ROAN found himself standing in a hospital hallway, sure he should be somewhere, but not 100 percent certain where that place was. He turned to find a lion waiting at one end of the hall, its face framed by a huge fluffy fall of mane. It was growling at him, and he shook his head and gave it the finger while turning away. “Like I’d be scared of you.”
At the other end of the hall, a man stood. It took Roan a minute to recognize him, but he looked like a younger version of himself. Roan didn’t really look like that, did he? His face was leaner than he thought, and his hair was a slightly lighter shade of red, lighter than it had ever been. But this was a dream, he knew that, and things didn’t always make sense in dreams. “Maybe you should be scared,” his other self said. “You’re losing the fight.”
“What fight?”
“You’re not even trying, are you? Since when did you become such a pussy?”
He sighed, wondering if he could actually punch himself. Would it hurt? Would he care? “Go away. I talk to myself enough.” He turned toward the door he saw in his peripheral vision, only to find it was gone. There was just a smooth, unbroken wall. He touched it, feeling stucco, but there was no seam. He turned again, only to find that his second self and the lion had exchanged places. “Just fuck off already,” he told the lion, then spun to face himself. He—the other he—was sitting in one of those outdoor patio chairs that cafes sometimes had, something that looked like wrought-iron filigree, was either freezing cold or too hot, and was invariably one of the most uncomfortable things you could sit on next to a chair full of spikes. The table he was sitting at was a wooden end table, though. “You do know how stupid this all is, don’t you?”
Roan glared at him. “Talking to myself? Yeah. What’d you do to your hair, you stupid fuck? You tryin’ to go for a junior Carrot Top look?”
His other self didn’t appear amused. “Aren’t you tired of all this sad-sack bullshit? You used to be better than this. What happened?”
Roan turned away, not about to get in an argument with a smartass like himself, but there was the lion, still growling at him. Huffing a sigh through his nose, he picked up the lion. It felt as light as a paper doll. “I told you to piss off.” He then tossed the lion aside, a piece of garbage. He heard a thud of impact but didn’t bother to see if it had landed on its feet.
The hallway became a narrow corridor, and as he turned a corner, he almost walked straight into his younger, other self. “If you can repel the lion that easily, why don’t you? Oh, I get it. You’re afraid of yourself, not the lion. How distressingly Freudian.”
“You think I won’t hit you, is that it?”
His younger self smirked in a really irritating manner. “Oh, I know you will. You enjoy beating yourself up almost as much as everyone else does. You’re taking all the sport out of it.”
He didn’t think about it, he just threw a punch, and it would have hit his other self square on the jaw if he had been standing there, but he had disappeared in a blink. “You’re so predictable,” his younger self said, shaking his head in exasperation. He was now standing farther away, arms crossed over his chest, somehow outside on a sunny sidewalk. Damn it, he hated dreams.
He closed his eyes and focused on waking up. He wasn’t sure it would work, especially since this wasn’t technically a nightmare, but it was worth a shot.
“You really think that’s gonna work?”
He sighed heavily and opened his eyes. “Fine, smartass, say what you’re gonna say so I can wake up.”
His other self shook his head sadly. “I’ve already said it. You already know it too. You’re being an obtuse idiot because it’s easier. Since when have you taken the path of least resistance?”
“Since the path I took didn’t matter in the least.”
“Is it old age that’s made you such a coward? Don’t blame Paris again. You always knew he was going to die.”
“Yes, that makes the pain less, doesn’t it?” he snapped, tired of this. What, like he didn’t know he’d become pathetic, that he’d given up? He knew all too well he had. He wasn’t even 100 percent sure why now, except the will had just gotten sucked out of him. Yes, Paris was the main reason, but he wasn’t all of it. It just seemed like he was fighting a battle that was pointless, and all he was doing was wearing himself out. The haters would win because they always won, and he got tired of beating his head against the same walls.
Roan scowled at his younger self and wondered if he killed himself in a dream, if he’d actually die. It might be worth the risk to find out.
HOLDEN had just reached the Night Owl when he felt his phone start vibrating in his pocket. He wasn’t going to answer it, especially since it was Scott, but by the sixth ring he had a change of heart. “Yeah?”
“Ever heard of a film called The Beast With A Thousand Eyes?” Scott asked without preamble.
“Um, no. Why?”
“It’s on channel twenty-two right now. I’ve been watching it… it’s kind of mesmerizing in its awfulness. I think the monster is a puppet with papier-mâché on it. And as far as I can tell, it has three eyes at most, unless the rest are on its butt or something.”
“That’s gonna happen. Is there a reason you’re calling with a movie review?”
“I’m bored. I thought maybe, if you weren’t doing anything, you’d like to come over. We could watch the movie and try this new microwave caramel popcorn that somehow ended up in our kitchen.”
“Ew! That sounds disgusting.”
“I know, right? Grey doesn’t cop to buyin’ it, but he must have. I didn’t.”
“Isn’t Grey there?”
“Naw, he’s at Tegan’s tonight.” Tegan was Grey’s current girlfriend. Holden knew this because he had been around Scott way too much.
And that was the problem. He’d been around Scott way too much. He didn’t want a relationship, he couldn’t handle one, and this was starting to feel like one. It was both frightening and strangely comforting, which was even more frightening. But he liked listening to his voice, so he settled back against the car seat and closed his eyes. “I’m working on a case right now.”
“Anything exciting?”
“God, no. It’s never anything exciting.” He thought he heard screaming in the background. “The monster eat someone?”
“It’s trying to. Mainly it seems to be humping the ground as a means of locomotion.”
“Now that’s a great date.”
Scott snorted humorously. “Not humping the ground, no.”
“Hump whatever you can get, that’s what I always say.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, with some obvious restrictions.”
Scott chuckled and took a drink of something, probably a beer. Holden could barely recall first meeting Scott. He thought he was cute but was overwhelmed by Grey’s gentle giant persona and the weird vibe he was picking up from Tank (which turned out to be totally justified, and yet not, as he was simply assuming a defensive posture. It was just that Tank’s idea of a defensive posture was total insanity. And that was brilliant). He assumed Scott was a typical jock, but even Grey turned out not to be typical in any sense of the word; in fact, Holden still didn’t get him at all. Except Grey could be fearless ’cause who was going to fuck with him, and he could see why he idolized Roan, macho asshole that he often was. After a moment, Scott said, “I should be up for a while. So if you wanna drop by later, feel free.”
“What if Grey comes home?”
“What if he does? He won’t care.”
Normally, he would call bullshit, but Grey was so oddly laid back, Holden bet he really wouldn’t care, as long as they didn’t fuck in front of him. And even then he might not care as long as they didn’t block his view of the television. “I don’t know how late I’m gonna be out tonight.”
“Well, keep it in mind. Maybe we can meet for a drink one of these days, huh?”
“What, like a date?”
“Nah, just a beer.”
“Maybe.” They were talking about a date, it was just that neither of them would admit it. Oh well, why not? It was probably easier to pretend.
Holden hung up and got out of the car, heading toward the night manager’s office. It was funny, but after all these years, Sivan was still the night manager. He was a squat but gaunt man with skin the color of a caramel macchiato and an indefinable accent that was almost as comically thick as his mustache, which was definitely a pornstache to be proud of. He was quick to anger but also quick to calm down, which was a good thing since it wasn’t always clear what he was angry about. He was a fighter, though, or had been at some point; his thick sausage fingers had callused knuckles, the type you could only earn through years of punching heavy bags or people. There were rumors that he used to be a “freedom fighter” back in his original homeland, but no one was sure where that was as apparently every time he was asked he gave a different answer. That led to rumors he used to work for the mob—someone’s mob—but he was too old to be an enforcer now. He was cheerfully crooked, though: happy to take money and look the other way when drug deals and prostitution took place in his parking lot, and being as mysterious and grizzled as he was, no one was brave enough to rob him.
Holden slipped him a twenty, and Sivan told him what room Newt was in without once looking away from his portable television, which seemed to be showing a Japanese game show involving scantily clad girls and lizards. (Surely that made sense to someone.)
Newt’s room was farthest away from the office, which made sense. The Night Owl was a bunch of single units laid out in an almost perfect U-shaped formation, and Newt’s room was basically the bottom of the U, the cornerstone that connected the two arms. Holden knocked on the door and wondered what he would say if Newt had a client.
After a moment, he heard stuff shifted away from the door (Newt was paranoid and often piled stuff up in front of a door, whether he could lock it or not), and Newt flung the door open wide. He stared at him a long moment, his pupils so wide you could have driven a truck through them, and finally said, “You’re not the pizza guy.”
What was Newt on? He was standing there in nothing but blue-striped boxer shorts that couldn’t have been his (Newt often liked to freeball it), showing a long, lean torso that was almost concave, a tattoo of a bright green lizard over his left pectoral, and a small reddish-purple bruise visible near his right hip. His chest was naturally hairless, save for a bit of barely visible fuzz in the center of his torso, which Newt always attributed to being half-Filipino. But since Holden had met some hairy Filipinos, he wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Newt’s hair was dark and wavy more than curly, but right now it was a lank rat’s nest of a tangle, and the smell of sweat coming off him seemed to indicate he hadn’t showered in a while. “Dude, it’s me, Fox.”
Newt stared at him once more, clearly tripping balls and barely holding on to the Earth. Holden was about to give up and come back another day, maybe when Newt was slightly more sober, when he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh. I thought you’d joined the Marines.”
He wasn’t kidding, otherwise Holden would have laughed. “What?”
Newt scratched his head with dirty fingernails. He not only had a club stamp on the back of his hand, but it looked like he had a tattoo on the underside of his wrist. It just said “Fuck” in thick black letters. “Oh, wait—I mean an escort agency. I don’t know what I was thinkin’ of. C’mon in, want some acid?”
“You’re doing acid?” That would explain a lot. Since Newt had retreated from the door, scratching his ass and revealing a new tattoo (a small spider on his back, in tramp-stamp location at the base of his spine), Holden had come in and was almost overwhelmed by the funk of the room, which smelled like body odor, burnt wires, and mold. It was dark, the only light a silent television playing flickering pictures of what appeared to be an infomercial. The covers had been pulled off the bed and lumped up on the floor, like a nest for a large bird, while empty booze bottles and orange juice cartons were scattered across the stained carpet like land mines. He had to look around carefully for a place to step.
“I think so.” Newt paused. “Or was that yesterday? Fuck if I know. What month is it?”
“June.”
That startled a laugh out of him as he sat on the stripped mattress and picked up a lit cigarette from where it had been balanced on the top of a Coke can. It looked like a regular cigarette, but the exceedingly acrid smell of it told Holden it had been laced with something more potent than tobacco. Holy fuck, he wasn’t dabbling in angel dust now, was he? “I promised my mother I’d start rehab in June. Good thing I didn’t specify the year, huh? Could you put that back up against the door?”
Holden turned and saw one of those huge wooden spools, the type they rolled up industrial cable on. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“Side of the road. Or somebody’s yard. I dunno. It was here when I woke up.”
Holden shook his head as he shoved the heavy thing back up against the door. He’d accuse anyone else of lying, but not Newt. He’d probably killed more brain cells than he’d ever actually had—the fact that he wasn’t a drooling vegetable just showed you how physically resilient he was.
His real name was Shawn, and he was from somewhere in Texas (location varied, just like it varied for Sivan). He was twenty-five going on eight hundred seven, if you considered how much mileage his fun adventures in drug abuse and wandering aimlessly must have added to his life. That lizard tattoo was supposedly where he got his nickname from, but Holden always figured it was really from the movie Aliens. That little girl the aliens couldn’t manage to kill was called Newt, and drugs hadn’t figured out a way to kill Shawn yet either. One monster was as good as another.
“How you gonna let the pizza man in?” Holden wondered.
Newt looked at him blankly. “Pizza man? You ordered a pizza? Thanks, dude.”
With a heavy sigh, Holden sat on the end of the mattress and fixed Newt with a scornful look. “If I ask you about Rico, will you remember anything that actually happened or didn’t happen?”
Newt gazed at him with those blown-pupil eyes, his irises a mere suggestion of hazel, and said, “Why, did that john kill him?”
Holden stared back at him, wondering if it could possibly be that simple.