John Dies at the End

The rest—Jennifer Lopez, Fred Chu, Big Jim Sullivan are nowhere to be found. They were all at the One Ball with John last night.

Now, only John remained.

You know all that, but you still can’t remember this cop’s name? You’re teetering on the brink of Crazy Man Bluff overlooking Weird Shit Valley.

“And to answer your next question,” I continued, “I didn’t know Jennifer well enough to know who her friends were or where she may have run off to. I’m sorry.”

Detective Freeman stepped forward and flipped open the manila envelope. He fanned out four photographs. One was a mug shot of a young black guy. Dreadlocks. I knew this was my fake Jamaican, knew before my eyes focused on the photo.

The next three pictures were vivid splashes of crimson.

Once, when I was twelve, for reasons that made sense at the time I filled a blender with some ice cubes and three cans of maraschino cherries. I didn’t know you had to use a lid on one of those things, so I hit the button and watched it erupt like a volcano. The room in the cop’s photographs looked like the resulting mess in our kitchen that day, everything a red spray with lumps.

He pointed to the Jamaican’s mug shot. “What about that guy? You know him?”

“He was there. At the party last night. Whatever John was on, this guy gave it to him. John told me.”

You already knew that, didn’t you, detective?

“That’s Bruce Matthews. Runs an amateur unlicensed pharmaceuticals operation on the corner of Thirtieth and Lexington.”

I nodded toward the red photos.

“What’s that?”

Morgan pointed to the mug shot.

“Before.”

He pointed to the red-drenched pictures.

“After.”

The first picture was just lumps on the floor, on carpet that was probably brown at one time but was now dyed a wet, purplish black. It looked like somebody had tossed down a bucket of raw steaks and chicken bones. The next picture was a close-up of one wall, deep red splatters over half the surface area, occasional bits of meat stuck here and there. The third picture was a close-up of a severed brown hand in a pool of red, fingers curled loosely, a bandage around the palm.

I turned my eyes away, suddenly sweating heavily. There was that tableau in the mirror again, just me and Morgan, face-to-face. Did he think I had anything to do with this? Was I a suspect? In my panic, I couldn’t read him. He let the silence congeal in the air, staring down on me. He broke me, and I broke the silence.

“What could even do that to a person? A bomb? Some kind of—”

“Nothing you know how to do, I’m sure of that. Maybe somethin’ not, uh, not within our bounds of familiarity.”

That fear again, on Morgan’s face. I understood it now.

But there’s more. Much more. He’s buried it so deep even you can’t read it.

The door opened and the detective’s words trailed off. A fat Hispanic cop ducked in and whispered in his ear. Morgan’s eyebrows shot up and the two of them left the room.

I heard a commotion outside, hurried shouts and feet shuffling on floor tile. After about ten minutes Morgan stormed into the room, eyes wide.

No, no, no, no-no-no. No. Don’t say it . . .

“Your friend is dead.”

CLICK!

A tape recorder, clicking off at the end of a cassette. Arnie had apparently set the thing on the table before me at some point. I hadn’t noticed. He grumbled an apology, fished out a new tape and went about changing it. I glanced over at his discarded notebook, saw he had abandoned his note-taking just after the word “Holocaust.”

I pushed away the plate of chicken, rice and snow peas that was the Flaming Shrimp Reunion. I had been picking through it for the last half hour, leaving the chicken. That bird, I knew, had lived a very sad life and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It also had spent its days covered head to toe in bits of other birds’ crap.

“When you got your cell phone bill, did it list the call you got at Denny’s?”

“What? I’m sorry.”

“The call you got from your friend at Denny’s when your friend was sitting there next to you without a phone. Was that call on your cell phone bill?”

“I never thought to check.”

The waitress swept by and claimed my plate, dropped off a fortune cookie and my ticket. She ignored Arnie. I held the cookie in my hand, tried to concentrate and “see” what the fortune said inside it. I found I couldn’t.

Arnie scratched his head, knitted a question with his eyebrows.

“So the black stuff, the soy sauce, it’s a drug, right?”

“Well, I’ll get to that.”

“And it makes you smarter? When you take it, it lets you read minds and all that?”

“Not really. It heightens your senses. I think. I don’t know. When you’re on it, it’s like overload, like if you hooked your car radio up to one of those interplanetary SETI antennas. You get shit from all over the place, can see things you shouldn’t be able to see, but I don’t think it would help you do your taxes.”

“And you still got some of this stuff?” He glanced quickly down at the silver canister.

“I’m getting to that.”

“You’re on it right now? That’s how you did the thing with the, uh, with the coins and the dream and all that earlier?”

“Yeah. I took some today. It’s fading though.”

“So the effects don’t last that long.”

“The side effects don’t last that long. The effects will last the rest of my life, I think.”

Maybe longer.

Arnie scratched his forehead.

“So, the kids that died, this is that rave overdose, right? I remember all that a few years ago, seein’ it on CNN. They thought they had gotten hold of some tainted Ecstasy or somethin’ like that? So you were the guy that —”

“I can’t figure out at what point the party got turned into a ‘rave’ in the newspapers. There was no techno music or dancing or PVC pants and there was certainly no raving. Freakin’ rave. It’s one of those words they throw around to scare old people.”

“What color is the interview room down at the precinct?”

“Uh, white. It’s flaked off in places, shows institutional green underneath.”

“And if I contact Detective Appleton, he’ll remember talking to you?”

“Good luck finding him.”

Arnie made notes.

“So?” I asked. “What do you think?”

“I think you’ve probably got a book here,” he said. “Flesh it out a little.”

“A book? Meaning a work of fiction? Meaning it’s all bullshit?”

Arnie shrugged. “It’s nothin’ to me. A story is a story. I’m just a feature reporter, so the fact that you think it happened is my story. But it’s like Whitley Strieber, writes that book about aliens. Nobody would ever have heard of it, except he sells it as nonfiction, swears to the end that it all really happened.”

His eyes flicked over to the little metal canister again. I realized my fingers had been fidgeting with it.

“Well, I’m not into that whole aliens thing, but I don’t think it’s right to label the guy a fraud, Arnie.”

“Exactly. He’s got a nice house, though. His own radio show. Played by Christopher Walken in a movie. Wouldn’t you like that? You know, I don’t remember leaving the house with any change in my pocket. You could