Little Elvises (25 page)

“I don’t know. If that’s what he’s after, why hire a band day after day? Why fill the place with witnesses? Why spend all that money? Why change band names all the time? He could hire the band once and have the kids sing to pre-recorded tracks for years, just him and them in the studio, nice and cozy.”

“And look at these CDs,” Rina said. “He’s making
something
.”

“Can you order them?” I asked.

“Probably. Sure,” she said. “Here’s a P.O. Box. No downloads, just the disks. Sixteen-ninety-five per, plus five dollars for postage and handling, whatever handling is.”

“Order a couple.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ve got nothing better to do with my
allowance.” But she already had an order form on the screen. “Two, right? Any two?”

“Right. And here’s fifty bucks, so you make a profit.”

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t,” she said, turning to grab the bills. She shoved them deep into her pocket, as though I might change my mind and try to get them back. “Really, it’s too much.”

“Rina,” Kathy called. “Tyrone. Dinner.”

“I need one more thing,” I said.

“Mom can get dangerous,” Rina said.

“Information about the one who disappeared, the one called Bobby Angel.”

I got the look teenagers reserve for adults who are beyond hope. “Did you read my paper
at all
?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “It was great, really impressive.”

She wasn’t having any. “How
much
of it did you read?”

I said hopefully, “Most of it?”

“Where is it? Do you even know where you put it?”

“Sure,” I said, but Rina looked at my eyes and shook her head in disgust. She grabbed some papers from the desk, folded them down the middle, and thrust them at me. “This is the last copy I’ll give you. Go home and read the rest of it. Try to get past page five. Then, if you’ve got another question about Bobby Angel, call me.”

“Rina,” Kathy said, and this time she was standing in the doorway. “Dinner will get cold.”

“Okay.” Rina and Tyrone got up, and she turned to me and kissed my cheek. “Thanks for coming.”

“Actually,” Kathy said. Then she stopped, looked down, located a spot on the carpet, and said to it, “Actually, if you want to stay, Junior, you can.”

“One too many at the table,” I said, slipping Rina’s report into my pocket. “But thanks.”

“Bill’s gone home,” she said.

Rina emitted a puff of breath and said, “
Mom
.” She sounded like she was hurting.

“It’s nothing,” Kathy said. She pushed a smile into place. “Really, nothing.”

I said, “I am such a jerk.”

“Yes, you are,” Kathy said. “But are you hungry?”

My cell phone rang.

“Hell,” I said. The display said
MARGE
. “This will just take a second.”

“You remember where the dining room is,” Kathy said. “Come on, kids.”

I waited until they were out the door and said, “Hi, Marge.”

“You oughtta come home,” Marge said. “Your girlfriend has had nine or ten too many.”

I said, “My girlfriend?” and then shrunk eight or ten inches as Kathy turned back to look at me. Behind her, Rina’s mouth was an O. “Is she okay?” Kathy shook her head and pushed past Rina and Tyrone, and the two of them followed her down the hall.

I said, to myself, not to Marge, “Idiot.”

Lights were burning in Blitzen, but that was to be expected if a vodka-sodden Ronnie was woozing around up there. Even drunk people sometimes prefer light. So I trudged up the stairs wrapped in the situation I’d just caused, and walked into an entirely new situation.

The look that greeted me when I opened the door didn’t come from Ronnie. It came from the mirror over the dresser, and it belonged to the individual who was reflected there, a 350-pound white male genetic misfire with a badly shaved head and a nose that looked like it had been hit with a hammer until it was as flat against his face as a cricket’s. He was shirtless and seemed to be fully involved in carving something into his stomach with a long, thin knife. A black case lay unzipped and open on the dresser, next to the festive bowl of glued-together Christmas-tree balls. The case contained four disposable syringes, all lined up like good little soldiers, and a couple of rubber-tipped vials. A fifth syringe lay beside the case. A tiny pool of fluid gleamed beneath the tip of the needle.

I pulled the Glock from under my shirt.

The monster in the mirror said, “Hey, Junior.”

“Fronts,” I said. There was a shapeless mound on the bed, covers pulled completely over it. “What did you do to her?”

“Her?” Fronts said. He was picking at his stomach with the knife’s tip. “Oh, her. She’s drunk.” He looked up from his stomach and saw the gun. “That’s funny.”

“The world is full of people who should have shot you the minute they saw you.”

“Uh-uh,” Fronts said, focused on his work again. “The world
used
to be full of people who shoulda shot me. They ain’t with us no more.”

I stepped away from the door, leaving it half an inch ajar, and moved sideways to the bed, keeping the gun trained on Fronts, who was busy cutting himself. When I tugged the covers down, I found Ronnie looking straight at the ceiling through half-closed eyes. Her mouth was open so wide it looked like she was screaming.

“Stop shitting me,” I said. “What did you do to her?”

“Just being nice. Suppose I have to kill you and she wakes up. This way, she’ll never see me. She’ll have a headache and she’ll have to explain the body on the floor, but she’ll be alive.”

“What did you shoot her with?”

“Horse tranquilizer,” Fronts said. “She was out cold when I came in, didn’t feel a thing. If you live through this, I’m gonna want thirty bucks for the trank. Stuff’s not cheap.”

“I didn’t know you had horses.”

“I don’t.” He took a step back from the mirror, and I gripped the gun in both hands, aimed at the center of his body. “Whaddya think?” He turned to face me.

His chest had more stuff carved into it than a men’s room wall. The fresh bright red letters on his stomach said, “
!iH
.”

“It’s backward,” I said.

Fronts looked down at himself and then turned back to the mirror. “Shit,” he said. “I do that all the time.”

“Kind of a painful way to learn about symmetrical letters.”

He used his thumb and forefinger to pluck a fold of skin just above the bleeding word, pulled it out, and poised the sharp edge of the knife over it. “Don’t hurt as much as erasing it,” he said. He started to slice at himself.

I absolutely could
not
look. I turned my head a couple of inches, toward the bed with Ronnie on it, and there Fronts was, his arm clamped around my neck, the knife at my throat, and his lips peeled back from his speed-freak-brown teeth. “If I’d cut myself like that,” he said, “think what I’d do to
you
.”

I shoved the gun into his gut and tried not to choke on his smell.

“Knife’s at your carotid,” he said. “One little nick, you’ll be down. You pull the trigger, think I’ll die before I nick you? Are you
sure
? Also,” he said, pushing the knife just a little harder, “you shouldn’t forget that I don’t care.”

“Everybody says that.” I could barely breathe.

“Junior,” he said. “It’s me. Fronts. You gotta know I don’t give a shit.”

“That’s the plan? You’re going to kill me?”

The door behind me opened, and Louie the Lost pushed through it, looked at the two of us, and turned white. “Oh, geez,” he said, staring at Fronts. “You two guys, uh, you want some privacy?”

I gasped, “Thanks a lot, Louie.”

Louie said, “No problem,” and backed out, so fast he didn’t even close the door.

“Friend of yours?” Fronts took his arm off me and took a step back, keeping the knife at my throat.

“You can never tell.”

“Listen, Junior. If I wanna kill you, you think I’m gonna stand here, borrow your mirror, write on myself? Shit, DNA everywhere for the cops. Why not just cut off a finger, leave it
here so they get a good print?” He took the knife away from my throat and put the edge against the index finger of his left hand.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Not in my room.”

“It’s a really shitty room.”

I said, “Yeah, but I’ll still have to replace the carpet.”

Fronts turned away and went to the bed. He pulled the blanket down, checked to see that Ronnie was still doing her unconscious imitation of
The Scream
, and said, “Pretty girl, huh?”

“She’s looked better.”

“You might want to walk her around, throw her in some cold water. You never know, maybe the dose was too big. You got any speed?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Oh, well, I ain’t died from it yet. She smart?”

“Smart enough.”

“Good, because she’ll lose some brain cells. But I use it all the time, and look at me.” He tugged the covers over her face again.

I said, “That’s very reassuring,” and then jumped a foot in the air as the door behind me banged against the wall, so loudly that it almost drowned out the sound of my gun going off as I accidentally yanked the trigger. The gun jumped once in my hand, and the bullet went through the outside of Fronts’s upper right arm and slammed into the wall with a white puff of plaster. My ears were ringing like someone had clapped his hands over them. I turned to see Louie standing there with a shotgun.

Fronts said, “Ouch.”

I said, “Sorry.”

Louie, who had the shotgun trained on Fronts, said, “
Sorry
?”

“He shot me,” Fronts explained. He pushed his index finger into the bullet hole.

“Please,” Louie said, going even paler. “Stop that.”

“Feels kind of cool,” Fronts said. He pushed the finger
farther in and twisted it, and Louie’s eyes went to the ceiling, and he crumpled as though his knees had dissolved. Fortunately, the shotgun didn’t go off. Louie lay folded neatly over it, in the middle of one of the carpet’s larger stains.

“You gonna shoot me again?” Fronts asked.

“No. I think I’m done.”

Outside, I heard a door slam and then I heard the hard slap of shoes on the far stairway.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Get into the bathroom. Now.” I pushed my gun under the blankets next to Ronnie and grabbed the shotgun beneath the collapsed Louie, but it snagged on his shirt. I said something filthy, got a foot under him, and rolled him over to free the gun. I’d just slid the gun under the bed when Marge barged in.

“What the hell—” She stopped, looking across the room at Fronts, who hadn’t moved an inch. “Who in the world are you? And who’s he?” She pointed down at Louie, who was starting to come around, his eyelids fluttering like a moth’s wings. She sniffed the air. “Who fired a gun?”

“No one,” I said, but Fronts, the tattletale, said, “He did, Mom. He shot me.” He grabbed the flesh around the bullet hole and yanked at it, as though he intended to hand it to her. “Here.”

“Who the hell are you to call me Mom?” Marge took an aggressive step forward, her sequins glinting dangerously. “What are you, anyway, the human blackboard? If Junior shot you, he had a good reason.” She looked down at his dangling hand. “Is that a boning knife?”

“Henckels Four-Star,” Fronts said mildly, raising it to show it to her.

“About seventy-five bucks?” Marge said.

“Fifty-two-fifty,” Fronts said. “Costco.”

“Good price,” Marge said. “But you don’t go using it on a paying guest. Not in this economy.”

“Sorry,” Fronts said.

“And put your shirt on. You think this is Zuma? Wait a minute. Lift both your arms.”

Fronts obeyed, displaying the four-foot-long, single scar that started beneath his left arm, ran all the way down to the top of his pants, crossed over beneath his belly-button to his right hipbone, and traveled up to his right armpit. “Jesus,” Marge said. “Looks like the hood of a car. Where’d you get that?”

“Around,” Fronts said. He sounded shy.

“Who stitched you up, a sailmaker?” The stitches had left a red crisscross trail the full length of the cut.

“Did it myself,” Fronts said, looking down at it critically. “It was hard, upside down.”

“I’ll bet. Well, this isn’t your neighborhood, bub. Put your shirt on and beat it.” She looked down at Louie. “Anybody shoot him?”

“He fainted,” I said.

“Junior,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m disappointed in you. If you weren’t special to me, I’d throw your butt in the street for this. Shooting a man in Blitzen.”

Fronts said, “Blitzen? Like the reindeer?”

“Don’t tell me they had Christmas where you came from. Just get dressed and get out.” Marge flicked a finger at the works on the bureau. “And take that filthy dope with you.” She prodded Louie with her foot, and he groaned. “Present and accounted for,” she said. “Where’s Ronnie?”

“Taking a nap,” I said, gesturing toward the bed.

“Girl can’t drink,” she said. “You might want to walk her around, maybe haul her into the shower.”

“That’s what I just said,” Fronts said.

Marge didn’t even glance at him. “I’m going now, but if I hear anything more, I’ll be back with Ed’s service revolver and shoot all of you.”