PIKE by Benjamin Whitmer Page B

lead. “Well, goddamn it,” Bogie says to them. “Ain’t no one gonna sell to me with you two country peckerwoods hanging around.”
    “Not my problem,” Pike says. “I sure as hell ain’t handing you my money and letting you walk away.”
    Bogie shakes his head mournfully, starts towards the hotel’s front entrance.
    Rory sticks his hands in the front pockets of his sweatshirt and follows, head hunched down. Even as cold as it is, there are people out. Hustling the sidewalks, their hands shoved in their pockets. Smoking cigarettes outside of the bars, stamping their feet to keep warm. Rory pulls his sweatshirt hood over his head. Fuck cities. He’s already sick of being herded. The streetlights and the shop signs. The buttons you have to push before you walk. The busses whisking past, clunking toa stop, doors whooshing open, discharging people, moving in jerks and halts, shocks and collisions. It’s electric, it grinds at your soul, it makes you want to claw at the sidewalks. Rory’s whole body angles towards Nanticote as he walks.
    Then he thinks of Wendy. And he sets his jaw and trudges after Pike.
    An intrepid hooker in a mini-skirt and greasy long underwear stands before the glossy black storefront of a piano repair shop. Bogie’s half turned to holler at her when Pike grabs him by the back of the neck and forces him on a straight line to the hotel. “Goddamn it,” Bogie says. “What if that had been Dana?”
    “Was it?”
    “No. Fuck it. She was leech bait anyhow.”
    Rory looks at him. “Leech bait?”
    “Leech bait. It’s in Thailand or wherever the fuck. When they get a hooker that’s too used up to sell to the whorehouse they tie the bitch up and dunk her a big old vat full of leech infested water. Just when she’s about to nod off, they pull her out and peel the leeches off. Then they sell ‘em in the market to all them poor motherfuckers they got starving over there. That’s why I’m glad to be an American.”
    Rory just looks at him. He can’t even raise his hand to slap him on the back of the head. “Please shut the fuck up,” he says, and they enter the hotel.
    The clerk has a face like a crushed windshield. He’s sitting behind an ironwork security screen, watching TV. The lobby’s clean, surprisingly clean. The maroon carpet’s frayed, but there isn’t a stain on it, and a four-bulb chandelier radiates a low watt light that creeps into every nook and cranny, scaring off any dirt.
    “We need a room,” Pike says.
    The clerk leans toward them like a stack of kindling toppling. “Not here you don’t,” he says, jigsawed segments of skin and muscle in his face moving in conflicting directions as he speaks. He looks to have survived some terrific catastrophe and been stitched back together with baling twine.
    “You’ve got vacancies,” Pike says.
    “I don’t need any trouble. And you’re trouble if I’ve ever seen it.”
    “No trouble at all.” Pike pulls a roll of bills out of his pocket. He makes a show of them. “How much?”
    The clerk hesitates, eyeing the money. Then he points at a sign spelling out the rates. “And there’ll be a deposit,” he says. He stares singularly at Pike, his left eye dribbling a long streak of water down his cheek. “A fifty dollar security deposit. I got doubles, I got no triples.”
    Pike peels bills. “We’ll take a double for a week.”
    The clerk angles around to the room keys, never letting go of the desk. “Five-thirteen.” He tosses the key on the desk.
    “And send Melinda up,” Bogie says, licking his lips as Pike picks the key off the desk.

CHAPTER 30
~ Smiling a sad smile that twists cruel.~
    E verything in the room’s red. The carpet, the wallpaper, even the drapes on the bay window that opens down on Main Street. Red and stifling, thick with womblike air. Rory walks to the window and opens it.
    Bogie looks nervous. He scratches his stomach. “Y’all mind if I watch television?”
    “Go for it,” Pike says,