splat chapter twenty-eight, part one

SPLAT CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT, PART ONE

 

The guys still weren't there when she got home. The TV was on the Cartoon Network, where she'd left it, but she was too depressed to watch the news, or to check out the chance of rain on the Weather Channel. She turned the TV off. The living room was eerie without constant sound and lights. It smelled of mold, stale cigarettes, and dried beer. The odor of freshly burnt house came in through the open windows. Suzie felt lonely, and this made her more depressed. She was all alone in the world. She felt fatigued beyond anything she'd known. Her back hurt. Her feet hurt. Her stomach hurt. Her head hurt.

She put herself to bed, but couldn't go to sleep. Her mind kept replaying all the conversations she'd overheard, all the snippets of vitriol and self-righteousness and prejudice, all the snide, catty observations, all the cruel abuse hurled at her. She kept thinking about Jerry's plan to enslave the working class. She kept seeing Jerry's wife, dying in her party dress. She kept wishing she'd been more forceful with the poor little barefoot woman. Leave the bastard, she kept thinking. Leave him. Divorce his ass and take him to the cleaners. It serves him right for treating his wife like that. Make him poor. Revenge is a dessert best served on a canapé tray.

Suzie's mind kept spinning. She wondered what she was going to do for a job now that she'd been fired. Fired. Let go. Terminated. She thought about almost being turned over to the cops, and felt cold. The chance of being arrested. Put in jail. Made to serve time with thieves and murderers. She started to shiver. It was eighty-two degrees in the house, and she was freezing.

It started to rain. This should have brightened Suzie's mood considerably, but she felt even more depressed. She lay in bed, snuggled in the covers, listening to the rain dripping on somebody else's window air conditioner, listening to the rain hitting the leaves of the dogwood tree outside her window. It sounded sad. She started to cry, and every time she thought of the things that had happened to her, she cried a little more. Her tears increased with the rain. Finally, it reached the intensity of a howling, drenching downpour.

She stayed up all night crying, sniffling, listening to the rain, feeling like she was drowning. When she finally slept, it was fitful, full of angry dreams.

She dreams...she forgot. But the pace was frenetic and confusing and she didn't know what to do.

She dreams it's raining. She's wet but not miserable, and is kind of enjoying herself. Everyone else is scurrying around trying to keep dry. The details are gone now, but she was on some kind of mission.

She dreams she's riding in the truck with her dad. They're stopped at a light, and talking easily. She doesn't remember what they were talking about. To their right is the on ramp to I-85. It looks like they're at the North Druid Hills entrance. The light changes. Suddenly Suzie is no longer in the truck, but standing at the side of the road, watching her dad drive away. She shouts his name. She thought he would pull over to the right shoulder and wait for her. But he keeps going, and gets into the left lane to take the cloverleaf back toward town, an option that doesn't exist except in the dream place. She shouts again. His window is down, and as he goes around the curve she sees him dart over in his seat, maybe to unlock her door. She shouts a third time, as he disappears. A stream of traffic is going past, blocking her from crossing the road to catch up. She doesn't know if he'll be there when she rounded the curve. She begins to think she'll have to make her way home on foot.

She swam into consciousness some time late in the morning. The apartment was silent, the rain was continuous, the humidity was 150Àher sheets were soaked. It was getting to be a full moon. Shit happens on a full moon.

The guys were still not home. She knew something was wrong, and was now certain they'd been arrested. She wondered what she could do about it, how she could find out what happened to them, how she could ever raise bail to get them out. Maybe her next paycheck would cover it. This reminded her of having been fired. Her heart sank.

She turned on the Weather Channel. It was good news: there was a hurricane, onshore and barreling straight up the border between Alabama and Georgia, and they were forecasting high winds and torrential rains all day, with the danger of flash floods and possibly tornadoes. But the news didn't brighten her mood at all.

Wandering through the apartment, picking up trash and pitching old clothes into the corners, she stumbled across a cellphone sticking out from under a couch. It looked like Alex's. Hmmm. She rummaged around in his room and found the charger, and plugged it in. She turned it on, but it came up with a message to upgrade the minutes. A prepaid phone. Maybe she could use it. It might come in handy to have a phone, especially if she was going to be looking for a job. And when Alex came home, he'd be glad to see that she'd bought him some minutes. He never had the money for cellphone service.

She got into the loaner, drenched to the skin, and started the engine. It was working fine the night before, except for overheating and the Check Engine light, but this morning there was a funny noise when she started it, and it roared to life with a new, loud clanking sound, metal slamming against metal.

Oh shit, she thought, it's going to die on me. She put it into gear and put her foot on the gas. The noise increased, the clanking went faster. How was she going to drive all the way to Riverdale with it acting like this? How could she get it there before it died? Nelson would be so mad at her for killing the car.

Passing the burned-out house on Seaboard brought tears to her eyes. The devastation reminded her of Jerry. Something she heard him say to Ed made her wonder if they weren't in back of the house fires. And the more she thought about it, the likelier it seemed. Neither of them had any respect for anyone without a lot of money and power, and both of them were ruthless.

She drove as fast as she could in the downpour, always in the right lane in case she had to pull off the highway with a dead car. She was anxious. She could feel the tension building in her shoulders, her legs. She was willing the car to keep going, sitting forward in her seat, using body english to propel the car down the road, watching the idiot lights and desperately hoping they wouldn't change. The engine noise gave her a headache. She was nearly in tears from worrying whether she was going to make it.

She pulled into the garage and took her foot off the gas. The sound lessened until it sounded almost normal. She put it into park and left it running so Nelson could hear it, but Nubby told her he was out on a test drive, so she shut it off and went into the shop to wait, slipping and nearly falling on a fresh grease spot. She wondered did they ever mop the floor, or did they just wait for a good rain and hope it would flood the place clean.

Nubby was working on a pickup in the southwest bay. He left the driver's side door open while he was fooling around under the hood, and Suzie could hear it. Bing bing bing. The sound irritated her.

Nathan pulled a rusty old car into the emissions bay. He grinned at her. 'We're going to have to clean-pipe this one,' he said. 'I got to wait until Nelson gets back, though. He won't let me do it myself.

Suzie hung out at the wooden worktable, rummaging through the newspaper, a copy of Hustler, a grease-thumbed parts catalog for the GTO. She found a huge butt-end of a joint, too big to call a roach. She found a picture. It was Nelson, looking smashed. He was sitting sprawled against a booth seat next to a dark haired woman with too much makeup on. The shot was taken from between some stripper's bare legs and high heels. She turned it over. It was developed a little over two weeks before.

Nelson pulled into the back parking lot and came loping into the shop. Nubby came up to him with a clipboard and they discussed what to bill some customer for taking a part off, cleaning it, putting it back on again, and calling it new. Nathan came up and snagged him to go watch the beginning of his illegal emissions test. Glenda yelled through the hatch that he had a call on line two. He hadn't even seen Suzie.

Suzie was distracted. The car Nelson had pulled up in looked a lot like the developer's car. She wondered if he'd taken her advice and brought it down to let Nelson fix it. She wandered over to the edge of the shop, standing out of the way of the rain sheeting off the roof and blowing in at a 45-degree angle, and had a look at his bumper. Sure enough, there was her replacement sticker. The bastard never noticed it. Cool.

She had a sudden thought. Maybe she could get a job working at the garage. Then she could make a side career out of political commentary with her stickers. She decided to ask Nelson if he had anything she could do there. Maybe she could change oil. Nathan certainly wanted to move up the ladder; she could do his job. Or Allen's, who hadn't been around the shop lately, probably a parole violation.

But first, she had to tell him about the loaner blowing up. She went up to him and waited for him to finish his phone call. He gave her a distracted half-hug and continued talking. She studied the clouds and rethought her confession. By the time he hung up, she was thinking of other things entirely. 'Look, Nelson,' she said, pointing to the sky. 'A feeder band. That's the hurricane, right there.'

He gave her a bothered look. He hated rain.

She sidled up to him. 'Do you want to go for a ride?' she asked. There was something so exciting about pounding rain. She suddenly felt like she'd really like to go off somewhere and make love. Even in the middle of the mall parking lot. Nobody would see them on a day like this.

Nelson noticed her condition, and dragged her off into the parts room for a quickie. This time she didn't pull away or feel embarrassed that everyone in the shop knew what was going on. She felt giddy, hearing the rain beating down on the roof, feeling Nelson thundering into her, knowing how close they were to being discovered. She forgot all about the car. Nelson came before she'd even hardly got going. She was sore afterward; it had been so long since they'd had sex, it felt like her hymen had grown back.

When they came out of the parts room, Nelson looked into the parking lot and saw the loaner. 'Oh, good,' he said, 'you've brought it back. We've got to get that car fixed and out of here today. Let me give you another car to drive until we can fix yours.' He called to Nathan to pull the car into the south bay.

The car started up and began clanking loudly. Nelson looked at Suzie narrowly. 'What's that sound?' he asked. Suzie was surprised that he had to ask. He should know the characteristics of every sound in every car.

'I was just going to ask you,' she said. 'It started making that noise this morning. That's why I brought it back.'

He blew up. 'Why didn't you call me instead of bringing it all this way?' he yelled, backing off and staring down at her. 'You could have damaged it beyond repair, and we'd be liable for it. What's the customer going to say when he finds out it's broken?'

'But the phone's out,' she said weakly. 'I couldn't call you, and I thought the best thing would be to get it here as fast as possible.' She held back tears. 'I didn't think.'

'Baby, cars aren't supposed to make that kind of noise,' he said, more gently. He was thinking over his options. He turned to Nathan. 'Leave it where it is,' he decided. 'We'll do something else.' Nathan shut it off and came back inside, sopping wet.

Suzie was puzzled. 'Doesn't the customer need it back today?'

'By the time I get through with it,' he said, 'the owner won't know it.'

Suzie pointed to Ed's car. 'Can I borrow that one?' she asked sweetly. She had a sudden thought about booby trapping it somehow, putting a paint grenade in the car somewhere, somehow. Something that would pop up and bite him.

'But we're working on it today,' he said. 'We got to do a brake job.'

'I told a friend I'd help her move today, and that's got plenty of room.' He looked around the parking lot for something big, but except for a pickup with a blown engine, there was nothing. 'I'll have it back in a couple of hours,' she insisted, trying the same type of baldfaced lie she suspected of him, rubbing up against him and stroking his arm. 'I'll have it right back. I promise.'

He hesitated only a split second. 'Sure, Sweetie,' he said with a show of generosity, handing her the keys with only a shadow of anxiety. 'Bring it right back.' She pulled on her driving gloves and blew him a kiss, and left before he could come up with another alternative.

She made her way back into town in Ed's Mercedes SUV. The rain was still steady, but the sky was lightening above her, and she could see yellow sky between feeder bands. She drove to her hideout, but went in through the cemetery next door so she could work on the car undisturbed. She hadn't gone in this way for months. The path was completely overgrown, and she had to push aside the undergrowth and step through brambles, watching for poison ivy. It was raining only lightly now, but she was wet through, with scratches on her arms and legs.

The ground was squishy. The trees sounded like it was still raining hard. It was hot, and humid, and everything smelled like a mixture of tropical plants, salt air, and mold.

As she brushed by all sorts of plants descending to the creek, she noticed some tree limbs that had been cut, and saw little dayglo orange flags on stakes. Surveyors had been through recently. Suzie wondered if someone was planning to develop the woods behind Auntie Mae's house, and thought evil thoughts about Ed and Jerry.

She looked around the clearing. It didn't look as if the surveyors had gotten that far. Everything was filthy. There was mud everywhere; runnels covered the clearing as the rain converged on the creek. Suzie looked around, disgusted with her silly fantasies of being a superhero. She went around gathering up the junk and stuffing it into a garbage bag, angry with herself.

It took a couple of trips to pack all the stuff into the trunk of Ed's Mercedes. Her lean-to and stool. Equipment for do-it-yourself paintballs, from an abortive attempt to include a printed message inside the sphere. A bunch of plastic jugs and a length of rope. Cans of house paint, a bicycle pump syringe, a couple of yards of rubber surgical tubing, some ball bearings, a pair of roach clips, cotter pins, some tools, a bunch of old paintgun magazines.

She'd had such grandiose dreams of complex James Bond stealth weapons. She'd spent hours dreaming up fantasy redesigns of her weaponry. She'd cut the paintgun barrel down. She'd disguised her gun as a drink cup. She thought about putting it into a long tube to hide it, but it would have meant shooting out of the passenger side window. She thought about making a gun hole through the back of the trunk, and wiring the trigger to the brake handle. She thought about filling the trunk with paint buckets and dumping them onto the road in front of her target.

Today, she had this stupid idea about cutting a hole in the driver's side door so she could fire unobserved. But cutting holes in the door wouldn't give her a good shot; it would confine the gun to a very narrow angle, so she'd be maneuvering the car to take aim.

She realized she was being hasty. She was about to do deliberate damage to a very expensive car that just happened to belong to someone she despised. She realized she was being hateful, and therefore she shouldn't do it. It would be better to put sugar in the gas tank, and fuck things up for him over the long term; cause him real money to get it fixed.

Then she thought about how much Ed made last year, some bunches of millions of dollars. Why the fuck not destroy his car? And plus, she was really paranoid about someone seeing her gun, because she was afraid of being spotted by Joe Commuter and turned in, or shot at by some vigilante punk wannabe cop. So she got out her screwdriver and started to take the interior panel off the door anyway. She felt silly, though.

She started on the panel screws, and noticed that they were half-stripped. Some were missing. The rain was starting to pick up. She was sitting there on the edge of the door, taking the door panel off, getting wetter by the moment. But she couldn't get a purchase on the screws. Everything was getting wet, and she was crying with frustration.

Finally she got the panel off. But how strange. Someone had built shelves into the door. She thought for a moment and peeled up the carpet in the back. The metal of the floor had been cut away, and there were more compartments. Suzie sat and thought. Then she examined the shelf in the door. Beeswax was scraped along the edge in curling slivers. There was a scummy gray mass on the ledge of the door below. Something had spilled and gotten wet. She tasted it. Sweet tea and something bitter. Then her teeth went numb. Cocaine. Ed was running drugs? Nelson was running drugs? Some expatriated mexican was running drugs?

She looked closer at the interior of the car. Everything had been fucked with. Not that anything was out of place, because how would she know? But there was ash everywhere, and a roach in the console ashtray. There was grease on the rug, and bolts and screws on the floor. The glove compartment was a mess. Someone had spilled sweet tea on the passenger's seat, and it was still damp. She wondered what was going on, and put the door back on, bemused. She forgot all about cutting her own holes in the car.

The rain picked up again. She got back on the road. The clouds were low and scuddy, the sky above them lead-gray. She was driving around aimlessly. With no job to go to, she was at a loss for something to do with herself. She was still steaming about getting fired, and her mind was still rolling around the things she'd heard last night. She was beginning to piece everything together. Things that had been too far over her head to muss her hair, now hit her upside the head as they came around again. Her neighborhood was going down the tubes, her roommates were going to jail, and her chances for another restaurant job were finished.

And it was all because of Ed and Jerry, who had been thorns in her side for a very long time. Jerry was behind the new, draconian homeless laws, and the new twist on slave labor. He and Ed were the cause of the house fires, and behind the plan to destroy her fine old Atlanta neighborhood for profit. She grew more and more angry, less and less rational. She felt crazy. She wanted revenge like she'd never wanted it before. Ed and Jerry must be made to suffer, to pay for her pain. She hated being in such a helpless position - no job, no home, no future - and she blamed them.

So she went looking for Jerry. One more quest for vengeance, but this time she wasn't just out to get a random bad driver. She was out to wreak justice on an evil man. To stop a clear and present danger. To stomp a noxious, disease-ridden bug.

She knew where he used to work, and figured she might could find him t here, so she drove over to the Midtown law offices of Reedham and Wheat, Mohn, Nash, Wayle, Sweat, and Trimble, and parked illegally at the end of a side street, watching the parking deck entrance.

She sat there for several hours peering through the streams of rain on the windshield. She smoked the roach, she read the owner's manual, she doodled on the leather seats with a ballpoint pen.

But Jerry wasn't coming out. Maybe he wasn't there at all. Maybe he was over at the legislature, helping to put new harshness into the legal system. She drove downtown to the Capitol buildings. But there were armed guards, and no way to cover all the exits and parking lots. So she moved on. Perhaps he was over at the old prison farm, the Straight Path Center, advising prison officials on how to get the most use out of their new slaves. So she cruised down Moreland past Auntie Mae's, out Key Road, and drove slowly by the barbed-wired facility. No luck.

She felt foolish. She'd spent three or four damp hours, sitting and waiting, and cruising and searching, and it was looking pretty hopeless. How stupid she felt. Back on Moreland, the first thing she saw was the Reinsourcing America billboard. Suzie pulled into a gas station and used the public phone, standing in the rain. The operator gave her the street address of the agency. Midtown, not two blocks from his old law office. So she headed back north.

And there he was. Suzie was illegally parked on Peachtree for no more than five minutes when she saw his BMW pull out of the parking lot and head for the highway at . She followed him. Her stomach hardened into a tight knot when she caught sight of him. She tasted bile. She wanted to kill him, to see his lifeless body slumped in his seat. It was a good fantasy. He so needed to die.

* * *

next, a little heavy weather