A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

bother to answer. He was busy lying seductively in the sun on the front seat, and his eyes, filled with light, were as beautiful as thousand-year-old amber.

I then lasted all of a minute, weakening in record time, and opened the glove compartment and reached for the Dilaudid, but then I remembered that there was something else in there that could help me and not be as debilitating: a tin of pre-rolled joints from the cannabis store.

Inside the tin, unfortunately, there were no whole joints, but there were six roaches I had saved, which I had planned, like a good pothead, to break up and put in a pipe. But this was an emergency.

So I smoked four of them, one after the other, rather furiously, and all they did was amplify the pain tremendously. “Oh, my God,” I said to George. “The pot made it much worse!”

He turned away from me, which was his way of saying, “Of course it did,” and a long, painful hour passed like this: my face throbbing madly and crying for help, and me wondering impatiently what the hell Maurais was doing up there, and what if his business in Malibu had nothing to do with Belden Drive and Lou being shot and killed? Then I’d really be going nowhere fast.

But it felt like his coming here was connected, and I reviewed in my mind the assumptions I had made so far: (1) Maurais knew about the dead bodies and might have even helped get the house in order early that morning, which is why he needed the nitro; (2) my asking about Belden Drive had spooked him, and he’d gone running to the owners of the house—or to someone else connected to what had happened—to tell them I was snooping around; (3) whatever Maurais wanted to talk about had to be done in person, either because he didn’t trust the phones or because what he wanted to express was of such seriousness that it had to be said face-to-face.

And so then what was my play? Stick to my original plan and wait for Maurais to leave, follow him, get him alone, and make him talk? Make him tell me who he went to see and what he knows? Or do I go up to the gate and bluff my way in?

Or do I go in after he leaves and see what I discover without him around? Maybe Dodgers Hat and the man with the gray hair who had been stooped over like a vulture would be up there.

The risk with that play was that if it was a client of Maurais’s who had nothing to do with Belden Drive or diamonds or dead blondes, then I would lose Maurais until I could find him again, and in this moment he was still my best lead.

So the smart move was to wait for Maurais and stick to the plan. Best to confront him somewhere without other people around, and if he told me Dodgers Hat was up on that ridge, then I would know what I was walking into and I might decide that the front gate was not the best approach.

Clear on the game plan, I then gave George another little walk, and the cold wind did some good work on my face, and George sniffed the ocean air and seemed very content, and I realized there were no butterflies around, probably because of the wind.

Then we got back in the car and it was a little past three. After a few more minutes of playing stakeout, the throbbing and stinging in my face kicked into an even higher gear, and so I smoked the last two roaches to make it all worse.

George sneezed because of the pot fog, and I cracked the windows and said, “I’m sorry,” and he rubbed his eyes with his white paws, which looked like opera gloves.

Then I stared out at the ocean to distract myself from the pain, but with each throb a different image came before my eyes: Carl Lusk, his knife in the air; Lou, black blood oozing out of the puncture in his belly; the tall blonde boy on the floor with a bullet hole in his head, like a third eye; and the other blonde with his neck broken sideways after I threw him to his death.

I was on an unholy streak of dead men, and who was next? Me? And was I a good guy in all this or a bad guy? I had killed two men, and I had more or less killed Lou. That didn’t seem to put me on the good-guy side of the ledger.

Meanwhile, the pain in my face was relentless, hateful, and I must have been higher than I realized from smoking all the roaches because then I thought I heard a squeal come out from under my bandage, like the noise a rat makes in a wall, and I said to George, feeling myself getting hysterical, “Something’s trying to come out of my face!”

And I had a desperate wish to itch at the thing, scratch it, something, and feeling crazy, I eased the bandage off to at least see what was happening, what was coming alive underneath there, and what I saw in the rearview mirror horrified me:

My wound, already disgusting, had become a hideous red-and-yellow tumor the size of a dead baby rat, about four inches long, and it was distended out from my face at least two inches, and down the middle of the tumor was the zipper of black stitches, and along the zipper I could see white pus just starting to crawl out, like maggot eggs, and I said to George, “Holy shit! It’s infected!”

Then, as if this would make it all better, I tried to put the bandage back on, but the adhesive had lost its will, and, frustrated, I threw it angrily in the back of the car, and George jumped over the seat and retrieved the thing. Then he hopped back