Kevin Wikse vs. The Spider of Tucson

 

Kevin Wikse

The sun lorded over 6th Ave like a vengeful despot, wringing every ounce of moisture from the land until the streets themselves seemed ready to split apart, groaning beneath the weight of its oppression. The heat was a tangible force, pressing down on the world, stifling, unrelenting. South Tucson lay in a kind of hushed submission, the silence broken only by the distant wheeze of a struggling air conditioner and the occasional muttered curses of men who had forgotten what it meant to feel cool air on their skin.

At two in the afternoon on a Sunday, the streets bore the mark of neglect, filth clinging to the cracked pavement like the remnants of a massacre. Bottles lay shattered, their jagged edges gleaming like the bared teeth of something long dead but still menacing. Needles sprawled in the gutters like the spines of a dead thing's husk, discarded, forgotten, waiting for the next poor bastard to step wrong.

The ants were the only creatures that seemed to thrive in this misery, great swollen red-and-black devils skittering over the sidewalk, their armored bodies gleaming like wet obsidian. They moved with frantic purpose, weaving between the debris, their tiny legs carrying them across a battlefield of human neglect. The homeless, usually scattered along the sidewalks like discarded saints in a forgotten chapel, had vanished, leaving only a single dog limping through the heat haze, its paws sizzling on the baked concrete. Its ribs pressed against its skin like the bars of a prison cell. I bent to offer water from my flask, but the beast bolted, yelping, dragging its own suffering deeper into the alleyways.

The hotel across from the gas station stood like a monument to decay. What had once been a proud structure now slumped against the sky, its bones exposed through shattered windows, its doors hanging ajar like gaping wounds. I had come to this graveyard on orders from the Dragon Lady of a certain alphabet agency, looking for a man whose name was spoken like a curse in the underworld. Spyder. A thing of filth. A whisper in the night followed by the sound of a girl sobbing into the crook of her own arm. His reputation slithered before him, a black widow inked into his throat, its legs creeping toward his jaw as if it might crawl inside and set up shop within him.

I was hunting something more than flesh that day. I had come with three hundred dollars to bargain for a Mexican girl—a street taco, as they were called in the filthiest corners of this world—but the money was a ghost, a meaningless prop. The real currency I carried was death, and I meant to spend every last cent of it on Spyder.

The crunch beneath my boots was like the snapping of dry bones, the sound heralding my arrival as I stepped into the carcass of the hotel. The hotel, with its external access, was a maze of broken doors and shattered windows, where the homeless had claimed their temporary dominion and escape from the relentless sun. My presence, towering and menacing, casting a long shadow, sent them scurrying like roaches into the dark corners of their makeshift dens.

The stairwell groaned under my weight, brittle wood and rusted metal protesting my passage, but nothing would stop me from my purpose. The sun clawed at me through the broken ceiling, a blinding eye bearing witness to what was to come.

Spyder stood in the doorway, twitchy, his eyes black pits of paranoia. His fingers twitched toward his waistband, the handle of a pistol peeking from the shadows of his shirt. It was a fool’s reflex.

"I'm here to fuck," I said, voice flat as iron.

His eyebrows raised, taking a quick step back and peered sharply at me. 

I laughed at him. "No, I am not here to fuck you. I am told your bitches can take a big dick."

His lip curled, but he stilled. A quick appraisal. A slow nod. "You got money?"

"Three hundred." I flashed the bills, let them vanish into my pocket. "And I want my ass eaten."

Spyder sneered, but there was amusement in his face, a choked-out chuckle like something stuck in his throat. "Dirty motherfucker."

I nodded.

"Oh, I watch and join in if I like what I see; that is non-negotiable," he said, sizing me up again.

A grin spread across my face, something wild behind it. "Who's the dirty motherfucker now? Let's break bread."

Satisfied I was just another rotten cowboy looking for something soft and brown-skinned to ruin, Spyder turned, leading me deeper into his domain. His back was a map of weakness, a lattice of bones and sinew ripe for breaking. The violence was a living thing within me, a coiled serpent ready to strike.

The moment he stepped past the threshold, I moved. My fist drove into his groin like a battering ram, the force of it folding him inward, a sound like wet paper tearing escaping his throat. He crumpled, a guttural moan rattling between clenched teeth. My hands found his manhood, a pathetic little worm, and I clutched it in an iron grip, lifting him with nothing but the pain of it.

For a moment, I held him aloft, his body writhing, his eyes wide with something that might have been pleading if it had belonged to another man. In that second, I felt something like tenderness, the way a farmer might feel for the pig he’s about to slaughter. A brief and fleeting thing.

“I guess I did come here to fuck you, Spyder,” I whispered, breath hot against his ear. And then I tossed him over the railing.

His body twisted as it fell, his limbs grasping at the empty air, trying to cling to something, anything. The landing was an obscene thing, a sickening crunch of flesh and cartilage giving way, his skull caved in like an overripe fruit. Blood spread outward in a fan, soaking into the dust, dark and final.

The watchers—junkies, drifters, the unseen eyes of the forgotten—stood frozen in their hiding places, waiting for the next breath, the next beat of the story. I turned, my boots clicking against the stairwell, the silence swallowing the sound whole.

"That’s quite the accident," I said to no one in particular. "Maybe you just mind your own business, and there won’t be any more accidents around here."

A few nods. The quiet agreement of men who knew better than to speak when death had passed through their midst.

I made my way to the gas station, where the cold drink in my hand felt like a baptism, washing the taste of the day from my tongue. The sun still bore down, the dust still clung to the air, and the violence—ah, the violence—was just another thread in the vast, rotting tapestry of South Tucson. Just another chapter in the long and lonesome tale of a man who had long since nearly forgotten the weight of his own soul,

-Kevin Wikse

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