Goddamn, what a job they done on me!
His left hand was all but useless. His right grabbed the lip of the sill and pulled.
It was a concerted effort; Blackjack never would’ve thought that simply standing up would be so difficult. Nevertheless, after much wincing, gasping, and grunting, he stood on his own two feet, leaning racked against the wall.
He peered out the window.
Christ…
Yeah, this was the same house, all right. He recognized the front yard and that shitty dirt road leading down the hill. But the bighead kid’s rattletrap truck was gone—
Motherfuckin’ Creeker motherfuckers!
—and so was his own.
God knew how he was going to get out of here, and once he did, what would he do? Walk around the woods buck naked? He didn’t even really know where he was. Some unmarked road off the Route, then a couple of turns he’d never remember. But—
Fuck it, he concluded.
Better to walk around naked and lost than stay here and buy the farm.
Peering out, he figured he must be on the third floor, not the second. From earlier, he vaguely recalled a narrow flight of steps going up from the floor the whore’s room was on. The window was his only way out…
He’d have to crawl out the window, slide down the shingled awning, then drop to the roof. That would be tough in any case, but with his left arm and leg so numb they felt dead, it would be damn near impossible. Still, though, what choice did he have?
Just gonna have to do it, he told himself. Just gonna have to flop outta this window and get the fuck outta this freak-house.
Just as he tried to push open the window, he noticed—
Aw, fer shit’s sake, no!
—that it had been nailed shut.
But before he could think further…
Whuh? What the fuck was that?
Had he heard something?
Voices, or something like voices, seemed to tickle his mind. He stared back wide-eyed in the dark…
Ona…
“Ah-no-pray-bee…
Redeemer…
“Mannona-come…
Sanctifier…
“Save us—”
They were like words mixed with thoughts. Etched whispers melded to blobs of swarming head-sounds. But one thing was clear to Blackjack: Someone else was in the room.
“Wh-who’s there?” Blackjack challenged.
The dark stood before him, impenetrable, a solid black wall.
“I know someone’s there, so how’s ’bout tellin’ me what the fuck’s goin’ on?”
No reply. Just the grainy dark staring back.
Then—
Blackjack jerked right.
Did he see something? Did he see something moving there in the corner to his right?
Something seemed to have shifted. A wet slither behind something blacker than the darkness…
“Mannona-come…”
“Onnamann…”
Blessed Ona, we give thee thanks!
A scream froze in Blackjack’s throat when something slimy, humid, and hideous reached out of the dark and very gently touched his shoulder.
— | — | —
Twenty
Something hot seemed to insinuate itself along Phil’s nerves to his brain, where it then lodged and seemed to hum. At once, he felt edgy, disjointed, but at the same time tranquilized. He knew there was no way to fake it, not around these guys. They were pros. He’d taken most of the drag in his mouth, holding it, then snorting it out through his sinuses, and had actually inhaled only a trace.
But only a trace had been enough.
Goddamn, he thought, flabbergasted. What a buzz…
Sullivan took the joint back. “Hey, bub, don’t be a bogart.” Then he laughed and began to smoke it himself.
Thank God, Phil thought. The stuff packed a heavy wallop; he knew that if he had to smoke any more of it, he wouldn’t be able to stand up, much less drive a car. Got to shake this off, he told himself. He started the Malibu. “Decent flake,” he said. “Big buzz. So where are we going?”
“North up the Route,” Eagle said.
Once he got going, he began to feel better. He let the fresh air from the open window rush into his face. His brow prickled, dark splinters seemed to twitch at the farthest peripheries of his vision, and every so often he was touched by a chill that was somehow hot.
Sullivan finished the flake joint as though he were eating the dense smoke. “Okay, bub, now I know you’re for real. One of our partners beat town a couple weeks ago, so we need a new driver full-time. You’re it.”
“Sounds good,” Phil said.
“What we do is pick up the finished product from our supplier, then drop it off at our points. The money’s good, and the cops aren’t on to us.”
Oh, yeah? Phil thought. I can’t wait to send you up to the slam for five…bub. “What’s your circuit?”
“Just north county,” Eagle said from the back of the Malibu. “Millersville, Lockwood, Waynesville, thereabouts. Rednecks buy this shit hand over fist. Our product’s better and cheaper than the regular supplier. We’re gonna cut him out.”
“Who’s the regular supplier?” Phil asked, but he thought he had a pretty good idea already who they were talking about.
“Never you mind about that,” Sullivan griped. “You’re just the wheel-man, so get on the wheels.”
“Right,” Phil said.
Eagle directed him through several turns up roads he never knew existed. Most were dirt roads, rutted and potholed, often so narrow that overgrown brush swiped the car on either side. Eventually they came to a clearing, and Phil was instructed to stop.
“Fuckin’-A,” Sullivan complained. “The bastard ain’t here. Are we early?”
“We’re five late,” Eagle said.
“Then where the fuck is Blackjack?”
Phil just sat there and kept his mouth shut. He knew he’d learn more about the network in time. But Sullivan and Eagle seemed overly distressed, pressing themselves into long silences, jerking their gazes constantly about the car.
They sat there a half-hour, and no one showed up.
These guys are freaking out because their point man’s running late? Phil thought. It didn’t make much sense. Why are these guys shitting their pants?
Eagle nervously swept his hair out of his eyes, leaning forward from the back. “How many times has Blackjack been this late?”
“Never,” Sullivan hotly answered.
“So the guy’s late,” Phil offered. “What’s the big deal?”
“Tell him the big deal,” Sullivan said, waving a hand.
Eagle’s face in the rearview looked pale. “Lately a lot of our point men and distros have been disappearing.”
“Jake Rhodes, Kevin Orndorf, and now Blackjack,” Sullivan grimly recited. “And there have been others, and I mean a fuckin’ shitload of others.”
“Maybe the cops are on to us,” Eagle suggested, “and we’re just too stupid to see it.”
“You guys are moving local dust,” Phil jumped in. “The county and state could shit care less about it—dust is small time to them. They’re all out after scag and coke. And the local cops? Guys like Mullins? No way. Those town clowns can’t even write parking tickets; they’re too busy taking bingo graft and pad money. It ain’t cops, fellas.”
“The fuck’s going on then?” Sullivan shouted.
“Wake up and smell the coffee. You just got done telling me you’re trying to undercut the major dust supplier in the area, and all of a sudden your people are disappearing. What’s that tell you?”
“Somebody’s putting the whack on us,” Eagle said. “And we’re sitting here like three ducks in a bathtub.”
««—»»
What a couple of dupes, Phil thought, chuckling all the way back. No wonder the idiots had done time; they were just plain stupid. Fuckers couldn’t sell shovels to ditch diggers. He’d dropped them off at their trucks back at Krazy Sallee’s, and agreed to meet them tomorrow night. Mullins is going to love this. Gotta hand it to the guy, though. He called the whole thing right from the start.