Zombie Pulp

3

It was midnight and rain was pissing down from a slate sky and I had spent the past three hours parked in the darkness. I was watching the house of Marianne Portis. Why? Because she was really all I had. Marianne was a slight, pale woman who looked like central casting’s idea of a librarian. She didn’t look to me as the sort that could hurt a fly…but you never knew. She showed up every day at Quigg’s trial and, more than once, I saw the two of them pass secretive looks. So I’d had her checked out. When Bobby bought it, I thought of her right away.

But nothing was happening. I didn’t know what I was expecting or hoping for, only that when it happened I’d know it. It was getting on one in the morning and I was starting to nod off when a black sedan rolled up. Marianne came out and hopped in. They drove off and I followed them all the way over to the East Side where they pulled into a small parking lot behind a funeral home. That definitely raised my curiosity a notch. Traffic was light so I didn’t hang around. I drove up to the next block and parked my heap across from some second-rate clip joint and struck out on foot.

The funeral home was stuck in between a boarded-up factory and a row of old houses. It was a two-story brick job with withered ivy climbing all over it like hair on a monkey’s back. There was a gray and weathered sign out front which proudly proclaimed it was the Douglas-Barre Funeral Home and had been since 1907…in case I was counting.

I strolled casually past the front and then circled around back. I came through the alley, a chill wind blasting rain into my face. My overcoat flapped around me like a flag on a high pole and rain ran off the brim of my fedora in tiny rivers. It was so wet even the rats were staying home. I positioned myself beneath the overhang of a warehouse loading dock, hiding in a pocket of shadow like a spider in a crevice.

I waited over an hour before something happened, cigarette butts gathering at my feet. The delivery/receiving doors at the back of the funeral home were opened and secured. There were two cars parked back there and neither of them were hearses. Just that sedan and a wood-paneled delivery wagon.

Cigarette dangling from my lower lip like a steaming icicle, I watched. Two men carried out a body-and I could see by the way they carried it that it was just as dead as my mother’s virtue-and unceremoniously dumped it into the back of the wagon. Then the doors were closed and the wagon drove off, followed by the sedan and Marianne. I could’ve made a mad dash for my heap, but I decided I wanted to look around first.

I was curious.

I wanted very much to know where they were taking the stiff, but there was no real chance of catching up with them at night. Not in this city. Not without breaking a few traffic laws and having coppers crawling up my backside like mites. And I didn’t want to spend the night in the jug.

Those delivery doors were locked, but the lock wasn’t much. I took out my little case of picks and went through it in about a minute. Inside, the place was lousy with shadows. All the darkness in the world was gathered here. It stunk of sweet flowers and age. I made my way through winding corridors and past darkened viewing rooms. All I could hear was the rain on the windows and the beat of my own heart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of dead people. Death and me go way back. I’ve sent plenty of business His way. But places like this always remind me of my mother buying it when I was eight…or of Helen. Helen was my wife. Three months after we were married we were still nuts about each other and then she got sick. Two months later, we planted her. The cancer. Got into her blood. She was two weeks shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. But that’s the way it works sometimes. Guys like me aren’t designed to be happy in life, we’re designed to stumble drunkenly from one scene to the next like a two-bit actor without the benefit of a script.

I looked around and didn’t see a thing worth noting. Then I went upstairs, found the offices, some storage rooms. In one of the offices, one that had been recently occupied judging by the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, I found an address book in the top drawer…after I jimmied it open, of course. There were notations and phone numbers scribbled down. Names of florists, mortuaries, a few business cards clipped to the back cover.

What intrigued me I found in the back.

It read:

H. HILL 2:00 A.M.

H. Hill?

I jotted that down in my little notebook. It must’ve been a meeting with someone, somewhere. It was a vague clue, but something told me there was relevance simply because funeral directors, to my knowledge, didn’t conduct their business at that hour of the morning “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

I looked up and there was some guy standing in the doorway leaning on a broom. His mouth was hanging open wider than a hooker’s at a convention. He was as ugly as a platter of fried dogshit. Looked like someone had heated up his face and pressed it into a Mr. Ugly mold. Thing was, it cooled all wrong. Another thing was, I knew him.

“You,” he said when he saw my mug. “Steel. What the hell are you doing here? I better call the cops in.”

“Slow down, Junior,” I told him.

His name was Junior Styles and he was a wrong number from the soles of his flat feet to the top of his pointy head. He’d had a pretty good racket going at one time. He had a couple girls working for him, young stuff mostly he’d bullied into it. They’d pick up johns at bars and bus stops, you name it, and bring ‘em back for a quick roll. Thing was, Junior’d be waiting there with a rod and he’d rob ‘em blind. Threaten to tell their wives or families if they squealed to the cops. I hadn’t seen him in about five years; he’d been upstate doing a nickel. I knew. I helped to put him there. And I could see he remembered it, too.

He screwed up his mug and said, “I’ve been thinking about you a long time, Steel, you dirty sonofabitch. Breaking and entering. Ha! I like that.”

“Zip it, pimp,” I told him. “If anyone’s gonna call the bulls in it’ll be me.”

He paled some at that. He knew I’d been a cop and he knew a lot of my friends were cops. And he was a petty criminal and an ex-con. We both knew who they’d believe.

“Never figured you for a broom jockey, Junior. Good to see you found your place in society.”

“Fuck you, Steel. This is just something I’m doing for awhile.”

“Yeah? What’s your grift? How’d you get tangled up in this mess?” I said.

“What mess?”

I shook my head like I knew what I was talking about. “They’ll put you away for keeps this time.”

But like a skinflint, he wasn’t buying it. He swung the broom handle at me and it whistled past my cheek. I stepped in hammered him two quick shots to the chops. He took ‘em, spit blood, and cracked me in the ear with the broom handle. I saw stars and clipped him under the jaw. Before he could answer that one, I took hold of his shirt and sank my knee into his stomach. I repeated that maybe three times until he was curled up harmless as a kitten in a box.

He gagged and spat and called my mother a few unsavory names. But all that got him was a couple more kisses from my left.

“Dirty…sonofabitch,” he growled.

“I’ll do the talking, Junior. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll do the answering. Savvy?”

He glared at me with eyes like runny egg yolks. “Go…screw…yourself.”

I laughed and pulled a switch out of my inner coat pocket. It was a special pocket I’d had sewn in the back, at the bottom, right where the seam was. Even if somebody took my gun, I was still armed. I thumbed the button and six inches of double-edge Sheffield steel was at my disposal. I took my pal by the shirt and hoisted his dead weight up. I slammed him up against the desk and pressed the blade against his crotch.

His eyes were wide, his face trembling. “What the hell you doing? Jesus, Steel.”

“What am I doing? I’m about to slice off Uncle Johnson and the twins unless you start singing a tune I wanna hear.”

“For chrissake! What do you wanna know?”

I sketched it in for him, real slow and simple-like. Didn’t want to tax that dishrag he called a brain.

Junior nodded, started humming a few bars. “All I know is that I was told those people would be coming for a body…that they knew what they were doing and I was to stay out of their way. That’s what the man said.”

“And who’s the man?”

“The man? Barre…Franklin Barre. He owns the place. Christ, you gotta believe me.”

And I did. I let him go and he slid to the floor like lard down a hot pan. He just sat there, covering his friends with his big mitts, and hating, just hating me.

“We’ll finish this talk another time,” I promised him.

I picked up my lid off the floor, brushed off the brim and put it on my skull. Then I got the hell out of there.