Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)(13)

He started to close the cabinet, then took another look. He moved some of the crap around. No birth control ring. Maybe it was in her purse. He hoped so, because he hadn’t been carrying a rubber. If he’d f*cked her—and although he couldn’t remember for sure, he probably had—he’d ridden in bareback.

He put on his underwear and shuffled back to the bedroom, standing in the doorway for a moment and looking at the woman who had brought him home last night. Arms and legs splayed, everything showing. Last night she had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals, her cropped top and hoop earrings. This morning he saw the sagging white dough of a growing boozegut, and the second chin starting to appear under the first.

He saw something worse: she wasn’t a woman, after all. Probably not jailbait (please God not jailbait), but surely no more than twenty and maybe still in her late teens. On one wall, chillingly childish, was a poster of KISS with Gene Simmons spewing fire. On another was a cute kitten with startled eyes, dangling from a tree branch. HANG IN THERE, BABY, this poster advised.

He needed to get out of here.

Their clothes were tangled together at the foot of the mattress. He separated his t-shirt from her panties, yanked it over his head, then stepped into his jeans. He froze with the zipper halfway up, realizing that his left front pocket was much flatter than it had been when he left the check-cashing joint the previous afternoon.

No. It can’t be.

His head, which had begun to feel the teeniest bit better, started to throb again as his heartbeat picked up speed, and when he shoved his hand into the pocket, it brought up nothing but a ten-dollar bill and two toothpicks, one of which poked under his index fingernail and into the sensitive meat beneath. He hardly noticed.

We didn’t drink up five hundred dollars. No way we did. We’d be dead if we drank up that much.

His wallet was still at home in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, hoping against hope, but no joy. He must have transferred the ten he usually kept there to his front pocket at some point. The front pocket made it tougher for barroom dips, which now seemed like quite the joke.

He looked at the snoring, splayed girl-woman on the mattress and started for her, meaning to shake her awake and ask her what she’d done with his f*cking money. Choke her awake, if that was what it took. But if she’d stolen from him, why had she brought him home? And hadn’t there been something else? Some other adventure after they left the Milky Way? Now that his head was clearing, he had a memory—hazy, but probably valid—of them taking a cab to the train station.

I know a guy who hangs out there, honey.

Had she really said that, or was it only his imagination?

She said it, all right. I’m in Wilmington, Bill Clinton’s the president, and we went to the train station. Where there was indeed a guy. The kind who likes to do his deals in the men’s room, especially when the customer has a slightly rearranged face. When he asked who teed off on me, I told him—

“I told him he should mind his beeswax,” Dan muttered.

When the two of them went in, Dan had been meaning to buy a gram to keep his date happy, no more than that, and only if it wasn’t half Manitol. Coke might be Deenie’s thing but it wasn’t his. Rich man’s Anacin, he’d heard it called, and he was far from rich. But then someone had come out of one of the stalls. A business type with a briefcase banging his knee. And when Mr. Businessman went to wash his hands at one of the basins, Dan had seen flies crawling all over his face.

Deathflies. Mr. Businessman was a dead man walking and didn’t know it.

So instead of going small, he was pretty sure he’d gone big. Maybe he’d changed his mind at the last moment, though. It was possible; he could remember so little.

I remember the flies, though.

Yes. He remembered those. Booze tamped down the shining, knocked it unconscious, but he wasn’t sure the flies were even a part of the shining. They came when they would, drunk or sober.

He thought again: I need to get out of here.

He thought again: I wish I were dead.


2

Deenie made a soft snorting sound and turned away from the merciless morning light. Except for the mattress on the floor, the room was devoid of furniture; there wasn’t even a thrift-shop bureau. The closet stood open, and Dan could see the majority of Deenie’s meager wardrobe heaped in two plastic laundry baskets. The few items on hangers looked like barhopping clothes. He could see a red t-shirt with SEXY GIRL printed in spangles on the front, and a denim skirt with a fashionably frayed hem. There were two pairs of sneakers, two pairs of flats, and one pair of strappy high-heel f*ck-me shoes. No cork sandals, though. No sign of his own beat-up Reeboks, for that matter.

Dan couldn’t remember them kicking off their shoes when they came in, but if they had, they’d be in the living room, which he could remember—vaguely. Her purse might be there, too. He might have given her whatever remained of his cash for safekeeping. It was unlikely but not impossible.

He walked his throbbing head down the short hall to what he assumed was the apartment’s only other room. On the far side was a kitchenette, the amenities consisting of a hotplate and a bar refrigerator tucked under the counter. In the living area was a sofa hemorrhaging stuffing and propped up at one end with a couple of bricks. It faced a big TV with a crack running down the middle of the glass. The crack had been mended with a strip of packing tape that now dangled by one corner. A couple of flies were stuck to the tape, one still struggling feebly. Dan eyed it with morbid fascination, reflecting (not for the first time) that the hungover eye had a weird ability to find the ugliest things in any given landscape.