Tommy Vine whacked his head against the wall again. He was babbling nonsense words in the same rhythm as Astor. No number of words could cover up the mound of Al Vine in the corner. His blood had begun to dry on the wall in brown patches.
“They caught Condon, the stupid kid, but they can’t even get it together to find out where Destinii went. They can’t be bothered to do anything right.
“The thing about a gun, Jamie, is that it’s so messy. Efficient, but when you factor in clean-up costs, time, and resource management, you come out on the loser’s end of the bargain,” Astor Crane explained. “Now the pseudo twins, they had to go. Like the Lorax— you ever meet him? I think we still have all his teeth somewhere in a jar. Sometimes you have to make cuts.”
Everything was bathed in pink. Dorothy was clicking her heels, but Jamie wasn’t going anywhere. His ankle still bleated pain up into his brain and he could almost see the shards of bone stippling the skin from the inside. The barrel of the rifle was directly between his eyes.
“Now this might wake a few people up. If you’d met me in the hospital, you coulda helped me find her instead,” Astor Crane said. “Wouldn’t it be grand to have that hypothetical kid? With a girl named Destinii, too. I got a deep want inside me. That ain’t ever going away.
“That want will eat you alive.”
Elvira didn’t want to stay in this bathroom anymore. She pulled herself up off the heart-shaped toilet and laid a hand on the knob. She could hear a voice out there; it wouldn’t stop talking. The Judge was lying on the floor outside. She was never going to get that perfect game. She would be left wondering why forever as she lay on other men’s rounded stomachs, but they would never be like Ted’s. They would be so cold and hairy and rumble in the night.
So she picked up the teal bowling ball. There was that man there in their suite, it was their suite and it used to have a waterbed and Ted Moon was supposed to leave messages underneath the mattress. Come and find me. I am ready, but of course he wasn’t ready, never would be. There were no postcards from Ted. And the man out there wouldn’t stop talking. He thought he could just talk and talk and talk, but Elvira had some things to say too.
Yes, she did. Something about family, and a son he had left behind and a life he could have had. And Ted Moon didn’t care, this man didn’t care, he kept talking, and he was wearing stupid slippers, Ted was always wearing stupid slippers too, she had just never noticed that before.
There was a teal bowling ball in her hand and Elvira remembered how to roll like she had in the big leagues. The ball flew out of Elvira’s hand and nothing stood in its way. There was no alley, just pure air.
All twelve pounds caught Astor Crane in the left temple and his skinny body tumbled down into the plush red carpet. His finger pulled at the trigger, a muscle reflex pulsing from a confused and damaged brain trying to evaluate a situation far out of its control. Astor’s lips tried to sputter something about flying luck dragons, and then they stopped altogether. There was no bullet in the rifle. Only one was ever in the chamber, and it was the same bullet now embedded in the drywall where Al Vine’s head had been.
Jamie tried to spring up from the loveseat, but his foot caused him to crash down onto the floor beside Astor. The skinny body convulsed a little, but there was no movement in its blue eyes. A torn bit of scalp revealed the damage to his head. The teal bowling ball rolled away into the corner, its three eyes refusing to gaze back.
“Moses, that’s you, right?” Jamie said. “Moses?”
“Yeah, it’s — ugh — me. Is he out?” Moses asked. “Is he down?”
The two boys were still lying by the door. Tommy Vine didn’t move. His lips were stuck open and he didn’t blink when the television flickered. Occasionally, he tugged at his brother’s beard and moaned, but the sound got trapped halfway up his throat. It was more like a gurgle — a clogged drain trying to swallow.
“He’s down, he’s down,” Jamie said. “There won’t be any more of him, all right? He’s out.”
“Like knocked out?”
“Like fucking dead, Moses,” Jamie said. “Can you move at all?”
“We can kind of roll around, but they taped the hands pretty good,” Moses said from the floor. “B. has been trying to break it out, but he’s kinda given up. They thrashed us pretty good on the ride up in the service elevator.”
Jamie crawled across the carpet and grabbed a piece of glass from one of the broken bottles near the bar. Moving on all fours, he dragged his right foot behind him. The pain was pointed and insistent, but it was tiny. It was something he could swallow by himself. Jamie didn’t need the Lorax to help him now. The glass in his hand was sharp. As he neared the boys by the door, Jamie got a look at the hallway. The elevator doors remained shut. Jamie began to saw at the tape binding the two boys. He was careful to avoid slicing through their pale wrists.
“Where did you find her?” Moses asked. “We were looking everywhere…”
He looked at Jamie while he shook out the static blood in his arms.
“What do you mean, where did I find her?” Jamie asked. “You mean Elvira? She was hidin’ in the bathroom where the big hairy dudes were living. Too much to explain. You know her?”
“Yeah I know her,” Moses said. “I recognize her, um, from the motel.”
Elvira did not check on the body splayed out on the floor; she knew it wasn’t Ted. Ted didn’t have a collapsed left temple and didn’t leak all over the nice red carpet. Everything else was blurry. While Moses shook out the needles in his fingers, Elvira started with what she knew best to reorient herself. The big toe always came first. This was a fact she could trust no matter where she was. This little piggy went to market.
Astor Crane watched her from the floor but did not see a thing.
“She live there or something? They had her locked up in the bathroom, and the first thing she does when we get here is run right into the bathroom,” Jamie said. “Look, I don’t wanna hustle anybody out of here, but I can’t crawl out by myself exactly, you know?”
Jamie was working on B. Rex now. The smaller boy wasn’t talking. He smelled like ammonia and the tattoo on his neck looked infected. The small numbers bled around the edges.
“You just — you wanna go?” Moses asked.
“Yes, and fucking now,” Jamie said. “Someone is gonna come up here eventually. Maybe to flip the sheets or something, and I don’t want to be seen with two dead men and a third — is he dead? Has he even moved? Hello? Buddy! Fucker! Beardo! Hello!”
“He’s been like that since the other guy got his face blasted,” Moses said.
“Well, good, the things they did to my friends,” Jamie said. “They deserved this shit. All right, now shake it out. Shake it out hard. Your wrists look like they’re purple.”
“They are purple,” B. Rex mumbled.
“Well, rub them or something. Don’t just stare at them.”
Jamie Garrison pulled himself up on the back of the loveseat. His right foot flopped back and forth when he kicked out his leg. He had seen worse in the warehouse. He’d tell the doctor Brock had backed over his foot with a truck. Crushed all the little bones and snapped the ankle. They would put him back together. Rebuild him. Astor had that right at least.
“Look, I can kind of hop,” Jamie said. “Moses, you grab one side of me. And little dude, you wanna grab Elvira from the bed there? And don’t touch the body. Just leave him. He isn’t going anywhere now.”