Kyle opened the door a crack, saw what was going on, and said to Max, “All right, all right! I’ll come out, just let him be. Let him be.”
Sounding like some John Lennon freak, like he was gonna go hold a fucking séance at Strawberry Fields.
“I want the truth out of you,” Max said, “and if you tell me I can’t handle the truth, trust me, you’ll make my day, asshole.”
He slit his eyes like Eastwood while going for the Nicholson hardass tone. He almost hoped Kyle wouldn’t give in. It would be fun to cut Katsu, to see what it felt like to kill with a knife. He’d already shot somebody today; if he strangled Kyle afterward it would be like hitting the murder trifecta. Yeah, Max felt fucking omnipotent, all right. He used to think that word had to do with, you know, getting it hard, getting a woody, but now he knew what it meant, he fucking knew.
“Okay, okay. I told her,” Kyle said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “We were in love, Mr. Fisher. I was gonna her take back down to Alabama and turn her into an honest woman.”
“You sold me out? After all I’ve done for you?”
Max felt seriously betrayed. He was Tony Soprano, getting ready to whack Pussy. He was Pacino asking his brother if he’d ratted him out.
Kyle said, “I tried to stay strong, I tried to do Jesus proud, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t resist her. That woman, she did something to me. I think…I think she might be Jezebel.”
“Yeah, she did something to you all right,” Max said. “She tried to get your ass killed, and my ass too. Who were the guys Felicia was with?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Bullshit, she must’ve told you something.”
Kyle waited then said, “She said it was her cousin, I think.”
“Did she tell you a name?” Max asked.
Again Kyle wouldn’t answer right away, slow annoying fuck, then he said, “Yeah…It was Sha-Sha.”
Sha-Sha? What the fuck kind of a name was that? It sounded like a guy in one those new videos Madonna was putting out-her tight and old in purple leotards with black guys hopping around her.
Max smiled, said, “But you don’t know anything, huh?”
“That’s all I know, honest to God.” He clasped his hands together, beseeching. “Oh, please, sweet Jesus, don’t invoke your wrath, and may the lord god Abraham, the sons of the tabernacle grant you the true wisdom-”
With his free hand, Max gave him a slap in the mouth, said, “May you shut the fuck up?”
Then Max gave Kyle another wallop, and because it felt good to beat on somebody he whacked his chef on the head too, the fucking jerk-off.
Leaving the two assholes, he went into the lounge, flipped on the TV and fixed himself a tall, dry martini, never letting go of the knife. It was like an extension of him. Maybe he’d be called Max the Knife in the movie. Jeez, then there’d be a musical. Max couldn’t wait to see it. Maybe they’d get Hugh Jackman to play him.
He cycled through the channels till he got to NY1. And sure enough, the main story was the shootings in Queens. Fuck, talk about popping wood. They were talking about a lone gunman who took down some of the baddest mothers in these here United States. Well, not exactly but that’s how it sounded.
Then someone handed something to the news lady, a sheet of blue paper. Breaking news, she said. An exstripper named Felicia Howard had been found, dead, off the Belt Parkway. Bye-bye, bee-atch, Max thought, then he heard a pair of loud sobs from behind him. He turned around to see Kyle and the freaking sushi chef, weeping in unison.
The fuck was Katsu crying for? Uh oh-Oprah light bulb moment-the little turd was giving the sticky rice to her as well? Christ, was there anyone in the apartment she hadn’t been screwing? If they’d had a dog, would she have fucked him, too?
Max turned back to the news report. A cop named Miscali or something was taking the heat for some monumental screw up. At first Max couldn’t follow it, but then he started to get the gist, in bits and pieces. Kyle and Felicia must’ve sold him out, but she’d given the cops the wrong location. But then who the fuck had shot Felicia? The only one left standing after the bloodbath had been Fat Albert-what was his name? Sha-Sha. But why would her own cousin shoot her?
Max’s head was throbbing from trying to follow all the ins and outs of this, not helped by no food, but he was fucked if he’d ever eat another morsel that jack-off chef produced. Also, the sounds of Kyle’s sobbing and wailing were seriously getting on his already frayed nerves. He shut the fucking TV off and stormed off to his bedroom, carrying the pitcher of martinis with him.
Max came to around ten the next morning. He was in his good smoking jacket, the one with M in gold on the pocket, and his stomach felt like a very large rodent was trying to gnaw its way out.
He wobbled toward the bathroom, then stopped, a thought hitting his very tender head, The knife, where the hell was it?
Nope, not on the floor. Then he thought, Kyle, and went to the living room, but the boy wasn’t there. He did a quick tour of the rest of the apartment-no Kyle.
Well, screw him, he had to get to the bathroom, like, now. As he sat on the bowl, feeling as if his intestines were pouring out, he decided Kyle had run on home to Alabama. Maybe Sushi Man went with him, the good ol’ boys down there, they’d sure appreciate cornholing some yellow meat, good for the skin. As another upheaval hit his tender stomach, he was sort of relieved he didn’t have the knife-he might not have been able to resist the urge to slit his own throat, put himself out of his misery.
Then the doorbell rang. What the fuck? The doorman was supposed to screen visitors or God knew what vermin could just come up and ring his bell.
He staggered to his feet, gave his tender ass a wipe, and was about to answer the door when he thought, maybe it’s Kyle. Eh, fuck him. Let the backstabbing bible boy sleep in the hallway.
Max started to walk away when a voice shouted, “Police, open up!”
Could Max have imagined it? Some side effect of the dope, the vodka…?
But the banging continued and a voice, said, “Police, open the fuckin’ door!”
Max opened it slowly, then they pushed it open all the way. That cop from TV-man, this was some bad trip all right-forced Max onto the floor and cuffed him from behind.
“Party’s over, big shot,” the cop said. “Time to get your scummy ass downtown.”
Eighteen
I want the legs.
Angela was not a happy bunny. They’d moved from the hotel to a basement apartment on Sixth Street, right under a restaurant called Taste of India. When she’d dreamed of coming back to New York, this was not where she’d imagined being. Yeah, yeah, all New York apartments were small, but come on, you couldn’t swing a frigging cat in this place, least not a live one. The ceiling was brown, either from nicotine, mildew, shite, or curry. She prayed it was curry. There was a constant pong of Eastern spice in the fetid air so the curry theory made some sense.
They had, count ’em, three rooms. You think, how bad is three? Well, one was a bathroom, then there was the so-called living room/kitchen-i.e., a hotplate and a kettle and barely enough room to walk-and the bedroom was the size of some closets, with one of those fold-up beds. Can you say cramped? And with Slide on top of her in every sense, she was on the verge of a scream every damn second. And worse, like they said at McDonald’s, he was lovin’ it.
They’d found the apartment, a sublet, on Craigslist. The rent was medieval, and that was before utilities. It didn’t help the situation that Angela was beginning to have serious doubts about Slide.
The books he brought home-what was the deal with those creepo volumes anyway? The Stranger Beside Me Dahmer: An Intimate Portrait Gacy, in his Own Words The Green River Killer Inside the Mind of Serial Killers