SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER TEN

TEN

“There you go.”

Exitus blinked. “Sir?”

Officer Welsh pointed out of the car window at an old and derelict building fast approaching. “Your motel.”

Exitus was back in a police car after the rather uncomfortable shopping excursion to Tough Break, Kid (even more uncomfortably, across the street and eight buildings away). He leaned across the backseat of the car to look out of the far window at the building Officer Welsh was now parking catercorner to.

“You’re kidding me. Isn’t there a Holiday Inn or Super8 nearby?”

“No. This is it.”

Wronki’s one and only motel was housed in the old town jail. The windows still had their iron bars and no one must have thought to remove the markings harking to the building’s sordid past. On the left side of the motel, its paint faded but still recognizable, was a massive relief for the brothel the building must have been before turning into a more respectable motel, partly covered by the advertisement of “WRONKI JAIL”. It was even named “The Slammer”.

“Can’t I get my hearse back? You can’t impound it for no other reason than I was the person who called in the crime.”

“You wouldn’t be able to sleep in your vehicle even if we were to return it to you; there’s a no homelessness law here.”

Exitus sputtered. “That’s unconstitutional! Besides, Genevieve is my home, so technically….”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Quick, but you’ll be staying here until we see fit to let you be on your way.”

‘See fit? See fit?’

His hands were on his lap, fingers entwined painfully. “I didn’t do anything.”

Exitus sighed. He frowned and sighed again, having nothing else to do but sit in the backseat of a police car and stare out at the fortress he was to reside in until—until whenever these people “saw fit”.

He never should have stopped in this town. What he should have done was starve to death, however slowly, and resort to eating the leather upholstery of the hearse—his own chest hair—anything to spare him the horrid decision of pulling into the parking lot of Lidia’s Diner (a woman who was somehow, crazily, permitted to be around living things).

He, like anyone alive, dead or in between, should have done a lot of things differently.

“Shall we go in, then?”

At the risk of being melodramatic, Exitus sighed once more. He only wanted Genevieve back in his possession, he only wanted to be far away from his whole mess, and Officer Welsh was not helping at all Exitus’s desires.

“Can’t I just get my hearse back?” he asked for a second time.

Officer Welsh met Exitus’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “Once those boys look her over, yes. In fact, I’ll drive her over here myself if you like—” and he did not pause long enough for Exitus to bring sound to his horrified expression “—But until then, son, you’re simply going to have to keep a low profile.”

That certainly wasn’t going to be a problem; right up to the prom incident back in high school, hardly anyone had even known Exitus’s name—given or otherwise. Some of the kids in his own class wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a line-up.

Was he going to be placed in a line-up?

Dear Lord, Aunt Lily was going to have a heart attack when she heard about this.

“I’ll do what I can, sir.”

Officer Welsh nodded. “Atta boy,” he said, as if his passenger was a newspaper-fetching dog and not a suspect in a mur-der. And by murder he didn’t mean a group of crows. This murder was the act, the malicious killing of a human being, a crime subject to capital punishment—and if there was one thing the majority of people liked, it was capital punishment. The courts sent people to death row every day, even if they knew Dead Man Walking was innocent. It happened all the time.

Aunt Lily was going to kill Exitus. Then she would have her heart attack. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for her to drop her overbearing, suffocating, anxiety-laden invigilation.

The door beside Exitus opened unexpectedly, Officer Welsh having left the vehicle at some point during Exitus’s anxiety attack.

Exitus gathered his bag of thrift store items and slid out of the car.

The Slammer was a small building as far as brothels-cum-jails-cum-motels went, though no less imposing in its stature than, say, a phial of deadly toxin.

He wondered if his room was going to be a jail cell, complete with iron bars and slamming metal door.

He wondered if he was ever going to be able to keep all of these Wronki citizens straight, he was meeting so many of them, and so many of them women. The town was like a microcosm of the world’s population. He’d read somewhere, on the back of a pamphlet for a medi-spa, that the world was becoming more decidedly female, which made sense; all humans begin as females. Of course, those people at the medi-spa might have been lying in order to create profit.

Noelle Akkaya, proprietor of The Slammer, was settled at the face of the building, tending to the final throws of the vegetable garden before autumn tightened its death grip. She was a round, pleasant-looking woman of Spanish decent. Or perhaps Italian.

“Merhaba!”

Or, C.) Neither of the above.

Noelle set down her trowel beside a wicker basket filled with vegetation, pulled off her lime green paisley gardening gloves, and rose to her feet. She strode over to her visitors, calling “Merhaba!” once again. She was smiling stiffly, though not at Exitus. Noelle seemed to be pretending that, for the moment, Exitus was an invisible being.

“Bu nedir?” she said, then: “What is this, calling me and telling me that I must put a killer in my hotel?” She sounded Indian. “Why is he not in jail?”

Officer Welsh smiled softly, as if about to point out the fact that The Slammer had quite apparently once been Wronki’s jail. Instead, he said: “There is nothing to prove he’s done a thing wrong, apart from defy our Homelessness Law.”

“So put him away for that! I don’t want him here. Lidia called me and—”

“Excuse me?”

Noelle’s fierce dark eyes, the complete antithesis to her cheery build, swung to Exitus. He lowered his head and backed away toward the police car.

“Lidia has a tendency to overreact to things, you know that.” Officer Welsh was either standing up for Exitus or—and more likely—he desperately wanted to rid himself of the burden of carting the kid around.

“Üzerinde tepki? A boy was killed in the diner, Eugene. Things like that don’t happen here—at least not until he showed up.” That word, ‘he’, was spoken with such effect that it created an image in Exitus’s head of that word wearing a carefully knit sweater of boric acid.

He stepped further back from Noelle; if The Slammer still had its solitary confinement cells, there was not a single doubt in his mind that she’d throw him in one and conveniently misplace the key.

“What kind of person drives around in a hearse, anyway?”

“My uncle Mort—”

That look again.

Exitus hid his hands in the pouch of his sweatshirt, pet his bar of soap as he had done back at the diner. He felt ill. He wondered how that person could have done it, killed a man, without feeling any strong emotion willing him to do something a little less drastic and bloody. How could someone beat in someone’s head like that? How could they stand the sight of… the smell of….

There was a sudden burst of static from Officer Welsh’s shoulder, a wall of noise which knocked into the group. All fell silent.

Exitus watched as Officer Welsh pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and leaned into his left shoulder.

“Go ahead.” The officer spoke rather gravely.

His words were met by another harsh burst of static and a few codes and numbers Exitus did not understand. He gathered that what was being said was not good, however, for Officer Welsh turned a peculiar shade of green. In fact, at that moment he closely resembled the complexion of Officer Adrian Cassidy when told Adam had been killed.

“10-4.”

Officer Welsh sighed deeply, returned his hand to his equipment belt.

“Noelle?”

“Evet?”

“See that Mr. Quick gets settled.”

Noelle looked aghast. “Yerleşmiş? Yerleşmiş! You’re not leaving him alone with me.”

Officer Welsh looked pained, much like Exitus had seen when Uncle Mort had that hateful kidney stone.

The policeman took Noelle by the arm and gently pulled the innkeeper aside. Beside the tomatoes and leaf lettuce, the latter waving precociously in the Dead Fall breeze, Officer Welsh spoke to Noelle. The words were lost to Exitus, but the texture he could make out well. The conversation was rough as hemp, sharp as broken glass.

Noelle screamed, a shrill and abrupt sound which startled a flock of small brown birds from a nearby tree. The innkeeper wailed again, her small hands at her mouth and words silken with grief falling to the hardening ground.

“Tanri cenneti bize tüm korumak,” she said—or so Exitus thought; he’d never been one for foreign tongues. He had enough difficulty with English. Whatever she said, Noelle repeated herself a second time, a third.

Officer Welsh patted her on the shoulder, shaking his head. He raised his head to Exitus before leaving him and the innkeeper alone on the front lawn of The Slammer.

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER NINE

NINE

Darla Andrews set her pricing gun on a nearby coffee table and led Exitus through her shop, Officer Welsh following closely behind either for Darla’s safety or Exitus’s. They maneuvered like three field mice in a naval ship, turning and spinning and pirouetting around and over the furniture packed so tightly in the room.

Posters, tapestries and mirrors hung on the wall, the latter causing disorienting mirages of additional aisles extending like tentacles out of the building. All manner of things draped down like spiders from the ceiling, from fans and chandeliers to petticoats and watering cans, hats and scarves, handbags and carnival-sized stuffed animals.

Darla somehow managed to save her ankle from rolling as her monumental stiletto heel caught the edge of an oriental rug. She stumbled a bit, muttered darkly, and then continued further into the depths of the retail store.

After several more turns (Exitus passing a number of suspiciously similar breakfronts, all with the same missing pane of glass) Darla stopped suddenly at a door at the back of the room. What color the wood was, if the door was wood at all, was a mystery. The door was covered in vintage postcards, multi-colored thumbtacks shimmering in the light of a gaudy carved wood chandelier.

“Right this way,” Darla said with the air of a museum curator. She opened the door—which smacked a console stereo with a thin crack—and began ascending a set of stairs.

The claustrophobic intensity of the stairwell was to some degree worse than the first floor of the store, the walls of the stairwell being wallpapered with graphic t-shirts on loud hangers dangling from protruding nails—each head covered with a thimble—and when Exitus was finally spit out from the stairs the tightness of the place did not relent.

Shoes and jewelry abounded on bookcases lining three walls, the books left to lie drunkenly on high shelves circling the room, up where no one but a basketball player could reach. And then there were the clothes…. Sweet jumping Jesus in a taco stand, the clothes.

Even with the five dozen or so clothing racks jammed into the room, which was about twice the size of the lower level, there still was not enough space for the garments. Cardigans were placed over blouses, blouses over tank tops and the overload of t-shirts which did not fit into the stairwell. Sweaters were thrown into large baskets resting atop the clothing racks, pants were folded over doweling rods which swung out from the wall not cloaked with bookcases and still—even with dresses hanging from the ceiling and more pants shoved wherever there was room—it was nigh impossible to move any of the garments on those clothing racks.

While Darla pawed through the doweling rods in search of Exitus’s pants, Exitus tried to find himself a shirt or two but, the hangers didn’t budge an inch and he only managed to exert enough force to cause his hand to slip, his stooped body to rock forward, and his jaw to collide with the rack. Strange thing to accomplish, but here was a man who could choke on air.

Officer Welsh moved away from Darla, who was creating a small pile of jeans on the floor (which looked like completed jigsaw puzzles under clear tile). “Feel free to take whatever you want,” Darla instructed. “It’s going on Adrian’s tab and he owes me big time.”

“How is that old dog doing, anyhow?” Officer Welsh asked. “Still destroying everything he sees?”

Darla groaned. “So I put him outside and he tries to eat the goats. I put him in the shed and he breaks out, goes sprinting off to who-knows-where. It’s like that Chevy Chase movie? The one where they get the Irish Setter and bring it home and open the car door and watch the thing run away.”

Exitus saw an oxford he liked and pulled it off the rack, taking five other garments with it. The clothes fell to the floor, the hangers clacking against the clear tile.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it though? I mean, it’s not going after your home or goats anymore.”

The clothes back on the rack, Exitus reached for a basket of sweaters. He grasped it by the handle and, just his rotten luck, the handle broke and the sweaters spilled out onto the floor.

“No, but you know those stories coming out about the bear ransacking those places a few miles away? I’m telling you now that that’s no bear. That’s that freaking dog.” Darla knelt to gather the pile of jeans into her arms. She stood and turned toward Exitus, frantically shoving sweaters into the broken basket. “So cute,” she said. “And to think, he might be a cold blooded murderer!”

Officer Welsh glowered fiercely.

Exitus put the sweater basket back atop the clothing rack, smiling stiffly. “Thank you?”

Darla grinned. “How exciting.” She walked to Exitus and handed him his pants. “The dressing room is over there, to your right. Let me know if you need any help.”

“Darla Jean!” Officer Welsh was aghast. Hitting on the only witness to a homicide….

She frowned. “I was only kidding.”

“Well, that’s enough. ”

Exitus carried his burden of jeans to the dressing room, a closet nestled conveniently to the right of Darla and her doweling rods. He locked the door and set the mound of denim on the small metal chair in the corner of the dimly lit room.

Darla rapped her knuckles against the door several minutes later, as Exitus stood hopping on one leg, struggling to get into a pair of slim-cut jeans cut entirely for the wrong gender.

“How’s it going, honey?”

The scowl on Officer Welsh’s face had a noise like the hum of a silent telephone turned up to full volume.

Exitus, with his thick calf still cemented into the right leg of the unich pants, moved the metal chair under the door handle.

At a stop in a Wyoming Wal-Mart (many years ago, when his parents were still alive), Exitus had gone into a changing room to try on a new outfit. He’d gotten distracted by the large mirror and, thinking that there was a camera behind the reflective surface used to monitor shop-lifting, Exitus began to torment the poor man monitoring the camera feed. He had stood in his skivvies, one leg still in his pants much like he was now, and danced before the mirror while using his hands to stretch his face into grotesque expressions.

His mother, worried that he was taking so long and getting permission to do so, opened the dressing room door just as her son was flailing about like an octopus hooked up to jumper cables. A group of teenage girls was passing by at that precise moment.

Oh! how little Toddy Toad had been mortified, standing there in his Power Rangers underwear as everyone pointed and giggled.

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER EIGHT

EIGHT

“Sir?” Exitus needed to socialize more often; he lived far too many lives inside his head. He drifted like a glass bottle in the ocean.

Officer Welsh, who had settled the squad car up against the curb sometime during Exitus’s roaming thoughts, shut off the engine, took the keys from the ignition and threaded a finger through the keyring. He unbuckled his seatbelt and exited the car, the merry tinkling of those metal keys sounding no less sinister than the laughter of clowns.

Exitus’s stomach lurched as the driver’s side passenger door opened, Officer Welsh leaning down with one hand on his equipment belt and the other on the roof of the car. “Tough Break, Kid,” he repeated. “The thrift shop where you’re getting some fresh clothes? I’ve only been talking about it the last three minutes.” He moved so that Exitus could stumble out of the vehicle.

“Right. Sorry. I must not have been paying attention.”

The dried mud on Exitus pants acquired at the crime scene, forgotten to memories and odd police officers, began to crack and fall away as he moved. Soon flakes dusted the floor of the squad car, then the pavement as Exitus left the torture box on wheels to follow Officer Welsh to the resale store dubbed Tough Break, Kid, housed in a dull-looking building on what might have been the only street in town.

Once inside the store, Exitus understood why the thrift store would want to call itself Tough Break, Kid.

The place resembled what might happen if one were to take every last possession of a shopaholic and cram it all into a space no bigger than a cheap New York apartment; there was hardly any room to breathe. It was a wonder they had even gotten through the door, for there were items stacked on the floor, leaning against walls, taped to windows, even hanging from the ceiling. In fact, the thrift store was so overwhelmed with junk that Exitus was half-convinced he’d stumbled upon a rift in time and passed into his bedroom back home. It even smelt like his bedroom.

“Sweet mother of—”

“Eugene!”

A pile of fabric—or drapery or clothing, it was hard to tell what with the mound being so great—stirred violently. “Eugene!” it called again, its voice slight and surprisingly feminine. “Adrian called to say you’d be here. I was expecting you sooner.”

“The traffic was horrendous,” Officer Welsh quipped to the mound teetering on a creme-colored loveseat. “This boy here needs some pants, Darla.”

The mound stirred a second time, eliminating a stocky woman no taller than Exitus’s elbow. “So I was told. You’re the kid that found Adam,” she said as she walked toward the apparently non-human (and therefor unqualified to be a “who”) Exitus and Officer Welsh. “Sucks to go like that, huh?” Darla shuddered. “And I thought Mikey’s car crash on I-35 was bad.”

She stopped before Exitus, a pricing gun in her hand. It was the kind with the needle and barbs, and Darla thrust it out toward Exitus’s gut. “You know the car split in two? Each half took a piece of him with them. How do you suppose something like that happens?”

Exitus backed away from the tiny woman and her gun, crashing into an armoire in the process. “I, uh. I really don’t know.”

Darla smiled and turned to address Officer Welsh. “He’s cute.”

“He’s also muddy. Getting flakes all over your floor.”

Darla waved the observation off. “Just area rugs.” In fact, every inch of the floor was covered by an area rug—sometimes two or more. The rugs were overlapped in such a way that the floor resembled queer-colored ocean waves. It was a miracle that the furniture wasn’t in a broken heap on the ground.

“Hey.”

Exitus looked up in time to see Darla sock him in the arm.

“Hey,” she said again. “What are you, a 36 regular?”

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER SEVEN

SEVEN

There really wasn’t anything like being chauffeured around town in the backseat of a police car. The smell of warm leather, the stink of crime and stale coffee. The hard, uncomfortable seats and the geometric pattern of safety mesh painted onto the back of the driver’s head. No, there wasn’t anything like it. It was fresh, it was exhilarating—it was absolutely horrifying, and Exitus hadn’t even been apprehended!

He got to wondering, sitting there in the hoodlums’ section of the police car, about one of his high school buddies.

Niles Bleu had been even more disturbing than the beautiful Agatha Freeland, she of the love affair with Pinhead. He was infamous for his rather macabre antics, which ranged everywhere from realistic eyeballs in the urinals to an actual dead rat in the English teacher’s thermos (Ms. Matthews never did come back after that, the rumor being that she’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the staff room of such magnitude that even a lobotomy couldn’t calm her down).

Surprisingly, Niles had been Exitus’s closest friend, and while Exitus couldn’t even handle a look at Spaghetti Os without feeling violently ill, he’d relished the joy on Niles’s face whenever he’d caused some fright-related heart attacks.

That oddly placed pride might have stemmed from the fact that he and Niles were such opposites; a goth boy afraid of butterflies (which strangely drew an awful lot of followers, as if Exitus had been Jesus or something—a fact not lost to the unhinged maniacs firebombing the local outreach center for victims of rape, incest, fear and teenage stupidity) and the tiny lad whose Bible seemed to be Turn of the Screw. Niles Nathaniel Bleu was the complete antithesis to Exitus (a kid who resembled a wee vole and was only popular because his first name just so happened to lack a second D) and for that Niles had been like a celestial being.

A celestial being who brought a corpse to Senior Prom.

Now, he wasn’t an actual corpse (the smell would have been too foul), but some random guy off of the street who’d willingly accepted the role. It would have been shocking enough if Niles had simply come with a man (Niles was all for the ladies, mind, one-hundred percent; he’d only wanted to press a few buttons), but he had never been one to let sleeping dogs lie. If he saw a stick setting on the ground beside a dosing lion, the man wouldn’t have been able to walk by. Niles would be the dope on the front page of the newspaper (above the fold) who’d gotten mauled to death after he’d repeatedly poked the lion in the eye with the stick. So, a corpse to Prom it was. He and the willing participant….

Oh, Hell. It was Exitus.

Agatha Freeland had denied Exitus the fortune of going to Prom with him and so, seething and cursing the world and all of its female inhabitants, he had agreed to Niles’s dastardly plot. Of course, he’d gotten a little bit drunk first—it was kind of hard playing the part of the walking dead whilst sober—and then he didn’t get just “a little bit” drunk either. Exitus had gotten so drunk that when, on the TV, a man appeared with a skull tattooed on his left hand Exitus had said, “man, I gotta get me one-ah-ose”. Niles had agreed. So Exitus and his best friend had walked down to the local tattoo parlor (in the basement of a friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend) and gotten himself tattooed. On the inner lip. While that friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend had smoked a joint and coughed a few times into Exitus’s mouth and snorted and spat and asked how one does exactly spell “this here word ‘cause it looks all wrong, man”. By the time it was all over and done with, Exitus not only had the word “TOAD” tattooed on his rapidly swelling lip, but he’d also somehow gotten high while Niles came out of the place with virgin skin and no foreign substance in his mouth other than some pills found rolling around the bottom of a toolbox drawer.

He’d said, “Dude!” after swallowing those half dozen pills. “We gotta fuck you up real good now!”

But in the end Exitus had made a damn fine corpse. The make-up and costume were superb specimens which could have been stolen from the archives of The Night of the Living Dead and he hadn’t even needed to memorize any dialogue (which was a blessing, for his lip looked like something found in a cabinet of curiosities under the heading “Disease and Other Malformations”). At least the expression on everyone’s faces were to die for—until the point where the police showed up, and then everyone was laughing hysterically.

The principal had suspected Niles of using any number of things for quite some time, but never actually had the proof to come right out and make an accusation. What luck, when Exitus the Corpse and Niles the Vile showed up in the gymnasium drunk and high and hopped up on barbiturates! The cops were summoned midway through the first quarter of the night (before the halftime show of the Prom Queen/King elections, but not after spotting Agatha and berating her with speech slurred from drink, slowed from weed and squashed from a massively swollen lip).

That car ride, also in the backseat with a police escort, had been not so much terrifying as unnerving.

Always prone to such unpleasant upheavals, Exitus had vomited onto the floor. He’d felt much better after that, though his lip stung something awful. With his head hanging down toward the floor, he noted the smell of the vehicle (like the Wronki one he’d find himself in five years later): that mandatory odor of warm leather, crime and stale coffee. And vomit. And the halitosis of Niles, who’d never once in how-many-years been seen brushing his teeth, who was sitting next to Exitus with a wide grin on his face. His eyes had been shining with, yes, the light of excitement but also with drugs and drink. When he spoke, it was in rapid time with his words crudely stitched together with fishing line. Exitus couldn’t understand much of what his best friend had been saying, but he caught the profanity and some sort of strange reference to foam puppets.

Exitus never did see Niles after that night. Occasionally he’d gotten letters, written in a tight and spidery hand which always asked for money or for promising news that someone else back home had also crawled down into a black festering pit of existence, and then the letters stopped.

The obituary never did show up in the newspaper or as a small throw away spot on the news, but Exitus always liked to hope that Niles Nathaniel Bleu had passed away quietly in a mosquito net-covered cot somewhere in the underbelly of Africa after finding God and devoting his life to bring meaning to the lives of AIDS orphans. Unlikely as world peace, but there was room enough to wish.

Sighing, Exitus brought himself back to the present, to the police car and the garrulous officer in the driver’s seat who was taking his passenger into town.

“You never did tell me,” the officer began. His name was Welsh, or some other nationality on the continent of Asia. “Why pick such a strange name to answer to?”

There was a loose piece of stitching on the seat. Exitus picked up the thread and started to finger it. “Not as strange as Pilot Inspektor.”

“Still,” Welsh pressed, turning left by the skeleton of an old tractor. “Why would you want to be called something like that, have people think of you as a lunatic?”

Exitus hoped to God he was no longer anything like that idiot kid he used to be, running around dressed as a corpse with a gnarly lip, because—Christ.

“But it just might be a lunatic they’re looking for,” Exitus suggested.

Welsh—a grown man, a police officer—tittered.

In spite of his fear of the situation he was in, Exitus rolled his eyes. Laka, his beloved plastic hula girl, surely would have done the same. She even would have added a sardonic quip, but Exitus had no talent for such things. He could play a mean pair of spoons, but humor was lost to him.

“Who was that?” Officer Welsh asked. “Paul Simon, was it?”

“Billy Joel, actually.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it was Paul Simon. Billy Joel did ‘Kodachrome’. You know—” and Lord please help him, he began to croon “—‘Kodachrome, they give us the night’s bright colors. They give us the greens of summers, makes you think it’s a sunny day—oh yeah.’ That was Billy Joel.”

“Billy Joel’s the freaky-looking face on the Piano Man album. Paul Simon’s the one who had the tiff with Art Garfunkel, and those lyrics are a wee bit incorrect….”

Welsh frowned into the rear view mirror. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three, sir.”

“Exactly. I’ve got twenty years on you. I think I know what I’m talking about.”

Exitus put up his hands in surrender.

Welsh must not have liked silence, for he started right up again with a new subject. “What brings you to these parts?”

In case the car was bugged, in case the truth might indeed set him free, Exitus spoke without lies. “I’m passing through on my way to the Mustard Museum up north.”

“That’s a fun place. Took my wife there on our first date. The trolls scared her so bad she almost didn’t want a second date.” Welsh winked into the rear view mirror. “But she couldn’t resist my charms.”

“No? Well…. Yeah, I’m on my way there.”

“You like those queer roadside attractions, huh?”

“Very much so. It keeps life interesting.”

Welsh stopped at an intersection. Turned right on the red light more quickly than Exitus had the other day; the road had been deserted, so he’d taken a glance at his map and soon found himself nearly pummeled by a very angry woman in a Beetle who was late for her tanning appointment.

“Any good ones, or are they all like the World’s Largest Ball of Twine?”

This was a very long car ride. No wonder the diner never got any business, it was way out in the middle of nowhere!

“No, they’re all different. Only a week ago I went to The Rock. It’s suppose to look like the head of Beethoven, but it more closely resembles a platypus. The guides say it dropped out of the sky one day, but if you look closely enough you can just make out the ruts where the thing was rolled into place. It’s neat, though. They even sell shirts. ‘I’ve been to The Rock!’”

“That was a great movie.”

Exitus had fiddled with the seat stitching so long that he had pulled it out of the seat. He spun it around between his thumb and index finger. “Sir?”

“The Rock. It’s a great movie. Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage, they break into the San Fransisco penitentiary in order to stop a madman from raining a deadly virus on the city.”

“Bombing it, you mean?”

“Bombing?” Welsh laughed. “No, it was a virus. They bad guy, see, wanted to destroy San Fransisco and so he created a plague-like virus to wipe it away.”

No wonder they weren’t getting anywhere; Officer Welsh was senile in his forties and had forgotten where exactly the town of Wronki was located. They were driving around in ever widening circles talking about pop singers swapping songs and a movie with the wrong plot line.

“Nitroglycerin. The bad guy wants to destroy San Fransisco by blowing it to smithereens and puts Nitroglycerin into a dozen or so highly unstable glass containers the size of billiard balls, which are then strung together like pearls.”

Outside of the police car, the town of Wronki sprang up into an unassuming portrait of quaint little buildings with quaint little people strolling about the quaint little streets.

“That was the virus.”

If this were happening five years ago, with Niles Bleu in the backseat and not Exitus, Officer Welsh might have received an impromptu education in pop culture. But Exitus was not Niles (junkie Niles, dead junkie Niles, reformed junkie Niles, or dead reformed junkie Niles (pick a fate)) and so he lapsed into a kind of annoyed stupor. Annoyed because of the idiot driving him into the center of a town too small to be placed on a map and too far away from the diner to justify the diner’s existence, and annoyed because his hearse had been taken away from him to be searched for evidence of a crime he hadn’t committed and he was fairly certain that people couldn’t just do that, take away people’s vehicles and homes just because they were the sole witness to a crime.

Officer Welsh began to whistle, as if knowing that Exitus was dangling on frayed nerves and whistling the tune of “Kodachrome” (badly, worse than when he sang the song) would finally make the boy scream and confess to the murder of Adam the Cook, killed by his prized golden cow.

Why use the cow as a bludgeon, anyway?

Why ever get a golden cow in the first place?

Hours before Adam had met his maker, as Exitus sat in the diner taking soda water to the sweet-smelling ketchup spot on his only jacket, the cook had recounted the history of that evil cow.

The evil cow named Harold had once been bundled in loud pink wrapping paper and placed inside of a box. That box had been wrapped in equally garish orange wrapping paper and placed inside of another box, and so on with different screaming colors for another ten boxes. That large package was placed in front of Adam’s bedroom door eleven months ago, on the morning of his 28^th birthday. Poor guy thought he was getting a jet ski, but instead….

“Yeah, there was Harold. After all that time unwrapping box after box, I get a cow. It was a gag gift, really. I was kinda heavy as a kid, everyone called me ‘Heifer’. Like the cartoon character, you know?”

Aunt Lily was not one for cartoons (there was far too much violence for her taste). It had been a downright miracle she’s allowed Exitus’s precious Fraggles into the house, and so a show about a wallaby, his dog, some angry frog neighbors, and his best friend Heifer were all but forbidden in the house. So Exitus watched the show in Uncle Monty’s shed, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the name of the show. Something’s Something Life, was it?

“It kinda sucked, actually, seeing a sodding cow at the bottom of all those freaking boxes. I was pissed.”

Pissed, he’d lifted the cow out of the box. As he did so, his fingers dislodged something taped to its underbelly and a single ticket fell away from Harold and back into the box.

“But that’s not the thing. The thing is that the ticket was to a taping of Rocco DiSpirito’s show. Rocco-motherfucking-DiSpirito, man! Only my culinary hero, only the greatest chef alive, only—”

Rocco’s Modern Life. That was the show Exitus had watched in secret in Uncle Monty’s shed. That was the show with the cow named Heifer and the wallaby named Rocco, which of course segwayed into the show ticket. Adam took the cow with him to the show. With that cow he had attracted the attention of his culinary hero and got Rocco DiSpirito’s autograph, only to be killed by that signed golden cow a month before his 29^th birthday.

“Tough Break, Kid.”