John Dies at the End

“You think she’d mind if I smoked in here?”

“John, I killed somebody.”

As the words hung in the air I had a split second to wonder how many people had ever uttered them and still gone on to live happy lives.

I said, “There’s a body in my toolshed.”

“Is it Jeff Wolflake? Does that mean the manager job is open?”

“No. A guy showed up, a guy but maybe not a guy, on the way home. He put a thing on me like a slug or something and asked me a bunch of questions.”

“And you killed him.”

“No, no. He got away. I killed some other person, completely unrelated to that guy apparently. I was just putting that out there.”

“Okay, so who is it?”

“Dunno. I didn’t check. I remember doing it, though, sort of. I shot them with the Smith. There’s a bullet missing and everything. I remember doing it but I don’t remember wanting to do it.”

John eyed me carefully. He looked away and pulled his hair back, then tied it with a rubber band. He pulled out a small box and shook out a rolling paper, then opened the tobacco.

He said, “You think it was like the thing with Danny Wexler? The demon thing we ran into at the mall?”

At the mall, he says. Like we saw it folding pants at American Eagle.

I serve none but Korrok.

“You know,” he said, “the way they could take hold of people, move them around like puppets? Then you shot me?”

“You gonna bring that up again?”

“You think it was Jennifer you killed?”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“No, I . . . I mean that was amicable, right?”

He didn’t answer.

I pulled out my cell phone and pulled Jennifer Lopez’s number off my speed-dial menu. One ring. Then three. Then six. Eight. Finally . . .

“Mmmm . . . hello?”

I knew the voice. Sleepy and drunk, sure, but hers. I broke the connection.

“She’s there,” I said.

“Well, that’s everybody you know.”

“But if it was . . . that thing controlling me, it wouldn’t be somebody I wanted dead. It would be somebody it wanted dead.”

Holy shit, this is madness.

John said, “So it could happen again?”

I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it. I actually hadn’t thought of that, either. John started laboriously sprinkling tobacco onto a cigarette paper.

I said, “She may not want you to smoke that in here, John.”

“Eh, I gotta make them ahead of time anyway. I get the urge to smoke, I don’t wanna sit and mess with it. You get the tobacco too clumped in the middle and it doesn’t stay lit. Rolling is a pain in the ass.”

“You know, I think you can buy them now where they’re already made.” He started rolling the thing, unrolled it, tried again.

I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Hey, John, when I saw Amy, I think her hand was missing.”

“Well, yeah. It’s been like that for a long time. She was in an accident.”

“Oh. And she lives here alone?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“There’s nobody who, you know, comes by to take care of her?”

John studied me for a moment, then said, “Well, Dave, I think one of the neighbors comes by to put out food and water in a bowl for her. Let her out, you know.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

We snapped into silence as Drake appeared in the doorway, Amy barely visible behind him. She squeezed around him, the girl now fully dressed in street clothes and even shoes. She wasn’t going anywhere, not at this time of night and not in this weather. Must be her hosting outfit. She had chin-length copper hair that looked like she had cut herself. Something weird with her eyes. The wrong shade of green.

On top of all that, she still didn’t have a hand. As she came into the room I averted my eyes from the handless arm that didn’t swing quite right when she walked, then realized it was becoming obvious that I was averting my eyes, so I looked at the scarred stump where her wrist ended, then it became so obvious I was looking at it that she actually folded her arms, her wrist disappearing behind her shirtsleeve. She glanced past me and said, “Hi, John!”

“What’s up. This is Dave, the one you saw in your hallway. He’s not a psychotic killer or anything,” he lied.

“Oh, I know. We went to school together.”

Yes, Amy, let’s reminisce about the Pine View Behavior Disorder Program. “Remember that time they had to restrain schizo Bobby Valdez and one of the aides broke his arm! Hahahahahahaha!!!”

I said, “Hey, I’m sorry about the, you know. Almost shooting you. We just have some questions and we’ll leave you alone.”

She looked at me with the too-long stare of someone with no social skills or diminished mental capacity. Like John said, I knew she had been in an accident as a kid. Brain damage? Was that her thing? I thought about the pills on the nightstand.

She held her gaze as she said, “It’s okay!” She waved a dismissive hand in the air and smiled. “So are you guys with the police or what?”

Damn, you’re cheery. Does one of those pill bottles contain Vicodin, dear?

“Oh, no. John knows Officer Drake here and he just called us to help out. We’re, uh, sort of experts on —”

“Oh, I know,” she said brightly. “I’ve read about you guys. There’s this Web site I go to, like a News of the Weird sort of thing. I think you guys are mentioned in every other article. The thing with Jim, when Jim, well, you know. I did a lot of reading. Do you want something to drink? I have, um, cranapple juice and . . .” she spun and opened the fridge, “. . . and . . . water. And pickles.”

“No, thanks.”

She closed the refrigerator and took a chair at the table opposite John and me. Drake said, “She doesn’t remember a thing. She lost about twenty hours, as far as I can tell.”

I said to her, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Brushing my teeth. I had the brush in my hand, I had gone downstairs to let Molly out so she could pee and roll around in the snow. She likes that. I came up and was putting toothpaste on the brush and then, the light was off. All of a sudden, just like that. The toothbrush was back on the shelf and the water was off and I don’t remember anything in between. Then I heard somebody in the hall and it turned out it was you.”

“And you were on your computer, right? Before you went in?”

Hesitation. Hiding something?

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Nothing strange happened?”

“When?”

“That night, the nights leading up to it.”

“No,” she said, studying my face as some bad liars do, always seeing if you’re buying it. No practice, this girl.

“Are you sure?”