When Hall follows Craig to the rest room, Michael faces the tigers. He raises his hand to his throat in the sign. Ericka returns it reflexively while the others look confused. Michael pinches his lower lip and prays the signals have not changed.
A grin spreads over Trent’s face; surprise on Howard’s; interest in Ericka’s. Michael has claimed the role of distractor and identified the prey. The others are to follow and be ready.
Michael’s heart races with an excitement he hasn’t felt in years. It takes him back to happy days when his family hunted together. They were not often successful, but the thrill of the hunt was always rewarding and he always learned so much; how to identify targets and stalk them, when and where to strike, and also, if not most importantly, when and how to break off the pursuit when it was too dangerous.
He longed for the hunt even after Barstow, when his family hung like garlands from the rafters. A beast stirs within him. He feels it move and take hold in his mind, his attitude, his allegiance. It’s not a dramatic shift. He’s been moving this way for months, but it is stirring now, crawling and scratching out of him like a waking butterfly breaking free from its chrysalis. Inch by inch, memory by memory, hunger by hunger, he’s becoming something else, something both new and old.
Why She has chosen Edgar Hall and Craig McCallister for his final confirmation, he can only guess, but he has an idea. It is the final repudiation of the life he’s giving up, the one kept in place by rules he was bred to disregard, simple culturally transcendent rules like “thou shalt not steal” and of course, the one about not murdering your friends.
But She has chosen Hall and McCallister, and put them in Michael’s path. It is indeed “a god thing.”
The two are not gone long. Hall’s still zipping his fly when they come back to the barstool. Craig still asking for a good word to get into the FBI academy.
“Hey I gotta go with my friends,” Michael says drinking the last of the rum and coke. On his empty stomach, it’s gone straight to his head. For a moment, he considers the possibility that he is not an angel of destruction reaping souls for a demonic god, but only drunk and confused. He sets this thought aside as quickly as it comes. “Where are you guys going to be after dinner? Want to catch a strip club?”
“That’s a killer idea,” Hall says. “The Western Trails.”
“What time?”
“Ten,” Hall says. “Early enough to avoid the riffraff, late enough to have the place going. You’ll love it. I’ve been there. This’ll be fun.”
“See you there,” Michael says shaking their hands.
Michael exits the bar tired and spent. He’s hungry, a little drunk, and his throat feels like he swallowed a hedgehog.
Trent materializes at his side. “Have a nice time?” he asks.
“I gotta get something to eat.” Michael heads toward the buffet. Trent doesn’t try to stop him, doesn’t steer him toward the others, a waiting car or the Thunderbird.
He fills a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and sits down with a spoon. Trent slides in across from him. “Where’d you get that roll of bills?” he asks.
“Oakland,” Michael says. “He didn’t need it anymore.”
The food is soft and easy to swallow. It slides down his broken throat easily and makes him feel better instantly. He forces himself to eat slowly, savoring the food. It still might be his last meal. He uses the time to think. Trent watches him carefully as if studying every action as a sign of betrayal.
“Was he really FBI?” Trent asks.
Michael nods.
“You told him about me and Connecticut,” he says. “Why’d you do that?”
“I didn’t know you knew,” Michael says surprised.
“How did you know?”
“I met your grandmother last week. Or was it last year? Time is not what it used to be. She’s looking for you. She has money and position, privilege and an obsession: you. She’d take you back. A DNA test and you’re off the road forever. Mansions, vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, golf with the Senator. Comfy. Some of this money your grandfather gave me. He’s a prick, by the way.”
“You’ve been there?” he says. “How is the other side?”
Michael pours sugar into his iced tea, stirs, and drinks.
“Lies,” he says. “Quiet desperation. False gods and fear. A vacuum of purpose. A mislabeling of prey and predator. Bland, patterned, and boring.”
“What if you have money?”
“It’s an analgesic, not a cure.”
“Kind of how I thought,” he says.
Michael is wary of the bonhomie. On one hand, he wants to tell Trent that Agent Hall and other cops are here because something is going to happen around Tahoe. It might have nothing at all to do with Jessica’s hunt, but it might have everything to do with it. The mention of the recovered truck from an informer would cast suspicion specifically upon everyone in Jessica’s streak. But he has to tread carefully. He is not yet a member of the group. An accusation like that against the very streak that brought him here, might not be beneficial to his long-term plans of breathing beyond this day, and possibly, hopefully, returning to the company of Kali’s children.
He needs proof before he says anything, or at least conviction beyond Hall’s suggestion. There is an approver among them. He senses a danger greater than his own death, a threat to all the tigers, maybe not all, but to these at least: his family.
He thinks maybe he should say something anyway. He could warn them, scare them off whatever they’re planning. Buy them another day. His father taught him that most hunts are not successful. There is no shame in going hungry if you live to hunt another day.
“The boat has sailed,” said the narrator of the demonic shadow-show. “There is nowhere to run. Death to everyone if any dare step off.”
And the children chanted, “It is too late. “Sail on! Sail on!”
They might survive a day, or a month, a season or two, but unless the approver is stopped, a new day will dawn without the tigers.
It is his purpose to choose how the play ends.
That is what the Mother wants of him: to decide. She does not care which he chooses. It is the same ultimate ending regardless. That is the lesson of Kali, the warning, the promise. The freedom. The music will stop, but he may change the dance if he can, if he dares. If he lives long enough.
“Thanks be to the Mother,” says Michael.
“Thanks be to Kali,” responds Trent.
“Those men I was talking to are going to the Western Trails strip club tonight,” Michael says. “Ten o’clock. Catch them there. I’m going to be somewhere else. Preferably on camera. Maybe here. They are the enemy.”
“Our enemy or your enemy?” says Trent.
“Both. Hall is ours; Craig is certainly mine.”
“Are you sure?”
By these deaths Michael can never return to the normal life he’d been offered by the Oswalds. It will set him inexorably upon the road of destruction, slave to the consort of all destruction, homeless and wandering. He will have sentenced two men to die. He won’t call them innocent. Innocence implies right and wrong and he’s beyond such niceties.
With another word, he will join the dark so the light can shine, muster with the armies of ruination so creation can happen in the ashes of the funeral pyre. It is a noble calling to be an agent of decay. He must put away his false conscience, forget the conventional mores and customs he was chosen to rise above. These men, mild and dutiful are a necessary sacrifice for Michael’s evolution and the Tiger’s coming feast.
Michael closes his eyes to stare into the darkness behind his lids. “Kill them,” he says.
Trent laughs. “You’re not in charge.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” says Michael opening his eyes.
Trent’s smile melts away. “If only She spoke to me like that,” he says.
“Then you’d be insane too.”
Trent pulls out his phone and texts a message.
“You know,” he says not looking up. “We’re still not going to leave you unattended.”
“Can’t or won’t?” says Michael. “You know what? I don’t care. Get me a bed and a lozenge. Wake me when you have to.”
“Okay,” he says.
Two more plates of potatoes and twenty minutes later he’s riding the elevator up with Perez. Perez collected him without leaving the elevator car, Trent handing him over like a lost child through the door.
“Agent Hall, huh?” says Perez when they’re moving. “And your buddy Craig?”
“Yeah,” says Michael.
The room is not the opulent suite from before. It’s far beneath that room in accoutrements, class, and cost. It is a budget two queen and smells of disinfectant over cigarettes. Michael staggers out of his clothes and takes a shower.
When he comes out Perez is playing solitaire by the window. “Get some sleep,” he tells him.
Michael nods and climbs into a bed. Perez pulls the drapes and continues his game under a desk lamp.
As Michael slips off, he tries to drive the thoughts of Agent Edgar Hall and Craig McCallister out of his mind. He tries not to think of them, their wives and imminent promotions. Hall’s son is off to college at Rutgers, the same age as his own lost son Peter. He tries to forget Craig’s excitement-warmed face, his joy and running into an old friend on the road. He tries not to think about the years he won’t see, the conversations he won’t have, the lovers and friends never to come, and those doomed to mourn him without even a corpse to bury in the ground beside six generations of family. He tries to forget that he knows these men, that he drew these details out of them like threads from a warm sweater, and used them to manipulate them, to suck from them a promise to meet where Michael arranged for them to die.
He tries not to imagine their faces, round and blue, tongues protruding from gaping jaws, stretching to make room for air that will not come again. Windpipe breaking, eyes searching the darkness for a friend and finding none. He allows himself but a moment to think how their bodies will be opened up after they are dead, when the blood does not flow. In passing and sure understanding, Michael sees how the killers will locate the kidneys behind the solar plexus, the yellow life force Chakra. And, finding those, atop each, they will cut the adrenal glands away with a knife, blessing the Dark Mother as they do. These small glands from his friends’ corpses will be stolen and saved and taken to the feast. Their bodies will be buried or burned or hidden, never to be seen again unless Kali wills it so.
All these things Michael knows. He sees them and remembers, but drives each thought from his mind before he feels regret, because such sentimentality no longer has a place in him.
After a time—a short time only, for he is very tired—all this passes and Michael sleeps a blessed sleep, without dreams.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Michael, it’s time to wake up.”
He rolls over and opens his eyes half expecting to see his bedroom, either Carla leaning over him as an adult, or as a teenager, Gloria late for school offering him a ride. But the room is dark and alien. The air is stale, the sheets coarse, and the mattress not much better than his car seat. He remembers where he is then. Not in his bedroom, but home.
Perez throws open the curtains to reveal a darkened Nevada sky over a flashing neon skyline.
“Let me guess,” Michael says. “I’ve been asleep for days.”
“Only a few hours,” he says.
“Well, that’s an improvement then.”
“Get dressed. We have to go.”
He doesn’t ask where or why, because that might lead to other questions the answers to which he is not sure his conscience can accept.
“We got you some clothes. Something for tonight and, if things go well, your costume for tomorrow.”
Michael looks at a new pair of jeans, underwear, socks and a heavy shirt. There’s a jacket too. The sizes are right and he slips into them easily. The costume is more formal. It’s a uniform, blue slacks, white shirt and blue tie. There are blue shoulder boards on the shirt. One gold stripe.
“Not a captain?”
“Yeoman,” says Perez. “Maybe.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Complicated,” he says. “Lots of moving parts.”
“You sound worried.”
“Lots of moving parts,” he repeats.
When they leave the room, they’re joined by Alex, the big black guy that Michael is sure is part of Barb’s streak. The soccer mom is there too. She’s dressed warmly.
“Hey Jim,” Michael says to Alex. Turning to the woman, and placing a hand to his throat, he says, “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Michael.”
“Kristina,” she says returning the sign.
“By the hook you will know the family,” he recites. “By the throat you will have the sign.” It draws a friendly smile from Kristina but an impatient grunt from Alex.
Tyler is waiting for them in the elevator car.
They ride down in awkward silence. Michael senses that Kristina wants to talk, but holds her tongue. Michael has a question or two as well but also waits. In the lobby, they’re met by Howard, the bartender.
The casino is more crowded than before, but this time they pass through it without incident. Tyler tips the valet, and they all pile into a waiting black SUV. Michael is sandwiched between Perez and Trent in the middle bank of seats, Alex and Howard are behind them. Kristina is riding shotgun while Tyler drives and eases the vehicles into the late-night traffic heading toward the California side of town and then north around the western bank of the lake.
“We’re going to a place called Pine River Resort,” Trent says when they’re out of the city. “There’s ground near there.”
“I don’t think I know it,” says Michael.
“That’s a plus,” says Alex.
Kristina throws Alex a look then turns to Michael. “Do you know much about the legends of Kali?” she asks.
“No, not at all. I had to ask a gas station manager about Hinduism.”
“Vegas?” asks Tyler.
“It was where you took the GPS off Lowe’s truck. I assume that was you.”
Tyler nods. “Yeah. Mr. Abi,” he says.
“What’s his story? Is he one of us?”
“No,” says Tyler. “But we think his family may have been once. Back in the old country.”
“Africa?” says Alex.
“Ireland?” says Kristina.
“Norway,” says Tyler.
“Yeah,” says Michael. “None of us are Indian. How’d that happen?”
“America, baby. America,” says Trent.
“I heard an owl tonight,” says Kristina.
“An owl is good if I remember,” says Michael.
She nods. “I was worried about having a feast before a hunt and not after. It struck me as wrong.”
“It’s still after,” says Tyler. “We hunted to have this feast. If Jessica’s hunt comes off, you can bet there’ll be some partying after that too.”
“To honor Kali,” she says solemnly.
“Look what you’ve done, Michael,” says Trent. “You’ve got all these tigers throwing salt over their shoulders and counting comets. You’ve brought back that old-fashion religion.”
“Omens are no substitute for real information,” says Alex. “You gotta’ do your homework.”
“Owls were good scouts,” said Michael. “My brother Christopher told me that owls wouldn’t hoot if there were lots of people nearby, so hearing one would mean there were no guards. It fell into folklore.”
“Makes sense,” says Kristina. “But it takes some of the magic out of it.”
“I don’t think so,” says Michael. “Owls are cool.”
“Yeah, okay,” says Kristina. “Did you hear the one about how sacrificing travelers was an appeasement to Kali to delay the end times?”
He shakes his head.
“Every sacrifice supposedly bought the universe a
nother hundred years.”
“I heard it was a thousand,” says Tyler.
“Well, some long time. If done right, Kali would be satisfied and spare the world. The sacrifice has to be right.”
“I didn’t know that one,” Michael says.
“It’s about balance,” says Perez. “Yin and Yang. Birth, life, death, rebirth.”
“It’s about culling the herd,” says Alex. “We’re the agents of evolution.”
“Strange it had to be travelers,” Kristina says. “For the sacrifice.”
“My mother told me that we’re all travelers, moving forever from nothing to something to nothing again. There is no stopping. There is no death, only transformation. She even believed in reincarnation,” says Michael.
“That’s good,” says Trent. “I like that.”
“I miss them, you know,” says Michael more to himself than others. “I remember hating them for a while for leaving me behind. I think that made forgetting them easier. How I loved Lynette. She was so special. She could dance and laugh like no one else I’ve ever known. She read Shakespeare to me, doing all the voices. God, I miss her.”
“Everyone dies,” says Howard. “Get over it.”
“The philosopher in the back speaks,” says Trent. “Thank you for your wisdom.”
“Don’t you have a wife and kids?” asks Kristina.
Michael says, “Yeah, that was alright for a while. Then my boy grew up and had to be his own man. I can’t say a word to him now about the weather without him finding fault in it. My daughter, Tiffany, she’s an actress without a stage. She’s lost, but she’ll be okay. Carla, my ex-wife, has her life. She’s into money and social position.”
“Let me guess,” says Howard. “You weren’t into that kind of thing, too hip to be materialistic?”
“No, for a while I bought in. I wanted everything she did, but the game’s fixed and I wasn’t born into the right class. She had looks and traded up.”
“If the game’s fixed, it’s fair to cheat,” says Perez.
“That from a cop,” says Tyler.
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