The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

BLOOD MONEY

Her name is Jessie.

She’s about twenty-five. Dark, and thin.

Not delicate. Not that kind of thin.

Hungry thin. She can put it away. Wedged in a corner booth where no one’s likely to see her, she’s working on a lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns. Eggs scrambled dry and sausage and white Wonder Bread toast slathered with every pat of butter the cook put on her plate.

Damn good toast, too. Singed just past golden brown and painted slick purple with blackberry jam from little plastic containers.

Thick Jackson Pollock smears of jam. Jessie really should have gone to art school. Her mother always told her: “You’ve got an eye, dear. Other people don’t even know how to look at the things you see.”

“It’s just that they blink at the wrong times, Mom,” Jessie always answered. “They blink, and they miss the world that’s right there in front of them.”

Jessie stares at the jam. She doesn’t blink. She sees it, every gleaming smear. Darker than wine, dark as arterial blood. A color just short of black, the same color as a tattered human heart.

Just that fast her appetite is gone. She pushes the plate away and catches the attention of the restaurant’s lone waitress, a young woman about her age who is trying to brighten the day of a family whose fishing vacation has drowned in a September downpour.

Age is the only thing the two women have in common. The waitress is a granola eater. Rule of thumb for the California traveler — anywhere that redwoods grow, they grow girls just like this one. Retro-hippies with dull spacy smiles. Tie-dyed and brain-fried Jerry Garcia wetdreams.

Only Jerry has been dead a long time now.

Yeah. Jerry’s dead. But if you take a really good look at the waitress, and if you manage not to blink while you’re doing it, you can tell that he’s still alive, too.

Jessie’s stomach lurches, because Jerry’s not the only one.

The waitress tries really hard to turn on some rainy day sunshine for the vacationing family, but the suburbanites won’t give her so much as a smile. She breaks things off with a resigned shrug and slips Jessie the check on her way to the service window, then hurries off with a couple lumberjack breakfast specials for a pair of truckers on the other side of the restaurant.

At least they look like truckers. The men sit in a booth, their faces lost in shadows cast by worn ball caps, their big hands bathed in dull saffron light from a redwood and glass chandelier. Rain lashes the window on the far side of the booth, but neither man pays any attention to the storm outside. After all, this is Northern California, home of the banana slug. Up here, mildew is a way of life.

Jessie stares past the men, through the window. She doesn’t want to go outside. Putting it in artistic terms, it’s much too Emily Carr for her tastes. Which is to say that its extremely north woods impressionistic — sky the color of a dead man’s flesh, decaying horizon bleeding cold water, redwood forest on the other side of the highway dense, black, forbidding.

But Jessie doesn’t have far to go now, and at least with some breakfast in her belly she isn’t liable to faint on the way. How to get where she’s going is the question. She doesn’t have a car, and the parking lot doesn’t exactly present many possibilities. A couple motor homes, and the soggy tourists that match up to them don’t look like their Christian charity would extend as far as Jessie. Besides the condos-on-wheels, there are several trucks. Mostly chromed-to-the-tits Peterbilts. A couple of the tractors are empty. Those with loads are hauling dead redwood trees.

That’s a crime in itself to some, but not all. If the deadhead waitress is ecologically minded, she’s forgotten about it. Little Ms. Earth Mama is flirting with the truckers for all she’s worth — coy and carefree, like she just burned her Earth First! membership card.

Tips in this joint, they must come few and far between. The little waitress is giving it her best. Jessie can see that. She knows how hard a buck comes for most people these days.

Yeah. Money comes hard for most.

But not for all.

Jessie looks at her check. Lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns and coffee. Six bucks and change.

Jessie has money. Money that came the hard way. She’s got seventy-seven bucks in the left pocket of her black leather jacket. Lapel on the left side, there’s nine hundred jammed into a rip in the seam. Six thousand in big bills stuffed in a tear in the inside lining. Plus seven hundred split between her boots, and that’s a bitch. Her boots are too small to begin with.

One last sip of coffee before she goes. One of the truckers cracks a tree-hugger joke and the waitress laughs like she’s never even heard of Greenpeace. Hell, a couple thousand dead trees here and there, what does it matters The cafe walls are lined with dead redwood. Like anywhere else, up here life is all about money and how to get more of it. Everyone’s got to make a dollar — hard or easy — and everyone knows how it’s done in the Pacific Northwest.

You grow something, you cut it down, you sell it. Redwoods or dope. Take your pick. And that’s just what is happening now. Because the waitress is slipping money to one of the drivers, trading him cash for a Ziplock bag of California’s finest…

The big man slides the greenbacks into the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Darlin’, I’ll bet you had to carry a hell of a lot of bacon and eggs for that cash.”

“I’m in the wrong business.”

“You got that right. What you need is a growth opportunity.”

“What? Forty acres? Sensimilla?”

“Hell no. I’ll grow the dope. You grow the babies.”

Laughter splashes dry redwood walls. The waitress and the truck driver, both of them laughing hard while his hand strokes her flat young belly.

His fingers find a piercing there. That’s no surprise. After all, the waitress is one of Jerry’s kids. Garcia himself would have admired the silver belly button ring that twinkles in the saffron light, and the trucker is of the same mind. His thick finger flips the fragile hoop up and down and the waitress doesn’t do anything but laugh some more.

The man’s head tilts back as he eyes the waitress. Light spills from the redwood chandelier above, misses his face, bathes his neck…

Jessie shivers.

There’s a swastika tattooed over the man’s carotid artery.

Quickly, Jessie slides out of the booth. It’s time to go. No one’s looking at her. Everyone’s looking at the waitress, at the truck driver, at his hand on the young woman’s belly.

Everyone’s looking at that little silver ring.

Jessie wads the six-bucks-and-change check into a ball and stuffs it into the pocket of her leather jacket, the same pocket that holds seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks. Twenties and fifties pinch her toes as she passes by the unattended cash register, jilting it cold.

She slips through the door. She squints against the storm. Almost looks back. Doesn’t. Her face is suddenly cold. As cold as the face of a dead man Jessie used to know, his heart splattered slick purple by shotgun fire, his dead eyes staring up at a man with a swastika tattooed on his neck.

Inside the restaurant, no one is laughing anymore.

The man with the tattoo smiles at the waitress.

He says, “Now about this girl we’re looking for… ”

Raindrops lash Jessie’s brow. The sour taste of coffee is gone from her mouth, but the taste of blackberry jam is heavy on her tongue.

Crossing the parking lot, she digs the unpaid check out of her pocket and drops it in a puddle. It wouldn’t take much to square things. Six bucks and change. Maybe a buck tip.

If the waitress was lucky — really lucky — she might pass those greenbacks to a customer when she made change. But on a day like today, when the rain comes in buckets, business is sure to slow down. That money could sit in the till for hours, until the cafe doors flew open and the storm blew inside, and a man with skin the color of a rainy sky burst into the cafe, and the little waitress took one look at him and screamed.

Because that man’s heart is a gleaming blackberry tangle in his tattered chest…

He’s a dead man who’s still alive…

A man Jessie can see in her mind’s eye…

The highway is a river. Jessie stares at the dark forest on the other side. Wet in there, sure. But not as wet as out here. She’ll crawl into the dark, wait until the man with the tattoo and his buddy hit the road —

A voice from behind.

“Hey.”

Jessie doesn’t want to hear that word so she walks faster, but a hand drops on her shoulder and spins her around. The guy with the swastika tattoo smiles at her. His buddy smiles, too.

“What do you think, Smitty?” Tattoo says.

“I think sixty miles haven’t changed her all that much.”

“Yeah,” Tattoo says. “But maybe we should make us some changes now, though. The kind she won’t forget.”

“You’ve got the wrong woman,” Jessie says, dropping her head so her long hair hides her face. She shrugs the guy off and digs her hands into her coat pockets as she turns.

Tattoo grabs her again. Spins her again, harder this time. “I don’t think you could forget me,” he says. “The name’s Larry Oates. I’m the guy who shotgunned your boyfriend, remember?”

Jessie remembers, all right. Raw hatred boils inside her. She spits in Oates’ face, and he shoves her, and she stumbles back and ends up behind one of the mobile homes.

Even if they were looking, the people in the restaurant couldn’t see her now. But the tourists aren’t the only ones missing out on the action. Oates is missing out, too. He takes hold of Jessie’s leather lapels and pulls her so close that he doesn’t even see the butterfly knife in her hand.

Chinkchink. The knife spits blade and Jessie jams it into Oates’ gut.

“Shit,” Smitty says. “Shit!” But Oates doesn’t say a word. All he does is grunt, staring straight into Jessie’s cool gray eyes, holding tight to her black leather lapels as she drives the blade deep and he grunts again —

Scarred knuckles bang the side of Jessie’s head and her knees turn to jelly. Smitty’s fist pounds another hard shot to the temple as she sags. Oates just stands there, trying to hold Jessie by her black leather lapels, but her legs are gone now and she’s real heavy for such a little chick — she’s just dead weight, Oates thinks, oh is that a laugh, this chick’s dead weight and my guts are washing away in the rain — and wet leather slips through his fingers as Jessie sinks away and he has to let her drop and the last thing he sees is a tight roll of bills squirming from the ripped seam of her left lapel, coaxed free by one of his fingers.

Oates opens his mouth, but pain strangles his words. The money squirms loose and he can’t close his fingers around it and the whole roll slips away and falls along with the girl and —

Smitty’s panicking. Oates knows that’s the wrong thing to do. He tries to focus, looking down, searching for the money —

But all he sees are the chrome grips of the girl’s butterfly knife sticking out of his belly. Then he’s down on his knees face to face with the girl — who’s also on her knees — but her eyes are blank slate and he knows she can’t see him.

Smitty’s fists have seen to that. The chick is out like a light. She falls backward and her head thuds against the pavement. Oates falls forward, on top of her.

The split butt of the butterfly knife jams against the hard ridge of the girl’s ribcage and the hilt of the knife follows the blade into Oates’ belly.

The point of the blade drives through his guts and nips his spinal column on the way through his backside.

The girl’s warm breath washes Oates’ cheek. It tickles — even through the pain it goddamn tickles — and Oates almost has to laugh.

He doesn’t. He manages to restrain himself, because right now laughing would hurt way too fucking much, like losing the goddamn money. Instead, he tries to rise. Blood drips from his lips, splatters the girl’s forehead, washes away in the rain —

The wad of bills rolls along the sloping pavement, carried across the yellow lines that separate empty parking spaces by a rippling stream of rainwater veined with Larry Oates’ blood.

Oates crawls after the money, but his buddy grabs him.

“Don’t try to move, man!” Smitty says.

Pain clamps Oates’ jaws. Smitty doesn’t see the goddamn money… and Oates has to tell him about it… but he can’t even say a word.

So he starts crawling after it himself…

.. .but it’s too late for that.

And that’s just what Jessie’s dead lover tells her as she lays unconscious in a parking lot, raindrops washing her all the way to dreamland.

Joe Shepard’s dead lips part and he says, “It’s too late, Jessie.”

“It’s never too late,” she says. “Unless you believe it is.”

“That’s the way you see it.”

“That’s the way you’d see it too, if you’d bother to look.”

Their eyes meet. Jessie knows that Joe is dead. She watched Oates murder him the night before, saw Joe’s heart chewed by buckshot. Saw the open ruin of his chest, slick and dark as blackberry jam. Saw his dead eyes, cold and green and still full of need, as Larry Oates stood over him with a smoking shotgun in his hands.

So she knows this shouldn’t be happening — this rendezvous with a dead man — but she trusts her eyes because she sees things other people don’t even know how to look for. Especially in her dreams. In dreams she sees those things dead on, and she never, ever blinks.

And right now she sees Joe Shepard, the only man she ever loved, a corpse standing in the barn where they first met Larry Oates. Her lover is free of the grave, and the rain has washed a lot of the mud off of him, but Jessie knows he’s not free at all. Not really.

That’s the way it looks to her. Of course, even someone like Jessie can’t see absolutely everything. She’s human. She misses things now and then. Little things, mostly. Or not-so-little things — like nine hundred bucks pulled from a rip in her lapel by the man who killed her lover.

So the next thing she tells the dead man isn’t exactly a lie. “I’ve still got the money,” she says. “Every cent, just like I told you. I promise I’ll bring it back if you just wait a little longer.”

Joe shakes his head, rain-washed face bathed in dim fluorescent light and a few trickles of unhallowed mud like dark tears on his cheeks. There’s not much light in the barn, but there’s enough to see the important things, like the little bit of a smile on Joe’s face, a smile Jessie has seen a thousand times before. A smile that means he understands things in a way she doesn’t. A smile that means he’s got to lay it out for her one more time.

“That money,” he says. “It was everything to me.”

“I swear, Joe. I’ve got it. I’ll bring it to you. If you just wait — ”

He grabs her by the lapels and pulls her close. Digs his dead fingers into the ripped seam. Comes up short one roll of greenbacks amounting to nine hundred dollars.

“Oates pulled it out when you stabbed him. He dropped the money, and rainwater carried it across the parking lot.” Joe taps his head. “I watched it happen, saw everything inside my skull. It’s funny being dead. You see all sorts of things. You even see some things that haven’t happened yet. Like this — a couple hours from now a little waitress with a pierced belly button is going to step outside for a cigarette break. She’ll spot that nine hundred bucks just before the rain washes it down a drain, and she’ll pick it up, and — ”

“I’ll go back for it,” Jessie says. “One way or another, I’ll make her give it to me.”

“Considering that you’re out cold at the moment, I don’t see how you have much chance of getting that done.”

“Trust me just a little longer, Joe. I can do it.”

Joe shakes his head some more, and the look on his face is stone cold, a look Jessie never saw when he was alive. “I’m tired of trusting other people,” he says, his voice flat. “It’s time I handled this myself.”

“No. Just give me one more chance — ”

“You had your chance. Our deal was that I’d stay put if you brought back every dollar, and now you’ve gone and lost nine hundred bucks. You don’t understand what that money meant to me. I won’t let anyone keep me from it. Not even you.”

There’s a work table near the barn door. Joe walks over to it. The table is littered with beer bottles and ashtrays and weapons. Joe picks up Larry Oates’ shotgun. “Somehow, I’ve got a shot at a second chance,” he says. “That’s what’s important here. I can feel it in my gut. It’s a new feeling, something that wasn’t there when I was alive, and I’ve got to go with it. See, this isn’t some crazy dream, Jess.”

Jessie stares at him. His green eyes are set, unblinking, not smiling at all anymore. Alive, his eyes always smiled. But now his eyes are dead, and different, like part of a mask.

A mask worn by a stranger.

“If you do this thing,” she says, “you won’t be the man I know anymore.”

Joe nods his head. “Maybe I’ll be different. Maybe I already am. I don’t know, Jess — maybe losing your pulse raises your IQ. Maybe I’m smarter than I used to be. Or maybe I’m just seeing some things that you can’t see — the same way I see that waitress picking up my money in a couple of hours. Any way you slice it, I know what feels right in my gut, and I’m going to go out and do it. It’s the only way I know to get back everything I lost.”

“But that waitress doesn’t have anything to do with this. All she’s going to do is pick up some money. Nine hundred bucks — ”

“You’re wrong. It’s more than money now. A lot more. That’s all you need to understand.”

Jessie stares at him. A chill travels her spine, because she barely recognizes the man she loved.

She wants to say more, but Joe holds up a hand. “Here’s my advice, Jess — stop worrying about me, and stop worrying about waitresses you don’t even know. Start worrying about yourself. After all, you’re the one who just knifed a drug dealer. I think he might be a little pissed about that.”

It’s almost funny, that last part.

But Jessie doesn’t laugh. Not this time.

And Joe doesn’t smile.

Not anymore.

“Shit,” Smitty says. “Shit!”

He boots the clutch and his hand chops the gear shift. His knuckles ache like a sonofabitch. Smitty doesn’t like to hit women. They all have hard fucking heads.

He shakes his right hand. It’s sure enough messed up. Probably busted. And Oates. Man! His partner is in the back of Smitty’s Peterbilt tractor, bleeding in the sleeper, gutted like a fish. If Oates dies… if the bossman doesn’t make it… Man, Smitty can’t handle everything on his own. He’s always been the guy who moves the merchandise, doing the job while he runs redwoods down the coast. He’s no businessman. He can’t handle cops and lawyers and all the rest of it, the way Oates can…

Shit!

Smitty glances at the chick. She’s out cold, buckled into the passenger seat. Ankles bound with duct tape. Wrists bound with same. She won’t be getting away.

Not this time. Last time, they weren’t careful enough. Oh, sure, her boyfriend wasn’t any problem. Just some loser looking to make a buck by moving some dope. They hooked him with a good line and a couple beers in a Portland tavern. That was all it took. After a little drive into the country and a couple more beers in Oates’ cozy cabin in the woods they marched the two of them out to the barn to show the boyfriend the merch. Right then and there Oates did him easy, blasting the boyfriend’s ass as soon as the fool told them what kind of green he wanted to lay down.

Moron came north to be a player, didn’t even get into the game. The girl was something else, though. She got away while they were searching the dead guy for his bankroll. Had to be that she had the dough, because all they found on her fool of a boyfriend was a withdrawal slip showing he’d cleaned seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks out of his bank account —

Not much money, really. But they’d killed for it.

And now Oates might fucking-well die for it.

And that makes it important.

That makes it everything.

Oates is huddled up in the sleeper, bleeding on a mattress that stinks of Smitty’s sweat.

Bleeding bad. The towel Smitty gave him is soaked through. He looks for something else, but the bedding is filthy, and the only other thing he spots is a stack of old skin magazines.

Oates grabs a copy of Hustler and presses it to his belly. He closes his eyes and thinks about the money. Seems like it’s right there in front of him. He can see it clear as day —

Right there in front of him. There it is. That little green jellyroll trundling across the parking lot.

It doesn’t look very thick, that jellyroll.

Not very thick at all.

But it’s there in his mind. Rolling… rolling…

Rolling like it’s never gonna stop.

The barn door creaks open.

Shotgun in hand, Joe steps into the storm.

Jessie watches him go. She remembers what he said about having a shot at a second chance, and she thinks she knows what’s driving him. It’s the money, but it’s so much more. Because the money was everything to him, to the both of them. It meant a new start after some really hard times. A future. It was like a dream, a dream they could hold in their hands —

And Joe died for it.

That made the money even more important, maybe more important than anything else in the world.

Maybe the money was so important that it brought Joe back from the dead. Maybe that’s the way it was. Maybe if you died for something, if a shotgun ripped you up because you wanted to hold on to it the same way you hold onto your own heartbeat, maybe something out there in the great beyond might cut you a break and bend the rules a little bit. Yeah. Maybe something up above in heaven or down below in hell might be impressed enough by all that unvarnished need to cheat the reaper for a little while and let you try to get that something back —

Maybe that’s how Joe sees it. Jessie doesn’t want to see it that way, though. Something inside tells her it’s wrong, the same something that tells her Joe isn’t the same man anymore. She recognizes him, sure. But with Jerry Oates’ shotgun in his hands, he’s a very different man than the man she loved.

She can’t imagine a second chance with that man, even if she had one.

The barn door bangs open and closed, driven by a renegade wind. Outside, Joe is nothing more than a shadow, drifting through the rain.

Jessie wants to run away, but she knows it won’t do her any good. After all, she already tried that. Running in the wake of Joe’s murder, scared of the law, scared of anyone who looked like they might have their hand in Larry Oates’ till. Thumbing her way south, traveling three hundred miles with some harmless college kid before sleep stole her from his car, before her dream took her to the grave in a marijuana field where Oates and Smitty were shoveling mud into her dead lover’s face. Listening as Joe said that he couldn’t rest without the money, every dollar of it. Screaming in her head that he’d come back for it if he had to, that six feet of mud wouldn’t keep him in the ground.

She knew he meant it. The only reason he hadn’t done anything up until then was that Jessie had the money. Joe gave it to her as soon as he cleaned out his account, saying he’d feel better with her holding it until the deal was set.

She’d held it, all right. When she woke from the dream in the kid’s car, she still had every dollar tucked in her pocket, and what wasn’t in her pocket was jammed into her ripped lapel, and what wasn’t in either of those places was hidden in her coat lining or her boots.

She made the college kid drop her at the first exit.

Then she reversed course, thumbed her way north again.

But she didn’t make it to Joe’s grave.

And now she is unconscious.

And nine hundred dollars float in a puddle in a restaurant parking lot.

And a dead man named Joe Shepard is walking in the rain with a shotgun in his hands.

And it is so dark in Jessie’s dream. She stands in the barn doorway, calling Joe’s name. She can see him in the distance, but he doesn’t look back. Finally she runs after him, and the rain pounds down on her so hard and cold that she thinks it will freeze her solid, and lightning flashes ahead of Joe, jagged spears that slice the night, cracks widening and growing brighter and brighter until —

The chick’s eyes flash open. Right off, Smitty wants to hit her again. Goddamn if he doesn’t want to do that in the worst way.

But he resists the temptation. He has to keep his eyes on the road. He has to get down to business, the way Oates would.

The windshield wipers beat time as Smitty fishes his cell phone from his pocket. He calls information and gets the number he needs. Nearly runs off the road while he punches it in, and that just makes him madder.

The wipers beat some more. The phone rings for-fucking-ever. Then the doctor finally answers. He’s the kind who’s willing to keep his mouth shut for a price. Smitty tells him to get his ass out to Oates’ barn. The smarmy bastard wants to negotiate right then and there, but Smitty doesn’t let him. He tells the sawbones he’d better get his mercenary butt moving and cuts the bastard off before he can argue.

The chick doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to. Her eyes are talking for her. She’s got those suckers clicked onto hi-beams, emotionally speaking.

Cool gray eyes, but they’re burning like coals.

Let ’em burn, Smitty thinks, watching the flapping windshield wipers, the drenching rain. In this kind of motherfucking weather, nothing burns for long

Not where this little girl’s headed.

Nothing much burns in a wet marijuana field. Nothing burns at all under six feet of mud.

Jessie almost opens her mouth.

Almost. But there’s no sense in it. She can’t explain things to a guy like Smitty. Dream visions don’t exist in his realm of possibilities. Neither do walking dead men. And why should they? A bottom-feeder like Smitty can’t see things the way Jessie can. A guy like that is practically born to blink at all the wrong times.

And even if Smitty could see those things, he probably couldn’t understand them. Some things are hard to process, even with a bucketful of downtime. Like a man wanting something badly enough to chase after it when he’s dead, or a woman returning to a lion’s den to keep him from doing it.

But Jessie knows she’ll do just that if she gets the chance. It isn’t over yet. Smitty’s Peterbilt tractor isn’t hitched to a load of logs, and he wants to get Oates to that doctor. In other words, they’re traveling fast. They have another five or ten miles to go before they get to Oates’ farm. The restaurant is a good fifty miles behind them. That means Joe has to travel sixty miles south in the rain before he can do any damage with Oates’ shotgun. That’s going to take some time, even for a dead man who’s as determined as he is cold.

Jessie figures it this way — Joe will probably take her old VW. He has the keys. They were in his pocket when Oates buried him. She remembers that the bug is parked by Oates’ house, where they’d had the beers while Oates put them at ease. The house was a good mile walk from the barn, through the woods she’d watched Joe enter in her dream, and —

And then she remembers something else. The VW is down to fumes. Joe was so eager to make the buy that he didn’t want to stop and gas up the bug. Maybe he can make twenty miles, maybe thirty if he’s lucky, but no way will the bug make sixty. That puts the restaurant at least thirty miles out of range, and gassing up is going to be a problem because Joe doesn’t have a dime.

And dead men don’t carry plastic.

Jessie laughs. She can’t help herself.

Smitty ignores her, downshifting as he nears the turnoff. There’s an old Mustang sitting at the stop sign at the bottom of the road that leads to Oates’ spread. It’s black with a couple of thick red bars painted on the hood, and its turn-signal flashes as the driver waits to turn onto the highway going south.

Smitty spots the car. “Hey,” he says. “That’s my ‘67! Someone stole my goddamn Mustang!”

The stolen car starts across the highway. Instantly, Jessie knows that Joe is the driver. Her hands are bound but that doesn’t stop her. She grabs the steering wheel and the truck veers left as the Mustang cuts in front of it, and the two vehicles miss by the width of a raindrop as Smitty stomps the brakes and whips the wheel and the Peterbilt screams down the highway sideways, hydroplaning like a sonofabitch.

Smitty’s tractor ends up on the shoulder, sliding though mud and gravel until Jessie’s door kisses a redwood. Smitty grinds the gears and turns the rig around while Jessie watches the Mustang’s red taillights disappear in the storm, like coals burning down to ash.

One more second and those taillights will be gone.

One more second and Joe Shepard will be on his way.

One more second until the storm and the dark hold sway.

One more second until —

Smitty just can’t help himself. Not anymore.

“This is all your fault, bitch,” he says.

His fist whips out and clips Jessie’s jaw.

Everything goes black.

“Hey there, Jess. Good to see you again.”

She opens her eyes and she’s in the Mustang, riding shotgun with a dead man.

“That was a close one, wasn’t it? Man, that truck-driving asshole nearly ran me off the road.” Joe winks at her. “Or did you have something to do with that, Jess?”

Jessie doesn’t say a word. Joe watches the storm through the windshield, as if he doesn’t really expect an answer, as if he’s determined to enjoy a Sunday drive through hell no matter what happens.

“Too bad Edward Hopper didn’t do pastoral scenes,” he jokes. “He would have loved this stuff.”

Joe laughs, but it’s like a hollow echo of yesterday. Jessie wants to cry. He’s trying really hard. He always tried really hard. He was a carpenter — still is, she figures, even though he’s dead. But money never came easy for him, and it always seemed to go too fast.

So their life wasn’t what they wanted it to be. A succession of low-rent apartments in low-rent towns, the kind of towns where a girl grows comfortable carrying a butterfly knife in her pocket. But that’s how it is when you work for someone else. They make the money, you do the work. They live someplace nice, and you don’t. Their wife doesn’t take anything but her credit card when she heads off to the grocery store after dark, your wife makes sure to remember her butterfly knife.

So when a friend offered to make Joe a partner in a custom cabinet shop, he jumped at the chance. Only problem was that Joe didn’t have enough green to buy his way into the business. So he decided to cash in his savings, make a run up north into marijuana country like he had in his college days, grab some quick profit on a larger scale than he’d ever tried before. But his old contacts steered him in the wrong direction, and he ended up in a Portland bar looking for a friend of a friend, and a short time after that he ended up on the wrong end of Larry Oates’ shotgun, and now his future doesn’t have anything to do with the life he wanted to make.

Now his future is all about death.

“You’ve got to listen to me, Joe. You can’t do this.”

“It’s the only way. Either I do it or I crawl back into that hole in the ground. It’s that simple.”

“But that waitress. The one who’s going to find the money… she doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”

Joe’s anger flares. “She poured Oates a cup of coffee, didn’t she? Brought the bastard his breakfast while I was digging my way out of a grave like some goddamn gopher. She flirted with him and bought his dope and put money in his pocket that’ll maybe buy more shotgun shells he can use to put some other poor bastard six-feet under.” Joe snorts laughter. “Hell, Jessie, that little waitress gave Oates everything but a sweet little cherry on top.”

“But that’s no reason to kill her!”

“You’re right.” Joe glances at his wristwatch. “But in just a little while she’ll be picking up nine hundred bucks that can buy another chance at life for me, and that’s all the reason I need.”

“But why does she have to die?”

“That money was taken in blood. Blood is the only way to get it back.”

“And what about me?” Jessie asks. “I’ve got your money, too. When you finish with the waitress, will you come after me with Larry Oates’ shotgun?”

“Jesus Christ, Jessie.” Joe sighs. “When I’m done with the waitress, it’s over. That’s what this thing in my gut tells me. I get that money back and I’m alive again, for keeps.”

Jessie doesn’t say anything.

She swallows hard. Up ahead, the road is dark.

Lightning flashes. A rip in the sky that’s too wide and too bright, like the polished blade of a butterfly knife.

Joe breaks the silence. “Don’t you want me to have another chance, Jess?”

‘Yes. Of course I do.”

“Then you have to let me do this thing.” Joe nods at the shotgun, waiting on the back seat. “And I have to do it this way.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m not. This is wrong. Everything tells me that. Even if we could turn back the hands of time, if everything could really be the same as it was, I couldn’t pay the price you’re asking. Because if we pay that price, things won’t ever be the same as they were. You’re not a killer, Joe. You never were. Not alive, and not in the dreams I had for us. If you become one now, you might get a second chance, but what kind of a chance would it be?”

Joe shakes his head. “Remember what your mother used to say, Jess? About the way you saw things, I mean?”

“She said I had a special kind of eye. She said other people didn’t even know how to look at the things I could see.”

“Your mother was wrong. At least on one count. See, I know exactly how you see the world. I know how you see it when you’re awake. I know how you see it when you’re dreaming. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m not the man you used to see in your dreams, but your dreams aren’t the same as they used to be. They’re not even dreams anymore. Think about that, Jess.”

“There’s got to be another way.”

“If you think of one, be sure to tell me about it. Until then, the clock is ticking.”

Up ahead, thunder rumbles. Loud. Getting louder.

When it comes again, Joe’s voice isn’t any more than a whisper. “It’s about time for us to say adios, Jess.”

Jessie opens her mouth. She can’t go now. Not yet… not until she convinces him she’s right.

Joe shifts gears, and the engine roars, and so does the thunder. Before she can so much as whisper, lightning tears Jessie’s world in half.

The next part takes only a second, maybe two. But to Jessie it seems to last forever, like crawling up a rickety set of cellar steps with a couple of broken legs.

Out of the dark, into the light.

That’s what it’s like. Because things start to come together for Jessie. The things Joe said about the way she sees things, about her dreams… and the way they’ve changed since Joe died… and the way Joe has changed, too…

A lightning crack as Smitty slaps her one more time, and Jessie’s eyelids flutter open. She’s on the floor of Oates’ barn. Her boots are by her head. Smitty looms over her, clutching her leather jacket in one hand, a fistful of dollar bills in the other.

He’s raided Jessie’s wearable bank, and he’s not happy. “I know how much money you had,” he says. “Seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven dollars. There’s nine hundred missing, bitch. I swear you’re going to give me every penny.”

Jessie rolls over onto her elbows. Her wrists and ankles aren’t bound anymore, but she can hardly move. Her right eye is swollen shut. Her lips are bruised and puffy, like a couple banana slugs glued to her face, and there’s a sound in her head that she can’t escape.

A sound like thunder.

Smitty pulls her to her feet and shoves her against the truck. For the first time, Jessie realizes they’re not alone. There’s a car parked over by the workbench, the one littered with beer bottles and ashtrays and guns. It’s a Mercedes. Oates is stretched out on the hood, his shirt skinned off, his skin nearly as white as Joe’s. There’s a man bent over him — he’s got to be the doctor that Smitty phoned — and his hands are covered with blood.

Oates screams, his body bucking against the hood of the car. Smitty whirls and yells something. The doctor swears and snatches up a syringe. He drives the spike into Oates’ pale flesh. The killer bucks again and falls back, his head striking the Mercedes hood with a hollow sound like a coffin lid slamming closed.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor says. “I swear to God, Smitty, I did everything I could.”

Blood pumps under Smitty’s skin. He drops the money on the ground and stares straight into Jessie’s eyes. “Seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks,” he says. “Seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks.”

Jessie tries to run, but she can barely walk. Smitty slaps her hard and… Joe slams the door of the Mustang. Heavy rain washes the last of the gravedirt from his face. He studies the parking lot. A couple logging trucks. An old Ford with a camper shell. A waitress dancing in the rain with a roll of soggy twenties and tens locked in her palm… and five hard knuckles pound Jessie’s belly. Smitty punches her once, twice, three times... four shells, five, and one more fed into the shotgun as Joe watches the waitress rush into the restaurant… and Jessie drops to her knees… reaching out, grabbing Joe, pulling him close so that his cold belt buckle burns against her cheek. “Listen to me,” she says. “That money cost us everything, and now it’s going to cost us even more.” Joe grabs her, pulls her to her feet… and Smitty drags her across the barn, to the Mercedes where Larry Oates rests in tortured repose, his face frozen in a grimace of agony, and Smitty grabs Jessie by the hair and shoves her head close to the dead man’s, so close that their lips nearly touch… and Joe’s dead lips are just as close but he says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but you see how things are now. You see that every time you close your eyes.” And he stares across the parking lot, the shotgun in his hands, and Jessie screams at him but he won’t even look at her. He’s looking at the restaurant, at that waitress on the other side of the glass, and his eyes are cold and green and full of need for all the things that have been taken from him and all the things he knows he can never get back no matter how hard he tries… and Smitty pushes Jessie nose-to-nose with the dead man… and Joe Shepard swallows hard and takes his first step forward.

Larry Oates’ eyelids look like little marble slabs. Jessie stares straight at them. She doesn’t even blink.

She can’t see Joe anymore, and she can’t see her dream. She knows she had one once, but she can’t see it at all. It’s like Joe said — she doesn’t even have a dream anymore.

But even though her dream is gone Joe is still part of it, the same way he’s still a part of her world. Jessie can never forget him, so he’s still alive in that most essential part of her, that thing-that-used-to-be-a-dream-but-isn’t-anymore.

She understands that now. He’s trapped there, and he wants a second chance at a dream that’s dead. He’s trying for it, trying the only way he knows how. Listening to something in his dead gut, cradling it there like a precious spark, allowing it to drive him forward.

Just that fast Jessie realizes what it is Joe’s listening to.

He’s listening to the only thing that survived the death of her dream.

He’s listening to her nightmare.

Jessie’s eyes are wide open. She’s wide awake. She’s not dreaming. But she’s not in Larry Oates’ barn, either, though that’s where her body stands. No. She’s not standing there, face-to-face with Larry Oates’ corpse. Not really. Instead, she’s standing in the only place she can possibly belong anymore — in the deepest, darkest pocket of a living nightmare, with a man who was once the biggest part of her world.

But Jessie and Joe aren’t alone in that nightmare.

In a nightmare, there’s plenty of room.

Jessie sees that, too.

Staring down at Larry Oates’ dead face, Jessie sees that clearly.

Just that fast, Larry Oates’ eyelids flash open.

The dead man gets up.

The doctor runs for it. Smitty grabs him.

“First thing you’ve done right all day,” Oates says.

Smitty swallows hard, and the doc’s shaking like he’s in the throws of the DT’s. “This is impossible,” the little man says, staring at the rope of intestines dangling from Oates’ belly. “It can’t be happening. He’s dead.”

Oates doesn’t pay the bastard any mind. What the doc says doesn’t make any difference to him. Hell, he knows he’s dead.

Or at least he was a minute ago. Now he’s back. He doesn’t know exactly why. Doesn’t much care, either. Hell, it could be he’s some kind of immortal. Or it could be his barn was built on top of some old enchanted Indian burial ground. Could be one of his spacy new-age girlfriends put some kind of mystic spell on him without him even knowing about it. Hell, could be a lot of things.

Maybe Oates could figure it out if he really wanted to. Tug at that rope of intestines sticking out of his belly, pull out his own entrails and read ’em, discover the mysteries of the ages in his coiled guts. But he can’t quite see the percentage in that.

Why he’s come back doesn’t much interest him.

What he can do now that he’s here does.

Oates’ right hand slices the air, palm up and open. Smitty just stares at it, like he expects to see something there.

Jesus, Oates thinks. Like he expects magic. Like he expects something to appear out of nowhere.

“The money, idiot,” Oates says. “Give me the money.”

Smitty’s a couple sandwiches short of a picnic, but he gets the message. He hands the wad to Oates. The dead man starts counting it, and he feels a little better already. There’s something in his gut talking to him, and it ain’t a butterfly knife. No. It’s something down deep, something that tells him everything will be okay if he has this money in his hands —

Only problem is, the money isn’t all there.

Oates remembers now. The restaurant parking lot. The little green jellyroll…

“We’re a little short,” Oates says.

Smitty swallows hard. “Nine hundred bucks. Gotta be that the girl’s got it, but she won’t tell me where it is.”

A quiet voice from the other side of the barn. “You’re never going to know,” Jessie says. “Neither of you.”

Oates blinks at the shadows. The little chick’s over by the workbench. She must have slipped over there while everyone was marveling at his Lazarus act. That wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but she’s holding one of his shotguns. It’s just like the gun he used to cut down her boyfriend, only this hogleg is sawed off.

“You put that down,” Oates says. “I’m already dead. I don’t figure you can kill me twice in one day.”

“Take a step,” she says, “and we’ll find out.”

Oates smiles. He feels pretty good, actually.

“Have it your way,” he says, and then he takes a step forward. Jessie raises the shotgun.

Oates takes another step.

Shivering, Jessie watches the dead man come.

She can see him, all right. She sees Larry Oates all too well. After all, this is her world. She knows that now. She made it, this thing-that-used-to-be-a-dream-but-isn’t-anymore.

Dead men live here because she can’t let go of them.

Joe Shepard walks here because she loves him.

Larry Oates walks here because she hates him.

And money controls everything, because money drove both men to their deaths.

Oates smiles at Jessie, his guts hanging from his belly like coiled snakes. He opens his mouth, and he’s smirking while he does it, and Jessie’s afraid that she’ll see a forked tongue flick over his lips while he brands her with words that will surely burn like hellfire —

Jessie swallows hard. She never imagined that a nightmare could talk, but she knows that it’s possible now, the same way she knows that Oates’ words will change her forever if she hears them.

Oates takes a breath. Fills his dead lungs. He’s ready to tell Jessie something.

But Jessie doesn’t plan on listening.

She opens her own mouth.

She screams Larry Oates’ words away.

Oates starts to laugh, but Jessie can’t hear him. She can’t hear anything. She’s still screaming.

Her finger tightens on the shotgun trigger.

Quite suddenly, she realizes that she knows how to kill a nightmare.

You kill one the same way you kill a dream.

Jessie doesn’t know how many times she fired the shotgun. All she knows is that Larry Oates isn’t moving anymore, and what’s left of his head wouldn’t fill a sock.

Jessie pries the money from Oates’ dead fingers. Smitty doesn’t say a word. Neither does the doctor.

She looks both men in the eye.

She thinks about that little tie-dyed waitress.

She points the shotgun at the doctor.

“Give me your keys,” she says.

He opens his mouth, ready to argue. Then he glances down at what’s left of Larry Oates, and a second later his keys hit the ground at Jessie’s feet.

Jessie pockets them. She finds a roll of duct tape on the workbench and tells the doc to get busy. Before long Smitty is on the ground, half-mummified in silver tape. Then she gets her boots and jacket on, as fast as she can.

“Head for the highway,” she tells the doctor, aiming the shotgun his way. “My advice is this — leave town and don’t look back.”

The doctor knows good advice when he hears it. He grabs his coat and hurries into the storm.

Jessie climbs behind the wheel of the Mercedes and backs out of the barn.

Raindrops pelt the bloodstained hood, washing Larry Oates’ blood over the fenders, into the mud.

Jessie only has one place to go.

She drives fast. She keeps her eyes on the road, but her thoughts travel elsewhere.

To Joe. She can’t see him now. She can’t see what he’s doing… or what he’s done. But she can still see the last vision she had of him in her mind’s eve.

Joe Shepard standing in that restaurant parking lot, swallowing hard, taking his first step forward with Larry Oates’ shotgun gripped between his dead fingers.

She wonders how long it would take Joe to cross that parking lot. It wasn’t what you’d call a long trip. Not really. Not if you measured it in footsteps. But measured another way, it was the longest trip imaginable. Because Joe was walking in a nightmare, not a dream. It was a nightmare that belonged to the woman he loved, and he knew all too well how she felt about the things it demanded of him.

Still, even if he hesitated, it would only take him a minute or two to cross the parking lot. Jessie wonders if that might have been long enough. She tries to remember the things that took place in Larry Oates’ barn. She tries to put everything into perspective.

Oates returned to life about the same time that Jessie regained consciousness. She grabbed the shotgun off the workbench… and then Oates walked across the barn, came at her, ready to tell her something —

That couldn’t have taken very long, could it?

A minute? Maybe two? But maybe that was long enough. Maybe she had fired the shotgun in time. Maybe Joe was still walking across the parking lot when she killed the walking nightmare called Larry Oates —

Maybe killing Oates had changed everything.

Maybe. If killing a nightmare could restore a dream.

Maybe. If second chances — the kind worth having — existed in her world.

Maybe…

Jessie doesn’t know, but she’s about to find out. The restaurant is just ahead. She turns into the parking lot. The rain is really coming down now. She can’t see very far at all.

She pulls to a stop, throws open the door, steps into the downpour.

It won’t take her long to cross the lot.

Not even a minute. Not even that long.

Dull light glows behind the windows, but Jessie can’t see anything inside with rainwater bleeding down the glass. She pulls her coat over her head and hurries toward the door, dodging puddles as best she can. She jumps a big one near a storm-drain grate, sees something half submerged in dark water.

A shotgun.

Jessie stops cold, staring down at the gun.

But you can’t tell if a shotgun’s been fired by staring at it, not even if you’ve got an eye like Jessie’s. There are other ways to find out, though. Jessie is close to the window now. She can see inside the restaurant.

And there’s the waitress, smiling and laughing, showing off her soggy bankroll to a couple of truckers. But that’s not all Jessie sees, not really. Because she looks at the waitress and she sees a woman who’s been handed a second chance and doesn’t even know it.

Jessie knows, though.

Because she’s been handed a second chance, too.

Across the parking lot, a pair of headlights flash at her.

She hurries toward the Mustang.

She hurries toward her dream.