sour and the sky skipped down, I was going to make a run for the bathroom and my tub, supposedly one of the safest places you could be during a tornado, if for no other reason than the plumbing is rooted deep into the ground. But of course there was really no safe place to be during a tornado, unless it was someplace where the tornado wasn’t.
Before I got back to the front porch, the rain came, blowing hard, and there was a sudden blast of hail so ferocious I couldn’t stay on the porch. Sitting there was like being a victim of a biblical stoning.
I rushed inside, shaking the rain off of me, listening to it blow at a slant under the porch and slam the wall. A chunk of ice literally the size of a baseball crashed through the window behind the couch, flew over it, slammed against the floor and bounced and hit a chair in the kitchen, thudded back into the living room, rolled to the middle of the floor.
I turned to look at the broken window. Rain and smaller chunks of hail were slamming against it now, and I heard another glass go in the bedroom. It was eerie, the wind blowing that way, pushing the hail straight before it. If this wasn’t a tornado, it would damn sure do until the real thing showed up.
I was thinking about pouring another cup of coffee and nesting in the bathtub with a flashlight and a book and one ear cocked for wind. Anything to get my mind off the storm and Brett being in it. But I didn’t do that. I guess it was people like me that waited until the last minute and were taken away by the wind. Instead I went to the side window of my living room and glanced out. Trees were bending way too far, and I saw lightning leap out of the sky and smack one like an insolent teenager, knocking pine bark and needles a-flying.
When I turned around the back door jumped away from the wall with an explosion of busted lock, and I thought, goddamn, the twister’s got me, but then I saw it was a human tornado.
Big Man Mountain. He came quickly into the room. He was wearing jeans and a filthy white T-shirt and his clod-hopper boots. He was soaked with rain and it ran off of him in great rivulets and pooled quickly at his feet. He looked like hell. He was pale as Casper the Ghost.
I thought about my gun, back in my bedroom in the nightstand drawer, and I started to run for it, but Big Man came through the open kitchen and into the living room at a rush. I braced myself to fight, but he leaped up and twisted and shot out both feet and hit me with a drop-kick that flung me across the room and into the front door with a sound like someone dropping a dead blowfish on the dock. It hurt like a sonofabitch. I tried to get up but didn’t have any wind in me. Big Man had hold of me and lifted me over his head as if I were a sack of flour, tossed me back onto the floor. I tried to curl my body and duck my chin, roll with the fall, but it still hurt like hell.
Next thing I knew, Big Man had me by the head and was yanking me around and whirling me onto the couch. I came to a sitting position and shot out my foot as he came at me, scored a good one on his chin. He went back and I came up and he swung and I went under and struck out with a knee that caught him in the thigh, and it was a good shot, right on that point in the thigh that makes you wish it was someone else’s leg, even your mother’s. I whipped my arm around and hammered him in the kidneys, slid in behind him, tried to grab him in a stranglehold. But this wasn’t smart. That was his game.
Big Man grabbed my arm, bent forward suddenly, and I found myself flying. I landed on the couch again, facedown. I tried to get up but took a kick in the ass, right above the blow hole, right there on the tip of the spinal cord. I went out, and when I awoke I was in hell.
I was on the couch, sitting. My feet were tied with a twisted coat hanger and my wrists were bound behind my back with what I figured was the same. At my back the wind and small pellets of ice whirled through the broken glass and smacked the back of my head, neck, and shoulders. The couch was soaked with cold rain.
Big Man had pulled a chair up in front of the couch and he was looking at me. To his right he had placed another chair. On the chair, from my cabinets and closets, were a variety of items. Straightened coat hangers, a butcher knife, a corkscrew, pliers, and an ice pick. There was also a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin.
Big Man had taken his shirt off, and he was a massive hunk, with a big solid belly and a hairy chest and arms that looked like knotted ship cables. On his right lower arm was a large festered wound. His face was oily and covered with sweat beads the size of his own knuckles, which were considerably larger than diesel truck lug bolts. He was holding his head up with difficulty. His breathing was bad. His face had gone from pale to blue, but not as blue as his lips. His eyes were scummy around the edges and the whites were no longer whites, but reds. In his left hand he held a Swiss Army knife open to the spoon.
“I was thinking of your eyes,” he said. “I thought they might be a good place to start. But I’m having second thoughts. I say let you see what there is to see until the very last.”
“There’s no reason to do this, Big Man,” I said. “It’s all over. You did Pierre in yourself. What’s the point?”
Big Man smiled at me. His teeth appeared not to have been cleaned in ages. They were yellow, with brown roots that were probably from chewing tobacco.
“The point is completion, ” Big Man said. “No one believes in completion anymore. I do. I finish what I start. I was paid to do you in, get a video and a book, and now I’m here to do just that. I could have done the nigger, but you worked out better. I been hiding in the woods. You’re easier to get to here. You, the nigger, the cunt, it don’t matter, long as I come up with what I set out to come up with. The book. The video.”
“It’s over, Big Man.”
Big Man shook his head. “No. The other night was left undone, Mr. Collins, but as you can see, here we are again.”
“You did your job, man. Pierre isn’t here to pay you anymore. You’re not obligated.”
“He hired me. He didn’t pay me. I had to extract some vengeance for that. I took a little money from him, a few items I could sell. Nothing that drastically exceeded what was owed me for the job I had done so far. He wanted to not pay me because I didn’t get the video and the book. He wasn’t giving me enough time. Jesus, you know, Collins, I feel like shit.”
“Big Man. Listen. The notebook, the videos. The cops have them.”
“You said that before.”
“And I lied, but this time it’s true. It’s all over. I wasn’t trying to blackmail anyone. That wasn’t my purpose.”
“Shut up. I got a headache. I’ll do the talkin’.”
“That looks like a bite,” I said, nodding toward the wound on his arm.
“Fox. I was campin’. Livin’ in the woods in Pierre’s Mercedes. I got out to take a piss. Fox came at me. Leaped at me. Bit me. I strangled it. I never seen one do like that before.”
“It was rabid, Big Man. You’ve been bitten by a rabid fox.”
“No.”
“Yes. A rabid squirrel bit me, so I should know!”
Big Man burst out laughing. “A rabid squirrel! What’s your game, Mr. Collins?”
“Big Man, I don’t have the video or the notebook. Your job is over.”
“It’s over when I say it’s over. And if you don’t have the video or the notebook, well, I’ll know for sure after we try out a few of these instruments. A corkscrew twisted into the knee, just above the knee joint. You wouldn’t believe-”
“Yes, I would.”
“Oh, no. Experiencing it is the only way to believe it. I’ve tried it on myself. It really hurts. Of course, I didn’t go as deep into my flesh as I’m going to go into yours. I’m going to screw it right into your leg and through the muscle and nerves and into the bone. Then I’m going to do your triceps tendons. Now there’s some pain, my man.”
The house rattled. The rain slammed harder and harder.
Big Man took the aspirin bottle and unscrewed it and shook several aspirin into his mouth. He picked up the glass of water, tried to sip it. He tossed it across the room, spat the aspirin in my lap.
“I can’t swallow,” he said. “Hell of a cold.”
“It’s the water. Hydrophobia. You have rabies, Big Man. You need a doctor. It may not be too late.”
Big Man stood up violently, causing the chair he had been sitting in to fall backwards to the floor. “I do not have rabies. I startled a fox, that’s all. You’re not going to frighten me.”
“I got bit by the squirrel, doctor told me a story about a boy got bit and died screaming in bed, gnashing his teeth. Finally his father smothered him. Whatever you do to me, it won’t be half of what’s going to happen to you. Call the doctor, Big Man. Get some help. This rabies stuff, it’s got you half out of your mind. Maybe more.”
