"Let me go!"
"Maybe." But Johnson hugged him closer, horribly intimate, still stinking of the Port-O-San. "First, though, I think you need to visit the g*yboy ducking stool. Kind of a baptism. Wash away your sins." The smile became a grin, the grin a rictus. Grunwald realized he was going to die. Not in his bed, in some misty, medicated future, but right here. Johnson was going to drown him in his own hot tub, and the last thing he'd see would be little particles of filth floating in the previously clean water.
Curtis grabbed Grunwald's naked, scrawny shoulders and shoved him under. Grunwald struggled, his legs kicking, his scant hair floating, little silver bubbles twisting up from his big old beak of a nose. The urge to just hold him there was strong...and Curtis could do it because he was strong. Once upon a time, Grunwald would have been able to take him with one hand tied behind his back, age difference or not, but those days were gone. This was one sick Motherfucker. Which was why Curtis let him go.
Grunwald surged for the surface, coughing and choking.
"You're right!" Curtis cried. "This baby is good for aches and pains! But never mind me; what about you? Want to go under again? Submersion is good for the soul, all the best religions say so."
Grunwald shook his head furiously. Drops of water flew from his thinning hair and more luxuriant eyebrows.
"Then just sit there," Curtis said. "Sit there and listen. And I don't think we need this, do we?" He reached under Grunwald's leg-Grunwald jerked and uttered a small scream-and snagged the hair dryer. Curtis tossed it over his shoulder. It skittered beneath Grunwald's patio chair.
"I'll be leaving you soon," Curtis said. "Going back to my own place. You can go down and watch the sunset if you still want to. Do you still want to?"
Grunwald shook his head.
"No? I didn't think so. I think you've had your last good sunset, neighbor. In fact, I think you've had your last good day, and that's why I'm letting you live. And do you want to know the irony? If you'd let me alone, you would have gotten exactly what you wanted. Because I was locked in the shithouse already and didn't even know it. Isn't that funny?"
Grunwald said nothing, only looked at him with his terrified eyes. His sick and terrified eyes. Curtis could almost have felt sorry for him, if the memory of the Port-O-San was not still so vivid. The lid of the toilet flopping open like a mouth. The turd landing in his lap like a dead fish.
"Answer, or you get another baptismal dunk."
"It's funny," Grunwald rasped. And then began to cough.
Curtis waited until he stopped. He wasn't smiling anymore.
"Yes, it is," he said. "It is funny. The whole thing's funny, if you see it from the right perspective. And I believe I do."
He boosted himself out of the hot tub, aware that he was moving with a litheness The Motherfucker would never again be able to match. There was a cabinet under the porch overhang. There were towels inside. Curtis took one and began to dry off.
"Here's the thing. You can call the police and tell them I tried to drown you in your hot tub, but if you do that, everything else comes out. You'll spend the rest of your life fighting a criminal case as well as dealing with your other woes. But if you let it go, it's a reset. Odometer back to zero. Only-here's the thing-I get to watch you rot. There will come a day when you smell just like the shithouse you locked me in. When other people smell you that way, and you smell that way to yourself."
"I'll kill myself first," Grunwald rasped.
Curtis was pulling the overalls on again. He had decided he sort of liked them. They might be the perfect garment to wear while watching the stock quotes on one's computer in one's cozy little study. He might go out to Target and buy half a dozen pairs. The new, non-compulsive Curtis Johnson: an overall kind of guy.
He paused in the act of buckling the second shoulder strap. "You could do that. You have that gun, the-what did you call it?-the Hardballer." He finished with the buckle, then leaned toward Grunwald, who was still marinating in the hot tub and looking at him fearfully. "That would be acceptable, too. You might even have the guts, although, when it comes right down to it...you might not. In any case, I'll listen with great interest for the bang."
He left Grunwald then, but not the way he had come. He went around to the road. A left turn would have taken him back to his house, but he turned right, toward the beach. For the first time since Betsy died, he felt like watching the sunset.
Two days later, while sitting at his computer (he was watching General Electric with especial interest), Curtis heard a loud bang from next door. He didn't have his music on, and the sound rolled through the humid, almost-July air with perfect clarity. He sat where he was, head cocked, still listening. Although there would be no second bang.
Us witches just know shit like that, he thought.