Royce Mullins and The Case of Virtue's Burn, A Novel: Chapter 13
by Jeff Hart
I poked my head out of a room that smelled of casual sex into a hallway where the prevailing odor was casual violence. It was the smell of spent adrenaline, the kind of butt-puckering pheromone warning that sent small animals scurrying back into the brush for cover. The top floor of the Unfettered Souls’ Wellness Center had witnessed the kind of primal discharge that Chief Motivationalist Wayne Maker dedicated books to suppressing. None of these men had paused to take a deep breath and count backwards from five.
Luckily, I’d been down the rabbit hole when the violence took place, working on a different sort of discharge.
I’d gotten to know Darlene, the unwitting soul mate of my client Paul Fennel, in ways both biblical and not. I’d used the fight in the hallway to scare her into agreeing to meet Fennel, and I’d lured the two marines on Fennel’s tail into combat with spiritual-enforcer Bo Harkins so that meeting could happen without murderous interruption. Everything was going to plan.
Except there was one body too few in the hallway.
“Where’s the other one?” I asked.
By way of reply, Bo Harkins punched the wall.
Harkins was still standing, but barely. He glared at me, his usual malice undermined by his tent-flap lower lip. It shuddered with every wet intake of breath, like a scraped-knee child expending great effort to be brave for his iodine-waving mother.
“Just him,” managed Harkins. “Alone.”
Harkins’ hands clenched and unclenched, short term muscle memory stuck in a loop of a few moments ago, when Harkins had wrapped his hands around Pilgrim’s throat and twisted. The marine was stretched out on the hallway floor in a pose similar to last night when he’d made himself comfortable on my futon. Except now Pilgrim’s Adam’s apple jutted out at an impossible angle, reminding me of a snake that’d gotten too ambitious with its prey. I looked into Pilgrim’s open, glassy eyes, one of them flooded with blood, and briefly considered my moral culpability in his demise. How responsible was I?
Not very, I decided. I was no more responsible for Pilgrim than I was for the combination of prayers and Chinese indifference that called down the trash comet that killed John the Bulldog. At least, that’s what I told myself. I felt a surge of relief looking at Pilgrim, tempered only by the wish that Yossarian was cooling on Unfettered carpet next to his tittering sidekick.
“Look at this,” groaned Harkins, and spun around to show me where Pilgrim’s butterfly knife hung, buried a couple inches into the meat between his shoulder blades. “He stuck me.”
Harkins hugged himself, his shaking hands ineffectually reaching for the handle of the knife. Pilgrim had found just the right spot, in backscratcher territory, where Harkins’ grasping fingers would never find the right angle.
“You want me to pull that out, Bo?”
“Well I don’t want you to just fucking stare at,” answered Harkins.
But then, Harkins remembered himself, realized that I wasn’t exactly a friend and certainly not a guy he wanted with one hand on the knife already in his back. He turned to face me, made an effort to straighten up. I noticed his lip had stopped shaking.
“Forget it,” said Harkins, sizing me up. “You’d probably just twist it.”
I was saved from having to mutter a half-hearted protest by Darlene emerging from her room. She’d traded the black robe of a Virtue for a hooded sweatshirt and tight jeans, the frumpy college girl look, far from the transcendental Helen that’d launched Paul Fennel’s doomed spiritual voyage. Nothing screamed destiny less than a hoodie. It was a good break-up outfit, the kind of ensemble that told a confused prophet that you weren’t his soul mate, that he’d read too much into the rash on his chest, that there were other souls in the sea.
“Holy shit,” she said, staring down at Pilgrim’s body. “I think I know this guy.”
Harkins lunged forward, grabbing me by the arm. He had the wild look of a man that wasn’t yet quite clear on the specifics, but still sensed that he’d been played.
“This some kind of set up, Royce?”
“We’re just going to take the air,” I replied. “I’ll bring her right back.”
“Uh-uh. That wasn’t the deal,” growled Harkins. His grip tightened on my arm, sending pins and needles through my shoulder, and causing me to involuntarily glance at Pilgrim’s body. “Neither of you is going anywhere until we sort this out.”
Without spending much time considering possible alternatives, I pepper-sprayed Harkins.
Having never been a specialist in protester disbursement, nor a damsel-in-distress navigating a dark alley, I’d never used the stuff before, but knew enough to turn my own head away, to hold my breath. Harkins fell to his knees, rubbing eyes already swollen, viciously coughing. A man in my profession knew this was the appropriate time for a quip but, as I opened my mouth to deliver a more metaphorical twisting of the knife, a swarm of invisible wasps with stingers dipped in cayenne overwhelmed me, and I started coughing too. From his front row seat in the afterlife, I imagined John the Bulldog about keeling over with laughter.
“Jesus,” said Darlene, shielding her face. “You just got me fired.”
Still coughing, I grabbed her by the hand and booked it toward the elevator.
I dragged her through the lobby, out the fire exit, and into the back alley where yesterday Bo Harkins had sucker-punched me. As threatened, Harkins had burned the trash. The alley still stunk of it, the more lethal Chinese equivalent of melted polystyrene not doing my raw lungs any favors.
Considering the circumstances, I was surprised to find myself smiling. If I hadn’t been coughing, I’d have been laughing too. An inexplicable giddiness had come over me — fleeing danger while holding the hand of a woman I was temporarily giving a shit about — it was a victorious feeling, something I wasn’t used to, a welcome change of pace. I felt Unfettered. I only reluctantly released Darlene’s hand when we made it to my car.
“Smells like shit in here,” said Darlene.
I grinned at her.
I drove us out of Midtown. I took a circuitous path through the busy streets, one eye pinned to my rearview for anything that might be a tail. If Yossarian was out there, following, he’d have needed a helicopter to keep track of my evasive maneuvers. Satisfied we weren’t being shadowed, I pulled the car over a block away from the Queensboro Bridge and asked to borrow Darlene’s cell phone.
“Royce,” answered Dot, on the first ring. “Are you alright?”
“How did you know?” I asked, referring to my tech-savvy colleague’s preternatural caller ID. “This is a new phone.”
“You’re the only one that calls this number,” she replied. “So, mystery solved.”
“Not yet, but it will be within the hour.”
“Where are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s where I want to be tomorrow that’s important. Can you make arrangements to get me out of the city? Doesn’t matter where,” I paused, considering. “Me, and maybe two others.”
“Who are the others?”
“Maybe nobody,” I replied, glancing at Darlene who dully stared at the blinking lights of the Queensboro. “Or maybe two souls will bond and blah blah blah. Who knows. The night is young.”
“I can do that,” said Dot. “You sound different, Royce.”
“Like a changed man?”
“Like you’ve lost it.”
“No,” I said. “I’m winning it.”
I hung up.
We crossed the Queensboro in silence. It was only as we cruised the last few blocks toward Fennel’s Long Island City hideout that it occurred to me to ask how Darlene had known Pilgrim. She shrugged, apparently not feeling much sympathy for the dead marine.
“I don’t know,” she said, lighting a Newport. “I think he served with my brother.”
Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.
Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.