Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Arthur was leaning against the brick wall behind Shut-Up-And-Eat-It when Jayne and Ronnie pulled in. He had told them he wanted
to meet at seven thirty, but he had been there since seven so he could be there when they arrived. He’d left the message with
the sleepy-sounding bro who was taking orders, and quite intentionally picked a night when Tana was off work. He didn’t want
her there for this.
The Ranchero ground in across the dirt lot, raising a cloud of white chalk, faintly luminescent in the light from that out-of-place
lamppost. It settled into the empty spot almost directly in front of Arthur. Jayne sat in the passenger seat. In the aquamarine
glow of the dash she looked more like a drowned corpse than ever. She stayed where she was while Ronnie threw open the driver’s-side
door and hauled himself wearily out. He left the door open, and music thundered into the night. “Dr. Feelgood” was on a rampage,
blasting from the speakers. Good. If there were shouts—if there were screams—the music might drown them out. Arthur pushed
himself off the brick wall and started toward him.
“This about, Artie?” Ronnie asked, in a tone that approximated his usual stoner’s charm, but did not quite disguise the faint
note of irascibility beneath it. “You wanted till the end of February, we gave it to you, and I think we were all enjoying
the break from each other. Unless maybe you been missing when Tana comes around to collect and—”
Then he clocked that Arthur was still closing in on him.
Arthur had the hammer up one sleeve of his black parka: the ball-peen hammer found in the Los Feliz murder house, one of the prizes of Llewellyn’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
As he closed the distance between them, Arthur let it slide down his sleeve and into his fist. Ronnie tried to get his hands out of the pockets of his denim jacket, but it was too late.
Arthur swiped the hammer into the side of his knee. It connected with a bony crack.
Ronnie howled, grabbed the knee, and began to hop on one leg. Arthur drove his shoulder into his chest and the little man
tipped over, hit the side of the Ranchero, and fell into the slush.
“You fuck,” Ronnie shrieked. “You motherfuck, are you out of your goddamn—”
Jayne threw open the passenger-side door. She had the gun in one hand, the 9mm Ronnie had carried Halloween night. She got
one foot out, started to rise, and Gwen came up from behind the next car over. Gwen threw herself into the passenger-side
door and it slammed on Jayne’s face. Jayne sagged into the passenger seat. Her arm, and the gun, still hung out into the night.
Arthur’s heart jammed itself in his throat: he wanted to scream, Get down, get down, Gwen. He clenched up, waiting for the gun to go off and rip a hole in the night.
It never fired. Gwen gave the door a kick, smashing it into Jayne’s bicep. Her grip loosened on the gun. Gwen wrenched at
the 9mm and Jayne was dragged out of the car in her attempt to hold on to it. Jayne went down hard in the gray, wintery slime
and Gwen stepped away, trembling, with the pistol in both hands. Arthur thought it might be three or four days before his
heart slowed down.
Gwen passed the nine back to Donna McBride, who had been crouched out of sight next to her, behind Gwen’s road-dirty Civic.
Donna knew more about guns than any of them, had been going to the range since she was thirteen, had fired everything from
revolvers to an M16. She racked the slide and a brass shell leapt into the night. She caught the bullet in one hand, examined
it briefly, and ejected the entire magazine.
“Cop killers,” she said. “The ammunition choice of dirtbags nationwide. You know how stupid it is to keep a bullet in the chamber? You jam it down the front of your pants, feeling gangsta, and wind up blowing your twat off. Self-inflicted crotch wounds are surprisingly common.”
“You’re dead!” Jayne screamed at them. “Every last fucking one of you!”
Arthur had looked away from Ronnie, his attention drawn by the brief grapple over the gun. He didn’t see the knife, hardly
registered the steely click of it snapping open. But before Ronnie could lunge to his feet and stick it into him, Colin stepped
past Arthur and trod on his wrist, pinning his arm to the ground. Ronnie yelped. The butterfly knife fell to the wet tarmac.
“No one needs to get hurt tonight,” Colin said. “Not much, anyway. Believe it or not, we’re here out of human concern.”
Van emerged from behind the parked Christmobile, where he had been hiding with Colin. He kicked the knife clattering under
the Ranchero, then leaned into the front seat and turned down the volume on the radio. As he dipped back out of the car, Van
said, “Sorry, man. Enough people been terrorized tonight without inflicting the Crüe on innocent bystanders.”
Jayne struggled up to one knee. She looked bad—worse than in that brief glimpse Arthur had of her through the windshield.
She had lost ten pounds she didn’t have to lose and her coke-bright eyes glittered in dark hollows. Her hair had lost its
vibrancy, looked fragile and pale. Maybe it was even thinning. In the light from the streetlamp Arthur could see her scalp
through the strands.
She laughed angrily. “Hey, Artie. Your little piece of ass here? I’m not going to kill her, ’cause she’s only a kid. I’m gonna
cut off her nose. I’m going to make her too ugly to fuck.” It was hard to tell if the bright shine in her eyes was a product
of drugs, excitement, or panic, but she turned her gaze on Gwen with a kind of triumph. “You hear that? When I’m done with
you, the only way he’ll be able to fuck you is with a bag over your head.”
Gwen sank down in front of Jayne, and when she reached out with one hand, Jayne flinched, as if she expected to be struck.
Instead, Gwen caught some of Jayne’s pale, washed-out hair and rubbed it between two fingers.
In the reflected glare of the Ranchero’s headlights, Arthur could see some of it had turned white.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said. “Awful as you are, if I could take it back, I would.”
Jayne flinched again. “Don’t you pity me—don’t you dare. You aren’t better than me. You think these people are your friends? You’re a hot piece of townie ass for Arthur to bang
while he’s on his four-year college vacation. He’s got a taste for that kind of thing.” Arthur’s insides cramped and he thought,
Here it comes, here’s where she spills it about Tana.
But Jayne never got to it. Allie had drifted over to stand next to Gwen, and now she helped Gwen to her feet. “I can think
of one way Gwen is better than you.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“The person holding the gun is on her side,” Allie said. “That’s a lot better.”
“This might be hard for you to believe,” Colin said, “what with both of you knocked on your asses in the slush, but we got
together tonight to try to help you.”
It was a marvel, how Colin Wren was so completely Colin, all day long. It was hard to imagine him frightened. It was difficult
to imagine him raising his voice.
“Some among us think you deserve a chance to . . . I don’t know, exactly. Start your lives again? Do better? For myself, I
can’t be troubled. You’re a pair of junkies who sell hard drugs to other junkies. You live revolting lives. Everything you
touch, everyone you meet, is stained by you. If Arthur didn’t cooperate with you, you threatened to have his mother beaten
and blinded. How revolting is that?”
“Man,” Ronnie said, a whine in his voice. “Man, you think we really woulda done that to her? Or even coulda? We were ninety
percent fucking with him. We were—”
He never got out the rest. Donna had moved around the front of the Ranchero to stand by Colin, and now she smacked the butt of the gun across his mouth. It struck with a wet thud. He screamed, started to get up, and Van put a boot on his shoulder and shoved him back down.
Donna said, “Open your dirty germ hole again and you’re going to be holding the rest of your teeth in your hand.”
Colin seemed to have lost his place. Van spoke next.
“What my pal here is saying, it’s time to saddle up and ride out of town.”
“What?” Jayne said. She sounded incredulous.
“Take off. Make like a banana and split,” Allie said. “Make like a tree and leave. Get in that butt-ugly car of yours and
make it walk and talk. The sooner the better. I don’t know how far you need to go. Maybe just put the pedal down and keep
driving until you hit Mexico. You should try Cancún. I read a thing in the paper about all the garbage and medical waste washing
up on the beach. The Gulf Coast current pushes all the trash there. You’ll fit right in.”
“Run for it,” Colin said. “That’s your best chance. Possibly your only chance.”
“Or what?” Jayne asked. “Or you fucking twerps are going to hassle us again?”
“No,” Arthur said. “It’ll be King Sorrow next time.”
Jayne shrank back into the side of the car, and her hands came up a little, as if one of them had threatened to cut up her
face.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what,” Arthur said. “He’s getting closer all the time. You’ve heard him moving around your house at night.”
“You,” Jayne cried. “Did you hire someone to come after us?”
“Not . . . someone,” Colin said.
“You’ve seen him, Jayne. He spoke to you. You blew up your TV because you thought he was inside it.”
“How do you know that, man?” Ronnie asked, although with one hand clapped over his smashed mouth, it came out more like How a you no da, mang? “Are you watching our house?”
No one paid him any mind.
“Easter,” Jayne whispered.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “You only have till Easter. Did he tell you that?”
She gestured with one hand at the back of the car. “He scratched it into the rear window of the Ranchero. I found it a couple days ago.”
Arthur had to see for himself. He walked around to the back of the car, and there it was, etched jaggedly across the rear
window:
E A S T E R