“What kind of haul?”
“Fair question.” Bill tossed back the rest of his Jack and eyed the bottle, which they were consuming at a surprising rate. “What do people want? Guns, food, booze, clothing, a safe place to live.”
“Right.”
“But things are getting better, and I think if we put our heads together we can figure out the next level of things people will need.”
Mortimer slurped Jack Daniel’s. “Next level?”
“Like…hell, I don’t know. Like if everyone is dying for a Pepsi Cola and willing to pay big money for a Pepsi Cola, and then they finally start getting Pepsi Cola on a regular basis, then the next thing is they want ice for their Pepsi Cola.”
Mortimer nodded. “I see. So we corner the market on ice. Or whatever the next thing is.”
“Exactly. Like I said, I might have a few ideas, but-”
“Give me that goddamn bottle!” Sheila’s sudden appearance at the table startled Mortimer. She grabbed the Jack Daniel’s bottle, upended it into her mouth. She coughed, sputtered. It splashed down her chin.
“Don’t waste it,” Bill said.
“Fuck off.” She coughed, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then took another drink. She winced but kept it down this time.
“You want to sit down?” Mortimer asked.
“Okay.”
Mortimer flagged down a busboy, who brought another chair for Sheila.
“What happened?”
“They don’t want me,” Sheila said. “Oh, they were sort of polite about it, I guess. They said they needed more kitchen help, or I could get on the list to ship out to one of the new Joey locations.”
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Bill said. “This place must get women from all over looking for work.” He gestured to the trapeze girls. “And they’re all incredibly hot too.”
Mortimer frowned. “Could you be a little more sensitive, please?”
Sheila sighed. “No, he’s right. That’s more or less what they told me. Shit, now what am I going to do?”
Mortimer felt suddenly, crushingly sorry for the girl. She had been so confident, and now it had all been so easily taken away. Maybe it was the booze sneaking up on him. He could get sloppy and sentimental sometimes. He could smell her sitting there next to him. Not so bad, not really, but like campfire smoke and road sweat. She hadn’t even had a chance to clean up.
“You can eat at least,” he said. “And maybe another drink?”
She nodded, wiped at her eyes and looked embarrassed. She cleared her throat. “Sure. Okay. But not this stuff.” She meant the Jack Daniel’s. “It’s making me ill.”
Mortimer called the waitress over and ordered three draft beers and another bottle of Jack for the boys. “Did you ask about Anne?”
“Uh…” The waitress wouldn’t meet his eyes. “No. Not yet.”
Mortimer sensed some kind of hesitation he didn’t understand. He was getting too drunk, maybe. The beer arrived with the steak. They all fell to eating like condemned prisoners. The steak in his mouth tasted like salt-and-garlic heaven. The meat so soft, as if the cow had been bludgeoned to death before grilling.
Mortimer felt pleasantly stuffed, sipped beer. The waitress cleared away the dishes just as the show started, spotlights washing the stage in hot-pink light, the curtain going up as four women took the stage, waving to the audience amid scorching applause.
Mortimer raised an eyebrow at Bill.
“Beats me,” he said.
“Wait,” said Sheila. “These are the Glam Van Dammes. I heard about them in Cleveland.”
The girl band picked up their instruments. A blonde in black leather on guitar and a short, striking Asian woman on bass. The bass player really seemed to be working the Asian angle, her hair in a tight bun pinned with chopsticks. She wore a Chinese dress with a floral print and a high collar. The combat boots seemed out of place but worked because they were out of place. The drummer was a black girl with a bright red buzz cut and the athletic build of a beach volleyball player. She wore a dark green tank top, cutoff denim shorts and high-top sneakers. She had a big gold hoop in her nose and way too much makeup.
The singer was something else. A powder-blue prom dress coming off the shoulder, platinum hair in little-girl pigtails. Barefoot. She snapped her fingers four times quickly and shouted into the microphone, “One two three four!”
The band jerked into motion, and the singer belted out R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World as We Know It,” not quite screaming, but definitely toward the punk end of the spectrum.
Mortimer found himself tapping his foot. They were good.
They segued into a Bangles song. When they hit the chorus, the band suddenly stopped and the lead singer pointed at the audience. The entire place shook with hundreds of voices singing “Walk Like an Egyptian.”
The evening began to get fuzzy around the edges. Mortimer kept sucking down Jack Daniel’s, pausing occasionally to sip cold beer. The band played two more songs Mortimer didn’t recognize and then this really crappy song called “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which made him so nostalgic for his youth in the eighties that his eyes went a little misty.
He began to drift but had wits enough to lay off the whiskey. The place felt hot and crowded suddenly, and there was a thin layer of sweat on his forehead. He leaned toward Sheila’s ear to tell her he was going to the restroom, but the words came out, “Gonnagothereshroom.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Piss.”
He left the table, wormed his way through the crowd and found the men’s room, relieved himself in a urinal. He ripped off a handful of paper towels, wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. He should probably drink some water. The steak lay in his gut like a poorly chewed medicine ball.
His waitress intercepted him on the way back to his table. “This way,” she whispered in his ear.
“What?”
She was already walking away. Mortimer followed. She turned down a hall away from the music and revelry. The Glam Van Dammes sounded muffled and distant. She opened a door, paused to motion him on.
Mortimer hesitated. “What’s this about?”
“You want to see your wife, don’t you?”
“Anne?” He went inside.
It was a large storage room, kitchen utensils and foodstuffs.
There was a clanging sound, and the darkness whirled around and around. His knees unlocked and the floor came up to catch him. Part of him wondered distantly what had struck the back of his head.
Some sort of skillet, he was pretty sure.
XXXV
The light came through the barred window of the tiny cell. Cement walls and floor. Mortimer lay in the narrow, hard bunk, his head pounding some sort of rumba. His tongue tasted like a water buffalo had used it to wipe its ass. There was a hard crust around his eyes, which he wiped away with a thumb. Somebody stood over him.
Mortimer blinked. It was Lars.
“Good morning, sir.” Lars poured a slim test tube of white powder into a glass of water. It bubbled and foamed. Lars handed it to Mortimer. “I anticipated your condition. This isn’t quite the same formula as the old plop, plop, fizz, fizz we grew up with, but our pharmacists are quite talented.”
Mortimer gulped it down. For a moment, it threatened to come back up, but Mortimer held it down and belched. The concoction took the edge off his torment. He was now merely miserable. “Where am I?”