Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  Tony had Lupo make their own first stop April’s apartment. Looked buttoned up and secured, blinds drawn. No sign of her car, mail stuffing the box. Across the alley, they spotted the Weatherman’s rental car. A search of its interior turned up nothing more than the set of keys, tucked beneath the seat, along with the motel key. Tony pocketed them. Send one of the flunkies back later for the car, take it back to the agency.

  So what did this mean, the Weatherman’s rental turning up sitting idle? Maybe he’d spooked them, and they ran while he had to give chase some other way.

  They checked out his motel, and Lupo found some blatantly out-of-town couple inside the room. He called the front desk from a pay phone, asked about its weekend occupant, and they didn’t know dick about him or where he’d gone. Shit. Bastard had absconded with $7,500 in front money, maybe. Either that, or some wetback maid had gone home with a hell of a tip.

  As the evening wore on, Tony’s mood grew darker. Periodically his four flunkies would check in on the Lincoln’s cellular. Always with no news he wanted to hear. He had them broaden the search parameters. Maybe their prey was lying low. He put them to work going down the Yellow Pages, calling motels to ask if anyone was registered under the name of Kingston or Gray.

  Keep those eyes peeled. Lupo had his MAC-10, and Tony dearly hoped the big guy would get a chance to use it. Just one glimpse, that’s all he wanted of them — it would be enough to lock him onto them for good. Just one glimpse, he thought.

  Not once considering the possibility that he might be the one who was being watched.

  Chapter 21

  TURNABOUT

  Thank God April had been to a housewarming soirée at Tony’s condo a few years ago and had a good memory. Otherwise, Justin reasoned, they might have forever lacked any way to bring the fight to his doorstep. Ever since leaving the motel Sunday evening, they had lived to keep an eye on his home, his car. The complex was laid out in a healthy sprawl; parking lots, while small, were plentiful. They parked catty-corner across the courtyard and swimming pool and settled in for an uneventful night.

  Early Monday they went shopping. Probably the safest time, assuming Tony slept late to compensate for his night-owl hours. April figured somebody should still stay behind to maintain the vigil, and Kerebawa was happy to leave the confines of the car for nearby brush and trees.

  Justin and April drove to a large sporting goods store. The MasterCards were really getting the workout lately. They bought two boxes of bullets, in both nine-millimeter and .32 caliber; no firearm ID required by Florida law, just be twenty-one or older. They also bought a pair of walkie-talkies, good for up to a mile of separation. A thermal jug to keep cool water handy. A small battery-operated fan to keep air circulating in the car once the day really started to heat up. A pair of binoculars. And a present for Kerebawa: a fistful of hunting arrows. He still had three bamboo shafts, but the supply of tips in his quiver was down to two. Those, and a few other odds and ends of convenience, and they drove back to the Westshore Boulevard condos.

  When Kerebawa saw the arrows, he laughed. Genuinely amused. Justin couldn’t figure it. Heavy dark steel tips, four wicked barbs. Show them to any smart deer, and the thing would probably strap itself to the front of the car just to avoid the additional anguish.

  “These tiny things, these are what your hunters use for arrows?” Kerebawa laughed. Held one of his six-foot bamboo shafts, more than twice the length of the new ones. “Those are like the toys the children of Mabori-teri use to shoot lizards!” He burst into another fit of laughter.

  “Lizards? Lizards?” Justin cried. “You could bring down a grizzly bear with one of those!”

  The rest of the day passed as uneventfully as the previous night. Though people came and went from the building they were parked beside, no one seemed to pay them any attention. Live and let live; they were bothering nothing.

  It was late afternoon before they saw Tony, wandering onto his balcony and sitting shirtless. Top balcony, directly above the three others below it. He looked like some petty dictator overseeing his domain. He had been out fifteen minutes before he was joined by a heretofore unseen blonde girl. The two of them looked friendly enough.

  “You know her?” Justin passed the binoculars to April.

  She stared for several moments, passed them back. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Justin peered more intently, trying to get a sense of the girl. Sometimes he could pick up vibes. A process he had developed as an adman, trying to get into someone’s head to see what motivated them. Pick an individual, target them as a typical consumer of some good or service. A worthwhile exercise. Before he had slit the throat of his career, his creative director had been impressed by it.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” April tapped the water jug to wet a cloth and dab it across her face. Sweat gleamed.

  “Don’t know,” he murmured. Wasn’t easy, trying to suck in vibes through binoculars with more than a hundred yards in between.

  He watched. She seemed wistfully sad, someone not very joyous over life as it was but still not clear on what she wanted it to be. He knew the type. Had been that type himself, once upon a time, before settling for the path of success, one more yuppie cranked into permanent acquisition mode. Something about her seemed hazily familiar.

  And then it came to him.

  “I’ll be damned,” he mouthed to himself.

  He’d never know for sure, not this way, but he would have been willing to lay down cash bets that this was the girl whose eyes he had seen through last week, in the dream that was not a dream. Exactly why was slippery to pinpoint. The flash of recognition was like the glimpse of an aura, a nagging question finally answered by his subconscious. Her eyes had grown sensitized to things beyond the rational, as had his; they had, in a way, grown sensitized together. She exuded it, like her melancholy, in vibes in sympathetic resonance with his own. And here she was, like a serving maiden at Tony’s side. He shook his head, lowered the binoculars. Couldn’t she see? Open her eyes?

  He’ll chew you up and spit you out someday, Justin thought.

  Afternoon became evening. Kerebawa was dozing, and April looked ready to do likewise when the most movement they had seen all day began to transpire.

  “Heads up,” he said, and they all snapped to.

  All three were leaving Tony’s condo. Hi ho, hi ho, Justin thought. Off to work they go. Once in the Lincoln, Lupo drove them away.

  “We’d better stay put for a while, still,” said April.

  Justin nodded. “Yeah. Watch them come back in ten minutes with pizzas.”

  Nightfall came an hour later, without the Lincoln returning. Justin had Kerebawa trek up to knock on Tony’s door to make sure that some unseen fourth person wasn’t still inside. If someone answered, Kerebawa would simply jabber in his native tongue and kowtow an apologetic retreat. Luckily, he came back to report no answer.

  This, however, wasn’t even half the headache remedy. When Justin checked the door himself, it looked and felt very solid. He was no lock-picker. Could try shooting the locks away, but he didn’t care for that. Even with the silencer, he didn’t like the idea of leaving blatant signs of his presence visible from the outside. Another two condos were accessed along the same open fourth-floor walkway, so they couldn’t rule out passing foot traffic. Hard to predict how long searching the inside of Tony’s place would take, too. And if somebody noticed a shot-up door, Justin doubted it would go ignored.

  So…

  The balcony? It was the only other alternative. The balconies were aligned in a vertical row. Nothing so handy as a fire ladder clinging down the sides, but it didn’t look to be too difficult. They were spaced closely enough that, standing on the ground-floor patio’s railing, a good climber could reach up to the second floor balcony and pull himself up, and so on.

  “So who goes?” April asked, once he was back at the car.

  Justin looked at Kerebawa. “With some of the things you told
us you’ve had to do, you’re definitely the best climber we have.”

  Kerebawa nodded, then frowned. “But you both know much more of homes like his than do I.”

  “He’s got a point.” April looked at them, one to another. “You could both go, while I keep an eye on things down here.”

  “Okay by me,” Justin said. Then, to Kerebawa, “You’re probably a lot better fighter than I am, too, if it comes to that. If something goes wrong, it’ll probably happen up there, not down here.”

  “That’s another problem.” April, ever the realist. “What about security alarms, something like that? He might have the place wired.”

  “With the police? He wouldn’t be that crazy.”

  She shook her head. “No. But what about a private security firm? Especially one that’s not above looking the other way for some of its, you know, shadier customers.”

  Justin sighed, leaned back against the seat back. Kerebawa regarded him with irritation, as if he were weakening. Maybe he was. The cons of this maneuver suddenly seemed far weightier than the pros. Take, for example—

  “The lights,” he said. The final straw. “Look at all these damned lights, anyway.”

  Sodium globe lamps lined various walks and the pool area. More light bled from the condos themselves, balcony doors and bedroom windows. Try to scale that wall up to Tony’s, and he and Kerebawa would be picked out by a spotlight like escaping convicts halfway to freedom.

  “Is there a switch to turn them off?” Kerebawa asked. Completely serious.

  “Get real,” Justin said.

  “Maybe he’s got the right idea,” April said.

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s kind of drastic.”

  “At this point, I can live with drastic.”

  “Maybe” — she was biting her lip, uncertain — ”maybe we could knock out a power transformer? We’ve got a silenced gun, you know.”

  Wipe out electrical service to the whole complex? Drastic indeed. But nothing would be remotely as effective. Besides taking care of the lights, it would also deactivate any electrical alarms Tony might have rigged to his balcony door.

  They wheeled back out to Westshore; traffic was light. Justin headed south, an arbitrary decision. They kept their eyes skyward, both sides of the road, scanning the rows of power poles and their lifelines of cables. They were all the way down near a neighboring apartment complex before spotting one.

  “Got to be one closer than this,” Justin said, and reversed direction.

  They found the likely target about fifty yards north of the turn-in for Tony’s complex, hanging on to the pole like a huge gray capsule. He cruised past it, continued north until they could stop for a moment in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. Had to decide who got the honors. Kerebawa, with no firearm experience, was out of the question. Justin pulled the Beretta from beneath the front seat.

  “How much shooting have you done?” he asked April.

  “Besides a couple nights ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve played Nintendo games. How about you?”

  “Few times at a pistol range with a client. He was a real gung-ho NRA type.”

  April patted him on the thigh. “You’re elected.” She craned her neck, gazed back down Westshore. “A drive-by shooting?”

  He nodded, and they played musical chairs. April slid behind the wheel, Kerebawa rode beside her. Justin had her slide the seat forward, scrunching their legs, but it gave him more room to lie on his back in the rear floorboard. Not very comfortable, but with luck, this would not take long.

  “If there’s no traffic, stop alongside the transformer. I’m not good enough to manage this on the roll,” Justin said.

  He felt the thump as they left the lot for the boulevard. In the floor, every little vibration felt magnified tenfold. Through the open passenger window, Justin watched his slice of skyline traveling past, nothing visible to link it with any landmark. Just the domino row of utility poles, the tops of trees.

  He drew his knees together so their curve formed a notch, then steadied his wrist into it. Held the pistol at the ready.

  “Almost there,” April said. He could barely see the back of her head from this angle. “Wait! Car coming.”

  They had to make two more passes before it was clear. The Aries braked, sat idling. His slice of skyline froze like a section of a mural.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Knees locked rigid, gun steadied. He brought its sights squarely onto the middle of the transformer. Squeezed the trigger. The gun coughed and bucked in his hand, the ejection port spat a hot shell casing onto the back seat. He squeezed again, again, again, again, swiveling his wrist minutely to cover as much area as possible. The transformer erupted into Fourth of July sparks, streamers of smoke, agitated sizzling. All at once, darkness fell beside them like a partial eclipse.

  “Oh, beautiful,” April said, and the car started to roll again. “That whole place just went out like a candle.”

  He raised himself up to peer out. In the beginning was darkness, and it was good.

  April drove to the south apartment complex again to wait a bit before returning. Hoping that nobody was noticing this same car, however bland, rolling back and forth, back and forth. Justin was getting the necessities together when April ran them back to the condos, now sitting in inky gloom. Even the moon seemed on their side, a mere crescent sliver showing. Their headlights seemed unnaturally bright as she drove them to a different lot than the one they’d used all day. No sense pushing their luck, wearing out their welcome.

  Justin took the Beretta and tucked it into his waistband, its safety on. It felt too loose for climbing, so he taped the butt to his bare stomach with a roll of masking tape bought earlier. On the other side of his waistband he clipped a walkie-talkie. The flashlight he thrust into a back pocket. Kerebawa did likewise with a second flashlight they’d bought this morning. Justin fit the roll of tape over his wrist like a bracelet. Then, from a cooler of melted ice in the trunk, he retrieved a surprise package: a plastic sandwich bag. He looked at it a moment, then handed it to Kerebawa.

  “Would you mind carrying this?”

  He did not, and secured it inside his shirt.

  They returned to the car for a few moments, sat loaded and ready to go, waiting, waiting. Justin’s heart and stomach felt hollow. He swallowed, and it sounded too loud.

  “If the hekura-teri is found, this will solve my problem,” Kerebawa said softly. “Do you know what would solve yours?”

  Neither Justin nor April said anything. Just watched him, waiting for the answer.

  “If we waited in his home for his return and killed him at once.” A simple solution, even more simply put.

  Justin caught April’s gaze, held it. Impossible to read her.

  “It’s something to think about, Justin,” she finally said.

  His eyes slid closed, deliberations of life and death, of morality under fire. Under the circumstances, did morality even matter anymore? He liked to think it did, somewhere deep within. That winning the game was important, but not much more than how it was played. Cold-blooded assassination? He wasn’t ready for that.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice low, measured. “I can’t do it. Not like that.” He looked at Kerebawa. “And I wouldn’t want anybody else doing it for me.”

  Was April’s sigh of relief real or imagined?

  “You may be sorry later,” said Kerebawa.

  Justin nodded. He was sorry now. He leaned over the front seat and gave April a quick hug, and she ran a hand along his face. Told them both to be careful. And then they were out of the cars. Walking briskly, amiably, across the lot and then the courtyard. Just a couple of happy condo owners, out for a stroll on the night the lights went out. Justin could hear scattered voices, sometimes see vague moving shadows. From the pool came continued splashing, feminine giggling. Oh, what acts we perform under cover of darkness.

  “Padre Angus taught to me a thing to say at ti
mes like this.”

  Justin glanced over to Kerebawa. “What was it?”

  Kerebawa appeared to concentrate, to get the words just right. “You watch my back, I watch yours.”

  They first circled Tony’s building instead of walking directly to the row of balconies. Approaching close up on the far side and creeping around the foundation. When they reached the bottom patio, Justin tested the railing. Sturdy. He took a deep breath, checked once more to make sure no one was nearby and watching. The point of no return beckoned.

  “I go first?” Kerebawa said, and scarcely waited for Justin’s agreeable nod before clambering onto the railing. He secured both feet, then rose. Reached overhead to latch onto the second floor and pushed off with his feet. Kerebawa swung a leg up and caught the edge, and a moment later, the rest of him followed.

  “Easy,” Kerebawa whispered, waving for Justin to follow.

  Justin steadied himself against the outer wall before mounting the patio railing. After holding fast to the second floor, he heaved, hoed, dangled. Kerebawa caught his flailing leg behind the knee and helped him get secured, and that made the rest of the trip easier. Silence, however best he could manage, was primary. Grace was optional. Alongside Kerebawa, finally, he nodded. Wiped sweat.

  “Easy,” he whispered back.

  They were just rising on the second-floor railing when, scant feet away, a sliding door unlatched. Justin’s every pore seemed to flood, and then the door was opening, and there came the distinctive sound of a champagne bottle popping open, a man and a woman coming outside to enjoy the blackout. Justin and Kerebawa performed arm-straining chin-ups, hauled themselves up quicker than he thought possible. Adrenaline. They clung to the railing, squatting on the edge of the balcony directly over the couple while Justin caught his breath. His heart was in a thunder, and from below sounded the crystal chime of two glasses clinking.