tried it. It was locked.
We didn’t know what to do. We’d planned everything down to the last detail, and now this. The Doc had changed his plans this night after being consistent for so many, and we didn’t have a backup plan. We stood there like idiots, trying to figure what to do next.
There was a scream from inside. It was short and ended almost before it started, but there was no doubt that a scream was what it was. Dave pulled his automatic out from under his sweater and looked at us and we looked at him.
I guess we stood there a full minute, looking at each other’s hangdog faces in the moonlight, not knowing what to do.
Suddenly, the door opened and a man was standing there looking at us. He was as startled as we were. He was real tall and broad shouldered and pale skinned and his head was shaved and there was a gold and blue tattoo that ran up from under his blue wind-breaker and along his neck and the side of his face and draped over his head. It was the tattoo of a cobra rising up to strike, and its fanned head terminated at the top of the guy’s bald head. We could smell the guy. He had a stink clung to him like glue.
Dave jerked up his automatic and Cobra Man reached out with a gloved mitt and grabbed the automatic and twisted it out of Dave’s hands and slapped him across the forehead with the grip. This took the guy less effort than it takes to wipe your ass.
Dave went to his knees. A trickle of blood streamed from under his hair and down in front of his ear. In the moonlight and the soft light from inside the house, it looked like a stream of lube oil.
Cobra Man lifted his other hand and showed us he had a silenced. 38 automatic in it. He smiled some gold ridged teeth at us and said, “Come on in, cousins. Good to see you.”
His breath went along with his body odor. It came out of his mouth with his oily voice and caressed us. Garlic would have smelled like a breath mint compared to that shit. Bob got Dave by the arm and helped him up. Dave held his head with one hand and looked wobbly. We all stood in our huddle for a moment, not moving. “I invited you in, cousins, and I meant it,” Cobra Man said. He was pointing both guns at us now.
One by one, we went inside and stood in the foyer, which was about the size of a mobile home Mom and I once lived in. It was partially lit by warm ceiling lights, and the floor was blue and white tile made up like a giant chessboard, and it Sboae live wasn’t our move.
End of the foyer was a huge grandfather clock, and you could hear it ticking softly, like the beating of a heart, but not fast enough to match the beating of my heart. The house was full of Cobra Man’s stench.
The fat guy who had swapped envelopes with the Doc came out of a room unscrewing a silencer from an automatic pistol. There was a Polaroid camera on a strap around his neck. He wore soft, thin gloves. He looked at us and started screwing the silencer back on. He looked at Cobra Man, said, “What the fuck’s this?”
“Visitors,” Cobra Man said. “They were at the back door. Tricker-treatin’ early, I reckon.” Cobra Man smiled like he was really funny.
The fat man came down the foyer and stood in front of us. He looked at Carrie and Sharon for quite a while. Sharon especially. “Who the fuck are you people?” he said to no one in particular.
Nobody answered.
“You guys were going to rob the place, weren’t you?” the fat man said, then laughed. “Well, you picked a bad night for it, little partners. A hell of a bad night. All you peckerheads into the room there.”
We went into the nearest room after Cobra Man went ahead of us and turned on the light. It was a big room with a fireplace large enough to cook a steer in and white curtains over windows the size of ping pong tables. The center of the room had one of those long conference style tables. So long, you sat at one end and wanted to talk to someone at the far end, you’d have to have had a megaphone. Maybe give them a telephone call.
Cobra Man motioned for us to sit on the couch, and we did, our knees and elbows close together, like kids waiting for detention. The sweat started rolling out from under my arms like someone had turned on a faucet.
“What you want to do with them, Fat Boy?” Cobra Man asked.
“I’m thinking on it,” Fat Boy said.
“I think we ought to do something with this nice pussy here before we do something else,” Cobra Man said. “The guys I don’t care what you do, though you want to be consistent, I’ll fuck them too, provided their buttholes’ll stretch enough to take the old snake.”
“That kind of thing’s your department,” Fat Boy said. “I don’t want anything like that with any guys. We do something else here, it could screw things up. I think we got to take ’em out of here before you can do what you want, then you and me got to do what we got to do.”
I knew then, I didn’t try something, it was all over. I panicked. I hopped up and ran and palmed myself onto the long table in the center of the room and dove right into one of the big windows with the white curtains. The jump was close. I just barely made the window.
Hitting those thick curtains and getting wound up in them was what saved me from getting cut really bad. I struck the ground rolling and twisted out of the curtains and started up running, tripped, went down, then something went by my ear like a bee, and then I was dipping down toward the woods and the Doc’s park.
As I got into the pines there, Spinowaa piece of bark jumped off a tree next to me and puffed in all directions, then I was down the hill and tripping over a stone seat, tumbling into the creek. I waded on across and started running through the woods.
Behind me, I could hear someone coming, and I knew without looking it was Cobra Man. He had followed me through the busted out window.
I ducked and weaved under branches and jumped over bushes and briars, hoping if he got off another shot, I’d be a hard target to nail. One thing in my favor was he didn’t seem too good at hitting what he aimed at.
If he fired again, I never knew it. Few moments later I was out of the woods and stumbling onto the highway, not even looking for cars. One went by me and swerved and honked and someone screamed “Motherfucker,” but I was across the highway then, running like hell into the University parking lot.
I didn’t have Dave’s car keys, of course, so I kept running. Across the lot and down into the stretch of woods that grows on either side of Morgan Creek. I went along the creek a while and finally stopped to listen. I didn’t hear anyone following, but I didn’t come out. I laid down in the leaves and tried to be quiet and think.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t broken any law, really. I hadn’t busted into the Doc’s house. We had been let inside by a man with a gun.
What was the deal?
What was the fat man, Fat Boy, the other called him, doing there?
Who had screamed?
What in the hell had happened to Doc’s schedule?
And the others, Sharon, the Disaster Club, what was to become of them?
No answers came to me. I lay there and felt the water that had splashed on my legs turn cold. Where I had banged the stone seat with my shin ached like hell. I felt like a coward, running like that, but what else could I do? I figured what Fat Boy had in mind was going to be unpleasant, and had I hesitated one moment longer, I felt certain I would have found out how unpleasant. There wouldn’t have been any getting away.
Finally, couple hours later is my guess, I got my nerve up. I went along the bank where the creek travels through the heart of the University, under the bridge and along these deep concrete channels the city put in for flood control. I came out on the other side of the University and started walking home. I guess I had been down there on the creek bank for a couple of hours, maybe longer, scared, not knowing what to do. I figured now the thing to do was get home and call the cops.
I wasn’t very far from my place by then, and I started walking home. You haven’t seen this place, Uncle Hank, but it’s not the Ritz. It’s over by the University and I moved there when I started school. It’s down in the one area over there hasn’t been upgraded. There’s about six streets with rows of ramshackle, slumlord houses on either side, and one of those dumps is mine. There’s one street light at either end of the street, so unless you’re under one of those lights, or you have a porch light on, way all those oaks and elms along there droop, you won’t see much.
I got to my street and started down it. Dogs ba Sn iyou’re rked at me along the way, and a goddamn bat swooped down on my hair and scared the hell out of me. Time I got to my walk, I was a bundle of raw nerves. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw Fat Boy or Cobra Man. My empty carport was full of shadows and all of them looked like people with guns.
