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ours?”

“He rook framiliar!”

“Oh, yeah, mang. I sell to him all the tying.”

A broom-skinny white man in dumpster clothes staggered trance-like toward them. His hair looked like a well-used and seldom-rinsed mop.

“Hey, blood,” Case Piece announced. “You lookin’ ta cop, ’cos if you is, we your main skagtown drop.”

The coin-eyed addict barely heard him. “Naw, man,” he croaked. Abscesses had erupted on his waxen face. “I mugged a old lady at the ATM and just copped.”

“But chew always cop from us, mang,” Menduez objected.

“I was jonesing, man.” When the addict scratched his arms, flakes fell off. “Couldn’t find you guys, so I had to cop from the new guys.”

Case Piece spat out a mouthful of Cherry Slush. “New guys?”

“Choo don’t mean dem motherless focks on Byrdtown Road. Chit, mang, dey long gone.”

“No, man. New guys. They just opened up shop on Maple Street. Sellin’ Mexican black for five bucks less a bag, man. They’re a couple white guys, from Maryland, they said.”

When the junkie foundered away, the three gang-members exchanged ominous glances.

“Fuckin’ competition all over, dawgs. Every no-dick piece’a garbage on the street comin’ here’n trine ta horn in on our gig,” Case Piece complained. “Well, hmmm. I wonder what we do about that. What’cha think…Menduez?”

Sung laughed and—in an Asian accent, no less—mimicked the sound of a barking dog.

“Maple Street, huh, mang?” Menduez nodded with a smile, message understood.

— | — | —

Chapter 12

(I)

Veronica conveniently awoke in the back of the truck only minutes after the men had dispensed suitable punishment upon the unfortunate Russian girl by the name of Kasha; therefore Veronica new nothing of the rowdy event. “I thought you wanted to go to New York City,” she questioned upon noticing only green pastures and farmland beyond the truck’s windshield, but then Helton explained, “Well, shucks, Veronnerka. We’se tried like the dickens ta get ourselfs a map, but…that didn’t work out.” Veronica frowned, went online via her laptop, Mapquested the address of one 62-year-old uptown cosmopolite, Adele Vinchetti, and provided turn-by-turn instructions to their destination.

It would likely belabor the narrative to recant the entire descriptive and subjective ordeal of Helton’s trek and subsequent mission. Nevertheless, some 500-plus miles later, the cumbersome and less-than-sightly vehicle had arrived in “The Big Apple.” Some inconsequential detail, however, seems in order, and given this, it must be said that the metropolis which academic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft referred to as a “polyglot abyss,” a “babel of sound and filth” where “Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles…rise blackly Babylonian,” a labyrinthine purview embalmed with an amoral populace who amass into an unabated and rampaging “Walpurgis riot of horror.”

One can imagine the psychological impact of such a place upon the simple psyches of Helton and his backwoods kin. Emotional paralysis was one result; others were sound-shock, culture-shock, acute claustrophobia, as well as something quite akin to the shell-shock a soldier feels after spending too much time on the front. However, thanks to Veronica’s navigatory guidance, the group was able to arrive without mishap in Manhattan. Much to Veronica’s displeasure, however, she was then required to treat each man to another oral “tweaking,” something they seemed to be quite fond of now that her skills as a fellatrice had been vastly improved. Veronica’s face seemed to lengthen like a mask of tallow at the now even-more-appalling crotch-odor of each man. My GOD! she thought shuddering from the musky organic stench, yet she’d done the deed all the same, stopping just short of orgasm as her captives still mysteriously seemed to want.

Then she’d directed them to the home of the 62-year-old Adele Vinchetti—a penthouse in a posh highrise— with relative ease; and, since they recognized her via her online photograph, were able to successfully abduct her when they saw her returning from a stroll after dinner-time. This done, they secured the woman in the back of the truck—Veronica, by now, had been repositioned to the front passenger seat—and fled across the bridge to the nearby city of Newark, whereupon they found a secluded spot beneath an overpass and…

The reader can be trusted to make the correct assumption.

Veronica, on the other hand—and try as she might’ve to not make such assumptions, split-infinite be damned—had no choice but to ponder. Sitting handcuffed in the front right seat, as the daylight’s last gasp surrendered to twilight’s first twinkling stars, Veronica stared out the windshield, cotton in her ears. What the men were doing exactly behind that old shower curtain she tried not to contemplate, but knowing at least generally that they were murdering Paul Vinchetti’s mother and simultaneously recording that murder, the darkest recesses of Veronica’s volition had to make considerations. Through the cotton, she had heard Helton say something like, “Not the table this time, boys, the chair. Tie her upright in the chair. We’se’ll do it a tad different this go-round.” He’d pronounced “different” as diff-urnt.

“How so, Paw?” Dumar had asked.

Helton had answered, “What we’se gonna do this time, son, is have a double-header…”

A double…HEADER? Veronica thought. Wasn’t that something in baseball? Further considerations terminated then as the sudden sound of the power drill could be heard even more easily through the makeshift earplugs. But unlike the previous night, the drill-sound had stopped, Helton ordered, “Now do the front, son,” and then the drill-sound had recommenced. What on earth are they doing with that drill? Veronica dared to wonder.

But she didn’t like this wondering; it unsettled her. She didn’t like the forbidden whispers her own psyche seemed to bleed like a nicked vein.

They were…ghastly whispers.

After a half an hour, the whooping commotion behind the curtain seemed to retard. Had someone exclaimed, “That there was a dandy nut!”? But Veronica knew they had Adele Vinchetti back there— that is, Adele Vinchetti’s dead body—so wouldn’t now be the time to dispose of the corpse? At night? Beneath this secluded bridge?

Helton came back up front and removed Veronica’s earplugs. “Well, Veronnerka, we’se done.” He handed her the laptop. “Now how’s ’bout you get on yer magic machine’n git us directions back to Pulaski?”

Veronica, in stifled silence, did so. “Don’t you want me in back now?” she asked when Helton started the truck and pulled away.

“Uh, no, hon. See, there’s somethin’ back there it’s best ya not be lookin’ at.”