Chapter 6
The distance from reason to chaos is often separated by no more than a heartbeat... or the lack of one. Billy B, renowned wag and raconteur, sat at his small kitchen table, disconsolate and closed. Three days ago, order, a commodity apt to be in short supply in his life under the best of circumstances, ceased to exist.
Stats... murdered? The thought brought chills. Time and again Billy B asked himself the same question: Who would do such a thing to such a nice kid? Sure, Stats could be a smart-ass at times... who couldn’t? It was part of the business... but murder? If that’s all it took to get you whacked, surely I should already be worm food. No, there had to be more to it. How well do we really know someone, anyway? For all Billy knew, Stats may have been a Grand Dragon or Imperial Wizard (or whatever the hell they called themselves these days) in the Ku Klux Klan. Somehow, that seemed a little far-fetched, the way Stats chased Sheniqua around. Ludicrous...
But, if Grenadier Hawkins was right, and someone had iced poor Stats, he’d gone to a whole lot of trouble. There were easier, less elaborate ways to kill someone, certainly. If someone was pissed enough to want to eliminate the guy, wouldn’t he want to watch him suffer? It all seemed so impersonal. Immediately, Billy ruled out jealous husbands and boyfriends, he wasn’t totally sure that Stats had ever been laid. He was just a big, sweet, nerdy kid. Was Stats gay? Urban legend, long the standard for misinformation in Billy’s world, contained account after account of jealousies in the gay community turning to violence, and given Stats’ intellectual bent, perhaps it wasn’t inconceivable that he’d cuckolded the chairman of the Bioethics Committee at some inner-city think tank.
Stop it! Billy buried his face in his hands and openly wept. The pent-up emotions of the last week’s horror drained from his eyes and his heart. Wiping his eyes with the Budweiser napkin wrapped around the long-necked amber beer bottle, Billy B, famous hack DJ and former friend of one recently-deceased stats-man, walked out of his apartment and boarded the elevator. Why, Stats? Why? And if he was murdered, how was he murdered? Billy’s memory of events leading up to Stats’ last days held no clues. The only thing remotely mysterious was the Cohiba cigar someone had sent Billy… the cigar that Stats was smoking when he collapsed!
Billy quickly opened the glass front door of his apartment building and stepped onto the street. Hailing a cab at this hour wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world to do, but he needed to get to the office and he had to do it now… if he was lucky, maybe no one had cleaned up The Pit.