The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
I swallowed hard.
Slivers of shadow melted across Rosie’s face. Her strong Navajo features had shriveled on the bone. Her empty eyes blinked through a private haze, her eyelids too small and dark in deeply hollowed sockets. She smiled, leered really. A zombie smile.
“Richeeee,” she said. “Thank God you came!”
“All the way from A.C.,” I said, sounding like a happy uncle who’d come to visit. “I came as soon as I got your letter. My mail’s not so good, you know. I move around too much. But it finally caught up to me at Caesars. The concierge from Trump Plaza sent it over. And I tried to call first, but no one’s been answering your phone ...”
She wasn’t listening. We hugged. I felt too many bones, smelled greasy hair and too much Anne Klein II.
I followed her upstairs and down a long hallway. My shoes sank into thick mint-green carpet and I worried that I hadn’t wiped them. Rosie was very proud of her carpets and her Italian marble. After growing up in a New Mexico hogan with nothing but dirt under her heels, I guess she had a thing about floors. In happier times, she’d sent her decorator after carpets that would match those at Caesars Tahoe. Drove the guy nuts. Torito told me that the decorator finally bribed some maintenance guys at Caesars into stealing a couple hundred square yards of the stuff.
Better days, better ways, I thought.
I caught up to Rosie at the bedroom door. A framed poster from the Barkley fight hung to my left; blank wall stared at me from the right. While Rosie fumbled with the doorknob, I prayed that Torito wasn’t saving that space for another poster. A comeback was the last thing I wanted to see. Two years ago he'd had nothing left, now he’d be worse.
Gus’s voice: “They always come back. You know that, Richie. They say they won’t, but they always do.”
Rosie flipped on the light. Torito was sitting up in bed, staring at a big screen Mitsubishi that stood to the right of the door.
Dried blood on the padded leather headboard.
Spots of fresh blood on Torito’s silk pajama top.
The stink of sweat and blood hit me as I stepped into the room. Heavy, worse than the stench of a slaughterhouse. Reflexively, my eyes darted from Torito to the spinach-green wallpaper above his bed; the flocked pattern squirmed like a tangle of snakes and I wiped my eyes and looked again. This time I saw a wooden crucifix nestled in the mossy velvet above Torito’s head, the figure of Jesus red with paint or Torito’s blood. A rusty nail had been hammered through Jesus’ chest, pinning the crucifix to the wall, splitting the icon from breastbone to head, but the old wood scissored tightly around it as if clinging there.
Rosie took my hand. “Richie, you gotta make it okay again ... I need you . . . Toro needs you ...”
She kept talking, but I couldn’t hear her over the blaring Mitsubishi. It shouted, “BARK-LEY, BARK-LEY, BARKLEY!”
Torito looked at me through swollen eyes. “Help me, Richie,” he said, his voice barely audible. “You gotta help me ... I can’t see the punches.”
The ice in the bucket had melted in the Vegas heat, but the Enswell iron was still cold. Gus pressed it against Torito’s swollen cheek and begged him to follow his jab with a double-hook to the body. “You can’t stop Barkley unless you take his legs,” he said.
I was working on the cuts. Torito was a mess. I’ve saved fights for lots of guys who had tender faces—Saad Muhammad and Antuofermo included—but Torito made those two look like they had skin of iron. After four rounds, he had deep slices over both eyes and the bridge of his nose. I mopped off the blood, pressed a Q-tip soaked with adrenaline chloride 1-1000 into the cuts, and glopped Vaseline over Torito’s brow.
The ring doctor tried to elbow past Gus. “He’s fine,” Gus assured the man, not giving an inch. “If you want to look at cuts, go check Barkley.”
Gus was right. Iran “The Blade” Barkley’s face was a mess, too.
The warning whistle sounded. Gus ducked between the ropes. I followed, pulling the stool as Torito rose. “Remember, Barkley’s trying to take your title!” Gus yelled, as if Torito needed reminding.
Round five. Torito came out jabbing, driving his fist into Barkley’s bloody nose. Barkley bent at the middle, but he was only ducking under the jabs, not going down, and then Torito pivoted and threw the money punch—a big left hook to the ribs. Again. The Blade spit blood and gasped, then came back with a twohanded body-attack that sent Torito into the ropes. Jabbing his way to the center of the ring, Torito bent and delivered another left hook, but Barkley’s right was already on its way and it caught Torito high on the head. Blood geysered from Torito’s brow and spattered the referee’s white shirt, and as Torito stumbled backward, Barkley nailed him with another chopping right that shattered his jaw and sent him to the canvas.
The referee didn’t bother to count.
“You see why I asked you to come,” Rosie said innocently. “I can’t call anyone else. Not with him around . . . not the way I am.”
That last part came in a whisper, like a confession. Turning away, I opened my snakeskin bag and set my gear on the walnut nightstand. Then I turned off the TV, my hands shaking.
“How can you let Torito watch that?” I asked.
“He makes Toro watch it all the time, because just watching it makes Toro bleed now. He says it’s the only way he can find Toro’s weak spots.”
Junkie logic. I couldn’t follow it, no more than I could imagine the zombie I’d met downstairs making Torito do anything. I asked Rosie if that’s who she was talking about, but she ignored my question.
“You got to hurry,” she said. “You got to fix Toro and then we got to get out of here before he comes back. He went looking for wood a couple hours ago. He probably won’t be back ’til morning. That’ll give us a head start. If we can get to New Mexico, to the reservation, my family will hide us.”
“Rosie, who the hell are you talking about?”
“Ask Toro,” she said, slipping through the doorway.
Torito’s hand closed over mine. “I don’t want to go to New Mexico,” he whispered.
“Jesus, Torito, how could you get mixed up with this shit? Who did this to you? Do you owe money or—”
“It ain’t like that. The horse, that’s Rosie’s thrill. I don’t mess with it.”
I stared at his swollen brow, trying to see his eyes, trying to see if he was lying. Torito’s grip tightened. “He wants to help me, Richie. Just like he said he would. You remember. A long time ago he told Gus that he’d help me when I was through . . . Gus told you about that, didn’t he?”
I cleaned Torito’s cuts and stitched his face together. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him, but I couldn’t get him to shut up, either.
“You should have seen Gus the first time he met him,” Torito laughed, his swollen lips twisting into a lumpy grin. “You know Gus, by the book and everything. Well, he had to get the devil to sign some papers—”
“The devil? Cut the bullshit, Torito. Tell me who did this to you.”
Torito’s voice was impatient: “That’s what I’m doing.”
I shook my head. “Whatever you say, Toro.”
Okay. I can't tell it like Gus, but let me try. See, when I was a boy, the devil lived in a little adobe behind our house. Even when my mother died and we moved away, he still lived there. He liked to carve; he could put the Santeros to shame. Of course, the devil didn’t make holy things. He made statues of demons, the death cart, coyotes . . . even La Llorona. He gave them to my brothers and me, but we didn’t like to play with them, and we locked them in a footlocker at night.