by Mark Budz
Rexx shook awkwardly, aware of the man’s lean, ropy hand in his soft pudgy one.
He didn’t belong here.
“Quiet fella,” the bandy-legged man remarked. “Them’s the ones you gotta look out fer.” He spat brown tobacco juice. “Real hell raisers.”
His father cuffed Rexx on the back of the head. “That’s the plan.”
“You hungry?” their host said as he led them in the direction of a big two-story building. It was garishly lit and looked like a saloon out of an old western.
“Just for some action,” his father said.
“Got us a cock fight.”
“That’s as good a place as any to start.” His father rubbed eager hands together.
Rexx followed them down a path, past a high-fenced corral with lichenboard bleachers, to a barn. The tall doors were open a crack. Inside, Rexx could hear raucous shouting. Cheers, curses, and bellowed exhortations. The interior had been decorated to resemble a hotel or brothel. The stalls had been converted into private rooms with doors. Red velour drapes festooned the walls. Several stuffed, high-backed chairs had their backs pressed against the walls. An enormous crystal chandelier dangled from the bare rafters.
All but one of the doors was closed. In the stall, a trapdoor and steps led down to a sweaty, dust-filled basement rank with cigar smoke, the musty smell of leather, dry rot, cologne, and the sharp copper taste of freshly spilled blood. A grid of overhead biolum panels blazed down on a square hole in the middle of the cramped room.
The pit was five meters across and two meters deep. A thin layer of sand covered the floor. Shrill squawks punctuated by the frantic flapping of wings erupted from the hole. The men peering over the rail at the edge leaned in, temporarily blocking his view. Feathery shadows strobed against their ruddy exuberance, animating them with a violent, demonic flicker.
There were no women in the room. It was men only. Most of them big, just like his father.
“Over there.” His father pointed, dragged Rexx through a breach in the crowd, and shoved him forward.
Rexx slammed into the railing. Chicken wire dug into his knees and kept them from buckling. The man next to him stepped on his foot, squashing his toes. His father eased in behind him, cutting off his breath and any escape.
“Fuck me to tears,” his father said.
Rexx swallowed . . . forced himself to glance down. The roosters were tattered and bloody. Their eyes darted—desperate, frantic. Blood spotted the sand and the bare concrete walls. Metal gleamed on the roosters’ heels, razor-sharp spurs, similar to those worn by cowboys.
Another explosion of feathers. Rexx jerked back, pelted by sand. The attack left a ragged gash across one cock’s head and an empty eye socket where more blood welled up and pooled. The detached, mangled eye stared up at him from the floor of the pit.
Rexx spat out sand, but the grit remained caught between his teeth. His gorge rose and he turned to leave. Couldn’t. The man’s foot held him in place. His vomit spattered the birds, the railing, and the man next to him.
Howls of laughter drowned the ruckus in the pit. The collective breath of the men scalded him, hot as steam.
The next day, his father held a restored Colt .45 to his head and ordered Rexx onto the bull.
“This is for your own good,” he grated into Rexx’s ear, just before the chute gate opened. “Sometimes you gotta hurt the ones you love.”
The passageway is short, barely twenty meters. Rexx worms his way through, guided by the halide beacon of Hjert’s utility light, and tumbles past a tinfoil skeleton puppet into a small chamber.
The puppet is life-size. It has a body of crumpled, twisted aluminum, a sugar skull head decorated with pink lipstick, pink cheek rouge, and a black, wide-brimmed hat piled high with plastic fruit.
“What took you so long?” Hjert says.
Rexx shields his eyes from the glare of her light, looks around. His scrotum tingles, the same way it had that morning on the bull.
“Holy shit,” he mutters.
24
BEHAVIORAL ENGINEERING
L. Mariachi assumes he’s being watched. It’s a given: the room is infested with acoustic spores and crawling with bitcams that record his every move. Get too close to the walls, dare to reach out to touch them, and the paralysis creeps back into his legs. The cold, icy numbness retreats as soon as he does but leaves him chilled. Ergo, the walls are impregnated with security pherions and iDNA sensors.
To make matters worse, it’s sweatshop hot in the room and uncomfortably bright. His wraparounds are gone, confiscated. Heat radiates from the ceiling, pounds down in waves on his parched and feverish head. He lies on the floor to escape the thermal assault, his face pressed to the rough concrete. But there’s no escape, no comfortable position. The concrete is almost as warm. It emits a cocktail of toxic gases that leaves him dizzy, his throat blistered by chlorine, sulfur, ammonia, and any number of harsh, bitter alkalis. He might as well be lying on brimstone.
He has no idea how much time has passed since he was arrested, how long he’s been in detention. It could be minutes, days, even weeks. The urine-colored light seeping through the thin cellophane walls doesn’t change. Neither does the temperature. It could be Joshua’s long day all over again, the sun stopped overhead, burning a hole in the sky and his internal clock.
Sleep comes in fits and starts, so does consciousness. There’s no pattern. He can wake up and find himself droopy eyed in a matter of minutes, unable to keep from nodding off. Other times he falls asleep for what feels like an eye blink before snapping wide awake. His circadian has lost its rhythm.
It’s all carefully orchestrated. Disorientation. Deprivation. The agents are trying to obliterate his connection to the world so that he has nothing solid to hold on to, no concrete points of reference. He’s completely cut off, isolated. Even Num Nut has gone AWOL.
Why the IA chose that name for itself is a mystery. Why pick a put-down? He’s never asked, figured it was none of his business and might create friction between them. Like he was making fun of the IA by questioning its choice. Plus, it might have put him in the position of having to explain his own moniker. Better not to go there at all. Still, there are times he wonders, times he wishes he knew more about the IA, the way it thinks and where it’s coming from.
His only companions are a pair of caustic splash marks on the otherwise featureless walls. He names one Insect Aside and the other Fertile Liza. Insect Aside has grasshopper legs grafted to a waspish torso, a beak-shaped mandible, and a curlicue antennae. Fertile Liza is short and pear shaped, has spindly arms, a wide-brimmed hat, and appears ready to give birth at a moment’s notice.
The splotches haven’t started talking to him yet. But they’re getting ready to. He can feel it. They’ve got that ready-to-burst look. Like an entire library of confidences is building up inside them. Complaints, problems, desires, regrets. He refuses to speak first. No way he’s going to get them started. Once they get started, they’ll never stop. He can kiss his sanity good-bye.
Also, he’s terrified they might be working for BEAN. Prison informants, birdies, hoping to gain his trust, get him to open up and spill his guts. Not that he has any guts to spill.
To ignore them he concentrates on the pain in his left hand. Uses the dull, steady throb as a distraction. And not just from them. There’s the hard, shriveled ache in the pit of his stomach to contend with as well.
That ulcer, dormant for so long, is finally starting to come out of hibernation and bloom under the light that’s penetrating all the way to the graveyard of his soul.
“You okay?” L. Mariachi whispered.
Renata brushed her hair, and tears, from her eyes. Sniffed. Folded her arms and rustled the shadows in the utility room where he’d heard her crying.
He eased closer to her, inhaling the scent of her jasmine perfume, damp and salty. “What’s wrong?”
She bit her lower lip, scraping the puffy bembe clean of lipstick, leaving the fron
t edge of her teeth blood red. “Sol,” she said, her chest heaving with exasperation. “He can be such a pendejo sometimes.”
L. Mariachi’s heart, anesthetized by his encounter with Sol two months earlier, stammered to life. “Like how? What did he do? Did he hit you?”
She shook her head, dispelling the meteoric hope that Sol was abusive, maybe in line for a restraining order. “No. Nothing like that.” She picked at the lipstick on her teeth with a fluorescent black nail. “He joined a labor reform committee at the biovat pharm where he works.”
“How come?”
“To improve working conditions.” She withdrew the nail and mashed her lips together in a pout.
“That’s crazy,” L. Mariachi said. “He could lose his job.”
“Tell me about it! I told him it would only lead to trouble. That he’s risking our future. But he won’t listen. I just wish that we could afford to leave and go someplace else, you know. Start over.”
“He cares more about himself than you,” L. Mariachi said. It popped out before he could censor himself.
“It’s not that. His problem is he cares about too many people. He wants to make a difference in the world.”
“It sounds to me like he’s got a martyr complex.” The implication being that Sol might not be around all that long. And that she was going to get hurt.
“He can be so stubborn,” she said. But instead of getting angry, she grew wistful. “That’s what makes him so sweet. His devotion.”
L. Mariachi didn’t want to hear how sweet Sol was, how dedicated and unselfish he could be. Next she’d be telling him what a great lover he was and the amazing things he could do with his tongue. Details he could live without.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“That’s all right.” It felt like somebody else was speaking the words. “I don’t mind. Really.”
Renata daubed her lashes. “Have you met Ass Assin?” she said, changing the subject.
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
That night Ass Assin was playing the first of three scheduled shows at the club. The Killer Guitarist was big, a major draw with the resurgent acid rock, body-electric scene that was the latest rage.
“I saw his guitar,” Renata continued. “It’s incredible. It has these old fossils glued on the front. Creepy. According to Claude it’s an antique, as valuable as one of those old violins.”
Claude worked sound at the club and was into music history. “A Stradivarius, you mean?”
“Right. It’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“If it’s real.” Supposedly the Killer Guitar was a vintage 1960s Gibson. One of only a few still in existence. Rumor had it the instrument once belonged to one of the greats—Jimi Hendrix. Jimmy Page. No one was sure—and that it had the power to pass on that greatness.
She looked at him sharply. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
He shrugged, hedging a bit. “It could just be false advertising, you know. Media spin for the netzines.”
Renata shook her head. The mascara on her lashes had hardened to the texture of dried blood. “Claude believes in it. Claude would know.”
“Rise and shine,” the rose agent says. His smile is full of false cheer. He carries a small stool and places it a safe distance from L. Mariachi, close to the door. Either blocking it to prevent any attempt at escape . . . or making it possible for him to beat a hasty retreat if the situation gets out of hand.
L. Mariachi pushes himself into a sitting position in the middle of the floor, wary of another sudden fit of narcolepsy.
The agent sits, takes out a ryce bar. “You hungry?”
L. Mariachi swallows the pang in his stomach. “No.”
This response elicits a look of genuine surprise. No doubt the chavo figured that he was in for the silent treatment. Zero cooperation, at least from the outset. “You don’t expect me to believe that.”
“It’s true.”
“Come on.” The rose agent chides him. “You haven’t had anything to eat in—how long?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been real busy lately. I’ve sorta lost track of time.”
“You, too?” Like it’s a flu that’s going around.
The rose agent takes a bite of the bar, makes a point of showing off his white, orderly upper-clade teeth. “This doesn’t have to be hard,” the agent says, all reasonable. He chews slowly, deliberately. “We can help each other out.”
“How?”
“First of all, we can start out by being honest with each other.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“So”—the agent holds out the bar—“would you like a bite?”
“No.”
“Look, all you have to do is admit that you’re hungry and the rest is yours. How hard is that?”
“I seem to have lost my appetite.”
“Have it your way.” The agent finishes the bar. He takes his sweet time, making L. Mariachi savor every moment. Licks his fingers at the end.
“Is this when we get to the physical torture part of the interview?” L. Mariachi says.
The agent shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m here to ask you a few questions. Nothing more.”
“Where’s pencil dick?” L. Mariachi says.
“Who?”
“Your macañema sidekick. He doesn’t want to join the party?”
The rose agent remains impassive, unfazed by the insult. “I’m afraid he had a previous engagement.”
Right. Almost certainly the asshole is watching them right now, monitoring body language and tonal inflection. Analyzing every last detail so they can map out weaknesses in him and formulate a plan for mentally and physically breaking him down.
He’s lucky. He doesn’t have a family or any close friends. There is no one they can threaten to hurt if he doesn’t confess and give in to their demands. He doesn’t have a cause, either. He doesn’t believe in anything. That leaves self-preservation. And at this point, death might be a blessing. It doesn’t hurt that he’s been half-dead for twenty years already.
The rose agent scoots his stool forward in a show of trust and intimacy. “What can you tell me about Lejandra?”
“Not much.”
The agent leans down, rests his elbows on his knees. “Look, I know you were at her house. Your iDNA print was everywhere. So why don’t you tell me what you were doing there?”
“Is she okay?”
“Not really.” The agent’s voice sags, becoming grave. “I’m afraid she’s not doing very well at all. That’s why we need you to tell us everything you know. So we can help her.”
The theatrical show of concern is laughable. Does the agent really expect him to rise to the bait?
“What’s wrong with her?” L. Mariachi says. Not that he expects to get a straight answer.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” the agent says, all earnest.
“I played a few songs for her,” L. Mariachi says, “to help her feel better. But you already know that.”
The agent doesn’t confirm or deny, simply consults his wraparounds. “How long have you known her family?”
“Not long. A couple of hours. I only met them last night.”
“How did you meet them?”
“A couple of gangstas invited me to play.” L. Mariachi shrugs.
“Because you used to be a rockero,” the rose agent says, dropping a mondo hint that he knows more about L. Mariachi than he’s letting on; that it’s pointless for L. Mariachi to not tell the truth, because the agent will, guaranteed, see through any lie he concocts.
“I didn’t want to piss them off or anything. Get on their bad side. So I agreed to help them out.”
The agent nods, as if that makes perfect sense. Fills in a blank in the long list of blanks he’s got. “There was another person there,” the agent says. “A bruja. How long have you been friends with her?”
“Where is this Doña Celia now?”
“No sé. I have no idea.” For all he knows, she could be in custody. They could have asked her the same questions about him.
“She just disappeared?” The rose agent sounds incredulous. “She didn’t tell you how to get in touch with her in case Lejandra needed another treatment?”
“That’s how it is with witches. They turn themselves into animals. Come and go as they please.”
The rose agent snorts. “Gimme a break. I’m not that stupid, and neither are you.”
“You’d be surprised.”
The rose agent spreads his hands, palms up. “I s’pose she didn’t tell you her real name, either.”
“Why would she do that?”
The rose agent snaps his fingers. “Stay with me here, Luis.”
L. Mariachi blinks. Finds himself seated on a stool. It feels like he’s exchanged places with the rose agent. Except that his hands are cuffed behind his back and his feet are cuffed to the legs of the stool. The stool isn’t quite level. It’s tipped at a slight angle so that he continually slumps forward, causing the cuffs around his wrist to dig in painfully. If he pushes back with his feet, to take some of the pressure off his hands, the ankle cuffs dig in even harder.
It’s a precarious balancing act, one that takes a lot of energy. After a few minutes he’s exhausted, ready to collapse back to sleep.
The rose agent claps his hands. The sound is sharp, stinging. Pain blossoms in L. Mariachi’s left cheek, as if he’s been slapped.
“You didn’t really think you’d get away with it, did you?”
“What? The limpia, trying to cure Lejandra?” That was the biggest worry he had during the night.
“Contaminating the ecotecture,” the agent says. “Infecting it with black-market pherions.”
“No.” The denial doesn’t sound like a denial. More like an affirmation of what he’s being accused of.
The rose agent paces in front of him. Relaxed. Confident. Authoritative. “You knew you’d get caught. So why not come clean? Why put yourself and the others through this?”
