Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  While the minister spoke his final official words on the subject of Erik Webber, Justin scanned the crowd. Lingered on those around Erik’s age, possibly former classmates. The difference between him and Erik, and them — it was a subtle thing, but there. Perhaps showing best in the eyes. These people had spent too long playing hangdog in this town where possibilities for the future were as narrow as a strand of vermicelli. He wondered what they thought, having watched this son of Shepley venture forth into the larger world, then watching it send him back literally chewed up and spit out. It confirmed their worst fears.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In dark suits and sober dresses, they stood in concentric rings around Erik’s coffin, suspended above its hole by the machine that would lower it. And after it was down, handfuls of dirt were cast in, and flowers. This was the only part of it all that felt truly real. The final tribute, the hands-on farewell. The ritual cleansing. He thought about how he and April how discussed these things that first night at Apocalips. And now, more than ever, they made sense.

  Rituals.

  Even when they were painful, they were still crucial. And letting go was easier when you had the format down.

  Dawn’s early light peeked over the land.

  There was something oddly comforting about being in the cemetery so early in the day. When most of the world was, at best, still rubbing the sleep from its eyes. Interruptions were scant, or not at all. Communion between souls seemed to have a better shot at dawn.

  Justin had taken the Capri from the motel’s lot and driven here alone. April still slept, had no idea he was gone. There was much he wished to share with her, but not all. Never all. All would be forever taboo, and that was as it should be.

  He’d had no small amount to drink in the hours following the funeral and burial. As usual, he’d managed little sleep. After a few hours of shallow catnapping at April’s side, a trip at dawn seemed as natural as, well, as dying.

  Justin left the Capri on the cemetery drive, allowing an ample walk to Erik’s grave. There would have seemed something vaguely desecrating about driving any closer.

  He approached. He sat. This rounded mound of still earth. The newest arrival, festooned with bouquets that were already starting to wilt. No headstone yet — that would come later. Until then there was just a small flat marker indicating who lay here, metal tracks holding sliding interchangeable letters. Like the price-per-pound sign beside a cut of beef.

  Justin had not come empty-handed. He still had a couple beers left over from last night’s marathon, had opened one for the short hop to the cemetery. And he drank under the dawning sky, threads of light mingling with darker clouds, blue-gray shadows. Drinking buddies. Bosom buddies. One on the earth, one in it.

  “We’re leaving this morning,” he said to this bulge of earth. “And I just wanted to say goodbye.” He smiled ruefully. “We’ve done plenty of crowd scenes in our day. But yesterday, I just couldn’t let that be it for you and me.”

  He shook his head, self-conscious. Not the kind that comes from embarrassing yourself publicly, realizing you’re muttering like a fool to yourself. It was, instead, a sense that somewhere Erik could look down and see him, small and hunched in the dawn, vaguely pitiful in the overall scheme of things. And if Erik could, he’d probably laugh at him and tell him to knock off with the muted histrionics and get on with living, because there were whole giant realms whose magnitudes he had no grasp of. Yet.

  But I don’t know, I don’t know what that’s all about, so I guess I’m being selfish here, that this is all for me. So be it. Erik would surely understand.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be back here. I don’t know if I want to. Or if you’d want me to either. I’ve got whole photo albums full of better ways to remember you than this place.” He drank, shut his eyes, and shook his head, remembering promises made. Promises broken. “I’m sorry you’re buried here instead of someplace better. Sorry I let you down. But it just didn’t seem my place to say anything. I guess we all have to make those arrangements ourselves if we want them done.”

  He remembered a distant night, the latter college years. Some night when they should have been studying and weren’t. The apartment trashed as usual, a litter of empty bottles. They had watched the late late late show, some forgotten Technicolor epic about Vikings. Hokey, historically inaccurate, and immense fun. They cheered and taunted and swashbuckled right along with the Norsemen. But they fell silent at a Viking funeral, watching a longship, timbers blazing, sailing out into a fjord. A sobering moment, in retrospect. They had watched, had held their tongues.

  Finally, “If I die first, don’t let them bury me.” Erik looked very serious. “Especially not in Shepley. Steal me if you have to. And do it just like that.” He pointed his long-neck bottle at the screen. “I’d rather go out like that than have people cry over some hole in the ground.”

  Justin had said he would.

  And now, nearly a decade later, he cast his eyes down in shame. Drunken promises, so easily made in those days. But so pure, so heartfelt. Vital. And so easily broken by neglect.

  Again, surely Erik would understand. How he hoped.

  “April and I are getting along great. You probably knew we would, didn’t you? She’s someone special, she really is. And I hope it lasts. I hope I don’t blow this one too.” He drank, sighed wetly. “It’s like, that was the last great thing you did in this life, you know? Made sure we met each other, forced us on each other for a few hours. You did good. And I thank you for that.”

  Justin stood, stretched legs that hadn’t yet loosened for the day. Birds were joining the chorus of their flocks, more by the minute. Down on the highway, a lone car passed, lights still burning in the gloom. Perhaps someone going to an early shift, or leaving a late one. The noise faded, engine and tires a whispering drone that the town swallowed.

  He looked back to the grave.

  “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. Don’t think I haven’t thought about that a lot. I know you’d never blame me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t blame myself.” Now, only now did the tears threaten. In the face of guilt. “I’m sorry, Erik. Sorry I fucked up my entire life and dragged you in to help me set it back up again. Because … look what it cost you.”

  He let the tears burn down his cheeks, pain and shame in equal measures, second and third helpings of each. He twisted off the cap of the second bottle he’d brought, stepped up alongside the mound.

  “The cops may not give a shit about anything else but Mendoza’s rights, but don’t think I’ll just let it pass. I don’t want this, and maybe it’s stupid and maybe it’s suicide, but I’m gonna do something about it. April thinks it’s a lot of both, but … I can’t let it go. My own neck’s on the line now, anyway.” He tipped a long draught that finished his bottle. “I’m not sure what to do yet, exactly. But I’ve got a few ideas. April says she knows where Mendoza lives, so that gives me a jump on him, ‘cause he doesn’t know that about me. I’ll figure it out. And I hope you’re watching. He’s gonna pay. I promise you that.”

  Justin leaned over the earthen mound and scooped away a couple handfuls of soil near the grave’s head end. He upended the full bottle and jammed it neck-first into the hole he’d made. Letting it gurgle slowly into the ground. He scooped loose soil back over the bottle’s base, sealing it in. Out of sight. Their little secret, ties that bind.

  Trying to smile, Justin laid both open hands on the grave, as gently as he might a friend’s shoulder. And leaving the bottle in place, he turned to walk back to the car.

  The ritual completed.

  Chapter 14

  PUNK DARWINISM

  Tony Mendoza managed to stay as busy and enterprising as ever while Justin and April were in Ohio.

  Lupo’s news lifted his mood considerably early in the week. Just the thing to put those scissors in his hands to trim loose ends. As soon as Lupo came back to the penthouse to report Justin’s whereabouts, they had switched cars, back to the
Lincoln, and Lupo had cruised him to a nearby shopping center, to a one-story branch bank near the boulevard. Stucco job ringed by palmettos, looked like some sort of Franciscan mission in the tropics. They rolled past the drive-through and got a fat roll of quarters. Then they glided across the lot to a row of drive-up telephone carrels.

  This was one call Tony definitely did not want remotely traceable back to his own numbers, or his long-distance-calling card. Today it was a cash-only transaction, no electronic footprints back to his doors.

  He punched in the number, and then on came the operator to tell him how much coinage to turn loose. Moments later a phone began to ring in Atlanta. Once, twice, answered on the third ring.

  “Wrong number,” said a voice, soft as silk and as humorless as a January gale in Michigan.

  “Don’t think so,” Tony said. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I don’t forget voices. Mister T. How’s the weather down there?”

  “Perfect. Except for a cloud or two I wish would be blown away. Think you can do anything about that?”

  “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He chuckled. “Yeah, I think I might.”

  “How soon?”

  “Bad timing for immediate gratification. I have a prior commitment up north. Maybe the end of the week?”

  Tony thought a moment. End of this week, shit. Well, it wasn’t as if he had enough acquaintances of this sort to fill up a Rolodex. Farm it out to the Weatherman, and he knew it would be done to perfection. End of the week it would have to be.

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll make travel arrangements and send you my arrival time. You can send someone to meet me?”

  “You won’t have to walk.”

  The line went dead in his ear, and that was that.

  As they cruised away, Tony did not relish the need to turn loose in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen grand.

  Nope, life did not come cheap.

  The next few days he merely wanted to walk through, business as usual. And true, business got done. There were, however, distractions.

  One was blonde, and now unemployed since she had never returned to a cocktail waitressing job after hooking up with him. Which was okay, in a sense, because he didn’t feel his woman should have to work. Might reflect bad on him. However. He wasn’t sure he wanted Sasha around to assume that title. She was fun, an interesting diversion. Had come in handy, no doubt about that. But her appeal was limited. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would be wanting to plug his prong into the same set of outlets.

  Couldn’t very well just cut her loose, though. Right now she was on his side, and Torquemada himself probably couldn’t get her to talk about Tony’s business dealings. She might even enjoy such interrogation. But set her forcibly free, and formerly tight lips might get loose in a hurry. He couldn’t have that.

  As well, it wasn’t a good time to up and off her either. Erik Webber was already kissing dirt. He was planning to do in two more, through the buffer zone of a contract job. Another one that he had ties with suddenly turning up dead, well, bad timing for that sort of thing. Police could be quite determined in hunting for common denominators. Even if they couldn’t turn up proof positive on him regarding any of them, he still didn’t need the extra attention.

  So string her along awhile longer, and an option would arise. Tony was sure of that. Patience was the name of this game.

  So much for distraction number one. The blonde one. The second was very green, and packaged by the kilogram.

  No getting around it, skullflush had thrown a major ripple into his life and career. Six keys, just waiting for … something.

  What to do with the stuff was a question never far from his mind. Annoyingly unanswerable, and that was no good at all. He was used to having control. Tony Mendoza took charge of circumstances, not the other way around.

  This was the only time he had allowed a shipment to get through his front door. Except for tiny sample tastes, easily flushable, that came in handy for deals, or coaxing sweeties to bed, like candy to bribable children. Never more than a few grams before. But six keys? Unthinkable.

  He was used to very short storage time. Have buyers ready to take a shipment almost as soon as it came in. Of course, he needed time to add his own cut to the mix. But in general, move-it-in-and-move-it-out, that was SOP.

  He couldn’t very well keep it at any of the safehouses he used for cutting and temp storage. Not this stuff. No honor among thieves in this business, no way to trust the safehouse guys a hundred percent. They’d fudge from a bag here, a bag there, scooping out their own cut. If you couldn’t catch them red-handed, what could you do? Live with it. One more shipment of coke wouldn’t cause a second glance among them. Throw the green stuff into the equation, and it could be an engraved invitation for trouble.

  So he kept it hidden here at the penthouse. Maybe dangerous, or maybe not. Laws were specific on what constituted an illegal drug. He was willing to bet the U.S. judicial system had never encountered anything like this before. No provisions made, no breakdown of chemical components on their books. For all he knew, skullflush might even be legal. So far.

  At any rate, it was probably best to keep it under no one else’s nose but his own.

  What to do, what to do? He’d briefly wondered about trying to move skullflush to the army. They were always in the market for a new weapons angle, something the Reds didn’t have in the works. Given the effects, the possibilities were mindboggling. Battle scenarios. The chips are down, and the platoon whips out concentrated capsulized doses. Breaks them open and pops them under their noses. And in a matter of a minute or two, you’ve got a platoon of the scariest badass soldiers any army has ever sent into battle.

  Interesting, and no doubt the army had loads of cash to invest in such projects. Those guys experimented with stuff that would turn the hair of the general populace snow white if it became public knowledge.

  There was, however, a big gaping hole in that road. Once military claws were sunk into the project, they would waste no time eliminating the middleman. Tony Mendoza would cease to exist. Legally, bodily, spiritually.

  So back to square one.

  Except a single word continued to nag at him, demanding he give it more attention. Experimentation.

  Coke he understood, and crack, heroin, crank, and everything else pouring through the pipeline. Just variations on a basic theme. Highs and lows of one sort or another. Didn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out their appeal.

  But skullflush was one monumentally different can of tuna. It didn’t just open your mind or cloud your vision. The stuff dropkicked you into a brand new stratosphere. Body, mind, and soul. Sasha had filled in a few blanks, given him glimpses into the effects. But that was like trying to enjoy a Caribbean vacation by listening to someone describe postcards. You had to live it yourself.

  I got to know, he thought. Got to know what that shit’s like.

  And this meant compromise. In ethics. In his own code of behavior. In the values that had gotten him this far in a highly competitive field. In one sense he thought himself nearly as prudish as those temperate bitches during Prohibition: The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine. Update it by a few decades and turn it inside out: The shit that goes into everybody else’s nose shall never hoover into mine. Same difference.

  But when there was progress to be made, one thing was certain. Every scientist in the world knew it:

  Rules had to remain flexible.

  Wednesday night.

  Half a country away, Erik Webber was just hours into his final resting place, and Justin Gray was getting morosely drunk while April Kingston tried futilely to bring him out of his shell.

  And on Tampa’s home turf, on Westshore Boulevard, Tony was gifted with an evening all by his lonesome. He seized the opportunity when Sasha began to whine about wanting to go out. Dancing, lights, music — she said she was going into withdrawal.

  Tony recognize
d a gift of fate. Gave Lupo a couple hundred in play money and told him to take her out until she got it out of her system. Maybe start her out at Masquerade, the same place she’d been when originally joining their world. Don’t bring her back until she’s worn herself out.

  Lupo didn’t like this kind of matchmaking. “She’s too close to everything, Tony. Airhead like that, man, you are playing with fire.”

  “She’ll be fine. Trust me on this.”

  Lupo frowned. He had a fearsome scowl. “It’s not you I don’t trust.” The meaning was implicit.

  “Man, what a bitch it is when your friends don’t get along.” Tony sighed, looking askance a moment. “Listen, if it’ll help thaw the ice between you two, take her somewhere and tear off a piece for yourself.” Sometimes his generosity surprised even him.

  Lupo looked surprised. Pleasantly, after a moment. “Seriously?”

  Tony shrugged. “Ah, why not. No skin off my pecker. Give her a nice change of pace for a night. Make her appreciate the best when she gets back to me.”

  “Not if I bring her back stretched out.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were gone, Sasha decked out in black with her hair teased into a cloud that should come with its own meteorological report. And none too happy about Tony staying behind tonight. She’d forget about it soon enough. Soon as her stilettoed feet hit the dance floor, she wouldn’t even remember who she was there with. One blissed-out babe.

  Tony was blissed out on his own terms. Locked within his pastel blue and white sanctum sanctorum. Eased back into his recliner surrounded by the horseshoe of softly burbling aquariums, their hoods the only light. He wore jeans only, no shoes, no shirt. The shark’s tooth hung against the smooth tan of his chest. And at his side, resting atop the chair’s arm…

  A healthy dose of skullflush.

  Six lines were chopped and paralleled on his gold cigarette case. This at his left arm. In his right he held a rolled dollar bill. Tight and ready for duty.