Authors: James Hall

The Haze (5 page)

BOOK: The Haze

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He sat at his desk and looked out at the hazy yard, the trees, the grass, the snow. Big white tropical birds. He sat and sat and sat.

Then he started to weep. He didn't know how long he cried but it was longer than he'd ever done before. His wife died, he didn't cry as much. A dog he loved got hit by a car, he cried for a few hours. The Raybun Library shut down and his job ended, and he cried. But nothing like this. He cried all afternoon, all evening, all night.

Javier tried to make him take his pills but he couldn't stop crying.

The next morning he stopped. Javier was back with the paper cup of pills.

He looked at the pills and said, “I'm out of the haze. I skipped one round of pills and now I'm feeling fine.”

“No, sir. You got to take them. That's the rules. You fight me, you go upstairs today. You already on probation.”

He took the pills.

Held them in his cheek, swallowed the water. Javi bought it.

When he was gone, Little Mo spit out the pills, flushed them away.

He looked out his window to check himself. Some patches of snow left, but it looked like it was warming up. No sign of a palm tree, no white birds. He was in Brooklyn, somewhere like that, across the river from Manhattan. Everything was starting to make sense.

He went out into the hallway, wandered up to the lobby. He was allowed to roam. Nobody looked funny at him. People said hello, he said hello back. He went to the little library they had near the aquarium. A woman was sitting in a chair asleep. A book in her lap. The book had a picture of a floozy on the cover. A dame with big red lips and a gun in the holster fixed to her girdle.

Little Mo sneaked the book out of her lap and headed back to his room.

Thank god for libraries. Thank god for free books lying around.

Back in his room he crawled into bed, pulled the covers up so he could hide the book if anybody came in.

He found his place. More than halfway in, things heating up, the pot boiling, action rolling fast down a twisty country road, the kind you'd find in Raybun, West Virginia.

“You gonna take the job or not? I need an answer now.”

The five thousand bucks was stacked on the chewed up table by the window.

“It's a girl I got to shoot?”

“That's right. She's a danger to me. A mortal danger.”

“Half now, half when I've done the job?”

“That's how it works.”

“What'd you do, she's gonna turn you in for?”

“Murder and mayhem. The usual stuff. What's it to you? You some kind of moralizer?”

“Maybe I am.”

“So forget it. I made a mistake picking you. Some crazy old bookworm.”

Little Mo started to leave but the gangster blocked him.

“You think I'm going to let you walk away, what you know about me? Hell, no. You got to die, old man. You know my face. One phone call from you I get put away. You think I'm nuts?”

His daughter was there.

“Dad, I'm going to have to sign the papers, have you sent upstairs.”

“Whoa, whoa. What'd I do?”

“You're threatening people, Pops. A sweet old lady out in the front library, you threatened her. You stole her book.”

“Did not.”

“I'm sorry, Pops. They're coming in an hour to move you upstairs. You'll like it up there. Everybody says it's very nice. And the food is very good.”

“Nobody talks up there. The drugs are stronger. That what you want, send me deeper into the haze?”

“Can you hear me, Pops?”

“Hell yes I can hear you and I don't like what I'm hearing. I don't like it one bit.”

Javier said, “He's been like this for a couple of days. All clammed up, acting deaf and dumb. Just looking out that window. Maybe he had another stroke. Doctor needs to check him out.”

“I'm not going upstairs and that's all there is to it. I got a say, don't I? You steal my books, you threaten me, it isn't fair. I was a good man. I did good.”

“What'd he do for a living?” Javi asked his daughter.

“Librarian,” she said. “Spent his life in a library in West Virginia.”

“He likes to read. I seen that for sure. He likes his books.”

“They only seem to agitate him these days. They make him act out.”

“He talks funny sometimes. Like he's playing a part in a play.”

He was upstairs.

Big common room, lots of wheelchairs. Everybody ate their meals together. No more sunnysides, no more grapefruit cut up. It was slop. Cold scrambled eggs, some kind of meat, it didn't have a name.

There were magazines but no books. The TV running night and day. Game shows. All the old shitbirds sitting in chairs watching people scream about winning a toaster oven.

He stole a magazine, took it back to his room. Tiny room, only one window and it was full of haze.

He lay down on his bed. Lumpy mattress.

Turned the pages of the magazine, came to a story.

And yes, by god, Varla was sneaking up the back stairs. She had her gun, a .38 snubbie. She was coming for him to liberate his ass. Little Mo Connors was trying to do his part, smiling at the nurses, taking his pills, being a good boy. All of it an act. Biding his time while Varla worked her way up the stairs. An old lady, the stairs were tough. She was breathing hard and talking to herself.

“Two more floors, Little Mo. Hang on, baby. I'm coming. I'm coming, fighting my way through the haze.”

Little Mo dug through his drawers and found his own snubbie. They'd work together. Him shooting from his end, her from hers. A serial killer and a retired hitman. This place couldn't hold them. These people didn't know from imprisonment. You want to see imprisonment, spend a few years in Raiford. This was a country club compared to that goddam place.

“Almost there, sweet pea, only one more floor. I got to shoot out the locks. And I'm making a lot of noise. They're bound to hear me, someone is bound to. They'll be coming for me, so get ready, honey. Get yourself all set. I'm climbing the mountain and I'm almost at the top and you're up there, the guru with the answers. I'm coming, sweetness, my big virile old man.”

He walked down the hall, waited by the locked stairway door. Big red sign on it, No Admittance. He could hear Varla coming up the stairs on the other side of the door. He could hear her breathing hard.

She'd want him to tell her what the secret was, coming all this way up the mountain just to see him. He needed to have something ready for her. The sum total of what he'd learned in these years, the sum total of all he'd learned from books and living and sitting and thinking. If there wasn't something to give her, shit, what was the point?

She was at the door now. He could hear her back there. She was wheezing hard from the climb.

“You there, Little Mo?” she called out.

“I'm here, Varla.”

“Stand back while I blow open this lock. Stand back.”

The lock exploded and she came through the door.

“You made it, Varla. You saved my ass.”

They embraced. She smelled musty and wonderful.

“Okay, I'm here. What you got for me?”

“Let's blow this hole first, I can tell you everything later.”

“And if there isn't a later? If we get nabbed on our way down. We take some hits, three up, one down. No, you need to tell me now. What is it, I climbed all this way, what's the answer?”

“I don't know, Varla.”

“Don't know? I come all this way and you don't have the secret?”

“I think that may be the secret,” he said. “The whole enchilada. There's no secret.”

“Enchilada? You telling me Mexican food is the secret, I come all this way, work through all this haze and shit and this is what you got? Chimichangas?”

He put the magazine on the little rickety table.

The gong was sounding for dinner.

His heart was beating hard. Varla wanted an answer. He didn't have one for her. He'd come all this way, read a thousand books and a thousand more, had his heart broken and broken again, and the dinner gong was sounding and he didn't have a goddam answer for her. He didn't have an answer to any of it.

He slid the magazine under the mattress. He had to go to dinner or they'd come fetch him and drag him there. But the magazine would still be here when supper was over, and he'd find his place again and he'd finish the story.

He went to dinner. Kept to himself. Piddled with his roast beef. Trying to think of an answer for Varla because she was back there waiting, back in his room. Back there where the magazine was under his mattress.

Maybe that was it.

The story. He had to finish the story, get to the end, see how it turned out. There'd be an answer at the end. He was sure of it. There had to be. Okay, okay. So that was his mission now, the thing he needed so he could hang on a little longer, he had to get to the end of the story. You had to have a mission, a way to fill up the hours.

That was it. That was it.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Mauricio DÃaz

978-1-5040-3948-2

Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
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