The Night Dahlia Page 2

  He was right, unfortunately, about all kinds of things. He’d have to willingly come out of there, and all that would be waiting for him was Hell, so I had to sweeten the pot a bit, or maybe more like piss in it. The spiritual light diminished and was gone. Corll guffawed, sounding for all the world like a rutting pig. Before he could rise off the floor, I took something from my shirt pocket and knelt beside him. It was a three-inch-long, dull, rusted needle. I placed it on Joey’s chest and uttered, “Malum, manere donec veniam ad hanc formam amotus fuero.” Then I grabbed an industrial-sized jug of bright blue window cleaner off the shelf next to me. “Fine,” I said, “suit yourself.” I unscrewed the cap of cleaner and took a whiff.

  “What is that?” Corll said. He tried to rise but discovered he couldn’t.

  “If you’re staying at the party,” I said, “you might as well have a drink.” I pinched Joey’s nose and began to pour the window cleaner down his throat. The boy and the demon choked and hacked as the toxic gunk went down.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Corll sputtered as I tipped the bottle back up. “Are you actually trying to kill the boy?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I am. That little needle there came out of the pelvis of a guy by the name of Albert Fish. He killed kids too, more than you. He thought God was telling him to do it, go figure. Old Al was a self-mutilator, besides being a homicidal fuck, and he would drive needles into his body. A buddy of mine who collects high-end weird shit got this for me. It’s got some power to it, bad power, and I figured it would have a good resonance with you, Dino, and looky there, it does. You can’t come out of that body until I take this off the kid’s chest, and yeah, I’m going to fucking kill him, and his soul will fly off to a real sweet place, maybe back into the big old cosmic rinse cycle where hopefully he won’t draw the ‘get possessed by a C-list demon fucktard’ card again.”

  I poured another big drink of the poison down the kid’s throat. Joey and Corll both gagged and coughed. I stopped pouring again. I heard shouts and bullhorns far away. I was running out of time. “You see, Dino,” I continued, “wherever the poor kid’s soul ends up, it’s better than being with you. So happy ending for little Joey. I’m not sure what kind of ending for ‘the mighty Zepar,’ however. Hard to say.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Corll said. “You came in here, tried to stop me, because you wanted to save the boy. You won’t kill him now.”

  “Actually,” I said, pouring more of the poison out of the jug again into the struggling boy’s mouth, “I’m here for you, Dino. I don’t give a fuck what happens to this kid, or anyone else. You read me my bio. You think I won’t? Stick around and find out, huckleberry. This is a contract job … for your landlord. Y’know, the one you call…” I tried to do my best Igor impersonation, which is kinda rough when you have a West Virginia drawl, “… the Master.”

  “Oh shit!” Corll gasped around more of the poison splashing into Joey’s mouth. “Wait, wait!”

  “The power of Windex compels you, fucker,” I said.

  “Jesus!” Corll screamed, squirming, “Stop, stop, please, don’t!”

  “I slip this needle into the boy’s body somewhere, and you’re anchored for good. My best guess is that after the agonizing stomach cramps and painful-as-shit death from his nervous system shutting down,” I said, “you’ll just be trapped in there until the body decays. Locked in that rotting meat jail, until everything that is Dean Corll just fades away into oblivion. It’s a harsh ending, Dino, but it satisfies my employer, so…”

  “I’ll leave, I’ll fucking leave,” Corll said. “Hurry up, I can feel that shit starting to affect his nervous system!”

  I put the cap back on the jug and placed the boy’s hand around the plastic handle. I put my hand on Fish’s needle. “I ever catch you in this world again, I’ll finish the job, next time. This is my fucking house, bitch.”

  “I’ll be waiting in line for you when you get to Hell, Ballard,” Corll said. I lifted the needle off the boy’s chest, and the thing that had been Dean Corll departed with a moan like a hot desert wind. It left the dank, cloying stench of rancid blood and candy in its wake.

  “Yeah,” I said, slipping open my satchel, “but your punk ass will be waaaay in the back of the line, Dino.” I stood, tucked the needle away in my pocket, and slipped on a dark blue windbreaker I had removed from my bag. On the back in bright yellow letters was the word PRESS. I also removed a lanyard with an official laminated press photo ID, a baseball cap with the logo of the Houston Chronicle, a local newspaper, on it, and a very nice digital Nikon camera. I knelt down beside the kid and waited for what I knew was coming next.

  Joey was breathing, a little ragged but still alive. Fun fact: you can drink a small amount of window cleaner, about two ounces an hour, and get wasted off of it, but too much does fuck up your nervous system and can kill you. You find out all kinds of neat life hacks like that when you vacation at rock bottom.

  A pair of cops in tactical gear, probably the point on a SWAT team, appeared on either side of the open door.

  “Don’t move!” one of them shouted. I put my hands up.

  “I think he’s trying to kill himself,” I said. “He drank a bunch of this blue cleaning shit. He was like this when I came down the hall.”

  “Keep your hands up, stand, and move over to the side,” the other cop said. “Jesus, it’s the shooter all right, we need medics in here now!”

  One of the SWAT cops frisked me and spun me around, reading my press ID. “How the fuck did you get past the lines and get in here, asshole?”

  “Hey, look, I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I’m new and I was just trying to get…”

  “Get him out of here,” an older tactical cop with sergeant’s stripes said as he entered the room with the EMTs. “Place is getting too damn crowded.”

  They confiscated my camera and ran my press credentials. My hacker, Grinner, had been good to his word and worth every penny. The fake ID stood up. In less than an hour, I was walking away from the school and dumping my career as a photojournalist in a trash can next to the bus stop.

  While they were vetting me, they brought Joey out on a stretcher. He was handcuffed to it. He was awake and crying, calling out for his mother. I felt a cowardly relief pass through me at the thought that I didn’t have to be the one to tell the boy his mother had been his first victim. I’d seen her body in the hallway of their quiet home.

  I imagined the nightmare existence Joey was going to have now, the horrors outside and inside eating him until the day he departed this earth. Death would have been more merciful. Kid hadn’t done a thing wrong, just got handed a shit deal. My job was done, I had done the best I could. I was never supposed to win this, never supposed to get there in the nick of time to make it all right for anyone except the manipulative bastard who sent me here. It was a cluster fuck from the jump.

  I hailed a cab. “Drive,” I said, handing the guy a hundred, and fumbling for a cigarette. I kept thinking that if I looked behind me, Joey would be there, staring at me.

  “Where?” the cabbie asked.

  “Away,” I said, “fast.”

  TWO

  The Voodoo Queen on Milby Street was a dive that tried a little too hard to be a dive. It made the hipster kids feel like they were really slumming without the need for paying gangland tolls and packing pistols. I liked the joint from my last visit to Houston because the music was good and the folks there didn’t skimp on the alcohol in their drinks. I bypassed the voluminous menu of concoctions that came in hollowed-out pineapples and fishbowls with little totem poles of fruit spears and paper umbrellas for buying the lone bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Reserve they had up on the top shelf. The fetching lass that sold it to me had hair dyed white and a tapestry of tattoos covering her slender body.

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “That’s like a three-thousand-dollar bottle of twenty-three-year-old whiskey. You know that, right?” I handed her a wad of cash.

  “Here’s fo
ur K,” I said. “It’s a tip for being the prettiest sight I’ve seen all day, darlin’.” The bartender looked at the money, back to me, and stepped to the back bar to count the bills and make sure they weren’t fake by the light of the enormous fish tank full of brilliantly colored clown fish that adorned the back wall of the bar. She came back with the bourbon like she was cradling the Ark of the Covenant, and a glass tumbler.

  “Ice?” she asked.

  “Be like pissing in holy water.”

  “What’s the special occasion?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said, getting up from the bar.

  “Happy birthday!” she said and actually meant it. “Hey, I get off at eight. I’ve never tasted twenty-three-year-old bourbon before.”

  “Well, come find me,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to it, but I suspect that whiskey is older than you are.”

  She laughed, and I retreated to the shadows of the bar floor.

  Funny thing, when you buy a bottle like this, they pretty much let you camp any damn place you please. I went around a velvet rope and sat myself down in a corner booth of a closed section. The only lights in here were the small round fills built into the ceiling, bright light under them, and deep shadow all around. I could still hear the music from the jukebox. It was playing the Swan’s cover of “Can’t Find My Way Home.” I poured a drink and sipped it like the first kiss from an old lover in a long, long time. I had stayed dry for eleven months, Magdalena’s influence on me. She was gone, little Joey was gone. Gone, baby, gone, like the song goes. But Dean-fucking-Corll would go on forever. That little girl was gone, but my evil ass sat right here in air-conditioned comfort, getting good and tight. Cheers. Seeing children’s brains sprayed all over walls seemed as good a reason as any to take a flying leap off the wagon. I drained my glass; it was smooth as Sinatra, worth every penny. I poured myself another one, saw that little girl’s eyes as she slipped away, and toasted the darkness.

  “Happy birthday, asshole,” I said.

  Half a bottle or so later, a waitress came back to see how I was doing. I told her to bring me a bottle of the cheapest, nastiest tequila they had and a Budweiser in a bottle. I gave her five hundred dollars for her trouble. After that, I had no shortage of customer service.

  The bottle of tequila was almost gone, and a forest of empty brown beer bottles covered the table. The afternoon crowd in the bar had mostly been office folks skipping out for a beer at lunchtime, a few college kids with no classes and money to burn, and of course my people, the barflies who didn’t give a fuck about the décor or the crowd as long as there was a seat for your ass and booze to whittle away the hours of your life until the end. There is a certain Zen meditation present in hard-core alcoholism.

  The evening crowd was in now. It consisted of more sketchy locals from the Second District, the surrounding neighborhood, and swarms of hipsters, nursing the one PBR they could afford. There was a battle over who was setting the tone for the night on the jukebox, the music jumping from blues, to dance, to country. I did my part for the war effort by tossing in Johnny Cash’s cover of “I See a Darkness” and followed it up with K.Flay’s “Blood in the Cut.” Take that, alt-folk scum! I paid the club manager a grand to keep my section closed. I wanted to be in a fishbowl, watching life, seeing how normal assholes spent their Friday night.

  I had almost finished off the Pappy Van when the tattooed bartender walked up to my table with a stride like a panther. The black lights made her white hair almost glow. “You didn’t forget about me, did you?” she said over the throbbing music and the traffic jam of voices. She had a glass in her hand. I nodded for her to sit and she did. I poured her a glass, the last of the bottle, leaving a single swallow for myself. She raised the glass, and I raised the bottle.

  “Happy birthday,” she said, “and congratulations on another successful fulfillment of your ongoing obligation, Laytham.”

  I paused in drinking the last of the bottle and cocked my head at the bartender, who drained her glass and sighed. I looked across the bar and saw the same bartender, same tattoos, same hair, waving bye to the other bartender on duty as she headed for the door, her purse over her shoulder.

  “That,” said the bartender sitting across from me, “is what sin tastes like.” I slipped a cigarette between my lips.

  “Got a light?” I asked the Devil.

  “You had two images prominent in your mind,” the embodiment of all malice said as she lit my cigarette like any good bartender would. “This sweet young thing you visualized rutting with, and that dead little girl back at the school. Since it was your birthday, I chose, sorry for this, the lesser of two evils.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “You are assassinating a very expensive buzz. I did your dirty work, and got you your AWOL scumbag back.”

  “You did, Laytham,” it said. “I would have manifested sooner, but I had to wait until your consciousness was altered sufficiently for us to interact. I wanted to congratulate you on heroically saving that poor boy’s life, Laytham. Bravo.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and drained the last of the bourbon. It tasted like ashes.

  “Technically, fuck you,” she replied, pouring herself a glass of the last of the oily tequila, “since you were the one who bartered away three years of your life in my service in exchange for those wishes you needed so desperately at the time.” I watched the Devil drink the last of my booze. I think there was a metaphor in there somewhere. “Haven’t we had fun these past few years? Me, breaking up the wearisome monotony of your plodding march toward self-induced oblivion with my little honey-do list of tasks. You, a villain most foul, given chances over and over again to act the hero, like you did today. Tell me, hero, how does it feel to be back on the side of the angels?”

  I looked across the table for anything left to drink. There was nothing. I looked up at this thing of purest self-hate, conjured out of my own mind, and said nothing. There was nothing to say. The Devil knows you, because the Devil is you. She went on, taking one of my American Spirits out of the crumpled and almost empty pack. “I wanted to congratulate you,” she said, lighting the cigarette between those full lips, “and let you know I was here to give you a little birthday present of my own. You have worked off about a year’s worth of your debt in the past two. I am forgiving almost all of the remaining time on your account tonight, my dear Laytham.”

  “Almost?” I said, leaning across the table, knocking several beer bottles over as I did. I think a few smashed on the floor.

  “I’m holding onto one minute,” the Devil said. “That’s all. One measly minute, and of course the ragged chunk of your soul invested in that time will remain in escrow until that minute is paid. Am I not a generous god?”

  “You’re what my granny would call a hoodooer,” I slurred. My companion nodded.

  “Well said. How is your dear grandmother these days? Don’t hear much from her since you ‘helped’ her all those years ago, eh, hero?”

  I roared and launched myself across the table at the son of a bitch. The table tumbled over as I fell. Bottles shattered everywhere. I was on the floor with all the other broken things, trying to get back up. The pretty bartender was gone; I was alone. I had been alone the whole time.

  “Okay, big spender, time to call you a cab.” Thick hands lifted me off the floor and to my feet.

  “Letgoame,” I said, articulately, and tried to pull away. It didn’t work. The guy holding me was a good six inches taller than me and outweighed me by maybe eighty pounds. He had a hardness behind his eyes that told me the smile fixed on his face was a lie. If I pushed, he would beat the hell out of me. “You have any idea who you’re fuhkin’ with?” I said.

  “Look, friend,” the bouncer said, walking me out of the closed section, “Let’s just go outside and talk about this, okay?”

  “Fuhyou,” I said and took a swing at him. “I’m fuhkin’ Laythm Ballard, you muther fuhker!” It connected, but there wasn’t anything behind it. I might as wel
l have slapped him with a bar rag. I tried to put together a spell, some kind of spell, death spell? Fire-fall? My concentration was like mercury, and my energies were as scattered as any other broken-down old drunk’s would have been. The bouncer snapped off two quick, tight jabs at me. He wasn’t just a meathead that stood at the door and checked ID; he had training. There were bright lights popping behind my eyes, and I was falling. Then there was movement after some time in the dark. A female voice was near my ear.

  “Who did he say he was?”

  “Nobody, just an old, rich drunk,” I heard the bouncer telling the girl, “celebrating his birthday a little too hard. He was back there talking to himself for the last half hour.”

  There was a hole in my memory after that. My next awareness was the smell of garbage. I climbed to my knees and looked. I was in an alley, next to a Dumpster overflowing with kitchen trash. I had no idea where I was or how much time had passed. I slid back down, and my face hit the sticky asphalt. I slept.

  Someone was turning me over. The man’s face was square and bland in its ugliness. He had short, thinning blond hair. He wore an expensive suit with his cheap haircut.

  “It’s him,” square-face said to someone. He had a British accent.

  “Fuck off,” I said. It was still dark, and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. Blondie grabbed me by my shirt and hauled me to my feet. I drove a right into his jaw, and this time it had a little something behind it. He staggered back, shaking his head. I was in another alley filled with Dumpsters. I had no clue where I was. There was a black SUV, a Mercedes-Benz, idling with its lights on. Square-face’s companion stood by the car; he held his arms behind his back. He was black, taller than me, and dressed better than his partner. He wore the expensive clothes better than Square-face too. He had his black hair cut very short, almost military fashion, and he had a neatly trimmed goatee. His eyes were hazel, and his features were fine, with slightly pointed ears, a slender nose, and good cheekbones.