The Informers

I tell them about the surfer who came over.

Peter walks around. “I think I’m gonna shit or something.”

Mary starts saying, “I told you I told you.”

“Get your shit together,” Peter tells us. “We’re getting out of here real fast.”

Mary is crying.

“I don’t have anything to bring with me,” I tell Peter. I watch him walking around nervously. Mary moves into the back room, flings herself onto the mattress, stuffs a hand into her mouth, gnaws on it.

“What the f**k are you doing?” Peter shouts.

“I’m getting my shit together,” she sobs, writhing on the mattress.

While she’s back there Peter comes up to me and reaches into his back pocket and hands me a switchblade and I ask, “What’s this for, dude?”

“The kid.”

I’ve forgotten about the kid and I look over at the bathroom door, feeling tired.

“If we leave the kid,” Peter is saying, “somebody will find him and he will talk and we will be in shit.”

“Let him starve,” I whisper, staring at the knife.

“No, man, no,” Peter says, forcing the knife into my hand.

I squeeze it and it pops open with a click and it’s mean-looking, long, heavy.

“It’s so f**king sharp,” I say, looking at the blade, and then I look at Peter for directions and he looks back.

“This is all it comes down to, man,” he says.

We stand there for I don’t know how long and when I start to say something, Peter says, “Do it.”

I grab him and, straining, tell him, “But I’m not protesting, see?”

I walk over to the bathroom door and Mary sees me and runs, limping toward me, but Peter hits her a couple of times, knocking her back, and I go into the bathroom.

The kid is pale and pretty and looks weak and he sees the knife and starts crying, moving his body around, trying to escape, and I don’t want to do it with the light on so I turn it off and try to stab the kid in the dark but I get freaked out thinking about stabbing him in the dark so I turn the light on and get on my knees and bring the knife down into his stomach but not hard enough so I stab him again, harder, and he arches his back way up and I stick it in again, trying to cut up but the kid keeps bringing his stomach up like he can’t help it and I keep stabbing him in the stomach then in the chest but the knife gets stuck on bones and the kid isn’t dying so I try to cut his throat but he brings his chin down and I end up stabbing his chin, slicing it open and I finally grab his hair and pull his head back with it and he’s crying, still arching his back up, trying to twist free, bleeding all over the tub from shallow wounds, and Mary is screaming in the living room and I ram the knife deep into his throat, hacking it open, and his eyes go wide with realization and a huge geyser of hot blood hits me in the face and I can taste it and I’m wiping it out of my eyes with the hand that still has the knife in it and blood is basically spurting everywhere and it takes a long time for the kid to stop moving and I’m on my knees, covered with blood, some of it purple, darker than the rest and the kid moves into more quiet spasms and there aren’t any more sounds from the living room, just the sound of blood running down a drain in the tub, and sometime later Peter comes in and dries me off and whispers, “It’ll be okay, man, we’re going to the desert, man, it’ll be okay, man, shhh,” and somehow we get into the van and drive away from the apartment, out of Van Nuys, and I’ve got to convince Peter that I’m all right.

Peter stops the van in the parking lot of a Taco Bell way out in the Valley and Mary stays in the back of the van because she has the shakes and Peter is hoarse from telling her to shut up and she’s rolled up like a baby, clawing at her face.

“She is freaking out,” Peter says, while he hits her a couple of times to shut her up.

“You could say that,” I tell him.

Now we’re sitting at a little table beneath a broken umbrella and it’s hot and my overalls are drenched with blood, making cracking noises every time I move my arms, get up, sit down.

“Do you feel anything?” Peter asks. “Like what?”

Peter looks at me, figures something out, shrugs.

“We really didn’t need to off that kid,” I mumble.

“No. You didn’t need to do it,” Peter says.

“I hear you did some bad stuff out in the desert, man.”

Peter’s eating a burrito and says, “I’m thinking Las Vegas.” He shrugs. “What’s bad?”