"Who do you think, Cliff?"
"That's not my name. I'm Clint Edwards. Got that?"
"Yeah, I got it."
Matt moved around the cramped room, turning on every light switch he could find. Under its tilted shade, the table lamp by the door had only a forty-watt bulb. A bathroom cubicle tiled in stained white shone sickly under a buzzing fluorescent bulb that flickered like a strobe light above the tiny mirrored medicine chest. The outer room boasted only one more light, whatever would leach from the screen of a battered black-and-white TV opposite the lumpy double bed.
Matt turned the TV on too, and turned up the sound knob, so the passionate late-movie voices argued in the room like real people. A woman crying and pleading. A man yelling. It sounded just like home.
"Whatcha doin', you goddamn little freak, always lookin' at me with those big googly eyes! Always watching me. I told you to keep that TV down or off! This is my place--"
"No, it was our place. And then you came."
"Why shouldn't I have? Your ma thought it was a-okay. Don't like that, do you, kid? Your ma wanted more than a squalling brat to look after. I fit in real good."
"Why aren't you dead?"
"What--? What the hell you talkin' about? You want me dead, is that it?"
"No, Mr. Effinger. I can't want you dead. I'm a good guy in a black skirt, remember? I'm just wondering why you aren't dead when your ID was cramming the pockets of the dead guy they found at the Crystal Phoenix a few weeks back."
Effinger backed toward the bathroom, his face as white as the streaked tile. "I don't know nothin' about that."
"You have to. It was your ID."
"I lost that. At the bus station."
"And the dead guy looked a lot like you. Same age, same general physiognomy, same build."
"I don't care what his physiogomectomy said, I don't know some dead guy at the Phoenix from Adam."
"They think they buried you, Effinger. Doesn't that make you feel safe? The police think they buried you, but I don't."
"You're nuts. A priest shouldn't act like this. I knew you were a bad one when you knocked me down on the kitchen floor. You were just a punk. I could have wiped up the linoleum with you, but I didn't want to hurt your ma."
"But you did! You hurt her a lot. I heard it. I saw it. And I'm not a priest anymore."
"You can't quit that. They don't let you."
"A little like the . . . mob, isn't it?"
"What mob? No mob in Vegas these days. You're nuts. I'm gettin' outta here."
He ran like a rat for every exit.
The door, but Matt was there first. The window, where he tore at the torn curtains and slammed his palm on the glass
Matt pushed him back.
Effinger looked for something to hurl at Matt, but the TV was bolted down, the lamp was a flimsy joke and ... he ran for the bathroom.
Matt thought of a high narrow window like Midnight Louie's escape hatch from the Circle Ritz, and of a narrow, ratty man shimming through another window like that.
He made the bathroom in four giant steps, and slammed the door behind him.
The fluorescent light buzzed warning like an angry hornet.
"Get away from me," Effinger squealed, backing into the tub edge, the tiles bouncing back his voice.
Once his voice had been thunder, Matt recalled, and his footsteps earthquakes. Clickety-click, stomp!
Cleats. Clint. Wanting to be somebody, and always being Cliff.
Effinger was standing in the tub, clawing at the tiny frosted glass window above it.
"They'll kill me, you stupid kid! All that old stuff was nothing compared to what I'm into now. For now, they like me alive, but later, who knows? You're gonna be the death of me."
Matt seized Effinger's cheesy western jacket by the shoulders, and dragged him back from the window.
Effinger reached up behind him, fingers clawing for Matt's face. Matt jumped into the ancient bathtub and kicked Effinger's foot from under him. The man folded onto his knees on the yellowed porcelain. Rust trailed down from the ancient water spigot like old, dry blood.
"You're gonna kill me!" Effinger's voice ran hot and hysterical.
Matt yanked the right faucet until the pipes screeched, and pulled up the porcelain lever in the wall. Cold water trickled from the tinny shower head. Effinger was screaming as if under boiling steam as Matt hauled him up into the icy baptism of rusty water.
"Blood. You're killing me. I don't deserve it. I'm a victim. They got me by the short hairs. You stupid, stupid punk--"
The water spat on Matt's face and ran down his forearms. It was going to ruin his faux suede jacket.
Finally, Cliff Effinger sagged in his hands like wet wool. His water-soaked clothes reeked of unlaundered urine and hard liquor.
Matt pulled the guy up again until the ragged stream of water from the shower head ran down Effinger's face like spittle, into his closed eyes and chattering teeth. He was small, so terribly small, after all.
"Listen," Matt said. "You aren't worth hurting back. Calm down. I'm not going to touch a hair on your mostly bald head." That was why the hat, not disguise. Vanity.
"You're ... not?" Effinger hiccoughed like a spent, hysterical kid.
Matt jerked him out of the piddling shower stream and shook him until the water beaded off his clothes.
"No." Matt held Effinger against the cracked tile with one hand while he turned off the water.
"What you gonna do?"
"Nothing personal."
"Huh?"
"Brace yourself for a touch of cold air."
"What? We going outside? I'll freeze in that night air."
"It's nothing like the Chicago air that January you locked me out all night."
"Hey, I was hot-tempered then. Young and hair-trigger, you know?"
"No, I don't know." Matt had him at the unit door. He opened it and looked out. Deceptively deserted.
"Where we going?"
"There's a public phone outside the office. If you keep your mouth shut, the manager won't even know we're there, and that you messed up his bathroom."
"Huh? Who you gonna call?"
Matt's smile was grim.
"Ghostbusters."
Above them, the Mermaid loomed like a Virgin Mary Blue blimp.
Chapter 17
Raising Saint Nick
Sometimes I live up to my reputation. I am one unlucky black cat for somebody.
Here I stand, the focus of all eyes (which is as it should be), but my presence on this ersatz roof is very bad news for somebody. Not that anybody puts two and two together.
I have not liked the layout of that chimney since I first saw it. I liked it even less when I took a second look only minutes before and saw that what I did not like before, I liked even less now that somebody had changed it.
Now there is somebody in the chimney, and nobody knows but eight cardboard reindeer and me.
Are you getting tired of all these "bodys"? Somebody, anybody, nobody ...
Well, get used to it, because there is a body in the chimney and it is not me.
"Where is Santa?" somebody yells out.
Good question, dude. Why do you not take a look up the flue?
Finally somebody is smart enough to examine Santa's escape route. The woman named Kendall who has been shepherding Miss Temple Barr about walks over on brisk heels, bends down to look up the chimney and screams.
The first one is a scream pure and simple, and works pretty well. The second one is a word, and it finally gives all the dumb-bunnie nobodies an idea of what is up, in this case up the chimney.