John Dies at the End

So Cucumber was right to worry.



I didn’t tell Morgan I knew the name. In the years since I’ve wondered how many lives could have been saved if I had.



“You’re not outta school even three years. You went to high school with most of these people, East Side. But you only knew the one girl?”



“I kind of kept to myself.”



“And then you got shipped off to the other school—”



“Look, I’m not saying anything else until you tell me whether Jennifer is dead or alive. That ain’t confidential information and I deserve to know.”



Don’t bother. He doesn’t know.



“We don’t know. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why I got six hours of overtime already today. At least nine people were at the One Ball at closing time, twelve hours ago. Four of them are missing. Your friend is here.”



He paused, probably for effect.



“The rest are dead.”



It’s funny. Up until that point, despite all the evidence that had been provided to the contrary, it had never hit home how much trouble I was really in. I thought about John, again wondering if I had killed him by not rushing him to the ER.



I turned and looked at myself in the one-way mirror. The image was distorted, the other cop out of range at the back of the room. What was left was just me and Morgan, the clean-cut protector of the people, standing tall over the slumped, unshaven kid in a battered video store T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it had been wadded up on a car floorboard for two days. Good guy and bad guy. Trash man and trash.



“What about Justin Feingold and the guys John was with?” I asked. “Kelly and—”



“They’re fine. I’ve already talked to ’em, the whole band. They went home before the party moved on. Which brings us to my next question. Your friend is the only known survivor of the One Ball Inn and—now don’t take offense at this—but he ain’t lookin’ too healthy right about now. Did he say anything this morning at work? Maybe while you guys were putting away the last night’s porno returns?”



The white cop across the room stepped forward, put his hands on his hips. Waiting for an answer. Morgan left his gaze on me, calmly waited for me to fill the tense silence. Old interrogation trick.



“John called me last night, talking crazy, clearly out of it. Paranoia, hallucinations, the whole bit. This would have been around five A.M. I came over. He was acting, well, crazy. Seein’ things. But otherwise okay. Conscious, you know. Not, like, puking or convulsing or anything. I calmed him down, we went and got some food. That was that. We went to work.”



“What did he say? Exactly?”



“Monsters in his apartment, said he couldn’t remember how he got where he was, so on.”



“Did he say what he was on?”



“No.”



“You know we can find out anyway, right? We’re not interested in booking a bunch of your raver friends for poppin’ pills. To somebody like me, the dead bodies are what matters. And if somebody’s sellin’ poison, right now, as we talk—”



“No. I’d tell you if I knew. You’re a cop, you know I’m tellin’ you the truth. So, what, that’s how everybody died? Overdose?”



“This Jennifer Lopez, she was your girlfriend?”



“No.”



I thought about repeating my question, then stopped. Instead I replayed his question in my mind, focused on it, studied every contour of each word, was almost terrified to find I could glean libraries of information from between each syllable. In an instant I learned volumes by what he didn’t say, by the way he breathed, the minute twitch at the corner of his mouth, the slight widening of his left eyelid on the third and fifth word.



This detective last ate seven hours and fifteen minutes ago, two Egg McMuffins and four cups of coffee. You can smell it in the oils seeping through his skin. Check out his posture, he hasn’t slept in twenty hours. He forces a smoothness into his voice, wants to come across cultured but shrewd. He tells people his hero is Shaft, but it’s really Sean Connery’s James Bond. In his daydreams he sees himself hanging off a helicopter in a tuxedo.



And then, in a blink, I knew everything he knew. I saw the fate of each of the dead kids from the One Ball.



Nathan Curry had committed suicide, shot himself in the temple with a little .32 caliber pistol he kept hidden under his bed.



Arkeym Gibbs took a swim, fully clothed, in his family’s swimming pool—they found him floating facedown a few hours later.



Shelby Winder and another girl, Carrie Saddleworth, were found together. Each dead of a massive stroke. Shelby was missing her right hand, the wrist a ragged stump wrapped with a blood-soaked shirt.



The rest—Jennifer Lopez, Fred Chu, Big Jim Sullivan are nowhere to be found. They were all at the One Ball with John last night.



Now, only John remained.



You know all that, but you still can’t remember this cop’s name? You’re teetering on the brink of Crazy Man Bluff overlooking Weird Shit Valley.



“And to answer your next question,” I continued, “I didn’t know Jennifer well enough to know who her friends were or where she may have run off to. I’m sorry.”



Detective Freeman stepped forward and flipped open the manila envelope. He fanned out four photographs. One was a mug shot of a young black guy. Dreadlocks. I knew this was my fake Jamaican, knew before my eyes focused on the photo.



The next three pictures were vivid splashes of crimson.



Once, when I was twelve, for reasons that made sense at the time I filled a blender with some ice cubes and three cans of maraschino cherries. I didn’t know you had to use a lid on one of those things, so I hit the button and watched it erupt like a volcano. The room in the cop’s photographs looked like the resulting mess in our kitchen that day, everything a red spray with lumps.



He pointed to the Jamaican’s mug shot. “What about that guy? You know him?”



“He was there. At the party last night. Whatever John was on, this guy gave it to him. John told me.”



You already knew that, didn’t you, detective?



“That’s Bruce Matthews. Runs an amateur unlicensed pharmaceuticals operation on the corner of Thirtieth and Lexington.”



I nodded toward the red photos.



“What’s that?”



Morgan pointed to the mug shot.



“Before.”



He pointed to the red-drenched pictures.



“After.”



The first picture was just lumps on the floor, on carpet that was probably brown at one time but was now dyed a wet, purplish black. It looked like somebody had tossed down a bucket of raw steaks and chicken bones. The next picture was a close-up of one wall, deep red splatters over half the surface area, occasional bits of meat stuck here and there. The third picture was a close-up of a severed brown hand in a pool of red, fingers curled loosely, a bandage around the palm.



I turned my eyes away, suddenly sweating heavily. There was that tableau in the mirror again, just me and Morgan, face-to-face. Did he think I had anything to do with this? Was I a suspect? In my panic, I couldn’t read him. He let the silence congeal in the air, staring down on me. He broke me, and I broke the silence.



“What could even do that to a person? A bomb? Some kind of—”



“Nothing you know how to do, I’m sure of that. Maybe somethin’ not, uh, not within our bounds of familiarity.”



That fear again, on Morgan’s face. I understood it now.



But there’s more. Much more. He’s buried it so deep even you can’t read it.



The door opened and the detective’s words trailed off. A fat Hispanic cop ducked in and whispered in his ear. Morgan’s eyebrows shot up and the two of them left the room.



I heard a commotion outside, hurried shouts and feet shuffling on floor tile. After about ten minutes Morgan stormed into the room, eyes wide.



No, no, no, no-no-no. No. Don’t say it . . .



“Your friend is dead.”



CLICK!



A tape recorder, clicking off at the end of a cassette. Arnie had apparently set the thing on the table before me at some point. I hadn’t noticed. He grumbled an apology, fished out a new tape and went about changing it. I glanced over at his discarded notebook, saw he had abandoned his note-taking just after the word “Holocaust.”



I pushed away the plate of chicken, rice and snow peas that was the Flaming Shrimp Reunion. I had been picking through it for the last half hour, leaving the chicken. That bird, I knew, had lived a very sad life and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. It also had spent its days covered head to toe in bits of other birds’ crap.



“When you got your cell phone bill, did it list the call you got at Denny’s?”



“What? I’m sorry.”



“The call you got from your friend at Denny’s when your friend was sitting there next to you without a phone. Was that call on your cell phone bill?”



“I never thought to check.”



The waitress swept by and claimed my plate, dropped off a fortune cookie and my ticket. She ignored Arnie. I held the cookie in my hand, tried to concentrate and “see” what the fortune said inside it. I found I couldn’t.



Arnie scratched his head, knitted a question with his eyebrows.



“So the black stuff, the soy sauce, it’s a drug, right?”



“Well, I’ll get to that.”



“And it makes you smarter? When you take it, it lets you read minds and all that?”



“Not really. It heightens your senses. I think. I don’t know. When you’re on it, it’s like overload, like if you hooked your car radio up to one of those interplanetary SETI antennas. You get shit from all over the place, can see things you shouldn’t be able to see, but I don’t think it would help you do your taxes.”



“And you still got some of this stuff?” He glanced quickly down at the silver canister.



“I’m getting to that.”



“You’re on it right now? That’s how you did the thing with the, uh, with the coins and the dream and all that earlier?”