The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“I’ve been thinking,” Whistler began. “I could use a man like you on a permanent basis. I’m sure you can appreciate that mine is an organization on the move. With my father out of the way and me at the helm, we’ll be more than just another cult. We’ll be an accepted religion.” He slapped a magazine down on the desk. “Just take a look.”

Newsweek. Black glanced at Junior’s picture above the blurb that read, THE NEW HEDONISM.

Black slid the magazine toward Whistler. “Look, I’m not much of a joiner. You bought me once. You can buy me again, should the need arise. I only work when I need the money.” He smiled. “Besides, I want to see how things develop. I wouldn’t want to make too many commitments with the end of the world so close at hand.”

Whistler laughed.

Black said, “You don’t believe any of it, do you?”

“What?”

“All that stuff your old man preached. All that stuff about a new satanic age coming on the heels of his death. Satan rising from the ruin of Diabolos Whistler’s corpse like Jesus born of Mary. The end of the Christian era and the beginning of — ”

“You’ve been doing your homework, Mr. Black.”

“Hanging around airports, you have plenty of time to read. You run into all sorts of interesting folks selling all sorts of interesting pamphlets.”

“Very funny.” Whistler snatched up the magazine and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Look, this is a job to me. Some people put on suits and ties and run corporations. They tell their stockholders what the chumps want to hear. I put on a black leather jacket and run a religion.”

“But you don’t pay taxes.”

“Come, come, Mr. Black. Neither do the corporations.”

“But your father — ”

Whistler cut him off with a sigh. “My father didn’t have much business sense. He was wasting our money, frittering it away on archaeological expeditions and medieval manuscripts without the slightest concern for the bottom line. Our operation was poised upon the brink of a sinkhole called debt, and my father was determined to shove us over the edge.”

“And now he won’t have the chance.”

“Now he’ll be my ace in the hole. People love a good mystery. They still talk about Ambrose Bierce disappearing into the Mexican desert, don’t they? They even speculate about Jim Morrison… ”

Black yawned. “Morrison died choking on his own vomit in a bathtub in Paris. Your old man died with six inches of steel jammed through his neck.”

Whistler’s breaths came short and hard through flared nostrils. Finally, he said, “You think about my offer. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

“Right. Rodeo Drive.”

“Wrong, Mr. Black. You watch for me on the financial page.”

Whistler left the shack. Black let him go, wondering how long the kid would last. He thought about how nice it would be to milk Junior for some extra green, but he doubted that either of them would be around long enough for that. As it was, Black felt lucky to be paid for this job.

Black closed his eyes. “You go find a lab and play with your ear,” he said. ‘You see if you still think it’s important in a day or two.”

A car door slammed. A sound you could recognize if you knew what to listen for: an angry man hurrying on a treadmill to nowhere.

Headlight beams washed over the grimy window.

Black opened the desk drawer and stared down at a lump of leathery red flesh that came to a twisted point.

When Black severed Whistler Senior’s ear out on that Baja backroad, it looked like any other human ear. But when he arrived at the cemetery shack and removed the ear from the false bottom of his suitcase, he realized what it had become.

The prospector returned to the shack at almost the same moment, thirsty for Brown Derby beer and surprised as hell to see a rusty rice-rocket parked in front of his current digs. Black slipped the ear into the drawer just as the old-timer stepped through the doorway with a big, “Howdy, stranger.” Then he listened to the prospector’s story, the old one about milking silver from an abandoned mine up in the mountains.

Mine, hell. One look at the prospector’s flimsy shovel told Black what kind of mining this guy was doing. He’d heard about scavengers who hit abandoned cemeteries, but he’d never run into one. He’d never been eager to mix with that kind of man.

Funny, doing what he did for a living and feeling like that.

So Black let the prospector gab and drink Brown Derby beer. After a while, Black told the old guy that he had an ice chest fall of Anchor Steam out in the Toy’s trunk. Said that he was bringing it in from San Francisco for a buddy, but what the hell. The prospector went for it with a nod and a wrinkled grin — Black imagined that it was the same grin the old guy wore when he hit pay dirt.

In the heat, in the blowing sand, Black stabbed the prospector just above the first vertebra and watched him crumple like a puppet shorn of strings.

When the old guy stopped bleeding, Black severed his left ear.

Black rolled the prospector’s body out of the Toy’s trunk. He returned to the shack to get the duffle and the shovel. Old man Whistler’s ear lay in the drawer. It had sprouted a hedge of tiny white spikes that were as thin as cactus thorns but as hard as teeth.

Black pulled the last white pin out of the cemetery map. Found a black pin in the desk. Stabbed it through Whistler’s ear and pinned the ear to the spot where the white pin had been.

Outside, the moon crested the ash-colored mountains like an enormous tombstone. Black took off his shirt and let the evening breeze caress his sweaty back. His sweat smelled like beer. He dragged the prospector’s skinny corpse through the graveyard. The dead man’s heels dug little ditches in the sand.

Black found the empty plot and was kind of surprised that it wasn’t marked with a big white pin. He started to dig. He felt a little better. The wind had dried his sweat, and the desert air smelled good. Dry and clean, like the sky. The baked-earth smell that had bothered him in the heat of the day was long gone.

He went down about two feet before the sand started to sift back into the hole. He rolled the prospector’s body into the grave, upended the duffle and poured diamond rings and gold teeth and silver crosses over the corpse, and covered it up.

The cool wind smoothed the mounded sand. Black tossed the empty duffle to the wind and watched it tumble past a row of blank tombstones. He thought about the ear pinned to the map in the cemetery shack, and he thought about the body that he had buried on that Baja backroad, remembered burying that body without a second thought. He wondered what it looked like right now, that body.

Black stared at the moon. Maybe he should make a marker for the prospector’s grave. Maybe he ought to dig the registration slip out of the old-timer’s truck and pin it to a cross so the skinny old guy wouldn’t go unknown. Maybe… He shook his head. That was the flip side all right, but he didn’t have any proof that it really existed.

What he had was the ear.

What he figured he didn’t have was a whole lot of time.

Black hesitated, then planted the shovel at the head of the grave.