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

picked up my book, but got distracted and thought about Monica. Why did she, out of the blue, tell me she loved me? I knew it probably just meant that she loved me as a friend and nothing more, but maybe she was also open to giving me a second chance. It had been four years since our one night, and I hadn’t been with anyone since.

At 10:43, I heard the scream.

June stood up and I stood up. I ran through the beaded curtain and a couple of the girls popped out of their rooms. Where did the scream come from? The doors to rooms 3, 5, and 8 were still closed, and then there was another scream. Seemed to be coming from room 8. Which made sense.

Rat Eyes.

I took the baton out of my pocket and flicked it to its full length. I yanked the door open and Rat Eyes was on the far side of the room and had the rubber shower hose around Mei’s neck. She was in her bathing suit, her eyes were bulging out of her head, and his immense body was naked and wet. He saw me and dropped Mei and dashed for his backpack, which was on a chair with his clothes. Out came a big hunting knife.

Water was all over the floor and there was a chemical smell in the air—I saw a glass pipe on the counter by the towels. He had smoked some meth and was out of his mind.

He charged me like a wet bull and I flashed to his orange pubes. Same color as my father’s, and the purple head of his penis was poking out of the pubes like some kind of hideous growth, and all of it was tucked under the slick monstrous slab of his stomach.

The whole thing threw me—my father’s Irish pubes, Mei lying dead or unconscious on the floor, water everywhere, Rat Eyes’s cock—and I was slow to react. I didn’t bark and I didn’t go first, and he was on me and slicing down at me with the knife and I got my left forearm up just in time and took the blow there, the knife cutting through my jacket and deep into my skin.

As I was blocking him, I took a swing at his rib cage with the baton, but I was all off balance and it was a weak blow and he hardly felt it, there was too much beef on him, and then he was slicing down at me again and this time his blow was stronger and it knocked my arm out of the way and the blade caught my face and sliced my cheek open and I could feel it peel off like a sticker.

Then suddenly we were on the floor—he had slipped and brought me with him—and the back of my head bounced off the hard tile and I lost the baton, and he climbed on top of me, naked and slippery, and the knife was in the air and then coming down at me, to stab me, and my eyes were filled with blood from my cheek, but I was able to grab his wrist with my left hand and I made my right hand like a knife, my fingers all together, like they teach you in self-defense, and you either go for the eyes or the throat, and I jabbed him hard in the left eye, and that got through the meth and he screamed and rolled off of me, and I rolled away, and then we were both trying to stand on the slippery floor, and he was squinting, and I got to my feet first and kicked him in the shoulder, which didn’t do much, and on his knees he swiped at me with his knife and nearly got me, and so then I took out my belly gun and meant to shoot him in the leg to slow him down, but my hand was unsteady, and I shot him through the neck and blood geysered out in a spray.

And when he toppled over, Mei sat up, like it was choreographed, like they were puppets, one dead, one alive, and then I sat down, like a yogi, in the blood pooling around his body. I think I was in shock: I had never killed a man before, and the girls were crowding the door to the room, and I turned to look at them and could feel something tickling my neck. It was the flap of my face. I tried to put it back in place and one of the girls screamed.

I said, all calm and relaxed and in shock: “Has anyone called 911?”

6.

After the cops arrived, Mrs. Pak called her son and he pulled strings and the EMTs brought me to Cedars-Sinai instead of the Presbyterian hospital on Vermont, which was closer.

Mei wasn’t injured, just badly shaken up, so she stayed with Mrs. Pak and her mother. Her son, Dr. Pak, met my ambulance in the driveway outside the ER at Cedars, escorted me inside, and had already arranged for a top plastic surgeon to put my face back on.

Before I went into surgery, I called Monica at the Dresden and told her what had happened, without getting too gory, and she said she’d get George and take him back to her place. She knew where I hid my key.

And before she hung up, she said it again: “You know, I love you, Hap.”

I got thirty stitches in my arm and thirty in my face—nice and symmetrical. The good news—not that I really cared at that time—was that with both cuts the blade hadn’t gone too deep and there was minimal nerve damage.

In the morning, Dr. Pak came to see me—my face was heavily bandaged—and he switched my pain meds, unsolicited, to the good stuff: Dilaudid. He explained to me that the face has a lot of nerves and I should anticipate a fair amount of pain, but that the