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

getting harder than Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

She grins. “Let’s see it.”

She watches him carefully unzip the canvas bag. He starts pulling out the adult-sized diapers, the Little Bo Peep baby bonnet, the giant rubber pacifier. Way at the bottom of the bag is the apparatus. It looks like a block and tackle, like something a mechanic might use to lift an engine out of a truck.

Cathy O’Dell stares at the apparatus. “All right then... in for a penny, in for a pound.”

* * *

Gerbil finds a spot just south of the Harum’s property line, along the edge of a vacant lot. She pulls behind a garbage dumpster and slams the stick into NEUTRAL.

Through the passenger window and the spindly, diseased trees, Oswald can see Building 12-A, the late afternoon sun glimmering off the hut’s shingles. He is reaching for the door handle, his head pounding unmercifully, when his cell phone starts chirping.

“Who’s calling, please,” he says, after positioning the Bluetooth earpiece. The number on the caller ID window looks familiar but he can’t place it.

The Candy Man’s voice crackles on the other end. “Hey, Big Chief, whassup?”

“Candy?”

“That’s right, dawg, it’s your homey from the home team, your inside man, your blood brother. Now listen. Something important’s come up, Chief, and I gots to give you the 4-1-1—A-S-A-P—and you gotta trust me on this, dawg, it’s O-M-G.”

26.

“Tell that asshole you’ll call him back,” Gerbil says, killing the engine. She gathers up her denim jacket and her Camels. She wears a torn purple unitard embellished with strategically spray-painted profanities—a remnant of her days with her garage band, the Flotsam and the Jetsons—and she has a fervid, pinched expression on her face, like a child being forced to do homework.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something right now,” Oswald informs the caller, pushing open his door and climbing out of the truck.

Oswald steps around the front of the S-10 as he whispers into the Bluetooth, adjusting the gun, which is wedged behind his belt. Icy-hot chills surge through him. “I’m going to need to call you back.”

Gerbil comes around the front of the truck. “Tell him to fuck off already. Jesus Christ. And gimme one of your pistols.”

Dizziness swirls through Oswald’s head, and he has to grab the door handle to steady himself. The back of his scalp tingles—a shard of broken glass shooting through his left eye. “Hold on a second, Candy—”

“C’mon, c’mon.” Gerbil has her hand out. “Gimme a gun, c’mon—”

“I am not giving you a gun.” Oswald blinks away the light-spots dotting his vision. “Just watch the front door so they don’t get away.”

Through the Bluetooth: “Hey, Chief? Did I lose ya? Y’all still there?”

“Goddamnit, Candy, hold on.” Oswald looks at Gerbil. “Why are you doing this?”

Petulant, Gerbil puts her hands on her hips. “I am not budging until you give me a fucking gun.”

“Jesus!” Oswald marches around behind the truck, yanks the tailgate down, throws the tarp back, fishes inside the trunk, and digs out a little filed-down .38 Police Special. “You’re gonna shoot your damn foot off!”

“Is it loaded?” Gerbil says, holding out her hand. “Are there bullets in it, Ozzy?”

“Yes, there are bullets in it!” He hands it to her.

“Chief? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Candy, I can hear you!” Oswald hisses into the Bluetooth, then turns to Gerbil. “C’mon, let’s do this thing—before we lose the lovebirds.”

He grabs Gerbil by the arm, then starts dragging her across the gravel apron and into the undergrowth. The late-afternoon sun has sharpened its angles, filtering down through the dust motes in shafts of dirty light, the air thick with gnats. “Candy, what the fuck do you want?”

“Awright... what it is, is there’s another motherfucker making it to Top of the Pops.”

Oswald reaches the Harum’s back fence, and gives Gerbil a boost over the concertina wire.

They land in a mushy patch of weeds, sodden and moldy with a recent rain. Bungalow 12-A is less than twenty yards away, the lovebirds’ little baby-shit-yellow Ford Focus tucked into the carport.

“I’m still listening,” Oswald says into the wireless. His heart is starting to chug as he creeps across the weeds with Gerbil on his flank. With the moon full in less than four days, he needs every opportunity to save another asshole he can get. “Go on, Candy.”

“You said you wanted to hear about every contract comes down the line.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, this one deal, it comes all the way down from the Don himself. You stop this one, you can really fuck with the old man.”

Oswald does not notice the strange, wooden tone in the Candy Man’s voice—almost as though the pimp is reading a script—nor does Oswald wonder how the Candy Man knows about Oswald’s quest to save lives. Oswald doesn’t even notice that Gerbil has already split off, vanishing around the opposite side of the bungalow. The plan is for her to wait in front, guarding the entrance.

But Oswald is not thinking about the bungalow right now. At the moment, he is too distracted by the icy needle of pain shooting down the bridge of his nose. He is drenched in sweat.

He falls against the back of the building, his massive shoulder banging into an unmarked access door that is obscured by the shadows of poplar trees. This narrow, unmarked slab of framed timber—the egress commonly used by cleaning crews—has a cheap dead bolt. A little welcome mat hewn from weathered Astroturf, the color of rotten eggs, lies at the base of the door, fringed in weeds.

Oswald fights the dark shade threatening to swallow him up as he pulls a jimmy-pick from his back pocket and starts digging at the bolt.

“Chief—?”

“Hold on a second, Candy, I’m interested, but right now I gotta—”

Oswald stops and looks down. The Astroturf welcome mat is moving beneath him, the moldy little filaments of grass undulating like a carpet of bugs, roiling and liquifying and changing.

“Chief, you there—?”

“I’m—I’m in the—” His boots appear to be sinking into the