I was so juiced on adrenaline, I barely felt my legs move as I walked inside the dressing room, which doubled as a storeroom. To my right, a small area was partitioned off as a green room with a leather sofa and a coffee table hosting a ravaged sandwich plate. Empty beer bottles stood in a circle. Three potted ficus trees were a scraggly forest dying for light. A row of four filing cabinets in the middle of the floor were a wall of privacy.
On the other side of the room, six chairs sat in front of the dressing table built into the wall, posed before a six-foot rectangular mirror framed by darkened lightbulbs. Only the overhead lights were on.
Near the dressing table, a closed door had a unisex bathroom sign.
I craned my ears, but I didn’t hear a sound from the bathroom. Unless the bathroom had an exit to a room on the other side, I couldn’t see a way out. If Spider was the one who’d come in, he might not be able to get out without passing by me.
But if it wasn’t Spider, I was wasting precious seconds.
No time to wait for the sound of a flushing toilet. I rapped on the bathroom door.
“Anyone in here, mon?” Clarence Love called.
I tried to turn the knob. The bathroom door was locked.
“Oh hey, sorry,” Clarence Love said. I slurred my words, as if I were tipsy. “Tryin’ to get away from dat line. I thought only the ladies had to wait!” I faked a self-amused laugh.
No answer. My heart pounded in my fingertips on the cold metal knob.
“I gotta take a piss, mon,” Clarence Love said.
Tingling hairs on my forearm made me look behind me. A shadow moved in a corner of the large dressing-room mirror, a brown arm so fast it was a blur.
A click, then blackness. The room was as dark as a tomb. Even the streetlights outside couldn’t penetrate the tinted windows.
Clothing rustled toward me, and I dove to the floor. My broom handle clanked loudly against the side of a filing cabinet, like a flare to pinpoint my location.
Spider had chosen darkness. That implied comfort. Familiarity. In the dark, I was dead.
My mind snapped me a photograph of the room from my first glance, and I remembered a small panel on the wall near the door. I thrust my broom’s business end at the wall, guessing where it should land. I pushed upward, trying to find the light switch.
Precious light, on my left. The ring of lights around the mirror weren’t as bright as the overheads, but they came on in time for me to see Spider’s knife. Spider was only the shadow behind a slender eight-inch blade.
“Shit—” I twisted, swinging the broom toward Spider. It hit his left side, and he gave a grunt of surprise. He backed up, and I had enough time to scramble to my feet.
At my angle, I didn’t have time to get to the door.
“Fuck! What’s goin’ on, mon?” Clarence Love said, pretending ignorance.
That was the end of our conversation. A terrible scream slowed my blood, and I hoped it wasn’t mine. But it was Spider’s declaration of war. He lunged, and only my broom handle kept my arm from getting slashed to the bone.
Spider was fast, maybe 20 percent faster than the kid in South Africa. The fastest man I’d seen in a very long time. He parried and evaded, always spiraling in, trying to get close enough to stab. I had no clean shot, and caught only glimpses of him in the darkness, enough to get the hell out of the way, but not to counter effectively.
Don’t be hypnotized, Cliff had warned me.
I scrambled away from the door, my only escape.
“Who sent you?” Spider rasped. “What do you want? Who are you?”
My disguise had held up! Spider didn’t know who I was.
My luck ran out as soon as it had arrived. He shifted right, and as I followed he managed to grab hold of the handle for a moment. His left leg flashed up and fell on the handle, breaking it in half. I held on to the short end and ran, hoping to lose him at the filing cabinets. Hot pain raked across my lower back, and I yelled. Spider had drawn blood—it felt like a shallow slash, not a puncture. Hot wetness dampened the back of my shirt. Shit shit shit shit.
I couldn’t leave my back open to him, and there was nowhere to run.
Cornered, I faced him again, armed with fourteen inches of broken broom. I fought to calm my breathing. All right. I’m not dead yet. He’s faster, and has the better weapon. I’d studied Escrima, Filipino stick fighting, but I’d never faced anyone like Spider.
I was an actor to the end. “Why you killing me, mon?” Clarence Love said, dazed, while Tennyson Hardwick’s mind raced for a move.
Spider sprang at me like a cat, and I struck out with my stick, knowing he would parry and riposte, or even attack the wrist. Or feint high and kick low: I’d seen his kicks, and they were almost as fast as his hands. If I didn’t find a defense, I was going to experience a few moments of intense, significant pain. And then, nothing at all, ever again.
A loud POP behind us sounded like a fantasy of my cooling brain. But I didn’t imagine the drywall that chipped away from the wall behind us, and a fresh hole. A gunshot!
In a blink, Spider pivoted out of sight behind the filing cabinets. I expected the next gunshot to put a hole in my chest.
“Where is he?” Marsha called.
Oh thank God.
“Filing cabinets!” I warned her. Maybe it was Clarence’s voice, maybe it was me.
Marsha appeared in front of me, her active eyes searching for movement. She had a tiny gun I’d never seen in her steady, two-handed isosceles stance.
A clattering near the waiting area turned Marsha’s head. Too late, we both realized that Spider had thrown the sandwich platter against the mirror, hard enough to shatter the glass. Sandwich wedges rained down while beer bottles crashed to the floor. While we tracked the platter, Spider reached the door with a speed that looked supernatural.
“Door!” we said in unison. He opened the door in a deft motion, and his body seemed to squeeze through six inches of space. We could only watch the weighted door close behind him.
I got within three steps of him, in time to hear a scraping sound from the other side. I tugged down on the latch and tried to push the door open, but it gave only half an inch before it held tight. Spider had barred the door, probably with the mop.
“He’s locked us in!” I said.
“I’m fine, but we’re locked in!” Marsha said. “We’ve lost our visual!”
But Marsha wasn’t looking at me, or talking to me. Palm cupped her right ear. A microphone in her ear canal. Probably invisibly flesh colored. Grandma was in the room with us, another one of Marsha’s secrets.
Marsha and I combined our weight to fling it against the doors, trying to break out. Once. Twice. Three times. I was sure I was about to dislocate my shoulder when the door gave way, and I heard the mop fall to the floor. Spider hadn’t had time to slide it far enough into place to secure it.
We raced around the corner, nearly barreling into two men and a woman laughing, in a huddle. They gawked at us, their laughter stopped cold.
“You’re bleeding . . . ,” the woman began, concerned.
Marsha leveled her gun at the group. “Spider—which way did he go?” Her voice was in a bad mood, ready to pull the trigger.
“Who?”
“The drummer.”
Three blank, terrified faces stared at us, and the woman clung to the nearest man.
“The . . . d-drummer?” one of the men said. My gut told me that somehow they hadn’t seen him.
I ran for the red EXIT sign fifteen yards from us. “Take the front!” I told Marsha.
A sign on the door warned that opening it would set off the fire alarm, but no alarm sounded when I ran outside. Cool night air bathed my sweating face.
By then, more than a dozen cars were parked outside the rear door. No one was in sight, not even a stray smoker. No screeching tires betrayed an escape.
Without realizing it at first, I was whispering to myself. “No, no, no, no, no . . .”
I
fell to the ground to stare at the gravel beneath the cars. It was too dark to see, so I carefully scurried from one to the next. Next, I peeked through the windows of the parked cars, looking for movement, my ears open for a surprise attack.
None came. There was nothing and no one.
“No . . . no . . . NO!” I wasn’t whispering anymore.
Spider had melted into the night.
TWENTY-ONE
WEDNESDAY
2:15 A.M.
The club shut down Afrika Night early, by one thirty, and Marsha and I watched the last of the patrons reluctantly leave—none of them Spider.
The police had been called, thanks to Marsha’s gun incident, but she remade herself with a change of clothes and a horrible Jheri curl wig so she could float in and out of the club. Even with a light jacket to cover my injury, I stayed outside in the shadows to avoid LAPD uniforms. I couldn’t get detained again. My back throbbed from the memory of Spider’s knife.
The band had played a partial second set without Spider, but the police presence thinned the crowds even before the owners announced the club was closing. I questioned patrons and employees as they left, and no one had seen Spider since the break at eleven.
Two people out of the dozens I talked to could confirm that Spider’s first name was Mhambi, although no one could tell me his surname, or where he lived. When I wasn’t with Marsha, I asked the bouncer and regulars about the Asian man I’d seen. The bouncer said Yeah, we get some Chinese and Koreans in here, but he didn’t tell me anything that could help me understand what Marsha had been up to when we were supposed to be watching Spider.
I avoided thinking about Marsha while I searched for Spider. No point. But as the street emptied and the crowds disappeared, it was hard to think about anything else. Our mission had failed, and she was holding out on me. I didn’t know if one fact had anything to do with the other. I didn’t know a damn thing about her, except how well she lied.
By the time Marsha walked up to me after her last tour of the club, I was shaking in frustration and rage. Blame it on sleep deprivation. Marsha’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear anything except my heartbeat thundering between my ears.
“Who is he?” I said quietly.
“Who?”
“That Asian guy you were pretending not to notice.”
Her face narrowed with confusion. “Wait—what? You’ve lost me.”
“Before the break, he was listening to the band. You took a picture. Who was he?”
Marsha’s face was all confusion, like the people she’d scared shitless with her gun.
I went on, my voice chilled. “Tell me to my face you weren’t tracking an Asian man. You remember: When you lied and said you were going to the bathroom?”
Marsha hooked her arm inside mine as she settled beside me against the car. Her soft eyes met mine, not blinking. “The only person I was tracking in there was Spider, just like you,” she said evenly. “Ten . . . where’s this coming from? I’m worried about you—”
“You lying BITCH!” I pounded my fist against the convertible top of my Corvette, two inches from Marsha’s head. I’ve never come closer to hitting a woman. That was one of the rare times I’d uttered the epithet that rarely crossed my lips or my thoughts.
My shout turned heads. A couple of well-built brothers in mud-cloth prints walked in our direction, ready to intervene on Marsha’s behalf. I took a step back from Marsha, holding my hands up as if she’d pulled her gun on me. Maybe I was lucky she hadn’t.
“It’s okay!” Marsha called to her rescuers. “He’s my husband. He’s a little drunk!”
Marsha tugged on my arm playfully, walking me toward the passenger seat. “No driving for you tonight!” she said cheerfully.
The men were still watching us, not quite buying Marsha’s act, so I climbed into the car. Marsha followed, and we sat without moving until the men walked back to their Mustang and drove off. Nobody in their right mind wants to leap into a domestic problem.
Inside the car, Marsha’s smell sickened me. I remembered my borrowed Beretta in the glove compartment and wondered what she would say if I pressed it against her temple. If she didn’t shoot me first.
“I’m pissed off, too,” Marsha said gently. “He got away. You learn to roll with it, Ten.”
Rage boiled in me again. My hands clawed at my kneecaps. “I . . . saw . . . you,” I said. “Get it? I’m not a fool.”
“Nobody’s saying you’re a fool! How long has it been since you slept, Ten? Don’t go batshit on me. The op went south. It happens. We have a first name for Spider now. It’s a common name in South Africa, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll start—”
“Get out of my car.”
Marsha looked at me, newly stunned. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You are not going to leave me here with my dick in the wind . . . in Culver City!”
“Lady, if you had a dick, I’d rip it out by the root. Get out.” I leaned toward her earpiece. “Hear that, asshole? She needs a ride!”
Marsha pressed her hand to her ear with an angry stare before she opened her car door. “Grow the hell up, Ten. And you’re welcome for saving your life,” she said, climbing out. “Do everyone a favor—go get some sleep.”
She slammed the door.
I closed my eyes. I was too weary to curse, or even to feel.
I had nowhere else to go, except home.
* * *
Tennyson confronts Marsha
http://www.simonandschuster.com/multimedia?video=87313461001
* * *
3 A.M.
Dad had waited for me in his living-room recliner, but he’d fallen asleep. His gentle snores followed me as I crept into the kitchen. After the din at Club Skylight, the silence in my house was surreal and deafening. I glanced toward the stairs, but they looked like Mount Kilimanjaro, so I changed course.
I tried to be quiet as I turned on the kitchen faucet at a low stream and washed my lower-back injury with a clean cloth from the drawer. Marsha had examined me soon after Spider vanished, deciding that the bleeding had stopped, but it was an ugly gash—six inches long and an eighth of an inch deep, from my kidney to beyond my spine. If Spider had struck deeper, I would have spent a quiet evening at the coroner’s office.
Dad had gotten so good without his cane that I didn’t hear him until he was in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing the faded LAPD sweatpants he liked to sleep in.
“Damn,” Dad said, flicking on the kitchen light to see the blood. “You found him?”
I nodded. “At a nightclub in Culver City.” I paused, my tongue almost too heavy for the task. “He got away. All we got is a first name. In other words, nothing.”
“He make you?”
My face was still disguised. The glue on my skin itched like hell.
“Maybe. Probably. Or maybe he just doesn’t like being followed.”
Both of us mulled that over while the refrigerator broke into its tuneless hum. If Spider had guessed that I was the man he’d met on the football field, I had jeopardized the drop-off again. The whole way home, I’d braced for a frantic call from Sofia.
I dabbed alcohol on my back, and it felt like liquid fire. I gritted my teeth, but part of me reveled in the pain. Pain was a relief from everything else I was feeling.
“Gonna need stitches, son.”
“Not now, Dad. What’s the FBI saying about Paki?” The birth father was my last lead.
“Nothing since ten. Still in interview. Maybe they held him overnight. I prolly won’t hear back till morning.”
“I can’t just sit on my hands.”
“Think that’s best now,” Dad said. “Don’t you?”
He didn’t say I told you so, but he didn’t have to. Dad left the kitchen doorway, and I thought he might be finished with talking to me for the night. But he came back with a large first aid kit. “Marcela keeps this for me,” he said. “Come on to the living room, Tennyson.”
My neck was exhausted, so I kept my head and eyes low.
Marcela shuffled out of Dad’s bedroom in my father’s rumpled terry cloth robe, sleepy. She didn’t always sleep over, but now she did more and more.
“Dios—what happened?” she said, alarmed.
“Cut his back,” Dad said. “He’s all right.”
Marcela was a trained nurse, but she hung back to let Dad finish his work. Some jobs are for parents alone. “Ten, I could heat up some food . . . ,” she said.
I shook my head. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, but food was a foreign concept as a harrowing truth settled across my spirit: Of course Spider had recognized me! He wouldn’t have tried to kill a random intruder. Marsha had said Kingdom of Heaven liked to make an example of families who didn’t play by their rules.
I might have sealed Nandi’s death.
“Doesn’t need food,” I heard my father say, like a dream. “He needs rest.”
I didn’t make the decision to lie down on the sofa, but my body improvised without me. My eyes had battled with me while I drove home, and I finally gave them their way. I could have wrapped myself in that darkness for years.
Finally, I grasped the notion of wanting to stay in bed and never get up. My agent, Len, had tried to explain depression to me after his divorce, when he popped prescription pills like candy to get through his day. I wanted to call Len up and apologize to him for every bullshit pep talk I’d ever given him. I wanted to apologize to Chela for trying to convince her that control and comfort were anything except illusions. Delusions.
The world was a house of horrors. End of story. The rest was bullshit.
To me, only seconds had passed when I opened my eyes and saw Chela sitting in my father’s lounger, watching me sleep. Dad and Marcela were nowhere in sight.
From Cape Town with Love Page 25