He fingered the burning cut on his right forearm and cursed. “Superstitious motherfucker. Not laughing now, are you? But I am. Hardy-fucking-har!”
The last of the downed men had not passed quickly, but rather sat against the wall with a look of surprise on his face, burbling blood. He had waved Nicky over, and, out of sheer curiosity, he had squatted next to him. The man had spoken in jibberish. It certainly wasn’t Spanish, at which Nicky had become passably proficient in prison, but rather something sharper, more halted. At first, he had thought the man was just hallucinating in his death throes, but after a few seconds he had jerked out and caught Nicky by surprise with the blade, driving it into his forearm.
Nicky had then emptied the rest of his gun’s clip into him. Not very professional, but it was effective. And besides, he hated being stabbed. But the really strange thing was that after the shock of being cut had worn off, he had been unable to actually find the knife. He searched the tubby man and the area around him, not wanting to leave any trace of his blood behind, but was unable to locate the weapon. After turning out the man’s sleeves, the only thing he came across was a peculiar looking, intricately looping forearm tattoo. Finally, he had found a fountain pen in the man’s pocket which, though clean, he decided must have been the culprit. He took the stolen duffel bag and left as coolly as he could manage with his throbbing arm.
Ten minutes down the road, Nicky’s heart had finally slowed down and he was winding the Mustang cautiously into the sixties. The merciless sun beat down overhead, and the open windows provided rushing air that only further baked his skin. Highway 285 was one of the most desolate stretches of road that he had ever driven on, and he hoped that the rebuilt Ford was up to making the trip through the scorching desert twice in the same day. Using the air-conditioning was out of the question.
“So far, so good,” he said, patting the dashboard. “Ain’t that right, Layla?”
By the time the odometer told him that he was forty miles into the return trip, Nicky felt terrible. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, and dark rings had begun to form beneath his eyes. Painful gurgles roiled in his stomach and his arm ached so badly that he was both steering and shifting completely with his left hand. If only he had some Tylenol. No, better yet, he needed a fucking joint, one so big it would knock Tommy Chong on his ass. He resolved to find just that when he made it back home.
As for the next few hours, he remembered that there was some sort of decrepit filling station at the fleck of a town that lay somewhere between Roswell and Vaughn. Ramon, he thought it might have been called.
Looking out the window, Nicky tried to divert his focus from the pain to the passing scenery, which consisted of miles of red dirt, patches of short scrub grass, and plenty of cactus plants. Without the existence of the road to remind him of the modern world, Nicky felt a little bit like an outlaw bank robber fleeing through the treacherous desert in some old western movie. He had not yet seen a single car.
A beacon of hope presented itself about twenty minutes later in the form of a wind-tilted sign just past the intersection of 285 with another deserted highway. If the wooden sign told the truth, the town of Ramon sat waiting for him only a few miles to the north.
Nicky looked at himself in the mirror to offer a smile, but could only frown at his appearance. His eyes had darkened even further and his skin was a pale, ashy gray. He looked like death warmed over.
“Motherfucker poisoned me,” he spat. He knew it must have been true. When that dying spic had stuck him with the pen, he had passed on something extremely nasty. What if it had been cyanide, or maybe strychnine? No, he would have been long gone by now, he thought. It was probably something pretty low-level, or at least, slow-acting. When Nicky got to Ramon, he would find a telephone and dial the number of the hotel room that Svaroski’s men had given him.
His sweaty hands slipped on the steering wheel, and the car veered dangerously off the road.
“Shit!” He seized the wheel and bounced back up onto the pavement. His heart pounded hard in his chest. If the symptoms of whatever he’d been exposed to continued as this rate, he did not know that he would be able to complete the last leg of the drive to Vaughn. From where he was, it was still about forty miles off.
Ten minutes later, he wheeled the car to a stop and cursed. Where the hell was that little armpit of a village? He had to have driven right past it, which would not have been hard to do in the deepening dusk.
He walked down the road and scanned the distance, seeing nothing that even remotely resembled a town.
“Fuck this stinking-ass state!” Nicky shouted. Unable to control the grinding in his stomach, he dropped to his knees and vomited. To his horror, thick black fluid spewed from him and into the dirt. He fell backward and scrambled back to the warm white leather of the driver’s seat.
He had to get back to Vaughn immediately. Forget about getting noticed by the cops. Nicky was dying. He could feel something dark wending its way through his blood stream, enveloping him in wretched pain and clouding his thoughts. He put the pedal to the floor and felt the powerful 351 Cleveland motor wrench the car sideways as it thrust forward.
He scratched at his arm beneath its makeshift bandage that he’d torn from a spare tee-shirt in the back seat. Each scratch only intensified the pain.
“What the hell did you do to me?” he said with a cough. “What’d you give me you fat bastard?” Nicky checked himself in the mirror again and gasped. In the back seat, the dead man who had stabbed him sat grinning. The bullet wounds to his chest and head were still visible in the fading light. His suit was blood-smattered and hung crookedly on his torso. Though his dark features were obscured by growing shadow, his smile was unmistakable.
Nicky screamed and let go of the wheel. The car jumped off the side of the road and buried itself in a steep, sandy ditch. He had bashed his head pretty severely on the wheel when the car crashed, and found that blood ran freely down from his forehead. In a groggy instant, he spun with his pistol and aimed into the rear of the car, finding it empty.
He searched the whole interior frantically before realizing that the dead man had only been a hallucination. A much more realistic problem was that the Mustang was stuck. It would remain immobilized without the aid of a tow. His cell phone was useless, as there were only a handful of areas in New Mexico that even had service.
Nicky did the only thing he could think to do. He stuffed the gun in his belt, lifted the duffel bag over his shoulder, and began staggering painfully down the road.
His arm itched so bad that he tore off the tatter of shirt and scraped at it furiously. In the last bit of dying sunlight, he looked in disgusted wonder at the shape of the bloody design that had erupted from his skin like a brand. It was a raised scab of lines arranged in identical pattern to the tattoo that his last victim had worn.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Even through the caked blood Nicky was able to discern the odd configuration that somewhat resembled a fancy tic-tac-toe board.
Even though it was not very heavy, he cursed the awkwardly square duffel bag as he walked. He had no idea what priceless contents rested inside. The men who had given him his instructions had specifically neglected to fill him in on that. At the time, that had been just fine by Nicky, as his biggest concern was how he was going to successfully deal with the assassinations. The transport was small potatoes, in comparison.
Not that he could have even peeked if he had wanted to. The Kevlar-sided bag was locked with a braided steel cable that ran through a series of staggered eyeholes on its top.
The last rays of sunshine faded across the sky in a deep purple hue and were dutifully swallowed by spreading darkness. Nicky limped down the empty road, wincing at the fire spreading in his belly and growing weaker with each passing minute.
Having lost count of his steps, Nicky slowed to examine his watch. He was twenty minutes late for his meeting with Svaroski’s men. He laughed. Surely they would come looking for him when they re
alized that he wasn’t going to be coming. He had their precious cargo, as agreed, and save for a little jostling when the car veered off the road, it was unharmed. Probably. As for him, however, he just hoped that he could last long enough to hitch a ride back to a hospital.
At first, the only sound he could hear was the irregular click of his cowboy boots on the cooling blacktop. After a few minutes, Nicky’s knees buckled and he found himself vomiting again. His guts burned like the furies of hell. Finally, he had nothing left to give, and was left dry-heaving himself into a wheeze.
“Dunno what you did, you rotten asshole, but this ain’t over. Gonna find out who you were. Kill your whole goddamn family for this. You don’t fuck with Nicky Montblanc. This is my show, motherfuc—Aggh !”
He climbed slowly to his feet, letting the bag rest on the ground. With a harsh series of coughs, he began walking again, pulling the duffel behind him by its sturdy strap. It scraped along willingly enough over the gravel and pebbles. “My show.”
And that was when he heard a second pair of footsteps. He stopped abruptly, letting the strap fall to the ground, and reached for the pistol.
“Who’s there?” he said. He spun around, searching the darkness for any signs of life. Turning nearly caused him to lose his balance.
“That you, hombre?”
Still, there was no answer.
“Saw you hitchin’ a ride in my car, didn’t I, asshole? Guess what, my friend. Hate to spoil the party, but you’re dead. An’ I’m not.” For some reason, this struck him as funny and he burst into laughter. “Dead.”
“You’re dead, and I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.” He scratched his arm with the butt of the pistol and then seized the strap of the duffel bag. After another few minutes, he was certain that the accompanying footsteps had returned, just at the threshold of his auditory detection.
Nicky stopped and fired a round into the darkness. The flash lit up the road and the surrounding desert like a bolt of lightning. In that flashbulb glimpse, he saw something large and dark in close proximity just off the side of the blacktop. He squeezed the trigger twice more in the direction of the dark mass. When again revealed, the smoky form swirled in a trail of shadows and dissipated.
His arm was filled with intense pain. He scraped at it with the hot barrel of the gun, which hardly helped at all. A sudden breeze cut across the road. It intensified, throwing gravel into Nicky’s face and stinging his cuts.
“What—”
And then a solid wisp brushed by his left cheek. He pointed wildly and loosed four more bullets into the night. Through strained eyes he saw the spinning blanket of blackness as it swooped down to him. In terror, he fired the remainder of the clip.
There was a moment of soft impact as the wispy form collided with him. Nicky screamed, fell to the ground, and convulsed violently. Something heavy shifted in his stomach. Whatever dark, hallucination-causing passenger had been growing inside of him had set itself free, charging rampantly through every cell of his body. His arms and torso shook and trembled involuntarily; legs kicked wildly into the air as he was consumed.
And then as suddenly as it had started, Nicky Montblanc’s body went slack and still. His eyelids drifted closed.
“Shit, Remy. Stop the car.”
“Is that—”
The black Cadillac slowed to a stop, thirty miles south of the city of Vaughn.
“That’s him.”
“What’s he doing wandering around in the middle of the goddamn desert?”
“He’s got the bag.” The man stepped out of the car and called out over the top of the open door. “Nicky. What the hell happened? Jesus, man. Your shirt’s covered in blood.”
With an innocent smile on his face, Nicky walked assuredly toward the car. Despite the drying crust of blood on his shirt and jacket, and the fact that he was traveling the long desert road on foot, he actually looked to be in perfectly good spirits. “Hiya boys.” He hefted the duffel bag from his left hand to his right, and stuck it out for Svaroski’s man to grab. The motion revealed a glimpse of a dark, intricately-lined tattoo on the inside of his forearm.
“Are you alright, kid?”
“Never been better,” Nicky said with a wink. And indeed he did look fine, perhaps even better than fine, but the man would have sworn he saw something fiery flicker in the depths of Nicky’s eyes. “Just had a little car trouble.”
Spirit House
Sawdust spilled across the pristine marble table as Donald pried the top off the bulky shipping crate. Thinking only about the magnificent treasure that awaited him, packed carefully away inside, he could not have cared less about making a mess.
If all had gone smoothly, the precious contents of the box would be as stunningly preserved as when he had last seen them carefully packed into the container a fortnight prior.
Grinning from ear to ear, he saw that indeed his packaging had been sufficient. The bubble wrap pulled away to reveal the sharp sloping points that adorned the peaks of the miniature house. Its spires drifted upward in wispy curls that were a combination of flame and cloud: the easily recognizable classic Thai design.
Like all spirit houses, this one was without windows or doors. It was a scale-model structure that was comprised of a few open rooms and windows that allowed the viewer to see completely through the house on every side. Its teak wood was lustrous but incredibly dark, having been well-preserved indoors since the day it of its construction.
Donald Martindale smiled broadly. While he already possessed his own impressive share of beautiful artwork and artifacts that had been acquired through means of sub-legal trading, this piece was something special. It was something unique. It carried with it a dark beauty that went far beyond simple woodwork. The house itself almost breathed with the life of ages. Donald had thought just that the moment he had first laid eyes on it.
Standing two-feet high, the black wooden structure took up most of the surface of Donald’s dining room table. The immaculate condition of the house was amazing, given its moderately ancient age. There were no chips or scratches, and relatively little fading of the wood. The dealer in Taipei had appraised its construction to have been somewhere in the middle sixteenth-century.
“Oh, you are a beauty, aren’t you?”
He could still hardly believe the price that the dealer had asked. Not as much an expert in the value of Thai artifacts as he was in Chinese, Donald still knew that the spirit house could easily have sold for double what he had paid. The condition alone made it worth a small fortune. Not to mention the intricate carvings and inscriptions that were the evidence of months of laborious construction. The dealer had seemed anxious and almost glad to be rid of it, even offering to pay for shipment, which was almost unheard of for an overseas transaction.
He had, for a moment, considered turning the piece right back around and putting it on the auction block. After all, Donald was a business man. But something about the house called out to him in a way that begged to be placed among the trove reserved for his most treasured of possessions, which was precisely the space where he had decided to make its home.
At least for a little while. After all, nothing can be permanently reserved in an antique collector’s world, even one’s personal archive. Every collection piece has a price.
Donald turned the house carefully to the side to further inspect it. The wood was warm to the touch, a pleasing contrast to the chill of his air-conditioned living room. He peered into the windows of the nearest rooms, glad to note how clean everything looked. The spirit house was so neat inside he thought amusedly that he ought to double-check that a miniature housekeeper wasn’t keeping residence within. He kept rotating the house, feeling no sense at all of buyer’s remorse, when he noticed something inside the structure that he had not seen before agreeing to purchase it in the dismal light of the antique dealer’s back storage room. A square wooden box about the size of a roll of coins sat tightly against the wall of the house’s backmost room. It was a tiny li
ttle footlocker, the same grain and color as the rest of the home.
“Well, blow me down, matey. Be this a treasure chest?” Donald said giddily. He reached a hand in through the window and found that the lid of the chest lifted without resistance.
A cool draft suddenly swelled against his face, as if a miniature air-conditioning unit had been switched on inside the spirit house. He looked up at the overhead air-conditioning register and made a mental note to turn down the thermostat once he was done inspecting his new acquisition. Donald continued to paw at the container. His fingers scraped across the rough but flimsy surface of the box’s contents. Donald withdrew his hand to see a folded piece of yellow parchment. He knew better than to get too grabby without using a pair of cotton gloves and tweezers, given the age of the antique, but his excitement got the better of him. His own idiocy was forgiven as the parchment was miraculously intact and firm. The uneven scroll of paper did not look hundreds of years old. It looked like it could have been rolled up and stuck in the box only a few months ago. His heart sank a little.
Frowning, he said, “Fantastic. The damn thing has instructions.” He checked the box once more for miniature treasure before returning to the scrap of paper. It had been written upon in scrawling ink that was barely legible. Or, at least he assumed it was legible, as it was written in Asian characters that were foreign to Donald. And that was no surprise given that he was an affluent artifact collector, not a scholar.
“That figures.”
Donald casually tossed the piece of parchment onto the front porch of the tiny house. “Have to get it to Carl.” Carl was Donald’s long-time friend and most trusted advisor in the matters of acquiring new pieces for his collection. Though good with books and numbers, Carl probably wouldn’t have been able to guess any better at the paper’s inscription than Donald. He would, however, know at least one person who could. After all, it was his business to know people that knew such things. Clients paid Carl very well to ensure confidence about their purchases, which included making sure that the records stayed squeaky clean. Paper trails were not welcomed in the world of black-market artifact trading. But he wouldn’t charge Donald for finding a quick translation. They were better buddies than that. And, chances were, the damn thing was some kind of fortune cookie thank you note from the greasy shop owner he’d bought the thing from two weeks ago.
Chasing the Sandman Page 15