Dallas Noir Page 14

  Danny snorted another line of crystal and stashed the rest in the trunk, except a Thai stick he decided he’d hit as he sailed along Hampton Road on his drive home. The radio’s hum was soothing now, like wind or waves. When he topped the hill between Fort Worth Avenue and Singleton, he felt electric as he peered out at Dallas sprawled before him, a carpet of glitter. He looked at the full moon hanging low on the horizon, its white light pulsing with every heartbeat that throbbed in his chest and head, while he coasted down the steep hill. His stomach rose, as if he was on the descent of a roller coaster. The traffic lights were with him when he sailed through the intersections, leveling out at Singleton. Ahead, he could see the incline of the bridge that would carry him back across the Trinity. Back to the luxury and safety of his West Village high-rise.

  “It’s three o’clock,” an announcer’s voice blared from the radio, startling Danny. He ashtrayed the Thai stick and focused on the radio. When he realized the car was veering, he tried to compensate, but too late. The front wheels had already climbed over the curb, and when he looked up he saw two men frozen in the beam of his headlights. They were standing under an oak tree in the little semicircle of a park in front of the Nash Davis Recreation Center. As the Beamer struck them with a dull thud, they became airborne—one somersaulting, the other spinning as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Danny applauded their acrobatics in his mind, watching them land on their heads and crumple clumsily on the ground in his rearview mirror. They reminded him of some circus show he’d seen in Vegas, but these two needed to work on their landing. When he turned the wheel to keep from clipping an approaching oak tree, he remembered. He wasn’t in Vegas tonight.

  He brought the car to a stop after he’d jolted over another curb at the rear of the driveway that separated the park from the rec center. He sat for a moment in the double circle cast by the sodium-vapor streetlights that flanked the rec center’s entrance. The euphoria and oblivion he’d spent the last few hours working up was draining out of him, but the effects of the meth still gave everything an unearthly, electric glow. Shit, he thought. He’d just hit someone. Two someones. He straightened out the car, pulled forward in the driveway, and out of the twin spotlights of the streetlamps. He turned off the engine and his headlights. As far as he could tell, he was okay. He got out of the car. Not much damage. A couple of shallow dents, and it seemed that no one had seen the accident. Still, a feeling of paranoia settled on him while he looked around and listened for movement from the dark park. There was an SUV—a black Tahoe—parked on the side street abutting the rec center. One of theirs, he decided, running over to the tree on the edge of the park.

  Oh fuck. They were both young. Midtwenties. He could see that one was already dead. The other was clutching his throat, gurgling, blood running from the side of his mouth in measured arterial ebbs and flows. “Don’t worry. Fucking don’t worry,” Danny said. “I’ve got a cell phone in the car. I’m going to get you some help.” He turned back toward the car, but stopped when he saw a briefcase on the ground behind the gurgling man. He picked it up, instinctively. Heavy, he thought, balancing the briefcase on the rear of the car, as he pushed the buttons that released the locks with a metallic clatter. A whistle escaped his lips. Must be thirty grand. Maybe more. He opened the car door and slid the briefcase onto the passenger seat and took his phone off the charger. He didn’t call 911 though—not yet. He was still trying to figure it all out. Besides, what if the other guy was dead now too? If they were both dead, there was nothing Danny could do. Why should he fuck up his life, and anyway, what were they doing with a briefcase full of money, hiding in the trees at three in the morning in this shithole of a neighborhood? He walked back to the man by the tree.

  “You okay?” Danny asked, trying to sound composed. A weak gurgle was the man’s only reply. “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, help’s on the way.” Danny glanced around and walked over to the dead guy. There. He was clutching a brown paper bag. Danny bent over and tugged on the sack, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again, pulling harder, and when he let go, he fell forward. On top of the dead guy and the bag. He got to his knees and pried the dead man’s fingers from the brown paper bag. “Yes,” he said, looking at the collection of tiny baggies it contained. He retrieved one, brought it to his mouth, and ripped it open with his teeth. Powder spilled out onto his tongue. He licked it across his gums and waited. Crystal meth. Good quality too. A couple of drug dealers. That’s who I hit—who I killed, he thought.

  He hurried back to the car with his prize, taking another look at the guy choking on his own blood. “You hang in there, buddy,” Danny said, striding past. He deposited the brown paper bag in the trunk with the rest of his stash. Then he put the phone back in the car. He made one more trip over to the hemorrhaging man. The blood had slowed to a trickle. Danny sat down. Reaching over, he cradled the man’s bloody jaw in one hand and pushed it up until his teeth met. With his other hand, Danny reached over and pinched the man’s nostrils shut. They stayed together in the still darkness that way, until he was sure this one was dead too. After he wiped his bloody hands on the grass, Danny stood and turned to walk away. An audible gasp startled him, and he turned to see the man’s jaw dropping back open, as the last of the air in his lungs bubbled out through the congealing blood in his mouth.

  He was getting panicky now. How long had he been here? He surveyed the area a final time and decided no one had seen a thing. As he opened the car door, he heard the sound of an engine turn over. His eyes shot to the SUV on the side street just in time to see its headlights flash on as it pulled away into the night. Someone had seen. One of the men must have had an accomplice, waiting in the black Tahoe.

  Danny’s car started right up. He drove down the curve of the driveway and turned out onto Hampton, toward the bridge. There was a car a few blocks ahead of him, and he could see the glow of the headlights of a couple of others behind him, stopped at the light at Singleton. No cops though. That was good. “You still got it, Danny-boy,” he said aloud. As the pounding of his heart in his head began to slow, he started to feel a sense of elation. Started to feel like he’d gotten away with murder, as the euphoric effects of the meth and Thai stick washed back over him—coursed back through him.

  At the summit of the bridge the radio crackled alive again, and when he looked out at the skyline with the full moon rising above it, he watched the shadowy silhouette of an enormous bird slowly traversing the pulsating orb. He felt a chill, and a new sensation he couldn’t shake. That he was being followed. He rolled down the window and threw the last few inches of the Thai stick out into the night.

  * * *

  Danny was a little sore when he woke. He’d spent a rough night dreaming about the accident. Everything was jumbled up. The faces of the dead men, the shadow of the bird on the moon, the SUV. Someone had seen him. A drug dealer. But what was a drug dealer going to do—go to the police and say he saw somebody kill his accomplices? Not likely. Calm down, he told himself. He’d let all this shit get mixed up with the nightmare about his mother and La Lechuza. Rationally, he knew no one had followed him. Otherwise, someone would have shown up to claim the money and the dope. He remembered what his father had told him the first time he’d taken Danny to the cemetery to put flowers on the family graves for All Saint’s Day.

  “Don’t worry about the dead. It’s only the living that can hurt you, son.”

  That’s right. He got up. Tried to banish the visions of the previous night when they ran through his mind. Think about the money—a shopping spree at NorthPark. He’d get his Rolex out of hock from Kevin. But nothing worked. He kept coming back to the dream. The nightmare where his mother tried to warn him from the other side. Did he really believe in another side? He believed in what he could snort, smoke, and fuck. But that goddamned bird. That wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that. And there was the feeling. The feeling he was being watched.

  Danny took the money from the briefcase and stashed it around the
apartment. Then he dressed and went to the car wash. He was amazed there was so little damage. Hardly any blood. A tidy job, he thought, as he drove home with a newspaper, after eating a late lunch.

  He flipped through the newspaper when he got home. Nothing unusual. It felt like a weight had been removed from him, and he thought how foolish it was to be so paranoid. To believe he was being followed. He laid out a few lines of crystal on the mirrored coffee table and snorted them. He grew luminous again. As he relaxed, he heard the neighbor’s dog barking. Old Mrs. Somerset had the balcony two floors below. She’d put the dog out there and go away for hours sometimes, and the little fucker, a Yorkie named Mitzi, would bark nonstop. He wished the dog was on the balcony right below his. He’d drop a poisoned pork chop down to that miserable thing so he could have some peace and quiet. He walked over to the heavy industrial blackout drapes he’d had custom made for the sliding glass door and flung them open. He shook his head, blinked his eyes shut and opened them again. It was still there. Perched on the aluminum curve of the balcony railing. An owl, the size of a small woman. They stared at each other through the glass, Danny and the owl. As if they were in a contest. A pissing match to see which one could stare the longest without blinking. When his eyes got dry, he whipped the blackout panels together, took a deep breath, and pulled them apart again. The owl was gone.

  The closest thing he could find on the Internet was a great horned owl. He printed pictures of owls, tacking them to the walls with pushpins—barn owls, snow owls, burrowing owls. There was some confusion as to whether the eagle owl or the great gray owl was the largest species. The maximum attainable sizes mentioned by the various websites were all wrong too. These owls were runts compared to the one he’d seen. But it was the face of the bird on the balcony that was so different. The ones pictured on the Internet lacked humanity. They were just birds. Yes, it was the face. There was something soft and malleable about its beak. And its sagging, feathered breasts. Do birds have breasts? See, these were the questions he wanted answers to, and the fucking Fish and Wildlife Service website was no help with that.

  When the ink cartridges in the printer ran dry, he noticed how quiet it was. All he could hear was a faint whistling noise, like a tea kettle in a distant closet. Two notes. Two syllables. Dan-ny. He could hear it distinctly now. He walked to the drapes and eased them apart. It was back. But something was different. The bird wasn’t staring at him. He couldn’t see the strange beak or the glaring eyes, but the creature’s sagging breasts were front and center. He jumped when the bird shook, fluffing its feathers momentarily, and watched its head swivel around, 180 degrees, to meet his gaze. The bird held Mitzi’s limp body in its grotesque maw. A hybrid organ. Part nose—part mouth—part beak. Danny watched it grasp the dog’s lifeless body in a scaly claw and tear tufts of hair and a little pink bow from the top of her head, before it ripped her head off and swallowed it whole with a gagging motion. He shut the drapes quietly.

  That’s how the weekend went. He’d open the drapes and sometimes it was there, and sometimes it wasn’t. He crashed hard Saturday night, catching nine hours. Sunday afternoon, he snapped a broomstick over his knee and laid the stick into the interior track of the sliding door after he noticed that the bird was tearing away at the metal stripping of the threshold. Sunday night, he decided it wasn’t safe to sleep so he sat up, snorting crystal, watching porn, too tired to masturbate. Monday morning, without showering or shaving, he got dressed in his best Brooks Brothers suit and drove to work. He could feel the owl following him. He heard the whistle of his name even though the car windows were rolled up. He was sure a black Tahoe took the same exit he’d taken off Central Expressway.

  At the office, everyone was whispering. Staring. Could they hear the whistle? The secretary stopped him and said the boss wanted to see him.

  “Danny, my boy, I’m worried about you. I wondered if you still had it, so to speak. But I see you here today, obviously still sick from whatever was ailing you last week. Well, I appreciate loyalty, but I wouldn’t feel right letting you work in your condition. No sir, we take care of our own. Have you seen a doctor yet, son? I mean a specialist.”

  “Ah, no sir.”

  “Well, that’s just what you’re going to do. From the looks of you, I wonder if you didn’t pick up some fucking parasite over there in Thailand. Filthy place. Anyway, consider yourself on medical leave until further notice.”

  On his way out, even the secretary was nice for a change. “Take care of yourself, Danny,” she said to him as he passed her desk. He thought she looked like she was on the verge of crying. In the office tower lobby, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the tinted panes of the revolving door. He hardly recognized himself. His face was hollow with deep circles under his eyes, and his clothes hung on him, like a bum. He drove home at the head of the strange convoy, knowing the owl and the Tahoe were following. In his apartment, he paced back and forth between the pictures of the owls he’d tacked on the walls and the mirrored coffee table where he snorted rails of crystal meth, the clarity he sought always just out of reach.

  When he peeked through a slit in the curtains, it was there, just as surely as the black Tahoe was parked below. And now the balcony looked different. Cluttered. The bird had been dragging up bits of debris. Pieces of carpet, a pair of old boots. Some sticks. Danny thought there might even be some bones. He recognized the bowl shape taking form. It was building a nest. Was it going to lay a giant fucking egg? Maybe two? Raise a brood of monsters on his balcony, feeding the chicks on neighborhood pets? He’d had enough. He threw up the lock on the sliding door, but then the owl reacted, throwing out its wings, releasing an agitated screech. Its golden eyes dilated to reveal unwavering inky black pupils. He locked the door.

  He thought about the dream, his mother. About Uncle Santiago. About what his aunt Mary had said about getting a curandero to lift the curse. It was worth one last effort. He decided to start his search in the botánicas along Jefferson. He retrieved a thousand dollars from his dresser drawer and headed across the river to Oak Cliff.

  He stopped at several large botánicas, but met with no success. The proprietors treated him like he was crazy when he told them his story, or shook their heads in resignation and made the sign of the cross. On a side street, between Jefferson and West Davis, he spotted a sign. Botánica San Ramón. As he got out of his car, he saw a curtain move in the old house—someone was watching. A string of bells announced him when he walked into the front room. There was a showcase with decks of tarot cards, plaster gargoyles, and crystals in front of shelves of colored candles and jars of potions and powders. Around the walls candles flickered on makeshift altars, illuminating pictures of saints in hammered tin frames. A short man entered the room.

  “May I help you?” the man asked with a raspy voice.

  Danny stalled, hoping to break the ice before bringing up the giant owl. “Are you a curandero?” Danny asked, then blurted it out: “What do you know about La Lechuza?”

  “Yes, I am a curandero. La Lechuza,” the man said, drawing out the words. “That is an old Mexican legend. Best to let those kinds of spirits be.”

  “Is that what it is? A spirit?”

  “Yes, an evil spirit. A kind of witch. Do you know someone who has seen the creature?”

  “Yes. Me. I saw it. I mean, I still see it. I need help. It’s following me. I want it gone.” Danny pulled out a roll of cash. “I can pay. Whatever it costs.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong place,” the little man said. “My business is gossip and love charms. I’m sorry I can’t help.” He turned to walk away, but Danny sidestepped and blocked him.

  “You said you were a curandero. My aunt Mary said a curandero could lift the curse.”

  The little man shook his head. “I am a curandero, but I don’t deal in the black arts. What you need is a bruja—a witch.”

  “Okay,” Danny said, holding out a fifty-dollar bill. “Tell me where to find this witch.


  * * *

  Danny followed the directions the man had drawn on a scrap of paper. The place was near the zoo. There was a sign with an open hand. Palm Reading by Madame Zora. He rang the bell, but no one answered. He knocked. The door must have been ajar because it swung open. He remained at the threshold, looking into the room. It was dark, with green shag carpeting. There were two carved chairs with a low table between them in the corner, like a waiting area. In the middle of the room, two more carved chairs sat facing a round table draped with a lace cloth. He was about to leave when he felt something behind him. He turned, and a middle-aged woman with frizzy gray hair, a pinched face, and eyes the color of straw said, “Do you have an appointment? I was at the side of the house. I didn’t hear the bell.”

  “No, do I need one? The man at Botánica San Ramón said you might be able to help me.”

  She stepped inside. “Did he? I must remember to thank him. No, you don’t need an appointment. Come in.” The woman closed the door behind them and instructed him to sit in one of the chairs at the table. She had a low center of gravity and short legs, and Danny thought she waddled more than walked, as she went around the room and moved various objects to the center of the round table—some old books, a deck of cards, a silver bowl. “Wait,” she said, opening a door and disappearing through it. She returned holding two eggs.

  “I guess I should tell you why I’m here.”

  “Silence,” the woman said, and Danny watched her pale eyes and nimble fingers move over the table, placing the eggs in the silver bowl, and the bowl atop the books. She slid the pack of cards from the table, shuffled them, and held them out toward Danny. “Blow on this,” she instructed. He did. She cut the cards and began to turn them over on the tabletop in a cruciform pattern, grunting as she went, her pitch signifying either pleasure or distaste. “Choose an egg from the bowl.”