He clamps a hand around the wound, trying not to scream. Color drains out of his vision.
It takes a few minutes for it to come back. A few more for him to shake off the pain enough to glance at the cut. A deep slash by the looks of it, blood soaking his sweater at multiple locations. He re-clamps his hand and squints around the room, hunting for something to staunch the flow.
Dama gazelle, Amur leopard, Cape buffalo—nothing to sop blood.
Then it dawns on him. Dama, Amur, and Cape are all species on the endangered list. He glares at Walker’s head.
“And just when I was starting to like you.”
Lion unclamps his hand and pushes up his sleeve to check the damage. The jacket is shredded, the sweater ruined, the arm not much better. A long scimitar slash from wrist to elbow, thankfully not bone-deep.
Still bleeding, though.
He looks around again, needing something to press against the wound. Finds a second wall of tartan and carnage: bear, mountain lion, seven kinds of deer, desk, armchair, Winchester in gun bag. Finally, a zebra-hide pillow on a black leather couch.
Grabbing the pillow, he presses hide to cut and sits down on the couch to wait. He tastes puke in his mouth, his arm throbs. “I want hazard pay,” he tells the head.
Then he remembers asking Penelope to double his day rate.
“I want more hazard pay.”
It takes about ten minutes to calm the wound. When the throb dials down to semi-manageable, he turns his attention back to the almost empty wall. Beside Walker, only a stuffed African lion remains, perched on a heavy stone pedestal. Adult male. The irony not lost on him.
He looks from Walker to the lion and back again. Another endangered species, but, thinking it through, not everything Walker’s slaughtered is on that list. The itemized bill Lion found on the kitchen table. Black rhino and Iberian lynx are off the list. Now, they’re on another list.
No más. No more. Extinct.
Glares at Walker.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
But dead men tell no tales and, eventually, Lion pries himself out of the couch to finish the job. Crossing to the corner, he attempts to lift the lion, but it’s got some heft and his bum arm can’t get a grip. All he can manage is shoulder against mane and a four-foot slide across the hardwood floor.
Far enough to be out of his field of vision.
Contemplating the wall again, the only thing left to see is Robert Walker, dead center, tartan wallpaper, and the occasional nail where a head once hung. His stomach feels a little better.
Lion decides he wants the nausea all the way gone, but his joint got lost somewhere midpuke. It’s dragon box and the familiar origami instead. He clicks his lighter, pulls smoke into his lungs, pushes off the floor, and walks over to look directly into the hazel of Walker’s eyes.
Not what he was expecting.
From this close, the eyes don’t look terrified or enraged. So Walker didn’t fight the person who killed him? Not drugged, either. Too clear around the irises, not enough pupil dilation. So he was conscious when it happened? More than that. The emotion that Lion reads in Walker’s eyes is the exact same emotion he noticed in the photos: remorse. Pure and deep. Lion is absolutely sure of it. Robert Walker died sorry about something.
Clicking into journalist mode, he grabs his notebook and lists all the species in the room. Adds the two from the bill in the kitchen. Then, beneath them, underlined: Robert Walker felt remorse.
He takes another drag and stares at the words, trying to find signal in noise. And then he feels it: a change in atmospheric pressure, space to breathe, a tingle of hope—and not sure where that’s coming from.
He glances back at the wall, sees the prep school haircut and the ache of sorry in his eyes. Data bit finds data bit. If a man like Walker can feel remorse, maybe, just maybe, there’s a little hope after all.
Since taking this job, it’s the first future he can feel.
There’s another sensation on top of that feeling, more like a lack of sensation, a gap. It’s the sense that something’s missing. Not an em-tracker’s skill, a journalist’s skill. But definitely missing.
But what?
Arctic’s crime scene photos are still in his bag, the rag weave envelope wedged between padded sides of computer sleeve. He slides it out, flips it over, and lifts the flap. Oxygen-saturated plastic pulses, illuminating canary-yellow fingerprint. He puts his finger on the square. The flap, with a soft click, opens.
Sliding out the photos, he finds his answer. The end table with the silver straw and silver powder is absent from the room. Double-checks the images to be sure. Sees Lucite in close-up, five silver lines, two already inhaled, three thick with powder. And the table is supposed to rest on the far side of the black leather couch, near the buffalo head, atop a zebra-skin rug.
Lion puts the photos under his arm and walks over to the buffalo. Careful of the horns, he crouches down and slides the head out of the way. Wavy black and white stripes and four indentations in the fur—where an end table once sat.
He pinches the cherry on his joint, sets it on the ground, then triple-checks the photos. His hunch is confirmed. Lion opens his notebook and starts writing: Crime scene preserved, but end table missing. No silver powder, no silver straw. Stolen? Stolen by someone working for Sir Richard?
Lion glances around the room, the pile of animal heads, the now bare wall, the bloodstained zebra-hide pillow. He’s made a mess but isn’t going to bother to clean up. Let Sir Richard explain it to the cops. Then he remembers.
Sir Richard’s not the type to explain.
NOT THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES
Lion almost makes it all the way back to the truck before the adrenaline wears off.
Almost.
Exiting the house, he jostles his wound on the doorjamb. A sharp pain shoots wrist to elbow and the nausea comes back full force. Down the steps and onto the garden path on hazy autopilot. Bile rises in his throat, forcing him to stop and catch his breath about ten feet from the SUV.
“You look like you’re going to puke,” says Bo, watching him through the driver’s side window.
“Done puking,” through gritted teeth.
“You’re bleeding.”
He notices his sleeve is still pushed up, the cut clearly visible and starting to leak.
“Gored by a dead buffalo.”
Bo reaches under the dash to push something. Lion hears a hard click and then a whisper from the rear of the truck. A hidden drawer slides out from beneath the back end, red metal sides, clear polyurethane lid. He takes a step closer to get a better view. Beneath the lid, the shiny red nylon of a commercial first aid kit, the kind available at any camping supply store.
“I’m going to take a look,” says Bo. Not a question.
He opens his door, climbs out, and walks to the back of the SUV. Out of the drawer comes the first aid kit. Out of the kit come a couple of sterile wipes and an oversized syringe, red plastic with a black cap. Bo wipes his hands with one of the wipes, unscrews the cap, and turns to face Lion.
“Put your pack down and give me your arm.”
Lion bends over to set it on the lawn, wobbles as he stands back up, then extends his arm. Bo grips the syringe in his teeth and inspects the cut with clinical disinterest. Teasing apart the skin at the point of impact, probing, trying to see how deep it goes. A meticulous procedure. Lion gets the feeling he’s done this before.
“You had training?”
“I’m an Eagle Scout.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, thinking about the bar code tattoo on the back of Bo’s neck, “you’re an Eagle Scout.”
“Twenty-one merit badges. Seriously. Do you want to see me tie some knots?” Bo tears open the other wipe. “This will sting.”
Then he rubs the cloth over the cut, sopping up blood, cleaning it thoroughly. Lion wobbles again but stays silent. Setting aside the wipe, Bo takes the syringe out of his mouth and passes it over.
“You�
�re going to apply this to the cut. I’m gonna push the sides together. It’s gonna hurt.”
Lion looks at him.
“Then it’s going to stop hurting.”
Bo wraps his hands around Lion’s forearm and, using thumbs and palm heels, pushes the edges together. Lion grits his teeth.
“Put it on thick, an even line.”
Depressing the plunger exudes a translucent yellow cream, like a wax-paper inchworm, flecked with shiny blue particles. He tries to slather the wound. The ache in his arm starts to burn, then turns cold, icy cold, searing. But soon the sensation vanishes completely, almost as quickly as it came. Instead, a warm glow in his toes, ankles, legs, spreading toward his chest and a smile on his face.
“It feels,” says Lion, wide-eyed in surprise, “really, really good.”
“Low-temperature superglue mixed with long-lasting fentanyl nano-crystals.”
The cream has hardened into a tight seal, and he can’t stop smiling.
“It’s about five hundred times more potent than morphine,” explains Bo. “You’re gonna be pretty high, at least for the next few hours.”
“What happens in a few hours?”
Bo grabs his sling-pack from the lawn and passes it over. “In a few hours, you’re gonna want to smoke more of what’s in that dragon box.”
“Thanks,” taking it back.
“Part of the service.”
He lifts his arm. “And thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Lion turns toward the SUV and waves at the back door. The sensor doesn’t read, the door doesn’t move.
He tries again.
“I think you have to get closer.”
Lion double-takes. He’s still standing in the middle of the lawn, ten feet from the SUV. So five hundred times more powerful than morphine and heavy impact on depth perception. He attempts a step closer, but his feet don’t work like he remembers.
“Not…”
Not what? Open for business? Working? Lion can’t recall what he was trying to say. Then it hits him.
“Not the opiate of the masses.”
And a wobble.
“I got you.”
Bo’s hand on his elbow, steady until Lion’s tucked into the backseat.
“Back to the hotel?”
“Please.”
Bo drops the car into gear and starts down the driveway. As they approach the street, Lion sees a flash of silver metal from a thicket of green. The mailbox, tucked between bushes. It reminds him of the silver container he found beneath the desk, the cylinder he thought was a pen holder.
Not a pen holder.
“We need to go back.”
Bo looks at him in the rearview. “Fentanyl.”
“Yeah?”
“Walking’s not the best idea right now.”
“Agreed, but it’s important.”
Bo nods and reverses back to the top of the driveway, parking under the same grandfather oak. He climbs out and steadies Lion up the path to the front porch. Pirate key into pirate lock, the panel slips open, the code, the other key. The door slides into itself, and both step inside.
Auto-whoosh as it closes behind them.
“Step away from the airlock, Bo.”
“What?”
“2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Fentanyl, my friend, just fentanyl.”
Lion sees himself in the mirror again, worse than before—if that’s even possible.
“Where are we going?” asks Bo. “I think I should steer.”
The words seem to arrive at Lion’s ears a few seconds late, so his experience is mouth moving without sound, like a Kung Fu classic with bad lip-synch. It takes him a second to crack the code, then decides Bo might be right.
“The trophy room. Off the hallway at the end of the great room and down the stairs.”
Which they manage without incident.
Lion leaves Bo by the door and makes his way over to Walker’s desk. He picks up the silver cylinder. Maybe three inches long and an inch wide. He unscrews the plastic lid and sees nothing inside.
“Tsunami?”
Lion looks up, sees Bo pointing at the pile of animal heads.
“Carnage,” he agrees, then gestures toward Walker’s head, “and this guy’s an asshole.” A twinge of guilt penetrates his opiate haze. “I’d clean it up, but I’ll start puking again.”
“That’s true, huh? I heard about it on a podcast. Didn’t know if it was just the guy they were interviewing or all em-trackers.”
“I can puke again. It’s like the licking pug—I’m used to it.”
“Do what you came to do,” says Bo, walking over to lift the buffalo head off the floor.
Lion looks back into the cylinder and notices it’s not completely empty. There’s a tiny wedge of crystal pinned to the bottom. He taps the container against his palm, dislodging flecks of silver powder, like miniature snowflakes made from tinfoil. Maybe enough for a mass spectrometer to analyze, which would be useful, he concludes, if he knew anyone with a mass spectrometer.
He turns his attention back to the container. The clear cap looks like half a bullet. An oversized bullet. Suddenly, he knows what he’s holding. All that’s missing is a disco beat and a silver spoon.
A snuff container.
A clatter beside him and Lion turns to see Bo failing to pick an antelope off the floor.
“Careful of the horns,” he says.
Feeling a flash of heat against his palm, Lion glances down to see one side of the cylinder shiver. A bright white light that quickly fades, leaving behind a glittering question mark, like dying fireworks, visible for only a second. Lion wraps his palm around the container again. Moments later, he feels more heat, sees the flash again, and the shimmer.
He also notices a second pulse of light from inside the container, but it’s gone before he can get a good look.
This time, when he wraps his palm around the cylinder, he stares down the barrel. It’s the same shiver, but on the inside of the container, near the bottom. Hard to say, but definitely not a question mark.
More like writing. Short words in cursive script. A phrase? A name?
Carrying the container over to Walker’s desk, Lion snaps on an Arteluce lamp, adjusting the shade until the light falls straight down the chamber. Smooth silver on all sides, and nothing more. To figure this out, he needs a jeweler’s loupe, special tools, skills he doesn’t have.
“Know a good jeweler?” he asks Bo.
“No.” Thinking a moment. “Penelope would.”
Lion slips the snuff vial into his pocket, then catches sight of his joint, on the floor beside the desk, where he left it. A little unsteady on the way down, but slots it between his lips on the first try and manages to stand back up. Bo glances his way at the click of his lighter.
A long inhale, a long exhale, holds the joint out. “Interested?”
“Ghost Trainwreck #69,” says Bo, crossing the room and taking the joint. “My brother, of course I’m interested.”
NOT A RILKEAN
Fentanyl and Ghost Trainwreck and Lion falls dead asleep before they’re even out of Montauk. He’s down for an hour and again does not dream. When he wakes, it’s to a light drizzle, dark skies, and two lanes of empty freeway. Maybe east of East Quogue, but can’t say for sure.
Back upright and his vision starts to clear. It seems like he’s not quite as high as before, but does that acid-head test, checking the lines on his palm to see what’s moving.
Yup, still high.
Despite his altered state, he feels like doing something. Grabs his Moleskine and a pen. Bo notices the movement, asks if he’d like a bottle of water, maybe some music.
“Music,” he decides, “would be great.”
“Do you have a preference?”
“Surprise me.”
Bo clicks a button on the steering wheel. Lion hears the slow build of an Egyptian melody, dubstep stutter bass and a soft accordion wail, like King Tut got lost on the
bayou. Hip-hop lyrics: “You thought I was dead; I was living the questions; just hidden from sight, Sir Richard’s deception.”
He knows that voice. “This is Shiz.”
“Yeah,” says Bo, “unreleased.”
Lion listens to a few more verses, but already he has questions about Shiz living the questions. Richard said he started those Rilkean rumors—was he lying? Why would he lie about that? Then he considers another possibility, that Shiz became a Rilkean after Richard started those rumors. Fiction becoming fact, like Slenderman. Is this more emergent storytelling?
Too many questions to hold in his head.
Lion opens his notebook and starts listing puzzle pieces. Arctic, Shiz, the snuff container engraved with Rilkean symbols. All of them mean something to someone; none of them mean anything to him.
He can feel the edge of frustration poke through the fentanyl. An overload of questions that he can’t answer. A grind in his teeth. Lorenzo would tell him to go get laid. Not really an option right now. He decides what he really needs is sustenance. And caffeine.
“Any chance we could stop for coffee, maybe a sandwich?”
Bo punches another button on the steering wheel and a razor screen rises from the middle of the dashboard, showing a map of the old Montauk Highway marked with restaurants. “There’s Cajun takeout, pretty good too, if you can wait twenty minutes.”
“I can wait.”
They pass under a couple of traffic lights and through a couple of towns: interchangeable cute with the occasional strip mall, the way they do it in the Hamptons. The Prince Shiz track ends and the next one cues. Superfly trumpets mixed with Dre-era fuzz tones. Bo’s head bobs a little harder and Lion glimpses the question mark tattoo on the back of his neck. He decides this is one question he might actually be able to answer.
“Bo,” he asks, “are you a Rilkean? Is that a rude question?”
“My tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“Not rude, not a Rilkean,” says Bo, taking off his cap and running a hand through his hair. “I used to wear it longer, to hide it.”
“If you’re not a Rilkean…?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long ride.”
Last Tango in Cyberspace Page 7
