Twisted Tales Page 21

  In the light, Peanut looked something awful. He looked like Death—in the actual sense of the phrase.

  His dark brown skin had begun to turn purple. His eyes were yellow, rheumy, clouded. His head was bald, as was his habit, but swollen sores marred his scalp, as if his skull was going soft.

  When Peanut opened his mouth, a fetid stench came out that nearly knocked Michael unconscious again.

  You say you saw Peanut? Well, he passed like five or six months ago, had lung cancer or something. You’re imagining shit ...

  Michael was suddenly convinced that he was dreaming, or imagining shit, as Tommy Boy had said. Dead men didn’t walk.

  “I tole Big Daddy you was back,” Peanut said.

  And dead men didn’t talk, either.

  Peanut took a swig of whisky from the flask in the wrinkled paper bag. Then he coughed—violent spasms that racked his withered body.

  Peanut wiped his mouth. “You knew he was gonna get you, didn’t you? Old boy got me, too, man. Big Daddy ain’t about to let you get away without paying him his money.”

  “Tommy Boy said you were dead,” Michael said.

  Peanut grinned, exposing a row of blackened, crumbling teeth.

  “Still had to pay my debts,” Peanut said. “Dying don’t clean the slate, not for Big Daddy Jay, not for the man he work for.”

  “You know who Big Daddy works for?”

  Michael was surprised that he had the clarity of mind to ask, to follow a logical line of questioning. But he’d just asked Peanut one of those questions that had floated around Big Daddy Jay for decades. In spite of his influence and the fear he inspired, Big Daddy supposedly was the front man for someone far more frightening—and even more mysterious. But no one had ever seen this individual, spoken to him, or even learned his name. Amongst the hustlers and gamblers in town, the mystery man had taken on an air of myth, like an urban legend.

  Twirling the gun, Peanut only smiled. “If I knew, think I’d tell you?”

  “Where’s Big Daddy Jay?”

  Michael heard a heavy footstep behind him. Then a hollow clop, like a cane striking a floorboard.

  Peanut’s smile fell away. He straightened.

  Michael sat ramrod straight in the chair.

  The dragging footsteps and clopping cane grew closer—and so did a noxious smell. Michael squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to believe this was happening.

  Dead men don’t walk, dead men don’t walk, dead men don’t walk ...

  The walking noises ended behind the desk.

  “You owe Big Daddy Jay a lotta money, son,” a familiar, guttural voice said. “Think you fooled me pulling off that little suicide?”

  Michael opened his eyes.

  Big Daddy Jay sat in his old leather chair. As dead-looking as a corpse that had been in the grave for a few weeks. Milky eyes. Bloated, greenish-blue skin. Fingers like fat, spoiled sausages.

  Big Daddy Jay leaned back in the chair, one fat hand massaging the pearl-handled cane.

  “You think I’m a joker?” Big Daddy Jay asked. “That what you think?”

  I think you’re a dead man who can’t be here talking to me.

  Michael licked his dry lips. “I ... I don’t know what to say. I can’t pay you. I don’t have all the money.”

  “Should’ve thought about that before you went all in at the table,” Big Daddy Jay said. He belched, and a stench steamed forth, making Michael’s stomach turn.

  “I can’t pay you. So I guess you’ll just have to kill me.”

  Peanut started to chuckle. So did Big Daddy Jay, and he was not a man prone to laughter.

  “Why would we want to kill you, son?” Big Daddy Jay asked. “When we can own your soul forever?”

  Michael looked at Peanut, raised from the dead and looking the worse for it. Peanut, who’d always drunk too much and struggled to cover his bets. Peanut, who, drowning in debts, most likely had signed over his soul to Big Daddy Jay and his enigmatic silent partner.

  “That’s right,” Big Daddy Jay said, reading his thoughts. “Just like Peanut.”

  Peanut shrugged. He spun the gun on his finger.

  Michael leapt out of the chair and wrested the gun out of Peanut’s hand. He must have pulled too hard, because Peanut’s arm came off with a soft, squishy sound. Peanut wailed as his arm plopped to the floor.

  His gut churning with revulsion, Michael stepped away from the desk. He aimed the gun at Big Daddy Jay.

  Big Daddy Jay grinned, unconcerned.

  Michael shot him in the head.

  Dark blood drained like water from the head shot, and Big Daddy Jay’s head snapped backward. Then his head bounced forward, as if attached to a coiled spring. He smiled at Michael.

  “I ain’t no joker,” he said. “You ain’t getting away this time.”

  Michael heard shuffling footsteps behind him. He spun.

  Five men, all of them dead, their bodies in various stages of decomposition, dragged across the room, toward him. He recognized a couple of them; they were men he’d played cards with, guys who, like him, sometimes won, and often lost.

  He wondered if all of them were indebted to Big Daddy Jay.

  “Fuck this,” he said.

  The zombies reached toward him.

  Michael barreled through them like a running back breaking a tackle, batting away their groping, dead hands. He threw open the door and rushed to the stairs. He took the steps three at a time, landed on the bottom, banged through the back door, and stumbled into the alley behind the building.

  And into the path of a white Cadillac.

  The car hit him head-on. He flew in the air, smashed against the windshield, flipped over the roof, and bounced to the gravel in a ragged, broken heap.

  Was just about to make a getaway, he thought, dimly. Big Daddy Jay had someone back here waiting for me, sneaky bastard ...

  Someone climbed out of the Cadillac. The driver walked toward him, crunching across gravel. He looked down at Michael.

  It was Tommy Boy.

  “Hey,” Michael said, weakly. “Help ... me.”

  “I tried to help you, Michael—or should I call you Ricky, the name you’ve been using in Atlanta?” Tommy Boy gave a small smile. “I warned you to run away. I was hoping you would. It would’ve been fun to hunt you down.”

  In spite of his agony, Michael frowned. What the hell ... ?

  “Confused, eh? Thought I was merely Big Daddy Jay’s obedient little boy, tending shop?” Tommy Boy smirked. “His apparently ageless son? Funny how people in a small town don’t question such telling details.”

  As comprehension settled over Michael, he tried to open his mouth to scream. But his ruined throat emitted only a desperate croak.

  Tommy Boy knelt, leaned over him. His eyes danced—they were much darker and deeper than Michael remembered.

  “You owe me, Michael,” Tommy Boy said, as his face began to pulsate and shift into something evil and utterly inhuman. “Do I look like a joker?”

  The Last Train Home

  When Tonya’s boss popped his head over the wall of her cubicle an hour before she was scheduled to go home, she anticipated what he was going to say. It had happened many times before, too many.

  “Hey, Tonya,” Roger said. A fortyish white man with a pale moon of a face, he brushed a strand of his stringy hair across his bald spot, an unconscious gesture that many of the customer service reps in her department ridiculed. Who that man think he foolin? Benita, Tonya’s cube mate, would say. Brushing his hair across that big fat head of his like he covering up something. Everybody know he going bald ...

  “Hey, Rog,” Tonya said. She turned away from the computer, where she had been typing comments into a call log, and gave him a sweet—and thoroughly fake—smile. “What’s up?”

  “I hate to ask you this,” Roger said, and grinned, proof that he didn’t hate asking her at all. “But I need you to stay late tonight.”

  She’d known he was
going to ask her to work late. Roger’s facial expressions were as easy to read as her son’s picture books.

  She held in her breath, stifling her annoyance, and listened to him.

  “Our department is ten days behind on our workflows,” Roger continued. “We’ve got the worst workflow stats of any department in the region, actually. The Powers That Be want us to take care of that. So ...”

  “How late do you need me to stay?” she asked. Her gaze flicked across the framed photograph of her five-year-old son, Aaron. In the photo, he was posed with Bugs Bunny. She’d taken the picture of him this past summer, at Six Flags Great America. That had been a wonderful day. Looking at the picture reminded her of why she worked so hard at a job that she despised: so she could give her son opportunities to brighten the world with his smile.

  “Oh, a few hours,” Roger said. He slid his short, hairy arms over the cubicle wall and inadvertently knocked down a sheet of paper that she had pinned to the wall. He didn’t apologize. “Till about eight or so. We’ll order in, like we always do.”

  We’ll order in. As if the promise of pizza or Chinese takeout was adequate compensation for her losing precious hours of quality time with her son.

  There was also the train to consider. She commuted via train from her home in Zion to her job at the insurance company in downtown Chicago. The last northbound train departed at ... she glanced at the Metra/Union Pacific timetable tacked to the wall ... eight thirty-five. It wouldn’t arrive in Zion until nine fifty.

  She hated riding the train at night. It was December, two weeks before Christmas, and already the snow had begun falling and the temperature had dropped into the teens. Her car would be covered with ice. And it would be dark. At night, the Zion station had an aura of complete abandonment that scared her.

  But four hours of overtime pay would be a big help in buying Aaron’s Christmas presents. Last Christmas had been difficult, what with her getting laid off from her good-paying job at a utility company. She’d vowed that once she started working again, she would do better in providing for her son. She’d been working as a customer service rep for eight months, and she took advantage of overtime whenever it was offered. She couldn’t afford to turn it down.

  Roger watched her with his small, marble eyes. His gaze skipped, ever so quickly, across her cleavage. That was another reason why the reps—all except one of whom were women—disliked him. He was a voyeur. He was harmless, but it was annoying all the same.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll stay until eight.”

  Nodding, Roger smiled and rapped the top of her cubicle with his knuckles.

  “Thanks for being a team player, Tonya. I knew I could count on you.”

  When he walked away, Tonya rolled her eyes. She studied Aaron’s photo.

  She would have to call her mother and tell her that she’d be home late. By the time she arrived home, Aaron would already be asleep. She put him to bed at eight thirty on school nights. Aaron didn’t like going to bed without her tucking him in, and despite her mother’s smooth reassurances, would worry that something had happened to her.

  “Sorry, baby,” she said to her son’s picture. “But Mommy’s doing this for you.”

  “You working late, huh?” Benita asked. Tonya was at the coffee station, refilling her big plastic Gulp cup with water, when Benita wandered out of the women’s restroom and approached her. “I can’t stand that asshole Rog.”

  Benita was a sister, in her late thirties, dark brown and full-figured—and all attitude. She didn’t try to hide how much she despised Roger and the company. Benita’s venomous comments could often be amusing, but sometimes they had the effect of making Tonya feel worse about an already upsetting situation.

  Tonya shrugged. “I need the money. Christmas is coming up. Aaron wrote a wish list as long as my arm.”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Benita said. She had three children of her own, by three different fathers. “If these motherfuckas paid us more maybe we’d finish the workflows on time, and we wouldn’t have to sit our black asses up in here working overtime looking at dumb-ass Rog.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Tonya said. “Kinda hard to be motivated when you’re earning nickels and dimes.”

  “Nickels and dimes? Shit, girl, pennies. I can’t half pay my rent on this salary. If I didn’t get my child support I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Yeah,” Tonya said. She gazed at the company flyers on the bulletin board, but she wasn’t really seeing them; the mention of child support had further dampened her spirits. Aaron’s father, Marcus, was five months behind on his payments. She felt the lack of that money like a hunger pain in her stomach. Marcus was just getting back on his feet after being out of work for a while, and she was trying to be sympathetic to his situation, but she had to raise their child. She would have to take him back to court if he didn’t resume his payments soon.

  “Hmmm,” Benita said. She motioned down the hallway and leaned close to Tonya. “Look at that.”

  Tonya looked. A tall, broad-shouldered brother was striding toward them. He appeared to be in his late-twenties; he had flawless, chocolate-brown skin and deep-set eyes. He wore a shirt and tie, the knot loosened and his sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms adorned with tattoos.

  He was an undeniably attractive man. Tonya had caught a quick glimpse of him a few times before. But when she looked at him now, her first time really seeing him for longer than a second, her gut clenched. It wasn’t a good feeling.

  “He looks like a model, don’t he?” Benita asked. “I think he work in shipping. He can pack me up any day ...”

  “Evening, ladies,” the man said in a deep bass voice. Although he addressed both of them, he focused on Tonya. “Working hard, or hardly working?”

  “You know the answer to that, honey,” Benita said, and laughed loudly.

  The man only glanced at Benita, as if she wasn’t worth his interest. He gazed at Tonya expectantly.

  “I’d better get back to my desk,” Tonya said. She laughed nervously. “Gotta make that money.”

  “See you around, sister,” he said. He winked at her, and then headed to the restrooms.

  Benita followed Tonya down the hall. “Well, damn, ain’t I worth a wink?”

  “You can have him,” Tonya said, nearing her desk.

  “Why you say that?”

  The phone rang, saving Tonya from having to respond to Benita’s question. She was thankful for the distraction, because she didn’t know why the man made her uncomfortable. It was a feeling that she couldn’t put into words. A feeling of... apprehension.

  When she picked up the phone and heard her son’s cheerful voice, her troubling feelings immediately departed.

  “Hi, Mommy,” Aaron said. “What you doing?”

  “How are you, sweetheart? Mommy’s still working. How was school?”

  “School was good. I got a star. And we had taffy apples.”

  Tonya smiled. It didn’t take much to make her son happy. Recognition and a taffy apple, and he was in heaven.

  God, she wished she could be home with him tonight.

  “Ooh, that sounds good,” she said. She heard a cartoon playing in the background. “Are you doing your homework?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then he giggled, most likely at something he saw on TV.

  “Let me talk to Grandma, sweetie,” Tonya said.

  “’kay.” There was a bumping sound as Aaron fumbled the phone. “Grandma, Mommy wants to talk to you!”

  A few seconds later, Tonya’s mother answered.

  “Hi, Mom. Why is Aaron watching cartoons? He needs to finish his homework first.”

  “He’s watching TV?” Her mother laughed, self-consciously. “These kids are so smart, ain’t they? Turn my back and he’s got the remote control and flipping channels.”

  “Right, Mom.” Tonya had to smile. Her mother had a soft spot for Aaron, gave in to almost anything the boy wanted. Aaron, thank God, never demanded much, thoug
h. He was an easygoing kid.

  Tonya heard the television fall silent. Her mother promised Aaron that he could watch cartoons once he finished his homework.

  Aaron didn’t whine; he said, “Yes, ma’am,” and that was that.

  “There,” Mom said. “Are you working late tonight?”

  “I was going to call you about that. Yes, I am. How’d you know?”

  “It’s a quarter to four and I ain’t heard you zipping up your bag yet.”

  “I won’t get off till eight, Mom. Then I have to catch the last train home, so I won’t walk in until ten, if I’m lucky.”

  “I’ll put him to bed at eight thirty,” Mom said. “You want me to leave a plate for you? I’m fixing chicken and rice.”

  “Would you please? That sounds good.” Her mom’s cooking was far more appealing than any takeout food her company would order.

  “Be careful on that train, Tonya. You know how I feel about you riding those trains at night. There’s too many crazy folk out there, and they see a young, pretty woman like you riding home alone—”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom. I’ve done it before.”

  Tonya was twenty-nine years old and had lived on her own, raising her son, for five years, yet sometimes her mother treated her as if she was thirteen. And ever since Tonya had moved back home earlier in the year, to get her bearings after losing her job, Mom had worried more than ever before. She worked Tonya’s nerves, but Tonya reminded herself that her mother did it only out of love and concern.

  Besides, her mom’s worries had a basis in reality. It was a dangerous world for a young woman. Every night, the media ran stories of women abducted, raped, beaten, murdered. You could never be too careful.

  “You got your phone?” Mom asked.

  “Of course I do. I’ll keep it on.”

  “All right,” Mom said. Then she added again: “Be careful.”

  “Okay.” Tonya sighed. “Can I talk to Aaron again, please?”

  Her son came on the phone. “You working late, Mommy?”

  Aaron sounded depressed. Her heart twisted.

  “I am, baby,” she said. “But I want you to know that I love you.”