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 fuck-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.
There was a coffee table in front of the sofa. On it was an ashtray filled with butts, a baggie filled with white powder, and a People magazine with more blow scattered across it. Beside it, completing the picture, was a dollar bill, still partly rolled up. He didn’t know how much they had snorted, but judging by how much still remained, he could kiss his five hundred dollars goodbye.
Fuck. I don’t even like coke. And how did I snort it, anyway? I can hardly breathe.
He hadn’t. She had snorted it. He had rubbed it on his gums. It was all starting to come back to him. He would have preferred it stay away, but too late.
The deathflies in the restroom, crawling in and out of Mr. Businessman’s mouth and over the wet surfaces of his eyes. Mr. Dealerman asking what Dan was looking at. Dan telling him it was nothing, it didn’t matter, let’s see what you’ve got. It turned out Mr. Dealerman had plenty. They usually did. Next came the ride back to her place in another taxi, Deenie already snorting from the back of her hand, too greedy—or too needy—to wait. The two of them trying to sing “Mr. Roboto.”
He spied her sandals and his Reeboks right inside the door, and here were more golden memories. She hadn’t kicked the sandals off, only dropped them from her feet, because by then he’d had his hands planted firmly on her ass and she had her legs wrapped around his waist. Her neck smelled of perfume, her breath of barbecue-flavored pork rinds. They had been gobbling them by the handful before moving on to the pool table.
Dan put on his sneakers, then walked across to the kitchenette, thinking there might be instant coffee in the single cupboard. He didn’t find coffee, but he did see her purse, lying on the floor. He thought he could remember her tossing it at the sofa and laughing when it missed. Half the crap had spilled out,