Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  The core crew and most of the men were in their early thirties, and all their money and flashy tattoos couldn’t hide the fact that the men in the camp tended towards pudgy, greasy, slovenly, lazy and unattractive. The cloud of decorative women – Talena quickly took to calling them “concubines” – were in their early twenties, some of them embracing their party-across-America lifestyle, others torn by moral qualms, sexual repulsion, or the desire for some kind of normalcy. It was an interesting crowd and under other circumstances I would have studied them with utter fascination. The intellectual member of the core crew wanted to retire, but the rest wanted to move from rich to ultra-rich, from first class to corporate jets, and that conflict simmered all day. They complained about money launderers who took forty per cent of their hard-earned money. A woman agonized to one another about whether she should sleep with the man who invited her, she wanted to but worried he would then lose interest and expel her from this drug dealer’s Eden she was enjoying so much. Another told her friend in strict confidence that she couldn’t stand the lifestyle any more and she was going to go back to stripping as soon as they got back from Burning Man. Two of the gofers resented the core crew because they couldn’t get promoted into membership and were thinking of striking out on their own. Just a few of Smack Dealer Camp’s dozen in-progress micro-soap-operas.

  For a group of big-money drug dealers they were amazingly easy to spy on. Maybe they had let their guard down for Burning Man. Maybe they had just grown overconfident. They seemed to be good at their business. None of the core crew had ever been arrested, and while one of them talked about guns a lot, and we briefly saw one of the gofers carry two handguns from one Ryder truck to another, we overheard no anecdotes of violence.

  We had moved our camp almost next door to theirs, killing two birds with one stone; we no longer risked discovery by staying close to the address Zoltan and Zorana knew from the posters they had torn down, and we were close enough to Smack Dealer Camp that we could sit in our tent with binoculars and shotgun mike and see and hear just about everything that went on. It was uncomfortable work, our tent was like an oven even with door and window flaps wide open and two rapidly-melting bags of newly-purchased ice cooling the air a little, but at the same time it was voyeuristically fun.

  “Smack Dealer Camp,” I suggested to Talena at lunch, crackers with corned beef and more soup, “would be the greatest reality TV show ever.”

  In the afternoon, when Steve and Lawrence and Saskia took over the eyes-and-ears work, Talena and I went roving across the disc of playa that surrounded the Man, and the vast wedge between the Man and the trash fence, looking at the art installations. Some of them were amazing. Some of them were just weird. A vividly painted forty-foot-tall fallen chandelier. A huge ball of fire on a chain that endless wound and unwound itself around an iron pillar. A three-story house of wood made of fifty-two wooden panels, each one painted as a different playing card. A field of little bobblehead dogs rippling in the wind. A telephone with which one could talk to God, who had an unexpectedly nasal voice. A tall and disturbing jagged metal sculpture of some inhuman beast. A row of blown-up, six-foot by four-foot pictures of two dozen people, along with a note from the artist explaining that she rejected family and country and religion; these pictures were of her closest friends, who she saw as her nation, her tribe, her gods. I looked at that one for a long time.

  After the art we went to the trapeze. I expected a long line but there were only a few other burners and we both spend a giddy hour leaping and swinging about, high above the net, learning how to swing from our legs, to backflip into the net, to do a two-person catch-and-release. We cruised back to dinner high on endorphins, giggling and nudging one another like teenagers.

  By the time we got back our camp had changed. Steve and Lawrence and Saskia sat on folding seats beneath a tall shade canopy, drinking bottles of Stella Artois, playing cards on the red surface of a brand-new cooler. As we approached, flabbergasted, Steve and Lawrence loudly started to complain that Saskia, who had a much larger pile of paperclips in front of her, was clearly cheating.

  “What the hell?” Talena asked. “Where did you get all this?”

  “Empire. Turns out they stock up on all this gear so lazy forgetful people like us don’t have to drive all the way back to Reno,” Lawrence said. “Very thoughtful of them. Can you believe Anders wasn’t happy I bought him Stella? He wanted Michelob instead? There’s just no telling with some people. It’s good that we moved. He’s clearly not a trustworthy neighbour.”

  “Speaking of neighbours,” I said, “what happened to keeping an eye on our new ones?”

  “No need, mate,” Steve said. “They went and blabbed it all.”

  “Blabbed what?”

  “Tomorrow night,” Lawrence said. “Four and thirty, ante meridian. Between the Temple of Gravity and the trash fence. That’s where the deal goes down.” He grinned. “You like that? ‘The deal goes down’? Very convincingly American of me, no?”

  “Lawrence,” Talena said, “you couldn’t convince Helen Keller that you were American.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” he said, pleased.

  “Tomorrow night,” I repeated. Somehow it seemed too soon. I had thought it would happen Saturday, the night of the Burn, when all the rest of Burning Man clustered around the Man and watched him erupt into a pillar of flame.

  “A bit of action,” Steve said, cracking his knuckles. “About bloody time. Tell you the truth, all this sitting around watching was getting a bit dull.”

  Chapter 25

  Thursday: Coffee And Heroin

  The downside to our new camp was that it took half an hour to walk to Center Camp for coffee. Steve and Saskia and Lawrence remained behind; Saskia had won almost a hundred dollars at cards and was eager to continue her streak, while Steve and Lawrence wanted to win it back, and besides, both of them claimed, a quick bottle of beer was all the morning pick-me-up they needed.

  The Café was buzzing with activity and we had to stand in line for fifteen minutes before a gorgeous redhead wearing stripey orange-and-black tights and a cowboy hat covered with plastic cockroaches sold us our morning mochas. We turned, headed across the café to find a place to sit, walked maybe twenty steps, and very nearly collided with Zoltan and Zorana as they cut across one of the coffee lineups.

  I went cold before I even consciously recognized them. My stomach tightened painfully and my hands started to shake, spilling hot mocha on my fingers. Pavlovian fight-or-flight response. Talena gasped. They were no less surprised to see us. All four of us froze dead still for several seconds, staring at one another in shock. The burners in the nearby coffee lineup turned and curiously observed our tableau.

  I told myself that we weren’t in immediate danger. They wouldn’t dare try anything here in the Café. The important thing was to ensure that they didn’t find out where we were camped, and to stay cool. I tried to tell my nervous system that neither fight nor flight was the right response. It didn’t seem at all convinced.

  Zorana recovered first. “Balthazar,” she said, smiling as if with delight, her voice so smooth she was practically purring. “Talena. What a pleasure it is to see you.”

  Talena smiled thinly back. “The pleasure is all yours.”

  “You know what I see?” Zoltan growled. “I see two dead people.”

  “Wow, just like the Sixth Sense,” I said, managing to keep my voice amused and dismissive. As I expected he didn’t get the reference and for a second his menace turned to bewilderment. Fine by me. If you can’t beat ‘em, outweird ‘em.

  “We gave you a chance,” Zorana said to me. “We should have known you would spurn it. You stupid, stupid man.”

  “I will finish with you,” Zoltan said to Talena. “I will finish you. I will make you –”

  I said, “Shut the fuck up, you bloated sack of shit.”

  They were so surprised at being addressed in that way – I was probably the first person to do so i
n a long, long time – that they actually did shut up. Zoltan and Zorana, very accustomed to fear, were much less familiar with anger. And when Zoltan had threatened Talena it was like he had flicked a switch in my mind from FEAR to RAGE. I wanted to gouge his eyes out, tear his head off, plunge my fist into his chest and pull out his still-beating heart.

  “I was going to give you a chance,” I said. “I was going to say, go out and give yourself up to the FBI and we’ll all call it a day. But fuck that. Fuck prison. Prison’s too good for you.”

  “Your mouth,” Zoltan said contemptuously. “It flaps like the wings of a bird.”

  Now he had weirded me out. I had never heard Zoltan wax poetic before.

  “One day soon,” he continued, “I will make it stop flapping and start to scream. Your mouth, Paul Wood, it will scream for very long. Your mouth, but first, hers. She will scream for very long, and I will make you watch.”

  “Promises, promises,” Talena said airily.

  I forced a casual smile and inwardly raged at the Brady bill. If I had had a gun I would have shot him right then and there, in the middle of Center Camp Café, to hell with the spectators. I was tempted to fling my hot mocha in his eyes. But with his boxer’s reflexes he might well dodge, and even if I succeeded there were surely Black Rock Rangers present, Burning Man’s unofficial and unarmed law enforcement, who would expel me from Black Rock City. It wasn’t quite worth it.

  “Not promises,” Zorana said. “Prophecy.”

  “Are you about finished,” I asked, “or would you like to vomit out more horseshit and call it conversation?”

  “So proud,” Zoltan said. “Such a man. Such a big man. Do you know, Paul Wood, do you know how many big men like you I have watched to die?”

  I wanted to say something to rattle him. Something like “so how’s tonight’s drug deal going?” or “booked your flight to Tijuana yet?” I almost did. It would have almost been worth it to reveal that we knew exactly why he was here, just to shake his implacably menacing composure for a moment.

  “What did you do, bore them to death?” I asked instead. Not much of a comeback.

  Zorana said something to Zoltan in a low voice, in Serbian. Later Talena told me it was ‘We should go.’

  “Goodbye, Paul,” Zoltan said, staring straight into my eyes. “You should pray to every God, every night, that I never again see you.”

  “Oh, no no no. We will meet again,” I said. “Once. Very, very briefly.”

  “On the contrary,” Zorana said to us both, “when we meet again, it will feel like a long time. A terribly long time. For you it will feel like forever. And when it is over, I will know both of you so well. Better than you know each other. You can learn so much about a person. You have no idea how much.”

  I began to wonder if Zorana was the really crazy one.

  “Until we meet again,” she said.

  They turned and walked away, inwards, towards the Man. We watched them until they were well past the Esplanade, into the playa. I was pleased to see them furtively glance over their shoulders several times. For all their threats and intimidation they were at least a little worried about us following them.

  “Are you frightened?” Talena asked me quietly, as we walked back towards our camp.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  We walked a little further.

  “But I’m angry too,” I said. “I’m more angry than scared. I’m furious.”

  “Good,” Talena said. “Me too. Me too very fucking much.”

  * * *

  The Temple of Gravity, half art and half dance club, was in the empty playa beyond the Man, a good twenty-minute walk from the nearest camps. Four huge slabs of concrete hung on chains at a 60-degree angle from two high intersecting arches of solid steel. In the center, a huge brass brazier burned. When we arrived at 4:15 in the morning, more than a hundred people still perched on the concrete slabs or swayed to the throbbing music. I assumed most of them were coming down from E or acid or some other unnatural-stamina drug.

  At this hour the desert was very cold, the day’s blistering heat a distant memory. We all wore jackets or sweaters, but I don’t think we really needed them. The adrenaline alone would have kept us warm.

  Despite Steve’s desire for action our plan featured yet more waiting and watching. Watch the deal take place, and then follow Zoltan and Zorana back to their camp. When we found out where they lived, we would be able to make some informed decisions about what to do next. I wasn’t looking forward to that part. I knew that the road we had begun to walk had only one logical conclusion. Sneak into their camp at night and murder them as they slept. I could barely even think of it. I didn’t know if I could do that. Not for practical reasons, not because they might ambush us, or because the authorities might catch us and jail us forever. I just didn’t think I could bring myself to kill someone like that, coldblooded, premeditated, not even a monster like Zoltan, not even after what he had done to us. In hot blood, if he threatened Talena in front of me, sure. But crouched over his sleeping form? I didn’t know if I could do that. I didn’t know if I wanted to be able do that.

  “They’re on the move,” Lawrence said, his voice low.

  There were two people from Smack Dealer Camp in the tricycle and three more in the spider-car, a Volkswagen Beetle tricked out with eight welded steel limbs, a spider’s head, and mandibles, all made of gleaming albeit playa-dusted chrome. There were guns aboard the tricycle, and the spider-car contained a crate carrying thirteen million U.S. dollars. Judging from their grunts as they had hoisted it into the trunk, that much money weighed a whole hell of a lot.

  They moved slowly enough that we were easily able to follow at walking speed, probably because they didn’t want to attract any adverse attention. We stayed far enough away that we could only just see the headlight perched above the tricycle. We followed that light into utter darkness for several minutes. A light breeze blew. The moon was new, and above us the sky was full of so many stars there barely seemed to be room for them all. The pale band of the Milky Way was clearly visible. Talena held our shotgun mike, Lawrence the binoculars. Behind us, we could see the glow of the Temple of Gravity, the Man, and the Esplanade, but before us the darkness was broken only by the tricycle’s headlight and, far away, a faint dim red light moving slowly left to right. Hatter had told me about the perimeter scouts, Black Rock Coyotes, armed with heat and motion sensors, patrolling the fence lest people enter without paying. It was ironic that up here “coyote” meant someone who prevented a border crossing.

  Talena and I held hands tightly as we walked. We each wore one of the shotgun mike’s two headphones, which were the kind that clipped individually on to one’s ear. It was so dark that I only knew the others were still with me from the soft crunching sounds of their boots on the playa. The wind grew stronger, a blessing and a curse. It obscured the air with swirling playa dust and drowned out small sounds, which made it easier for us to go undiscovered, but harder to see and hear with the binoculars and shotgun mike.

  Now that something was finally happening I was alert, adrenalized, more excited than scared. The situation felt unreal and dreamlike. Every physical sense seemed to have been artificially heightened. I imagined I could feel individual motes of playa dust as they brushed against my skin, could pick out individual lines on Talena’s palm.

  We closed to maybe three hundred feet from the tricycle. It was hard to judge distance. The headlight went out. A moment later, two flashlights winked on next to it. I listened intently, but the shotgun mike amplified the whistling wind into the howl of an oncoming gale; I could hear that words were being spoken, but not what they were.

  “We have to get closer,” Talena said.

  “Won’t you come a little closer, said the spider to the fly,” I murmured to myself.

  We began to approach.

  “No,” Saskia said. “We should go to the left.”

  I stopped, surprised to hear Saskia volunte
er a suggestion. “Why?”

  “So the wind blows from them to us. We will hear them much better that way. If we go too much closer, and they have other people watching, they will see us.”

  “What other people?” Talena asked, low-voiced.

  “Snipers. Sometimes we had meetings like this to exchange prisoners, in the war. Always both sides had many snipers watching.”

  I had forgotten that Saskia had actually fought on the front lines, in Sarajevo. “All right,” I said. We circled to the left.

  “We’ll need to run some tests,” a nervous voice said over the wind noises in my right ear, and I twitched with surprise at the voice’s unexpected volume and clarity, as if the speaker stood as close to me as Talena. Saskia had been right. We were no nearer, but standing downwind of them, the sound was much clearer.

  “Tests, yes, okay,” a voice said. Zoltan’s voice. He sounded bored.

  Lawrence passed me the binoculars. Four figures I recognized from Smack Dealer Camp stood in the light of two flashlights, presumably held by Zoltan and Zorana. Between them, on the playa, lay an open duffel bag full of bags of white powder. Just like the movies. One of the Smack Dealer Camp boys knelt knext to the backpack, opened a small briefcase next to it, and began to perform a set of delicate maneuvers, presumably making sure that what they were buying was in fact reasonably pure heroin. I handed the binoculars to Saskia, wondering how it could be that we lived in a world where this single duffel bag, full of the slightly processed petals of a flower so common it was practically a weed, was worth so much.

  Zorana said something in Serbian. Talena stiffened next to me.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “She said, ‘they have a clear view,’” Talena whispered back.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. It had to mean that Saskia was right, there were other people out here, allies of Zoltan and Zorana, watching the deal as it happened. Their insurance. Which was very bad news. First of all it meant that we had more than just Zoltan and Zorana to deal with. Second it meant that their friends, presumably armed, could be anywhere around us, and could spot us at any minute.