Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

want you to know that even if I’m dead and cold that information will be delivered to the LAPD.”
    I hung up on the petty thief and armed robber. Roaches was a little soap-colored man who was always scratching. Whether the itching came from psoriasis or neuroses, no one knew, but the name Roaches stuck on him because he always seemed a little dirty and disheveled, you expected to see bugs darting out from a pant leg, sleeve, or collar.
    A certain glee appeared at the deprecation of the criminal, and my persona, randomly named Jack Strong, mentally shrugged off the unclean Lance Richards. I was, Jack Strong was, the top man in the pyramid of innumerable personalities that made up my mind. This certainty caused a sense of security throughout the fields of thought and feeling that comprised me, were becoming me.
    Jack Strong got up from the stuffed chair and went back to the window.
    There was another car parked in front of Rosetta’s little matchbox house—a red 1967 Mustang.
    Rosetta was sleeping when I left hours before dawn.
    It was maybe four in the morning when I arrived at another tiny house in yet another sleepy suburb of Sin City. It looked gray in the darkness, but I knew that Lana Santini’s house was turquoise and white. Lance was so angry that for a moment he almost broke through to the podium intending to go up to her door. But I held him back and called her number from memory. It had been disconnected so I tried information. That got the call put through automatically.
    “Hello,” she said, all sleepyhead.
    It surprised me that Lance still had feelings for her.
    “Lana, it’s Lance.”
    “Oh.” Her words were flat and cautious. “I heard you were at the casino today.”
    “Yeah, I was there.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Why’d you do it, baby? Why’d you have to try and kill me?”
    “I didn’t.”
    “You thought you could get the money, and Mr. Petron would be searching for me not knowing that I was buried out in the desert somewhere.”
    “I didn’t do that, Lance. I swear.”
    “You thought I kept that key in my wallet. You thought you could get away clean and leave me holding the bag in my dead, cold hands.”
    “You sound funny. You’re talking funny.”
    “I been through some shit,” Stumper Brown said through my lips. He’s the one who had been on death row. He’d hung himself from the bars of his cage rather than let the officials of the prison have the satisfaction of executing him.
    “What do you want from me?” she asked.
    “The safe-deposit box key.”
    “Half of it is mine.”
    “You lost your claim on that when you tried to kill me.”
    “I was afraid. I thought that if they caught you that they’d make you tell about me. Or … or … or you’d turn me over offering them the money using my key.”
    “Tell me something, Lana.”
    “What?”
    “Why don’t I remember how you did it?”
    “You were unconscious,” she said mechanically. “I shot you in the heart after putting laudanum in your whiskey.”
    That made sense. But the train of thought led me on a tangent.
    Most of the personae in my head didn’t remember the moments of their deaths. Of the suicides—some did and some didn’t. But even there, they remembered the fall or pulling the trigger, falling asleep or sudden unexpected pain; my congregation of souls remembered flipping the switch but not exactly when the lights went out.
    “Lance?” Lana Santini said in my ear.
    “Yeah, babe?” I could see a light go on in the kitchen at the side of her little home.
    “That’s what you used to say to me all the time.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Yeah, babe.”
    “And then you tried to slaughter me.”
    “You would have done the same.”
    Lance retreated at the accusation. He didn’t believe it, instead felt he was the victim of the classic heartless vamp. If it were his mind alone hearing Lana’s indictment, the words would have fallen on flinty denial.
    But Lance was a member of an intimate