They left the hoards of liquor, and the weapons in the gun racks and glove compartments.
When the twins stopped crying, Max went to the girls to lead them to one of the vehicles, a classic, restored ‘69 Mustang Lee had found and hot-wired.
“We’re sorry,” Kueur said, stopping suddenly. Tears had painted tribal streaks through the splattered blood on their faces.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Max said, speaking with certainty from the shadows of the past few hours. Heads. There’d been heads. Young men running at him. Tunnels. Rooms. A television showing a video. “There’s nothing you could have done to save the children,” he continued, speaking faster than usual, unable to contain himself. “Those men, they’d taken the kids, already. I went through half the place looking for you, and it looks like they’d been doing things down there with children for years. Those teenagers who attacked us–”
“No,” Alioune said.
Kueur put her hand on Max’s chest. “We’re sorry for you, that you don’t understand, and that we can’t help you.”
When Max could neither move nor speak, transfixed by their pity, Alioune said, “We almost speak the same language. We should. But we don’t.”
“Almost,” Kueur added. “But not quite.”
The sound of the Super Cobra Jet motor revving broke Max’s paralysis, and he led them to the parked vehicles.
When Max opened the door for them, pointing at the back seat and the clothes they’d found, the twins refused to climb in. Alioune looked away from Max and Lee, while Kueur held her lamp high and swung it in the direction of the woods.
“Water,” said Alioune.
Kueur held out her arms to display the filth covering her body. “Wash.”
“Bet it’s ice fucking cold,” Lee said, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel so he appeared to be studying his own bare crotch. He’d protected the interior upholstery with more dead men’s clothing.
They followed the twins until they came to a stream, and they all knelt on the stony banks at a distance from each other – Kueur shutting off the lantern – and bathed. Max distributed clothes he’d brought along, some to wear, others to use as towels and wash clothes. The girls used their teeth to rip pants down to their size, and tied off shirts. Max made do with the clothes from men who’d looked to be his size. Lee led the way back to the car, reaching it first and flashing its four headlights at them as the engine roared to life, Shaker scoop rattling. “Guess Morris and his perv enemies went to the same car shows, huh?” Lee shouted as Max opened the passenger side door.
“So did you,” Max said.
The twins slipped into the back.
Lee drove carefully along the dirt road leading out of the trees, up into the hills, using the fire-lit valley below for orientation to take turns onto more back roads, until he’d worked his way back to the route that had taken them to the carnival town. Max looked down on the destruction, catching glimpses of bigger mysteries in the smoke rising and merging with the night. He’d almost found out something down there. Almost caught prey he couldn’t even imagine. There were bigger things left to kill. But the Beast was strangely quiescent, Max was weary, and the twins needed his attention. He turned from the fires and closed his eyes, letting Lee take them to the two-lane highway, where the ride was much smoother for the Mustang’s overmatched suspension, until they reached the stretch of road where they’d met Cal.
“Tonton!” the girls said in unison as they tumbled out of the back seat and pointed in a direction leading deeper into the woods off the road side.
Lee cursed.
The twins, looking ridiculous in cut-down men’s clothing, but with the life in their eyes and walk restored, led them to where they’d left the man they’d killed, though the trail of broken vegetation on the overgrown dirt road could have guided them just as easily.
“Shit,” Lee said, shaking his head at the obvious track. “You really do have to clean up after them don’t you.”
The twins should have known better. He’d taught them. And they’d known enough when he found them. But that was their way, with him. He was always cleaning up after them.
He was sure he’d already thought of the question that suddenly popped out of the darkness and into his mind: had the twins picked their prey by accident, or had they used their talents and their appetites this time to involve Max and Lee in a greater cause?
The darkness spared Max an answer, and he didn’t search too hard for the truth, even when the Beast roiled and twitched with the offense it took in the possibility of being used. It didn’t matter. Instead, he watched for anyone coming at them from the woods and joined Lee in digging a hole for a body.
They’d almost finished when brush rustled from the direction of the road, where they’d left the Mustang.
“Mother fucker,” a man said, aiming an intense beam of light down at Max and Lee, in the ground. “You guys look like bit players from Night of the Living Dead.”
Max raised a hand against the brightness and picked out the shape of the man through the glare, confirming he was alone and unarmed.
“Should have seen us twenty minutes ago,” Lee said.
“I drove right past you guys before I realized the car was there. I know I’m really late, but you should have still given me a sign. I was expecting a whole posse waiting on me.”
“They went home,” Lee answered.
The light shined on the twins, and the man said, “Ah, taking care of some business?” He walked up to Kueur and Alioune, then flashed the light over the body. “Daddy had a little accident? These nice men taking care of you all right?” He laughed. The shadow that was his head bobbed against the stars. “Hey, I hope you Choir Boys didn’t go to any trouble on account of me. The girls aren’t my kind of action, you know. I’m not judging or anything, but kids just don’t rock my boat. I’ll just take the cash.”
“Who are you?” Lee asked
“Oh, we have to go through the whole thing? Fine. Yeah, I’m Mister Cool. You know, your contractor. I hear you have a problem. I’m a guy who solves problems.”
“Mister Cool?” Lee asked, grinning. “What cartoon did that come from?”
“Nah, it’s my name for Clint Eastwood. Dude deserves an Oscar.”
Lee shook his head. “Dirty Harry? He’ll never get one.”
“If I work hard enough, I’ll have the money to back him. Maybe get him back on a horse in a spaghetti western or something.”
“You want to go to Hollywood?”
“Yeah, I want to be a producer. You need money for that. And I can get good money for what I do best.”
“Let me guess,” Lee said, glancing at Max. “That would be killing people.”
“That’s right. Useful skill for Hollywood, too, I hear.”
“I thought you needed connections, too.”
“Well,” Mister Cool said, “you meet a lot of people in this business. And half of them you don’t have to kill. They got money, too. And everybody wants to go to Hollywood.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
Max held his hand out. “Let me see your gun.”
The Beast, bored by Mister Cool’s delusions, roused itself.
“What’s the matter, don’t believe I’m the real thing?” He pulled out a Glock 20.
Max felt the weight, slipped his finger into the trigger, depressed the safety. Blew a hole through Mister Cool’s face.
The Beast, startled, roared its approval and demanded desecration.
“Love these new 10mms,” Lee said, studying the hole between Mister Cool’s blasted eyes.
The twins rolled him into the hole Lee and Max had dug, then dragged their victim over from where they’d kept him hidden and pushed him in as well. “We’re hungry,” Alioune said, with a touch of petulance.
The Beast agreed. But Max took a deep breath and thought of all the blood and gore that had covered him, and the Beast subsided, knowing it was not really all that hungry.
<
br /> “Guess we’re through digging,” Lee said. “Time to start filling.”
Max picked Mister Cool’s identification, money, and car keys from his pockets, dropped the Glock in the double grave and helped Lee fill it in. Dawn broke as they were laying loose brush and leaves over the disturbed earth. The twins planted a few pine cones in the ground, on which they promptly pissed.
“I’ll be damned,” Lee said.
“They’ll be a foot tall in a week,” Kueur said proudly. “Won’t look like a fresh grave.”
“But we’re still hungry,” Alioune added.
“Take them,” Max said. “I’ll follow. We’ll stop for breakfast as soon as we can.”
“We’ll leave Mister Cool’s car in the parking lot?”
“No, the Mustang. We don’t want to draw attention. I’ll dump the other car when we get back into the city.”
“Too bad,” Lee said, as they headed back to the highway. “I really love the Mustang.”
The twins walked in the ruts of the overgrown trail their supposed kidnapper had taken to the site of his death, over the vegetation broken and flattened by a car’s coming and going. It might take a few days to completely cover up the tracks, but Max didn’t think the locals would be too eager to encourage a wide-ranging investigation into what had happened in their ghost-carnival town.
They found Mister Cool’s car, a dark blue LeSabre, parked behind the Mustang. Max took the Mustang over Lee’s protests. “There’s more room for the twins,” he said, pointing to the Buick. “And this car’s connected to what happened back there. I’m not risking them in a chase.”
“Max?” He looked lost and lonely standing by the car as the twins, giggling hysterically, ran out of the woods and charged Lee. “Don’t leave me alone with these girls of yours!”
“I trust you.”
“I might start hallucinating, again.”
“Me, too.”
“Fuck you.”
“Come on, we don’t want to be caught out here in the light.”
Lee mumbled, but Max couldn’t hear over Kueur’s excited chirping to Max about the discovery she and her sister had made about their urine on a recent school trip to Versailles. Reacting to the exasperated expression Max couldn’t contain, Alioune supported her sister, bragging again about having a god and goddess for parents.
“Aren’t you girls a little too old for that kind of fairy tale stuff?” Lee said, as he opened the door for them. “Everybody wants to be cool,” he said to Max.
“Not me,” Max answered.
The twins tumbled into the back seat and Lee slammed the door and walked to the driver’s side. “Yeah, right. I guess that’s why you’re not babysitting. ‘Cause you’re not cool or nothing.”
They drove off, Lee leading. In the solitary peace of the road, the Mustang’s engine like a Beast to the car, and with the twins waving at him through the Buick’s rear window, Max could only hope he hadn’t done anything during the night that he’d regret.
He had to laugh at his feeble, and irrelevant, hope.
So did the Beast.
A Preview of A BLOOD OF KILLERS
LIKE SMOKE RISING FROM THE BURNING GHASTS
The boy ran.
It was what he did best, what Jo away, run away, run from the reach of the predators who would consume him in a bite.
His soles felt no pain though loose stones, glass shards, a bent Guru beer bottle cap all tore at his calloused, bare skin. Snakes darted at his ankles and rats squirmed to bite his toes as he stepped on them like Ganesha hitching a ride, but he was too quick. There and gone were his feet; his legs, a blur of pale, bony flesh.
Through the humid weight of afternoon heat and the drenching wind of cyclones he’d run. Through the murderous traffic of rickshaws, cycles, cars and trucks, the fleshy fortresses of cow or goat herds, slipping on shit and piss, sliding through cracks at the backs of alleys like a turd from the narrow ass of a mendicant, scuttling like a bug across pools fed by tanneries and sties, ricocheting from one moving wall of flesh or metal to another, falling to be stomped, kicked, run over, crushed, before bouncing up again to run, run so fast he might have been a goshawk with legs instead of wings, always he’d run.
But he’d never run from Jolly.
There were always people in the streets of Calcutta who laughed. Where did he think he was going? they’d asked, their faces lit for once with the joy the city was named for. He always knew, though never told. This time, his silence was true—he didn’t know where to go.
“They found you by the ghats,” Jolly liked to tell him, usually in front of others, to show what a generous and spiritual man he was. “Out of the sludge of the ashes of the dead, out of the sacred pollution of the Hooghly, you appeared, a bobbing bloody thing. One of my men picked you up to see if you were wearing anything valuable. But you were naked, and he was ready to toss you back into the river. A Sadhu thought you were desecrating the funeral ceremony we were attending for one of my sadly deceased rivals, and he was eager to have you cast back to the sacred wheel of your karma.
“But you bit my man to the bone, right on his index finger, and when he dropped you, you bounced once on the ghat’s stone pavement, rolled, and went for his calf. Tore through the cloth of his pyjami. We pulled you free, and you took his flesh in your mouth. That’s when I decided to keep you. In a cage, at first. You reminded me of that bear girl, that story they tell of long ago. A demented child. Wild. Something not quite human. A pet. Maybe something I could sell.
“When my man died from the bites you gave him, I thought you might one day replace him. That hope has not died. But neither does it blaze with Surya’s light.”
He’d heard the story a thousand times. Noise, at first, until Sangeeta, a nurse in Jolly’s employ, noticed him trying to imitate words and taught him Hindi, then English. Her little Mukul, she called him. A bud, a flower not yet blossomed.
This time, Jolly had told him, no one’s taking you from the river, or the ghats. When we throw you in the water, you’ll be ash.
He’d thought of jumping the distance between them, sinking his teeth into the fat old bastard’s neck, after Jolly delivered judgment and sentence in the overcrowded office. His bite was still venomous, a condition Jolly’s doctors had not been able to explain, but which their employer had occasionally put to use despite the warnings of his personal fakir. It would have been just. But Jolly’d been surrounded by his partners—Burmese, Thai, Chinese, English and American; gangsters in durkas and military men from the embassies in Western civilian clothes. Quick and competent men, with their own guards.
The musky scent of aftershave and sweat tainted with foreign spices and gunpowder was faint in the room’s thick fog of Calcutta stench, just strong enough over the smell of latrines and burning gasoline to serve as warning, like the buzz of a wasp.
And there was Shishir by Jolly’s side, as well, standing tall and straight in his shimmering blue silk Pathani suit like an icicle the sun would never melt. Jolly liked him close, he said, because his coldness was refreshing in the oppressive heat.
Though Jolly deserved to die, there were other karmic instruments in his life waiting to serve retribution. Sangeeta might have disagreed, but then she’d learned too much from Nutan and Helma Malini movies. Heroes did not come to the rescue. There were no happy endings. If she’d listened to her little Mukul, her little flower, she’d still be alive.
So he flew out the window, so fast the American laughed like one of Calcutta’s street people, and pointed, as if to say, look at that, he thinks he’s a bird.
He fell the three flights down, partially controlling his descent by bouncing from a balcony rail to a shop awning to the roof of the Ambassador cab he’d heard through the background din of horns, engine idling in traffic, fumes filling Jolly’s office.
Unlike the movies Sageenta used to take him to for lessons about life, the car did not speed off with him hanging on for his life, but remained stuck in traffic, even as
Shishir appeared, knife in hand, at the window. But just like in the movies, Mukul was not hurt. Bones aren’t set yet, Jolly always said. He’d witnessed enough of the boy’s talent for survival to trust him with important pieces of business. Sageenta disagreed: it’s your karma that’s not yet set.
It was that kind of talk, from someone like Sageenta, that had moved Shishir to glance at her in ways that had always raised Mukul’s concern for her life.
The boy dropped to the street and ran, with both the driver and passengers yelling after him.
He was supposed to have brought back a message. Very important. Worth a lot of money. A phrase. Coded information, critical to a complex transaction involving Vietnamese supply lines and Pakistani tank deployments was at stake, not to mention a shipment traveling through the heroin pipeline and just about to reach an American cargo ship at Da Nang. None of the parties trusted each other. The boy was chosen to make the contact, as close to an innocent as could be found among them.
But the phrase was wrong. The information garbled. One of the men in Jolly’s office had betrayed the others. The question of the traitor’s identity was complex, involving the unwinding of tangled allegiances and the transformation of inconveniences into terrible truths no wanted to face. He saw it in their faces. Easier to say, it’s the boy’s fault.
Mukul was their scapegoat. They’d given him a trial, let him have his say, but the show was for their own benefit, to cover up layers of deception and levels of corruption no one wanted brought into the light. Judgment had already been passed. His years of service meant nothing. His talents were irrelevant, perhaps even a threat. His future, at least, was something he didn’t have to miss. He’d never had one. This was Calcutta. He had no value. There was no future.
He ran.
Through the day and into the night, his legs carried him. He wove through a procession of men chanting, singing, dancing, as they carried their god, dressed in finery and flashing strings of colored lights, through winding unnamed streets of mud. He never looked up to see who they were honoring, didn’t bother joining their prayers. He ran through markets, dousing his scent with a touch of perfume, stealing a scarf here, a wrap there, trying to disguise his short, thin form covered only in a black lungi. When he was hungry, he scavenged and snatched, and sometimes merchants rose up to pursue him, their number crowding the street at his back. But they always dropped away, unable to keep up. It wasn’t the ones he could see chasing him that were dangerous.
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