UNCLE MERL'S BAR & GRILL
Just another Friday Night—In Newark!
By
Peter "Lou" D'Alessio
Copyright 2010
“The damned things get into your mind, you know? Everybody thinks life just ends, and it doesn’t. See!” Old Doc Boreese pointed to the ‘full woody’ in the corpse’s trousers. “This unlucky bastard’s been through rigor and back and he’s still ready to take a swing. Jesus! Does this guy stink!” The old man threw the rain soaked jacket that had been lying in the puddle next to the ‘stiff’ over its face and rose from the crouching position he was in. I was a good six or seven yards away from him and I still heard his knees pop and lock. “We’ve got our hands full with this one, Charley!” he said. “It looks like he got his passport punched for the Great Beyond maybe 4 days ago! Christ! Will ya look at that grin! She’s a real devil, this one is!”
The old fellow walked over to the brick wall I was staring at. Two sets of four very deep scrapes were grooved into the bricks—one for the right hand, the other for the left! Boreese fingered the groves and sniffed his fingertips. His head turned until his eyes caught mine and he extended his hand under my nose. I instinctively pulled back expecting a foul sulfurous scent. The odor was a delicate rose.
Boreese reached into his pocket and produced a small rubber atomizer of Holy Water. I had never noticed before, but one side of the atomizer was decorated with a crucifix. The other side said, “Dine at Uncle Merl’s Bar & Grill—If You Don’t Eat We’ll Both Starve!” He sprayed the sacred fluid into the scratches. They smoked, releasing the sulfurous smell I had been expecting. Mixed with the rose scent it reminded me of a cathouse in New Orleans that I once had to purge of a demon, and in the process purged a few of my own. As the fumes lightened, the ancient shaman reached into his pocket and pulled out a large piece of yellow chalk.
“Here! Take this! When I tell you I’m ready, outline the heels of my shoes on the pavement. Then measure the distance to the wall. Let’s find out how tall she is.” His fingers slid into the marks and he slowly paced backward into the “spread ’em” position made so popular by many of Newark’s Finest, and some police too!
“Come here! Slide between me and the wall!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t waste time! He died here! Right on this spot! Standin’ in the box, waitin’ for a fastball! He got hit with a psychic spitball and bounced… there!” Doc looked down towards where I was slowly starting to inch in. “The poor bastard in the pile over there was about three inches taller than me. That’s close enough, get in here!”
I slid under his extended right arm, facing into the wall. I felt the hot air of an exasperated groan on my neck.
“I don’t believe she was facing that way! They’re mentally erotic, not physically. And they’re not very creative—they don’t have to be. It’s all in the victim’s mind! Sort of like the Internal Revenue, only on the spectral plane. If they want you, they’ll get you!”
I squeezed myself around. Doc was pressing his upper torso into me with a great deal of force. His forehead pinned my whole head onto the wall. I could feel him shifting body weight around.
“That’s it! Quick! Slide out and mark where my heels are!”
As I forced my way out from his pressing, his face drove into the brick with a great deal of force. It was as if a window had suddenly been opened and someone had grabbed him by the hair and tried to pull him through. I hesitated.
“Don’t hesitate! NEVER HESITATE!” he screamed. “If you hesitate with this one, she’ll rip your throat out!” There was fear in his voice. I had never heard it there before and THAT scared me. I was frozen in place for a second. I could see sweat forming on his brow. “Hurry! Hurry! I can’t hold on much longer!”
Hold on? I turned my head quickly towards the wall. His fingers were starting to smolder in the grooves as if they were going to spontaneously combust at any moment. I rolled across his back and fell to my knees, marking the pavement around his shoes.
“Forget the shoes! Outline my head and stand back!”
I obeyed, tracing a semi-circle from his left to his right shoulder. I had barely touched the right shoulder when Boreese seemed to explode off the wall, carrying me with him. We slid across the pavement wildly dancing our way over the ‘deceased.’ Our feet tangled in the remains and we sprawled to the pavement in a heap.
I rolled off the body and into a kneeling fetal position. I began to brush my clothing off as hard as I could in a near-desperate attempt to wipe the scent of four-day-old death from my jacket. It took several seconds to calm myself. I looked to see where Doc had landed.
He lay on his back, head resting on the victim’s lower stomach. He seemed to be studying the full moon that lit the ally. It was a ridiculous visual—especially with stiff’s ‘stiff’ waving in the wind over Doc’s left ear. He had placed his hands in the puddles he had partially landed in. They were still smoldering!
“Are you okay, Doc?”
“Does it LOOK to you like I’m okay?“ he grunted out agitatedly towards my voice. “HELL, NO I’M NOT OKAY! GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND FIND THE HOLY WATER, NOW!!!”
I frantically crawled through the Newark gutters, feeling over the broken wine bottles, spent crack vials and assorted Coney Island Whitefish for the Righteous Aqueous Dispenserium. It had flown nearly out to the cross street and I had to fend off a rat for sole possession. A couple of whacks with a Newark Alley Apple and the arrogant rodent conceded my prior claim. I dropped the brick and staggered back towards my mentor. His fingers were starting to glow a dark red and he was sucking his lower lip so hard it was turning purple! At the first glance of the bottle, air rushed from his mouth in a gesture of relief. I popped the cover off the bottle and started spraying like a scared skunk, covering both of his downturned hands quickly as possible. As I worked, I noticed that the puddles had evaporated from beneath his fingers. Doc had gritted his teeth and clamped his eyes shut, and stayed that way for several minutes, seemingly turning into a gargoyle.
“Is there any glow left?” he said cautiously.
“Only in your cheeks. Doc, what the hell happened?”
Doc’s eyes opened and he sat up, palms down on the now sanctified street, knees bent slightly. He pushed his head slowly towards his chest and turned his bearded jowls towards me. “Congratulations, Charley. You’ve just been promoted to first team Apparition Tracker. We’re a noble and ancient guild. The pay stinks, the work’ll kill you, there are no benefits, but if you’re still alive, next month is the 906th anniversary reunion. You get invited! Now that there’re two of us, we can rent a table down at Merl’s joint and talk about old times!” He shook his head.
“I liked para-psychology a lot more when it was theoretical! Man, was that scary!”
Doc was still trembling, the way people tremble after they’ve hit a divider at sixty miles an hour and crawled almost unscratched from the wreck. Or worse—he looked like he’d just hit a game-winning home run, and got called out for not touching second base. There was a bottle of bourbon in our future, that much was certain.
“We’d better get Jonsey down here to claim the body for the police.”
“Shouldn’t we ‘stake’ him first, before the cops get here?”
“Naw. He’s dead-dead!” Doc studied his own slightly toasted fingers; I think to see if his fingerprints were gone. “There hasn’t been a case like this in eight hundred years! Male vampires are ALWAYS dominant! Their women, their servants—they’re just psychic leeches, they feed off him! When he dies, they die! It’s the last bastion of true Ritualistic Male Chauvinism. Somehow, some way, our little Vampira here got “liberated”. She’s somehow managed to break off from the pack.”
Doc rose from the street and dusted himself off. “C’mon, we go for the cops together. From here on in, we do EVERYTHING together. I was careless! She knows we’re after her!”
We walked the moon-lit Newark streets waiting for a patrol car out on rounds. This was a less-fashionable section of town—remote, destitute, and deserted. Only the bones of pay phones were to be found. I could think of any number of places to meet death better than here. I didn’t mind flagging down a cop car, but it meant we’d have to go back with them to the scene of the crime—and right now, that pleased me less than the thought of catching parts of my anatomy in my zipper!
And then there was Jonsey. Every time we started chasing the Voodoo around town, Jonsey was usually the detective who got assigned the case. He either couldn’t understand or wouldn’t accept how the bodies we turned in had gotten to be, well… past tense! At least with Jonsey around I wouldn’t be over-inspired to catch anything!
* * *
“Heart attack!” Jonsey rolled the jacket over the face again.
“Heart Attack, my ass, Jonsey! If you look up the word ‘murder’ in the dictionary, you’re gonna see this guy’s ID for the definition.” I rolled the jacket back down.
Jonsey pointed to the grin that was plastered across the victim’s face. “Hell, I been a cop for fourteen years! I ain’t EVER seen an OFFT stiff with a grin like that! The sucker got himself a hooker, came back here to do his thing—he had a heart attack, she took his cash, stole his car—good bye, good luck, sorry it didn’t work out! CASE CLOSED!!!” He tried to roll the jacket over the grin. I grabbed the collar and started trying to roll it back down. It rapidly degenerated into a polite, if somewhat macabre, tug of war.
“Gimme a break! That’s what I like about you, Jonsey, always an open mind!”
“Every time you say that, my boss starts pushin’ early retirement plans at me! What is it this time? Another werewolf? More fire-breathing dragons—”
“Ga’dammit, Jonsey, how many times I got to tell you! They don’t breath fire, they belch it!”
“There are NO signs of violence! There ain’t a mark on his whole damned body!” Jonsey gave the jacket an especially hard pull and it caught me off guard. I tumbled over onto the cadaver, but I got ’im on the way down—I grabbed Jonsey by the knot in his tie and took him with me.
“But there ‘is’ a mark on the body! Four marks in fact.” Doc’s voice froze everyone in the alley. The old bastard had a real flair for the dramatic when he needed it. “Get him back to the morgue and start an autopsy fast! He’ll be dust by morning!”
* * *
Even in Newark, at 2 AM it’s tough to find a coroner. Jonsey was all for slabbin’ the corpse and headin’ for a White Castle down off Broad Street, but Doc put up such a fuss that Jonsey allowed him to escort the deceased right to the marble “good-bye” chute. Doc was in a frenzy and it was makin’ Jonsey as nervous as a rookie Red Sox pitcher facin’ Babe for the first time. When Doc pulled out his Swiss Army Knife (ya know, for a neutral nation, they make a hell of a knife) and started moving for Mr. Dead’s private parts, I thought Jonsey was going to pull out his gun and shoot!
“You’re not a doctor! You’re a shrink!” he shrieked.
Too late! Doc had grabbed the right pant leg by the knee and drove the blade in. He grabbed both sides of the incision and ripped the cloth apart. “There!” he said. “See!” Doc pointed inside the hole. Jonsey and I crept sheepishly in to get a look.
“Man, I don’t see nothin’.”
“There! By his… look!” Doc grabbed the belt buckle and undid the trouser catch. He ripped the pants right off the body. “There, both inner thighs!” Jonsey and I looked at each other. Neither one of us saw what Doc was pointing at. “Oh hell! Under here!” Boreese grabbed a wooden ruler and hoisted Mr. Dead’s ‘Captain Happy’s power-pack’ about four inches further than the good Lord had intended—and rather unceremoniously too, I might add. And sure enough, there they were. Jonsey shook his head in disbelief.
“You mean to tell me I gotta go into my boss’s office in the morning and tell him I was down here with you, desecratin’ the dead for an hour—so that you could show me how this guy died of four mosquito bites?”
“They’re not insect bites. They’re puncture marks, right into the femoral vein. If this gentleman were going to be here in the morning, when the coroner went to drain his fluid he’d find him two or three liters low. If I were you, I’d roll some fingerprints fast. At the first ray of daylight our friend here is going to fall apart.”
* * *
Jonsey took his prints. He even shot some Polaroid and thought there was a problem with the camera because he couldn’t get an image of the cadaver to come up on the print. Doc thanked Jonsey and we left. It was now nearly 3AM. The only place still open and selling liquor was a jazz bar down on Liberty Street. It was about a ten minute ‘hoof’ from where we were. If we hustled, we could get there with a solid four minutes to legally order five or six rounds before the law required them to stop serving. The old guy that ran the joint wouldn’t mind if we talked till daybreak. More importantly, he wouldn’t think we were crazy if he overheard what we were talking about! You can’t get that from White Castle!
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