Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

the vest off her lap. Then she fishes for a cigarette, lights one, and cracks her window. “This gets stupider by the minute.”

“This prick Wachowski is unpredictable, Gerbil, I’d feel better if you stayed in the truck.”

“They’re all unpredictable, Ozzy. What am I—a rookie?”

“I’d feel better if you sat this one out.”

“Have we met? I got no sick days left at the coffee shop, I’m short on this month’s rent—and now I’m supposed to go off on some circle jerk with Don Quixote here?!”

“I’m just asking you to stay in the truck this time, don’t make a big deal out of it.”

Gerbil smokes her cigarette, thinks for a moment. “If you were cracking up, you’d tell me, right?”

He glances at her. “Whattya mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know, little things like you’re talking to yourself all the time and you think you’re on a mission from God and you’re intermittently shitting your pants.”

He sighs. “It’s not a mission from God, Gerbil, it’s a last wish.”

“A what?”

“It’s imperative that I do this.

“Oh right, right. Thank you. That just clears it all right the fuck up.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m listening.”

“I told you it’s personal shit. Plus—” He pauses. “—never mind, forget it.”

“Plus what?”

“It’s nothing, forget it.”

“I’m going to open the door and jump out of this fucking vehicle if you don’t tell me.”

He takes a deep breath, then lets out a sigh. “If I don’t do this, I’m never going to see Matilda again. Okay? There. I said it. You happy now?”

Gerbil smokes, stares at him, thinks about it. “There’s gotta be some kind of medication you can get for this.”

“What can I tell ya? It was a deathbed-type situation, I didn’t see it coming.” He hangs his head for a moment, struggling not to well up. “I didn’t see much of anything coming.”

A long beat of silence follows.

“Wait a minute.” Gerbil looks askance at him suddenly. “I know what’s wrong with you. You’re not drinking. Are you? You’re as sober as a fucking judge.”

Her observation is correct. Oswald has been off the hooch for nearly three days. He needs his wits about him, and he needs to be able to walk and talk. But right now he’s thinking about how much he could use a blast of that good old Bushmills to shave off the corners, to give him courage. “Look. I’ve done some things “

He stops. Something in the rearview mirror catches his eye.

“Yeah? I’m listening,” Gerbil says, flicking her butt out the open wing and into the polluted wind. Sparks jump in the twilight.

Oswald stares at the rearview. He can see a dark figure behind them, perched on the cargo trunk, between the seat and the rear window. Translucent in the waning light, sparkling like stardust, she wears a tapered, crimson-colored gown, her cleavage as pale as spoiled milk. One of her eyes is hemorrhaged from an eight-ball exit wound, her bouffant wig hanging charred off one side of her head. She nods at Oswald in the mirror.

“What I’m saying is—” Oswald tries to ignore the apparition behind him, but the sight of Alberta Goldstein tugs at his guts. “What I mean is—”

“Spit it out, Tonto,” Gerbil says, gazing across the dark interior at him.

Oswald gazes at the mirror. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Gerbil waits.

Oswald swallows his nerves. “Something I never told you before.”

In the rearview, Alberta Goldstein stares forlornly through strands of a burned wig.

On the passenger side, Gerbil shrugs. “You gonna tell me what it is, or do I have to guess?”

“It’s about your mother.”

Gerbil remains stoic, poker-faced. “I’m listening,” she says.

“Something about your mom I never told you before, something I should have told a long time ago but I guess I just didn’t have the heart.”

“Save your breath, Tonto.”

Oswald looks at her. “Excuse me?”

Again Gerbil gives him a shrug. “I know all about it.”

Oswald shoots another glance at her. “You what?”

Gerbil nods. “I know it was you who whacked her.”

Oswald is aghast. “How did you—?”

“It’s no big deal, Ozzy. Believe me. You did me a favor. She was a royal asshole.”

“But how did—?”

“I was ten when I found out.” Gerbil fishes for another cigarette, then gazes out the window at the blur of passing sewage treatment plants. “I was a big reader back then. When they threw me in the detention room at the orphanage, I discovered the juvie center library. Got my hands on all the papers.”

Oswald feels his stomach clench with emotion. “How’d you connect it up to me?”

“Took a few years to figure it out.” She sparks her Zippo and her eyes shine in the glow. “Just had bits and pieces at first. All that shit about my mom being in bed with old man Ferri. She was a real piece of work, Mommy Dearest.”

“But how did you—?”

She looks at him through a plume of blue smoke. “Didn’t know for sure until a couple of years later, when we ran into each other that night outside the Copper Penny.”

Oswald breathes out a tortured sigh, all of it making sense now, all of it clicking together in his brain like a crazy erector set. He had kept tabs on the poor girl for years, stalking her from a distance, even becoming a regular patron of the little dive at which she waitressed. It was at the Copper Penny that he finally got up the nerve to speak to her—and they used to spend hours philosophizing over coffee in the corner booth, Oswald secretly slipping rot-gut into his java, Gerbil filling salt shakers with zombie-like precision. It was their mutual misanthropy that bound them in friendship, and it was a coincidence that brought them together in the assassination game.

The truth is, Oswald had never wanted Gerbil to know about his avocation as a contract killer, but the night he did the Kiddie-Porn guy, events conspired to radically change the dynamics between the two friends.

The original plan was to take the pervert, after hours, outside the backstage exit of a titty bar on Taylor Street.