Read Online Internecine by David J. Schow - Free Book Online Page A

just the usual mess of conspiracy theories any paranoid schizophrenic could have made up. Secret agencies with funny names. A laugh riot. Best of luck with your career.”
    He started to roll up the window and I hit it with the palms of both hands.
    Understand something: I did it impulsively, already angry that I was spending so much time beating myself up. I had the sudden, taboo urge to hit something, and I just did it—practically a first.
    The safety glass bowed and shattered into a crescent shape, a shark-mouth, and suddenly my wrists were gouged and bleeding. When I looked toward him, it was down the muzzle of a pistol.
    “Think first,” he said.
    It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t sweating. I doubt if his heart rate had even changed from when he was calmly smoking.
    Again, the smile, but this time, it was actually connected to his eyes, which glinted with mischief. “Conrad Maddox, Man of Action,” he said.
    Then the son of a bitch started laughing. It started as a stuttering exhalation that turned into a chortling cough. Then the dam broke. He laughed out loud. He smacked the steering wheel. He clutched at himself. He had to mop his eyes with his gun hand. “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, and this propelled him into another paroxysm of mirth, at my expense. He put a hand into the air to steady himself, like an actor trying to wipe his expression clean for a new take. No good. That busted him up again. This paragon of control was out of control.
    “I’ll just stand here and bleed,” I said, brushing glass cubes from my arms.
    “No, no . . . it’s not you, it’s . . . ohh, hoohoo . . . !”
    Terrific. If I had been hit with a cream pie, Dandine couldn’t be more hysterical.
    “It’s . . . ahhh . . . you
broke the window ohhaaaahahaha!
” He stuffed the pistol into his crotch and tried to compose himself. “You looked so fucking
serious,
man!”
    “Shut up.”
    “I . . . can’t. Look, Conrad, what do you want?”
    “That shit you were running about guys in JCPenney’s suits swarming over my apartment? Prove it.”
    He really was just going to drive away and leave me; exit my life, fast as a finger snap. But something in his eyes told me he might consider indulging this stranger, this member of the walking dead, for a few moments more just because it seemed exotic to him. And look at me: begging my captor to hang onto me, in a sort of ultimate perversion of the Stockholm syndrome.
    Good god, maybe he felt
sorry
for me.
    “You opened the door,” I said. “I don’t want to just stand on the threshold. If some of the things you said are even remotely true I can’t ease back into whatever I was before tonight. I know you understand that much. I need to understand more. Please.”
    It was a sales routine, and we both knew it.
    He huffed out a sigh hinting at some of the things I suspected inside him. He could keep me for a few more minutes or take me to the pound.
    Or euthanize me, if I pestered him enough.
    Finally he said, “All right, climb aboard, but mind the . . .
glass
. . .”
    That shoved him down the fun-chute again, and I willingly got into a high-powered vehicular deathtrap with an armed man who was apparently a gibbering lunatic. What the hell, it wasn’t even 2 A.M. , yet.
    He handed me a fairly expensive looking pair of Zeiss binoculars. “Four down, three over from the west face of the structure,” he said. “See it? That’s your apartment.”
    The magnification screwed up my ability to count, and I had to resisttrying to squint and see the display through one eye. “How’d you get onto my balcony?”
    “Trade secret.”
    I craned up to the top, then down, then over. Windows, mostly dark, rushed past in my amplified view until I found my balcony. Funny; I’d never bothered to place it before, from the outside of the building. Now it seemed as obvious as a billboard—more so because my lights were on, and I knew I had turned them off when we first left