Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

Probably the most disturbing, at least for the moment, he had nearly had his privates shot away. The bullet had skimmed a shallow trench along his inner thigh a mere inch below the family jewels. It probably needed a stitch or three, but that was a luxury they couldn’t afford right now. A quick bandage had to suffice.

  And now the weirdest, the icing on the cake. Some neo-Stone Age guy, who smelled as if his last bath had been during the Carter administration, was claiming to have tracked Tony’s green skullflush all the way from Venezuela. Following a vision of an eagle with broken wings. And who was now squatting in the kitchen floor while eating a kiwi. Too too much.

  April was in the bathroom getting sick. He figured if he had been the one who’d done the shooting, he wouldn’t have lasted all of fifteen minutes before having to clutch the porcelain and heave.

  Seated at the kitchen table, Justin looked at the two guns before him. Semiautomatic and revolver, the sole items a search of the body had yielded. He groaned. This was precisely the reason he’d not set one step further into the St. Louis trade. This was exactly the sort of thing he had wanted to avoid at all costs.

  Now it had come knocking at the door claiming to bring a pizza.

  April appeared in the bathroom doorway, weak in the knees. “Do you want to call the police, or should I do it?”

  He shook his head, tentatively. “Maybe we should leave them out of this.”

  “I just killed somebody! I pulled that trigger, and there’s no way it was anything else but self-defense.” She moved a few steps forward. “They can’t ignore this and Tony anymore.”

  “They did a good job of ignoring Erik, didn’t they? And acting like I was the guilty one.” He held up a gun in each hand. “These aren’t going to register back in Tony’s name, I guarantee you that.” He let them clunk to the tabletop. “There’s still no proof he’s done anything at all. The fact is, he probably hired this guy to kill us just so he could distance himself from it.”

  April nodded. Wandered over to collapse into another chair. The Indian — Kerebawa, he had said his name was — looked at her. All told, he appeared the least shaken of them, and here he was the stranger in the strange land.

  Justin held up a gun again, said to Kerebawa, “Do you know how to use one of these?”

  The Indian smacked down the last of the fruit. “I never have before used one.”

  Justin looked at the bow, the machete. “You seem to do all right without.” He slid the small revolver across the table to April. “You’d better keep this with you.”

  She looked as if he had asked her to pick up a snake. Not so gung-ho now that the heat of emergency had cooled. But she nodded.

  Justin held the silenced semiautomatic, looked at it from various angles. A Beretta, according to the round emblem on the grip. He found the magazine release just behind the trigger guard, ejected the clip to count the remaining bullets. Ten. Plus one in the chamber made eleven. At least they weren’t running on empty, in case something else happened tonight. He slid the magazine back in.

  “Do you need a firearm ID card in Florida to buy ammunition?”

  “I don’t know,” April whispered. “How would I know?”

  That question would keep. The dead man, though?

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” she said. “If we’re not calling the police, we have to get rid of that body.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “And not just drop him into the bay. Like they did with Erik. He’d turn up. We’ve got to make him vanish. And then we’ve got to vanish.” Her eyes narrowed with resolve. “If the body’s found tonight, tomorrow, Tony’ll hear about it. He’ll figure out what happened, more or less. And plan accordingly. But. What’s the most frustrating thing we could do to him?”

  Justin smiled tightly. “Everybody disappears without a trace. You’re playing mind games with him?”

  “That’s part of it. But if he has no idea what’s happened, that gives us time to figure things out. It buys us time to think.”

  Her words hung in the air with the humidity. Time to think. His mind needed something to help along those lines. Thirst was raging in his throat, a longing to raid April’s liquor cabinet and see what he could find to file down the sharp edges of his nerves. They whipped around inside like the frayed ends of cables snapping under too much strain. Anything would do right about now.

  Kerebawa was regarding them both intently. No doubt he’d quickly gotten the idea that the two of them were novices to such a situation. If I were him, I think I’d pack up and leave us to bungle our way alone.

  Kerebawa began to frown. To shake his head. “No, no, no. You know this Mendoza, we must look for the green powder. That’s why I come here. That’s what I promised.”

  “Look, that may be tops on your list of things to do, but right now, April and I are a lot more concerned about staying alive. You should be too. You can’t take it away from him if you’re dead.”

  Kerebawa proudly thumped his chest. “I will kill him first.”

  “I hope you do.” There, appeal to the Indian’s inbred machismo, and maybe he would see it their way. “But this place isn’t anything like your home. And you don’t know a single thing about Tony Mendoza.”

  This seemed to sink in. “Warriors must know their enemies,” he mused, as if reminding himself.

  Justin turned his attention to April. “You have any place in mind to hide the body?”

  She folded her hands before her on the table. “Give me a minute.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t be too long about it.”

  Her hands became fists, and slammed down onto the table. “It’s not like I’ve done this kind of thing before!”

  Temptation got the better of Justin. The liquor cabinet beckoned. He found Jack Daniel’s, half full. He didn’t bother with a glass. Killers, whether by deed or conspiracy, drank straight from the bottle, didn’t they? Sure they did. Direct pipeline to sanding down those nerves.

  “Do you have to do that now?” April’s voice, brittle.

  He pulled the bottle from his mouth; caught a whiskey dribble with his tongue. “You think your way, I’ll think mine.”

  Her flaming eyes, righteous indignation. “It didn’t help you think very clearly that night at Apocalips. If it weren’t for that…”

  The implied accusation was as caustic as bile. And irrefutable. “You want to blame me for this, fine. Fine. But I don’t need you to remind me. You had your chance to cut me loose a week ago, and didn’t want it.”

  They stared across the kitchen, a moment that could have swung either way. Finally she nodded.

  “You’re right. And I still don’t want it.” A hesitant smile, but hearteningly genuine, and he relaxed. “Sorry.”

  Justin turned back to Kerebawa. “The powder. Do you know how much you’re after?”

  Kerebawa hunkered in thought for a moment, as if to find the best words to convey. “If used every day, maybe three weeks’ supply for Mabori-teri. It was hard to see how much they carried, though.”

  Three weeks’ supply for his village. Meaningless. “I’ll tell you how much is around here, at least. Mendoza says he has six kilos.”

  Equally meaningless. Kerebawa only looked confused. North and south were at definite odds in terms of measurement standards. How to bridge the gap?

  Justin started in on her cabinets again. There, next to the sugar and baking soda. He pulled from the shelf an unopened two-pound bag of Pillsbury flour. He tossed it to Kerebawa, who caught it deftly.

  “One kilo is a little more than that. And Mendoza’s got six.”

  Kerebawa inspected the package, reverently traced his finger along the image of the Dough Boy. Hefted its weight, then looked up with an air of satisfaction.

  “I would say he maybe has it all, then.”

  At last, a minor breakthrough. Quickly followed by another, when April stood up.

  “I think I know,” she said, “where we can hide the body.”

  Tryi
ng to accomplish this task in April’s Fiero was more than an inconvenience. It was a logistical nightmare.

  The Fiero was Pontiac’s antithesis of a practical family car. Two low-riding bucket seats was it. No back seat. The interior was as tight as a cockpit, and directly behind it was the engine compartment. All except for the radiator, which rode up front with the spare tire. The only trunk space to speak of was sandwiched between the taillights and the engine, and it didn’t look much bigger than a rain gutter, even when emptied.

  They wrapped the body inside a blanket, and she backed the car to the bottom of her stairwell while Justin and Kerebawa lugged the body down. April kept watch, forever pacing, fidgeting with her hands. They stuffed the dead hitman into the little trough of a trunk, bending arms and legs as if he were some gigantic Gumby doll inside the blanket. His pliability brought on another wave of the queasies. At last they got him to fit, and slammed the trunk lid. The body was already emitting a bouquet of unpleasant odors.

  They got Kerebawa to stand guard at the door, in case of a second-wave attack, while they packed. Hurriedly, a five-minute job. Justin threw a few changes of clothing and toiletries into a nylon gym bag. He felt like a peasant, readying to flee before an army’s onslaught. With no way to even leave behind the defiance of scorched earth.

  He slowed only when he saw April standing dejectedly in the midst of her office. A moment later, he realized that tears brimmed her eyes.

  “What is it?” Pointless question, instantly regretted.

  She held her palms out toward the office. “I worked so hard to make a go of this.” Voice crackling. “It’s not much, but it’s mine. And now … now I don’t know if I’ll see it again.”

  He let his bag slip to the floor, stepped forward to hold her. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to tell her sure, she’d see it all again, very soon. Promises without guarantees were always the easiest to make. He kept his mouth shut.

  They held tight for several moments, then broke the clinch. April switched on her answering machine, said she could at least phone in to check her messages by remote, try to return calls that way. Keep her business from completely stagnating.

  Grim business, this hiding of bodies and going underground.

  They grabbed their bags, closed and locked windows, turned out the lights. Locked the inner and outer doors. Down the stairs.

  There was but one possible configuration for the three of them to fit in the car. April removed the moonroof and stowed it beside the spare tire under the hood. Then she got into the car first, straddling the console, one leg in Justin’s lap as he drove, the other braced against the dash before Kerebawa. Luckily the transmission was automatic; a manual wouldn’t have allowed this. Even though she was the smallest, the top of her head still peeked above the gap in the roof, along with the longbow and arrow shafts. Their bags they molded into the floorboard.

  This was going to be a long trip. They’d barely gotten used to Kerebawa’s body odor upstairs. Now it was slapping them in the face all over again. Justin cranked down his window in a hurry. April did the passenger window.

  Justin fired the ignition, let it idle. He leaned against the steering wheel, softly swore.

  “What’s wrong?” April asked.

  “We need some way to weight that body down. We can’t just have it floating out there.”

  Really thinking this through, weren’t they? A real group of hardcase pros. Might as well cruise on down to Mendoza’s place and turn themselves over. Eliminate the suspense.

  “Concrete blocks or something,” he muttered. “Do you know of any construction sites around here?”

  April said she didn’t. Figured. Wasn’t as if Florida was the real-estate-development-boom capital of the country, oh no. A moment later, though, he sat up, toasted himself with the bottle of Jack snugged between his thighs. He really should pitch that — he knew it as surely as the glass chafed against the bandaged flesh wound. But couldn’t yet bring himself to get rid of it.

  Maybe Paula had been right all along. Maybe he really did need a reserved seat at AA.

  Worry about it later. The ones with the brainstorms deserved an indulgence or two. He had April drop the transmission into drive, and they set off for Davis Island.

  He still had Erik’s duplicate apartment key, and when they let themselves in, the stuffiness hit them like a blanket. Too many days of direct sun and no ventilation.

  Justin clicked on the light, and the three of them stood just inside the doorway. He didn’t know how the place felt to April, but to him a world of difference had come over it. Erik’s belongings might still have filled it, but the apartment no longer reeked of him. Sometime between last Saturday, when they’d gotten the news, and now, Erik’s spirit had seeped away.

  “He’s really gone now,” Justin whispered.

  He turned to April, her sorrow tempered with fright. She nodded, nothing more than reflex. Then he looked at Kerebawa, who had no idea where they were, who had lived here, what had drawn Justin here in the first place. Kerebawa knew none of that. And yet looking into the man’s black eyes, Justin sensed he understood anyway, on some fundamental level. Here was a place of sorrow.

  Justin had never come face-to-face with someone from so different a culture, not like this. The large wad of green tobacco, the simple belongings, the bowl-shaped haircut, now unkempt. So much to ask of this strange man who had been deposited on their doorstep like some tribal guardian angel. So much to know before his curiosity was satisfied…

  When there was time. Present tense was more than demanding enough.

  Justin walked to Erik’s makeshift bookshelves along one wall. Glanced back at the Indian.

  “Give me a hand here, okay?”

  Kerebawa stood rooted to the spot. A brief flicker of confusion, and he looked at his own hands, then Justin.

  Wrong phrase, he thought. I better watch that.

  “Help me with this, I mean.”

  The two of them hefted the top strip of plywood, laden with books, and set it aside. Freeing up the objects of interest: the heavy cinder blocks at either end. Justin hoisted one, Kerebawa the other.

  “Get some clothes hangers out of his closet,” he told April. “Three or four.”

  By the time they left the apartment, he was feeling in control again. The jitters were backing down in favor of cool intellect. Maybe they could pull this off after all.

  The fit inside the Fiero suffered all the more. The blocks had to be stowed in the floorboard, one before each seat. Good thing they had all they needed, because there wasn’t a spare bit of room to be found.

  Justin let April navigate his driving until they were heading north through the center of the city, from bottom to top, on Nebraska. Saturday-night traffic was heavy, but steadily thinned the farther north they drove. They rode in silence, brooding about escalations of disaster, no doubt, and now and again Justin glanced over to see Kerebawa staring transfixed as Tampa flashed past. It wasn’t necessarily an awestruck demeanor — look at this great big world I’m missing. More like, look what they’ve done to their land.

  They were well past the city limits when April had him veer left, where Nebraska simply became Highway 41. This they followed through flatland where small forests still flourished, towering pines that grew close to the road. Land that was dotted far and wide with amoeba-shaped lakes, and where the settled areas were fewer, farther between.

  They were less than three miles shy of the Hillsborough County Line when April finally directed him off 41. West for nearly a mile, north a few hundred yards. She was telling him to double back east on something called Grandaddy Lane when he stopped the car. Just long enough to jump out and scoop a handful of mud from a ditch of free-standing water and smear it across the license plates. The place wasn’t devoid of houses, by any means.

  He killed the lights and drove by moonlight back along Grandaddy Lane. Slowing to a crawl, leaving its dead end for open ground. Ahead he could see the shimmerin
g glimmer of moonlight on water, and beyond that, darkly hulking masses of trees, thickly grouped. A relatively small but serviceable cypress swamp.

  “How do you know about this place?”

  April was riding higher and straighter now, her head nearly all the way out of the moonroof. “See that house back there, with the lights still on?” She jabbed a thumb in its direction. “This guy that works at the Tribune rents it with another couple of roommates. Erik and I were out here for parties two or three times.” She was still for several moments, then, “Better stop here.”

  They were drawing close to the water’s edge, and he killed the engine. A massive silence descended, unheard since he had come down here. A total nonexistence of all things urban. The houses behind them on Grandaddy Lane? The land merely tolerated them.

  He could hear armies of crickets, platoons of frogs. Cicadas. All things wild and untamed. Mosquitoes wasted no time in zeroing in on exposed skin; he’d swatted two before he was four steps from the car. Over the swamp, humidity hung in a gauzy haze, fuzzy in the moonlight.

  This seemed a fitting place to hide secrets of life and death.

  April stretched her leg muscles, bracing against the car. She groaned. “I can’t believe I rode the whole way like that without complaining.”

  He smiled at her. She seemed a lot more together about things than she had been back at the loft. Maybe all she’d needed was to get into motion, get clear of the place where they had come too close to knocking on Heaven’s door.

  “Stay here, okay?” she said. “I’ll be gone a few minutes.”

  Before he could question, April took off, running toward the right as softly and gracefully as a deer. Swallowed by shadows before she drew even with the nearest houses behind them.

  Justin looked at Kerebawa, who was now squatting comfortably on the ground. He felt as if he’d just been deserted by his best friend and left in charge of some newly met cousin from out of town. Way out of town, in this case. Couldn’t very well ask him if he’d seen any good movies lately. Just how did you small-talk a rain-forest aborigine?

  “So. Um.” He grimaced. Off to a flying start. “So you found us because you followed this … vision? This, um … eagle with broken wings?”