"You're dead."
"No, Mr. Hammer. That's just another hallucination of yours. Now, we need to get to work. The cocktail I gave you is unpredictable."
"Cock ... tail?"
"I'm not Dr. Harrin. I don't resort to simple sodium pentothal, although that's in the mix, along with horse tranquilizer and of course the dose of acid. I know a good deal more than Harrin did about narcotics—he was only a doctor, but I'm an artist, although ironically not one who partakes of my own art."
"You're dead."
"You're repeating yourself, but that's to be expected. We don't have a lot of time before you go-go-go on your trip ... that's what they call it, Mr. Hammer, a trip, which you'll take inside your mind, and from which you will probably recover, despite the strength of the dose."
"What ... what was all that bullshit...?"
"Over there, at the table? Not bullshit. It's quite a sincere offer. I think you're a man of considerable talent, and as close to a violent psychopath as one can be and still make recruiting worthwhile—I feel you're socialized to a workable degree."
"Fuck you!"
"Well, there are rough edges we'll have to polish off. But for now, as the drugs begin their magic, you should feel compelled to answer my questions."
He wasn't melting. The walls weren't pulsing, and I was getting centered. Maybe I had hold of it.
Then the lights went down and the flashing orange and purple lights kicked in, and above me the mirrored ballroom ball was spinning and catching those lights and sending them everywhere, like that splintering multicolored effect inside my head. Music blared from the sound system, a raucous soul number with few words that could be discerned, but "Shotgun!" was one of them. That crazy stitched-together film was flickering on the brick wall over the stage, just above and in back of Wren and his men, those weird images of flowers and rotting carcasses and Buster Keaton and Guadalcanal and Woody Woodpecker and Lana Turner and Adolf Hitler and fashion models and Venus de Milo and Shirley moved in front of me, blocking Wren, and she leaned down and her voice was kind.
"Tell him what he wants to know, Mike. He won't hurt you if you cooperate. Tell him what he wants to know, and we can be together in this. You and I can be together again. The Snowbird has a lot of girls, and boys, too, and he won't mind ... he won't mind...."
It was a nice little speech but the jarring thing was that halfway through she seemed to turn into Velda, when the orange light hit her, and then back to herself on the purple, and then Velda, then Shirley, but the voice for both was slow and slurry like a 45 rpm record on 33⅓
She moved away and Wren stepped forward. If my hands had been free, I could have grabbed his throat, or that .45 from his waistband. But my hands weren't free, they were roped behind me.
"Mr. Hammer, I have reason to believe Dr. Harrin was the middleman on the super shipment, and I suspect he was planning to hijack it, perhaps even turn it over to the feds. His son Davy was one of my people, and died of an overdose, as maybe you know ... and I became suspicious of Harrin's solicitude, although he seems to have fooled that idiot Evello entirely."
I heard every word, but this time speeded up, the 33⅓ on 45, and his face seemed distorted, like putty that was stretching itself. And the gunmen behind him, two on either side, had disappeared to be replaced by Jesus and Satan on the one side, and Milton Berle and Pinky Lee on the other. But they all still had guns....
"Did Dr. Harrin tell you anything about the shipment, Mr. Hammer?"
He had made a mistake telling me about the LSD, because I knew, for now I knew anyway, that these distorted sights and sounds were hallucinations, they were not real, I did not need to be frightened, though the reality behind them remained deadly. Jesus and Satan and Uncle Miltie and Yoo-Hoo It's Me My Name Is Pinky Lee all had guns and would kill my ass and it would not be a TV channel I could change or a dream I would wake up from.
So I told him what he wanted to hear: "Yes. He told me. The doctor told me."
The bizarre sights and sounds could be closed out by shutting my eyes, though I saw intense colors in strange patterns, like an abstract painting that moved and wiggled and slithered across the inside of my eyelids, but even so I could still hold on to some sense of sanity, some sense of me, and I knew something that Wren did not.
I knew that I always carried a safety-razor blade inserted in a slit in my belt for just such occasions. I'd been tied with my hands behind my back before, and more than once, but after the first time, I said never again, and ever since carried that tiny blade. But I had to hold on to my marbles long enough to get that blade out and start working on the ropes....
"What do you know about the shipment?" Wren spoke softly and yet his voice seemed to echo throughout the old warehouse.
I hoped there was nobody I didn't know about behind me, no one who could see what I was up to. It was a delicate process cold sober, getting the blade out of its little hiding place, but I managed it, though I was hammered on a hallucinatory cocktail and the world was going crazy all around me and if I dropped that blade, I was finished, because I probably would spill what I knew and this fucker would kill me, that bullshit about working for or with him was bullshit, and thank God my hands were steady and I could somehow focus and I did not drop the blade and the rope was nice and soft.
"I know the date," I said.
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"What time?"
"One o'clock."
"What pier?"
My hands were loose and I brought that safety blade around in a vicious swing that sliced the air and then sliced Wren, too, across the cheek, opening a long red gleaming cut, and he backpedaled, screaming, fingers on his face, but he was close enough for me to grab my .45 from his belt, though the action toppled me down on my side, onto the dance floor, chair and all, because my ankles were still tied to its legs.
I fired blindly toward Satan who became the black guy again and he had his rod halfway out of his pants when the .45 slug angled through his open yelling mouth and up through the roof of his bald head, bursting it in bloody chunks like a target-range melon. Pinky Lee turned back into the stocky guy, who was pointing that sawed-off at me, his geometric shirt shifting and changing. Shirley wasn't Velda at the moment, just Shirley, standing frozen in terror, and from my fallen, chair-bound position, I managed to spin on the slick dance floor in such a way that my legs came around and caught her and she fell into the shotgun blast, which took her head off her shoulders and some of her shoulders, too. What was left of her flopped onto the floor and twitched like a dancer who'd slipped but just kept frugging, even as the soul singer's voice shouted, " Shot-guuun!" from high speakers.
Blood-spattered, still tied to the damn chair, I got onto my back and spread my feet apart as far as the ropes would allow, making them taut, and shot the ropes apart with the .45. Uncle Miltie, Pinky Lee, and Jesus had gone scrambling back toward the tables under a balcony overhang, and Wren had disappeared, I didn't know to where, but I somehow got the ropes and the now-broken chair off me without anybody killing me, and I stayed low as I hustled for the tiki bar. With no shoes on, I sort of skated over the dance floor, but picked up speed on the carpet under the tables with the stacked chairs, whose legs weren't dancing right now, then I dove over the counter and landed on the floor back there, breathing hard.
You're doing fine, I told myself. You're doing fine. But who are you? What was my name? What was my fucking name?