Nightlife (49 page)

The shape was familiar to anyone who had watched the news of ghetto violence and schoolyard massacres. An AK-47.

Justin popped up in the back seat while snapping the assault rifle to his shoulder. Hazily wondering where it had come from, if Kerebawa had disarmed some fourth member of the welcoming committee. Had to be it. He didn’t know where the particulars of this weapon were situated, could only trust that if a sniper was ready to fire if needed, the safety would be disengaged.

He slammed the gun onto the back window deck, swiveled it with a loud cry. Amazing, the way a shift in the balance of power could infuse a dead soul with fresh hatred. He boiled, he raged. The magnitude was ungodly. He brought the muzzle onto Barrington and squeezed the trigger as fast as he could, for the sniper had it set on semi instead of full auto.

Fans of white fire spat from the muzzle, four times, six, ten, and he screamed the whole time while watching the karate kid disintegrate into wet fragments. The AK-47 put out a solid meaty roar that made all the others sound anemic by comparison. Barrington was dead on the ground and twitching, and still Justin didn’t trust him, kept firing even as he pushed himself through the window and across the trunk. Even as he slid to set foot on solid ground once more. Until there was barely enough left to bury.

Then he turned his attention to Tony Mendoza. Grand architect of all misery in the known world. Survival instincts must have taken precedence over hunger, for Tony rose dripping black blood from the mangle of Lupo’s throat. Grappled for the fallen submachine gun.

“Don’t kill him, Justin!” he heard from somewhere behind him. Kerebawa’s voice barely registered. “Don’t kill him
DON’T KILL HIM!”

“Fuck that,” Justin whispered, and squeezed the trigger.

Blood and tissue flew from Tony’s shoulder, knocked him back and sprawling across asphalt. Justin took the time to carefully sight in while behind him, Kerebawa screamed and clambered up the fence. Again, fire. Dark blood splotched on Tony’s shirt, just left of center chest, and coughed out through the exit wound. Raise the gun, fire again. Stalk this tumbling body across the asphalt like some dark avenging angel, watch organic shrapnel pinwheeling from the side of Tony’s leviathan head.

Fire again, and again, and again, the banana clip in the AK-47 bottomless. Sometimes he missed, sometimes he grazed, sometimes he plowed home with deadly accuracy, and beneath the crackling rumble of the gun he began to hear a new sound, something completely out of place.

Tony was laughing.

Laughing like a man who understands the funniest, most ironic joke ever conceived, to your exclusion. Justin stilled his trigger finger, stood wreathed in the war zone stink of smoke and cordite—and watched him sit up.
Laughing.
His ruined features began to melt and flow beneath moonlight, achieving some ghastly netherworld state between his two polarities.

“Nice try,” he rasped, and rose halfway to his feet.

Justin stood rooted to the asphalt. Nothing could have survived that kind of gunfire.
Nothing.
Barrington lay deader than a roadside animal. His finger twitched on the trigger twice more, blew Tony back another six feet, but it only seemed to help him along. He lurched, hobbled back toward the warehouse, and Justin could do nothing more than watch wide-eyed as this darkly spattered figure made his retreat.

Kerebawa came running up to his side, scooped up the fallen packet of the green drug. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he cried.
“Do you know what you’ve done!”

Justin could only stare.

“We must go.”

Justin nodded. Heard the muffled sound of an engine roaring to mighty life. A moment later, one of the loading bay doors exploded into curled panels of metal and flying glass. A pale Olds sedan bulldozed out, tires squealing, and hooked sharply to its left and careened for the exit. There was no choice but to let it.

“We must go,” Kerebawa repeated.
“Now. ”

He was right; the police would be converging on this scene like flies. Justin hung on to the assault rifle, snatched up the fallen pistol from beside Barrington’s body. The rented Dodge—he spun in circles, disoriented, probably couldn’t find his own feet.

Only then did April emerge from behind her own shelter.

Hate may have been out of the question before. Not now.

He looked at the guns in his hands. Then the one in hers; so far as he knew, she still had two shots left. He was sure she had gotten the same idea at the same time.
Who’s first?
he wondered. Finger tightening all over again, nauseous fright.

April let the .32 fall to the ground. She walked closer, eyes empty, mouth downturned in sorrow. She looked half dead already. Then she stopped. Yanked open her blouse hard enough to pop a button free and expose more chest. Like a target.

“If you’re going to do it,” she said,
“do
it.”

Justin shut his eyes, felt his own tears burn. Caesar and Brutus, betrayer and betrayed. Bestower and recipient of Judas’ kiss. He actually felt his finger put more pressure on that trigger before he shook his head.

“Live with it,” he said, anything but forgiveness in his voice. Nor was it in his heart.

But there was necessity.

“Come on.”

He grabbed her wrist, yanked her along to follow. Kerebawa was already at their car. And sirens wailed in the distance.

Most of all, Tony remembered the light. Or rather,
lights.

Those supernova blasts before him from Ivan’s AK—how had Justin ended up with it?—that tore pain through his shoulder and then skewered him through the chest and soaked both sides of his shirt with dark cardiac blood. The killing light. Followed by darkness.

And there was where the gaps in memory began.

There came more light, he recalled, at some point—but from the inside. Drenched with it, he knew that in its presence a moment could seem a thousand years just as easily as the reverse could hold true. It could have lasted no more than a few seconds, given that the next thing his eyes registered was the same as the last before the blackout: Justin, closing in.

Tony stumbled up stairway after stairway to get to his penthouse, clinging to the rail as if it were a lifeline. Past two in the morning; he was the only thing moving, which was for the best. His features had oozed back to full humanity while he was behind the wheel. But before ditching the dirty-work Olds for good, Tony had inspected his damage in its mirror and knew he would give anyone, bar none, a sphincter-loosening fright.

Lights before him, lights inside. And then he had snapped rudely back to gritty reality, and the lights were before him again, Justin pumping round after round, and there had been no more pain, only annoying tugging sensations through his body.

Gaps plagued his memory, like alcoholic blackout; he wasn’t sure how he had found his way home. It was as if some autopilot had taken over, leaving his own cognizance to drift without anchor.

No longer the master of his own mind; he’d grown frightfully aware that he had signed over the title papers at Agualar’s. The hunger born of smelling Justin’s blood underscored it. First the mind, now the body was relinquished. And the soul? A toss-up, anyone’s guess.

It felt as if the being known to himself and others as Antonio Mendoza were nothing more than a figurehead. Ceremonial head of state for public appearances and the sake of continuity. While the deeper, more elemental decisions were made by something else, from the deeper levels where it preferred to hide.

Pushing buttons. Pulling strings. Routing switches . . .

And speaking to him in a language understood on the inside when it would fall on uncomprehending ears if coming from without.
We are one now,
it seemed to say.
And we are hungry.

It told him so very many things, and each one gave him the strength to go on. Step after step, stairway after stairway. It would tolerate no disagreements. For the
hekura
were wise beyond the reaches of time.

Tony lurched through the penthouse door and quadruple-locked it behind him, reeled along until he could hit the bathroom lights and prop himself against the sink before the mirror.

The old Tony was strong inside, of stomach and heart, with no low tolerance for things gruesome. Even so, the old Tony couldn’t have seen himself in this condition without dancing on the rim of madness. His skull was wreckage. He peeled away his shirt and saw that his torso fared no better. Hamburger.

But the new Tony stared with detachment and fascination. To shriek would have been to risk the rebuke of the master. From somewhere behind his eyes, Tony peered out at a ravaged body he could no longer conceive of as being wholly his own.

Left of the breastbone, a hole, red-rimmed. He ran a finger around the ragged edges, then sank the finger in. Probed with the nail through a scabrous crust. Up to the first knuckle. Then the second. Deeper still. Alongside his finger, he felt the clenching beat of his heart. Weak, arrhythmic—but on the mend.

He popped the finger out with a wet sucking sound. Watched the unplugged hole drool a few trickles of blood before the flow turned sluggish, ceased altogether.

Tony gulped. But then smiled like a child taking his first few unaided steps.
Gonna be all right, gonna be all right.
He just needed a little sack-time, time to heal.

He shuffled over to the sunken tub and turned the faucet on full blast, watched water splash cool and inviting. The sound was sweeter than Brahms, than the voice of a lover. The chlorine though. It had burned a bit before, nothing he couldn’t handle, but now it would likely be excruciating.

Tony wobbled into the aquarium room and listened to the hiss and gurgle of the homes of kindred souls. He rummaged through supplies until he found what he needed: the bottle of dechlorinator.

Soon he shed the rest of his tattered clothes. Eased the equally tattered body into the tub, nearly a three-foot depth waiting to engulf him.

He had but to think of it, and the change came over him, and while the pain was greater this time by far, given the wounds, it was better this way. A few bloodied scales slipped from his neck to the water.

No more need of the powder. For himself, at least. He would still need it for others, and there
would
be others. A good man tries to find homes for homeless friends.

Sleepily, Tony slipped beneath the water, curled onto the bottom of the tub, the change complete.

And let the
hekura
work healing wonders.

Most of all, Justin remembered the blood. So much, so copiously splashed about.

With every passing mile back to the motel, he tried to force it from his mind. No crying over spilt milk, nor over shed blood. That he had been shoved face-to-face with the one thing he had always wanted most to avoid in the drug world —violent physical confrontation—and that he had coped somehow, tended to foster new self-respect.

But what the hell had
happened
with Tony? The big question. He tried to impose calm on himself, wait until he and Kerebawa could talk without shouting back and forth across the seat, volume driven by sheer intensity. Wait until he could think again.

They dragged themselves through the doorway into their room, now stale and as cloying as a prison-camp sweatbox. April took it upon herself to turn on the air conditioner, and once it had rumbled to life, she sank onto the bed with her head in her hands. Apparently none too inclined to look at Justin or Kerebawa.

Justin took a step closer to her, without knowing why. And now she looked.

“If you lay a hand on me, you’ll lose it,” she said.

The temptation was there; perhaps she had sensed it from the wounded fury of his eyes. It had been strongest in the car, while she sat silently in back, while the enormity of being sold out washed over him stronger than a monsoon. Taken all the love, the intimacy, the passion, and kicked them into his face like sand. He actively hated her then, for being so willing to trade his life in on whatever pathological hang-up she had about disappointing her parents. The temptation to lash out in retaliation, to reach back and blacken an eye or bloody a nose, had been a tangible urge.