Less Than Human Page 2

  She stared at him, alternately attracted and repulsed. "Is that stick really made out of… bone? Or were you just kidding around, trying to throw me off my game?"

  "I never kid about anything to do with pool. It's made out of bone. Human bone."

  "You're lying. Where did you get something like that?"

  "I got it from the first guy I ever played against. When I made my comeback"

  Everyone at the bar was watching them now. The TV continued on, soundless people cheering a soundless game. The juke dropped another record. Leon dropped a glass.

  Conversation looked to be on hold.

  Dorinda looked over at her father, and for the first time she could ever remember, he looked afraid. The sight filled her with fear, too.

  "He lost it to you on a bet, huh?" Dorinda asked, licking her

  "Yes he did, in a manner of speaking."

  "I bet it's worth a lot."

  "Only to him. It was made from his legs."

  The smile died on her lips, unborn.

  Leon reached his hand under the bar. "All right, that's enough. You're scaring Dorinda talking that voodoo bullshit. All bets are off." His right hand came out from under the bar with a double-barreled sawed-off twelve-gauge in it. "You and your friend get the hell out of here, right now."

  Steven looked at the shotgun, then calmly turned back to Dorinda as though Leon didn't exist. His eyes caught the light and gave it back, shiny yellow, like some kind of animal. "You want to see a trick?" Without waiting for an answer he closed his eyes and stroked the cue ball. It banked twice then rolled the entire length of the table with maddening slowness until it kissed the eight, soft as a whisper. It fell into the pocket.

  Leon spat, wadded up a hundred-dollar bill, and threw it at Steven's feet. "Pick it up; go on, you hear me? You take your money and hit that door. I don't want no trouble."

  "We don't want any trouble either, do we, Earl?" Steven said. With a small grin, he unscrewed his cue stick and laid it on the table. He picked up the wadded bill, walked toward the bar. Stopped as the gun raised. "We just came in here for a friendly game of pool."

  "We like to keep it friendly," Earl agreed. He stood up.

  Two soft clicks were the only sounds as Leon pulled back the hammers on the twelve-gauge. It looked like a toy in his huge hand. "I don't know what you two came in here for, but it damn sure wasn't to shoot no pool." He swung the gun around, centered the two stubby barrels on Earl's chest. "If I had to guess, I'd say your friend there is some crazy son of a bitch who gets his kicks out of scaring young girls."

  "Hell, Leon," Earl said, "you must be psychic. You ought to get you one of them nine-hundred telephone numbers and tell fortunes for a living. You see anything in my future?"

  "Nothing you're gonna like if I ever lay eyes on either one of you again," Leon promised.

  "Damn, I was hoping for money."

  Steven laid the crumpled bill on the bar, started backing away. "Oh, we'll meet again," he said. "You can count on it." He turned to pick up his cue stick, the easy smile still on his face. "Come on, Earl, I guess we'd better leave. It looks like we've worn out our welcome." The smile left his face.

  His cue stick was gone.

  Chapter 2

  John Warrick was a small-time drifter and hustler, and the only thing he cared about in this world was playing pool. A very few people, who made it their business to know such things, said he might have been the best to ever play the game. They also said he was past it now.

  Maybe that was so.

  Maybe it wasn't.

  All John knew for sure was that last night he'd taken a smart-ass college boy for three hundred of his rich daddy's bucks. And he had also lifted a pool cue, a very nice pool cue with a red snake curled around the handle.

  He'd taken a chance walking behind that crazy son of a bitch who'd been messing with Leon. If that shotgun had gone off, it would have made hamburger out of the both of them. But life was full of risks. This one had paid off.

  At the moment he was sitting on a bed in a cheap motel just outside San Benito, nursing a Lone Star that had gone warm ten minutes ago. In his hands was the cue stick he had risked his life to get. He was waiting to see if any of the images would gather in his head. Ninety percent of the time nothing ever happened. Sometimes it did. It always took a while, and he was patient, letting the pictures come. Waiting for the cue to give up its secrets.

  John Warrick had one other talent besides pool. He was a little bit psychic.

  After a few minutes the water stains on the ceiling were gone, replaced by the patter of warm rain, neon glare in the night. John Warnck was now someone else and he was walking down a street. Searching for something. Someone. Hookers came up to him, bright smears of color, soft honied voices, offering to fulfill his every sexual fantasy. He smelled their drugs, their diseases, and he rejected their offers. The crowds thinned. The lights were left behind. He walked on, searching.

  Finally he found what he wanted.

  A teenaged boy.

  They talked. The boy said his name was Joey. The man gave no name. After a few minutes, Joey motioned for him to follow. John felt heat in the pit of his stomach.

  The boy led him through a winding alley and up some stairs to a room on the second floor. Money changed hands and he pulled the boy close. Nuzzled his throat. Cold leather, warm skin. A hint of some cheap after-shave on a face too young to shave. John tried to wake up but the images were too strong and they held him between waking and sleeping.

  Suddenly John knew that whoever this man was, he wasn't here for sex. Not even this kind. His lips peeled back over teeth, and the hustler knew the man was smiling. A case was laid on the soiled bed. Opened. Something long was taken out. He couldn't quite tell what it was. Then he saw it had a red snake on the handle. And that it was sharp.

  Everything faded for a moment. And he knew something had happened. Something awful.

  The boy struggled, and John could feel every beat of the laboring heart. Strong at first, then slowing. Slowing. A wild bird flinging itself against the bars of its cage. As the small heart struggled beneath the frail ribs, John could feel his mind merging with Joey's mind. He knew everything the boy knew, his deepest wishes, his darkest fears. It was fragments for the most part, pieces of nightmare coupled with dim memories. This man who held Joey in his arms was watching the boy die. And enjoying it.

  John Warrick separated from the man, separated from himself and became Joey Estevez as he was drawn down… into the dying boy's nightmare… as… Joey watched the rats crawl from the gutted dog. He knew they had seen him.

  It was impossible they could have found him so soon, yet somehow, they had. More of them spilled from the fire-gutted house on the corner. Just a few at first. But in seconds, the place was swarming with them and they watched him from the stoop, making no effort to hide, jostling each other like a crowd of anxious spectators at a parade.

  Joey would have laughed if he wasn't so scared.

  Agitation swept through their midst as though they were… expecting him, and Joey felt he should know why they had come, why they were after him. The answer taunted, an elusive secret that danced beyond his grasp, tantalizing him with its nearness, whispering words he couldn't quite hear.

  Joey felt the weight of their eyes as he moved past. His legs pistoned, a sharp turn, and the rats disappeared from sight.

  He listened for sounds of pursuit.

  All he heard was the rain drumming its fingers across the rooftops.

  And the jackhammer of his heart.

  Few people were on the streets at this late hour of the night. A man with an empty shirtsleeve pinned to his shoulder leaned against a street lamp and drank from a bottle in a brown paper bag. He began dancing, a demented Gene Kelly who stopped now and then to gesture, to whisper vague threats to companions who existed only in his mind. A hooker limped by on her way home, oblivious of the rain, cradling five-inch spike heels in one hand, a glowing cigarette in the other.<
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  "You better lay off that shit, Luke," she called out to the dancer. "It'll make you crazy."

  A cab cruised down the puddle-filled street, drowning the man's laughter beneath the hiss of tires.

  No one saw Joey, who was dressed in black, from his leather jacket down to the Air Jordans that hugged his feet. The dark clothes made him one more shadow on a street of shadows, and if you were a thief and hustler, that's the way it had to be.

  Especially if you were only fifteen.

  He'd been out, taking care of business. Now he was on his way home.

  Home—

  What a joke that was. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to have a real honest-to-god home, the kind that came with parents who made you eat all the vegetables on your plate, who made you do your homework, who beat your ass when you stayed out too late.

  Who said they loved you.

  A vacant smile replaced the sneer. That dream had become ancient history when a doctor up at County had walked out into a waiting room and told him his mama had OD'ed. Joey remembered a dirty white jacket and empty blue eyes that looked right through him. The guy said it like he was talking about the fucking weather. Hey kid, it's going to rain today; hey kid, don't forget your umbrella; and by the way, kid, your mama used to be a junkie but now your mama's dead.

  Before she made love to the needle for the final time, she had laid a curse on him. She made him swear he would find his dad and get him off the booze.

  Last month he'd managed to keep his promise, even though it had been by accident. Still it had been something of a tearful reunion—the old bastard had caught him on the nose with a wine bottle while Joey had been going through his pockets in an alley over on Collins.

  Joey had been about to carve his initials on some unwashed skin when something in the old man's voice had stopped him. The foulmouthed swearing had a familiar ring.

  They were together now, him and the old man, doing their best to get by. Joey did whatever he had to in order for them to eat: shoplifting, purse snatching, making pickups for the bookies.

  When times were really tough, he sold his body to men with a taste for young boys, his defiant smile a bandage far too small to cover the hurt when he endured their cold sweaty hands, when they threw their money at his feet, when they roared away in cars that smelled of new leather and spent passion… to their big fine homes… where the rats never came in the night.

  The city fought sleep, tossing and turning fitfully, a shadow troubled by fevered neon dreams. Sounds leaked from the apartments he passed: an argument between a man and a woman, a snatch of Latino melody, a child laughing, an old woman praying, someone crying. Always someone crying.

  Night music his mama had called it, a lullaby made by souls in torment.

  When he used to ask her what she meant, she would always brush the hair from over his eyes and hold him close without answering. Without conscious thought, he brushed the hair from his eyes.

  He pushed the painful thoughts aside. Time to get a move on. The night had managed to find him far from home. He hated the night, because the rats came then and they might try to get into the apartment. His dad was there alone. He picked up the pace, his footsteps throwing lonely echoes down the alley—pat pat pat—increasing to a run as he weaved around an overturned garbage can.

  At first he didn't see the rats. He plowed into them before he realized what they were, and they lazily abandoned the contents of the can, only to return like a swarm of blowflies disturbed on a summer day. Fear kicked Joey in the gut, driving the breath from his body. He did his best to make himself part of the wall when the biggest rat he'd ever seen crawled out holding a gobbet of something bloody.

  The thing was a monster, a twisted crippled mass of scar tissue with fur the color of pissed-on snow. Joey watched it drag its bloated body up onto a fire escape and hobble along as it tried to flee with its prize. But the smaller rats were quicker. They were waiting at the other end.

  Drawn by the smell of blood, they crept across the swaying span. The sheer weight of them caused the rusted metal to groan in protest. Their hunger drove them, made them edge nearer the bared fangs, their eyes wet with equal portions of need and fear as they sidled up to death.

  They hesitated, working up their courage. And then, like a single-minded organism that knew a part must die so the whole might live, they lunged forward.

  The white monster killed five.

  It caught them by the throat and flung their wriggling bodies from the fire escape like a child digging through a drawer in search of a missing sock. One bounced off the wall by Joey and he recoiled from the wetness that splattered his face.

  Anger overcame fear.

  "You want something to eat? I got something right here. How about a little metal pizza, you fuckers!" He scooped up a garbage-can lid and flung it in a flat, vicious arc.

  A squeal of agony died beneath the clang of metal and the white rat's hindquarters were almost severed in two. It should have died right there, but instead it began a frenzied dance, around and around, its body held together by a piece of skin no bigger than a string, leaking wet black stains onto the pavement.

  What happened next was inevitable. Joey had seen it many times before—the writhing bodies descended, a magician's scarf fluttering in the night.

  "Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!" Disgust was in his voice as he broke into an impromptu impression of a carnival barker. "We're only doing one show tonight, so you'd better get your tickets quick." He scanned the imaginary crowd, getting into the part. "How much, you ask? It's a steal. One thin dime—yes, sir, that's right, ten cents gets you in." He ripped an invisible ticket, his eyes never leaving the rats.

  "Watch close now. It's showtime!"

  He swept an arm outward and the scarf of flesh parted on cue. Not a trace of the injured rat remained. The other five were gone, too.

  "Rat magic, ladies and gentlemen. Now you see it."

  He tipped an imaginary derby and bowed to the imaginary applause.

  "And now you don't."

  Joey smiled but the fear returned to his eyes when he felt their eyes bore into him. En masse they rose to their back legs, noses sniffing the air expectantly. His fingers strayed once again to his face, searching until they found a small blemish, a scar that marred his features.

  "What the hell do you want from me?" His words were smothered by the night. And they came at him like rain pouring from a downspout, their claws scrabbling for purchase on the cobblestones as they gathered speed.

  "Oh man, something definitely weird is going down here," he said, "very weird." He turned and fled from the alley, his footsteps pounding a tattoo down the street. His side stitched with pain as he raced on, doubling him over.

  His building came into sight and he risked a quick look around before ducking in. A sign was nailed to the door. Only one word, it summed up the building: The word was Condemned.

  The landing was pitch black, but that didn't stop Joey. He knew every creak, every loose board in the place. Taking the steps three at a time, he raced to the second floor. A rustling came in the dark. For a timeless moment he knew the stairs were covered with rats. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of rats.

  —that they were creeping downward—

  -that they were only inches away—

  The thought that one might touch his face caused his heart to squirt sideways. He floated in the blackness, frozen by terror when he recalled how quickly the rats had scrambled down the fire escape.

  "This is crazy, muy loco," he muttered, yanking out a book of matches. When he tried to strike one, his hands began to shake. What if it was true? What if they really were waiting?

  On the third try the match flared, burning his nose with the stink of sulfur. He lit the entire book and heaved it up the stairwell.

  Only shadows flickered on the walls.

  Mocking him.

  Then he saw a flash of yellowish white and for an instant he thought the huge rat had returned. Bu
t it was just a newspaper caught in a draft, flapping down the hallway like a lost and weary ghost searching out a room for the night. His laughter died with the light. The sight of all those rats in the alley had gotten to him.

  He bolted the remaining distance.

  Softly he eased into the apartment and tried to swallow the soured cotton that clogged his throat. His eyes slitted before they adjusted to a kerosene lamp guttering in the corner. The glow barely disturbed the shadows. That was okay with Joey, because the place wasn't much to look at anyway, just a bare room with a stained mattress on the floor and a couch so old its bones poked through.

  His dad was a pile of rags asleep on the mattress, snoring gutturally, and Joey breathed a sigh of relief. Everything was okay. He was home now.

  Yet the fear refused to die.

  Somewhere, out of sight, came the sound of claws.

  He tried to locate the furtive scrabbling. He couldn't.

  It seemed to come from everywhere.

  "Come on, Papa," he urged, his voice cracking, "we've got to get out of here." As he reached over to shake the figure huddled beneath the filthy blanket, his foot bumped something. It tipped over with a clatter… and the scratching grew louder… grew frantic… as though a signal of some kind had been given.

  With animal quickness, Joey's hand darted out and grabbed the object. He turned it over, fascinated by the dull oily sheen that reflected hack. Then, without warning, his head throbbed, clenching his skull in a vise of pain so intense he was rocked back. In an instant the tremor passed. He gave his head a shake before turning back toward his dad, before smiling and hefting the object in his hand.

  Flipping it high in the air. Watching as it spun.

  End over end.

  Once. Twice.

  Watching as it came to rest in his hand.

  Staring at a wine bottle—an empty wine bottle.

  "You said you'd quit," Joey accused, his voice going soft as he caressed the bottle. "When I took you in, you swore on Mama's grave."

  Agitation swept across his face, chasing all other emotions before it like leaves before the wind. He bit into his lip and a dot of blood appeared, the head of a black worm crawling out onto his chin. He blinked back tears and fought for calm. His eyes were those of an angel betrayed.