NOS4A2(96)
Bing gripped the can of Gingersnap Spice, pointed it in the boy’s face, and blasted a hissing stream of pale smoke into his mouth and eyes—what he should’ve done minutes ago, what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been so awful mad, if he hadn’t decided to make the boy watch. The kid flinched, tried to turn his face, but Bing held him by the hair and kept spraying. Wayne Carmody shut his eyes and clamped his lips shut.
“Bing! Bing!” Manx screamed.
Bing screamed himself, desperate to be out of the car and moving, and aware at the same time that he had not dosed the boy well. It didn’t matter. There was no time, and the boy was in the car now, couldn’t leave. Bing let go of him and dropped the can of Gingersnap Spice into one pocket of his tracksuit jacket. His right hand was pawing for the pistol in the other pocket.
He was out then, slamming the door behind him and pulling out the big oiled revolver. She had on a black motorcycle helmet that showed only her eyes, wide now, seeing the gun in his hand, seeing the last thing she was ever going to see. Three steps away at most, right in his kill zone.
“Bing Bing,” he said, “time to do my thing!”
He had already begun to apply pressure on the trigger when Mr. Manx pushed himself up off the hood, putting himself right in the way. The gun went off, and Manx’s left ear exploded in a spray of skin and blood.
Manx screamed, clapped his hand to the side of his head where raggedy pieces of ear now hung from the side of his face.
Bing screamed, too, and fired again, into the mist. The sound of the gun going off a second time, when he wasn’t prepared for it, startled him so badly that he farted, a high squeak in his pants.
“Mr. Manx! Oh, my God! Mr. Manx, are you all right?”
Mr. Manx dropped against the side of the car, twisting his head around to look at him.
“Well, what do you think? I have been stabbed in the face and my ear is shot to pieces! I am lucky my brains are not running down the front of my shirt, you dumbbell!”
“Oh, my God! I am such an *! I didn’t mean it! Mr. Manx, I would rather die than hurt you! What do I do? Oh, God! I should just shoot myself!”
“You should shoot her is what you should do!” Manx yelled at him, dropping his hand from the side of his head. Red strings of ear dangled and swung. “Do it! Shoot her already! Put her down! Put her down in the dirt and have done with it!”
Bing wrenched his gaze away from the Good Man, his heart slugging in his chest, ka-bam-bam-bam like a piano pushed down a flight of stairs in a great crash of discordant sound and slamming wood. His gaze swept the yard and found McQueen, already on the run, loping away from him on her long brown legs. His ears were ringing so loudly he could hardly hear his own gun as it went off again, flame shredding through the ghost-silk of the fog.
Logan Airport
LOU CARMODY CLEARED SECURITY AND STILL HAD AN HOUR TO kill, so he hit Mickey D’s in the food court. He told himself he would get the grilled chicken salad and a water, but the air was full of the hungry-making odor of french fries, and when he got to the cash register, he heard himself telling the pimply kid he wanted two Big Macs, large fries, and an extra-large vanilla milkshake—the same thing he’d been ordering since he was thirteen.
While he was waiting, he looked to his right and saw a little boy, no more than eight, with dark eyes just like Wayne’s, standing with his mother at the next register. The boy stared up at Lou—at Lou’s two chins and man tits—not with disgust but with a strange sorrow. Lou’s father had been so fat when he died that they had to pay for a special-order coffin, a f*cking double-wide that looked like a dinner table with the lid shut.
“Just make it a small milkshake,” Lou told his server. He found himself unable to look at the boy again, was afraid to see him staring.
What shamed him was not that he was, as his doctor said, morbidly obese (what a qualifier, “morbidly,” as if at a certain point, being overweight were morally similar to necrophilia). What he hated, what made him feel squirmy and ill inside, was his own inability to change his habits. He genuinely could not say the things he needed to say, could not order the salad when he smelled french fries. The last year he had been with Vic, he knew she needed help—that she was drinking in secret, that she was answering imaginary phone calls—but he could not draw the line with her, could not make demands or issue ultimatums. And if she was blasted and wanted to screw him, he could not say he was worried about her; all he could do was clap his hands to her ass and bury his face in her naked breasts. He had been her accomplice right until the day she filled the oven with telephones and burned their house to the ground. He had done everything but light the match himself.
He settled at a table designed for an anorexic dwarf, in a chair only suitable for the ass of a ten-year-old—didn’t McDonald’s understand their clientele? what were they thinking, providing chairs like this for men like him?—pulled out his laptop, and got on the free Wi-Fi.
He checked his e-mail and looked at cosplay honeys in Power Girl outfits. He dropped in on the Millarworld message boards; some friends were debating which color Hulk should be next. Comic dorks embarrassed him, the dumb shit they argued about. It was obviously gray or green. The other colors were stupid.
Lou was wondering if he could look at SuicideGirls without anyone walking by and noticing when his phone began to hum in the pocket of his cargo shorts. He lifted his rear end and began to dig for it.