by Brian Hodge
“I’m not sure. I guess … I was hoping he might get away, and — and I wouldn’t have to live with the idea of him, too.”
“Nice of you to take him into consideration, at least.” His voice was cobra venom.
“You don’t understand.”
How many times had he heard that? Ten? Twelve? Justin shook his head slowly. Stared at her, the low cold throbbing in his face, the trickle of water crawling along his scalp. She squirmed under the scrutiny, and as the seconds wormed by, he could almost grasp some sense of the depth of whatever she had suffered in an unfathomable past. Somewhere so deep and so tangled in the roots of her life that it might never be extricated, could be brought to the surface only by hacking and mangling those roots beyond repair. Never understand? He might, if only he knew. But understanding did not mean forgiveness. That legendary unkindest cut of all was a wound like no other, and left such scars behind.
Justin wiped across his eyes with the washcloth. He could feel his own tears starting to form, did not want her to see them. Although she would likely detect their presence in his voice.
“I loved you,” he whispered raggedly. “I believed in you. I would’ve trusted my life with you.” He swallowed. Anybody who said that emotion was not a tangible solid had never had to deal with the kind of lump he had in his throat. “What a fucking moron I was.”
He’d thought her crying was over. He was wrong.
Justin felt as if he were on some accelerated cycle of loss. Same pattern as dealing with a loved one’s death. First denial, then fury. Then real grief, ravenous and all-consuming. He had sped through the first two, was now on the nauseating spiral down to the third. But in some ways, this was worse than death. It was like watching a loved one rot before your eyes, by choice, knowing you were helpless to stop it. At least the dead left behind memories, unspoiled by time. This? This was watching all the memories, one by one, sprout thorns and turn to poison.
“Just leave me alone,” he said. “Just walk out that door and shut it, like you found it.”
April nodded, rose from her seat. She was halfway out the door when she lingered, one hand wrapped around its edge, and turned to look back. Red eyes looking hopelessly for chinks in that tarnished armor he wore.
“No matter what you think about me now, please remember a couple of things. I loved you too. And — and between the two of us tonight, I was the first one to start shooting.”
She did as asked then, and the door latched softly. Leaving him to his water, his steam, his soap, his life. Solitude, hovering over the tub like a ghost. He took a long pull at the beer, tried to soak the solitude away with everything else. Strange. Far more stubborn and clinging than blood, sweat, tears. So try harder, later. He had the rest of his life to fret about lost loves, which wouldn’t be very long if he didn’t get some priorities straight.
He drank the Busch, thought about jungles.
And then realized that the answer had been in his hand ever since April had stepped in.
Chapter 30
ASSIMILATION
There was nothing worse than the scream of a friend. Only degrees of how long it lasted, how deeply it pierced. When it kept going for hours and came from within, then it bordered on the seventh level of hell. Tony could hear Lupo screaming on the inside. Couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t sick it up like a bad meal. Had it done any good, he would have raged a tormented path through the penthouse, battering his head against walls and furniture and floors, but the hekura would not let him. Its vessel had sustained enough damage lately. On which it had worked long and hard.
When Tony reclaimed humanity and rose dripping from the sunken tub a couple of hours past dawn that Saturday morning, he walked to the mirror in a gait owing its shuffle more to trepidation than to bullet wounds. Risen from a watery grave, he bore only faint scars to mark the night before. A round, puckered depression beside his breastbone, others scattered elsewhere. Lumpy skin on his shoulder. He finger-parted his sodden hair and found bare little patches of scalp, but these could be hidden easily enough.
Inside his head, though, it was anything but the picture of health. Snippets of hoarse masculine cries, redolent with the stink of blood and confusion and betrayal. They rose and fell like a whining wind in the eaves on chilly nights of isolation.
He toweled himself dry, then dressed in black leather slacks and tank top, the actions automatic. He wandered about the penthouse, slowly realizing that it was beginning to seem alien. Someone else’s to do with as they pleased. Smash it to bits, burn it to cinders, while he couldn’t do a thing. Watch, maybe, if allowed.
In the living room, he stood before a bookcase and ran someone else’s fingertip along the spines. Lupo’s books, every single one. Mocking him, like patient friends that were not his to share, and who now pointed accusing fingers.
“Get out of me!” he shrieked, not sure to whom it was directed. “Get oouuut!” He wrenched the bookcase over and it crashed to the floor in a cascade of volumes. Tony dropped to his knees and tore through them, ripping the thinner ones in half and hurling them up until pages drifted about him like falling leaves.
Energy spent, he sagged down to both elbows, breathing harshly. He was on center stage, it felt, watched as a child throwing a tantrum is watched in silent reproach by a wise guardian who knew there was all the time in the world for the petulance to burn itself out. He rolled onto his side, small and insignificant beneath its gaze.
We are one…
And we are hungry.
There in the floor, he surrendered. Wholly. For fear that he too would be devoured, then find himself in that worst of hells. An equal with Sasha and Agualar and now Lupo, surrounded as they ravaged him out of vengeance.
Surrender was a matter of survival as much as anything, and goals to be accomplished in vivid splashes of emerald and crimson. Too much weakness in him that had to be purged. Time to learn the basics. Again.
He went to the aquarium room, flipped on the lights. Knelt before a fifty-gallon tank with four oscars inside, striped gray and orange. Aggressive, hungry, and whose concept of mercy meant only that they toyed with food awhile rather than dining immediately.
Tony netted several feeder goldfish from their own small tank, dumped them into the larger aquarium. Then settled back in his new recliner to watch the show. Strong consuming weak, the large consuming the small. Back to basics.
How primal.
How fundamentally right.
The sight was a soothing balm. He began to regard the strange dynamics within him as a kind of seesaw. The ancient presence rising up to seize control in matters of danger, instinct, and fury — then dropping down to let the old Tony return and carry them safe and undetected through the crafty ways of the modern world. A perfect symbiosis. Such a team they made.
When the telephone rang, he was ready. Almost expecting it. He whipped up the aerial on the remote receiver. Knew it was Justin from the first word out of his mouth.
“I’m calling to see just how smart a businessman you are,” his voice said. Far calmer than the last time Tony had heard it. “So far I haven’t been very impressed.”
Tony smiled, mildly amused. Not quite the tune he was expecting. “Sometimes business sense has to be sacrificed for personal gain.”
“Yeah, and that’s why you blew yourself out of the water. By the way, very impressive comeback last night. I haven’t seen anything like that since the time I dropped acid.” Tony couldn’t believe this was the same guy close to pissing his pants last night. “Now, I don’t know what kind of bogeyman that green stuff has turned you into, but I figure there’s got to be at least something inside that shot-up head of yours that’ll listen to reason. And will agree that it makes good business sense.”
Was Justin really this naïve? Thinking he could just call up, appeal to logic? Guy had rocks in his skull. So play along, see where this infantile game led.
“I’m all ears. You got thirty seconds to interest me before I just decide to sniff
you out and tear you open.”
“You want the skullflush back? You can have it. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, considering what you’ve done to try and get it back. But I want something in return.”
“My promise to leave you alone?” A malicious grin in Tony’s voice.
“Yeah. Right. I’d trust you there about as well as your former bodyguard can do his job now.”
Tony winced. That one stung.
“I’m thinking more in terms of cash. Twenty thousand for the load. If it’s wholesale priced about like coke, that’s not much more than you’d have paid for one kilo. A bargain, considering what you’ve put me through. In return, you get your stock back, and you never see or hear about me again. Call the twenty thousand stake money to get me someplace way the hell away from here. Now, I know you’ve got this big hard-on to see me dead, but just look at it with a business head for a minute.”
“Twenty grand for you. Hm. What about April?” His tongue caressed her name, twist that knife a little deeper.
“Far as I know, she’ll be sticking around here, ‘cause she’s sure not coming with me. Do what you want with her. I feel like cutting her up and feeding her to you myself. Maybe you’d choke on her.”
“Not likely,” Tony said. Then he mused, “So sad when love dies. If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Right now I believe in cash. What do you believe in?”
“Mutual trust,” Tony said, then roared laughter. Oh, this was getting funnier by the moment. He tried to keep his dark delight from betraying the fact that he had no intention of shelling out one cent for what was rightfully his, or letting Justin walk away with it. He agreed to the terms, none too readily, a little complaining so as not to arouse suspicion.
And then Justin laid down the particulars. The when and where.
Definitely an unexpected choice.
Justin had hung up before Tony got a chance to question. Why there? Chalk it up to his fruitcake sense of drama. What a numbnuts.
It had crossed his mind that Justin and April might be working with the police by now, that they were merely the bait for a much larger trap. At least until Justin rattled off the swap point. Way too many people for the police to feel comfy; any shooting, and a fatality or two among innocent bystanders was not only possible, but likely. Hot damn, then. A genuine offer from a witless amateur.
Tony compressed the phone’s aerial, feeling the hunger flood him, fresh and raw. The change was already starting to ripple across his features from excitement.
Hours to wait, though. Sadly. At least there was one consolation.
Plenty of time to work up an even greater appetite.
April watched Justin stare at the phone for several moments after cradling the receiver. The bravado may have registered well in his voice, but less so in his face. Finally he looked up.
“He bought it, I think,” Justin said. So he’d been right after all. Earlier, April had feared the offer might not work, since Mendoza no longer needed the skullflush to change. Justin had said it didn’t matter. Tony’s pride and fury would make him seize any opportunity to get in close to them. Of secondary value was the likelihood that Mendoza would long to exploit skullflush’s potential for his own gain.
Kerebawa had been listening to the conversation from the floor, leaning against a wall. He nodded, eyes darkly set in anticipation. He spared no looks for her; she might as well not even exist, so far as he was concerned. Which was preferable, she supposed, to bearing the brunt of the ill will he professed last night.
She sat at the breakfast table, sharing it with no one but herself. The survivor who was now caught between the most rocks and hard places of all. Wishing as never before for some way to spin back clocks and calendars, to retroactively derail all those stupid trains of thought. The aftermath of her decisions ached like a rotten tooth.
“It made me uncomfortable hearing my fate talked about that way,” she said.
Justin gave her one of the no-humor looks she’d become intimately familiar with since last night. “You don’t have much room to complain.”
She nodded, the responsibility leaden. “No.” And turned away.
April heard him moving closer, around the bed. The bed that had been unused until last night. Her exile to it had been unspoken, but no less expected, no less absolute. Justin settled a couple of feet from her chair. He took her chin between thumb and forefinger, tilted her head around to look him straight on. Not roughly. Just sternly.
“I don’t know if I can trust you on this today. Especially when you’ll be out of my sight. But I’ve got no choice. We need three people to make this work. So if you tip off Tony in any way, or do one little thing to blow this for us, I’ll figure that’s it, I’m dead. So I won’t care anymore. And I promise: I will kill you.”
She reached up to curl her fingers around his own, and he pulled away.
“No you won’t,” she said quietly. Not hating him for the threat, just aching for having pushed him to it. “Maybe you can bluff Tony, but don’t try bluffing me. I know you better than that.”
He stared, worlds apart. “I never dreamed I’d need leverage over you.”
“You don’t.” While sleep had enabled them all to meet the world with clearer eyes and heads, for her it had only served to shine more light on the ugly truth of betrayal. Guilt, the master crippler. But she stood firm against it, refused to fall. Survival by atonement. “I can’t change what I did. All I can do is try to help undo the harm. If I do one thing, I want to show you that.”
Justin got up, and she could tell he remained unconvinced. “Then you’d better do a good job. Because Tony can still send out that videotape. If he hasn’t already.”
There. Whether Justin realized it or not — and he most likely did — there was the leverage. She decided he was far more effective at manipulation when he was subtle.
“If that happens, I’ll deal with it however I can.” A thought that still set her insides on a ten-point quake. “So my best bet is making sure he never gets another chance.”
Homicide was buzzing Saturday morning. A domestic tiff on the north side had turned fatal for the husband after an upgrade from dinner plates to kitchen cutlery. Tame stuff, though, in comparison to what had gone down just off East Platt.
At first glance, Rene Espinoza thought it looked like a standard dope-deal-gone-sour slaughterfest. Of particular interest was that all three of the DOAs were ranked as known associates in the file of the one, the only, Tony Mendoza. You had your basic shot-up body, shell casings of various calibers strewn everywhere, a couple fallen guns. But closer looks showed wild deviations from the typical scenario.
Anyone could see that Eduardo Lupo’s throat had been torn away to the extent that his head wobbled atop a fragile stalk of spine. But forensics said that the bulk of the damage had been caused by as-yet-unclassifiable teeth. Not human. Even so, a single bullet had been dug out of the ruins, having lodged in his spinal column.
Then there was Ivan Barrington, in the boxcar. A hunting arrow?
Nothing settled comfortably into place. And upon leaving the scene, well before dawn, the dismal night lit with swirling beacons and the entire area roped off like a grisly museum exhibit, her first stray thought had been, Justin Gray? No. Couldn’t be. For even if it were, that still wouldn’t explain everything.
Midmorning in the homicide bullpen. Rene and Nate Harris were poring over the dead men’s files and logging paperwork time. Nate’s metronomic two-finger hunt-and-peck keyboard prowess always grew irksome after five minutes. Her ashtray was loaded with enough butts to resemble a jumble of dry bones. She had started in on her fifth cup of coffee when Lieutenant Chadwick materialized. He wore the look of a terrier who’d just been tossed a particularly tasty scrap.
“I want you down on the lot in ten minutes. We just got the go-ahead to move on Mendoza.”
She let the sheaf of papers she’d been holding slap the desk blotter. Typing halted in midpeck. “Some
thing must’ve broken on Agualar.”
Chadwick nodded, fluorescent lights gleaming a nimbus around his balding pate. “Agualar’s dead.”
“Pity,” Harris said. No mourning and a cockeyed smile.
“Turns out the DEA had a man inside on Agualar even higher up than we did. Guy’s cover was the name of Diaz or something, one of Agualar’s newer lieutenants. We never knew. Shit, don’t you just love interagency communication?” He bummed one of Rene’s cigarettes from the pack on her desk. “It’s still kind of sketchy, but Thursday night Mendoza did the job on Agualar. Don’t ask me how. Then, yesterday morning, he calls the lieutenants together to show off Agualar’s head and announce a change in management. He lines a bunch of Agualar’s goons together and caps them in the head, one by one. Diaz saw the whole thing, said it was like something out of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He also capped one of the lieutenants.”
“How come we’re just finding out about this now?” Rene asked.
“Diaz — whatever his real name is — he didn’t get a chance to come out of cover until late last night. Probably about the same time you were out scraping up what was left of Mendoza’s crew.”
“So maybe that was a retaliation move?” Harris hunched his shoulders, spitballing.
“Who knows? All I know is, we got fresh warrants on eight counts of murder. Probably more’ll turn up too.”
Rene frowned. “If Mendoza falls on straight murder, the DEA won’t get a thing out of it. How come they’re being so generous?”
Chadwick blew smoke and shook his head. “Diaz doesn’t want to go back, not after what he saw. Says Mendoza’s the most unstable guy he ever saw, he’s wired tighter than a drum. The last guy he shot? Diaz says he cannibalized the guy right there in front of everybody.”