***
GODS & MONSTERS: MYTHBREAKER
by Stephen Blackmoore
CHAPTER 1
AFTER YEARS of doing everything
from smoking crushed-up Quaaludes in a Skid Row homeless camp to
snorting cocaine with Miami “businessmen,” Fitz has come to one
inescapable conclusion.
Getting
high is a huge pain in the ass.
You’d
think it wouldn’t be that hard. Doesn’t matter if it’s pot,
opium, ecstasy or Viagra; it all works the same way. You take a
thing, and put it in your body. It goes up your nose, or down your
mouth, in a vein, up your butt. Simple, right? But no.
People,
man. Fucking people. Got to make everything complicated. Pipes,
domes, vaporizers, spoons, butane torches, screens, papers, irons,
ash catchers, straws, grinders, nails, syringes, chillums, hookahs,
clips, masks.
Not
that that’s ever stopped him, of course. Whether he’s popping
prescription anti-psychotics or doing opium out of a glass pipe, it’s
all worth it. To keep the voices out of his head.
“Gimme
a hit,” Marty says. He leans into him on the bed, wraps his leg
around Fitz’s own. They fucked the sheets off the mattress an hour
ago, their clothes scattered across the floor.
Or
is it Matty? Marvin? Fitz can’t remember. That’s fine. He’ll be
gone by morning, and he’ll never see him again. Dark brown hair,
thin to the point of ribs showing, eyes a shade of green that makes
Fitz think of the ocean. He’ll remember those eyes, even if he
never remembers his name.
Fitz
passes him the pipe, runs the lighter underneath until the dab of
opium dissolves into a little dark pool. Marvin sucks down the vapor,
holding it in for a moment and then blowing it out through his
nostrils.
“Oh,
I like that,” Matty-Maybe-Marvin says.
Last
week there was a girl. Patty? Pamela? He did a lot of coke with her.
And the week before was a couple of Mormon missionaries who weren’t
quite as devout as their nice white shirts and straight black ties
would suggest.
“It’s
good, isn’t it?” Fitz takes the pipe from him, packs another dot
of opium into it and lights up. He sucks in the vapor and his mind
goes still.
If
it didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point. He’s not in it for the
high. He’s in it for the way it shuts his brain up. All the
backchatter and noise. Like being in a crowded bar. And the sights.
Images that crowd out his own vision, sometimes; make it hard to tell
what’s real and what isn’t.
A
mix of anti-psychotics and benzos does the trick most of the time,
shuts things up enough where he can function. But sometimes it gets
too much. Everything’s too loud, too bright, too everything. And
that’s when he goes out, gets himself a nice little brown ball of
pure joy and a twink like Matty here and spends the weekend in a
hotel room getting fucked up and sucked off.
“I’ve
never tried it before,” Marty says. Dammit, maybe it’s Michael?
“It’s... different. What’s the craziest stuff you’ve ever
tried?”
“Toads,”
Fitz says, his voice hazy like smoke.
“Toads?”
“Bufo
alvarius,” he says.
“Colorado river toad. They secrete a toxin on their backs that’s
like doing acid. It’ll really fuck you up.”
“So,
like, you suck the toad?”
“No.
God, no. Eew. They taste nasty,” Fitz says, remembering when he’d
heard about the toads and tried exactly that. “You squeeze it. And
when it starts to secrete the toxin you slap it against a windshield
and smear it all over. You get this gross, goopy gel. And then you
let it dry in the sun and scrape it off and smoke it.”
Marty
shudders. “That’s disgusting. Seriously?”
Fitz
shrugs. “No idea, really. I just smoked the shit.”
“But
what about the stuff we just did? You got any more? I want another
hit.”
“Pace
yourself. This shit ain’t for amateurs. And it costs more than you
do.”
“Fuck
you,” Matthew says, less admonishment than suggestion. “I’m
plenty expensive.”
“My
point exactly.”
He
trails a long fingernail from Fitz’s neck to his cock, his fingers
wrapping lightly around the shaft. “What’ll it take to get
another hit?”
“That’s
a good start.”
“How
about I smoke your
toad?”
“Is
that what we’re calling it now?”
He
kisses his way down Fitz’s chest and stomach until he’s taken him
in his mouth. Fitz rides the high of the opium, the feeling of lips
around his cock. Drifts away on the sensation.
Then
the visions slam into him like a truck through a convenience store
window. They punch through the opium haze, sear into his brain.
Panic
and howling winds. Angels and demons fucking in mid-air, tearing into
each other with swords of fire. A raven-haired woman in green pulls
the still-beating heart out of a man’s chest and holds it high,
before tearing dripping chunks from it with razor teeth. Bulls and
bears battle in a pit of money while high above them the sky fills
with clouds of numbers in an unending stream of data that watches and
waits and passes judgment. The images tear through him, fill him like
an empty basin, crack and burst through the sides.
And
through it all is the high, keening wail of someone screaming like
they’re on fire, like their skin is being flayed from their bones,
their eyes being put out with nails.
It
isn’t until the police break down the door that he realizes it’s
him.
Hospitals.
Full
of sick people. The old,
the frail, the dying. The constant stink of disease and antiseptic,
of rot and bodily fluids seeping out of holes that should never leak.
They die in their beds, bleed all over them. Shit in them, too. Beds
just like the one Fitz is currently lying in and handcuffed to. He’s
wearing nothing but a badly fit gown that’s cut too high and leaves
his ass exposed. His head hurts, and when he reaches up to touch it
he feels a bandaged lump on his forehead.
But
there is good news, as good news goes. He overheard a cop and a
doctor outside his room talking. Fitz isn’t being locked up on a
5150, an involuntary psych hold. It’s happened a few times and he’s
narrowly avoided doctors admitting him for a longer stay so they can
turn him into a case study. He’s not schizophrenic, they say. He’s
too lucid, they say. He has hallucinations, but not delusions. He’s
not bipolar, not depressed, not manic. They don’t know what he is,
though they all agree ‘crazier than a shithouse rat’ is a pretty
good description.
If
only that was a listing in the DSM-V.
But
of course, there’s bad news, too. He’s probably going to do some
time for the drug charge. He’s got a record, and judges don’t
like records. He got picked up for heroin a while back and avoided an
eighteen-month stint in the state penal system by going to rehab.
He’s probably not going to get that again.
Even
with a good lawyer, he’s probably going to do a stint in County.
This
is a problem. A very big problem.
“Louie
Fitzsimmons?” the doctor says as he comes in through the door. He’s
young, like Doogie Howser young. Asian, with wide, dark eyes. Is this
what happens when you get older? You see people in their twenties and
they look like they should still be at their mother’s tit?
“Far
as I know.” He’s having a hard time remembering everything he saw
when he freaked out in the hotel room. Mostly he remembers blood.
The
doctor chuckles. “You’re doing better than you were. Can you tell
me what you were on? The young man you were with didn’t say.”
“Benadryl.
Maybe some Advil. You know. I had a headache. And I got allergies.
Must have had a bad reaction.”
“Right,”
the doctor says. “And this Advil it was, uh, smoked, was it?”
“Don’t
know what you’re talkin’ about, doc.”
“Uh
huh. I hope those allergies clear up, Mister Fitzsimmons. I don’t
think you’re going to be getting any Benadryl for a while.”
“How
about some Advil?”
“Sorry,”
the doctor says. “We only do Tylenol here.” He closes his chart,
heads to the door. Stops when a six-foot-plus wall of muscle steps in
his way. He looks up at the giant woman standing there.
“I
don’t think you’re supposed to be in here,” the doctor says,
his voice suddenly very small.
Samantha
Kellerman looms. At six-foot-five, with eyes like carved jade and a
shock of bright red hair, Sam can’t help but loom. It’s built
into her DNA. She is not fat, she is big-boned. This only explains
her girth because those bones are wrapped in two-hundred-and-twenty
pounds of densely packed muscle built doing MMA before she lost a
bout in a bad way. She is big-boned surrounded by big-meat.
“Cops
said I could,” she says, pointing over her shoulder with a thumb.
“Oh,”
is all the doctor can seem to get out. “Okay, then.” He edges
past Sam and scuttles away down the hall.
“What’s
eatin’ him?” Sam says. She slings a backpack off her shoulder and
onto the hospital bed.
“I
think you scared him.”
“Don’t
know why. I’m just a big ol’ teddy bear. You doin’ all right?”
Fitz
holds up his left arm as far as the cuff securing him to the hospital
bed will let him. “Been better. How’d you get in here, anyway?”
“Couple
of the cops are Blake’s customers. They gave me a few minutes.”
“He
got any prosecutors in his pocket?”
Sam
shrugs. It’s like watching a mountain shrug. Fitz half expects to
see boulders tumble to the floor. “Used to. But these days? Dunno.”
“I
gotta get out of here, man,” Fitz says. “I am not going to do
well in prison.”
“Jail.
The prisons are all full up. And you know you won’t do a full
stretch. Blake’ll take care of you, man. He always does. They gotta
get you squared away here and then book you. Then they’ll probably
move you to County for a few days before they get you in front of a
judge.”
Any
other time that would be a relief. Fitz and Sam have known each
other, and worked together, for almost twenty years. Fitz to cook
books and hide money, and Sam to break legs and hide bodies. All in
the service of Blake Kaplan, a record producer who moved into selling
drugs when his boy bands didn’t quite get there. Wasn’t much of a
stretch; he was supplying his kids with enough coke to frost the
Alps, so moving into a wider distribution was a natural progression.
No
matter what happened, Blake always took care of his boys. Then, as
now, whether it’s getting someone out of jail, fixing a parking
ticket, scoring some Zoloft and Haldol for Fitz to take the edge off,
Blake’s always come through.
But
as soon as Blake figures out a couple of things Fitz has done, that’s
all going to stop, and Fitz needs to get out of here before it does.
“Yeah,”
Fitz says.
“Oh,
come on. Why so glum? You’ve done time before.”
“I
got a suspended sentence and rehab,” Fitz says. “I was in for a
weekend.”
“And
that’s what this is. Three days max and Blake’ll post bail.”
Sam pulls up a chair. “So what happened? You have another one of
those episodes?”
Those
episodes. Explaining
to Sam that when they hit it’s like having his mind turned inside
out and poured down the drain is like trying to teach a dog orbital
mechanics. Sam’s good as murderous thugs go, but anything outside
of MMA, craft beer and the best places in Los Angeles to hide a body
never seems to fully register with her.
“This
one was pretty bad.”
“Huh.
Well, Blake wanted me to tell you he’s got you covered. He has all
the updated passwords, right? He’ll take over the books while
you’re out of commission.”
“He
can’t do that,” Fitz says a little too quickly, trying to hold
his panic down.
“How
come?”
“I
need to clean a few things up. The numbers are off. I think I
transposed some digits. They won’t add up.”
“I
don’t know what any of that means,” Sam says. “But Blake’ll
figure it out.” She gets up, pats Fitz’s hand. It feels like
she’s slamming a Christmas ham across Fitz’s knuckles. “We’ll
get you taken care of. I know you don’t want nobody to help you
with these episodes, but if they’re getting this bad, you need to
see somebody. Like, for real this time. Not that dealer in Koreatown
you keep talking to.”
“But—”
“I
mean it. Like a real doctor. But right now, don’t worry about it.
Oh, before I go.” She unzips the backpack, pulls out a shirt,
pants, socks, shoes and a jacket. “They said they brought you in
naked. So I hit your place and grabbed you some stuff. I wasn’t
gonna touch your underwear. Figure if you’re going to lock-up you
should at least have something to wear besides a hospital gown for
the ride over. There’s nothing else in there. I had to promise the
guys outside I wasn’t sneaking anything in and I don’t want them
gettin’ into trouble.”
“You’re
the most honest crook I know.”
“Thanks.
So take care and don’t worry. We got your back.”
Fitz
waits until Sam disappears through the door before he really starts
to lose his shit. Blake’s going to look at the books. And when he
does he’s going to figure out that things aren’t adding up. It
won’t take him long to see it.
After
all, it’s hard to hide fifteen million dollars.
Not
that Fitz hasn’t tried. He’s been skimming from Blake for almost
ten years now. He doesn’t want to be an accountant the rest of his
life, after all. He’d like to retire sooner rather than later. So
he’s taken a little bit here, little bit there. Funneled it all
into an offshore account in the Caymans and covered his tracks.
But
in the last few months he’s gotten more aggressive about it, and
just a week ago he grabbed nine million out of some of Blake’s own
offshore accounts and he hasn’t figured out how to hide it all yet.
When Blake goes looking, he’s going to find it.
And
the next time Fitz sees Sam, she’s not going to be bringing him a
change of clothes.
Gods & Monsters: Mythbreaker is out in the US December 2nd 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment