Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  “You want the last kilo, we want Mendoza in jail. Jail is something your people don’t have, so we have to do things different here. Not that your way is wrong. It just won’t always work to get you what you want in this land. Do you see that?”

  A hesitant nod. He was on a roll here.

  And then, inspiration. “Suppose your village is at war with another village twice as big as yours. For every one of your warriors, they have two. Now, suppose they have something you want to get back. You can’t find out where it is, so you can’t steal it. Would you charge right over and attack them?”

  Kerebawa shook his head fiercely. “We would not be fools. We would first seek the help of allies. Another village who is their enemy too.”

  Justin smiled, relaxation washing him like spring rains. “That’s all I think we should do.”

  That afternoon, Justin arrived at the meeting first. Not liking the way this was going already. Seemed that if things boded well for cooperation, there wouldn’t have been any problem meeting at the police station.

  April had driven him here and was staying behind in the car with Kerebawa, keeping watch. He was at some little patch of greenery called H.B. Plant Park, beside the University of Tampa. Its centerpiece was a bizarre metal sculpture growing out of tiered brick planters: a ring of seven tall, tapered steel spires, straight until the top ends hooked. They looked like a Stonehenge of giant dental picks.

  Justin sat on a nearby bench beneath a Spanish moss-infested oak. Cooler under here, shady and lazy, the sky as blue as a virgin summer sky should be.

  Justin fingered the vial in his shirt pocket, a bulge he felt a touch of paranoia about. The vial had previously contained aspirin, apportioned into April’s travel kit from an econo-drum of a thousand. But now? Yes, I’m carrying drugs, it seemed to shout. To passing students in shorts and T-shirts, to office workers from the nearby downtown towers, immersing themselves in a tiny oasis of nature while taking a late lunch. One glance and they would know it couldn’t possibly be anything like allergy pills.

  It was the only trace of last night’s thievery left in easy reach. This morning, after convincing Kerebawa that the skullflush was best left intact and sharing his idea with Kerebawa and April, they had decided to hide the stuff. Justin bought a roll of aluminum foil and a ball of twine at a walking-distance convenience store.

  Back in the room, he’d repackaged the five kilos within the foil, rolling each into a longer, thinner shape. He tied the ends together with twine until they resembled metallic sausage links.

  The stash was April’s idea, born of intimate familiarity with her car. They ran a quick trip to the airport’s long-term lot and her Fiero. While keeping a watch for security sweeps, they got into the Fiero’s engine through the trunk, disconnected the air hose, whose opposite end sat just inside the intake port behind the driver’s door. They fed the sausages in, one at a time, then reconnected the hose. A far better stash than the spare tire. Justin had retained only enough for a sample.

  He fingered the vial again. Eyes distracted by a girl in cutoffs until his reason for being here was almost upon him. Rene Espinoza, the only marginally tolerable aspect of his experience with Tampa homicide.

  “I’m a little late,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, waited until she took the other end of the bench. “Why wouldn’t you meet with me at the station? All I hear in the media from cops is how they need public cooperation. I’m trying to cooperate, and you don’t even want me setting foot inside the door.”

  “I can’t get into that, Justin. But I’m here. And I will listen to what you have to say, so don’t start on me.”

  He’d been watching her face, her eyes. While with the agency in St. Louis, he’d done that with clients. Sometimes they hedged. The maker of a new mouthwash fails to tell you that initial test sampling has found that a majority regard the product as tasty as mule piss. There were usually signs when someone was bugged over a situation they were keeping mum about.

  And a couple of tics seemed to creep through Espinoza’s facade.

  He decided to begin with more comfortable territory. For her, anyway. For himself, the wounds were still nearly raw.

  “Has anything turned up yet about Erik’s death? Anything with Tony Mendoza?”

  “He had an alibi for the night. It wasn’t shaky.” She reeled it off with all the ease of a prepared answer, as if she’d been anticipating the question. Very smooth.

  Justin nodded, neither believing nor disbelieving. Only knowing that unsubstantiated accusations of a lie or laziness on the police’s part would be counterproductive.

  “Do you have any pull with the narcotics department?” he asked.

  “I know people. We don’t work in a vacuum.”

  “Has anybody been talking about some new drug on the street, something called skullflush?”

  Espinoza gave it a few moments of thought, then shook her head. He thought it wholly honest. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Well, believe me, there is such a thing, and it’s nothing you want out in the general population. Mendoza brought it in, I guess. Only he’s lost most of it, all but one kilo.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I took it away from him myself, five kilos.”

  It was always a perverse pleasure to reveal the unexpected, the look of surprise being its own reward. Then her large brown eyes narrowed again, all-seeing and as watchful as his own.

  “So in other words, now you could be busted for possession with intent to sell,” she said, “You’re on thin ice here. Your background isn’t exactly squeaky clean in this area.”

  “Please.” He huffed in exasperation. “If I had any intention of dealing, do you think I’d call you up to brag about ripping off another dealer?”

  “I’ve seen dumber. And what I think doesn’t mean a thing. I’m telling you how it looks.”

  Couldn’t fault her there, he decided. Imagine the scrutiny of an outsider — a judge, say, or a prosecutor — looking at his past and present, should he and April trip up and be found with five kilos of a new drug. Not a rosy picture. Be that as it may, however…

  “You didn’t leave me with much choice. Mendoza wants me dead, and I didn’t see much help from you. I’m just trying to keep afloat, is all.” He realized he was, maybe unconsciously, referring solely to me, to I. No us, no we. Protecting the others, he supposed, by refusing to drag them in without need. “Now, I know you’re in homicide, that you don’t speak for the narcs. But you’re the only one there I know who treated me civilly. So I’d like to bounce an idea off you, if I could.”

  She said nothing, simply nodded once. The palest of green lights.

  “Suppose I try to work out a deal with Mendoza where I sell the five keys back to him. Whether or not he believes I’m stupid enough to think he’d actually cooperate is irrelevant. I’m pretty sure he’d go for it, just because his pride won’t allow me to get away with ripping him off. He won’t pay, he’ll want to kill me. But if I’m there, he’s there, and you people are there — you should have a good solid place to start digging away at him. He wouldn’t be there alone, either, so maybe you could lean on one of his own people enough to divide and conquer, get somebody to implicate him in Erik’s death.”

  She pondered things a moment, then shrugged. “It’s not my decision, you know that.” She frowned. “And skullflush. What is it exactly? Some new form of coke?”

  “This is where it gets tricky. I brought a sample.”

  Justin two-fingered the vial from his shirt pocket, discreetly palmed it to her. Almost sleight-of-hand, it had come automatically. A move he’d honed to perfection in earlier days. Must be like riding a bicycle: once learned, never forgotten.

  The vial was in her purse before she spared it a good look. A frown. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” She snapped the purse shut. “First, I’ll have to get this analyzed and find out what you’ve got. There’s no sense in planning anyt
hing else until that’s done.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we’ll see.”

  Frustration at this lukewarm reception was starting to exceed his tolerance level. We’ll see. She’d said it in the same tone of voice every guy in the world had heard from female lips. I had a great time tonight. When can we go out again? An uncomfortable pause, then, We’ll see.

  “What the hell is it with you?” His voice was finally rising. “This guy is trying to kill me. Maybe I’d have better luck talking to somebody else in the department, take my chances that way.”

  “No. You won’t. I guarantee you that.” Espinoza was getting heated, as well. “Just be patient and quit trying to ramrod this, Justin. You have no idea what all it involves, and if you step on the wrong toes, you will get bulldozed. That’s a fact.”

  He let the light of realization dawn in his face. See if he could push the envelope a bit more, the master manipulator. “Is somebody there on Mendoza’s payroll, is that it? Bought and paid for?”

  The anger contained behind her face suddenly snapped. If she could’ve gotten away with punching him, he believed she’d have tried.

  “You asshole, I already went to bat for you. I met you here because I can’t risk being seen talking to you. So don’t feed me that shit.” She fumed and stewed for several moments. Finally, in her eyes, a conflict wearily laid halfway to rest. “Maybe you do deserve an explanation. And I wish I could give it, completely, but I can’t. But. My … superiors … decided that moving against Mendoza at the present time could jeopardize another ongoing investigation. Which could break any day now, it’s possible, so if you could just stay low until it’s safer for us to move on him…”

  He gazed at her, watching her mouth move, the sound seeming to come from increasingly farther away. Feeling his eyes blank out into stupid disbelief.

  “You stonewalled us.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “You stonewalled me, and someone I love, because … because our lives aren’t as important?” His voice, on the rise. “We weren’t high up enough on the fucking priority list?”

  “It wasn’t a matter of priorities—”

  “The hell it wasn’t!” He leaned away from her, raised his arms in futility. Politics, everything was politics, even life and death.

  “Why can’t you just leave town?” she asked. “Mendoza’s arms can’t reach across the country.”

  Justin rose from the bench, thrust hands into pockets, and wandered a few steps away. All around, students and denizens of the business world whose lives he envied — their security, their relative simplicity. He’d gladly trade problems with any of them.

  “Why don’t we leave?” He laughed without humor. He felt broken, suddenly, disconnected, as if now discussing someone else. “I’m practically bankrupt. April? Her family’s here. And everything she ever worked for and invested in, it’s right here. She goes away, it falls apart.” Justin shook his head, recalling the sight of her earlier today, taking care of business. Retrieving the messages from her answering machine. Making calls to clients, making excuses. Trying to hold it all together.

  Justin turned back to Espinoza, finally. “‘To protect and serve.’ What a crock of shit.”

  She didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to breathe. “Whether you believe it or not, I am on your side. I just can’t make you any promises.” She patted her purse, the vial. “We’ve got this. And it’s a start.”

  “Whoopee,” he said flatly. But still clung to hope.

  Chapter 24

  THE GREEN AND DISTANT VOYAGE

  “Come here,” he said, and she came.

  Sasha moved across the bedroom, a seductive wraith, smooth ivory skin draped in black silk and lace. Blonde hair wisping past her shoulders. Victory and hunger, blended until they were one, swimming in her eyes. She knew she had won.

  Sasha stood at the foot of the waterbed, lingering as the material whispered down her sylphlike body to puddle at her feet. She kicked them free, and then was on the bed, naked, moving on hands and knees to where Tony sat against the headboard. Also naked.

  She had won, yes, and taken him with her. Victory was not total, though. Could it truly be surrender when you wanted to fall? He didn’t know, didn’t care. All that mattered was that he had come to stand on the brink, had looked over, and decided that jumping wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hand in hand.

  Lovers’ Leap.

  Tony, smiling as Sasha crawled inch by inch along his legs to his lap, reached over to a tabletop for a rectangular mirror. Chopped and paralleled across its surface, sixteen lines of fertile green. And two straws, as if they were a pair of teenagers ready to share a malt in the fifties.

  Grief had driven him to this; grief and thwarted rage. Today he’d taken his piranha and lovingly placed their punctured bodies in a plastic bag, then had taken them along the boardwalk to the edge of the bay. Alone, refusing Lupo’s company, Sasha’s comforts. He’d leaped over one side of the gazebo to the mudflat below, landing with a squishy thud. He shed his shirt, the shark tooth already glued to his chest with a film of sweat. And while the sun beat down, while the surf lapped yards away in a perpetual bid to reclaim all that had risen from its depths, Tony dropped to his knees and dug. With his hands. Until the grave was ready.

  He had buried more than pets. He had buried brethren.

  Only fitting, then, that he now honor them. In form if nothing else.

  As well, he was fundamentally curious. What would happen if two of them took skullflush at the same time?

  The Lincoln was equipped with a few, custom-installed stashes, invisible to the eye and nearly impossible to blunder into unless you knew where to look. He’d been keeping a kilo in one of them since his initial test on Sasha two weeks ago. He praised his reluctance to remove it from the car and store it with the rest as foresight bordering on sixth sense. Because, oh, the wonders he could wreak with this last of such a precious commodity, not the least of which would be figuring some way to regain the rest.

  Sasha was even with him now, rolled back against the other pillow. Tony reached toward the table, its lamp. Flicked off one bulb, the regular one, then switched on the mood bulb. Where matters of sensuality were concerned, he preferred this one. Whitewash disappeared and everything was rinsed with a vibrant red.

  And even green became crimson.

  He rested the mirror between them. Straws dipped to glass, noses dipped to straws. She at one side of the mirror, he at the other. They would meet halfway, when the well ran dry.

  There was pain, that golden-green glow bursting in the backs of their skulls. But with his second primal voyage under way, he was beginning to regard it less as mere pain and more an exquisitely intense prelude. Ride it out, ride it out. He relished the opportunity to prove himself the master of his own senses. Wondered if she felt anything remotely similar.

  Sasha slid the mirror across the satin covering the waterbed, and Tony heard it thump to the carpet. Hunger augmented, turned in on itself, twisted its head around into passion.

  Their limbs entwined, and their mouths lapped at each other’s, and they rode it out. It was wet, it was messy, it was orgasmic.

  Pain. Oh yes. Yes…

  And this wicked new bastard cousin of childbirth.

  “Come,” said Kerebawa, and Justin moved across the motel room. He had to admit, his curiosity was piqued.

  April had scooted out for a while minutes ago, using the cover of new-fallen dusk to head for the post office. Things she had to mail for work, clinging by desperate fingertips to normal life, normal routines. Rituals of the late twentieth century. He wondered if she needed them more than he did. Perhaps, if anything he’d built had survived, he’d be doing the same.

  “Justin, you and I, we will chant to the hekura together?” There was an eagerness to Kerebawa’s manner that he’d not exhibited before. An excited child on show-and-tell day. Perhaps, as well, it was his way of dispelling the last of this morning’s tension.

  Jus
tin nodded, couldn’t refuse this gesture. “You’ll have to teach me.”

  He grinned slyly. Placed a fist over his own heart. “You know inside. You know.”

  Perhaps it was for the better that April had gone. Her approval would be questionable. Perhaps the Indian had been waiting for this moment for days: female gone, two men left alone with idle time.

  Kerebawa reached under a bed to withdraw one of his bamboo arrow shafts, held it lengthwise toward the light and peered into one end. He drew an experimental breath and heaved it into the end, like a blowgun. Seemed satisfied.

  “Won’t the hekura be dangerous?” Justin said.

  “Not with ebene.” Kerebawa unrolled his cloth pack for the powder. “If we are lucky, we will meet them. We will see them. They may come to live in our chests. But they will not rule us.”

  Justin felt scant reassurance, and then Kerebawa began to strip away the clothes that, even to Justin’s thoroughly Western-acculturated eye, looked out of place on the man. Finally he was naked, save for the thin cord encircling his waist like a G-string, to which his foreskin was tied. Justin shrugged, stripped down to his shorts.

  “Are there paints here?” Kerebawa asked.

  “Paints?”

  Kerebawa nodded. “Paints. Yes.” He held his fingers toward his face and moved them in circular patterns. “So we may decorate ourselves and become more beautiful for the hekura.”

  Paints. Justin shook his head. Ceremonial pigments hadn’t ranked high on the list of necessities. They would have to do without. Go before the hekura ugly.

  But wait; he reconsidered. Went to the bathroom and returned with a small plastic case. April’s eye makeup.

  Kerebawa nodded when Justin opened it, showing shallow wells of blues and greens and browns. They squatted on the floor, and Kerebawa decorated himself first, then turned his fingers onto Justin. Rough fingertips, but gentle in their strength, sure and deft as they stroked squiggly brown patterns up and down his torso, lines on his face. With every stroke, as the pattern gained definition, Justin felt the differences between them eroding that much more.