“Then Mr. Pudd snapped his fingers and made me look up at him. He was choosing containers from the box and holding them up in front of me so I could see what was in them. One had a tarantula squatting on the bottom. There was a widow in a second one, crouched under a leaf. A third had a little red scorpion. Its tail twitched.
“He leaned forward and whispered in my ear: ‘Which one, Mr. Sheinberg, which one?’ But he didn't release them. He just put them back in the box and took an envelope from inside his jacket. In the envelope were photographs: my ex-wife, my son, my daughters, and my little granddaughter. They were black and whites, taken while they were on the street. He showed me each one in turn, then put them back in the envelope.
“ ‘You're going to be a warning, Mr. Sheinberg,’ he said, ‘a warning to anyone else who thinks he can make some easy money by hunting me down. Perhaps you'll survive tonight, and perhaps you won't. If you live, and go back to your flower store and forget about me, then I'll leave your family alone. But if you ever try to find me again, this little baby girl—Sylvia, isn't that what they named her?—well, little Sylvia will quickly be lying where you are now, and what's about to happen to you will happen to her. And I guarantee you, Mr. Sheinberg, that she won't survive.’
“Then he got up, stood by my legs, and pulled out the plug from the bath. ‘Get ready to make some new friends, Mr. Sheinberg,’ he whispered.
“I looked down and spiders started climbing from the drain. It was like there was hundreds of them, all fighting and twisting against each other. I think some of them were already dead and were just being carried along by the tide, but the rest of them . . .”
I looked away from him, a memory from my youth flashing briefly in my head. Someone had once done something similar to me when I was a boy: a man named Daddy Helms, who tormented me with fire ants for breaking some windows. Daddy Helms was dead now, but for that fleeting instant his spirit peered malevolently from behind the hoods of Mr. Pudd's eyes. I think, when I looked back at Mickey, that he must have seen something of that memory in my face, because the tone of his voice changed. It softened, and some of the anger he felt toward me for forcing him, through Al Z, to make this confession seemed to dissipate.
“They were all over me. I screamed and screamed and no one could hear me. I couldn't see my skin, there were so many of them. And Pudd, he just stood there and watched while they crawled all over me, biting. I think I must have fainted because, when I came to, the bath was filling with water and the spiders were drowning. It was the only time I saw anything but joy in the sick fuck's face; he looked regretful, as if the loss of those fucking horrors really troubled him. And when they were all dead, he pulled me from the bath and took me back to the trunk of the car and drove me away from that place. He left me by the side of a street in Bangor. Somebody called an ambulance and they took me to a hospital, but the venom had already started to take effect.”
Mickey Shine stood up and began to unbutton his shirt, finishing-with his cuffs. He looked at me, then opened the shirt and let it fall from his body, his hands holding on to the ends of the sleeves.
My mouth went dry. There were four chunks of flesh, each about the size of a quarter, missing from his right arm, as if some kind of animal had taken a bite from it. There was another cavity at his chest, where his left nipple had once been. When he turned, there were similar marks on his back and sides, the skin at the edges mottled and gray.
“The flesh rotted away,” he said softly. “Damnedest fucking thing. This is the kind of man you're dealing with, Mr. Parker. If you decide to go after him, then you make sure you kill him because, if he gets away, you'll have nobody left. He'll kill them all, and then he'll kill you.”
He pulled his shirt back over his body and began to fix the buttons.
“Do you have any idea where he might have taken you?” I asked when he had finished.
Mickey shook his head. “I think we went north, and I could hear the sea. That's all I remember.” He stopped suddenly, and wrinkled his brow. “And there was a light up high, off to my right. I saw it as he pulled me in. It could have been a lighthouse, I guess.
“He said something else. He told me that if I came after him again, all of our names would be written. We would be written, and then we would be damned.”
I felt my brow furrow.
“What did he mean?”
Mickey Shine seemed about to answer, but instead he looked down and concentrated on rebuttoning his cuffs. He was embarrassed, I thought, ashamed at what he saw as his weakness in the face of Mr. Pudd's sadism, but he was also scared.
“I don't know what he meant,” he said, and his lips pursed at the taste of the lie in his mouth.
“What did you mean earlier when you said it was time?” I asked.
“Only Al Z ever heard that story before,” he answered. “You and him, you're the only ones who know. I was supposed to be a mute witness to what Pudd could do, what he would do, to anyone who came after him. I wasn't supposed to talk, I was just supposed to be. But I knew that a day would come when it might be possible to make a move against him, to finish him off. I've been waiting a long time for it, a long time to tell that story again. So here's what I know; he's north of Bangor, on the coast, and there's a lighthouse close by. It's not much, but it's all I can give. Just make sure that it stays between us; between you, me, and Al Z.”
I wanted to press him on what he was leaving out, on what the threat of a name being “written” might mean, but already I felt him closing up on me.
“I'll keep it that way,” I replied.
He nodded. “Because if Pudd finds out that we talked, that we're moving against him, we're all dead. He'll kill us all.”
He shook my hand and turned away from me.
“You going to wish me luck?” I asked.
He stopped and looked back, shaking his head. “If you need luck,” he said softly, “you're already dead.”
Then he went back to his orchids and said no more.