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Hank had met the guy a few weeks ago in a bar downtown, just on the fringes of Five Points and well away from the tourist hangouts. Hank had been drinking since 2:00 p.m., when he’d stopping taking calls and just fled the office, unable to deal.
He had already made a name for himself as the best feeder in the business. Nobody but the Headster came up with fresh, qualified leads, leads that had not been called a million times already and thus useless.
But recently, something had gone wrong. Hank’s head was just not into it. He couldn’t shake the cruelty of her moving out of the condo and ditching her mobile number—doing all that—without granting him so much as a lunch or a coffee to hash it out.
He needed to get over this. Her departure felt like a stinging insult, a rebuke of his manhood, his intelligence, and his prospects. Truth was, it wasn’t so long ago that he felt he was something of a loser, trying to land a decent job on nothing but a piece of paper from a crappy two-year school. He’d worked hard to squelch that bullshit. He’d mastered it. The job had saved him.
But now the bullshit mind games were all back.
He couldn’t afford to mope around for a month or two or three while the bad feelings slowly trickled away.
His numbers were slipping, but he couldn’t tell anyone why. The bosses didn’t want to hear that he needed time to clear his head. The bosses wanted him to keep working the Headley magic, lining up some virgin numbers so the telemarketing babies could pop some cherries and get the closing ratio up.
Hank Headley needed to clear his head.
Alcohol wasn’t exactly helping, but he knew a guy who knew a guy.
The guy at Agave.
It was Happy Hour all over town, but the bar looked empty except for a couple of old men in VFW hats drinking one-dollar beers, staring up at the bowling program on the TV in the back. The TV over the bar was blaring the horse races. The bartender was lining up bottles in the fridge with a vengeance, stocking up for a party that would never happen.
It was not a place Hank would ordinarily catch himself dead in.
But he was desperate.
“How do we do this?” he whispered to the one-armed man.
The guy was sitting at the middle of the bar, just as he’d promised on the phone. A guy with a beard and some long-assed gray hair tied behind him in a ponytail. His pencil tore up the pages of the racing form as he made his picks, moving as if he were slicing the horses’ bellies as well, to see what their guts augured.
The guy looked like he needed to be vacuumed. He had one good arm, which worked the pencil or else cradled a shot of mezcal. The other arm just rested on the bar, black as night, stiff as wood, though Hank thought he saw something flick across its shiny surface like a serpent’s tail.
Hank ordered tequila.
“Show me what you got,” the man said.
Hank pulled open the right pocket of his Armani jacket. The man glimpsed the contents perfectly well.
“What good’s it doing in your pocket ’stead of mine?”
A voice like the mountains. A voice like rickety fences and forest-dwelling freaks. Not that Hank had spent much time in the hills, but he’d heard stories. He’d seen movies.
“Before I hand it over,” Hank said, “I need to understand why you want more money in two week’s time. Don’t you just slip it to me and we go our separate ways? Why do we meet again?”
A drug deal is a drug deal is a drug deal.
“’Cause you’re renting temporary access, son. You don’t want her for more than that. Trust me. You’ll understand when you see the stuff. Are we ready? Because if’n we’re not, I got drinking to do.”
“Sure.”
“Put the money on the bar.”
Hank looked around. “Just like that?”
But instead of reaching for the money, Hank dipped his beak to his drink. The old man’s wooden arm thunked the back of Hank’s head and sent his shot glass flying. Hank’s forehead smacked the bar.
“Hey, what the f—”
“Butchie,” the old man said. “Help me with this pussy, will you?”
The bartender came over, and dropped a baseball bat across the top of Hank’s shoulders. Hank thrashed his arms and feet, but he was trapped. The bartender had his shoulders and biceps pinned.
The old man raked a fingernail across the top of Hank’s ear, just above the ridge of his earlobe, and slit the skin open.
“Holy shit! What are you doing?”
“What you paid for.”
“I thought it was a pill! A drug! You swallow it or…or…snort it.”
The one-armed man shook his head. “Stomach acid dissolves it before it would do any good. It’s got to go under the skin. Before we do this, you know the terms?”
“One-third now! Two-thirds after!”
“Do we have an agreement?”
“Sounds like a stupid way to do business—”
“In fifteen days, it’ll get all it can get. You call the number on the fourteenth day. We meet here to do the extraction. Deal?”
“Deal!”
The man eyed Butchie, who nodded. The one-armed man eased up on Hank’s scalp. Produced a matchbox from his leather vest and slowly slid it open.
Hank saw what was in the box, and struggled anew.
“Don’t make this tougher, son. Don’t make Butchie take you out. Man up and we’ll get through it.”
The matchbox came closer.
Over the tip of the cardboard Hank saw a writhing white worm with two black ends. He couldn’t tell which end was the head.
“Make it fast!”
Hank closed his eyes. He felt the man pry apart the angry bleeding lips of his scalp wound. At first, he felt just a tickle as the grubby thing lapped at his blood and then moseyed across the cut. Then came a chilly prickle as it spread his flesh with its legs and crawled inside.
He could feel it.
Like water in the ear.
Like an itch inside your mouth, present but impossible to quell.
He could feel it.
Chugging up the side of his skull.
Hank fought against the bat, but Butchie held him fast.
“Jesus fuck, I can’t believe I let you put that thing inside me!”
“You city people make me sick,” the old man said, wiping his hands on a bar napkin and returning to his drink. “How else is it supposed to rid you of all your bullshit? You people, you think it’s all about the remote controls and the MRIs and the magic wands. This here treatment demands flesh and blood.”
Butchie eased off on the bat and Hank dropped to the floor. Butchie flung a bar towel at him, which Hank caught and clapped to the cut above his ear.
“You ruined my suit.”
The old man was sipping his drink, watching the ponies on the TV over the bar. “Fifteen days,” he said. “Bring the money or we’re gonna have problems.”