Maxie Honeycutt, he taps his Pall Mall on the back of his left hand, then lights it. He shrugs and stares at this chick at the bar, because he thinks she looks a lot like Grace Slick and he’s got a serious hard-on for Grace Slick, even if he can’t stand fucking hippie music.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” he says.
Right then, Charlie Six Pack snaps his fingers real loud and Maxie jumps. “Now I remember,” says Charlie Six Pack. “Dude’s name was Breen. Patrick Breen.”
“Who’s name was Patrick Breen? The professor?”
“No, man, the cannibal. Way that guy at Brigham Young told it, Breen said he found the thing”—and Charlie nods at the greasy paper bag again—“up there in the mountains, and it was the doodad here told Breen that if they ate the dead people, if they could get over being all squeamish and shit, maybe they wouldn’t all starve and freeze to death hundreds of miles from civilization and no hope of rescue till spring. Some kind of Indian fetish or heathen idol or some shit, I don’t know, right, and desperate people, well, you figure they were all just looking for some excuse not to let that meat go to waste. So, great, fine, blame it on voices from this doodad. Rationalization, man.” And Charlie Six Pack taps at his forehead.
“So, how’d this professor get his hands on it?”
“No idea, man. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
“And what’s the Turk want with something like that?” Maxie asks again.
“Look, ain’t the Turk who wants it. It’s this cat down in Australia, right? So, you gonna hold onto it for me or what? You do it, I’ll cut you in for seven percent.”
“I don’t want to go getting messed up in some sort of heavy Apache hoodoo horseshit,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him, and he takes a long pull on his Pall Mall, then checks his watch like maybe he’s got somewhere better to be when he most certainly does not. “I don’t like the look of the thing.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” sighs a thoroughly exasperated Charlie Six Pack. He licks a thumb and forefinger and pinches out the joint, then stashes it in a snuff tin. “I always knew you were crazy, man, crazy fucking Paranoid Jack, loonier than a run-over dog, but I didn’t ever take you for the superstitious sort. Didn’t finger you for the sorta guy’s gonna let a spook story get in between him and easy money, leaving me fucking hanging in the wind like this.”
“It ain’t nothing personal, Charlie.”
“Sure it ain’t,” Charlie tells Maxie, and the cat makes no effort whatsoever to hide his displeasure. “But don’t think word ain’t gonna get back to the Turk how you had a chance to lend a hand and didn’t do diddly squat, all right?”
“Sounds fair,” says Maxie Honeycutt, though he doesn’t think it sounds fair at all, the off chance he might find himself in Dutch with the Turk just because he doesn’t want to play nursemaid to Charlie Six Pack’s little green gargoyle.
“What time you got?” Charlie wants to know. “I have to make some calls, man, try to find someone ain’t such a goddamn pussy.”
“My watch says it’s seven fifteen,” Maxie tells him, “but it’s running a little slow, because of all NASA’s excess electromagnetism or something.”
“You and your fucking watch,” snorts Charlie Six Pack, and he takes his greasy brown paper bag and leaves Maxie Honeycutt alone in the booth. And Maxie, he tries hard to feel relieved. He sits there chain smoking Pall Malls and staring at that girl who doesn’t look even half as much like Grace Slick as he at first glance thought she did. He’ll have a few beers, stick around for the band, then head back to Silver Lake and the two-room rattrap he calls home. And round about dawn, cat’s gonna wake up from the worst bad dream he’s had since he was a kid. He’s gonna wake up and find he’s pissed the sheets. He’ll turn on the radio real damn loud and sit by the kitchenette window, smoking and drinking from a warm bottle of Wild Irish Rose while he watches the sun come up. He’ll sit there trying hard not to think about Charlie Six Pack’s ugly fucking doodad or blizzards or a raw January wind howling like a banshee through high mountain passes.
3.: Saint Joan(ah) Redux
(Atlanta, regarding January 12, 2011)
The way I heard it, Ms. Esmé Symes was born Esther Simon, the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister who spoke in tongues, handled rattlesnakes, and drank strychnine from Ball mason jars. There are two or three different stories floating around about why she up and left that pissant backwater Florida town, but they all come back around to her daddy not keeping his hands to himself. Might be she killed him. Might be her momma killed him. Might be the man only lost his ministry to the scandal and slunk off into the Everglades to drink away whatever was left of his miserable, sorry life. Whichever, Esther became Esmé and spent some time with a traveling show, reading palms and tarot cards, telling rubes what they’d want to hear about their futures, instead of telling them what she really saw. Oh, I’m not saying I believe she was a bona fide psychic or clairvoyant or whatever. But that lady, she most definitely made a living convincing people she was, and, to tell the God’s honest truth, if I’m gonna deny there’s anything to all this sixth-sense folderol, well, then I’m left with the mystery of how exactly it was she led two detectives from APD Homicide to that empty warehouse between Spring Street and West Peachtree.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d helped the police. There was that kid who’d gone missing out in Stone Mountain, two years earlier, and there was the Decatur woman who’d been raped, murdered, dismembered, and buried in her own backyard. Remember her? Well, Esmé found both of them, so when she made the call about the warehouse, we sat up and listened. Now, if she’d been upfront and warned us what she thought we were going to find in there, I like to think someone would have had the good sense to hang up on her. Tell her to go fuck herself. But apparently full disclosure was not that woman’s style. And looking back, the whole day seems sorta like walking into an ambush, climbing the three flights of stairs up to that long fucking hall, and then, she’d told us, go all the way down to the end. That’s where we’d find what we were looking for. Down at the end of the hall.
Franklin Babineaux, that skinny kid from New Orleans, he’s first into the room, and then me, and then Audrey. Yeah, she was still my partner, right. This was still six months or so before her accident. Anyway, so, by the time I make it through the door, Babineaux, he’s already gotten a big, juicy eyeful, and he’s just sorta standing off to the side, fucking dumbstruck, gawking. And there before us was the nightmare that Esmé Symes had neglected to elaborate on. My first thought—I shit you not—my very first thought was how it all had to be some sort of sick-ass practical joke. Something like that, your brain doesn’t want to admit you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing, and if you are seeing it, well, then it can’t possibly be what it looks like. Oh, you’ve seen the photos, I know, but the photos, let me assure you, they don’t convey one one-hundredth of the sheer surreal fucked-upness. The photos, they’re like a fading memory of the real thing, like, let’s say, a copy of a copy. For one, you look at them and you don’t get the smell. Like a fish market or a salt marsh at low tide, and just beneath the oily, fishy ocean smell there was the sharp metallic stink of all that blood. See, you take away the smell and you take away that punch to the gut. Thank sweet damn Jesus it was winter. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have been like walking into that shitstorm in July instead of January.