“I’ll be waiting in line for you when you get to Hell, Ballard,” Corll said. I lifted the needle off the boy’s chest, and the thing that had been Dean Corll departed with a moan like a hot desert wind. It left the dank, cloying stench of rancid blood and candy in its wake.
“Yeah,” I said, slipping open my satchel, “but your punk ass will be waaaay in the back of the line, Dino.” I stood, tucked the needle away in my pocket, and slipped on a dark blue windbreaker I had removed from my bag. On the back in bright yellow letters was the word PRESS. I also removed a lanyard with an official laminated press photo ID, a baseball cap with the logo of the Houston Chronicle, a local newspaper, on it, and a very nice digital Nikon camera. I knelt down beside the kid and waited for what I knew was coming next.
Joey was breathing, a little ragged but still alive. Fun fact: you can drink a small amount of window cleaner, about two ounces an hour, and get wasted off of it, but too much does fuck up your nervous system and can kill you. You find out all kinds of neat life hacks like that when you vacation at rock bottom.
A pair of cops in tactical gear, probably the point on a SWAT team, appeared on either side of the open door.
“Don’t move!” one of them shouted. I put my hands up.
“I think he’s trying to kill himself,” I said. “He drank a bunch of this blue cleaning shit. He was like this when I came down the hall.”
“Keep your hands up, stand, and move over to the side,” the other cop said. “Jesus, it’s the shooter all right, we need medics in here now!”
One of the SWAT cops frisked me and spun me around, reading my press ID. “How the fuck did you get past the lines and get in here, asshole?”
“Hey, look, I’m sorry, man,” I said. “I’m new and I was just trying to get…”
“Get him out of here,” an older tactical cop with sergeant’s stripes said as he entered the room with the EMTs. “Place is getting too damn crowded.”
They confiscated my camera and ran my press credentials. My hacker, Grinner, had been good to his word and worth every penny. The fake ID stood up. In less than an hour, I was walking away from the school and dumping my career as a photojournalist in a trash can next to the bus stop.
While they were vetting me, they brought Joey out on a stretcher. He was handcuffed to it. He was awake and crying, calling out for his mother. I felt a cowardly relief pass through me at the thought that I didn’t have to be the one to tell the boy his mother had been his first victim. I’d seen her body in the hallway of their quiet home.
I imagined the nightmare existence Joey was going to have now, the horrors outside and inside eating him until the day he departed this earth. Death would have been more merciful. Kid hadn’t done a thing wrong, just got handed a shit deal. My job was done, I had done the best I could. I was never supposed to win this, never supposed to get there in the nick of time to make it all right for anyone except the manipulative bastard who sent me here. It was a cluster fuck from the jump.
I hailed a cab. “Drive,” I said, handing the guy a hundred, and fumbling for a cigarette. I kept thinking that if I looked behind me, Joey would be there, staring at me.
“Where?” the cabbie asked.
“Away,” I said, “fast.”
TWO
The Voodoo Queen on Milby Street was a dive that tried a little too hard to be a dive. It made the hipster kids feel like they were really slumming without the need for paying gangland tolls and packing pistols. I liked the joint from my last visit to Houston because the music was good and the folks there didn’t skimp on the alcohol in their drinks. I bypassed the voluminous menu of concoctions that came in hollowed-out pineapples and fishbowls with little totem poles of fruit spears and paper umbrellas for buying the lone bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Reserve they had up on the top shelf. The fetching lass that sold it to me had hair dyed white and a tapestry of tattoos covering her slender body.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “That’s like a three-thousand-dollar bottle of twenty-three-year-old whiskey. You know that, right?” I handed her a wad of cash.
“Here’s four K,” I said. “It’s a tip for being the prettiest sight I’ve seen all day, darlin’.” The bartender looked at the money, back to me, and stepped to the back bar to count the bills and make sure they weren’t fake by the light of the enormous fish tank full of brilliantly colored clown fish that adorned the back wall of the bar. She came back with the bourbon like she was cradling the Ark of the Covenant, and a glass tumbler.
“Ice?” she asked.
“Be like pissing in holy water.”
“What’s the special occasion?”
“It’s my birthday,” I said, getting up from the bar.
“Happy birthday!” she said and actually meant it. “Hey, I get off at eight. I’ve never tasted twenty-three-year-old bourbon before.”
“Well, come find me,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to it, but I suspect that whiskey is older than you are.”
She laughed, and I retreated to the shadows of the bar floor.
Funny thing, when you buy a bottle like this, they pretty much let you camp any damn place you please. I went around a velvet rope and sat myself down in a corner booth of a closed section. The only lights in here were the small round fills built into the ceiling, bright light under them, and deep shadow all around. I could still hear the music from the
