John Dies at the End

“Good. Anyway, Amy is missing and the scene is weird as shit. The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it’ll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.”

“Who’s—”

“Because you’re gay.”

“Who’s missing, John?”

“Amy, Dave. A-M-Y. I think my signal’s breaking up—”

“I don’t know any—”

“Amy Sullivan? Big Jim’s sister?”

That stopped me.

Memories of an entire day spent locked in the back of a truck, sick with fear and boredom. A promise made to a dead man. I hadn’t thought of that day in months.

“Oh. You mean Cucumber.”

“Do you not feel the need to learn people’s real names, Dave?”

“We called her that in school. She was in that Special Ed class, always throwing up for some reason.”

A silent pause on John’s end.

“You know, like a sea cucumber? They’re these eels that—”

“Anyway, Dave, we’re at her house now. The cops, too. How soon can you be here?”

How about June?

Even that wasn’t going to be enough time to piece this together. I pictured Big Jim on his back, a crimson stain across his neck and the floor like a scarf. The dead man had circled back into my life somehow. I glanced at the gun, trying to make it all fit and failing.

“What’d you say on my machine? Bag full of—”

“I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up. Just get here as soon as you can, we gotta go deal with this flying jellyfish thing.”

A pause on my end now.

“What?”

“See you in a few—UNDER THE CABINET! NO, THE CABINET! THE—HERE, LET ME—”

Click. Doooooooooooooooo . . .

I disconnected and did what I usually do after hanging up with John: sat in dumbfounded silence and contemplated all of the poor choices in my life.

I shrugged out of my coat, pulled off my Wally’s shirt, smelled it, then hung it back in the bedroom closet.

As I pulled on a new shirt I grabbed a bottle of caffeine pills from my desk drawer. I washed down four of them with a warm, half-empty bottle of red Mountain Dew I found on the kitchen counter.

I pulled on the coat and, after a moment’s hesitation, dropped the Smith & Wesson in the pocket, the weight pulling the whole left side of the coat down on my shoulder. I felt like Bruce Willis.

Is it just me, or is the barrel slightly warm?

I pushed through my front door and plunged into the cold, but made it no farther than the doormat.

Footprints.

The thin blanket of white across my front lawn should have been clean, save for a single trail of prints from the driver’s side of my Bronco to the spot I was standing. Instead, there was a haphazard circle of tracks in loops around my front yard, then trailing off around the back of the house. The trail of prints emerged from the other side and eventually led to the front porch, where I was now.

I stepped off the porch and into the crunchy snow/ice shell that coated the ground. I leaned down, squinting against the storm. Boot prints, zigzag treads. I had a very dark, very lonely realization.

The prints were mine. All of them.

I glanced around in the darkness, seeing nothing but sparkling flecks of ice passing through shafts of street light. I made the silent decision to never tell anyone about this, and got in my truck.

Missing time. That’s what they call it. John’s got a missing girl, you’ve got a missing half hour. Shit.

I twisted the ignition to life, thought for a moment, then pulled the Smith from my pocket. I pressed the button on the handle and again popped out the magazine. I made a little pouch in my lap with my shirt and, with my thumb, flicked out the bullets one by one. I counted as I went, hoping—no, praying—that none were missing.

One, two, three, four . . .

The bullets were, uh, unusual. The heads were silver with a bright-green plastic tip. A guy had mailed me these, anonymously. They were lined up in rows in a heavy white cardboard box, a tag on the inside typed with bullet jargon I didn’t understand. Something about “proximity fuses” and long serial numbers. John and I test-fired them, shot a pumpkin and watched it explode into flaming bits of blackened shell.

. . . seven, eight, nine . . .

That’s what people do these days, they mail me things. Crystals. Shrunken heads. Doctored pictures of angels in clouds and of bleeding statues. Bundles of blue-lined notebook paper full of scrawled, rambly stories about Satan sending hidden messages through mass e-mail subject lines. I’ve gotten chunks of stone stolen from haunted castles in Scotland, hunks of supposedly cursed black volcanic rock from Hawaii, dried Bigfoot turds. John and I have this reputation now and everybody wants to help.

. . . thirteen, fourteen . . .

I let out a long breath.

One missing. One.

THE TWO-STORY PSYCHO- STYLE house “Big Jim” Sullivan had lived in with his mentally handicapped sister would have cost most of a million dollars had it not been run-down and located in a weedy, desolate section of town a block from a chemical-drain-cleaner factory. I guessed the sister, Amy, lived here by herself now that Big Jim was deceased under circumstances I am rarely able to adequately explain in mixed company.

I swung my headlights into the yard of the Sullivan Psycho house, between John’s 1978 Caddie (bearing the cryptic license plate, CRKHTLR) and an Undisclosed cop car that was parked along the road.

It really was a shitty, shitty neighborhood. The next house over looked empty. The neighbor down the hill on the other side was an expanse of white parking lot dense with a wormy pattern of tire treads. It led to the ass of a huge building lined with a row of roll-up garage doors. The rear trucking entrance of the Drain Rooter plant. There was a single semi backed into one of the stalls, bearing the logo of a cartoon plumber with a big red “X” through him. I wondered if the bathroom drains at the plant ever got clogged to the point that they had to call in a plumber and, if so, if anyone was able to make eye contact with the guy while he was there.

Through my windshield I saw two figures in the front yard. One was John, arms jammed in his pockets, the stiff breeze sucking away cigarette smoke in a horizontal stream. The other was a bear of a man who I recognized as John’s uncle Drake, still the only cop in town with whom we were on a first-name basis. Drake spoke, John nodded, the ember of his cigarette bobbing slightly in the darkness. John was growing a beard. He had been working construction off and on after having been fired from Wally’s a year before. He had gotten caught bootlegging DVDs and giving them away to customers, right there at the store. Not selling them, mind you. Giving them away. I climbed out and was immediately assaulted by the freezing wind.

The looming house didn’t just look empty, it looked abandoned. It had gone downhill since I had last seen it on the night I tried to return Molly. Peeling paint, filthy windows, no tire tracks in the driveway.

Big Jim had looked after Amy in the years since their parents died, but I don’t know who was looking after her now. Apparently nobody, since she was lost and all. Man, was it cold.

Drake looked shabbier than I did, the man inflated in full cop uniform and parka, complete with one of those navy blue fur earflap hats. The blue blimp of weariness.

“Wong,” he said, with a lack of enthusiasm usually reserved for door-to-door Mormons.

I don’t enjoy our little encounters either, Drake. But here we are, just the same.

“How long’s she been missing?”