Jerry woke up an hour before dawn. He might have had thirty minutes of sleep at most, but for some reason, he was wide awake. He drank the last of the warm, flat champagne to get rid of his splitting headache. He had been hungover before. Sometimes when he was still drunk. But this headache was different somehow. It felt personally pissed at him or something. Like he’d fucked the headache’s wife. He heard Sally in the shower, but the hot Indian girl was long gone. He expected her to have robbed him blind, or maybe taken a thousand bucks for “services rendered” if she was indeed a professional, but she didn’t even steal one poker chip.
But she did leave her old newspaper behind.
You miss her, Jerry.
You want to find her, Jerry.
She’s fucking some other guy, Jerry.
The bitch is laughing at you right now, Jerry.
After the streak of streaks, the voice had come back as mean as a snake. The only thing he could do to get Kate out of his mind was read that old newspaper from the fall. He skimmed through a weather forecast predicting this would be an unseasonably mild winter. Great work, Kreskin. He was about to turn to the life section when he thought to skip ahead to sports. Luckily for him, the hot Indian girl’s newspaper was intact.
About halfway through a story about the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quest for another Super Bowl (try being a Lions fan, assholes), Sally came out of the shower, crying her eyes out. Jerry realized that when the booze wore off, so did the “Mustang” part of Sally. And whatever part of her was actually bi-curious was no match for her Catholic school upbringing in Flint.
“It’s Christmas Eve. I need to go home,” she said.
“Okay, Sally. Let’s go,” he said.
He left the newspaper in the hotel room. Facedown.
As he walked through the cloud of cigarette smoke on the casino floor for the last time, he looked around for the hot Indian girl. He realized he didn’t even know her name. Maybe she was a mirage, like in that song, Hotel California. He hummed his own version. Welcome to the Hotel West Virginia. Such a shitty place. Such a shitty face.
The casino doors opened like a mouth and puked them outside. The fresh air was sweet. Pure, dry, and clean as the moonlight peeking through the clouds.
He walked slowly through the parking lot. The wind swept across his face. And it smelled like something. He was probably hungover still. But for some reason, he thought of being a little kid going hunting for the first time. That smell of the woods mixed with powder burns and beer. He couldn’t stop thinking about his mom’s old boyfriend who taught him how to shoot. The really bad one who also taught him how not to be afraid of a baseball by throwing them at his head.
He groaned when he saw his car. Some asshole had put one of those stupid flyers in his windshield wiper. When he got a little closer, he realized it wasn’t a Jiffy Lube coupon or a We-Buy-Junk-Cars ad. It was a set of four index cards. They were attached to something hanging off them with strings. The wind kicked it up, and Jerry saw four colored deflated rubber things slapping the side of his Chevy.
They were four popped balloons.
Jerry looked at the cards.
Sir or Madam:
You have found balloons for the Mill Grove Elementary School Balloon Derby. Please contact us at your earliest convenience, so our students can see how far their balloons went. Thank you very much.
Jerry turned the cards over and saw a bunch of names that meant nothing to him. Matt something. Mike something. Eddie who-gives-a-shit. He was about to throw away the cards when the wind whipped a cold snap through his jacket. The hunting smell was all over him. And that little voice inside his head told him to just look at the last card before he threw them all away. His hands shivered as he turned it over and read the last name.
Christopher Reese
It’s your lucky day, Jerry.
Chapter 72
The nice man led Christopher under a thick knot of trees and down an old path, worn and weathered by time. He moved some dead brush out of the way to reveal a fresh trail hidden behind it. Christopher looked at the clouds above the Mission Street Woods. The moonlight trapped inside them