by Harvey Click
“He shouldn’t have wasted his time,” she said. “But he would, he loved that collection.”
“We’re wasting time too,” Dexter said. “I think Ryver’s trying to cover his tracks by eliminating everyone who knows anything, and you know plenty. When we’re done with this tea, I’m going to drive you to the airport and buy you a ticket to the safest place you can think of. I’ll give you a credit card and some cash.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere unless you do. What about that research trip you planned, we could leave tonight.”
“That’s not the kind of research that interests me right now.”
She saw the hard look in his eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re wondering how you can get your hands on Ryver.”
“Maybe.”
“Is this about feeling safe or is it about revenge?” she asked.
“Both.”
“You better just hope you never see him,” she said. “He’ll kill you so quick you won’t know what happened.”
Dexter didn’t say anything, and Mary knew what his silence meant.
“Look, I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’ve been wading around in this shit my whole life, and it ain’t no two-hour movie where the good guys win. This silver chain I wear around my waist, Father made it for me when I was barely able to walk. He called it my death chain, and he kept adding links so it would fit me as I grew. He said each new link was another reason to hate the man who killed my mother. ‘Always remember, Bitter Ember,’ that’s what he said every time he added a new link. Well, I’m sick of this fucking chain, and I think tonight I’m going to throw it in the river. If you have any sense, you’ll be thinking along the same lines.”
“So you just intend to keep staring at that tracking stone the rest of your life and hope he doesn’t catch you sleeping,” Dexter said.
Mary didn’t answer. She sipped her tea and tried to make the leaves look like something other than flames, but then they looked like drops of blood and yellow bruises.
“I want you to leave tonight,” he said. “You can come back when things look safe.”
“No, I’m sick of moving,” she said. “Father and I kept moving. Every stinking hellhole west of the Missouri, we lived there for about a month. If you’re staying, I am too.”
“Then we need to use our heads,” he said. “I figure the most likely place to find Ryver is right here, and it’s probably not going to be when we expect him. I want you to tell me everything you know about him.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into, Dex,” she said. “Forget your gourmet cookbooks and your classical music collection and start learning a thousand slick ways to kill quick and quiet, that’s what it’s going to be like. That’s what my father did. Every night he listened to the Spirit Horn, and the spirit that talked to him after I was born wasn’t interested in healing. Poppa said he used to practice medicine out of love for many, and now he practiced different medicine out of hate for one. You’ll have to learn that medicine too. You ever kill anyone?”
“No,” Dexter said. “Just tell me what you know about Ryver.”
“We kept learning about him in bits and pieces,” she said. “Everywhere we went there was another story about an old vaquero who’d been haunting every state in the West leaving a trail of bodies behind him. Some people called him Dead Man because he’d been killing for more years than any man could live.”
“What did you do for money?” Dexter asked.
“Money’s easy when you talk to a killing spirit,” she said. “One year it showed us a mine in Colorado that still had a little bit of gold, but usually our money came from somebody’s pocket. Poppa would come home in the middle of the night with a handful of cash or jewels or whatever. He said he liberated the goods from enemies of the spirit, so that made it okay.”
She sipped her tea and watched every shadow behind every tree, ugly old story planted early turning every leaf into fire and death.
“We didn’t learn very much that was useful until I was fourteen,” she said. “Here we are in Kansas City, and one night a man knocks on our motel door and says he wants to buy the Spirit Horn. We figure he’s working with Dead Man and this is the thing we’ve been waiting for, so me and Poppa are talking sign back and forth working out a plan while this man’s talking dollars. When he turns to leave, Poppa tackles him and I get a knife on his throat, except somehow it doesn’t go that way. We both end up on the floor paralyzed, and this man’s just standing there smiling and waving his walking stick.”
“Grimes,” Dexter said.
“Yep. Michael Hieronymus Grimes. So he says, ‘The man you’re looking for calls himself Joe Ryver these days, and if you want to kill him you’re going to have to do better than that—no?’ ”
Grimes dead now like everyone else she’d ever gotten close to, everyone except Dexter, and she wondered how long he would live.
“In those days Grimes lived in a big townhouse in Chicago,” she said. “We went there and stayed with him for a few months, and he taught us ten times what we knew already. I turned fifteen while we were there, and Grimes gave me an animate wire for my birthday.” She touched her wire bracelet. “He told us why stories about Dead Man went back more than a hundred years. He said Ryver was a Longevital.”
“What’s that?” Dexter asked.
“Means he gave himself a treatment to prolong his life. It’s some formula the alchemists cooked up way back when and kept all to themselves, but if you can get your hands on it you can live a very long time. Grimes said some of the ingredients are extinct, insects and roots and weeds and a dozen other things we’ve killed to make shopping malls and parking lots.”
“Ebenezer talks about the Elixir of Longevity in his journal,” Dexter said. “But I think even he decided it was hokum. You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”
“I halfway believed it when I was young and stupid,” she said. “Now I’m smarter, and I know it’s a fact. Grimes is a Longevital himself, God only knows how old he is.”
“Was,” Dexter said.
“Yeah. Was.”
She felt chilly in the breeze and wanted to go in the house and get a sweater, her tracking stone, and a gun.
“Longevitals don’t kill easy,” she said, “so Grimes gave us knives and some bullets made out of Hermesium. It’s an alchemist alloy that’s poisonous to Longevitals if you can get it in their heart or brain. Otherwise you can chop off their heads or burn them up. Shoot ‘em with ordinary bullets, and they’ll just crawl off somewhere and heal up in a couple days and come gunning for you again.”
“You have any of these bullets?” Dexter asked.
“I’ve got a few nine millimeters left.”
“We can load my Ruger,” he said.
He refilled her cup, but the tea was cold. A bright red leaf fell on the table like a gaping wound.
“So Grimes knew an old Mexican asesino in San Antonio named Alejadro Abarca,” she said. “The plan was, Alejadro would leak out news that he owned a spectrehole, and we’d be waiting there with him and four other trained killers ready to ambush Ryver when he showed up. Grimes bought our plane tickets and gave us a little cash and stayed safe at home in Chicago. That’s the way he works. He wanted us to leave the Spirit Horn safe with him, but we weren’t that stupid.”
At least we thought we weren’t, she thought, picture of Josh’s head dangling by its dreads from the safe-house porch, Lizzie and Hayes upstairs with his dead hand groping her breast. Hatred makes you stupid, she thought, can’t eat or sleep or fuck without thinking about blood, stupid wasted life.
“Alejadro had a run-down hacienda with some horse stables a few miles out of town,” she said. “He was old and didn’t have much meat on his bones, but he had eagle eyes and knew how to kill ‘cause he’d been doing it all his life. He put out rumors that he shot a curandero down in Monterey and stole a little lead box with a purple rock inside that ta
lked con la voz de los muertos.
“So we stayed there and waited for these four other trained killers to show up before Ryver did, and whenever we called Grimes he kept saying they’d be there tomorrow. One night the horses woke me up making a fuss in the barn. I couldn’t see anything out my window, so I got my knife and gun and went to my father’s room and he wasn’t there. I found Alejadro in the living room with his throat cut. The front door was open, and I saw Poppa laying in the yard.”
Dusty dry yard steeped in shadows, Poppa groaning, old thorn still pricking the back of her brain still sharp as yesterday.
“I forgot everything I ever learned and just ran out of the house screaming my head off,” she said. “It was fucking stupid, and I didn’t make it very far. Ryver’s wire wrapped around my wrist and shook the gun out of my hand.
“And there he was. He was standing just a few feet away in the moonlight. He had his gun stuck in his belt, but for some reason he didn’t pull it and shoot me, maybe he didn’t want to make noise. He just kept staring at me like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill me or not, like he was puzzled or something. I can’t even describe it, it’s like everything you ever hated standing there in front of you and the air feels so fucking thick you can hardly move, like time is frozen solid, and for some reason neither one of us seems to know what to do.
“Then I lunged at him and stuck my knife in his eye, except only the tip of it went in, sort of between his eye and his eye socket, because he had a hold of my wrist already and was trying to make me drop it. We struggled like that for a few seconds, and I managed to cut his face pretty good but then he flung me to the ground so hard I was dazed. Then he’s just standing there clutching his eye and howling like a dog with blood trickling between his fingers. Jesus, it was horrible.”
Jesus, it was good, she thought. My first orgasm.
“I probably had a chance then,” she said, “I probably could have jumped up and stabbed him again while he was howling like that, but I laid there with the wind knocked out of me for a second too long. Then all of a sudden he was laying on top of me, pinning my arms and legs, blood dripping out of his eye onto my face while he stared down at me. I thought maybe he was going to rape me, but instead he just cracked my jaw and knocked me out.
“He could have killed me then—I don’t know why he didn’t. He was gone when I came to, and my father was dead.”
Dexter didn’t say anything. She remembered lying there in the dry grass holding Poppa’s body till the sun lit the dry air, whole world burning dead like a pile of flaming rubble, always remember, Bitter Ember.
“I felt so ashamed,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dexter said.
“You don’t understand. I felt ashamed because I got my rocks off jabbing Ryver’s face while Poppa was dying. The problem with revenge is that it feels so fucking good.”
Cold breeze swept the trees. Mary tried to imagine it was Father’s spirit telling her to turn away from revenge, but the falling leaves still looked like blood and flames.
Chapter Nineteen
Toya Jones awoke from strange purple dreams of demented teether dwarves and iridescent blue fever wasps and the churning Soft Place where Zyx wallowed in a reeking gray vomit of digested stone.
She got out of bed and fell several times before she remembered how to walk. She toddled to the bathroom and stared at the face of a familiar stranger in the mirror.
So this is where history ends, she thought, in a place owned by . . . She picked clotted blood from her nose and tried to remember his name . . . in a place owned by Mark Burton. The Cypher who once was Toya Jones hereby designates this place as a sacred shrine, she thought. Let it hitherto be called The Place Where History Died.
She showered greasy sweat from her skin and explored the sleek pink hills and valleys of her interesting body with a lover’s curious fingers. She went to the living room and called a number that her new brain remembered even though it squirmed and fretted in her skull like a sick baby.
“New Society,” a male voice answered.
“Give me Katerina,” Toya said.
“Who is this?”
“Toya Jones, First Avatar. I’m God on earth.”
***
Something big was going on in the big room. Burne listened but was too sick to understand what he heard. His cocoon stank of pus and piss and rotting blood, and the iron threads slit his skin like slivers of glass. Any part of his body that wasn’t numb or gone screamed with agony, but his mutilated eye socket screamed the loudest. It was a mushroom cloud exploding in his skull, and his thoughts had to tunnel through a maze of dark fallout shelters beneath the holocaust of pain.
But something big was going on. Kat pulled a girl with a pinched face behind Burne’s lead partition so the others couldn’t hear them talk. It was someone named Emily.
“Ryver’s going with me,” Kat said. “I think he’s going to fuck up on the issue of communion, if you catch my drift.”
Emily’s pinched face pinched tighter. “Not really,” she said.
“That’s okay, you don’t need to understand,” Kat said. “Just follow us and wait outside the condo and when your phone rings do whatever I tell you. You’re going to have a nice sweet position after I’m Second Avatar. Understand that much?”
“I think so,” Emily said. “You want me to take off your chastity belt and make you feel good.”
“Not now, silly sister. Just give me the kiss of peace and make sure Ryver doesn’t see you following us.”
They kissed and slipped out from behind the lead partition. Maybe Kat thought nobody could hear, but Burne saw something glistening up in the dark ceiling corner like a cobweb spun from thin Rebus faces.
“Okay, Ryver, get your boots on,” Kat said. “This could be a trap, and no one can smell them like you.”
***
Ryver tried to ignore the trash sitting beside him in his truck, but he kept feeling her eyes on him, and they were awful things. He imagined how tasty it would be to jab them out of their sockets and squish them under his boots like sour green tomatoes. This was why it was time to retire. These days the Society got its money from drugs, and drugs drew trash like shit drew flies, and with all that drug money the trash was calling all the shots. It was time to collect his pay and get out.
Kat kept playing with that cunt-looking amulet she wore around her neck, and he figured she was trying to cast a hex. He wasn’t afraid of her spells, but this was his truck and there were certain rules that applied.
“Quit playing with that damn hoodoo charm or get out and walk,” he said.
“It’s not a hoodoo charm,” she said. “It’s called a yoni, but I doubt that word’s in your three-page dictionary.”
“I seen my share of dictionaries over the years,” he said. “A yoni’s some kind of Buddhist hoodoo charm, and if you keep playing with it you can get out and walk.”
“It’s Hindu,” she said. “It’s a symbol of Shakti.”
“What’s that, another word for pussy?”
Kat sneered. “You’re so pathetic I almost feel sorry for you,” she said. “Here you’ve been doing all these chores for Shakti all these years, and she hasn’t even told you her true name.”
Ryver picked up his spit can and spit tobacco juice in it. “So Cypher told you he’s some kind of Hindu pussy-god,” he said. “Christsake, you doped-up brats will believe any damn thing.”
Kat didn’t answer. She kept playing with her hoodoo charm, and her silence got on his nerves even worse than her voice.
“I hate to bust up your party,” he said, “but Cypher ain’t no god and he sure ain’t no woman. He tells you idiots that kind of shit just to give you a good scare, and it looks to me like you scare real easy.”
“You know something, this truck stinks,” Kat said. “It smells like an old man whose time is dead and done with.” She sniffed the air. “Yeah, that’s what I smell, old dead time. Your truck is worn out and your time’s fi
nished, Mr. cowboy capitalist sexist racist retro Republican peckerwood pig. You’re history, and when we write it you won’t even be in the pages. This is a New Society and you’re not invited.”
Ryver pulled over to the berm and touched the hilt of his boot dagger. Kat looked nervous, but not as nervous as she ought to be.
“I don’t like your smell either, and I’m getting sick of your face,” he said. “I pissed on toadstools that look a whole lot better.”
“Cut the comedy and get back on the road,” she said. “Let’s see, what is it you need, dried Sekem leaves? I got a quarter ounce in from Cairo last week just for you. I got a gram of ground death’s head scarab and a nickel bag of Nefertiti toad skin dust. It’s probably the only toad dust left, but if you think you know where there’s some more go ahead and pull that knife.”
The sound of the names was enough to make him cold. He let go of his knife and pulled his coat tighter.
“Ix Chel scorpion venom,” he said. “I want that too.”
“I have five milliliters, solution of twenty percent.”
“I get paid today when this job’s done,” he said. “If I don’t, I’m gonna stick your head up on a fence post for the buzzards to eat.”
“You get paid if you shut up and drive,” she said.
He spit in his spit can and pulled back on the road, wondering if buzzards would eat anything that ugly. The flies would, they weren’t particular. Pretty soon Kat was playing with her cunt-looking amulet and talking again.
“You’re shivering, old man,” she said. “Looks to me like you scare real easy.”
She kept talking, and her words made his skin itch like some new disease going around. The disease was called New Society, and it didn’t make any sense but it didn’t have to because it got into your bloodstream and turned your brains to mush so you didn’t care about making sense. You have the freedom to do what we do and think what we think. We say God’s got a pussy but you ain’t allowed to get a hard-on when you look at it or that’s called harassment. He told himself he’d done worse jobs than this, but he couldn’t think of any.