In the netherworld, Oswald is sitting by the fire, waiting for the Great Spirit Matilda the Ball Buster of wWest Chicago to make her decision, watching the flames dance and lick up through the air, when he hears a faint, echoing voice.

  Ozzzzzzzeeeee.

  OZZEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  The voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Like a distant, lonely wind. Oswald looks around the sweat lodge at the others. The spirit-elders are gathered in one corner, clucking and murmuring in their complex ancient language.

  Along the opposite wall, the ghosts of the dead are lined up, all of them sitting “Indian-style,” with their legs crossed, waiting silently, occasionally giving Oswald encouraging looks like a Greek chorus of aunts and uncles hoping for the best. All of them seem to be on his side except for the Head-Wound Guy.

  The Head-Wound Guy just can’t get past the fact that half his face is missing because of Oswald.

  AAAHHHHHHZZZZZZZZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  The ethereal voice penetrates the walls of the sweat lodge, vibrating the air, making Oswald’s stomach clench. He is about to remark on it when he feels a cold hand on the nape of his neck. It feels like a fish-belly on his skin, and he twists around and looks up into the mournful face of Alberta Goldstein, the dead lady of the night, with her charred wig and her eye darkened by an eight-ball hemorrhage. “It doesn’t really matter how many lives you save,” she says.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Oswald feels a twinge of dread in the pit of his guts. “I got this one chance.”

  “Only one road to redemption in this world,” the ghost tells him. “And that’s love.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Giving it and receiving it.”

  Oswald’s eyes are stinging. “That’s rich, coming from a street walker.”

  “You can say what you want about me, but you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I have no fucking idea what the fuck you’re talking about—love?—how do I do that? Matilda’s gone. It ain’t a part of the equation anymore.”

  The ghost looks into his eyes. “You haven’t told her yet, have you? The most important part.”

  “Whattya mean—Gerbil?—I told her everything.”

  AAAHHHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZZEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  The ghost lets out a sad little laugh. “You haven’t told her the one thing she needs to know.”

  Oswald shakes his head. “That I love her? Jesus Christ, you dead people are so full of shit. I don’t love that little snot-nosed kid any more than I—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” The ghost fixes her sad eyes on him. “And you know it.”

  Oswald looks away. “Look. What you’re talking about—it’s complicated.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, I mean, the rest of it is—”

  “The rest of it is what?”

  Oswald looks at the ghost. “It’s basically on a need-to-know basis.”

  “And what you’re saying is she doesn’t need to know?”

  “That’s right.”

  Alberta Goldstein nods, her dead face sinking inward with sorrow. “You’re gonna get her killed, you know.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Sorry, but the fact is, you will.”

  “No. I won’t. I won’t get her killed.”

  “Yes, actually, you will,” the dead woman says with chilling certainty. “That’s the one benefit of being over here, you find out things.”

  Oswald gazes into that dark hemorrhaged eye, which glints with otherworldly knowledge, and he is starting to say something else when Duffy’s voice suddenly breaks the spell.

  “Okay, folks, we got a ruling!”

  Oswald turns and faces the spirits, who now stand in a perfect semi-circle around the fire, all six of them, the tribal council, all of them gazing up at their Chieftain, their sage, their leader, the Great and Powerful Ball-Busting Badass Matilda of the West Chicago Prairie. She stands at the mouth of the semi-circle, transformed into a luminous demi-god of gossamer white robes, her sculpted face painted in ceremonial colors, her headdress so vivid and bright with plumage it looks almost radiant.

  She lifts her birch-wood scepter and spear and booms with celestial authority, her voice as deep and rich now as a waterfall. “The Man-Killer will be granted five lives thus far!” Orange light flickers off her angular, alabaster face, gleaming along her flaxen braids, shimmering in the downy fluff of her raven feathers, reflecting in her sapphire eyes. “You must save three more lives by the full moon.”

  “Go team!” Duffy cheers, taking off his John Deere hat, waving it, and spitting a gob of chewing tobacco into the ceremonial fire.

  The fire erupts suddenly, exploding into a ball of blinding magnesium-white light.

  “WHOA—!”

  Oswald snaps awake, soaked in sweat on the cold ground, in the shadows of emaciated poplars, behind Building 12-A.

  Blinking away the shock, his head pounding like a tribal drum, he tries to sit up. He hears the jangle of metal, and a nearby voice madly cussing and cursing, but he can’t focus on anything.

  He manages to sit up and rub his temples. “Judas Priest,” he groans. “The fuck are you doing?”

  Gerbil comes into focus twelve feet away. “What does it look like I’m doing?” She has the metal jimmy-stick from Oswald’s pocket, and she’s trying to pick the dead bolt on the bungalow’s back door. “I’m trying to get in there before they finish up and take off.”

  “Let me do it.” Oswald struggles to his feet, and wavers for a moment, and then falls back onto his ass. The impact sends shooting stars across his vision. “Oh Jesus,” he moans, shaking off the disorientation.

  Gerbil pauses, glances over her shoulder at him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, great.”

  “You sure?”

  “How long was I out?”

  “I don’t know, maybe, like, ten minutes.”

  “Holy crap.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, then breathes out his mouth. He actually feels a little better. His fever has broken, and now his clothes are adhering to his slimy cold skin like black paint. He gets up again, and he lumbers over to the door. “Get outta the way, Gerbil.”

  She hands over the jimmy, and Oswald thrusts the edge of the tool into the latch-plate. A couple of quick yanks, and the cylinder surrenders with a click.

  Gerbil grabs the knob and she starts to turn it, but Oswald grabs her hand and stops her. “Where’s your gun?” he asks in a low voice.

  “Oh yeah.” She hurries over to the trees and finds her .38 Police Special in the weeds. She scoops it up and comes back to the mat. “Okay, ready.”

  “Let me do the talking,” Oswald whispers. He pulls the Beretta from his belt. “You just back me up and shit, look dangerous and scary with the gun.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I mean—whattya mean?—yeah.” Oswald looks at her. “Stop worrying.”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  Oswald thumbs the hammer back. “You ready?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Oswald takes a quick breath and then kicks the door in, and the thing busts open on screaming hinges.

  At first, they notice nothing out of the ordinary as they storm into the dimly lit rear vestibule, guns raised and eyes peeled for the two lovebirds. Before they even get a glimpse of anybody, Oswald calls out at the top of his lungs, in a voice better suited to a professional bank robber: “OKAY, FOLKS! PARTY’S OVER! EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!”

  They push their way through a beaded curtain and into the main pool area, and find themselves in a candle-lit, perfumed, womb-like suite adorned with fake ferns and shag carpet and leopard-print wallpaper, and a long oval pool like a giant amniotic sac.

  For a single millisecond, Oswald and Gerbil freeze like a couple of statues, paralyzed in an almost comical tableau, their heads turning slowly to their immediate left, where the massive circular bed sits in all its purple velvet glory. What they see on that big pedestal bed—suspended from the rafters over the mattress—strikes them dumb for a moment.

  “Whoa.”

  The word comes out of Oswald almost involuntarily as he gapes at the woman hanging from the ceiling like a giant pink bat.

  And the man in the baby costume on the bed with his thumb in his mouth.

  And the trickle of urine coming down in glistening rivulets like a baptismal font.

  * * *

  “Oh, dear—oh my—oh my God what’s going on? What’s going on? What’s—?” Cathy O’Dell cannot stop urinating, despite the fact that strangers have barged into the sex-den with guns and dumb-stuck expressions. She wears a fuzzy pink Halloween costume—a cartoon Miss Piggy.

  “Okay you can stop now, honey, you can stop peeing,” Kevin Trout gurgles beneath her, the piss-stream in his face making him cough and spit.

  “What’s going on, Kevin? What’s going on? Is this part of the game?” Turning slowly in the harness attached by nylon straps and steel carabiners to the ceiling mount, Cathy O’Dell is in shock. And because she is in shock, her bladder lets loose all its contents in one gushing stream all over Kevin Trout below her.

  The two intruders stand over by the tiny lap pool, transfixed, speechless, rapt, bug-eyed.

  “Enough with the pissing, honey!” Trout pleads. Dressed in a Walt Disney version of baby garb, a huge, comical diaper fixed around his nude paunch with big plastic safety pins, his Little-Miss-Muffat baby-bonnet crowning his thinning pate, he shakes the moisture from his ruddy face like a wet dog.

  “Um... yeah.” One of the intruders, a big olive-skinned thug in black, who looks sick or drunk or just plain disoriented, takes a step toward the big bed. “Playtime’s over, kids, let’s all—”

  The big man trips suddenly, his boot catching the edge of a big fake polar bear rug.

  The behemoth falls headfirst onto the bed. His massive weight makes Trout bounce off the edge and onto the floor, and his beefy shoulder bangs into Miss Piggy’s hanging feet. The poor woman, still urinating profusely, begins to spin like a giant ceiling fan.

  Or—more precisely—a giant sprinkler.

  “HOLY CHRIST, LOOK OUT!”

  Gerbil hits the deck—a graceful, lurching dive—and her fall is skillful and elegant considering the fact she’s holding a gun and completely grossed out.

  She lands on the shag carpet on the other side of the bed, near the glass door to the Swedish sauna, and she instinctively covers her head as though caught in a terrible Blitzkrieg air raid back in 1940s London, only right now the only ordnance falling from the sky is of the warm, yellow, misty variety. It comes in great lovely gouts of glistening fluid, ejaculating across the room, shimmering in the lascivious red light, not unlike the dancing waters one might encounter at the entrance of some lavish amusement park.

  “GRAB HER, OZZY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GRAB HER!”

  Across the room, Oswald is balanced precariously on the cushiony surface of the bed, staggering back and forth on the mattress, trying to grab the whirling dervish of a woman affixed to the ceiling. “I’M TRYING!” Oswald bellows. “GODDAMNIT, I’M TRYING! I’M TRYING!”

  The girl in the Miss Piggy get-up is shrieking now, and the Doppler effect of her voice creates a siren-like rhythm with the urine spray, which is coating everything in the room now, every surface, every person.

  Especially Oswald. He’s getting a urine bath as he finally manages to grab the woman’s ankles and bring her wild rotations to a violent halt.

  The last of her stream trickles away like a gentle rain sluicing down a drain-spout.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Oswald utters, wiping his face with his upper arm, his sleeve soaked.

  He stands there a moment on the bed, clutching the woman’s ankle, his gun on the mattress, his free hand clenching and unclenching. He’s at a loss. He cannot find the words. He gazes around the room, and then gazes up at the mortified Cathy O’Dell in her fuzzy, pink ears and ghastly expression. “You done, honey?” Oswald asks her in a strange sort of paternal tone.

  The woman nods.

  On the other side of the room, Gerbil holds her .38 with shaking hands, aiming it at the boyfriend. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”

  “Please don’t kill us,” the boyfriend moans, cowering on the floor, his hands shielding his face as though a light is shining into it.

  “Don’t tempt me,” Gerbil snarls at the giant infant with the hairy ass.

  28.

  “Next weekend’s no good, Candy.”

  “Whattya mean no good?”

  “Next weekend’s not gonna work for me.”

  “What—you got something to do? You got plans?”

  “It’s no good.”

  “Dawg, I’m telling you, this here thing is in the bank. It’s going down next Saturday night.”

  “Next weekend’s too late, I gotta find somebody on the hit list in the next three days.”

  There’s a pause on the other end, and Oswald continues pacing along the scarred concrete island between the Departures gate and the cabstand, gripping the cell phone a little too tightly. The air outside O’Hare Airport’s Terminal “B” is redolent with carbon monoxide, jet fumes, and the shouts of Red Caps calling for baggage handlers and Metra porters.

  Night has rolled in over the polluted horizon of towers and hotels to the west, and now the yellow harvest moon is high in the sky, a big, buttery orb, slightly flat on one side, but bulging menacingly toward fullness. Every few moments the distant silhouette of an airliner slices across its luminous cornea like a scalpel slowly slicing an eyeball.

  Gerbil is inside the terminal, putting the lovebirds on a cheap Southwest Airlines flight to Mexico City, and Oswald is getting fidgety. She’s been in there too long. Oswald told her not to give any speeches, or hand out any brochures. Just tell the two dirt-bags this is their only chance of survival. Just get rid of them.

  “Okay, lookit…” The Candy Man’s strained voice returns over the line. “I’ll see what I can do. Awright? You sit tight, awright?”

  “Whatever, Candy, whatever.”

  Oswald thumbs the connection off and stares at the moon. The noxious wind feels cool on his sweaty face. His fever has diminished, and he feels slightly better than he did back at the love nest—despite the fact that he’s still damp with nympho-urine.

  The epiphany—brewing within him since they left the Sheik’s Harum—is now a full-blown revelation, the forlorn words of Alberta Goldstein echoing in his scrambled brain. He knows what he has to do now. For once in his miserable life, he can see his destiny. Maybe getting pissed on actually is a baptism of some sort. Maybe he should write a book on the cleansing quality of golden showers.

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice shatters Oswald’s reverie, and he whirls around to see Gerbil approaching the cabstand. He gives her an expectant shrug. “How did it go?”

  Gerbil reaches the cabstand, then pauses to shrug and light a Camel. “I don’t know. They seemed... unconvinced.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Another shrug, blowing smoke into the wind. “I don’t know, they seemed—what’s the word? Non-committal? Like they didn’t buy the whole husband-hiring-a-hitter story.”

  Oswald rubs his mouth. “They’ll get over it when they see the price of beach-front condos down there.”

  Gerbil puffs her smoke thoughtfully. “Golden sunsets and golden showers for life.”

  Oswald nods. “Seven down and one to go.”

  “Speaking of showers,” she says, “can we please get the hell outta here? I need a bath, like, immediately.”

  “Yeah, um…” Oswald looks at her. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Can we wash up first?”

  She turns and starts toward the parking ramp, but Oswald gently grabs her arm. “One second, Gerbil, hold on, I need to say something first.”

  She pauses and smokes her cigarette.

  Oswald searches for the words. “Um…”

  She waits.

  He chews the inside of his cheek, agonizing over the proper way to put this. “Lemme ask you something. Didn’t you once say you always dreamed of opening up a little tattoo parlor?”

  “What?!”

  “A tattoo parlor, you know.”

  She stares at him. “What in God’s grey earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about one of those little bohemian places where you hang out and stick each other with needles and talk about how much you hate society.”

  She shakes her head. “How in the world do you come up with this shit?”

  “I swear to God you told me this one time. Goddamnit, you told me one of your dreams was to open up a goddamn tattoo parlor.”

  “I was stoned, Ozzy, I don’t know.”

  “What’s so bad about opening up a tattoo parlor? I think it’s a great idea.”

  Gerbil lets out a sigh. “What’s wrong, Tonto? What’s the matter?”

  Oswald takes a breath. “Look. Here’s the thing. This last one. Number eight—whatever it turns out to be—I’m gonna go it alone.”

  She cocks her head at him. “Not this shit again.”

  “Just listen. It’s not what you think.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  He takes a deep breath. “After this last one... I’m getting out.”

  She drops her butt and grinds it into the pavement. “Out of town? Out of state? What are you saying?”

  “I’m getting out of the life. Outta the game. For good. I’m gonna—”

  She looks at him. “What. You’re gonna what? Become a tattoo artist? Work in a hardware store? Teach kindergarten?”

  He reaches out and touches her cheek. “I’m sorry, kid, but this is how it’s gotta—”

  “What are you doing?” She removes his hand, which has lingered on her cheek far too long.

  He pulls his hand back like it’s burned. “I’m sorry, sorry.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I shouldn’t have—” Oswald looks away. “I need to get organized.”