ked him and all. Like Vic gave two s.h.i.ts and a squirt about his d.i.n.ky little dump, or any of its grazing herd. He flipped him a five-spot just to get him to back off, show him that Vic was nice, Vic meant no harm, Vic was a regular friend to the animals.

The bartender returned with a fresh setup and a hard look, and Vic thanked him just as sweet as you please. He was just starting to fantasize what that big moon face would look like coming off in his hands when a giggling bevy of 4-H queens bellied up to the other end of the bar. The ox looked over.