by Jeff Long
That empty black pit terrified him. He was nose to nose with nothing. It was sniffing at his balls, teeth bared.
The footsteps padded on the gravel.
"Where'd you get my name?" asked Bullseye, trying to feather in. If only he could get a dialogue going.
"A whore."
"A whore?" Then he remembered the party, the three whores. "You killed Tucker, didn't you?"
"The boy." He said it like an old memory.
"But why?"
The man snorted.
"The lake?"
"Good."
Bullseye felt the nausea crawling up again and fought it. "Well, you fucked up," he said. "Tucker was the wrong guy."
"I know."
"I'm the wrong guy, too."
"Maybe. But you've got the college education. I'm counting on that to help us out here."
"What happened to Tuck?"
For an answer, the dark silhouette darted in close and grabbed Bullseye by the scruff of the jacket. Arms pinned behind by the wire, Bullseye felt his upper body dip forward over the abyss.
The stranger held him there and shook him like a doll. "I'm not trading with you, asshole," he snarled.
"Please," whispered Bullseye. "Please. Please." But even as he begged and pissed in his pants, part of him was sorting out the pain and fear and terror. What's going on is what's going on, he instructed himself. The wire hurts you. The pit scares you. In that file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (155
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light way part of him still held control. That was the part of him that was still crafting the plan.
"Please," he hissed. His head and torso jerked up from the blackness, and once again he was kneeling square on the hard ground. The fresh adrenaline nailed him hard.
He was going to puke unless he somehow shunted the adrenaline into what it was meant for, fight or flight, and fight was out.
"You dumb cocksucker," he tried to roar. It came out as three sad small coughs of noise. But the man heard. He laughed. It was a single deep bark filled with approval of Bullseye's defiance. It was a bullfighter's laugh, the kind Hemingway used to draw for his hammerheaded, tiger-by-the-tail machos. And Bullseye despised Hemingway.
With a sudden twist of his head, he chanced that the moonlight would reveal more than just a silhouette. It did this time. What he saw froze him.
It was the smuggler. The ghost. Standing up, he was even taller than when they'd dragged him from the lake, beefier, too, with a hooded sweatshirt under a down vest.
His shoulders and chest and face were enormous, like statuary that is a scale larger than life. For a moment Bullseye relinquished his carefully hoarded control to sheer confusion. There was an explanation, but he had none. The smuggler's grin faded under his mustache. Back to business.
"You must have known I'd be coming," the man said.
Still shocked, Bullseye stared. You're right, he was thinking. I knew you'd be coming.
It was one of those backward-looking foresights that hit him as unnaturally profound. For how Page 131
many years had he been waiting for the voice of the night? And here it was, the reckoning. The ice that moved quicker than the Iceman could climb it. "Guess so," he murmured. The plan.
Where was his plan? Where were his footholds?
"You go out into the world, Mr. Broomis," the smuggler said. "And pretty soon you learn that innocence is the bottom line. The virgins don't want to be virgin. The boys want to be men. And the ones that are all growed up like you and me, we waste time dreaming about how it would be to be innocent all over again. There's second chances on some things. But not on that. So let's not fuck around with innocence, okay? You were there."
"Okay."
"I want my cargo."
"It's gone. It's all gone."
"You know it's not, friend."
"Yes it is. It's all sold. The money's all spent."
For a minute the smuggler sucked his teeth beneath the black mustache. Finally he said, "I've talked to your buyers."
Bullseye wondered if he'd talked to them the way they were talking now, close to death. "So?"
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The smuggler tsk'ed. "You and your wild bunch cashed in approximately one and a half tons of marijuana worth between one and one point five million dollars."
"People just spent it all," said Bullseye. "It's gone."
"Shit, you boys earned it. Matter of fact, I salute you. The one and only way to get that stuff out was the way you did, on your backs. And you did it with style."
Bullseye didn't answer.
"Oh, I heard the stories. I heard about the chain saw and the axes. I heard about Mr.
Kresinski's dive to locate the buried treasure. I heard about it all."
"Yeah."
"But that was only half the shipment. My sources inform me that you never cashed in the other half. And now I want it."
"There's nothing left."
"That jacket," said the smuggler. It seemed like a throwaway remark, nothing else to say. But that was only if you weren't listening. "That jacket's left." Bullseye heard the ominous concern.
"It's not mine," said Bullseye.
"You're right."
"Take it."
"It's not even yours to give."
"Look, I don't have anything else that belongs to you."
"Of course I wouldn't be here if I believed that, would I?"
"I don't give a fuck what you believe," Bullseye suddenly snapped. "Get this goddamn wire off me."
"Not yet."
"Then tell me what you're looking for."
"I don't really care, Mr. Broomis. You can give me the cash. Or the coke."
Bullseye reacted with disgust. "You're nuts," he mocked. "What coke?" He was here suffering for that myth? The three great lake fictions: gold, diamonds, and blow.
When all there was to be had was fuel-soaked weed.
The smuggler's voice dropped to a new sobriety. "Do you realize how much my information has cost, Mr. Broomis?" he said. "It has cost me a lot. It has cost certain of my sources everything."
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Bullseye accepted the rebuke. He wet his lips and smelled new fear. He wanted to give in and slide, just slide with the knowledge. But it was becoming more and more apparent that he had nothing to give. "I'm having trouble keeping up is all," he said.
"Serious. I don't know what coke."
"All right," the smuggler allowed. "We'll trade. Your buyers assured me there was no transaction involving cocaine. And I learned that when the government went back up to Snake Lake to appraise the damage you boys did, there was nothing of any value remaining in the cockpit or under the lake. They found your tools, your garbage, your
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light footprints, and a bale or two of marijuana that escaped your attention. But the most expensive item on board was missing. And remains missing. That package is easily worth twice what the marijuana was. If you gentlemen want to sit on it, that's your business. But the money you stand to realize, that's my business."
Bullseye shut up. Pot was hippie action. But coke. The legends of casual murder in the jungles of Colombia and Peru and Bolivia, of Communist guerrillas and corrupt army and failed interdiction and double and triple dealings and wild-man pilots and smugglers without conscience, none at all, all of it came tumbling in at once. Some of it was TV and Hollywood pyrotechnics, some of it was U.S. scare propaganda aimed at yuppie consumers, some of it was just toot talk. But even discounting all the lies and bullshit, there was an apocalyptic zone right beneath the veneer. There was evil.
It was pacing in the dirt behind him.
A tremendous wearine
ss settled on him. Kneeling on the cliff's edge like this was sapping every bit of his attention. Each moment the abyss had to be resisted, and each moment he fought became yet another moment that it was right there in front of him, sucking and calling. Singing.
Give me just a piece of your heart. He was weakening. His balance was off, and the pain all over was edging toward unbearable.
He had to think. He had to trade, and yet what was there to trade? How could he think properly with all that music heat-seeking him from the blackness? He remembered the list of guns in the leather jacket Tucker had brought down from the cave. "Guns," he tried feebly. "There was a list of, like M16s and shit."
"You can get that coke for me."
"Yes." He still didn't believe there was any cocaine, and yet he did believe. There was one too many realities going on, which ordinarily was no problem for Bullseye. The more the merrier.
Right now, though, with the wire cinched around his arms unjointing both shoulders and his knees breaking down on the stone rim and the songs reaching up out of that syrupy darkness, it was like trying to decide if you should climb a melting waterfall. The ice looks blue and plastic and majestic, but you can hear the water falling behind the ice, wearing it away. Which one do you obey, which one do you ignore—what you see or what you know? "Fuck, yes," he said.
"Where is it?"
"I have to get it. We hid it." It wasn't going to work, though, he could tell.
"That's what I thought," said the smuggler, the disappointment thick in his voice.
Bullseye even felt disappointed in himself. He'd failed them both, and failure is never free.
"Look," he surrendered, "I'd tell you if I knew. I would."
"I know," said the smuggler. And, amazingly, he started to unwind the wire from Bullseye's arms. He took his time and kept talking. "No one hasn't lost something out of this whole deal. Painful losses, some of them." He paused, and Bullseye felt a tug somewhere at the lower end of his arms. "Snare wire bit you there," the smuggler file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (158
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light remarked. "Nothing bad. A few more scars for the collection, right?"
Bullseye was full of relief. He'd lost sight of hope, but now there was a chance, a miraculous, championship, go-for-broke chance. "I don't know you," he said, and then groaned as his shoulders came forward and his lungs filled. His hands were completely dead. Even staring at his fingers and commanding them, they wouldn't move. That changed nothing. "I can't go to the cops anyway. They'd nail me for the pot. Besides, we don't have cops." He was just chattering, filling time. Whatever came to mind he spoke. "I stay put for a while and just pretend I'm in church, right?"
"You're right. You don't know me. You never even asked who I am."
"I don't want to know."
"You've seen me before, though."
Bullseye licked his lips and stared at his fingers. Still no blood in them. "No."
"Yes," the smuggler contradicted him. "You were there. You saw the body."
Bullseye could hear his heart drumming. He started to hyperventilate, but quietly so the man couldn't hear him.
"That was me."
"Bullshit."
"Right again. But God, it worked on the boy."
Bullseye pressed his rubbery hands against the gravel. Time to boogie. A word or two more, and there was going to be a wholesale collision, and he had none of the momentum.
"I saw the pictures in the newspaper," the man said. "All decorated like a subway car or a shantytown wall. Hauled him out of the water by a rope around his neck. Sort of made me sick, you know."
Bullseye waited and watched, and there it was, a window between the syllables. But when he made his move, his body was different, heavier than he'd ever felt, and his legs had lost their spring. His arms half collapsed at the joints like soggy puzzle weed.
His calculations were all wrong, but somehow he got all the way up on his feet and managed a full step sideways along the rim, making for the forest.
He was too slow, of course. It felt like a feather, the hand that nudged him. He started to twist his balance back toward the solid ground, but then cool reason took over and he knew it was just more of the same. So while there was still earth to relinquish, he shoved with his feet and launched. He didn't even say anything. In the original Sanskrit, nirvana means "blowing out," as in signing out as John Doe, hello cosmos. Bullseye had never thought it entirely coincidental that climbers apply the term "blowout" to a fall, though the connection had never appeared so literal as right now at this moment. He felt his toe let go of the world. And he blew out with a whisper.
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CHAPTER 13
It was like treading along the scales of a sleeping dragon. Each footstep planted on rocks that vibrated and shifted and rocked. Steep and loose with scree, the hillside looked safe, even innocuous. But the climbers knew how mercurial such terrain can be. The entire slope was ripe to slide. They'd considered going up through the neighboring thickets, pines, and underbrush, but short of sending Sammy up with the machete he'd brought back from his Amazon trek three years before, they'd never be able to bring Bullseye down through the dense woods. Cutting a path would have taken forever, and besides, Sammy was already up there with Bullseye.
No, it had to be a direct approach and a direct descent with the litter. They had taken what precautions they could to secure the slope, though only a climber could have seen them. Some of the worst rocks and most threatening windfall had either been tumbled down or stabilized with makeshift chocks picked up from the forest floor. At two of the steepest points a braking system lay ready to lower the litter and rescuers, and someone had contributed a retired "trash"
rope as a hand line across a span of slick gravel. Kresinski stood just outside the mouth of the Amphitheater containing
Bullseye. He surveyed the precautions and backups primitively installed on the hillside below him. He watched the string of five climbers slowly snaking upward across the long, nerve-racking slope of granite rubble.
They were in a hurry, but there was no hurry in their ginger plodding. Those who'd slogged at high altitudes recognized a familiar pace. You take your time. Keep your eyes down. Copy the feet in front of you. Find the rhythm. Eventually you get where you need to. Besides ropes, water, and hardware, they were loaded with the two halves of a litter so old there was rust on the chicken wire between its metal ribs. Also they were carrying two twenty-pound bottles of oxygen that Tavini had brought back from one expedition and had been saving for another. There was no breeze and the sun was hot. Dust hung in the air. It was going to be a while before they reached
Kresinski. Someone had Robin Trower on a tape deck, so the cloudless sky held strings of electronic riff, a dark, bass, lashing dirge.
They were just starting on side two of the heavy metal when John appeared at the edge of the trees far below and started upslope. Whereas the rescue team was zigzagging on informal switchbacks, John surged up the scree in a straight exhausting line, loping from stone to stone, limping but dogged. Unburdened by a pack and spurred by alarm, he caught the rescue party after only ten minutes.
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"John," greeted Pete, holding to his snail's pace. "Where ya been?"
"That John?" said a voice up front, face obscured by his pack. The line kept moving.
"Hey, man." The music humped their skulls. Victims of the fury, sang the blaster.
"What happened?" said John. He slowed to match their pace and tried not to breathe so they could hear him. One more conceit of the aging.
"I don'
t think I want to see this one," said Pete.
"It's that bad?" said John.
"It's Bullseye," Pete declared, as if that explained it all.
"I know."
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"He's fucked. Blew his guts down into his balls. His spine's busted. His legs. His arms. He's fucked."
"Is he going to make it?"
"You tell me."
"He must have gone out again," remarked the forward voice. "I haven't heard him for a while."
"What do you mean?" said John.
The rock under Pete's boot suddenly skated loose and almost took him for a ride.
John grabbed the ax strap on the back of Pete's big pack and steadied him. Pete grunted thanks and they rejoined the line.
"He was like a fucking banshee," the forward man said. "Want to make you throw up just hearin'
him. Like, what, three o'clock? Four? All the way until dawn. Then the sun came up and he got quiet. Wouldn't never have found him if he didn't start up again."
"He was screaming?"
"Oh, man," the forward voice admired. "The Amphitheater's got awesome acoustics."
"When did you find him?"
"Hour, hour and a half ago," said Pete. "There was a bunch of 'em, but Kreski was the only one who'd go in and look at first. He sent Tavini and everybody else down to get people and rig the slope. Sammy came up half an hour ago. He's playing doctor."
Sammy was an ex-Rocky Mountain Rescue man. He knew as much about real medicine as a frontier doctor. But that was more than the rest of them combined.
"Everything's ready," Pete said. "Soon as we get up there, we're gonna scoop him and run."
John looked upslope and appraised the rigging job. So long as the hill didn't slide on them, things looked about as stable as you could get. "What happened, though? What was he doing up here?" There were so many questions to ask.
"It's Bullseye," Pete said again, and again presumed that explained it all.
"He picked a fuck of a place to do it," said another voice. "Who ever goes up to the Amphitheater? He had a tomb in mind."