“Then there’s no time to explain all this. Get out of there.”
“But—I’ll be a fugitive,” I whispered, turning away from the cop. “They know where I—”
“Listen. Get up. Walk to the door. Leave the room. Leave the building. Whatever you do, see that big white cop standing there in the room with you? Don’t look at him in the mirror.”
“Huh?”
I glanced back over my shoulder at the cop. Something was . . . off.
“Just go. Now.”
I tried to get a read on the cop, and realized that’s what was off. Even with the soy sauce I was getting zero information from the G. Gordon Liddy–looking detective. I turned my head a few degrees to the right . . .
—Don’t look at the mirror don’t look at the mirror—
. . . to the reflective surface of the two-way mirror directly opposite the cop.
It was just you and Morgan in the mirror, Dave. Even after the white cop stepped forward.
In the mirror it was just me. Standing there, talking on my cell.
Alone.
I spun toward the cop.
“I don’t get it.”
“He’s not real, Dave. Not in the, uh, traditional sense.”
“He’s coming toward me!”
“Go, Dave. You’re gonna start seeing things like this from time to time. It’s important that you not freak out.”
The cop was one step away from me now. His mustache twitched, as if he was starting to grin underneath it.
“So he, uh, can’t hurt me?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure he can.”
A hand clenched around my face. The cop’s fingers dug into my cheeks, squeezing, rigid as iron bars. I thought my teeth would crack into pieces. He pushed me back using my face and slammed me against the wall.
I clawed at his arm, but it was like trying to tear the limbs off a bronze statue. I smacked him across the nose with my phone. His mustache twitched again as if this amused him greatly.
The mustache kept twitching and twitching and then one end of it began to curl up and peel off, like a man’s disguise torn off by a hard wind. Finally the mustache detached completely, leaving a patch of pink, shredded skin. The thing flapped its halves like bat wings—no, it really did—and flew over and landed on my face.
The cop’s mustache bit me above the right eyebrow. I slapped at the thing with my left hand, then worked my leg up and, with all my strength, shoved a knee into the detective’s guts just below the ribs.
A jolt of pain shot up my thigh, like I had kneed over a pile of cinder blocks. But I felt him give, pushed back by the force. The mustache bat flittered over to my ear and clamped down, feeling like somebody doing five piercings at once. I slapped at it again, suddenly realized the cop had reeled back and fallen to a knee on the floor. I should have been free of him but the hand was still around my face—
Ah, look at that. His arm came off.
The man had a six-inch bloody hole on one shoulder now. The detached arm, on its own, whipped around my neck and coiled up like a python. No hint of bone in there now, the arm making two loops around until the ragged stump hung under my chin like a meat scarf.
I thrashed around, tried to pry the thing off. The armsnake was all muscle, tensed and wiry, slowly squeezing off my windpipe.
Colored spots flashed before my eyes, lack of oxygen shorting out the wiring in my brain. I blinked and saw the floor was closer than before. I was on my knees.
The mustache bat flitted around my head, taking stinging little bites on my cheek and forehead. It went after my eye, pulling at the lid, and I couldn’t get my hands up to swat it away. Arms not working right.
The meat scarf squeezed tighter. The whole room got dark. I was on all fours and I suddenly realized the best idea was just to lay down there on the floor and go to sleep.
I detected movement from the corner of my eye. The rest of the cop’s body. It was up, walking toward me.
Shit!
I crawled clumsily toward the door. Gordon reached for me with his remaining arm and I felt his fingers try to snatch my shirt. I flung myself toward the door, my face banging off it. I reached up, clawing around for the handle. I sucked air through a squeezed windpipe, my head felt like it would pop like a balloon.
Don’t be locked don’t be locked don’t be locked . . .
The handle turned. I banged open the door with my head and spilled out of the room—
—AND IT WAS over.
The thick bundle of armsnake had vanished from my neck, as had the flying mustache. I stood up, saw four guys hustling down the hall with an empty stretcher. I stuck my finger in my mouth, it came out bloody. I looked my cell phone over, saw it had the cracks and busted mouthpiece from its tour as a nose club seconds ago. I cursed at myself, sure that whatever freak-ass cellular conduit I just had with John was now cut off.
People rushed past me and I wanted to push my way through to see what was up with John, remembered John’s disembodied instructions. Taking advantage of the chaos, I strolled back through the police station, finally walking right out the front door.
I hit the sidewalk, my heart pounding. What now?
A fat man in a shiny business suit strode by without a glance my way.
Without trying, I realized that he was going to die in just two weeks, a heart attack while trying to knock his cat out of a tree with a broomstick.A pretty late-model Trans Am gleamed past and I noticed from the posture of the driver that the car was stolen and that the owner was dead. The car’s fan belt was going to break in 26,931 miles.
Man, I gotta focus on one thing at a time or my brain’s gonna melt and run out of my ears like strawberry jam.
Fine. I took a deep breath. Now what?
My car was two miles away at Wally’s and I didn’t have cash to waste on a taxi, even if one of the town’s three cabs should happen by at this moment. To my surprise, my cell phone rang. I put the broken thing to my ear, realized I owed some props to the engineers at Motorola.
“Hello?”
“Dave? It’s me.”
John.
“Where are you right now, Dave?”
“I’m on the sidewalk outside the cop shop, walking. Where are you? Heaven?”
“If you figure it out, let me know. Right now just keep walking. Go toward the park. Don’t freak out. Are you freaking out?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe this phone still works.”
“It won’t for very much longer. Half a block away, there should be the hot dog guy. Can you see him?”
I walked a dozen steps, smelled it before I saw it. The cart was plastered with right-wing stickers, and had a yellow-and-orange umbrella hanging over it. The hot dog guy was painfully thin, looked about one hundred and sixty years old. As much a landmark as this city has.
“Okay.”
“Buy a bratwurst from him.”
Questioning this seemed a waste of words.
The man and I exchanged $3.15 and a brat wrapped in a hot dog bun and a sheet of wax paper.
For a moment, I hesitated, then drew two fat, neat lines of mustard along its length. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Cell phone balanced between shoulder and ear, John spoke again, as if under water, his voice growing fainter by the second.
“Now put it up to your head.”
I looked down at the rivulets of oozing grease, congealing with the now dripping mustard and was thankful that I didn’t use ketchup or that brown hot onion sauce.
Glancing around, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead.
A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom.
As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money’s worth by eating the bratwurst while it was still hot, I heard it.
“Dave? Can you hear me?”
John’s voice, coming clear as day through the tube of seasoned meat. I glanced down at the cell phone and got the point. The display was black, the glass busted out of it. A green circuit board was poking out of the warped seam along one side.
“All right, all right. I’m hearing you through some kind of psychic vibration or whatever and not the phone. I get it. You could have just told me that.” I lowered the sausage and replaced it with the cell. “Okay, what’s next?”
Nothing.
I heard a faint sound coming from the bratwurst, put it back to my head.
“Dave? Are you there?”
“Yeah. I can’t get you through the cell now.”
“You have to talk through the bratwurst from now on.”
“Why—”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes, feeling a headache coming on.
“—Okay. What do we do?”
“The only reason you can hear me is because you got some of the soy sauce into your system, from the syringe. But it’s not very much and it won’t last long.”
“What is it, John? The sauce . . . it was alive. I swear it—”
“Listen. You gotta get over to Robert’s place. There aren’t any cops there now, but there will be. We have sort of a narrow window here. Take a cab to Wally’s and get your car, then go to Shire Village on Lathrop Avenue. It’s a trailer park, south of town past that one candy place. You should be able to get there in twenty minutes with any luck.”
“I don’t have any cash. I had five bucks and I just spent three of it on the bratwurst.”
“That bratwurst was three bucks? Holy crap. Okay. Give me a second. All right. Check between the sausage and the bun. You’ll find a hundred dollar bill folded up in there.”
Encouraged that maybe all this black magic could actually produce something positive, I fingered around under the sausage for a few seconds.
“Nothing here, John.”
“Okay. I guess I can’t do that. Do you have your ATM card?”