"Max! Wake up Maxie." Debbie's sing-song voice rattled into his subconscious fog like fingernails across a dusty chalk board. "Maxie.... Oh Maaaxiee."
"Whaa? Uh, okay, I'm up."
He woke to find himself prostrate on a 1970's vintage couch constructed of used whiskey barrels with horse shoe accents. Faded orange vinyl upholstery was sticking to every square inch of exposed flesh. Pulling away from the sweaty plastic produced a sound akin to masking tape coming off of a roll, or a rubber boot sucking out of six-inches of cow flop. Max's creaky bones were not only struggling against a vinyl vacuum, but he was simultaneously being compressed by over one hundred pounds of aromatic canine stupidity.
Max lifted his left arm from the red and black shag carpet and tried to swat Bruno from his back like some giant blow-fly. "Bruno," Max grunted, "get the hell offa me."
Bruno moved. A little. He repositioned his head and let out a long dogly sigh. A sigh that was punctuated by a fit of rapid-fire, jowl-jiggling, gum-flapping, snot-slinging sneezes. Max's naked back, neck, and head were being splattered by a flood of dog mucus interspersed with unchewed bits of last night's dog chow. In a primeval instinctive response to a very threatening situation, Max twisted and contorted his sleep-logged body in an attempt to get the mongrel off his back. The sudden gyrations shot a spasm of pain from the lumbar-thoracic region of his spinal cord straight into his sleepy brain.
Bruno found all of this commotion to be most disturbing. He decided to search out a more peaceful locale. The beast lost traction on the sweaty vinyl. He scrambled for a purchase with claws that had gone far too long without trimming. The seat of Max's favorite and threadbare Levi's was shredded. And so was his left cheek.
"Oh, gawd, my back, my butt, my best jeans!" Max howled as much from indignation as from pain. "Get outta here, you stupid mutt!" The grimace of pain was intense enough to curdle raw oatmeal at ten paces. Unfortunately for Max, it had an equal and opposite effect upon Debbie.
"Maxie!" Debbie scolded. "Don't you yell at that poor dog. He was so comfy sleeping with you. You should have seen him sleeping there, a little bit of drool coming out of his mouth. Just like you." She collapsed and melted into a crumpled heap of laughter.
"Goddammit, Debbie, don't call me Maxie. I hate it."
"Lighten up, Max. Hey, look at your pants! Your cute little white butt is sticking right out. You really should try to get some more sun, big boy."
Bruno was presently focused on a puddle of beer that gurgled from an unfinished can and onto the shag carpet.
Mike emerged from his bedroom clad only in a very large pair of Mickey Mouse boxer shorts. "Bruno! Stop that, guy, it gives you gas." The shorts were a perfect match to the very small version that Debbie was wearing "Hey, Max, look out here. There's a black-and-white creeping by in front of Mike's apartment. It's the second time that I've seen it in the last fifteen minutes.
The pain in Max's back and a damaged derriere were suddenly only of tertiary concern. "Is the scanner still on?" he asked, now fully awake. "What have they been saying?"
Max dropped to his knees by the front window. He interrupted the plane of a venetian blind vane with his right index finger while his left arm was fully engaged in keeping Bruno's pilsner-soaked snout at bay.
Fiddling with the buttons, knobs, and adjustments on a Bearcat scanner, Mike said, "Nothing. Nope, not a damn thing. They're not saying a damn thing."
The patrol car slowly moved past the duplex apartment, turned the corner and very slowly motored down the block. Both officers of the law were locked in on the apartment like a cat stalking a mouse. From Mike's house, directly across the street from Mike's apartment, Max, Mike, and now Debbie, watched as the cruiser pulled up to Ho's Asian Market. One cop got out and went to the pay phone.
"Quick, call Mike!" Max was still peering through the blinds at the patrol car while absentmindedly scratching his back. "Get him on the phone, pronto!"
The venetian blind snapped back into position when he stood up. He grabbed his pack of Camels from the coffee table, plucked out a smoke and released the pack. Like a magician palming a silver dollar, the Camels refused to return to the table. They hung in gravitational limbo, supported from Max's palm by glistening elastic threads of Bruno's nasal napalm.
The way that he reacted, you would have thought he had a tarantula crawling up his arm.
"Arawwwgh!"
The blood curdling shriek even made Bruno do a double-take.
Max flapped his hand at least three times before the dog boogers let go. Cigarettes were jumping out of the agitated pack, trying to seek refuge in the shag carpet fibers. Bruno, seeing that the cigarettes were coming from Max, who had just put one to his lips, naturally assumed they must be food. Max's last three smokes were vacuumed up into Bruno's maw before the beast realized that they were not really very tasty.
Why was Master eating them anyway?
Mike had Mike on the phone. "Looks like they were checking out your garage, dude."
"Yeah, I know. I've been watching. They've been around the house at least three times this morning. Woke me up leaning on the doorbell about twenty minutes ago. I just looked at 'em through the peephole till they split. Don't see 'em now. Musta left."
"Nope, didn't leave. Max is watching the car right now. One of 'em is using the phone outside of Ho's." Mike looked into the living room. He could see Max trying to detach a cigarette dangling from his lower lip without losing too much skin. "Still there Max?"
"Yeah, uh... just a sec." Max glanced out the window. "Yeah, still on the phone."
"Ms. Talbert? This is Matson again. There's no answer. We tried the bell, and knocked, couldn't see much through the windows. Can't tell for sure if he's home or not."
"What a bout the car?"
"Beg your pardon...?"
"The car. The old Buick. Is it there?"
"Might be in the garage, but there's no window. Whatcha want us to do now?
"Check the garage. If it's in there, then bring him in"
"But Ms. Talbert," the big man whined, "the door is locked. And we can't see inside. Besides, I don't think that he's even home."
"Kick it."
"What?"
"Kick it, goddammit, kick it! I don't care how you get in, but check that garage. And if the car is in there, kick the house, too."
"Yes ma'am. Anything else?"
"No!" Shelly hissed. "And don't bother calling again until you've got him!"
The slam of the receiver hurt Matson's ear.
"Bitch," he mouthed to his partner as he returned to the cruiser.
"What she say?"
"Just like you said she'd say."
"Kick it?"
"Yup. Kick it." Matson nodded. "But she wants us to do the garage first, just to make sure it's the right place. Even if it is the right place, if the car's gone, so is he, and then we don't have to kick the house."
"Just the garage?"
"Depends if he's home or not."
"Get the hell outta there, Mike."
"You got it, bro."
The connection clicked off. Seconds later, Mike blasted out of his front door, bound across the gravel driveway, and threw open the overhead garage door. The vibrato of Death Angel's mellow bass rumble exploded to an earsplitting roar. The black behemoth squealed out of the garage through its own blue-white cloud of oil and burning rubber. Mike jumped out, ran back to the garage, slammed the door shut, and flew across the few steps back to Death Angel. The Buick had just barely disappeared behind Mike's house across the street, and into the garage when the cops rounded the corner for the fourth time that morning. Moments later, Max and Mike and Mike and Debbie watched as the two cops first pounded on Mike's front door, then pried the side garage door open with a tire iron. The two public servants didn't even bother to step inside. They pushed the door open, looked inside, and got back into their black-and-white.
"Those assholes didn't even close the door!"
"Well," Bobbie began, "that night I heard Max tell the patrolmen that he was going fishing. He said Sunday, or maybe he said 'tomorrow'. Shelly, I was so scared, I'm not sure. I thought he was just trying to get rid of the two officers."
Shelly was biting her nails and scribbling on the legal pad. "Maybe that explains why we can't find that Buick. What else happened before I showed up? Start from the beginning."
"Nothing happened. There wasn't a beginning. We played cards, that's all."
"Was Gustafson there when you got there? Did he come by himself, or what? Come on, Bobbie," Shelly implored, "work with me."
"Like I told you before, I had Max sold on the idea of renting an apartment to me. But he wanted me to come down to the garage that evening. I didn't know that there was going to be a card game until I saw the table. We had been there only a few minutes when the others showed up. Both cars arrived about the same time. I think that the old car came in first--"
"Was Gustafson in the Coroner's vehicle, or the old car?"
"I don't know...I can't remember. They all just sort of got out at once." The strain of filtering the mundane and calm prologue from the insane mayhem that followed, was showing clearly on Bobbie's face. "Almost everyone had a bag of drinks or snacks." Her eyes searched the ceiling tiles of the office for bits of memory just beyond her grasp. "Two of Max's friends were opening beers and passing them around. I was so excited at seeing Gustafson that I couldn't help watching him. He was putting his stuff in the refrigerator. Some beer, some dip, and something in the freezer, probably ice cream or something."
"Ice cream? At a poker game?" Shelly flipped back a few pages in her notes. "Are you sure it was ice cream? How much was it?"
"Hell, I don't know. It was small, like a pint maybe. Jesus! Shelly, what difference does it make?"
"A pint of ice cream, for seven people? At a poker game?"
"Well?"
"Well what?" Officer Matson replied.
The black-and-white was still parked in front of Mike's half of the duplex. "Now what are we gonna do? Talbert expects us to collar that guy. I think we better call and tell her he wasn't home."
"Nope, she said not to call until we got him. We're gonna do just that. Sit right here until he comes home." Matson said, pulling a Stanley thermos in hammertone grey from under passenger seat. "Coffee?"
"Yeah, thanks," his partner said, accepting a Styrofoam cup from Matson. "But I didn't think that you were quite so stupid."
Matson blew into the thermos lid serving as his cup, "Yeah, Einstein. Stupid, huh? Where do you get off, calling me stupid?"
"If you were this guy that Talbert has the hots for, I suppose you'd see a patrol car parked in front of your house, and just drive right up, huh?"
Matson could see it coming. He was about to be privileged with his partner's best Shirley Temple impersonation.
"Oh, hello officers! Here I am. Please be gentle when you slap the cuffs on me. And...oh yes, here is a signed confession and a map to Jimmy Hoffa's grave!"
Matson didn't want to, but he couldn't stifle a chuckle. "Okay, okay, cut the crap. You start here and I'll take the other side of the street. Maybe somebody knows where he is. Just lemme finish my coffee first, huh?"
"Hey, works for me," the other guy smiled, offering a zip-lock bag to his partner. "Oreo?"
Debbie was taken aback at the sight of a policeman on the front door, even though she had been watching both him and his counterpart methodically canvassing the neighborhood. "Yes, can I help you?"
Matson stood and stared, mouth agape, as he quickly brushed some errant cookie crumbs from his tie. The sight of Debbie wearing very brief Mickey Mouse boxers and a clinging cropped satin tank top almost gave him apoplexy. "Yes, Miss. I'm trying to locate one of your neighbors, a Mr. Terrance Mikelson. The department has recovered some stolen property of his."
"Who?"
"Ah...lemme check." Matson flipped open his notebook to check the name again, and to give his eyes something to look at other than what Debbie was not wearing. "Yup, Terrance Mikelson. Lives right across the street." Matson motioned over his shoulder, stealing another glance at the woman's chest in the process. "Drives a '56 Buick,"
"Oh! You mean Mike. Whatcha got for him? I bet it's my stereo. He said somebody ripped it off outta Death Angel. I always thought that he just hocked it so he could buy...never mind. Where is it, huh, it's my stereo right? Can I have it?"
"I'm sorry, Miss," Matson evaded. "But we need his signature on the property release. Do you happen to know when Mr. Mikelson will be back?"
"No, he went fishing."
"Fishing?"
"Yeah, fishing. Him and my boyfriend went fishing."
"Miss, do you happen to know where Mr. Mikelson and your friend went fishing?" Matson poised his pen, ready to scribble-down the key to his impending payoff.
. "Of course, silly, the lake!" Debbie bubbled.
"And do you know which lake?"
"Wilderness Lake. We all just went there a little while ago. And my stereo was gone, so we had to listen to Max's boring old stories. Are you sure you can't just give my stereo back now?"
"Thank you very much, Miss," Matson said, already turning from the door and heading back to the patrol car. "You've been a great deal of help." Matson cringed as he heard himself parroting the same corny lines that they had force-fed him at the academy. "This job really sucks."
He waved-down his partner and they met again in the car, which was still idling on the street in front of Mike's house.
"So?"
"So what?"
"Whatcha find out?"
"He went fishing."
"Yeah? You know where?"
"Of course, silly, at the lake!"
"What's wrong with you today? Are you nuts, or what?"
"Sorry, just kidding. The girl across the street says our boy Mikelson and her boyfriend went fishing up at Wilderness Lake."
"Okay. Now I say it's time to call Talbert. We sure as hell can't just take an afternoon drive across three counties to find this guy."
Salvatore definitely did not relish the idea of driving over 150 miles across open country where the ratio of asphalt and concrete to sage brush and corn rows was abnormally low. Especially not alone. He would rather have walked bare-ass naked through the south-side at midnight, than be completely enveloped and encased by thousands of acres of empty space. Salvatore had heard about the inbred flannel-coated hayseeds that infested the unpaved wilderness. Sunburned tobacco-spitting lowbrows that routinely copulated with all sorts of farm animals.
At least he felt relatively secure on the freeway. There was a chain link fence on either side, and a three-foot high concrete barrier down the middle of six traffic lanes. Salvatore reasoned that the chance of being gored by a buffalo or killed by a band of rampaging savages was acceptably low.
The car was another plus. Shelly had seen fit to provide him with a decent automobile, not a fume-belching hulk of Detroit pig iron, but a refined, comfortable, and quiet fine German machine. He was certain that Bobbie would not mind that he was using her new car. After all, how could a mere woman appreciate the erogenous euphoria of a BMW sedan?
After thirty miles, the six-lane concrete interstate had devolved into a four-lane divided state highway. After sixty miles there were only two lanes of asphalt remaining. After ninety miles, the degeneration was nearly complete. Salvatore found himself on a chuckhole infested stretch of dirt with a thin coat of gravel. At 35 miles per hour he was lucky to have missed the house-sized Holstein cow being herded along by a kid in faded blue bib overalls. The little urchin dove into the barrow pit, narrowly avoiding obliteration by a now mud-caked and bug-spattered car driven by a madly cursing metro-Neapolitan.
Around the next corner and at the crest of a gentle rise, was a ramshackle pile of boards that was probably a rural version of a 7-11. The outside walls were festooned with rusted steel signs advertising products that were defunct before Salvatore was born. A pair of antique gas pumps were holding up the front part of the roof over a rickety wooden porch. The whole building was capped with rusty corrugated steel and squatted precariously on a stone foundation. There was some furniture on the porch, a long wooden bench, and an unmatched set of rocking chairs, all of the same weather-beaten grey color. A shabby fat man, with flesh just as weather-beaten as the furniture, sat beneath a green plastic visor in one of the rockers.
Yellow dust followed Salvatore and the BMW under the tin roof between the pumps and the porch. Leaving the sanitary safety of the car, he was immediately engulfed by the gritty cloud. The oily concoction on his hair and a static-charged silk suit were magnets to the dust. Mangy, underfed, and colored to match the ocher dust, a wandering dog found the pristine radials equally irresistible. Salvatore booted it in the ribs before he had finished sprinkling-down the front hubcap.
"Hey, you!" The voice from the porch sounded like bacon grease snaking down a clogged drain. "You kick my dog again, I'll kick yer ass."
Salvatore squinted against the dust and the sun. He slid his sunglasses from their sheath and settled in behind the cool green lenses. Ignoring warnings from the porch, he stepped into the store. Unpainted wooden shelves displayed a random selection of canned goods. Some of the cans matched those nailed to the floor covering knot holes. He stepped up to the register and pounded the bell. Slow heavy footfalls preceded the visored proprietor.
"You gotta phone, old man?"
"Yep. On the wall to the back."
"My goddamn cellular won't work out here," Salvatore commented, looking for the back.
"Hold on there. Is it local?"
"Fuck, no. Who the hell would I be calling here in Mayberry?"
"Not, local, then five bucks. In advance."
"Jesus," Salvatore cursed, flipping a fiver on the counter. He made his call, then came back out front. "Where's the men's room?"
"There's a privy out back. But it's only for payin' customers."
"Hey, pal, I just gave you five bucks. What more do ya want?"
"You gotta buy sumthin. Phone don't count."
"Then gimme a goddamm sandwich and the key to the washroom."
"Ain't no key," the old man smiled. "Ain't no sandwiches neither. Bread's over there and the baloney's in the cooler."
Salvatore stomped out the front door and made his way to the backyard outhouse, daintily stepping around mud puddles surrounded by ankle deep yellow dust. The outhouse was just as he expected; worse than his imagination could have conjured. He was in the thick, humid, buzzing box as short a time as humanly possible. He kicked open the door and stood blinking in the bright sun.
"That's him! That's him!"
It was the scrawny kid that had been herding the cow. He was pointing a dirty finger at Salvatore from behind a stump of a man dressed in a red and black checkered shirt, cuffs rolled up over long-sleeved underwear. Another yokel in suspenders and hip-waders had a grip on a little black-and-white calf, one hand around the tail, the other clamped onto an ear. The stump jumped at Salvatore, knocked him against the outhouse door, spun him around and threw him face-down into the dirt. The kid darted out and kicked him in the ribs.
"Good shot, kid," the stump said, through a stream of tobacco juice. "Give 'em another one."
He did.
The stump grabbed Salvatore by the wrists and pulled him to his feet, nearly ripping his shoulders from their sockets. Salvatore would have screamed, but he was spitting out clods of dirt and muck.
"Hey there, fancy-pants. Lemme adjust yer sunglasses for ya."
The stump adjusted them all right. He adjusted them with a smash of his elbow across the bridge of Salvatore's nose. The tortoise shell Ray-Bans flew from his face, two equal parts in opposite directions. Salvatore didn't care much about the broken nose and bleeding lips when his air supply began to go. He struggled to maintain consciousness. His shirt was pulled up over his head and was tightening down on his windpipe as the stump tied him to a power pole.
"Mister," the man holding the calf began to explain, "you nearly runned over my little brother back there. Scairt the little tyke half to death. And I reckon we'll be looking for my cow till way past supper time."
The stump pulled Salvatore's pants down around his ankles, using the alligator belt to cinch him up to the pole.
"Whooo-eee! Lookit them fancy panties! I bet my old lady would just love to have her some of them."
When he heard the click of a lock blade knife snapping open, and felt its cold blade slipping between his legs, Salvatore held his breath. A quick upward jerk of the knife ripped and tore.
"Holy Mother of God!" At that moment, Salvatore knew he was going to lose more than his consciousness. But he gradually realized that he felt no pain. No hot flush of blood. Just a cool breeze.
"Tommy, will ya just take a lookit that! This fella's hung pretty respectable-like, for a sissy-pants city boy." The stump waved his knife until Salvatore's shredded shorts fluttered to the ground. "All them lonely city women prob'ly come-a-runnin' when you snap your fingers, huh?" He smiled at Tommy, who was by now laughing so hard he could barely manage wrapping a red bandanna around the little calf's eyes.
"Well, mister, I just know that you'll keep this little feller occupied till we round up his mama."
Tommy and the stump turned their backs and sauntered into the store for a beer. They left Salvatore, trying to scream through a silken sleeve stuck into his mouth, and a very confused baby calf valiantly trying to satisfy an endless appetite from an empty spigot.