8

Every time Flip closed his eyes, he saw the boy’s face.

He couldn’t figure out why. He had beaten, maimed, even killed before. The others never haunted him the way the boy did. Their stakes were on the table, and they must have known what they were doing, what they were risking. They would have done it to him if he hadn’t done it first. Even the man he had taken down outside Diane’s apartment didn’t give him a second’s pause. He had no idea what had happened to him. He didn’t care.

But the boy was different. And he was a boy, wasn’t he? He wasn’t a man. He’d looked tall enough to have been a man when he’d rounded the corner in that dark house. But he wasn’t.

Flip tried closing his eyes. The image was there. The loose strands of the boy’s hair stuck to the blood smeared on his forehead. The gray color of his face shadowed in the light from the single bulb behind the gas station, discolored by the effects of death, blood no longer pumping through his flesh. Eyes frozen open, vacant.

He could feel the boy’s body, the lightness and jumbled limbs, joints thickening even in the time it took Flip to drive from the house out to Robertson, up to Pico, and to the rear of the closed gas station where he’d left him. Only a boy. Not fully grown. Sixteen or seventeen maybe. The same age Flip was when he had the door slammed behind him in the youth authority for the first time.

In the light of the gas station he’d leaned over the kid, to see the face that still held traces of childhood in its texture. Why had he looked?

Flip’s eyes wanted to stay closed, but he couldn’t let them. Not with this image haunting him.

He went for more coffee.

The smell of the dishes in the sink hung in the air like sewer vapor. He lifted the coffeepot out of the machine and saw only dregs swirling in the bottom of it. A little liquid, black as tar, moved in a mass of caked residue burned into the glass.

At the sink, he tried to wedge the coffeepot between the tip of the faucet and the plates and cups piled underneath it. It wouldn’t fit. He shoved the plates to one side. They clattered against the porcelain like shattered teeth. Still not enough room for the pot.

His eyes held on the blackness of the burned sediment. It pooled at the edge of the bottom of the glass pot.

In desperation, he shoved the pot between the faucet and the plates. A crack appeared, thick, deep, running the length of the side.

With a shout, he wheeled and threw the pot against the wall.

It shattered into a hundred pieces. The circular top spun on the linoleum.

Black sludge smeared the wall in the shape of a spider.

He jammed his cap onto his head. He would get coffee somewhere else.

In the hallway, there was no sound. He moved past the closed doors with his ears attuned, wanting noise to distract him, needing some kind of exchange to draw him away from the image that plagued him whenever he blinked.

His legs were weak as he descended the stairs. They felt like needles joined together by frayed thread.

How long without sleep? Three days?

He’d slept the first night. When he came back to his place, he had laid his head on the pillow without the boy’s face accosting him. After an hour or two, his juices had settled from their seething boil, and sleep had come. But the dream of the boy had awakened him before sunrise. In the dream, he was leaning over the body, looking at the bloody face in the light from the bulb behind the gas station, and the boy’s dead eyes turned in their sockets to look back at him.

On Melrose now, people passed him. When they approached, they looked under the bill of his hat to his eyes and quickly looked away.

They always did that. Didn’t they?

He came to a coffee place. His hand went to the cool metal handle and pulled.

Reggae music bounced behind the swoosh of a barista frothing someone’s drink.

He went to the line. A woman had her back to him. Middle-aged, a scarf restraining pony-tailed hair with strands of gray in it like worms in earth. She stepped away. Then it was Flip’s turn.

The cashier was about the age of the boy. A girl, freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and nose, she could be a cheerleader or somebody’s high school sweetheart. Her smile held, then drifted. She’d said something to him. She shifted her feet. Her eyes left him, returned.

He spoke. “Large coffee. Black.” His voice sounded alien to his ears.

The smile returned, automatic. “Any room for cream?”

“No. No cream.”

She turned from the counter and tilted the tall cup underneath the spigot to fill it and returned.

The black coffee trembled in the cup, smoking.

“Sir?”

He looked back to her face.

Her smile was frozen in place. “It’s $2.10.”

He dug into his pocket, and a wad of cash came into his hand. He sorted through it and found a ten. With a start, it occurred to him that it belonged to the boy. Flip couldn’t seem to open the bill. As if something sinister might be on the face of the dead president pictured there.

Her hand reached out for it. He put it in her white palm.

With the coffee, he turned away. She called to him, wanting to give him the contaminated change, but he waved at her, ignoring her thanks for the tip.

He paused with his back to her. She could have known him—the boy. She might have been his date. Flip turned to look over his shoulder at her. Her eyes met his. Something about the way he looked at her cratered her smile. She stepped back from the counter, bumped into the machine behind her, but could not seem to look away from him.

He rushed for the door. His uncovered coffee sloshed, searing his knuckles and the back of his hand. A man on the other side of the glass door yanked it open. Flip passed him, head down, the bill of his hat shading his eyes.

On the sidewalk a half-block away, he stopped. Pain simmered in his hand.

He brought the cup to his mouth. The brim quivered against his lips, and he sipped. Hot, hot, it coursed down his throat, into his chest, the heat spreading there, finally slamming into his stomach.

He put his back to the wall, held his eyes wide to watch the pedestrians and the cars hurtling down Melrose.

Don’t close your eyes.