Sea No Evil, page 5
“Me? Banyon? I wish,” I said. I found my fedora and grabbed it up, talking as I marched right towards him. “Unfortunately I’m Myron Wasserbaum, D.D.S., the worst dentist in the twelve boroughs, and that includes the one over in Dickery who was feeling up all his patients in the chair. I can supply you with all your dental needs, provided you need the wrong tooth pulled or your brand new fillings to drop out next week.”
“I am a god, mortal. We have no need for dentists.”
“That’s good for you, because spit gives me hives and I faint at the sight of incisors.” I cut short before I reached him, slapping open the door to the stairwell. “Remember, that’s Myron Wasserbaum. Be sure to tell all your friends how rotten I am.”
Mercury’s eyes narrowed as he looked past me. He was reading something, and as he did so he raised a curious brow. “Isn’t that your office down there?”
“Yes, it is. However, I just remembered I forgot to get drunk this morning.”
At least that part was mostly true.
The last I saw of the messenger god, he and his winged moccasins were walking past the blown-apart water cooler Mannix had left in the hallway and striding through my office door. My pal the elf was unfailingly honest, so that didn’t leave me much time.
I took the stairs at a sprint and for good measure took the back door to the alley and hustled over to the next block.
I wouldn’t have thought after the hilarious exploding water cooler gag that I could possibly hate Poseidon and his Olympic swimmer wife even more.
As far as I knew, Mercury only brought messages from other gods. Which meant either Poseidon himself was sending me a love letter behind the little woman’s back or another Olympian had been dragged into my wake thanks to the two of them.
As I hustled along the afternoon streets, I kept a watchful eye out to make sure my newly acquired and rapidly expanding fan club wasn’t tagging along behind me.
It’s hard enough to lose a tail when you know you’ve got one, it’s doubly hard when you’ve got to keep an eye trained on every puddle to make sure it doesn’t magically leap up and go for your jugular while simultaneously watching the skies for golden chariots to hurl out of the sun and cut you off in the Third Avenue crosswalk by the Taco Bell. I was never happier to reach my little oasis in the urban jungle.
O’Hale’s Bar looked clean, which is to say it was as delightfully filthy and inhospitable as usual. No gods loitered under the flickering neon sign and there was no trace of that SOB in the parka. Still, I am a cautious man by nature when it comes to protecting that most precious commodity under the sun, my ass, and so I made the extra precaution of circling the block and entering O’Hale’s through the side door.
The joint was usually pretty dead this time of day. This particular day it was not only dead, it was also undead and -- I noted with no small annoyance -- reanimated.
The only customers I could see sat a couple of booths away from the door near the busted jukebox. There were three of them, a zombie, a vampire and one of those ambulatory corpses mad scientists are forever piecing together and setting loose on the neighborhood. Every scientist -- mad and otherwise -- is supposed to get a license from the health department for all projects involving the reanimation of human flesh, but if the crazy ones could be bothered to pull all the right permits they wouldn’t be mad. The nuttiest ones never file the right paperwork and, after it all goes horribly wrong and half the city is out chasing their creations with torches, they inevitably dump their monsters in one of the vacant lots over on Burnside along with any used sofas and broken TVs they’ve got lying around their castles. It’s cheaper to heave out a hideously deformed mockery of humanity than pay the five bucks fee to sanitation for a laboratory pickup. Mad scientists are always the cheapest bastards too. It’s in their self-mutilated genes.
The dearly departed trio glanced up when I came in. Two of them ogled me like dinner, while the bruiser who’d been assembled in a lab absently picked at the crooked stitches that were holding his giant mauler onto the end of someone else’s wrist.
I’d seen the vampire in there a couple of times before, and I flashed my phoniest smile and made a cross with my index fingers. He recoiled, hissing, and flipped me the bird. We understood each other.
The quilt-work golem in the Timberland boots with the four-inch soles wasn’t interested in me in the least. The stitched-together monster had a pitcher of beer all to himself and he was crying buckets through somebody else’s tear ducts.
“It’s not like I asked for this,” he wailed. “One minute I’m the decomposing corpse of one of my generation’s most brilliant academicians, the next I’m waking up on a slab on someone’s roof in the middle of lightning storm. I’m not ashamed to say that I pissed my pants. Or someone’s pants. I have no idea who I am from the waist down. Oh, that a brain like mine could be shoehorned into the body of an oaf like this.”
“You not so smart,” grunted the zombie. “You sociology professor. Teach at rinky-dink party school. Zombie have you sophomore year. Zombie wind up on dean’s list and him either miss most classes or show up drunk whole semester.”
The zombie was talking to his sobbing pal at the table, but he only had eyes for my forehead. Frothy foam was already forming at the corners of his gray lips.
“Spool those eyeballs back in their sockets, junior,” I warned, tapping a finger to my temple. “This ain’t the desert cart.”
The vampire tugged on the zombie’s ragged sleeve and shook his head. Zombies aren’t great for picking up on subtle clues, but this particular ambulatory corpse seemed to get the hint that I was hands-off. He pulled his gaze from my delectable head.
There were only two other people in the joint: the bartender at his usual post, and the waitress who came in some afternoons. She was a solid couple of decades past her sell-by date yet still dressed like the junior prom was next week. The old bird was half-asleep and slouching against the cigarette machine.
The palooka behind the bar had made a point of ignoring my little interaction with his only other customers. When I slid onto my usual stool, Ed Jaublowski, the owner of O’Hale’s and the saloon’s chief mixologist, pretended he was surprised.
“Oh, hey, Jinx. I didn’t see you come in.” He was dicing up a quivering brain and dropping the chunks into a blender.
“I’d think, Jaublowski, that a habitual liar like you would at least get marginally better at it after so many years of practice.”
The barkeep quit what he was doing and rapidly fixed me up a medicinal bribe. He was moving so fast as he yanked down the bottle and picked up the glass and napkin that for a second I swore he’d sprouted a third arm.
“Whatever, Jinx. Can you just cut them some slack?” He pitched his voice low as he worked. “That rag doll meat-sack must’ve just gone zombie last night or something. He’s got a wallet full of cash he’s been flashing around. Usually grave robbers lift whatever they got on them before the voodoo comes around, but they must of missed this guy. He’s a paying customer. You must’ve heard of them, right? Some people really do pay their bartender. So back off, will you?”
It was the most I ever heard Ed talk at once other than the time he was injected with a phonograph needle. Skid row doc mixed up the syringe with a stylus. Jaublowski wouldn’t shut up for three days. Worst was the Barbra Streisand numbers he kept belting out. I nearly sank a bullet in my own delicious brain to end that particular torture.
Jaublowski’s eyes were pleading as he slid me over a tumbler of turpentine.
“Brains!” the zombie shouted from across the bar, clearly annoyed that the living at O’Hale’s got preferential treatment .
“Please, Jinx,” Jaublowski begged.
I shook my head and waved my hand in silent acquiescence. Jaublowski quickly snapped the lid on the blender and pureed the hell out of the soggy chunks therein.
“Monkey brains,” he explained with a broad wink as he poured the thick mixture into a pitcher. “Zoo always has a pile of ’em left over after the annual barbecue. People’ll eat every part these days except the brain, tail and face. Bunch of picky bastards they’s raising up nowadays. Not like when we was kids, Jinx. I got thirty pounds of ’em at a steal. Zombie’s can’t tell the difference, ’specially the freshly turned ones.”
“Brains!” the zombie bellowed, banging the table.
“Will you, please?” hissed his stitched-up monster companion. “You’re embarrassing us all.” He hissed so emphatically that his lower lip fell off and splashed in his pitcher of beer. “Oh, darn. I am not going back up on that roof.” He stuck someone’s hand inside the beer and fished clumsily around for somebody else’s lower lip.
“It is difficult to believe, Ed, that this joint could become even more high class than it has always been,” I observed.
“Just please shut up, Jinx, will you?” Jaublowski pleaded.
This time he didn’t wait for a reply. The barkeep snapped his fingers and the afternoon waitress roused herself from her slumber. The dame had set the paint gun she used to apply her makeup to two notches above Tammy Faye Baker, and she left the streak of her Bozo profile on the side of the cigarette machine where she’d been snoring.
She earned her day’s pay by shuffling the tray with the zombie’s pitcher on it over to the booth across the room.
When the waitress returned with the wad of cash, Jaublowski was drooling more than his living dead customer. The waitress went back over to nap against the cigarette machine as Jaublowski hastily rang up the sale and stuffed the dough in the till.
“Ed,” I asked nonchalantly as the newly minted King Midas of the barkeep world counted up his ill-gotten gains, “anybody happen to be in here looking for me?”
And just like that Jaublowski’s face was suddenly the regular scowling Rosie O’Donnell puss that haunted a thousand city drunks like me in those sweating DT hours between fun and sober. He slammed the register drawer shut.
“What kinda hell you rainin’ down on me now, Jinx?” the barkeep demanded.
I shrugged, the very picture of innocence. “Just making conversation.”
Jaublowski’s reaction alone had already answered my question, and he knew I would be less than forthcoming if he pressed the issue. Over the next silent half hour Jaublowski whipped up a few more pitchers of brains and sent them along with some IV bags of blood to the party at table seven, but his heart -- or whatever lump of gnarled muscle in his chest kept him vertical -- was no longer in it.
Jaublowski was grinding the smoking blender yet again as I slipped off my favorite stool and shambled off to the toxic cleanup site O’Hale’s mislabeled a men’s john.
The bathroom was five stalls, three urinals, and no sink, and in a great O’Hale’s tradition stretching back decades, the clientele attempted to keep all the porcelain surfaces showroom clean by utilizing the floor for all their hasty evacuation needs.
The O’Hale’s men’s room was Russian roulette with eight flushable chambers, and I was standing in the middle of the floor and had barely given the cylinder in my head one boozy spin when I heard the door squeak shut behind me.
If there had been a clean surface I would have first looked for a reflection to see who wanted to kill me now, but finding a clean surface in the O’Hale’s men’s room was as impossible as finding a joke in Jim Carrey’s career. Not finding a single reflective surface, I reluctantly staggered around.
My new zombie pal stood just inside the door, a hungry glint in his watery red eyes. He displayed a row of choppers smeared with gray matter and clicked his molars a few times as he eyeballed his half-bagged lunch in the middle of the bathroom floor.
“Brains,” he moaned.
“Kid, if mine were anything to write home about, don’t you think I’d put them to use locating a gin mill that doesn’t use health code violations as wallpaper? Now take it back outside with your pals and you won’t live to regret this. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I’m open-minded when it comes to the breathing impaired.”
“Braaaaaaains!” the zombie persuasively cried.
With zombies it’s hard to tell just by looking at them which ones are the fast-movers, and which are the slow shamblers. I got my answer a split-second later when the young zombie darted from the door like a flashing cobra.
He lunged at me, all bared fangs and grabbing arms. Luckily he didn’t count on the one-two punch of a surprisingly agile, middle-aged drunk has-been and Jaublowski’s crud-covered floors that hadn’t seen a mop since O’Hale’s was a jitterbugging speakeasy.
I ducked back, hooked my foot around the charging zombie’s ankle and let nine decades of sludge-coated linoleum do the rest.
The zombie went down flat and slid hard into the far wall, cracking a dozen tiles and knocking them loose from the mildew-coated walls like busted yellow teeth.
The fast-movers are deadly when cornered, but lucky for me so am I.
I jumped onto the wriggling zombie’s back before he was able to flip over and renew his assault. He grabbed blindly for my wrists, like a dirty dog trying to twist out of its master’s arms on the way to the bucket of soapy water.
“Brains!” the zombie kid growled, jerking around on his belly, my knee pressed to his spine and pinning him to the floor.
“Just a sec, this is one of those rare occasions that I’m using mine,” I informed him.
One scratch from a zombie fingernail and it’s a whole quarantine thing if they catch you, then the endless tests and the possibility that you’re a zombie now too. Plus the only flesh I felt like hungering for besides Michelle Pfeiffer’s was the Banquet spicy chicken wings O’Hale’s served alternate Thursday nights. Every way I looked at it was a fresh pain in the ass that I wasn’t up for dealing with that day. Only one way out.
I hauled out my piece, planted the barrel at the base of his neck and blew the bastard to Zombie Heaven, which is actually pretty nice except for all the zombies.
The blowback wasn’t so bad; just a little blood and gore on my hands. I didn’t have any open wounds that I knew about, but better safe than sorry.
There was a small closet in the men’s room near the entrance in which Jaublowski stored cleaning supplies, I assumed as ironic juxtaposition. I found an unopened bottle of ammonia with a price tag from a local supermarket chain that had gone out of business twelve years ago and a bag of Scott paper towels that were so old and yellowed it was like tearing pages from a Gutenberg Bible. I was nearly finished wiping off zombie remains when my virgin ears were assaulted by a string of profanity filthier than the bathroom floor to which my Florsheims were presently welded.
Jaublowski was hollering like he was back dueting with Neil Diamond on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” I figured he’d gotten a stylus booster from his skid row sawbones but as I reached for the door I suddenly heard the sound of shattering glass.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. While I definitely don’t have a supply of harp polish and a pair of wings stashed under my mattress, I’m not stupid enough to charge out into the middle of a bar fight without first taking a moment for a little cowardly reconnoitering. I opened the men’s room door just a crack.
The idyllic, grimy serenity of O’Hale’s had erupted in pandemonium.
The waitress and the stitched-up monster were running screaming out the entrance into daylight. The vampire was gliding for the side door to the apartments that comprised the rest of the building. Jaublowski was behind his bar jumping helplessly from one foot to another as bottle after bottle lining the rear wall exploded in a spray of glass.
Before the bar stood a familiar figure in a white parka.
“Get outta here!” Jaublowski yelled. “What are you, some kinda maniac?”
Parka Man swept the golden trident clutched in his dark hand from left to right, and the next row of bottles popped apart one after the other.
Jaublowski was practically in tears, probably thinking of all the man hours he’d invested in hosing down all that uninsured booze; also how high his water bill -- which thanks to his zero tolerance for flushing was usually the basic city sewer charge -- was going to shoot up next month throughout the lengthy booze-rewatering process.
“Banyon,” Parka Man calmly announced. “Where Banyon?”
I can always count on my pals in a crisis. Jaublowki nearly broke his finger he pointed at the men’s room door so hard.
I slammed it shut before the bastard saw me looking out. I stripped off my coat as I ran back across the room. I figured this was going to get hairy fast, and I knew I was right when, as I suspected, the first urinal I ran past exploded in a spray of porcelain. Fat beige chunks scattered like busted bricks across the floor. A corner slab as big as a cinderblock cracked my ankle and sent me spinning sideways into a stall door.
I hobbled up, then ducked when the second urinal directly in front of me as well as the bowl behind me erupted simultaneously. A chunk of porcelain the size of my head blasted the closed stall door. I ducked and twisted just in time to see the metal door bend at the waist like a bowing Japanese waiter. The stall vomited out a large chunk of unmoored toilet which slid down the upper half of the buckled door, ripping the metal slab off its hinges. Door and toilet piece crashed to the linoleum.
Water was bursting from busted pipes in three separate locations. The last urinal and the second toilet went up as I ran past. The floor was flooding as I knelt down next to the newly re-dead zombie.
I was already soaked through. A pipe burst on the wall above me and I fought against the tide as I jammed one zombie arm and then the other into my trench coat. Part of a toilet tank had landed nearby, and I busted the handle off with my heel and planted the chrome in the bullet entry wound in the back of the zombie’s neck.
I was back up in a flash, slipped, fell, got up in another much more nauseated flash, and ran like hell back across the bathroom.
The last three toilets blasted to pieces on the return trip and I raced the gauntlet of gushing water all the way to the small bathroom closet. I crammed myself inside and yanked the door shut just in time. In the same second I tugged the closet door closed, I heard the bathroom door squeak open.
