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Dwight stared at him. Horror and relief washed through him like wave upon wave of pastel dancing waters. It was a joke! A horrible example of terrible judgment, and so unbelievably mean and cruel, and God, he was pissed, and—
"What? he said to Angelo. "Why would I do that?"
"Because you like her. You want to get into her pants."
"Dude, you have kurukuru," Dwight said. Then he hit rewind. "And don't try to push this thing onto me. Jesus, you told Bob V. What the hell were you thinking?"
Angelo looked unrepentant. "I wanted to get better. You don't get better if you're not rigorously honest. He was my sponsor. We did the Fifth Step at Malibu: Confessed to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."
"Get better? At what? Dying by lethal injection?" Dwight shouted.
"Bob V. is dead," Angelo reminded him. "Having a sponsor is like going to confession. They can't tell anybody jack."
"Priests can go to the police if it will solve a murder case," Dwight bellowed. "We just saw that on CSI."
"Stop freaking out. I was raised Catholic," Angelo said with a toss of his brand-new curls. "You're wrong."
The Jag was still circling the fountain. The localz were standing up, watching, fishing in their sweatshirts, probably for unregistered weapons. Angelo gazed thoughtfully at them.
"I want something," he said. "Meth or I don't know what." He giggled. "Blow. It's the other white meat."
And it was then, and only then, that Dwight realized that Angelo was already higher than a kite. He must have toked up or tanked up or shot up sometime during their creative Big Picture evening of Artistic Choices.
That was allowable. Dwight had shot up, too. In fact, he was probably higher than Angelo right now, because of the adrenaline racing through his body. He could feel his mind begi
"I was worried you might tell Carla M. to impress her," Angelo said again. "You know you want her. And not just for di
And suddenly Dwight saw the real Big Picture: Telling. I Know Who Ate You Last Summer. Forget perms and screenwriters with tasty parts; Angelo was going to start one-upping him with the truth. He was going to break Rule Number One with the gusto of the parasitically infected. Already had, in fact.
"You bastard!" he shouted at Angelo. Then who knew what possessed him, but he made a fist and slammed it against Angelo's temple. To his even greater surprise, Angelo's head slammed against the driver's side window, and the car roared straight for the fountain.
"Shit!" Angelo yelled. "What the hell did you do that for?"
I did it because you always humiliate me. I did it because you ate my girlfriend. I did it because if I don't do it to you, you're go
Dwight saw red. He saw blood. He grabbed the wheel with his left hand and dug in the glove compartment with his right. Got out their .357 Magnum and whammed it against Angelo's head as hard as he possibly could.
Angelo slumped. His foot slid off the gas pedal. Dwight turned the wheel and they orbited the fountain like a ride at Disneyland.
The gangbangers looked on in amazement. Bling gleamed in the moonlight. Teeth, too. It was not every night boyz in the hood watched two guys in a Jag making like Lindsay Lohan.
Finally the car screamed sideways and stopped. The tires were smoking. Angelo was still unconscious.
Dwight got out of the car, stomped around to the driver's side, opened the door, unbuckled Angelo, and dragged him out.
"Hey!" he shouted at the desperado homeboys. "Hey, this dude killed that girl Maria!" He dug into the pocket of his tight leather pants and pulled out her ugly rhinestone LA County Fair necklace. He'd almost forgotten he'd ripped it off her neck after he'd bashed her head in with that very same .357 last Tuesday. And Ana-somebody-nobody, three weeks before that.
"Check it out!" He shook the necklace at them. M-A-R-I-A. Stringy. Addicts so often were. "I found this on him! He killed her!"
Faces black and brown looked at one another. Muttered. Someone purple-black and six-four started walking toward the car.
And bald. He was bald! "Yeah! Bring it on! Payback!" Dwight flung down the necklace; it landed in the big gash in Angelo's head where the blood was pooling. Oh God, were those his brains? Eaten away by kurukuru?
Dwight stepped over him, piled into the car, and blasted out of there. Drove like a crazy man. A crazy man with a big secret that he had told no one, not even Angelo. No One Knows. He called Carla M.
"Hey," she said drowsily. She must be in bed. Ka-zoing! Dwight got hard.
"Yeah, hi. Angelo said he forgot something at your house. Okay if I come and get it for him?"
"Oh? Sure," she said. "What is it?"
"His emotional throughline," he replied. Then he hung up.
Laugh, cry? Plow the car into that oncoming retaining wall?
So many artistic choices, so little—
time.
Bitches of the Night
Nancy Kilpatrick
"Dis night, you vill take two each, a male and a female. And dis time, no AB negative!"
Istvan hated using the cheesy English-with-a-Transylvania accent. Sure, he'd been born in Transylvania, but his family had moved to what was now called Romania. He'd tried to teach these women his language—Romanian— but they were all too thick to learn. And although each spoke English, and their native tongue, of course, nothing worked as well at controlling them as the Englvanian. And Satan knew, they were hard enough to control. He felt lucky he'd stumbled on even one trick, which seemed to excite them sexually. At least when they were aroused they weren't thinking about wrestling power from his hands. They were perverse in the extreme, and he had to stay on top of his game or he was doomed; no wonder he felt perpetually exhausted! When was the last time he'd had a good day's rest?
"Am I understood?" he bellowed, Bela Lugosi-style, accompanied by Lugosi hand gestures.
The three females cowered, or two of them anyway. For the last century or so, he hadn't deluded himself that it was in real terror, but at least they played the game.
Sephora, the Spanish one, so voluptuous and juicy, the one who refused to cower, cocked her pretty head, dark eyes flashing, and positioned her fists on her ample hips. "Master, let me take two females. She can take two men." She jerked her head toward the willowy Celine, the French one, who arched a pencil-thin eyebrow and pouted her full lips until the tip of one snowy fang glistened against the crimson of that sensuous mouth.
"You think I want to take the men?" Celine snapped. " Tabernace!" she shouted, a Quebecois curse word that had something to do with a church. "They are puny in this city. Their balls shriveled and their cocks hungry like a moose's snot."
They all stared at Celine blankly. Istvan wished she'd stop using those indecipherable and obscure French expressions. Her language skills were pathetic.
Morgana, of Celtic origins, or so she claimed, always the impatient one, tossed back her long fiery hair and hissed at Celine. Celine clawed the air in Morgana's direction. Sephora cackled, a sound like fingernails on a blackboard.
Istvan's shoulders tensed. He felt a headache forming at his frontal lobes. They were driving him nuts! "Enough, bitches! I haf no time for your constant bickerings! I am busy man!"
"But Master," Sephora purred, moving close, and he became wary.
She smiled up at him and batted her eyes flirtatiously.
This was better. He snaked an arm around her waist. "Yes, my luf?" He cupped her chin.
"Master," she breathed seductively into his ear, "you are no longer a man."