4.

4.

Bill has the guts to show the kid an actual workday. They hustle a diner over on Bedford (“Is that mouse poop I see?”), raking in a princely ninety bucks, before pulling into the gravel lot behind Paradise Alley at a quarter past eleven. Bill shows the faintest modicum of decency by ordering his nephew to stay in the car while he goes inside Paradise Alley “for a minute.” Poor kid, hopefully he’ll prove smart enough to crack a window within the next hour, lest he fry in the late-morning heat like a puppy.

Bill really means to have a shot of whiskey or two, the early lunch of champions, but he finds his best friend Frank at the bar, loading up. Frank is a homicide dick (emphasis on the word “dick”) who lives with his mother, snorts mountains of coke swiped from the evidence locker, and recites more Bible verses than a street preacher. He’s such a walking contradiction it’s a wonder that he can stride more than a block without vaporizing into thin air, his warring impulses canceling him out of existence like a negative subtracted from a negative. Maybe someday he will disappear. In Bill’s highly suspect vision, Frank often shimmers a bit, like a figure viewed across a wide stretch of desert.

Frank deserves a parasite with his best interests at heart, but instead he needs to make do with the voices in his head. These bottom-feeders, how do they find one another? Bill and Frank spend twenty minutes trading shots at the bar and making fun of the furnishings, which is easy to do in a place like Paradise Alley, with its cheesy neon signage and ratty moose’s head over the bar. Bill is about to say adios and head back to the car when Frank claps him on the shoulder and asks for a favor.

Bill follows Frank to the far edge of the bar’s parking lot, where Frank has parked his bright purple Cadillac (purchased for cheap at a police auction; he never bothered to fix the two bullet-holes in the dashboard). Frank opens the trunk to reveal an ominous-looking bundle wrapped in white sheets and bound in duct tape. Definitely a body.

His panic spiking, Bill glances at his car parked across the lot. His nephew slumps in the passenger seat, head down as he plays with his phone. When Bill looks back at Frank, the cop’s cheeks are iridescent with tears.

“Can you help me, buddy?” Frank asks.

We can tell that Bill wants to ask about the identity of the body in the trunk. But if he says the wrong thing, Frank in his alcohol-powered lunacy is liable to pull his service pistol and decorate the gravel with Bill’s brains. Of all the days for Bill’s nephew to just show up, why the hell did it have to be this one?

Bill swallows hard and nods.

“Good. Let’s take a ride.” Frank tosses the keys over the roof. “You’re driving.”

Bill ducks into Frank’s car without looking back at his nephew, and we hope the kid will stay parked behind the bar until . . . well, whenever. Bill feels a pang of sadness (a dark tinge we can smell in his blood) at abandoning a relative. He fastens his seatbelt and takes the offered keys from Frank. The Caddy starts with a vigorous roar that vibrates everybody’s gelatin in the most pleasing of ways. The crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror swings wildly as Bill slams the gas and squeals the car out of the parking lot, and Frank claps his hands in delight like an over-caffeinated child.

“You have a plan?” Bill asks, glancing up at the rearview mirror—and almost has a heart attack when he sees his jalopy in pursuit, his nephew at the wheel. Maybe the kid is brave, but knowing how this family works, that’s probably wishful thinking. Trent’s more likely furious, or curious, or any of those lesser devils that drive humans to do really stupid things.

“Yeah, I got a contact who owes me a favor,” Frank says. “Why we’re trusting something this sensitive to a bunch of trust-fund babies with hygiene issues is totally beyond my comprehension, but this is the situation and we’re dealing with it.”

“Huh?” Bill doesn’t quite follow.

Frank cocks an eyebrow. “Eh?”

“What did I do to deserve this?” Bill says, mostly to himself.

Frank’s already twisted his inner dial to a different channel. “Did I ever tell you, when I was a kid, I saw the last show Nirvana ever played? I swear, there was not a man or woman in that place who did not want to drop to their knees and suck Kurt dry right there.”

“That’s not a very Christian impulse, buddy.”

Frank pulls his pistol and jams it into Bill’s neck, spittle flying as he yells: “Show me where in the Bible it says that, you chunky motherfucker.”

Bill shakes his head, stunned into wise silence. Trapped inside his skin, we can do nothing but tighten up and hope for the best. In theory, a part of us could execute an acrobatic transfer through a bullet hole in Bill’s spine, snap across the blood-humid space and down Frank’s throat before the cop could so much as holler. The odds of us pulling off something like that, with bodies moving so fast, are nil. And if we think Bill’s guts are terrifying, can you imagine what we would find inside Frank?

“Right,” Frank says, grinding the barrel deeper. “The Bible said nothing about going down on rock stars, because rock stars hadn’t been invented when Jesus walked the Earth. Can I get an Amen?”

“Amen?” Bill mutters. In the rearview mirror, his nephew continues his pursuit, wisely dropping back a few car-lengths.

“You’re damn skippy.” Frank tucks away the pistol and flops back in his seat, adjusting his collar with a few deft tugs. “For the love of God, Bill, why are you always so dense?”

“It’s how I was raised,” Bill moans.

“Indeed.” Frank reaches into his pocket, extracts a bright blue pill, and swallows it dry. “That’s not your kid, is it?”

Bill tries playing dumb. “What kid?”

“The one that’s been following us since the bar. I’m a cop, buddy, remember?”

“Oh, that’s just my nephew.” Bill tries a fake chuckle. “He’s a good kid. He’s fine.”

“He’s a witness.” Frank’s hand strokes the pistol grip jutting out of his pants. “How close are you to him?”

“He’s fine, I said. You want me to lose him?”

Frank winks. “No, let him follow. Then I’ll deal with him.”

Given Bill’s habitual cowardice, there’s every chance he’ll let Frank shoot his nephew in the head. If we could finally plug that tendril into his brainstem, we could maybe take control of the ship—but we have to sort through nerves by feel, and that takes time.

Time is something we don’t have in abundance. Frank gestures for Bill to take a right into an industrial wasteland, where we motor along the edge of a drainage ditch, spewing a huge cloud of dust in our wake. Trent, the idiot, accelerates until he’s right behind.

Bill finally musters the courage to ask: “Who’s in the trunk?” He wrinkles his nose, smelling shit, but given the environs it’s hard for us to tell whether the scent is purely in his head.

“My mother,” Frank says, and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “She tried to cross me on my big coke deal. You know what it’s like, getting shot by the woman who gave birth to you? It doesn’t just hurt physically, man.” He pulls his shirt open, revealing a nasty bruise just beneath the sternum. “Good thing I always wear my bulletproof vest in the house.”

“I’m sorry,” Bill says, which seems like the phrase least likely to draw a lethal response from Frank, whose voice begins to shake.

“I loved her, man,” Frank says, the faucets in his eyes squeaking open again. In Bill’s fear-heightened state, where all sounds and sights and smells are achingly acute, we can hear a teardrop spatter Frank’s shirt.

“I’m sure,” Bill says.

“I loved her. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” Frank’s hands tremble along with his vocal cords. He’s at his weakest, distracted, his heart exposed.

We take back everything we might have said about Bill’s cowardice, because we can tell he’s about to do something impulsive, based on the soda-sweet tang of adrenaline flooding his bloodstream. Bill is liable to mess up whatever he’s considering, but fortunately we are here to help. As his excitement peaks, we take our tendril that loops around a bundle of nerves and tendons in his calf—and pull as hard as we can. His foot slams down the gas pedal.

The Cadillac slams forward and to the left, over the edge of the ditch and airborne, just as Bill gets a hand on Frank’s gun, which Frank has already pulled from his pants, gunshots bursting everybody’s eardrums as the dashboard explodes. The car crunches into the far side of the ditch and Frank, without a seatbelt holding him back, tumbles through the windshield with the greatest of ease, his bones snap-crackle-popping on the way.

While Bill gasps for oxygen like a beached whale, we perform a quick damage assessment. He’ll have a nasty bruise across the man-tits, and maybe a busted finger. Unlocking his seatbelt, he leans on his crumpled door until it pops open, spilling him onto the crumbling bank of the ditch. Brakes screech, followed by Trent calling out Bill’s name.

Trent charges through the dust, pearls jangling, but Bill spares him the briefest look before turning to the nightmare that is Frank trying to stand on broken legs, his face glittering with broken glass embedded in his skin, his bloody hand holding the pistol.

“Why’d you do that, man?” Frank asks. He sounds offended.

“I couldn’t let you hurt my family,” Bill says, maybe his first ethical sentence in years, and we swear we had nothing to do with it. We would applaud, if we had hands.

“Well, you failed,” Frank says, gritting his teeth in pain as he lifts the pistol. Trent spins on his heel, sprinting for the car. Bill’s beyond any fancy moves at this point, but we can offer a late-game assist.

We yank the tendon again, tilting Bill into the path of the bullet. We assume a heroic sacrifice is what he wants, right? The hollow-point slug plows through his side, clipping a kidney and ruining some blood vessels, but he’ll live if we can get him to a hospital in time, or if Frank doesn’t shoot him between the eyes.

That second outcome looks like a definite possibility as Frank hobbles forward, babbling something incoherent about God and vengeance and cocaine. The pistol rises again, about to finish off Bill once and for all, when Bill’s car bursts from the dust-cloud and plows into Frank head-on, sending everybody’s favorite crooked cop through a windshield for the second time in one day. Behind the wheel, panicked Trent keeps the gas slammed down until the car rolls into the side of the crashed Cadillac, Frank’s feet drumming a final solo on the hood while his mouth sputters blood all over the dashboard.