“Shut up, asshole.”
Austin stiffened. “Well, now. I can see this isn’t going to be very friendly, after all.”
“I don’t have any interest in being friendly with you. Why don’t we just leave it at that.”
Austin pushed his dark glasses high on his nose, and Bat glimpsed himself in the mirrored lenses. “That would be just fine,” Austin said. “But unfortunately I have an interest in you.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“I want you to leave April alone.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Austin, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but April’s dead.”
Austin stared up at the sky and his mirrored sunglasses were masked with clouds. The clouds rolled and heaved as he shook his head, and his voice was the whisper of a cold spring rain. “You were at April’s grave last night. You and those other morons. I don’t want you going near her. You guys were her nightmare, and you tried to bring it back-”
“Wait a minute. You’re way out of line.”
“Don’t get jumpy. Bat.” Very slowly, Austin unbuttoned his pocket and produced a reel of film. “Y’know, Shutterbug handled this a little better than you.”
“Give me that.”
“Not likely”
“Shit.” Bat stepped toward his car. He turned and advanced onto the lawn. He slapped his nightstick into his other hand and pointed it at the coil of 16mm. “That’s nothing. Doesn’t mean a thing. Nobody says anything on it. It’s a goddamn silent movie. It’s just a party, everyone having a little fun on a choo choo ride, and you’re just pissed off after all these years because you weren’t in on it.”
“It’s not a party, Joaquin. I don’t have time to explain the difference, but what’s on this film is a rape. And it’s-”
“Come off it, Ozzy. I know you had the hots for her. You just never had the guts to-”
“-it’s a nightmare, and April is very tired of it.”
The two men stared at each other. Austin slipped the plastic reel into his pocket, and Bat almost laughed. “Are you trying to hit me up for money? Is that what this is about? Because if it is, do I have a surprise for you.”
“No. Not money, Joaquin. I just want you to leave April alone.” Austin shook his head. “You just don’t get it. We don’t have to lock horns on this. It’s real simple. April doesn’t want to be part of your nightmare anymore-she’s been stuck there too many years already. Now she wants to be with me.”
Bat exhaled, smelled beer on his own breath. So much for his plans to blackmail Austin. Jesus. The guy was pitching mental Nerf balls.
But Austin had the film. That could be dangerous. Bat had to play it cool, close to the vest. He could figure out the rest of it when he had a little more-
“I want an answer, Joaquin.”
“You’re nuts, Austin. Oh, man, you are loony.”
Austin ignored the comments. “I want you to pass the word to Derwin and Griz and Todd. If you don’t do that, there’s going to be trouble. And you don’t want trouble with me, because the movie will only be the start of it.”
Bautista flushed. He tossed the nightstick on the cement driveway, and it rang hollowly there, and his hands balled into fists, and he wanted to blurt it out: YOU DUG THE BITCH UP YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKER!
No, that wasn’t the way. That wasn’t smart. Austin had already turned and started for his car, but Bat caught up to him, walked with him from the weed patch that passed for a lawn to the broken cement curb.
Find a way to get under his skin. Punch the robot’s buttons. That was the thing to do. “Your problem is that you just can’t handle it,” Bat said. “That I was better than you. That I did everything you wanted to do. Won all-city. Fucked April Destino. She was just a whore-”
“Don’t call her that.” Steve whirled, and Bat saw his own wild eyes reflected in Austin’s mirrored sunglasses, and seeing his eyes hanging there on Austin’s face frightened him more than he could have imagined.
Bat stumbled backward.
Austin grinned. “I just knocked you out of the box, and I didn’t even have to throw a pitch,” he said. “Maybe you did win some ball games. Maybe you did that. But you raped April Destino, and you stole her dreams.” He took off the glasses, and his eyes were cold green things in a face too white.
Austin chuckled at Bat’s baby-shit brown prison guard uniform. Glanced up at the crummy house where Bautista lived with his wife and kids, understanding that Bautista’s glory days were the only memories that kept him going. “Maybe you were a winner when we were kids,” Austin said. “But you never won when it counted. Now did you. Bat?”
Bat fought for control, but his fingers slipped over the scored grip of his pistol. The house behind him was honeycombed with dry rot. Even with his back turned, he could hear his kids yelling in the living room because the TV was on the blink again, and he could smell Hamburger Helper and pepper oil coming from the kitchen, and he could feel the uneven weeds beneath the worn soles of his boots, and his burning gut screamed for Maalox.
“You get the hell out of here,” Bat whispered.
Austin nodded, opened the door of his car, slipped on his sunglasses. “Don’t make me come back.”
7:15 A.M.
This is what did the trick for Steve Austin: fifteen minutes under a cold pulsing shower, a close shave with a new blade, a couple slaps of Old Spice aftershave, and a pot of a potent espresso-Kona blend brewed courtesy of Mr. Coffee. Then down to the neighborhood coffee shop for eggs over easy and four link sausages and extra hash browns well done skip the toast and four more cups of coffee that were pretty strong for restaurant brew but paled in comparison to Steve’s double-barreled espresso-Kona blend. The morning ritual took a couple of hours. When it was complete, the alcohol and the Halcion were behind him.
Or so he told himself. He had always treated his body like a twitchy machine that ran out of whack or not at all. It made things easier, just as it sometimes was easier to think of himself as The Six Million Dollar Man. He couldn’t fix the machine, but he could keep it running. For a time the machine ran on nothing more than dreams, April Destino, and Halcion. Last night, when it was ready to blow its main circuit, it ran on April alone.
Today it needed food and coffee. There was work to be done. The girl of his dreams was alive, living in this moment. Everything would be okay if he could just hold on to her.
Sunlight glinted off the spotless windshield of the Dodge Diplomat patrol car. Steve stared at his big hands on the hard black wheel, at the perfect creases in the sleeves of his uniform shirt and the swollen knuckles that had KO’d an umpire. The whole damn thing seemed so unreal. A living, walking dream was locked in his basement. A living, screaming dream. Every passing minute that separated him from April created another little hole in the window of reality. Yet Steve was sure that everything had happened just as he remembered it.
It hadn’t been a dream.
April was back.
He’d dug her up. Her empty shell, at least. That was nuts. Full tilt loony tunes. But he had been certain that he needed the dead husk of April to get to the real April, the April of his dreams. The dead April, the dreamweaver he had known in that sad little trailer, had convinced him that she was the only one who could help him to dream, to find the April he loved. But something had gone terribly wrong when the dreamweaver killed herself.
That was the way it shook out. It had to be. Because the dreamweaver was dead, and the girl of his dreams was here.