They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy Read online

  Then I got bored and stopped caring about that old stuff and switched the DVD out for something more hardcore.

  I smiled, thinking about bat-shit crazy days of my youth, and enjoyed the bleach-blonde woman with the lopsided implants wearing nothing but high heels on my television. And I thought about the old days of Will yanking ATM machines out of walls with his bare hands and hitting liquor stores and all the times we nearly got busted because of his half-assed way of doing things.

  Yeah, I needed to find out exactly what he had done.

  Chapter 2

  Falling off the Wagon

  There was only one sure way to get Will talking something other than bullshit, and that was to get him smoking. The problem with that was that I didn't keep any weed at my place. I always went over to his apartment to smoke because I would never get a goddamn thing done if I had the stuff in my house. So when I woke up at the crack of noon, I made due by putting on coffee and spiking it with plenty of Jack Daniels to get the ball rolling.

  "Get up, slick," I said, shoving him with my heel. "Let's get lit."

  He grunted.

  I set his cup on the coffee table in front of him and rattled the liquor bottles he'd from the gas station that were all over my living room. "These bottles are waiting for you, boy."

  I sat down in my recliner to wait for him to come around and flipped on the local TV news. Of course they had to drone on about the gas station explosion because it had been the biggest thing to happen in town in years. In the light of day, the building had been totally blackened and burnt. I over did the hell out of it with the fire. The place looked like it had been fucking incinerated. Bad enough that they were throwing the word 'arson' around.

  "Fuck," I muttered, turning up the volume. I got up and kicked Will in the side. "Get up. Start drinking, you pussy. I'm already two ahead of you." That would get him going.

  He rolled over and said with his eyes closed, "Bottle race, bitch. Set 'em up."

  "--No suspects as of yet and no reports of robbery, but police are asking anyone with information about the two individuals spotted on Zachary Lane before the chase began to call them. There is a reward being offered."

  "Zachary Lane," I repeated. I damn sure hadn't been on Zachary Lane; that was a mile away from the station on Cedar at least. I kicked Will again and jammed my damn toe. "You're back to rich neighborhoods?" I asked him.

  He finally sat up, my damn sofa groaning under the weight of his dense leadskin ass. He grabbed the coffee without a word and downed it like he had a Ph.D. in getting shit-faced. "That's good. Hit me again, bitch."

  I muted the TV. "Stop with the 'bitch' shit and tell me about Zachary Lane. What the hell did you do?"

  "I gotta take a piss."

  I heated the air around him to the heat of an oven to make sure he felt it. "Tie a knot in it. What did you do last night?"

  He wiped his face with his hand and reached for a bottle of Grey Goose. I grabbed it from him, unscrewed the top and handed it back. He wasn't allowed to open bottles in my place after how many longnecks he had shattered in his fucking hands.

  "I met this girl out with Bobbie," he started, then took a long gulp of vodka. "We had some dranks one night and were feelin' each other. She knew I was an ex-con, and I told her I'd gone in for robbery, and she starts going on and on about this rich old guy she bangs that keeps her as his mistress, y'know. Bought her a car, her cell phone, paid for her apartment, clothes, all that shit. But he never gave her cash because he said it would make her a whore."

  God, I needed a fucking cigarette. I found the pack and my lighter lit one.

  "I know what you're gonna say," he said, "but it was a good scene. She knew the combination to his safe because he changed it to her birthday one night when his wife was out of town and he fucked her on his cash. With his wrinkled old guy wiener, right?"

  He waited for me to say something, but I just stared at the ceiling from my easy chair while he ruined my enjoyment of the day's first smoke.

  "So, she had the safe combination and knew the alarm code because she had to use it to get into his house one night. He kept over ten grand in the safe, cash."

  "Did the cameras fucking catch you for this ten grand?" I asked.

  "No, they didn't. And we wore gloves."

  "'We?'" The heat flared up in my apartment without me realizing it. "You fucking brought her with you?"

  He started grabbing liquor bottles and stood up, his ears turning red with that temper of his. "I'm going home. You're right, you don't need to be dragged into this."

  "Wait, did you get inside the house or not? Because I sure as hell don't see any money. Please, fucking please, tell me you did not give it to her?"

  With bottles in his arms like a mother's child, he walked to my door. I popped a fireball in front of his face to stop him. He flinched; the bottles rattled.

  "Donnie, don't start anything. You know I'll flatten your ass."

  "She took the money, and you can't get in touch with her, can you?" I said from my chair.

  "She's freaked out. I left her some messages. She'll call me."

  I blew out smoke and took another deep lungful of nicotine. "If I could beat your ass, I would right now, I swear to God. I may go rent a wrecking ball so I can. Anybody from the Skee-Ay call you yet?"

  "No, man. Nobody. And nobody's gonna."

  My phone buzzed on the counter with a text message. I ignored it.

  "How did the cops show up?" I pressed him. "She said she knew the alarm code and she really didn't?"

  He still stood facing my door, bottles in his arms. "We were running across the yard afterward and a fucking neighborhood security guard spotted us, all right? He turned his lights on and told us to stop, and we split up. I gave her the money to take and got him to go after me because I could get away." He turned around to face me. "I already thought about this, man, the old guy's not gonna report the break-in because she told him it was her and that she would tell his wife about the affair if she was arrested. It's ten grand, this guy's worth nearly a million. He won't give a shit."

  "Jesus Christ, Will. What if his wife doesn't give a shit that he's having an affair and he just wants to make this little bitch of yours pay for crossing him like this?"

  "Don't play the 'what if' game, Donnie. I hate the 'what if' game."

  "Will, this dumb fucking chick is going to sell you up the river. She's not gonna protect you, man. She used you. I told you to forget about this kinda shit."

  "I'm not gonna sell you out," he said bitterly. "You already know I won't. Nobody's gonna know about you and your little secret."

  "Don't get that shitty tone. You sound like a bitch. I still got a file at Interpol marked 'John Doe,' and it's marked that because shit like this doesn't come through my door. Just, fuck, man, just come sit down, all right? We need to go over this exactly. Everything."

  He shuffled up to my chair and held out a bottle to me. "I ain't staying unless you drink, Das Biest."

  His phone buzzed in his pocket.

  "Don't fucking call me that." I grabbed the bottle, opened it and downed as much as I could take at once. "I can't believe you put me through all this and didn't even get anything for it. God damn, man."

  "I bet that's her texting me now." He pointed to all the liquor bottles and said, "'least I got something," and slapped my leg. "Now, I told you bottle race, bitch. Let's go. If they get me, they get me. I already did one stretch." He pulled his phone from his pocket and hit buttons.

  "Where is she?"

  "Hey, Bobbie says put it on channel 38."

  My phone buzzed again in the kitchen. I went and got it. Will took the remote and put it on 38. Hoffield, the guy that had the machine station next to me at the factory, had texted: LAZY BASTARD, WATCH CHNL 38. POSTERS N CHI.

  "Aw, shit," Will said from my punished couch. "Check it out, man."

  I grabbed two plastic cups from the cabinet for the drinks and went back into the living room.

 
; The news anchor from CNN went on about what some idiot Post-Human was pulling in Chicago. The tag at the bottom of the screen said in all caps, 'SPECIAL CATASTROPHIC EVENT IN PROGRESS IN CHICAGO STOCK EXCHANGE.' They started that shit up in the eighties or nineties because somebody in a courtroom or something decided that calling it a 'Post-Human Disaster' when somebody fucked everything up with their 'Atypical Human Abilities' made Post-Humans like me feel stereotyped and alienated. They had also changed 'Atypical Human Abilities' to 'Enhanced Biological Processes' because 'Atypical' made us sound like we weren't natural or some shit. That was right around the time the pussies took over the world.

  On TV, eleven Chicago cops in uniform stood around with their guns aimed at a crowd of people huddled together on a floor.

  "Where is that?" Will asked.

  "Chicago Stock Exchange."

  "The stock market's in New York."

  "Dumbass. It says it at the bottom of the screen. They got one in Chicago, too."

  The police officers each had drawn a letter on their forehead. The news had already figured out what it spelled out: Psycho Silvy.

  Will looked at me. "Fuckin' Silvy, man. What's she gonna pull this year?" He poured us both a drink in the plastic cups and handed me one. "Drink. Now." He downed his.

  I swallowed the vodka. At least once a year or so, Silvia Greenstreet pulled some kind of shit like this. She took control of a limo driver in Vegas once, she grabbed a couple of meth heads in California, she used her brain to pull somebody's strings to commit murder, to kill themselves, to do some kind of crazy crap. Because of her, mind-control beat out the insanity plea when lawyers wanted to get their clients off.

  "Tha'z your girl," Will said, already starting to slur with the alcohol going through his system. "How'd you meet her again?" He had heard the story before, but he never got tired of me talking about Europe. I had lived it up and tore it up over there by invitation while he was in his special cell in Stone Pass after Miami.

  I sipped the vodka again. "Me, Tracey, Lady Mike, Gunter the Wall and fucking Silvy all went bar-hopping in Amsterdam one cold-ass night. She was a fucking nutcase. Kept trying to start fights and shit and talk about all this weird, sick shit she wanted to make people do. She tried to get Lady Mike to give it up to her and ended up dragging Gunter into the alley behind a bar."

  "She thought 'Lady Mike' was straight?"

  "No, she just didn't give a fuck." The vodka had started to hit me, too. "She was crazy. She was all bitchy to Tracey and Tracey almost teleported her ass to the middle of the Atlantic, but Jurgen Chaotischer would have killed us because we were there to kiss her ass in case we needed her on a job. Gunter had to get on his knees for her or she was gonna make us all kill ourselves and then everybody in the place and make Tracey go down to the police station and confess to it. We were in the middle of our run over there, and nobody wanted to go back to Jurgen and tell him we let Silvy fuck it all up because nobody in our group wanted to go down on her. Gunter took that bullet. He said it was nasty as fuck, too."

  Will turned the volume up on the TV. "That's sick shit, man."

  "Yeah, you missed so much great stuff in prison," I said sarcastically.

  Six feet three inches of southern fried ass-stomp in a green flight suit walked onto the floor of the stock exchange on TV like he owned the damn place to talk with Psycho Silvy through her police mind puppets. Special Agent Red. To protect his family, he was one of only two agents with the Special Catastrophic Event Investigation Agency whose name was not public. The footage didn't have sound, but legally the first thing he had to do was rattle off his power set to give a suspect 'reasonable expectations' of what could happen to them if they resisted. Even still, the SCEIA got hit with lawsuits all the fucking time for excessive force. Had to keep the pigs honest somehow.

  Will leaned closer to the screen. "Red's gonna fuck her shit up now, man. Watch this."

  "She's not even there, dumbass. She's probably not even in the country. She can do this shit from anywhere."

  Then it happened. What everybody knew was coming. Before Red could move to disarm them, every cop turned his sidearm on himself and blew his brains out on national television. The hostages at the stock exchange freaked out but were too afraid to run. Agent Red went from cop to cop in a flash snatching away guns and trying to see if any of them survived it.

  "God dammit," I sucked down the rest of my Grey Goose and ground out my cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. "She let a fucking news camera in just so she could get that shit on TV. Fucking crazy bitch, man. If I knew where her ass was, I'd set her on fire right now myself. Fuck. That shit makes us look bad. It's gonna be on every damn station for weeks."

  "All'a us that people know are Posters," Will said. "Not you, bruh." He opened up another bottle before I could stop him and, sure enough, broke the damn thing at the neck trying to twist the top off. All over my damn couch.

  "Goddammit," I cursed at him. "This is why we can't have nice things."

  "Give me your cup."

  "Make sure you give me lots of glass shards. I love that shit."

  We kept drinking and watching the news until we got bored with the same crap being repeated and found a shitty 80's action movie to watch. Will fell and broke my damn coffee table trying to get to the bathroom to piss. By the time the six o'clock news came on, we were fucking full-on, blasting Def Leppard's Hysteria album drunk.

  I turned the volume up to see if they said anything about the gas station fire, but it was all about Silvy at the beginning of the news.

  "That's all they're gon' . . ." Will trailed off when the contents of his half-pound of solid bacon sandwich fell on the carpet. "Aw, fuck!" he yelled.

  "Shut the fuck up, motherfucker!" I told him and turned the stereo off.

  "--In local news, police were called out after a baby was found in a dumpster of the Liberty Bell Hotel on Wilmont Avenue. Authorities say the baby is a newborn and was left in the dumpster after being delivered, where it died shortly after. They say the infant had been in there at least three days before being found."

  "S'fuckin' it," I said. "I reco'nize that building."

  "You do?"

  "Yeah, I godda pass it on the way to your shit place apardment. I'm, watch, I'm gonna take care'a this shit. Fucking Wilmont Avenue, man. Fucking always shit going down there."

  Will said some shit I couldn't decipher, followed by, "What're you gonna do?"

  "I'm'a fuckin' give 'em something to scare the shit oudda them. A little fire, y'know?"

  "No, you won't, you pussy."

  I closed my eyes and focused for a second. "Done. They got a little fire to deal with now." I fumbled for my glass and knocked it over. "Fuck."

  Will laughed. "Yeah, get you some, boy. Fuck 'em, right? Fuckin' leavin' a baby in the trash, man. That's fucked-up."

  "Yeah. Had enough fucked-up shid today, man."

  "True, son. True."

  "I'm'a turn the fire off in a minute."

  "Turn the fuckin' music back on."

  It wasn't long before we passed the fuck out, black-out drunk. At least, I did. I woke up not knowing where I was but knowing that I needed to get to a bathroom. I hit my shoulder on a doorframe but made it to the toilet and got everything successfully from my mouth to the bowl while I hung on to it to keep from falling over.

  With effort, I made it over to the kitchen for a glass of water. Will was passed out on the sofa again, snoring. I filled up a used glass at the sink. When I put it to my lips I saw a giant centipede drowning at the bottom of it and dropped the glass in the steel sink with a single, "Fuck!"

  I needed air; the centipede about made me need to throw up again, and my place smelled like a damn Russian halfway house. I plotted a course to the door and breathed deeply to keep my stomach where it was. With my head against the door, I tried to unlock the deadbolt with my eyes closed. At some point, I got it without realizing it and spent who knew how long trying to unlock an unlocked lock.

  O
utside, the cool air hit me, and I staggered out into the parking lot toward my truck. I had forgotten my cigarettes but there was no going back for them. Fuck, I had left the door to my apartment open. Fuck it, I just needed to lie down in my truck and then I would take care of it. I tried to convince some random guy to go close it for me, and he told me to fuck off, so I pulled my keys out, dropped them, picked them up, dropped them again, then finally got a good hold on them and singled out the one for my truck.

  The something heavy slammed into me from the side, caught me under the arms and the next thing I knew I was sixty feet in the air and heading upward fast.

  Chapter 3

  Fallout

  Before my brain could come up with some kind of reaction other than trying not to throw up again, I got dropped onto a grit-covered, flat rooftop. As soon as I hit, the second wave of vomit I had been keeping locked down got loose.

  A cell phone camera made a digital chirp and took a picture. Somebody said, "Nasty, man. You all right?"

  I raised my pounding head from the gravel and slop to look at the son of a bitch who said it.

  A blonde, spike-haired young Asian punk in a black bodysuit put his phone back in his pocket. Everything he wore; hooded trench coat, Kevlar vest, military boots, fingerless knuckle-spiked gloves and thick round flight goggles over his eyes, was solid black like the bodysuit. He looked like he had watched The Matrix way too many times.

  His feet hovered two feet off the rooftop. Fuck me, a fucking flier. I hated fliers.

  "The fuck're you?" I asked him. "Japanese dick-sucking champ?"

  He pulled wired buds from his ears that blasted techno or some shit and let them hang on either side of his neck. "What's up, man? What'd you say?"

  "Dick-sucking?" my drunk ass came out with, trying to repeat the line he hadn't heard.

  "What?"

  "Fuck it, nev'mind," I mumbled out. I put my hand right in vomit.

  "Man, you are ass out," the kid said with a sneer. "I like to get my swerve on, too, but Jesus. I don't do shit like that when I do."