American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,95

and I felt like… like it knew me.”

Parson is quiet for a long, long time. “And you saw this when this man grabbed you? As if he was showing it to you?”

“I guess.”

“What did he look like?”

Mona describes him, but Parson shakes his head and says, “He does not sound familiar… I have never seen such a man in Wink. This is troubling.”

“More troubling than him blowing his brains out?” she asks.

He bobs his head from side to side, as if to say that they are roughly equal in his mind.

“What’s going to happen?”

“To you?” asks Parson. He thinks about it. “Well. If he is dead, he was no one of note.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I can tell when someone… important has died. As I did with Weringer, and Macey. And if his body is there, I expect someone will come to collect it in the night. Such things happen frequently with items left out. Even corpses, I assume, though I have never witnessed such a thing.”

Mona tries to ignore the sea of crazy shit he just said, and focuses on one thing in particular: “What do you mean, if he is dead? The top of his goddamn head was gone!”

Parson looks at her stony-faced. He shrugs.

“You can’t tell me, huh?” she says. “It isn’t allowed?”

Parson does nothing. He is hardly even breathing.

“And I guess you can’t tell me about the thing that tried to crawl out of his fucking gourd, can you?” says Mona. “The thing that foamed up like a… like a fucking science fair project when it touched asphalt? Or what I saw in that house?”

Parson clears his throat. “We should discuss what you are going to do with this key.” He pats the glove on the table.

“No,” says Mona.

He raises an eyebrow. “No?”

She coughs, hawks, and spits a lump into the trash can. Then she takes a Kleenex and blows each nostril thoroughly. “No,” she says. “I’m not doing a fucking thing, Mr. Parson. Not until you start telling me what the hell is going on.”

“I have told you about this,” says Parson calmly. “There are some things I am not allowed to discuss, or do.”

“I honestly don’t care,” says Mona. “I just endured some serious shit for you. I say we play fair and spread it around. This is a two-way street, Mr. Parson. Get fucking driving.”

“I do not understand your metaphor,” he says.

“What I am saying,” says Mona, and she hauls herself up and sits in the chair before his desk, “is you tell me something worth knowing. For starters, why the hell would I care about this key, anyway, let alone why would you?”

“It is a key to a door.”

“That’s specific.”

“I think it is the key to a door.”

“You don’t even know?”

“I have never… been there. And I do not know exactly what is inside the door. But I think… I think it is important.”

“This sounds like the worst setup I could imagine. I’m not just going to go out and open this mystery door of yours because you ask politely.”

“It is important to me,” Parson says quietly. “And it will be important to you.”

“Mr. Parson, you might not understand the meaning of this, but whatever you had me do tonight, it involved something apparently worth dying over. Because I’m fairly sure that spook in the hat offed himself to make sure he couldn’t talk. That’s a lot of devotion right there. I was a cop for seven years, and I never saw anyone do that. Usually folks are all about self-preservation. So whatever it is you have me doing, people are willing to die for it, and if they’re willing to die they’re almost certainly willing to kill. Now, don’t try and tell me you don’t know anything about this. And don’t send me out to some fucking mystery door without giving me the details, Mr. Parson. Don’t you even try to tell me to do that. I’m shocked I have to tell you this, but that dog won’t hunt.”

Parson contemplates this. He looks a little weary, as if this is a task he’s been dreading for a long time. He swallows, takes a breath, and says, “Are you quite sure about this?”

“After what I’ve seen tonight, I am damn sure, Mr. Parson.”

He nods and swallows again. “All right, then. I admit, I have thought about how best to do this,” he says. “Here is what is going to happen. Listen carefully. And you must trust me.”

“Well, I don’t really cotton to the