Nightlife (31 page)

“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 parcel 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 shimmering 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 sudden 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 flesh; he had 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 set into motion, 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?”

“Yes.” Kerebawa rose and pulled his cloth roll from the car. Held it up a moment as if for inspection. “I brought a powder from home. We call it
ebene.
It shows to me things. Sometimes things that are important.”

Sounded intriguing, if not entirely plausible. Of course, watching Trent Pollard and his floor show at Apocalips hadn’t been high on the list of probabilities either.

“What is it, some kind of drug?”

“So
you
call it. To us, it is our way of life.”

He nodded. Way of life, right. He’d known a lot of people to whom that phrase applied. “I’ve taken a lot of powders myself. Or at least, I used to. Never saw much of anything very useful with any of them.”

Kerebawa cocked his head, glanced down at his roll. The briefest flicker of a smile. An I-know-something-you-don’t smile. Justin found it irritatingly smug and was quickly amused by that.

“Maybe you did not have the right powders.”

Justin scuffed at the ground. “Sometimes I looked pretty hard though.”

Kerebawa peered at him, long, unflinchingly. It was a vaguely discomforting stare, the scrutiny of culture shock. “The eagle,” he said at last. “That was you.”

Justin blinked dumbly.
"Me?”

A simple nod. “Your
noreshi.
Your spirit animal. You have strength. You have high thoughts, like the eagle flies.” Justin swatted a mosquito, managed to beam with self-satisfied pride for a moment. Then he remembered:
Broken wings though.

“But,” Kerebawa went on, “you are crippled inside.” Lofty self-images plummeted in a deathly spiral. “Thank you, Mister Morale,” he muttered. That was the bad thing about listening to someone who could see into you with the clarity of a sixth sense. Brutal honesty, providing you were equally honest with yourself, was often hard to refute.

“You have used the green powder that Tony Mendoza has.”

Justin nodded. “Once. I didn’t know what it was. He lied to me about it. But yeah, I took it.”

“I can feel it about you. You, too, can see important things.”

Justin thought it over several moments. Remembering the sole instance when he had transcended the mundane and concrete for pure spiritual dynamite. That flash-in-the-pan linkup with some girl he did not know, whose exquisite fear of the shape-shifting unknown was nevertheless tangible.

“I thought I did. Once.”

Kerebawa nodded. “You could maybe see clearer if you were not crippled inside.”

They waited without speaking for several more minutes before April returned. Justin was nearly ready to follow her path and look for her when he heard a delicate splishing of water. Soon after, she came into view.

Working both mounted oars of a small rowboat.

Justin and Kerebawa moved over to the shore as she let the boat glide to them, rustling through sawgrass until the prow connected with a gentle thump. She stood, wavered her balance, and then Justin helped her out.

“You’re just one surprise after another.” The admiration was a hundred percent genuine. “Where did this come from?”

“Some old man in one of those houses back there has a little dock. Erik and I went joyriding in this one night at one of those parties.”

They backtracked to the car. And the grislier task at hand. Justin opened the trunk, and he and April stared down at the blanket-cloaked form for several beats. Serenaded by frogs and insects, to which death was an everyday fact of life, an everyday possibility, side-effect of the food chain. Somehow, when elevated to human terms, it often looked far uglier. There was no dignity in this, in being crammed inside a too-small trunk, still wearing the undies that had acted as a catcher’s mitt for the last wastes your body would ever void.

Reality was doing far more than slapping them in the face. Reality was rubbing their noses in itself.

Justin nodded at Kerebawa, and the two of them lifted the body free. Carried it to the rowboat and stowed it in the center, where the blanket soaked up stagnant water puddled in the bottom. Next they loaded the cinder blocks and hangers. April grabbed a small, flat plastic flashlight from the car’s console. Everything the expedition needed.

They boarded one at a time, pushed off. The rowboat rode considerably lower in the water now. Have to be careful. Justin didn’t relish the idea of tipping it too far and sinking, dropping in uninvited on a family of water moccasins.

April continued to do duty at the oars, slowly dipping them in and straining them back. They glided away from shore and aimed for the treeline, a soft shadow across the face of the water. Forsaking twentieth-century civilization for a little microcosm of a world still as primitive as it might have been long before man had trodden the soil in his present form.

While Justin held the light, she weaved them between the cypress, the flanged and fluted trunks tapering up and out of the water to form a canopy overhead. Now and again, the side of the boat would gently scrape against a cypress knee. Ephemeral curtains of Spanish moss and spiderwebs brushed his face, shoulders, and Justin shivered and pushed them away. While all around, living things seemed to shift, to scurry, unseen but heard.

“How deep is this water?” Justin asked.

“Oh, four to eight feet, I think they said once. In the spring and summer at least, with the rains.”

He nodded, feeling vaguely shameful, indecent acts under the cover of darkness. April rowed them in until there was no more light visible from Grandaddy Lane and they were utterly alone with primordial swamp and their own guilt.

“I suppose,” she said slowly, “this is as good as anyplace.”

The cypress rose like gray-brown legs around them, their little floating oasis of light. The air was warm and clinging with misty haze. Somewhere just within the range of Justin’s vision, he saw a flash of eyes and heard the splash as a rat tumbled into the water.

He twisted the tops of the clothes hangers, counterclockwise, until they came undone and he was left with stout wire. Shifting in the boat, he bound the corpse’s ankles together with one. Used another to securely lash the ankles to the first of the concrete blocks. The second he figured he would wire around the neck.

“I don’t suppose you want to keep this blanket,” he said, fingering the makeshift shroud.

April shook her head. She was hugging her arms around herself as if cold. “I never want to see that thing again.”

He moved to the other end of the body, and the boat rocked precariously. Settled. He fumbled with the limp arms, and one flopped free to rap knuckles against the gunwale. He looked at the curled fingers. . . .

The ugly turquoise ring.

And hated himself a bit for the idea that crept into his mind. This ordeal had really pushed his mind and imagination—and temper—toward the sewer’s edge. He pointed at the ring.

“Maybe we should keep a souvenir to let Tony know we came out on top of this one. When the time seems right.”

April swallowed thickly. “Then you keep the ring. I don’t want to see it anymore either.”

He breathed deeply. “Anybody can lose only a ring.”

She saw in his face what he meant instead. The realization spread across her face like the dawn of the darkest day.

“You can’t—”

“I’m not the one that decided the stakes of this mess we’re in. Mendoza did that. I just want to show him we mean to fight.”

She turned her head away. “I can’t watch this,” she said, and a moment later, pressed her palms against her ears.

Mosquitos whined around his face, his heart thundered. Justin looked at Kerebawa, then the machete he had brought. Pointed.

“Can I borrow that?”

He nodded, offered it handle first. Held fast to the blade for a moment after Justin gripped the handle.

“Do you rather me do it?” Kerebawa said.

He considered it. But Kerebawa had saved their lives to begin with, fired the crucial arrow. April had finished the man off, then had gotten them out here. So easy to let others do the dirty work.

“My idea.” Justin’s throat was abruptly dry and harsh. “I’ll do it.”

Kerebawa relinquished the machete.

Clenching his jaw tightly, Justin maneuvered the second cinderblock into better position. Chopping block. He draped the corpse’s forearm across the flat surface. Positioned it palm down, wrist straight. He passed the flashlight to Kerebawa.

“Hold this.”

It suddenly seemed very important that the blanket not pull free of the dead man’s face. Didn’t matter that he had come to kill them—Justin could not do this to someone with a face. He tucked the blanket tightly around the head.

Held the machete in both hands. Waited until it quit quivering.

No matter what it felt like, looked like, sounded like, he promised himself he would not get sick.
Would not.
Not for the entire duration of this whole Mendoza mess.

Justin took a bead on the stilled wrist. Practiced his swing a couple of times. Finally then, sucked in a deep breath and lifted the blade. Tensed his muscles.

And brought it down for real.