by Brian Hodge
Most of all, Tony remembered the light. Or rather, lights.
Those supernova blasts before him from Ivan’s AK — how had Justin ended up with it? — that tore pain through his shoulder and then skewered him through the chest and soaked both sides of his shirt with dark cardiac blood. The killing light. Followed by darkness.
And there was where the gaps in memory began.
There came more light, he recalled, at some point — but from the inside. Drenched with it, he knew that in its presence a moment could seem a thousand years just as easily as the reverse could hold true. It could have lasted no more than a few seconds, given that the next thing his eyes registered was the same as the last before the blackout: Justin, closing in.
Tony stumbled up stairway after stairway to get to his penthouse, clinging to the rail as if it were a lifeline. Past two in the morning, and he was the only thing moving, which was for the best. His features had oozed back to full humanity while he was behind the wheel. But before ditching the dirty-work Olds for good, Tony had inspected his damage in its mirror and knew he would give anyone, bar none, a sphincter-loosening fright.
Lights before him, lights inside. And then he’d snapped back to gritty reality, and the lights were before him again, Justin pumping round after round, and there had been no more pain, only annoying tugging sensations through his body.
Gaps plagued his memory, like alcoholic blackout. He wasn’t even sure how he’d found his way home. It was as if some autopilot had taken over, leaving his awareness to drift without anchor.
No longer the master of his own mind; he’d grown frightfully aware that he had signed over the title papers at Agualar’s. The hunger born of smelling Justin’s blood underscored it. First the mind, now the body was relinquished. And the soul? A toss-up, anyone’s guess.
It felt as if the entity known to himself and others as Antonio Mendoza was nothing more than a figurehead. Ceremonial head of state for public appearances and the sake of continuity. The deeper, more elemental decisions were made by something else, from the deeper levels where it preferred to hide.
Pushing buttons. Pulling strings. Routing switches…
And speaking to him in a language understood on the inside when it would fall on uncomprehending ears if coming from without. We are one now, it seemed to say. And we are hungry.
It told him so very many things, and each one gave him the strength to go on. Step after step, stairway after stairway. It would tolerate no disagreements. For the hekura were wise beyond the reaches of time.
Tony lurched through the penthouse door and quadruple-locked it behind him, reeled along until he could hit the bathroom lights and prop himself against the sink before the mirror.
The old Tony was strong inside, of stomach and heart, with a high tolerance for things gruesome. Even so, the old Tony couldn’t have seen himself in this condition without dancing on the rim of madness. His skull was wreckage. He peeled away his shirt and saw that his torso fared no better. Hamburger.
But the new Tony stared with detachment and fascination. To shriek would have been to risk the rebuke of the master. From somewhere behind his eyes, Tony peered out at a ravaged body he could no longer conceive of as being wholly his own.
Left of the breastbone, a hole, red-rimmed. He ran a finger around the ragged edges, then sank the finger in. Probed with the nail through a scabrous crust. Up to the first knuckle. Then the second. Deeper still. Alongside his finger, he felt the clenching beat of his heart. Weak, arrhythmic — but on the mend.
He popped the finger out with a wet sucking sound. Watched the unplugged hole drool a few trickles of blood before the flow turned sluggish, ceased altogether.
Tony gulped. But then smiled like a child taking his first few unaided steps. Gonna be all right, gonna be all right. He just needed a little sack-time, time to heal.
He shuffled over to the sunken tub and turned the faucet on full blast, watched water splash cool and inviting. The sound was sweeter than Brahms, than the voice of a lover. The chlorine though. It had burned a bit before, nothing he couldn’t handle, but now it would likely be excruciating.
Tony wobbled into the aquarium room and listened to the hiss and gurgle of the homes of kindred souls. He rummaged through supplies until he found what he needed: the bottle of dechlorinator.
Soon he shed the rest of his tattered clothes. Eased the equally tattered body into the tub, nearly a three-foot depth waiting to engulf him.
He had but to think of it, and the change came over him, and while the pain was greater this time by far, given the wounds, it was better this way. A few bloodied scales slipped from his neck to the water.
No more need of the powder. For himself, at least. He would still need it for others, and there would be others. A good man tries to find homes for homeless friends.
Sleepily, Tony slipped beneath the water, curled onto the bottom of the tub, the change complete.
And let the hekura work healing wonders.
Most of all, Justin remembered the blood. So much, so copiously splashed about.
With every passing mile back to the motel, he tried to force it from his mind. No crying over spilt milk, nor over shed blood. That he’d been shoved face-to-face with the one thing he had always wanted most to avoid in the drug world — a violent confrontation — and that he had coped somehow, fostered new self-respect.
But what the hell had happened with Tony? The big question. He tried to calm himself, wait until he and Kerebawa could talk without shouting back and forth across the seat, volume driven by sheer intensity. Wait until he could think again.
They dragged themselves through the doorway into their room, now stale and as cloying as a prison-camp sweatbox. April took it upon herself to turn on the air conditioner, and once it had rumbled to life, she sank onto the bed with her head in her hands. Apparently none too inclined to look at Justin or Kerebawa.
Justin took a step closer to her, without knowing why. And now she looked.
“If you lay a hand on me, you’ll lose it,” she said.
The temptation was there; perhaps she had sensed it from the wounded fury of his eyes. It had been strongest in the car, while she sat silently in back, while the enormity of being sold out washed over him stronger than a monsoon. Taken all the love, the intimacy, the passion, and kicked them into his face like sand. He actively hated her then, for being so willing to trade his life in on whatever pathological hang-up she had about disappointing her parents. The temptation to lash out in retaliation, to reach back and blacken an eye or bloody a nose, had been a tangible urge.
But he knew he could never succumb. Knew how horrible it would make him feel an instant later. He had killed one man, tried to kill another, and maybe someday the gravity of that would be hard to live with. Now, though, he was tolerating it just fine, jazzed on adrenaline and righteous rage. But turning the anger on April and imprinting it in blood and bruises — he still found it intolerable.
Maybe it was the benign sadist in him instead. Hitting April might make her feel the peace of absolution, an evening of their scores. It should never be that easy.
“She should be killed,” Kerebawa said with contempt. “In my home, she would be killed for her treachery.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not in your home, so get that idea out of your head.” A little of Justin’s anger went deflecting toward Kerebawa, who did not pursue the matter and sat across the room with a disgusted huff. Justin turned back to April. “Answer me one thing.”
She nodded, but he had to prod her shoulder to get her to face him again. Her eyes were bloodshot, purgatorial in their misery.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about that message from Tony as soon as you got it? We could have figured something out.” He stalked back and forth, burning nervous energy. “How could you do that to me!”
“I didn’t think we would’ve had a chance.” She wrestled mightily with something inside, and finally wrenched it free. “I was starting to lose
faith, Justin! I was losing faith!”
That one nailed him where he stood. “In me, you mean.”
“In you.” Her eyes pleaded for some sort of warped understanding she knew could never be granted. “You don’t understand about my father, if he finds out about that movie something’ll happen to him, I know it will, he’ll be crushed, please, Justin, please see that.”
He stared as if seeing her for the first time, his face a shaky balance between repugnance and astonishment. “You’re a head case. You really are. Hasn’t anybody ever told you to get some kind of therapy?”
She hunched her shoulders, and he shook his head wearily, you never know, you just never know.
“Remember what I told you last week, why I first liked you?” Her voice was meeker. He fleetingly wondered if the shift was as calculated to manipulate as her betrayal.
He tried to remember, but too much in the interim clamored for attention. Trivia was not a strong point at present. “Why?”
“I said I liked you because you were the only guy I’d met lately who was as screwed up as I am.”
Justin gave a derisive snort. “Huh. Keep looking.”
He moved before the air conditioner, let the output wash over him and chill the sweat into a sticky coating. It felt as thick as caramel by now.
He badly wanted a drink. Whiskey, gin, beer, rotgut moonshine, anything would do. Blame it on dehydration. He couldn’t remember the last time he had urinated. He ran water from the bathroom into one of the chintzy plastic cups, gulped it down, refilled. Came out and stared at Kerebawa, who sat on the floor beside the recovered packet of skullflush.
“And you,” he said. “What was all that about back there? Why wouldn’t he die?”
Kerebawa’s dark eyes brimmed with knowledge, mystery. Almost otherworldly. For the first time, it looked to be a burden.
“He did.”
Justin stared as blankly as when he’d first heard Mendoza compliment April on a job well done. “He did,” he echoed.
“He died. And the hekura was able to fill him completely, then, and bring him back as its slave.”
Justin hurled the half-filled plastic cup into the wall. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? This isn’t the kind of thing you just forget about!”
Kerebawa reared up from the floor. “I told you! I told you not to kill him!”
“I mean before!” Justin screamed.
“I did!” he screamed right back.
From somewhere on the other side of the beds’ headboards came a pounding fist, a muffled shout for them to shut up, keep the noise down, people were trying to sleep. Justin stomped over and pounded in reply, both fists, hard enough to dent the plasterboard. Shouted inarticulate threats, then whirled around to snatch up his water glass. He refilled it, then slammed it down and fell into a chair at the round breakfast table. Tired, so tired. While his mind raced like a hamster on its wheel, getting nowhere fast, just burning out.
He had to calm down. Knew that if the light sleeper on the other side of the wall started to whine again, he was nearly crazed enough to grab the AK-47 from the bed and begin firing sedatives through the wall. Breathe deeply, count to ten. Make it twenty.
“You told me?” he finally said. “When?”
“When I told you how I first came to be here. I thought you understood from when I told you of how Padre Angus died. When he was taken by the iwä — the alligator — and would rather die than risk us killing it. Because of how the iwä would return.”
Justin paled, now remembering the tale. At the time, he had dismissed it as so much rain-forest superstition. Filed it away.
“I didn’t believe you.” His voice was a raw whisper. “I didn’t know … didn’t know it would end up like that.” He slowly pointed at the assault rifle. “Didn’t think anything could survive that, I — I—” He dropped his hand and reeled back any more excuses. He had no one to blame but himself for this outcome. “I sure have fucked us.”
He looked over at April. She had keeled over on the far bed, her back to him, drawn into a fetal position. Useless — for now, at least.
Finally, “Let me get this straight: Tony’s dead, right?”
Kerebawa seemed to hedge against a definite answer. “Yes, no. He died for a time, but the hekura brought him back. They both share his body now, with no need of the hekura-teri powder.”
“You mean he can change into that ugly fucker anytime he wants to?”
Kerebawa nodded. “Whenever the hekura wills it.”
Justin threw his glass into the air in exasperation, let it fall to the carpet. “Then this is worse than what we started with.”
“And it will heal his body.”
“Sure. Why not,” he muttered. Justin pushed off his shoes. The stink was offensive even to his own nostrils. “Isn’t there any way to kill him now?”
“It will be difficult.”
Justin brightened. “But possible?”
“Yes.” As it sometimes had during their stay together, Kerebawa’s face reflected the search for words to explain concepts understood intuitively in his world. “The hekura and the hekura-teri — they are born of jungle. Not born of man. So its slaves cannot die by a man’s hand. Your guns, your bullets — they are not from that world, they have no results that will last. If your machines push down a tree in the jungle, a new tree will grow, in time. The jungle heals itself, if allowed. The hekura are no different. He is theirs now.”
Justin was beginning to see this reasoning. Primitive, the key was primitive. “Okay. Okay. What about your bow and arrows? You’ve still got a couple of those bamboo tips left. Why not use them?”
Kerebawa was shaking his head even before Justin finished. “No, no, no. They are no different than guns, they are made by men. Hekura-teri is born of jungle, and its slaves must die by jungle.”
Justin nodded. Kerebawa had explained as best as he could, and the case appeared to be closed. Here it was, take it or leave it.
Options, what were his options? They had, with tonight’s recovery, taken possession of the entire load of hekura-teri.
One victory, at least. Destroy it all, and Kerebawa’s duty was fulfilled. Run him back to Miami, try to link him up with his smugglers, and that would be that. And then keep going.
Maybe south, down into the Keys, where life was as lazy as waves splashing on coral beaches and the languid winds in palm fronds. Feel it, taste it, live it. Hemingway’s ghost beckoned. Or head back north, look for someplace new to settle and call home. An entire nation was at his disposal. Hurl a dart at a map and head for the point. He had always liked Boston, and Boulder, Colorado.
He could start the trip tomorrow, once sleep had buffered him against the violence and horrors of this night. He could be on the road in hours.
But he knew he wouldn’t be.
Ultimately, Mendoza had been the responsibility of the police. Rene Espinoza and her guarded assurances. Now, though, the burden had surely shifted, the moment he had pulled the trigger on Tony. And then there was the matter of a graveside promise to Erik.
“Jungle,” he murmured. “Where are we gonna find a jungle in the middle of Tampa?”
The only thing to answer was the chug of the air conditioner.
After another couple of minutes, Justin could tolerate the feel of his skin no longer. He dragged his waning body into the bathroom, cranked the tub water to maximum intensity. The nervous wired energy of the firefight was starting to neutralize. Soak it out, wash it down the drain.
He stripped, let the vile clothes he where they fell. He inspected his body. Several cuts, nicks, and scrapes sustained from crawling back and forth through the windshield frame. Tiny smears of blood and scabs dotting his torso, arms, knees. He looked at his face in the mirror for the first time. More dried blood, plus the bruised swelling from Barrington’s foot. Not too horrendous; he might have been able to get away with a lie about dental work if not for the cut on his cheek.
While the tub filled, he wrapped
a towel around his waist and left the room long enough to hotfoot down to the ice machine and fill the plastic bucket. Back in the bathroom, he dumped the ice into a hand towel, bundled it up, soaked it in cold water in the sink.
Justin eased into the tub, leaned back with a warm wet washcloth draped over his eyes and the makeshift ice pack pressed to his cheek. Club Med couldn’t have felt any better. Water and porcelain became as rich as silk. He could open the drain and risk oozing away with the water.
He floated in a timeless limbo in which the world outside could not penetrate past the washcloth, the ice. Sleep came to flirt with him, an elusive tease. He had no idea how long he’d been in the tub when light footsteps sounded on the tile floor. He pulled the washcloth away and blinked into focus.
April.
She cracked open a can of Busch beer, set it on the rim of the tub. Blue sky, white mountains. His hand crawled for it with a will of its own. Good, oh, very very good.
“I went out a few minutes. That convenience store down the street,” she said.
He nodded.
“Can we talk? Please talk to me.”
He looked at her sideways, evenly. Betraying nothing within. “You should have thought of that earlier.”
She sat atop the toilet lid, each hand cupping the opposite elbow, resting down upon her legs, knees pressed together.
No more tears, of which he was glad, but their tracks remained. He idly wondered what the convenience-store clerk must have thought of the sight of her. She looked as if one sharp word would draw blood.
“Why did you bring me back here?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just leave me behind at the warehouse?”
Justin drank, worked his tongue in the cut on the inside of his cheek. The beer seemed to anesthetize it.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “Cover my tracks, I guess. If you’d been around when the police got there, how long would it have taken before you’d have given them this room number?”
She said nothing.
“Maybe I can’t trust you, but I can at least keep an eye on you until it’s over.” He shook his head. “I’m curious about something. You obviously didn’t tell Tony about Kerebawa. He wasn’t prepared for that at all. The guy with the assault rifle was there in case you and I got out of hand. So why didn’t you serve Kerebawa up on a silver platter like you did me?”