Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

which keeps ringing incessantly. Alert now, with eyes wide open, the animal gives the phone one last good sniff and then positions its hind-quarter over the device, lifts its leg, and begins to pee on it.

Oswald sits up and grunts in agony. His body is seized up with stiffness and pain, his skull hammering like a broken church bell, his black garb damp with fever-sweat. He sees the dog pissing on his phone and just watches for a moment. The gesture seems apropos of something that Oswald cannot quite reckon.

“Get outta here! Fucking mutt! Shoo!” Oswald’s phlegmy wheeze gooses the animal away from the phone, and Oswald manages to crawl over to the device. “What,” he says flatly into the wet cell phone after flipping it open.

“Big Chief!”

The voice on the other end is a slap on the face. Oswald sits up, fighting the dizziness that’s washing over him now, all his troubles flooding back at the sound of that familiar taunting yammer. “Jesus Christ, Candy, what time is it?”

“Half past crazy.” The voice is wired and hyped up with fake glee. “Listen. Dawg. Good news.”

Oswald is seeing double as he grips the slimy device, the odor of dog pee like smelling salts in his nostrils. The previous evening’s festivities are coming back to him now—the horrible black regret for cutting Gerbil loose, the shame and regret and self-loathing and cheap whiskey burning a hole in his guts. “I could use some,” Oswald croaks in a hoarse voice.

“They moved the thing up.” A pause here. “You hear what I said?”

Oswald swallows the taste of sulfur. “The thing?”

“The thing I told you about yesterday.”

“What thing?”

“The thing, dawg. For next week. For the Mink? The thing you said was going to be too late, said it had to be in the next couple of days?”

Oswald remembers now. He remembers the Candy Man calling him about another hit yesterday, this one for Anthony Ferri, the old shriveled shit. “Right, right, right—okay,” Oswald says, sitting up against the wall of the alley, “I remember now, yeah, sure.”

“Listen. Big dawg. I could get my ass capped for telling you this. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Candy, my head is going to cave in if I don’t find some OxyContin and a shower. Just give me the facts.”

“Okay, here’s the thing. You didn’t hear nothin’ from me, but this thing is going down tomorrow night. Motherfucker name of Felson.”

Oswald searches his memory. “Freddie Felson? Freddy ‘Forty-Five’?”

“That’s the guy.” The voice sounds suspiciously like it’s reading the words aloud. “They got big guns from Jersey to do the job tomorrow night. You got a pen?”

Oswald pats the wrinkled seams of his black coat. “Hold on.” He notices his index finger is cracked, bleeding slightly, and he squeezes it. A pearl of blood forms. He grabs a paper sack. “Okay, go ahead.”

“So get this: They’re gonna do it on the motherfucking Amtrak, tomorrow night, around 9 o’clock.”

Oswald frowns at the pavement. “They’re gonna do Freddie ‘Forty-Five’ on a train?”

“You heard me—9 o’clock Amtrak—to Kalamazoo, y’all—outta Union station—that’s all I know.”

Oswald writes the details in blood. He gets down the words Felson, Kalamazoo, 9:00, and Union Station, and then he says into the cell phone, “You sure about this, Candy?”

“Sure as shit, brother, sure as shit.”

“On a train?”

“You got it, dawg.”

“You’re sure.”

“This is air-tight intel, my brother, air-fucking-tight. And remember, y’all didn’t hear nothin’ from me. You know what I’m saying?”

Oswald stares at the words written in his blood: last chance.

On a train.

On the night of the full moon.

“Chief?” The voice sounds uncertain all of a sudden. “You there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“You saving people now?”

Oswald sighs. “Yeah, Candy, I’m saving people.”

After a pause: “Why the fuck you want to go and do something like that?”

Oswald flips the cell phone shut and folds up the note written in blood.

32.

Keeping track of Oswald that next day is even trickier than the previous one.

Before the sun has even cleared the adjacent tenements, he staggers out of the alley off Damon with a purpose, his eyes alert and bright and burning up with some kind of weird urgency, as he searches for his pickup. Does this mean he’s on the scent again? Another job? Another doomed mope he’s supposed to snatch from the jaws of death?

He finds the truck in a no-parking zone a block down the street.

Thankfully, Gerbil has a younger cabbie that second day—a hot-shot gum-snapping Mexican kid with a backwards ball cap—who waits and watches under a weeping willow tree a half a block away as Oswald climbs back into the S-10 and takes off in a cloud of exhaust.

They follow the Indian across the north side, down deserted side streets, and past boarded store-fronts..

Finally Oswald pulls up in front of a seedy little transient hotel on Wells. The place has that seamy, sun-bleached air about it—a bunch of missing letters in the sign, a series of barred windows—and when Oswald pauses for an awkward moment before entering the place, it looks as though he’s considering whether or not he has truly hit rock bottom.

A half a block north of the hotel, sitting in the back of the idling taxi, Gerbil asks the driver to keep the meter running and wait for her, giving him one of those fake credit cards she got from Oswald’s treasure trove. The Mexican kid agrees to hold the card in hock while Gerbil goes about her business.

At that point Gerbil attempts another stunt she learned from make-believe detectives.

She goes into the lobby of the flophouse and lurks in the corner for a moment, pretending to read a magazine. Oswald has already vanished upstairs, checking into some unknown room, and now the lobby is silent and stewing in the soup of its own musty desolation.

Gerbil goes over to the emaciated junkie behind the front desk and inquires as to whether she could possibly see the register. The junkie looks at her as though she just took out her