barely
11:00.”
“Excellent, you’ve learned to read a digital
clock. Surely you don’t expect Milton or myself to venture onstage.
Obviously I can’t entice new talent at this hour of the night.
Come, come, come it’s time we put all that surgically enhanced
talent of yours to work, my dear. Now, relax,” he said, touching
her hand for the briefest of seconds before quickly pulling a
moist, sterile towelette from the packet resting between them, and
aggressively cleaning his fingers.
“Your shift will conclude at four and I
shan’t need your services until much later in the morning. There,
perfect, problem solved.”
Sunday
Otto slept in his recliner, in front of the TV. It
was tuned to the weather channel and between squeaks and beeps
repeated the forecast in a computerized monotone every twelve
minutes. He didn’t hear any of it. He was out cold, wearing a
bathrobe, his feet crusted with dried residue from the Epsom
salts.
His feet didn’t hurt, but Otto had soaked them anyway
to ensure they remained pain free. A barely touched scotch and
water sat on an end table and next to the drink, his forty-five. He
had set the alarm on his watch for 5:00 am, he usually woke a
minute or two before it went off.
He was snoring loudly and in his reoccurring
dream he was back in Saigon, getting ripped off by pretty bar girls
and not caring. Only this time he had his briefcase with him, and
he didn’t want anyone to touch it. There was a car, a battered
two-toned Fleetwood, dark blue with white spray paint along the
lower portion of the body. The car was parked in front of the bar,
three rough-looking bearded guys all hanging out the driver’s
window.
They were staring at his briefcase, and he
wondered how they knew it contained money. He stayed in the bar
with all the pretty girls ripping him off, knowing he didn’t have
to worry about the three thugs in the car, yet.
* * *
Billy Truesdale got up and walked down the
hallway to the bathroom. It was almost four on Sunday morning, and
he last checked his blood-sugar level at midnight. It wasn’t a big
deal, checking it, better that than going blind or ending up in
some sort of diabetic coma. He read the monitor and returned to
bed.
“You all right, Billy?” his wife Martha
asked, like she did every morning around 4:00 when he came back to
bed.
“Not to worry, honey, go back to sleep,” he
said knowing she already had.
He planned to lay low all day and catch the
final Vikings preseason game. He had a busy week ahead of him,
hauling those damn bags of currency out of the bank in a grocery
cart and into his armored car. What a pain. All that cash from the
fair, that he and his team had to cart back to Central all day
long. Drop off one load, only to turn back around for another. They
were vulnerable. He’d warned the bank every year for the past
twelve, nobody listened. Maybe they knew something he didn’t.
* * *
It was just after four when Merlot jerked
awake at his desk. He’d fallen asleep in his chair, a mound of
melted wax rose beneath each candle.
It took him a moment to get his bearings,
knew something was amiss when he spied Cindy’s purse on the couch.
Was she still in the bathroom?
In response to his question he heard a roar
from behind the bathroom door, followed by a sputtering female
cough that echoed from inside the tiny tiled room.
“Oh god, no.” Nothing echo’s quite like a
forlorn voice begging for mercy from deep inside a porcelain
bowl.
It was relatively quiet for a moment. He
silently crept to the door, heard her cough, then spit, followed by
the toilet flushing. The water refilling the tank had always been
loud and it masked all sound from inside the bathroom. He took a
step back in the event she opened the door, not wanting it to look
like he had been spying on her.
“Oh, oh, araugh!” she roared again, but with
not quite as much authority.
He was tired, and all he wanted to do was go
home to bed. Maybe just give her a
Phil Jackson, Hugh Delehanty