The Winner: Part Nineteen

Five-days later and the rash on my ass still burns. I’ve tried every sort of cream and ointment I can find in the drug store, but it does nothing but numb it. Note to self, quit walking around with soiled pants for hours at a time. I’d make the time to see a dermatologist if I even thought I had a future anymore.

My house is destroyed. It looks as bad as my mother’s house was, maybe worse. I haven’t taken the trash out in ages. There is a mountain of empty takeout boxes piling up in my kitchen, all filled with rotting food since I only seem to be able to keep down maybe half of the food I order before I feel nauseous. I feel like I’ve lost ten pounds in just the last week. Then again, I could stand to lose about twenty more. Perhaps it’s a side benefit of being followed by a vast conspiracy.

Besides the mountains of trash, building up in my loft, every bit of furniture is destroyed. I hacked through the cushions of my Italian leather sofa with the largest of my set of Japanese steel kitchen knives, searching for bugs, cameras, anything that could be watching or listening to me. I’ve pulled up the carpet and hacked up the floorboards with an axe to see if anything had been placed there. I used a metal pole to poke holes in my ceiling, looking for cameras. Every nightstand or dresser or hutch is in a pile of splinters. I know they are watching me in here, I just know it. Why wouldn’t they be? I do it just to be safe. Fuck it, it’s one of the advantages of owning over renting that I can tear the place up so much and not worry about losing my deposit.

Of course, I don’t find anything resembling a microphone or a camera in the piles of splinters and plaster all over my house, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Those things are fucking tiny now. I could be being watched by a camera the size of a pinhole or a piece of wire and I wouldn’t know it. Even after literally destroying my house, I’m sure the bugs and cameras are still there, I just missed them. I try to find every possible blind spot there could be in my house. I sleep in my closet, figuring that it’s one of the more unlikely places that would be under surveillance. I realize that all this is doing me no good. After all, after destroying my house, they can just sneak back in and replace a bug and it would be harder to find with my place being so trashed.

But it isn’t just unfounded paranoia. I know for a fact they are watching me, at least when I’m outside. The black car I noticed on the curb the night Hirsch dropped me off hasn’t moved. Occasionally, it’s a replaced by a black SUV, but I still see the ubiquitous silhouettes of two men in it each time. Every time I leave my building (usually just to the drugstore where I can stock up on industrial sized bottles of Advil which I’ve been eating like Tic-Tacs lately now that I always seem to have a headache), the same black cars are always in the parking lot. I see them pass me as I walk down the street. I walk everywhere now. I haven’t even bothered to get my Mercedes out of the impound yard, even though I can afford it. A car is just another thing that they can bug or track.

Yes, I’m thinking in terms of “they” now. “They” are always watching. “They” are everywhere. This must be what schizophrenia feels like. I’m never alone. I must always be on guard. The people who have planned this have far too much at stake to not know where I am or what I’m doing at all times. I must presume that they have left nothing to chance.

Still, I try to bring some optimism to all this. After all, “they” cannot be totally omniscient. If they knew that I was having Hirsch try and get me in touch with the FBI, I can only assume that they would have killed either me or him by now. I call Hirsch every day much to his annoyance, usually on the pretext of the arrest I had last weekend, but mostly just to make sure he’s still alive. The fucker hits me up for more money every time, telling me the “complexities” of my case are taking more billable hours than he expected. I don’t care. If he can’t do what I asked him to do then I’ll be dead anyway. I can only assume that if “they” knew what the two of us were up to that we’d both be dead.

The cellphone that Burke left in my apartment hasn’t rung the entire time I’ve had it. That’s even more maddening. I don’t know what is going on, what plans are in the works that I have no idea about but will end with me killing the president. I guess it would be stupid to let me in on more than I needed to know. To me, “their” entire plan sounds kind of stupid.

Anyway, I’m in the bathroom, trying to apply more ointment to the rash on my ass. It doesn’t make the burning go away, but does reduce it to the level of just a bad sunburn. I’ve gone through two tubes of the stuff in the past week. I’ve just squirted a fresh line of it on my index finger when I hear my doorbell go off. I don’t answer it, I just continue to apply my ointment. But whoever is at the door keeps hitting the buzzer and won’t go away. Dammit. I wipe the remaining ointment off on some toilet paper, pull up my pants and hobble with my ointment slicked buttcheeks over to the door. If someone let a Jehovah’s Witness into the building, I’m gonna be fucking pissed.

I yank the door open, ready to yell, but I stop when I see Apple standing outside.

“Poopy, are you okay?”

“Fine. I’m fucking fine,” I sneer. I’m still kind of pissed at her over the scene she made at the police station.

“Can I come in?”

“If you want to,” I say. I stand back from the door and let her inside. The swelling in her face has gone away. The bruises are changing from purple to yellow. She’s taken the bandages off her cuts, which are scabbing over. Still, it doesn’t look like Burke and his crew did any permanent damage to her besides her teeth. She looks officially like some hillbilly chick now, and not in a good Daisy Duke way either. Why the fuck did I get myself into such a mess over her?

“What happened here?” she asks, surveying the trash heap my apartment has become.

“It’s a long and unimportant story. Why are you here?”

But of course, I know why she’s here. She tells me anyway.

“Poopy, I want my babies back.”

“I’ll get them back for you, I promise. Just lay off me.”

Apple just nods. She backs up, opens up her purse and pulls out a Walther PPK, which she aims at my face.

“I’m through laying off you. Where are my kids?”

“Chill out,” I say, putting my hands up as if that will help. “I don’t know where they are right now. I’m working on it, I swear.”

“I covered for you with the police,” she says. “I told them I made up the whole kidnapping story for you. Now I’m in trouble with them and they’ve sent social workers to my trailer looking for my children. I told them they’re with Luke, but I don’t think they buy it. I’m in deep shit because of you and I want some answers.”

“Look,” I say. “I’ll tell you everything that’s going on, I just can’t tell you here. Let’s go someplace else, like the park or something. It’ll be safer.”

Apple shakes her head. “Someplace where I can’t keep a gun on you, huh? That’s convenient. Where else can you tell me what’s going on Poopy?”

“Not…here,” I repeat. “’They’re listening.” I cup one hand to my ear and wave my finger at the ceiling, but she doesn’t seem to understand what I’m pantomiming.

“No more games. Start talking or I’ll blow your head off.”

I smirk. “You won’t kill me. That gun you’re holding is nothing but a bluff—“

BANG! I feel a searing heat and pain in the side of my neck. I fall to the ground and land on a splinter that digs into my thigh. That fucking bitch shot me!

I clasp my hand to my neck and I feel blood running through my fingers. I can still breathe though, and there’s not too much blood (I figure if she hit me in the jugular, it would be coming out like a firehose), so she must have just grazed me. Still, if that bullet had been just a couple centimeters to the right, well then this story is over. I look up and she still has the gun trained on me.

“Start talking or I’ll shoot you again you sonofabitch!”

“I can’t! I swear!” I say. Dammit, one of my neighbors must have heard that shot. Then again, it’s one o’clock on a weekday and they all have to work. Besides, I’ve been making such a commotion tearing this place apart that even if they did hear it, they probably think it’s just me destroying another piece of furniture looking for microphones.

Apple orders me to get up, which I do. “Turn around,” she says. “Now go to the bathroom,” she says. I’m about to turn around and ask her why, when she prods me between the shoulder blades with the barrel of the Walther. “Move.”

I step over the piles of rubble and go into the master bathroom where I’d been applying my ointment just a few minutes earlier. Once inside, she shuts the door. “Lay down on your back in the tub you bastard.”

I do as she says. It only occurs to me after I’ve complied that she’s probably doing this to make it easier to clean up the blood if she decides to kill me.

But that’s not what she has in mind. As soon as I’m in the tub, she gets in with me, standing over my head. I can look up her skirt and I see she’s not wearing any panties. She’s let her pubic hair grow out into a wild and wooly bush since she stopped working at the strip club. She hikes up her skirt and squats down over my face. Sensing this is my best chance to overpower, I start to sit up. I stop when she jams the barrel of her gun against my crotch, digging it into my balls.

“Where the fuck are my babies, Poopy?”

“I’ll tell you! I just can’t tell you here! Please!”

Her butthole starts undulate and she lets out a mini-fart. A tiny squirt of liquid shit comes out. The smell is horrible.

“I’ve been wanting to pay you back for the time you did this to me for weeks now you sick fucker. Tell me what happened to my children and I’ll take a raincheck.”

“I’m serious! I can’t! They’ll kill us both if I tell you!”

Apple lets fly another fart; a louder one this time. There’s something nasty up in there. I start to gag at the smell.

“I think I should tell you that I’ve been eating off the value menu at Taco Bell all afternoon to get my shit smelling nice and stinky. Gave me kind of a tummy ache. But that’s the way you like it, right Poopy?”

I’m about to open my mouth and say something when a geyser of liquid shit hits me in the face. Some of it gets in my mouth and my nostrils. The stench is so overwhelming that I literally can’t smell anything anymore. My mind just shuts that part of the five senses off. Unfortunately, my sense of touch is still very active and I can feel the diarehea drip all over my face. I try to sit up, but a Apple just squashes the gun against my balls even harder. They feel like they’re gonna burst like grapes. I’m able to move my wrist up to wipe some of the shit out of my eyes. All that does is make it so I can see the snake of solid fecal matter coming at me. I’m able to shake my head enough so the initial bit of it just slides off my face, but the rest settles on my upper lip and balls up on my upper lip like warm, soft serve ice cream.

“For the last time! Tell me where my kids are or I’ll blow your balls off!” I hear the ominous click of her turning off the safety on the Walther. I don’t even open my mouth to protest, for fear of the any more of the shit getting in my mouth. I do grunt a bit though.

Then there’s a dinging sound. It’s my doorbell. I start grunting louder, but Apple barks at me: “Shut up.” I lay there, perfectly still. The doorbell rings again. Apple prods me with the gun again, to make sure I stay quiet, but whoever is there rings it again. They aren’t going away.

Apple jumps off me and turns around, keeping the gun on me. “Are you expecting someone?”

I don’t answer her, I just push off the pile of shit off my face and try to start spitting the taste of fecal matter out of my mouth.

She tosses me a towel. “Answer the door and make them go away. We aren’t done here…”

I take the towel and frantically try and wipe as much of the crap off my face as I can. I get up slowly since my balls are aching terribly. I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and despite the little bit of clean-up I was able to get done, I still look like something a dog shat out…so to speak.

“Don’t do or say anything stupid,” Apple says. She keeps the gun on me as we head towards the door. She stands next to the entrance where she can’t be seen from the outside.

The doorbell rings once more before I unlatch it. Outside is some Mexican teenager whose face scrunches up when he gets a look (or just as likely, a whiff) of me.

“Uh…sir, is your name Poopy Peanutz?”

A bit of liquid shit I missed with the towel trickles from my forehead and into my eye. I wipe it off using the back of my wrist.

“What do you think?” I sneer.

The kid backs away from the door some. “Hey, I was told to give you a message.”

“Who told you?”

“Some old dude. Said he’s give me twenty bucks to tell you personally,” the kid says. “He told me to tell you ‘The meeting you wanted will happen at four tomorrow in a gray van behind the Wilshire Apartments on sixth. Don’t be late.’”

“You positive?”

“Yeah. The guy made me repeat it a bunch of times to make sure I remembered.” The kid fidgets around. “Say, am I supposed to get my twenty bucks from you or from him, ‘cause he didn’t really explain—“

I shut the door in his face. After a second, I hear him mutter “Pendejo” on the other side and his sneakers clop off down the hall. I keep my head close to the door until I can hear that he’s completely gone. Apple moves in closer, aiming the gun at me from her hip.

“This ‘meeting’ has to do with my kids, doesn’t it? Are they gonna be there, ‘cause if they are I’m going along—“

I yank the door back open and it connects with her face with a solid CLUMP. Apple falls to the ground and I jump on her, grabbing her gun and trying to pry it from her fingers before she can pop off another shot. She’s dazed, but not unconscious. I manage to bend her wrist back far enough to yank the Walther out of her hand.

“Poopy!” she screams. “I just want my…” I bring the butt of the pistol down on her face twice and she’s knocked out cold. Blood streams from her nose. At least she’s still breathing.

I keep the gun trained on her until I’m certain she’s not gonna get up. Then I tuck it in the back of my pants, then start dragging her across the apartment into my bedroom, where the one chair I haven’t destroyed (mostly because it’s made of some fairly strudy stainless steel) and do my best to prop her dead weight onto it. She lets out a groan. I pull the pistol out, ready to knock her unconscious again, but she’s still not really awake.

I yank the sheets off my bed and tie her wrists, legs, and torso to the chair. She groans again as I pull it tight around her chest. When I’m done, it looks like she’s wrapped in some thousand-threadcount toga. Not really artful, but it looks like it will keep her down. I find a washcloth from my bathroom that hasn’t been soiled and stuff it in her mouth, then I grab a roll of duct tape and wrap it around her head to keep it in place. Blood starts bubbling from her nose. Fuck, I hope she can breathe since I’m pretty sure I broke her nose when I hit her. I watch her for a few minutes, making she I didn’t strangle her. When I’m convinced this won’t kill her, I go back into the bathroom to wash myself up a bit better and throw on some clean (or at least, cleaner) clothes.

After I’ve freshened up, I go and sit by the balcony window and look down to the street, Walther PPK in hand. The ubiquitous black car is still stationed down there in the same spot it’s been almost every day this week. These guys aren’t being particularly subtle about keeping me under surveillance. I have half a mind to take the gun, go down there and shoot every person in that car in their fucking face, get sent to jail again and be done with this whole thing. Or, maybe I should just put this gun in my mouth and blow my brains out. But then I’d be condemning Apple, her children, and my mother to death. For some reason, that bothers me now.

I shouldn’t despair though. Hirsch came through for me. If I can only convince the FBI I’m not full of shit tomorrow, perhaps I’ll pull through this. Maybe I can get them to give me witness protection and I can leave this whole life behind me. Start fresh and maybe become a better person. I don’t want to be me any more. I hate myself more than anything else in this world.