بخش 03 - فصل 04

4

A certain recent parolee wakes up as Hodges and Holly are leaving their movie and Tina is falling in love with Barbara’s brother. Morris has slept all morning and part of the afternoon following a wakeful, fretful night, only dropping off as the first light of that Saturday morning began to creep into his room. His dreams have been worse than bad. In the one that woke him, he opened the trunk to find it full of black widow spiders, thousands of them, all entwined and gorged with poison and pulsing in the moonlight. They came streaming out, pouring over his hands and clittering up his arms.

Morris gasps and chokes his way back into the real world, hugging his chest so tightly he can barely breathe.

He swings his legs out of bed and sits there with his head down, the same way he sat on the toilet after McFarland exited the MAC men’s room the previous afternoon. It’s the not knowing that’s killing him, and that uncertainty cannot be laid to rest too soon.

Andy must have taken them, he thinks. Nothing else makes sense. And you better still have them, pal. God help you if you don’t.

He puts on a fresh pair of jeans and takes a crosstown bus over to the South Side, because he’s decided he wants at least one of his tools, after all. He’ll also take back the Tuff Totes. Because you had to think positive.

Charlie Roberson is once more seated in front of the Harley, now so torn down it hardly looks like a motorcycle at all. He doesn’t seem terribly pleased at this reappearance of the man who helped get him out of jail. ‘How’d it go last night? Did you do what you needed to do?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ Morris says, and offers a smile that feels too wide and loose to be convincing. ‘Four-oh.’

Roberson doesn’t smile back. ‘As long as five-o isn’t involved. You don’t look so great, Morrie.’

‘Well, you know. Things rarely get taken care of all at once. I’ve got a few more details to iron out.’

‘If you need the truck again—’

‘No, no. I left a couple of things in it, is all. Okay if I grab them?’

‘It’s nothing that’s going to come back on me later, is it?’

‘Absolutely not. Just a couple of bags.’

And the hatchet, but he neglects to mention that. He could buy a knife, but there’s something scary about a hatchet. Morris drops it into one of the Tuff Totes, tells Charlie so long, and heads back to the bus stop. The hatchet slides back and forth in the bag with each swing of his arms.

Don’t make me use it, he will tell Andy. I don’t want to hurt you.

But of course part of him does want to use it. Part of him does want to hurt his old pal. Because – notebooks aside – he’s owed a payback, and payback’s a bitch.