diarrhea juice, but with a slightly worse taste. It burned my nose drinking it, to the point where I may have lost some nostril hair. Plus it was a shade of blue only found in nature as part of neon beer signs. I could barely choke down the last forty-six ounces.
The bus came. Again, the only seat available was next to George. I took it, and pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose to disguise myself.
“Goddamn germs on public transportation,” I said, loud enough for most of the bus to hear. This provided a clever reason for my conspicuous face-hiding behavior. I said it seven more times, just to be sure.
We took the bus to Jefferson Park, a northwest side neighborhood named after that famous politico, Thomas Park. George exited on Foster. I followed, tailing him up Pulaski and into the Montrose Cemetery, my mind racing like a race car on a race track, driven by a race car driver, named Race.
I never liked cemeteries. Not because I'm afraid of ghosts, even though when I was a child all the kids used to tease me because they thought I was. They would dress up like ghosts and try to scare me by visiting my house at night and threatening to hang us all because my family didn't go to church. They usually left after burning a cross on our lawn. Damn ghosts.
No, I hated graveyards for much more realistic reasons. When a person died they shouldn't be kept around, like leftovers. People had a freshness date. Death meant discard, not preserve in a box. What ghoul thought that one up? Fifty thousand years ago, did some caveman plant Grandma in the ground hoping to grow a Grandma Tree? What fruit did that bear? Saggy wrinkly breasts that hung to the ground and smelled like Ben Gay and pee-pee? And what's with neckties? Why are men forced to wear a strip of cloth around their necks good for absolutely nothing except getting caught in things like doors and soup?
As my computer-like mind pondered these imponderables, George cleverly gave me the slip by walking someplace I could no longer see him. That left me with three options.
1. Wait at the entrance for him to come out.
2. Search for him.
3. Drain the lizard. Those eighty ounces of Super Berry Taurine had expanded my bladder to the size of a morbidly obese child, named Race.
I opted for number 3, and chose Mary Agnes Morrison, Loving Wife and Mother, to sprinkle. Maybe the taurine would liven up her eternity.
I soaked her pretty good, and had enough left over for the rest of the Morrison family, including the Loving Husband and Father, the Beloved Uncle, and the Slutty Skank Daughter.
I made that last tombstone up, but it would sure be cool if it was real, wouldn't it? And wouldn't it be cool if someone made a flying car? One that gave you head while you drove? I'd buy one.
I shook twice, corralled the one-eyed stallion, and began to look for George. An autumn breeze cooled the sweat on my face, neck, ears, hair, armpits, back, legs, and hands, which made me aware that I was sweating. I put a hand to my heart and discovered it was beating faster than Joe Pesci in a Scorsese flick. Because he beats people in those flicks. Beats them fast.
Why was I so edgy? Had my subconscious tapped into some sort of collective, primal fear? Did my distant ancestors, with their reptile brains and their bronze weapons made of stone, leave some sort of genetic marker in my DNA that made me sensitive to lurking danger?
I did a 360, looking for pointy-headed ghosts with gas cans. All I saw were tombstones, stretching on for as far as I could see. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe even billions.
“Easy, McGlade. Nothing to be afraid of. It's not like you desecrated their graves or anything.”
Noise, to my left. I had my Magnum in my hand so fast that it probably looked like it magically appeared there to anyone watching, even though I didn't think anyone was watching.
Anyone alive.
My eyes drifted up an old, scary-looking tree, which had branches that looked like scary branch-shaped fingers, but with six fingers instead of the usual five, which made it even scarier. The sun was going down behind the tree, silhouetting some sort of nest-shaped mass on an extended limb that I guessed was a nest.
“Chirp,” went the nest.
My first shot blew the nest in half, and two more severed the branch from the tree.
“Dammit, McGlade. Stay cool. You just assassinated a bird.”
Which saddened me greatly. Magnum rounds were a buck-fifty each. Plus, I didn't have any extras on me. I needed to stay cool.
“Chirp,” went the nest.
BLAM! BLAM!
By heroic effort I didn't shoot the nest a sixth time, instead walking briskly in the opposite direction. I was in a state that might be called “hyper-awareness,” which was a lot like being the lone antelope at the watering hole. I could feel the stares of flying insects, and hear the grass growing. It was freaking me out a little bit, so I began to run, tripping over something on the ground, skidding face-first against a tombstone. A damp tombstone.
Mary Agnes Morrison.
I scurried away, palms and knees wet, and saw the bright red object that caused me to fall.
The empty can of Super Berry Mix energy drink.
So my paranoia wasn't really paranoia after all. It was just an unhealthy amount of caffeine in my veins. Which would have been kind of funny if I wasn't soaked with my own piss. Along with the taurine, the drink apparently contained a full day's supply of irony.
I stood up and shook out my pants legs.
“Get a grip, McGlade. And stop talking to yourself. You always know what you're going to say anyway.”
I took three or ten deep breaths, holstered my weapon, and then set out looking for George.
I had no idea that in just two minutes I was going to die.
Chapter 5
I didn't actually die. I'm lying to make the story more exciting, because this part is sort of slow.
It starts to pick up in Chapter 8. Trust me, it's worth the wait. There's sodomy.
Chapter 6
It was a fruitless search, but that didn't matter—I wasn't looking for fruit. After a few minutes, I'd found him. He'd given me the slip by cleverly disguising himself as a group of three bawling women. Closer inspection, and some grab ass, revealed they really were women after all. I did my “pretend to be blind and deaf” act and stumbled away before any of them called the police or their lawyers.
Luckily, I caught sight of an undisguised George heading into the mausoleum. I never liked mausoleums. Burying the dead was bad enough. Putting them in the walls was just begging for mice to move in. And not the kind of mice who wear red pants and open up amusement parks. I'm talking about dirty, vicious, baby-face-eating mice, the size of rats.
Actually, I'm talking about rats.
Speaking of non-sequiturs, I really needed to take another leak. The mausoleum was decent-sized, with a few hundred vaults stacked four high. Well lit, temperature controlled, silk plants next to marble benches every twenty feet. It was the kind of place that would have a bathroom, I thought, while pissing on one of the silk plants. The pot it was in wasn't any realer than the plant, because all of my piss leaked out the bottom. I stepped over the puddle and commenced the search.
One of the techniques they teach you in private eye school is how to conduct a search, I bet. I have no idea, because I didn't go to private eye school. I wasn't even sure that private eye school actually existed. But it did in my fantasies. All the teachers were naked women, and wrong answers were punished with spankings. And the water fountains were actually beer fountains. If they had a school like that, I'd go for sure.
George wasn't down the first aisle. He wasn't down the second aisle either. Or the first aisle, which I checked again because I got confused.
“You do this?”
I spun around, wondering who spoke. It was some little old caretaker guy, clutching a mop. He pointed at the puddle on the floor.
“It was that other guy,” I said, thinking fast. “You see him anywhere?”
“I only seen you, buddy. Did you go to the bathroom on my floor? There's a bathroom right there behind you. What kind of man does a thing like this?”
