HENRY'S TIRES squealed as he cut across Charleston and onto 10th. He gunned it, picking up speed as he flew by darkened law offices and bail bondsmen. A voice kept saying call the police, but Henry ignored it. Something told him he had to reach Napoleon Hendryx before anyone else. Instinctively he knew that Nap was in danger because of the investigation that Henry had appealed to him to undertake: the investigation of Don Ix and his employee, Madison Monroe.
Atomic Liquors was a dive on Fremont Street distinguished by its name, emblazoned over the cracked sidewalks in a 50s-vintage neon sign, and not much else. As Henry came up behind it, he slowed, looking for Nap. The back of the bar emptied out onto an abandoned expanse of asphalt, lit by a single spotlight. A battered, green dumpster stood like a sleeping cow in field a few hundred yards from the back entrance. Henry dimmed his lights, and rolled across the cracked pavement, his tires crunching bits of gravel. There didn't appear to be a soul about, nor could he see any cars parked anywhere near Atomic's rear door.
Henry stopped and shut off his engine, hesitating. What if someone had found Nap already and carried him inside? Or… what if someone had taken Nap away? Henry's stomach lurched as he banished a picture of Nap bleeding inside somebody's trunk. He shook the image out of his mind and got out of his car.
It was quiet. Voices from Fremont Street carried over, but they seemed muffled, far away. Henry walked carefully toward the back of the bar, scanning the scene. He looked behind him twice: nothing. Even traffic seemed to have ceased, though he could hear a cars on Fremont, just the other side of the building. He kept walking, looking down at the ground, scanning for… what? A clue? This was ridiculous. Nap was likely in the bar. Injured, perhaps, but okay. Just go in to the bar and see, Henry said to himself. He moved quickly toward the door.
He nearly didn't hear the soft thump of a hand against metal to his right.
Henry froze, and turned toward the dumpster. He moved toward it, and broke into a run without realizing it. "Nap?" he called out, in a near panic. "Nap, is that you?" He reached the dumpster's lip, peered down, and nearly cried out.
Napoleon Hendryx stared up at him, barely alive. At one horrible glance, Henry realized he had been stabbed many, many times. He looked down into Nap's eyes, full of blood and blinking dimly, and saw too that something had been carved into his forehead, some kind of… was it a Greek letter?
"Nap," Henry said, choking. "Hang on, I'm going to call an ambulance."
Nap gurgled, and moaned, blood gurgling thickly out of his mouth. His eyes widened at Henry's face.
"Oh Christ, Nap," Henry said. Nap extended his bloody fist upward, thumping dully on the empty dumpster's side, as if he was trying to get Henry's attention. Henry's eyes filled with tears as he reached down and grasped Nap's hand with his. It was then he found that Nap was holding something tightly in hand. Henry grasped it with both of his, looking into Nap's eyes. "Hold on," he said in a voice that seemed to come from some other place. "Hold on, I'm going to get help, you've got to hold on, Nap."
Nap never took his eyes off of him. He gurgled again, his breathing ragged, gasping. "Christ, I'm sorry, Nap," Henry said, and Nap seemed to shake his head, to say it was okay, but his eyes were terrified. He shook his fist between Henry's hands, and a hideous sound came deep out of his throat, and with that his eyes lost all terror, lost everything.
"Oh fuck, no," whispered Henry, crying. It was some seconds before he discovered that he now held something in his hands, something that had slid into them as Nap's fingers had unclenched and gone slack. After a few moments, Henry at last let go of Nap's hand, and brought the object up to his face.
He couldn't make any sense out of it. It was small plastic figurine of a man dressed in pale greenish suit and wearing a hat. The man had a short black moustache, and his hands were clasped behind his back. It looked like the sort of figure you would see on a dashboard of a saint or something. Henry stared at it numbly, looking from it to Nap back and forth, trying to understand. I have to call the police, he heard himself finally say.
As he said it, he also suddenly understood the sound he had been hearing but not perceiving for the last minute or so… the sound of an idling engine. As Henry turned, a pair of high beams flashed over him. Tires screeched like prey in the grip of a jungle cat as a car tore over the parking lot straight for him at great speed. Everything froze, and then sped up as adrenaline hit his veins. Instead of trying to leap to the right or left, however, Henry pulled himself up and onto the dumpster a split second before the car slammed into it.
The impact threw Henry onto the hood of the car, hard. He rolled off, dazed, as the car threw itself into reverse, embedding more rubber into the asphalt. An acrid smell filled Henry's nostrils, and he thought The bar… I have to get into the bar… Henry scrambled to his feet and started running toward Atomic's back door. He heard the car throw itself back into gear, and the tires squealed again. They're not going to risk slamming into a building, Harry thought wildly, but it sounded as if that was exactly what they were doing. Henry heard the engine roar, louder and louder, as he grasped the handle and yanked the door open. There was a tremendous screech of brakes as he stumbled into the darkness of the bar's back hall.
For a second, he nearly dropped to his knees. He was dizzy, sick to his stomach, but the thought that whoever was in the car was the person who murdered Nap propelled him forward. Too many witnesses in the bar, thought Henry. If he could just get to the phone…
But when he emerged into Atomic Liquors' dingy, cramped space, he was amazed to see only two people: a bartender laconically wiping glasses, and a dark-haired woman in a long coat, sitting at the bar with a shot glass in front of her.
Henry leaned heavily on the bar. "There's been an accident," he gasped to the bartender. "Please, I need to use your phone."
The bartender looked at him as if he was babbling in Swahili. "Accident?" he repeated slowly.
"Yes!" said Henry, a little hysterically. His eyes shot back toward the door. They would be inside at any moment. "A man has been killed, and I was just nearly run over, so please, give me the phone, or call the police yourself!"
The woman at the end of the bar slammed back her shot and brought the empty glass down hard with a snort of disgust. "Did you just say you were nearly run over?" she asked Henry in a thick accent.
Henry looked at her, almost distractedly. "Yes," he said, and turned to the bartender again. "Look, this is no joke, call the police!"
"Idiots," the woman hissed, and slid off of her barstool. Her hair was jet-black, and thick; between it and her large, hook nose the rest of her face disdained to come into focus. She walked swiftly to wear Henry stood. "Here, use my cell," she said, handing an expensive flip phone to him.
"Thank you," said Henry, quickly dialing 911. He explained everything to the dispatcher, his eyes drifting to the back door every few seconds, still not convinced that the killers would be deterred so easily.
He hung up at last, and handed the phone back to the woman. "Thank you," he said again. His eye was twitching again like a live wire, and he rubbed it, sagging a little onto the barstool. Everything had an unreal aspect to it, and he realized he was probably in shock.
"You need a drink," the woman said again in her thick accent. He nodded absent-mindedly, saying "I think you're right."
"Another H-Bomb," said the woman to the bartender, whose eyes had all the spark of an iguana sunning itself on a rock.
"I don't know if a drink called an H-Bomb is just what I need right now," said Henry, still dazed. He looked around nervously once more. Why was this place so dead? It was a dive, sure, but a busy one. And something else was nagging at him… something about the 911 call… had he forgotten something? Where were the police? The Metro substation was literally two blocks away up the street, right across from the El Cortez… what was taking them so long?
A strangely colored shot was placed in front of him. "Drink," the woman said, handing it to him.
Henry massaged his temple. "What is this again?" he asked, craning his neck, looking out the front windows to see if there was anyone outside on Fremont.
"Drink," the woman repeated. She smiled, as if to a reluctant customer in a shop. "You'll feel calmer."
Henry looked down at his hands. They were stained with Nap's blood. He shuddered, and quickly knocked the shot back. It tasted woody and sweet, almost unpleasant, like a bad scotch that warms you nonetheless. A wonderful sensation spread though his body as it hit his stomach. His tongue immediately felt thick and tingly.
"That's something," he said, and coughed. "What is that?" he asked the bartender.
Now the bartender smiled, but still said nothing. "That," said the woman's heavily accented voice… the same accent, come to think of it, that the 911 dispatcher had, hey, isn't that funny… "That is your ticket to not being killed by idiots."
The wonderful sensation had dissipated, and now Henry felt slightly sick, as if he'd just swallowed a vat of cough syrup.
"Yeah," said the bartender at last in a flat voice, "it's always better to be killed by people who know what they're doing."
Henry tried to turn and say something to the woman, but she suddenly darted away into a corner of the room like a kite caught in a sudden gust. Then Henry realized that the ceiling tiles of Atomic Liquors were very, very dirty. Even with them spinning like that, you could tell they'd undergone extensive water damage over the years. And then, suddenly, his long dead friend Jack Samson was leaning over him, his ghostly face becoming less and less luminous as the light dimmed all around, and Jack was shaking his head, saying "Henry, you ass. You're out of your league. Shape up, or you got Nap killed for nothing… you reading me, Hank? Hanh?"
But darkness had closed in, and Henry Bethel was no longer
reading anything at all.