Strange Weather by Joe Hill
“You figured out he killed your girlfriend’s daddy just because he glanced at his wrist?”
“Well, it didn’t help that his daughter was wearing one of Yolanda’s bracelets. I recognized it straightaway,” I lifted my wrist to show him the silver bangle. “I asked for it back this morning. Besides, if there was any doubt about what the neighbor did, it was cleared up when he entered the house at two in the morning to suffocate me with a pillow.”
He studied me for a moment longer, then turned his head and called to a couple of his compadres pushing brooms in the street. “You guys want a break from cleanup?”
“To do what?” one of them asked.
“To grab a murdering bigot and drag his ass to the lockup.”
The two soldiers looked at each other. The one leaning on his broom said, “Shit, why not? It’ll give us something to do while we’re waiting on the world to end.”
My soldier said, “Come on. Let’s go. Jump in the Humvee.”
“No, sir, I can’t. I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to Dr. Rusted’s house without me.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? We haul this guy in to Denver PD, they’re going to want you to give a statement.”
“And I will, but they’ll have to contact me at my house on Jackdaw Street. I left Dr. Rusted’s daughter up in Boulder. I need to get back to her.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked away from me. “Yeah. All right. I suppose she’ll want to know about her old man.”
I didn’t tell him the girl I wanted to get back to wasn’t waiting on news of her father, on account of being just as dead as he was. I was glad to let my soldier think what he wanted, as long as I could keep moving. As restless and antsy as I was, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Dr. Rusted’s and maybe losing another day in Denver.
I told him where the police could find the doctor and his assailant and where they could locate me in Boulder when they wanted my statement.
“If they want a statement. If this even goes to a judge.” My soldier took an uneasy look at the sky. “If the rains keep falling, I think trial by jury might be a fond memory in a few months. We’ll be back to frontier justice soon enough. Hanging people on the spot. Saves time and trouble.”
“Eye for an eye?” I asked.
“You know it,” he told me, and turned to glare at the crow. “I hope you’re paying attention, you filthy beast.”
The crow, half a block away, squawked at us, then lifted its prize, opened its wings, and flapped laboriously away—getting while the getting was good.
I WAS ALMOST BACK TO the pike when I came across Dillett’s John Deere, crashed through a fence of slender wooden posts and dumped in a dusty lot, just shy of a bridge over the brown, noisy rush of the South Platte River. The windshield had been shattered into a dozen spiderweb fractures from the evening’s rain. The driver’s-side door hung open on darkness.
I climbed up on the running board for a peek inside. The interior was empty but scattered with bloody hundred-dollar bills. The handcuffs hung from the steel bar under the dash. Someone had left what at first looked like a filthy, uncooked sausage on the driver’s seat. I leaned close, squinting at it, trying to figure out what it was, then realized it was a thumb and recoiled so fast I almost fell out onto the dirt. My stomach turned. Someone had clipped Teasdale’s thumb off so he could slip the cuffs, and then his mystery accomplice had attempted to stanch the bleeding with money. There were some torn strips of bloody white silk on the floor and something glittering in the footwell of the passenger seat. I reached in and picked it out. A fake golden tiara.
I don’t know for sure that Teasdale met the Queen of the Apocalypse. I can’t swear that she cut off part of his hand to enable his escape or that she bandaged him with ribbons torn from her wedding dress, padded with money out of her carpetbag. I could not tell you if the two of them went to Canada together. Maybe they did, though.
Maybe she taught him how to walk between raindrops.
I LEFT THE JOHN DEERE behind and went on. I was no tractor thief and didn’t have the confidence to try to drive a vehicle the size of a Tyrannosaurus rex anyhow. But I did miss having a ride. I was seven hours hoofing it through the hot, dry grass along the side of the Denver-Boulder Turnpike. I walked until I was footsore and weary and then walked some more.
The state troopers and the prisoners from the supermax weren’t to be found on the eight lanes of pike that day. Maybe, after yesterday’s escape, it was decided there was too much risk in trying to use them as a road crew. Or—and this struck me as more likely—maybe they didn’t see the point. After last night’s rainfall, the road was a trough filled with brassy spokes of sharpest crystal. All of yesterday’s sweeping hadn’t accomplished anything.
I wasn’t alone on the road. I saw lots of folks picking over abandoned cars, looking for loot. But this time no one bothered me. It was a quiet walk, no cars going by, no planes droning in the sky, no one to talk to, almost no sound at all except the buzzing of flies. To this day there are probably more flies feasting in the wrecks along those eighteen miles of the pike than there are human beings in all of Colorado.
As I was coming down the off-ramp in Boulder, I heard a boom that gave my heart a leap. People sometimes compare thunder to cannon fire. This was less like hearing a cannon go off and more like what you’d hear if you were shot from one. The sky was an expanse of filmy blue haze. At first it seemed there wasn’t a cloud in it. Then I spied what was almost like the ghost of a cloud, a towering blue mound so big it would’ve made an aircraft carrier look like a kayak. Only it hardly seemed to be there at all. It was like a halfhearted sketch of a cloud, lightly penciled in over the peaks. The afternoon heat was mounting, though, and I thought we would get pounded again at the end of the day, harder than ever. It wasn’t just that single blaring crash of thunder that made me think another storm was building. It was the almost airless quality to the late afternoon, a feeling like no matter how deeply I inhaled, my heart and lungs were never getting a full supply of oxygen.
The crews from Staples and McDonald’s were gone, and the football field was abandoned. A few earthmovers had been scattered about, and the field itself had been blanketed with a layer of dry yellow sod, concealing the recent dead. Numbered white posts stood in ranks, all they had for grave markers. I’m sure there were enough dead in Boulder to plant the field thrice over, but the project seemed to have been discontinued. The whole town was hushed and still, almost no one out on the sidewalks. There was a terrible sense of the place steeling itself for the next and worst blow.
That clamped-down air of silence went on for block after block, but there was nothing quiet about Jackdaw Street. Andropov had the radio and the TV going, top volume, just like when I left. You could hear it from the end of the street. That was interesting enough on its own. Power was out all over town, but he had his own source of juice: a genny or just a lot of batteries.
That wasn’t the only sound on the street. Elder Bent’s house throbbed with carefree song. They were singing what at first sounded like a religious hymn but after a more careful listen turned out to be Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love.” What a strange thing, to hear voices lifted in joy after a long hot day of walking with nothing to listen to except the idiot harmonic of the flies.
As I closed in on my house, I saw Templeton watching from the open bay door of his garage. He had come right up to the edge of the shadows but, as always, had held up there, knowing how sick the sunlight would make him. He had his cape over his shoulders, and when he saw me coming, he spread his arms out to either side and showed me his fangs. I made a cross with my fingers, and he obediently retreated into the gloom.
I stood in the street looking at Ursula’s house, thinking how nice it would be to go in there and sit on the couch and rest my feet. Maybe she would bring me some sun tea. Later, when the evening was cool, I could stretch out with Yolanda and slip the silver bracelet off my wrist and on to hers.
Then I c
There was another boom of thunder, loud enough to make the air quiver. If I thought it over long enough, I could probably devise a sly way to lure him out of his first-floor apartment so I could slip in while he wasn’t around and have another look in his bathroom. Then again, if I waited another night and he knew I was around, he might come for me himself.
I decided subterfuge was overrated and that it was better, as Admiral Lord Nelson supposedly said, to “go right at ’em!” I sank to one knee, took the water bottles out of my knapsack and lined them up on the curb. Then I began to collect fistfuls of crystal spikes. I piled them in until the bag was two-thirds full and as heavy as a sack of marbles. I zipped it shut, hefted it once to get the feel of it, and went up the steps to Andropov’s porch.
I booted the door once, twice, a third time, hard enough to jolt it in the frame. I roared, “Immigration, Ivan, open up! Donald Trump says we got to drag your ass back to Siberia! Either you let us in or we’ll kick the door off its hinges!”
I stepped to the side and pressed myself against the wall.
The door flew open, and Andropov stuck his fat, sagging face out. “I immigrate my cock to your hole, you lesbeen beetch—” he started, but he didn’t get any further than that.
I brought the sack down on the top of his head with both hands, and he collapsed to one knee, which was where I wanted him. I brought my own knee up into the center of his face and connected with the bony crunch of a snapping nose. He groaned and dropped to all fours. He had a big, rusty wrench in one hand that I didn’t intend to give him a chance to use. I brought the heel of one cowboy boot down on his knuckles and heard bones split. He screamed and let go.
I scooped up the wrench and stepped over him, into the front hall. It was dark and bare and had a sour smell of mildew and body odor. The green flower-print wallpaper was peeling away to show the water-stained plaster beneath.
A left turn took me to a squalid living room. The couch and end tables were the kind of stuff most folks put out on the sidewalk, next to a cardboard sign that says FREE. There was a bong made out of a two-liter Coke Zero bottle, five inches of brown slop that looked like diarrhea water in it.
He had an iPod jacked into a Mophie Powerstation, next to a big Bluetooth speaker. Twitchy synth loops played over a steady whop-whop beat. I jerked the power cable out of his sound deck, and that killed his St. Petersburg electronica. But the apartment was still filled with bellowing noise. Somewhere in the rear of the apartment, Hugh Grant was shouting over a background soundtrack of swelling violins. Beneath that came a stream of angry, muffled cries.
I stumbled in the short, dim hall between the living room and the bedroom. An enormous hot-pink vibrator in the shape of a horse’s phallus rolled under my foot. I lurched and put a hand out against a door to my right, and it swung open to show the dingy little bathroom I’d glimpsed before.
He had arranged a lab for himself in there. I wasn’t any chemist, but it for sure looked like he had a sinkful of crystal, glassy yellowish-white shards. Several big brown jugs labeled as brake fluid—brake fluid?—sat in the bathtub. Rubber tubing ran between flasks of amber liquid. The whole place had the sharp stink of nail polish.
The muffled cries were closer now. I backed out of the bathroom and went on to the bedroom.
Martina was on the big brass bed, handcuffs on her wrists, hands behind her back. A black leather bracelet had been buckled around her right ankle. One end of an extension cable was clipped to it. The other end had been elaborately knotted around one of the shiny brass bedposts.
The bedsheets were a tangle under her bony, light frame. She peered out from beneath the twisted Debbie Harry coils of her golden hair, like a bright-eyed fox peering out from a heap of briars. Andropov had strapped a piece of duct tape across her mouth. A laptop was open on a nearby dresser, playing what looked like Notting Hill at top volume.
She glared at me and kicked the wall with her free foot, same as she’d been doing the day before—the only way she could let anyone know she needed help. She struggled to rise to her knees, writhing from side to side and lifting the sharp edges of her hip bones into the air. It just about looked like porno: a twenty-two-year-old alabaster-skinned stripper in cheap white underwear and a tight little Ramones T-shirt that was so threadbare and thin it barely looked fit for use as a dishrag. What made me hold up, though, wasn’t my surprise to find her a prisoner in Andropov’s bedroom. It was the sight of a glass pipe, on the end table, with more yellowish chunks of crystal in it—crystal that was looking less and less like lethal rain and more and more like you-know-what.
I was taking it all in, waiting for my brain to catch up to my eyes, when the mad Russian crashed in. He stumbled past me—it was dark, and the floor was carpeted in sour-smelling unwashed laundry—then turned and stood between me and her. The lower half of his face was sticky with blood, and his broken left hand twitched against his chest. Tears crawled down his bristly cheeks.
“You stay away from her, lesbeen! She not go away with you!”
The way he called me a lesbian, like it was the dirtiest word he knew, got the better of me. I slapped him with an open hand. I didn’t have any words, just an overwhelming desire to smack his fat, foolish, tragic face. The instant I did it, he erupted into sobs that shook his whole body.
I moved around him and snatched the duct tape off Martina’s mouth. If I wrote down all the four-letter words that came pouring out of her, this page would catch fire in your hands.
When she finally started to make sense, what she said was “I try to leave, and crazy asshole lock me here, two days now! Crazy fucking piece of turd!” And she stretched toward him, getting as close as she could, and spit on his head. “Two days he run Notting Hill over and over, only unlock me to piss! He smoke too much his own shitty drugs!”
Andropov turned to face her, holding his head in his hands and sobbing wretchedly. “You said you run away with thees lesbeen! You said you have me arrest and live with girls who have the pussy to eat, leave me for women at end of world!”
“I said it, and I meant it! You go to jail a meelion years!”
He looked at me with pleading, miserable, lunatic eyes. “Every day, all the time, she parade herself almost naked to you lesbeens. Always she is calling to tell me she plan to sleep with you both! She say only women make her cum, and she laugh at me—”
“Yes, I laugh at you, I laugh at your penis, always soft—”
And then they were screaming at each other in Russian and she was spitting at him again and my head was about to split from the way the both of them were carrying on. He drew back one arm like he was going to backhand her, and I thumped him in the stomach with the wrench—not hard but hard enough to drive the air out of him and bend him double. He swayed, sank to his knees, and curled up on his side, crying his guts out. You never saw a more pitiful sight.
I stepped around Andropov and paused Notting Hill. I spotted a chrome key by the laptop and figured I’d try it on the handcuffs. I sat on the edge of the bed with Martina, and her bracelets popped off with a snick! She rubbed her bruised wrists.
“Filthy, horrible, soft-dick man,” she said, but her voice was lower now, and she was shaking.
I picked up the glass pipe with the crystals in it. “What’s this?”
“Drug he make me take to shut me up,
“What kind of drug?”
“Crystal meth.” She bit her lower lip and began to wrestle with the buckle around her ankle.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me something else. He isn’t from the area around Georgia, is he?”
Her brow furrowed. “What? No. Moscow.”
“And I guess he doesn’t know how to make the kind of crystals that are falling from the sky?”
“What you mean? No. No.” She barked—a harsh, ugly laugh. “He is washed-up pharmacist, not geeenius.”
“I love you,” he said to her from where he was curled up on the floor. “If you leave, I shoot myself.”
By now she had freed her ankle from the strap around it. She leapt up and began to kick him.
“Good! I hope so! I buy you the bullets myself!”
He did not attempt to escape from his place on the floor. Her foot found his ass again and again.
I’d heard about all I could stand. I dropped the wrench on the bed and left the two of them to the pleasure of each other’s company.
I STOOD ON THE PORCH, leaning against the railing, inhaling the clean, clear air with its taste of the mountains and summer. A few members of the comet cult had heard the commotion and come out onto the porch, Elder Bent among them, his stepdaughters flanking him. The girls were pretty brunettes in their early twenties, and each of them wore matching ceremonial hubcaps on their heads. It was only the best for Elder Bent’s pretties: golden ’59 Lancer hubcaps that looked like UFOs from a black-and-white movie.