Down To Sleep Read online

  Binky tightened his grip on the switchblade but left it down by his thigh. “You killed your own mother, you psycho fuck?”

  Quinn glanced around the terminal looking more and more like an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane. “Oh, I killed the bitch…but now she’s here.”

  “Even if all this was true,” Binky said, “why would she hurt that woman? Why would she hurt me? It’s you she wants.” Quinn stared at him blankly. “Matter of fact, how the hell do I know you didn’t kill that woman yourself? You’re the one who went in and checked on her and you already admitted you offed your own mother.”

  “And when exactly did I find the time to drag the rest of her body out here and write that message on the glass?” Quinn chuckled, as if the entire scenario was suddenly too hilarious to react to otherwise. “Don’t you see? You two mean nothing to her. You’re right, it’s me she wants but…but this is just a game. She’s toying with me.”

  Binky slowly raised the switchblade. “There ain’t nobody here but us, Quinn.”

  “Are you insane? After all that’s happened you—”

  “You were sitting right across the aisle from that blonde on the bus,” he interrupted, his thoughts slowly coming together. “Did you hit on her? Did she turn you down; was that it? Is that why you did it?”

  Quinn’s eyes narrowed as if he were trying to remember. “How the…how the hell did you know that?”

  “Just like when you made the decision to kill your mother,” Binky said, the theory still forming in his mind. “You converted your thoughts, your anger, into actions…and somehow, you’re doing the same thing now. The mind’s a powerful thing, Quinn…and yours is filled with hatred and guilt. At some point, with all the darkness in your own sick mind, you found the power to turn your thoughts into reality without even realizing it.” He stepped around him, the knife poised to strike if necessary as he inched closer to the phone, still dangling against the wall. Making sure to keep Quinn in his line of sight, Binky reached for the phone with his free hand. “Your mother’s dead and buried. What’s happened here tonight’s all you asshole.”

  An eerie grin pursed Quinn’s lips, the sorrowful, teary eyes giving way to a maniacal sneer of realization and power. “If what you’re saying is true, then there’ll be a dial tone on that phone.”

  Binky heard the incessant pitch of a busy signal even before he’d brought the receiver to his ear.

  “Sounds like that line’s already in use,” Quinn smiled.

  He dropped the phone and squared his shoulders, the knife held out in front of him. “Don’t make me do this, Quinn.”

  “Look, Ma,” Quinn laughed, “no hands.”

  The knife flew from his hand as if some invisible entity had yanked it free, and as the weapon bounced harmlessly along the floor at his feet, Binky felt tears well up in his eyes and a single droplet trickle the length of his face.

  “Imagine,” Quinn said through the same hideous grin, “all those years of hatred and anger just building up inside me, stewing and growing stronger until this was the result. The power of pure, unadulterated hatred, Bink…it’s as real as anything else.”

  Reaching one trembling hand to wipe the moisture from his chin, Binky’s fingers came back slick, but not with tears.

  The substance leaking from his eyes was blood.

  Binky’s world turned a deep crimson as he gagged on a sudden mouthful of blood. He felt himself falling, crashing to the floor, and somewhere in the distance he heard a rumbling and the loud hiss of airbrakes. Fighting to remain conscious, Quinn’s voice whispered to him above the thunderous beat of his heart. “Don’t worry…you’ll bleed to death within minutes.”

  * * *

  The driver was just about to check the terminal when he saw a lone figure saunter through the double front doors. He pushed the lever to release the door and greeted his newest passenger with an apologetic smile. “Evening, sir. Sorry for the delay.”

  The man climbed the steps, his suitcase in one hand and a guitar case in the other. “What took you so long?”

  “There was a terrible accident,” the driver explained, taking the man’s ticket. “Took more than an hour for the fire department to clean up the mess before we could get through. Is there anybody else waiting?”

  “Just me.”

  The man moved down the aisle, smiling in turn at all the other weary passengers until he found an empty seat next to an attractive young woman. He tossed his bag and the guitar case into the overhead compartment and sat down as the bus lurched forward, quickly leaving the terminal behind.

  “I noticed your guitar,” the woman said. “Are you a musician?”

  He looked at her. “I prefer to call myself an artist.”

  “Any chance I could hear you play?”

  “My talents are quite new to me, I’m still learning,” he said, studying her. “But we’ve got a long ride ahead of us, and before we get to New York I’ll be happy to show you what I can do.”

  The woman smiled coyly. “Promise?”

  “I’ll think on it,” Quinn said. “Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours.”

  THE RAINCATCHERS

  I used to think the rain would wash me clean, make it all better somehow, maybe even set me free. The tears of God—that’s what they told me when I was a kid, and I believed it. Years later, slowly dying and wasting away in my own misery, I finally figured out what He was crying about. The words of warning those nuns had whispered to me every night when they tucked me, and the rest of the kids nobody wanted, in for the night were branded into my memory like all the other mantras we’d learned.

  He cries for the damned.

  That day there was nothing left but the goddamn rain, trickling from pewter skies, spattering pavement, soaking the greenest grass I’d ever seen stretched across a small, empty park, weighing down branches, dripping from shiny leaves and blurring the world like smoke and mirrors from some cheesy magic show. For a while I’d even blocked out the sound of it tapping the canvas awning, but it always feels the same. Can’t ever shake the way it feels, the rain.

  Six days out of Bangor, stuck in some quiet little town between Boston and Cape Cod, me and Cowboy just sat there, watching the rain, waiting, for what we’ll never know. Never did, really. After more than three years on the road the days all blended together without meaning or purpose, except for those days when we did our thing, when it just happened and we found ourselves raging against everything and anything. Those days you remember. Still, it don’t matter. We were way beyond redemption, had been since the whole thing started, since the first time we took it from fantasy to reality, and we were in so deep there wasn’t no turning back, no matter how much we might’ve wanted to.

  “How long we gonna sit here, Jimmy?”

  His voice broke my concentration, ruined the moment like it always did, and dragged me kicking and screaming back to reality. Me and Cowboy huddled under a big blue canvas tarp stretched over some recreation building at the outskirts of a public park. Leaning against a cinderblock wall, just feet from what would be public bathrooms once the construction was finished, trying to figure out what the hell to do next.

  “Why, you got an appointment or something?”

  Cowboy picked at his fingernails, or what was left of them. Bastard was always chomping on the damn things like some nervous schoolgirl. He stared down at his hands for a minute, then, with a sigh, turned and looked out across the park. In three years he’d aged twenty from the looks, eyes all bloodshot and saddled with big black puffy bags, his stubble-covered skin creased and battered by life and weather and all the other shit that haunts people like us. He leaned against the edge of the cinderblocks and folded his arms, and that’s when the rain got him, trickling onto his old leather hat, dripping from the brim onto his nose and chin, dangling and clinging to him like a lover in the dark. A lost puppy, drenched and shivering in the rain.

  There were times I hated the motherfucker.

&
nbsp; “I miss Nikki already,” he said softly.

  “Don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  “Ain’t never gonna find another Nikki, man.”

  “What the fuck did I just say?” I settled back against the wall, hard and cold as a corpse against my back—even through my denim jacket—stretched my legs out and crossed them at the ankles, knees cracking like twigs.

  “So what are you thinking about then?”

  I shot him a look. “Don’t never ask me that, I told you before.”

  “It’s the rain, ain’t it?” Cowboy turned, gazing down at me with those sad dark eyes, forever the scolded child. “Three years road doggin’ with you and I still don’t know what this shit is you got with rain.”

  “It’s nothing you’d understand.”

  “I ain’t stupid.”

  I let that one go, but the battle in my mind was already raging. Visions flickering through the rain like strobe lights, coming and going, living and dying with every blink of my eyes. Times I didn’t like to think about. Times before they took me away from my mother and stuck me in that home with those nuns. Times when I’d sit on the porch of that old shack and watch the rain while my mother did her business with whoever was passing through town. She did what she did; I never hated her for it. Somebody’s got to be the town whore, just so happened it was her. Damn fine woman, my mother, just had her problems like the rest of us is all.

  I pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket. Only two left. I rolled one into the corner of my mouth and struck a match, watching the flame battle to survive against the light breeze. We all have our addictions, I guess, all got our weaknesses. Crosses to bear, the nuns called it. Least my mother never told me I was born evil. Even sitting in that dingy back bedroom, shit strewn from one corner to the next, her frail body straddling an old chair, draped in a stained and faded slip, hands shaking and trying to find a vein in all that bruised and swollen skin stretched tight over bone, she always told me I was an angel.

  One of God’s little angels, she used to say.And can’t nothing ever hurt you long as you remember that.

  Least she believed it, and I guess back then, that was enough.

  “Think they found her yet?” Cowboy asked.

  And then just as soon as I’d chased the visions off, they were back. Nikki, with those big blue eyes painted black, sexy little birthmark between her nose and upper lip, smiling that fuck-me-baby smile. Goddamn waste, just like everything else, don’t know why I’d ever thought she’d be any different. “It played out,” I told him. “Let it go, Cowboy.”

  He turned his back on the rain, and if I hadn’t known him even better than he knew himself, I would’ve thought he was challenging me. “That was fucked up, Jimmy. Nikki was one of us, she—”

  “Nothing lasts forever,” I said. “How many times I got to tell you that?”

  “I just don’t see—”

  I know he was still talking, still pissing and moaning, but his voice faded away, absorbed by the rhythm of the falling rain. And I was back in that shitty little motel in Bangor, sucking down the first beer I’d had in weeks, sprawled out on a bed that wasn’t nothing special but beat the hell out of sleeping on the ground, TV showing some old black and white movie. Nikki was sitting naked in front of the mirror, doing up her eyes like she always did when we ran into enough cash to afford her makeup. Big black long-legged spiders surrounding those baby blues, catching my attention in the mirror and giggling like a toddler come Christmas morning.

  “She wasn’t like the rest of them,” I heard Cowboy say. “Nikki was special, man, she was one of us. She was…”

  Just another bitch we’d snagged on the road. Young and pretty and stupid and dreaming about being a big star in Hollywood. A hot little tramp hitchhiking and running from some backwater town down south, running from a step daddy who loved her a little too much and a town where girls like her ended up pouring coffee at the local diner for the rest of their lives…or ended up like my mother.

  The only reason she lasted as long as she did was because she had the same disease festering inside her that me and Cowboy got, and those eyes and that ass and that smile and those tits came in handy on the road. But she wasn’t never one of us.

  I knew Cowboy was in love with her and that’s why it had to end. Can’t love nothing in this life if you want to survive…or even if you don’t. But he’d never see it that way. All the rest he could go along with, but Nikki he’d never get over, never forgive either one of us for. So I tuned him out and listened to the rain.

  Nothing quite like that sound. Rain.

  Made me think about being a kid again, sitting on the front porch of that old shack. My mother had a regular named Earl something, big fat slob, a traveling coffee salesman who drove through town in his piece of shit black Cadillac every few weeks. He’d waddle across the yard, toss me a can of coffee, muss my hair with his sausage fingers then go inside and roll around with my mother for an hour or so.

  I kept every coffee can the fucker ever gave me. Once they were empty I’d stack them out behind the house. My mother couldn’t afford much in the way of toys, so I played with them fucking cans. Didn’t matter anyway, there weren’t any kids in town I could call friends, so I was pretty much on my own. The rain…the rain was my friend. My best friend.

  It rained the last day I saw Earl. When he pulled up he noticed all the coffee cans scattered across the weed infested dirt lot we called a front yard, rain pinging against metal. I had a plan to catch me some rain.

  “What the hell are you doing, boy?” he asked, hurrying as best a man at his weight could to the shelter of the porch. “They turn off your indoor plumbing or something?”

  “Just playing, sir,” I told the fat fuck. “Catching some rain.”

  His pig eyes laughed at me, same way my mother’s laughed at him once he was gone and she was counting his money. “Can’t catch something like rain, boy. Like trying to catch the wind, don’t you know that?”

  Worst part is, he was right. Even after the rain, when I took all them cans back behind the house, careful not to spill them, the shit inside wasn’t rain, not anymore. Once you caught it, it became something else. Something common, something missing the magic that made me want to capture it in the first place.

  Even days later, when the water had turned dull and murky and had all sorts of small flying bugs floating dead along the top, I kept the shit. My mother asked me why once, how come that rainwater was so goddamned important to me. Never did give her an answer, but not because I didn’t have one.

  “What the hell we going to Cape Cod for anyway?”

  I looked at Cowboy; his face all scrunched up into a grimace. “There’s still another couple months before the tourist season hits. Nice and quiet out there now,” I said. “Plus, it rains a lot there this time of year.”

  “You and your fucking rain.” He let the cinderblocks support him, his eyes darting back and forth, scanning the park. “I don’t like these small towns, man. Guys like us stick out like titties on a ten-year-old. Always feel safer in the city, Jimmy. Cops in a big city don’t give a shit about guys like us, but in these places they love fucking with—”

  “Quit bitching,” I snapped. “Where you want to go?”

  Something kind of like a smile twitched across his lips. “I was thinking heading back toward Boston. Hang around there for a while, see what we can see. Remember how Nikki wanted to go to Boston for a while?”

  Nikki.

  Doggin’ it with us for more than two months. Crazier than we were. She could pull down enough cash working a truck stop for a few hours to keep us in hot food and motel sheets for days at a clip. Between what the truckers paid her for head and what she could steal when they weren’t looking, she was a moneymaking machine. But it wasn’t until the first night we did our thing, her picking a guy up at a bar and luring him outside to his car where me and Cowboy were waiting, that I knew she was special. All of us piling into that
car and driving him way out onto the state highway. Pulling into a rest area and dragging the cocksucker out into the tall grass between pavement and forest. The three of us—for the first time, the three of us—circling him, raining down on him until he didn’t cry or scream or beg no more.

  And Nikki, even better at it than me and Cowboy, even more turned on, drowning in the rush of power and the high you can only get from watching the life slip from somebody, and knowing you’re the one who stole it.

  I knew then we couldn’t just use Nikki up and toss her aside like all the pussy before her. I knew she’d stick for a while…but I also knew there’d come a day when I’d have to cut her loose.

  “Tell you what,” I sighed. “You want to go to Boston for a while? Then that’s where we’ll go.”

  Cowboy turned, crouched down next to me, grinning with them brown teeth. “You mean it, man?”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Besides, what the fuck did peace and quiet ever do for us, right?”

  Somewhere along the line his laughter turned to screams.

  Nikki’s screams.

  Getting up from that table, eyes and lips painted black, dancing and laughing, taunting me at the foot of the bed. Cowboy watching her—a love struck kid as always—his chest heaving; eyes wide, soaking in that body and all the evil that went with it.

  Nikki giggling and crawling across the bed like some panther in heat, talking shit about the next mark we found and how sweet it could be, her hands all over me, her head dropping into my lap and her mouth on me. Cowboy looking away, jealous and wishing it was him instead. The phone by the bed suddenly in my hand…all that fucking blood.

  Cowboy cradling her in his arms, crying and asking me why I had to do it this time, why her, why now? Me, standing in that tiny bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, covered in her blood. Feeling the high, the release, and the anger slipping away into the closest thing to calm I ever get.