If just moments before I had started fighting with Langley because he was kicking Whiskey, Deirdre and her crew would have ripped him to pieces right in front of our eyes. But outside the Garden, far from the dragons, it was a whole other story. I would kick his ass.
I closed the airtight door and crossed the hallway with a charging pace. Raleigh was waiting for me next to the entrance. She looked upset. Langley was outside the store and was checking on the hole in his pants. I tightened my fists. In that moment all I wanted was to give him a taste of my knuckles.
"Are you okay, Jack?" Raleigh asked me. "My God, that dragon is dangerous. He almost hurt Steve".
For a few seconds I couldn't articulate an answer. Raleigh had completely floored me.
"What? But...", I stuttered.
Outside the store, Langley stopped looking at his mortally wounded pants and started insulting me through the window.
"I'm going to press charges, Ports! You hear me? You and your shitty dragon! I'll have them shut down this disgusting shack".
Before I could answer him Raleigh went out the door and sent him to the car. Langley glared at me and left, pretending to limp.
Raleigh came back into store shaking her head.
"So Whiskey is dangerous?", I protested with a stern face. "And what about your boyfriend, do you want to talk about him?"
"You know Steve is the victim here", she answered back, pointing out the window. "Do you remember your assistant? The same thing happened with him".
"Victim my ass", I grumbled sarcastically. "How do you not see it?"
"See what, Jack?" she asked me. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. "If you have something to say, this is the right time".
"Raleigh...", I took in a deep breath and looked her in the eyes. "Stephen is an asshole. But not just any asshole. He's the heir to the throne of Asshole Land, the prince of shitheads. If the assholes on this planet had an exclusive club, he would be their president".
I was exaggerating and I wasn't realizing it. The fear and anger had exploded in my chest and I couldn't stop anymore.
"If assholes were a secret society, he would be the master of ceremonies, the grand treasurer!"
Raleigh stopped listening to me and opened the door to leave. If I had calmed down and shut my mouth then, I could have salvaged the situation. But instead of shutting up and saying sorry, I said something I will regret for the rest of my life.
"Yeah, leave. Go ahead and leave. I didn't know you were one of those..."
Raleigh stopped on the doorstep, as if hit by a slap. She straightened her head and turned around.
"One of those" what, Jack Ports?"
Her eyes dared me to go on, but it was done, I couldn't stop anymore.
"You know", I said with a disgusted smirk on my face, "there's guys who like girls with bit tits, and then there's girls who like guys with big wallets".
I regretted saying those words right away. If they had been made of stone, I would have eaten them. If they had been fire, I would have welcomed them on my skin, anything to avoid them coming out of my mouth. But I couldn't do it anymore.
"Is that what you think of me?"
The hurt expression on Raleigh's face brought me back to reason instantly, making all the anger disappear. I felt like a piece of shit. I tried to find some words to say sorry, anything, but nothing came to mind. Total emptiness.
"Very well", said Raleigh with a shred of a voice. "Goodbye, Jack".
And before I could say sorry, she left the store.
Obviously I tried following her, but when I reached her she had already gotten in the car. From the passenger seat, Langley insulted me some more and gave me the middle finger.
I pounded my hands on the hood to stop the car.
"Raleigh, wait! I'm sorry!"
She put the car in reverse, without listening to me, and left. I sat looking at the traffic on the West State for a few seconds, cursing myself.
Damn it, Jack, you're a real idiot.
I went back into the store and stopped at the counter. My hands were still shaking with anger. I went into the video surveillance system, to see what had happened.
Darn, usually Whiskey isn't aggressive
It's true, as Raleigh said, that Whiskey had terrorized Roger, but that kid smoke too much weed, let's be honest. Who knows what he had imagined upon seeing him.
I pressed a couple of buttons on the touchscreen and brought the recording back fifteen minutes, to the time when all three of us were in the Flight Garden.
I kept my eye on Langley on the central camera. Raleigh and I went to the Outbacks' burrow with the box, we set down Longstaff, while he was looking around. I heard myself talking with Raleigh about the plants in the ArK. Then Langley moved away, and went back toward Whiskey. I switched cameras, moving onto the one that monitored the Tangs' peach tree. A few feet from the tree was the piece of dirt where Whiskey was sitting sleeping peacefully, on top of the Pitahaya plants.
Now we'll see what happened.
I zoomed in on Langley. He had taken his smartphone out and was holding it up with his right hand, pointing it at my dragon. He got closer to Whiskey and told him something I couldn't understand. Whiskey noticed his presence and opened his eyes, but he didn't have any reaction. He just sat and watched him. Langley took a step closer, now he was right in front of Whiskey, less than two feet away. He turned his head toward us, saw that we were distracted by our conversation and so he shoved his foot against Whiskey's back.
He gave him a little kick, hitting him with the tip of his shoes.
Son of a bitch, I thought.
I felt anger rising up in me again. Langley gave another kick, this time at my dragon's side. I don't know what that idiot wanted. Maybe he wanted to move him, or perhaps he wanted to make him move to get a better shot with the smartphone. In any case, it didn't work. Whiskey opened his jaws to warn him, but Langley didn't pay any attention. He moved his leg again and this time the dragon snapped forward biting into his pants. I turned off the recording.
One day, dear Stephen, I'm going to break your face, I promised.
But it wasn't only Langley's fault. I was the one who let him get close to Whiskey. Half the fault was also mine. And the fight between Raleigh and I was all my fault.
After that night Raleigh didn't want to talk to me anymore. If I went to the university, she made a point to not be there, and from that day on, it was Elen or Ben Dameshek who updated me on the Outbacks, but more often Ben. The botanist from Phoenix had heard about what had happened from Langley himself, who made it seem like Whiskey had almost bit his leg off. In spite of this, Ben was on my side.
"I wish your dragon had really done it", he told me one of those days. "Just between us, Stephen is an intolerable dickhead".
"Thanks Ben, I appreciate your support. How's Raleigh?"
Ben shook his head.
"Well, buddy, I don't know what you said to her, but she's seriously pissed off. Every time she hears your name she presses her lips together. You know how she does, right? Like this". Ben gave an imitation of a pissed off Raleigh. "She's not going to get over it soon".
"Yeah, well, unfortunately she's not all wrong".
The day after the accident, I had sent her via email the piece of recording where her brave boyfriend was kicking my dangerous dragon, but Raleigh had discarded the email without even looking at it. I decided to not insist. It wasn't really important who had started or who's fault it was (Langley's, always his). It was I who had hurt her. In these situations, if we really care about a person, we just have to swallow our pride and say: "I'm sorry, I was wrong". It seems easy to do, I know, but in reality it really isn't. Especially if that person does everything to avoid you. Raleigh didn't want to talk to me, but, I hoped, sooner or later she would give me the chance to say sorry.
A whole month went by, in which I wasn't able to speak with Raleigh.
In the meanwhile, several interesting things happened in the Flight Garden.
The cherries matured, and during the first two weeks of July the Mustangs went into a state of ecstatic frenzy.
They jumped from branch to branch. They licked the fruits, ate them, adored them or all three together. Naturally all the juiciest and biggest cherries were for Deirdre. The male Mustangs competed to pick the biggest ones and fill her nest. One day, I tried to get close to the tree to pick one (One!) cherry. The dragons glared at me like a pride of lions that see a goat prance in front of them, so I took my hand away.
Certain acts of courage should be avoided.
While the Mustangs celebrated their tree's fruits, on the opposite side of the Garden, on the north-west terrace, the Pitahaya was growing at an abnormal rate. Halfway through July, the cacti were already six inches long. Bent by their own weight, they almost grazed the grass around them. Whiskey didn't sleep on top of them anymore, but in the middle. Once in a while, he left the plants to go to the pond or fly around the Garden, even when I was around.
I consulted the online Pitahaya videos again, and discovered that when the plant starts getting bigger, the farmers use various support structures to help it grow. Usually they plant a vertical pole in the ground, letting the cacti grow up along it, like vines. I instead chose to use an umbrella shaped support, just over five feet high. It was a pole with a wooden square made with planks on top.
The cacti, growing along the pole, would reach the square, using it as a support to hang on the outside, like a green waterfall. The umbrella support also gave me the possibility to put Whiskey's nest in the middle of the square. This way, my dragon could keep an eye on his beloved plant from above, like any respectable dragon would.
Furthermore, Whiskey hadn't stopped growing. In that month he put on almost another eight inches and more than two pounds. He had gotten bigger than Darwin, the biggest of my Outbacks, and he was getting dangerously close to the "Mustang Zone".
And he was influencing his totem plant's development, even if I didn't understand how. No manual described such a phenomenon, and all the scientific literature on the relationship between dragons and their plants was rather recent. Perhaps I was one of the few to have tied his undomesticated dragon to his plant's seeds and not to an already grown plant. What worried me the most, though, was the rhythm Whiskey was growing at. Just a few months from then, if he continued at that rate, I would need to find another place to put him.
I tormented myself with these questions for several days. With the end of July (and the end of their adored cherries), the Mustangs calmed down and went back to their normal habits, meaning plotting against each other and pulling terrible pranks. The Pitahayas had grown more than twenty inches, and thanks to the support they grew straight and strong. Whiskey, from his throne on top of the square, guarded them peacefully.
One of the first days of August, in the middle of the night, my store's alarm woke me up suddenly. The house phone, my smartphone and the sensors connected to the doors were going off all at the same time.
I got up from the bed and went to the laptop on the table in the living room, still half dazed.
Framed by the outside video camera, a thief was trying to break into the small stable.
Betrayals
THE MUSTANGS, ALL TOGETHER, are worth about eighty thousand dollars(10), the Outbacks a few thousand. In the safe at the store I only have my licenses and a few hundred dollars. The surprising thing wasn't that they were trying to rob me, but that I recognized the thief.
It was LeBon.
I got in the car and called the security company to have them switch off the alarm. I told them it was a raccoon. Ten minutes later I was in front of the store's sign, with a flashlight in my hand.
"Jean!" I called.
I went into the alley that brought to the stable, moving the torch left and right. From behind a garbage bin out came a thin and curved shadow.
"Christ, LeBon, is that really you?"
I pointed the flashlight at him, and LeBon came toward me squinting his eyes. He was dressed like a bum, his beard and hair were long and dirty.
"Jeq? Jeq Ports?"
When he recognized me, he stumbled forward and started sobbing. I held him up by his shoulders. He was a mess, and stunk like a garbage dump's ass.
"Come on, I'll take you to my house".
I put him in the car and he laid down in the back seat. During the ride to my apartment I tried to ask him a few questions, but he was still too weak to chit chat.
He regained some strength in front of a hot bowl of soup. He hadn't eaten in three days, he confessed. Besides "water" and "thanks Jeq" he didn't say much else. After the soup I helped him take his filthy clothes off and brought him to the bathroom. He took a long shower while I picked up his clothes to throw them away using the gloves I usually put on to shovel dragon poop. I lent him a pair of my sweat pants and a Broncos t-shirt. After the shower he almost looked like the old Jean, but he was scarily thin, and he had several white hairs in his mustache. We sat at the kitchen table and I was the first to speak.
"Where have you been? Why did you disappear?"
Jean ran his fingers through his damp hair, slicking them back.
"A mess happened, Jeq. Finlay & Pern..."
"They fired you, I know".
"No, if only that! They cut me off. All because of that egg! Tell me, Jeq, do you still have my present?"
I shook my head. "No, no. I won't tell you anything. It's your turn first".
"D'acord, d'acord", Jean shook a hand in front of him. "I was in Paris, remember? On that taxi. I thought I was being followed for a while, a couple of days, at least. When you told me Dao was dead, I immediately went to De Gaulle to take a flight. I hoped I could reach you the next day. But they were following me".
"They who?"
"I didn't know! They were two guys, the same as in Paris. As soon as I got to New York, I called Finlay & Pern, and they accused me of stealing the egg".
Jean smacked his chest. "Me! I've never stolen anything in my life. And those two wouldn't let me go".
As I had imagined, the egg was supposed to be for Finlay & Pern.
"And then, what happened?"
"Finlay & Pern", answered Jean, "had my visa taken away, and froze my accounts. They burnt me. I stayed at Frank's for a couple of days, but then I saw those two men again, so I fled".
LeBon never admitted it, but I think Frank had thrown him out. I had seen his boyfriend a couple of times, when I visited them in New York, and he had seemed like a Langley type to me. There are lovers that would do everything to protect us and others that toss us to the streets like an old cabinet as soon as things go bad. Frank didn't like old cabinets.
"For three months", Jean continued, "I hid to shake these guys off. Low rate motels, busses, train stations. I slept everywhere and never stopped. Meanwhile, I was trying to beg for some money to cross the country and reach you".
LeBon didn't go into details, but seeing his condition he surely didn't have a good time. With no money, an expired visa, and the two mysterious men on his tracks he must have been through terrible months.
"My God, Jean, you could have called me", I told him.
It was a trivial observation, but instead of getting angry Jean smiled.
"Oh, yes. See, I had thought about it. And you have no idea how tempted I was to do it. But...and if they had discovered me? They would have gotten to you in a heart beat. No, the only thing I was sure of was that you were safe, because I was the only one to know your identity".
I'm a real idiot, I told myself feeling guilty. During all those months, while I was having fun with my dragons, LeBon was going through hell with the only objective of protecting me. I still didn't know what trouble we were in, but maybe LeBon knew more.
"Who are these people, Jean?", I asked him. "And why are they looking for us?"
Jean wiped a trembling hand across his forehead, then looked at me.
"They're hit men, Jeq. People from the Oita Clan".
I almost dropped the
beer I had in my hand. I had understood the three guys from the train weren't normal thieves, but gangsters? We were really stuck in dragon poop up to our necks.
"Japanese hit men, really?", I asked him in the faint hope that Jean was only guessing. "And what do they have to do with the egg and mister Dao?"
"They want it", Jean answered. "At all costs. For their boss".
Because they were friends, Dao had told him that Finlay & Pern wasn't the only company to have made him an offer. Among the many buyers a certain Tajihara, a Japanese gangster, desperately wanted the egg. Recently, his behavior had become more and more insistent and aggressive, so much that Dao had decided to hire a bodyguard. According to LeBon, Tajihara was the one that had sent the hit men that had killed Dao and followed him around half the United States.
"Liu Dao would have never sold it to him. So, since he couldn't buy it, Tajihara decided to send his men to steal it".
"What I don't understand, Jean", I said taking another beer from the fridge. "Is why kill two people. We're talking about a dragon egg, right?"
"Oh, but that wasn't just a dragon egg, Jeq. That was the Egg, with a capital E".
Hearing those words I felt a shiver on the back of my neck. I sat down again and stared him in the eyes.
"Explain better", I told him.
I tried to stay calm, even if inside I was dying of curiosity. Finally, I would find out the truth about Whiskey and his origins.
And the story LeBon told me went beyond my imagination.
In March, he explained, a Chinese special task force had burst into the secret laboratory of Tianglong, one of GeNext's minor competitors, with headquarters in Hong Kong. The director of the laboratory was Liu Dao. The Chinese soldiers had destroyed all the eggs in the laboratory, but Dao's brother, a big shot in the army, had warned him of the raid, so Mister Dao was able to save an egg and flee. Once he knew about the story, LeBon had convinced Finlay & Pern to give him the money and make the exchange. According to Dao, the egg was one of a kind, because its DNA came directly from a meteorite.
The Dragon Seller: A Tale of Love and Dragons Page 11