Nightlife (36 page)

“We must finish the search,” said Kerebawa. “The dead hunger for vengeance too.”

Justin let his eyes slide closed as he turned away and leaned his forehead against the tank. Inches away, the fish watched him.

“And they’ll have it,” he whispered. “They’ll have it.”

They began to move through the condo with a renewed resolve. They searched closets and bureau drawers, under beds and between mattresses. Looked inside covered pots and pans in the kitchen, inspected Tupperware containers and wax-paper-wrapped bundles in the freezer. They ran their hands behind sofa and chair cushions in the living room. Anything that looked as if it might possibly have sufficient space to form a stash, they either looked inside or probed with their hands.

But continually came up with one big zero.

Time had lost meaning. They could have been there an hour or six. Only when Justin was nearing a furious realization that he might have been wrong did he wander back into the aquarium room. As he sank wearily into the soft embrace of the leather recliner, Kerebawa squatted in the floor, idly toying with a butcher knife taken from the kitchen. Maybe he felt more secure with a weapon.

Think, think.
Justin massaged his temples; they were flirting with a headache. He made fists, ground them against the armrests.

“Would there be someplace not looked in?” Kerebawa asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Justin murmured. He looked at their surroundings, following the light’s beam. “He’s got to keep it in here. Got to. It makes a twisted kind of sense.”

There, try climbing inside Tony’s head for a change. Try the crafty machismo on for size. Sure, he’d keep the skullflush in here. As if his pets would guard it.

“In Mabori-teri, we say sometimes the best place to hide from an enemy is in front of his eyes.”

Justin nodded.
In front of our eyes, so where does that put it?
Wrapped and submerged in the rocks of one or more tanks? He played his light over them. Doubtful, he decided. He couldn’t see Tony, with a setup like this, risking a rupture that might poison his fish. Besides, the gravel didn’t look deep enough for kilos.

In front of our eyes
—the recliner?

Justin hopped out of his seat, borrowed the knife from Kerebawa. To hell with secrecy. He sliced through the back of the chair—maybe the stuff was packed inside. But when the leather back hung in tatters, it revealed only empty space.

Justin sagged into the floor, leaned against the chair. The only thing preventing him from conceding defeat was the look Kerebawa had given him earlier when he was ready to call off the break-in. He tipped his head back over the armrest so that he was staring up toward the ceiling. He shined his light overhead, across the white acoustic tile. And stopped, wondering.

Acoustic tile. False ceiling. Meaning the real, structural ceiling was hidden, a gap of at least a foot between the two.

Justin scrambled to his feet, tested the sturdiness of the recliner’s armrests. A bit wobbly. He had Kerebawa hold them steady as he climbed aboard and pushed the section of tile directly overhead out of its frame. He aimed his light into the space.

And discovered that pay dirt was green.

He tossed the individually wrapped packages to the floor, five in all.
Only five.
He swept his light all across the false ceiling and found only dust balls. He replaced the tile, then hopped down.

“Where is the sixth?” Kerebawa asked. “There were to be six.”

“I don’t know. Not there. Maybe Tony’s got it someplace else. With him, maybe.” Justin gestured impatiently. “Come on, let’s find something to carry these out in.”

They took the kilos into the kitchen, where Justin rummaged through the pantry and found a cache of grocery sacks. He unfolded one; some supermarket’s name and logo were emblazoned across it. And with the skullflush inside, it looked and felt as innocent as if it contained nothing more than a few bags of flour. Getting ready for a marathon baking stint. They could walk right through Tony’s front door and waltz downstairs, and no one would think a thing about it.

Justin looked at the sack with a decisively satisfied nod.
“Now
things get personal,” he said, and moved for the main hall.

“We go now,” said Kerebawa. He stepped forward, far enough to snag Justin’s elbow. Urgently. “Justin, we
go
now.”

Justin whirled, batted the clinging hand away. For a brief moment, Kerebawa’s eyes ignited. There was no other term for it. Burning with the quick temper and hostility that were a part of his birthright, his people. His legacy. An imposing sight, unless you were past the point of caring.

“You got what you wanted out of this.” Justin kept his voice low. Unflinching. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Only fools stay in an enemy village after the work is done.”

“It’s
not
done, that’s the problem. As long as we’ve been here, a few more minutes won’t matter.” Justin let that sink in before hitting him with the truly irrefutable argument of his own words. “Remember, the dead hunger for vengeance too.”

Kerebawa appeared to resign himself to carrying out the wishes of the dead. Something he was surely no stranger to. And as Justin returned to the aquariums, he put his partner in crime and survival out of mind. Justin was on personal terms now and wanted no help. He was the one who had decreed the need for mind games with Tony.

And there was no better place than here. His refuge. Sanctuary.

From the doorway, Justin shined his light onto the huge piranha tank. At a distance, they looked so innocuous. Then he recalled the condition Erik had been found in. The prosthetic and glove needed for his funereal visitation. He remembered the mound of grave dirt in Ohio. The quiet slumber for the sleeper, in that quiet earth.

Some things just seemed destined to come full circle.

Justin drew the Beretta. Flicked off the safety, sighted in on the tank. Began to squeeze.

And lowered it. No. Not this way. This was too distant, too clean. Pulling a trigger was too easy. He put the gun away and, from the living room, brought back one of the hefty Lucite bookends, the one with the scorpion. Denizen of the desert. The justice factor seemed very poetic. Desert was about to meet deluge.

Kerebawa helped only by holding the flashlights, and this was all he wanted. Justin hefted the bookend in both hands. Gave a pair of practice heaves from the doorway, like a shot-putter before a track meet.

And with a pleasure bordering on the obscene, he let it fly.

The side of the tank staved in with a liquid crunch, and it was as if a dam had burst. Freshwater and foam erupted in torrential violence, gushing across the floor in a wave that reached from wall to wall and even out into the hallway. Justin stepped aside just before it slapped the hallway wall, soaking into the carpet and sloshing halfway up to the ceiling. He laughed. He laughed, and it felt wonderfully invigorating. Nothing he could have done tonight would have felt half as good.

On the hallway carpet flopped a lone piranha, silver with swirls of red-orange around its lower jaw and gills. First-place winner for distance. He took his light from Kerebawa and entered the room, found most of the other fish splashing feebly in water insufficient to cover them. They made low grunting noises in concert, and fascinated, he listened to this eerie cadence of their impending deaths.

Two fish were still in the tank, below its new, drastically lowered waterline. Easy enough to fix. He splashed onward and kicked the massive hole even larger, bringing about a secondary gusher. With it tumbled the two stragglers.

Hell with soggy shoes, he didn’t care. All he wanted to do was keep free of snapping jaws, and this wasn’t too difficult. He smiled again. The devastation, in just moments’ time, was enormous.

Justin squished past Kerebawa, back to the living room, where he retrieved the sandwich bag from the coffee table. Its time had come. Where to leave the contents though? He settled on the kitchen. Inside the refrigerator he found a pitcher of lemonade. Perfect. Guaranteed to kill someone’s thirst for a good long time. Once emptied, he pitched the bag in the trash.

While he was in the kitchen, inspiration struck. He gathered cutlery and steak knives until he had collected an even dozen. Then back to Tony’s private Sea World.

Kerebawa watched with impassive approval as Justin squatted beside the piranha that had made it all the way to the hall.

“This will bring great fury to Tony Mendoza,” he said.

Justin grinned, cold and humorless. “That’s the idea.”

With that, he gazed down at the piranha. Its tail beat at the soggy carpet; its gills flexed, useless in the air. Gasping its life away. Justin selected a knife, held the point over the thickest part of the fish’s middle. And punched through its body.

One by one, he followed suit with the rest, until all twelve were twitching on their own individual blades. He gathered them around Tony’s recliner, crippled throne in the center of a waterlogged palace.

Finally, time for the coup de grace.

Justin pinned the first fish to the leather backrest. And the second. And the rest. Not haphazardly, but with symmetry, with precision. Weaving them into a grand design that Tony could not help but perceive. With screaming futility. Justin smiled.

And then stood back to admire his handiwork.

The first indication that things were wrong came even before Tony and Lupo and Sasha made it up to the fourth level. His downstairs neighbor had been watching for him. And wasted no time charging out in a thigh-length bathrobe to howl and bitch about water leakage draining into his ceiling.

They left his complaints behind, and Lupo had his MAC-10 drawn and ready to fire as soon as Tony opened the door.

The entire atmosphere felt different. Violated, raped. By that time, the ruined transformer had been taken care of and full power had been restored. They knew nothing of the earlier blackout as Tony hit the lights.

As soon as he saw the sodden carpet, he went running for the aquarium room. When he splashed inside, Tony felt the heavy hand of tragedy as never before. It turned knees to jelly, took stomach and heart with them.

His pride, his joy—
demolished.

And then he saw the recliner.

His warbling cry of despair brought Lupo in at a run from checking the rest of the penthouse. And all three of them stood in the water, staring. Just staring. It took an extraordinarily pissed-off person to go to all this trouble.

“I don’t care what it takes,” he said, trying
so hard
to keep his voice from degenerating into a sob, “but I’m gonna kill them myself. I’m gonna tear out their fucking hearts and eat them raw.”

He went on and on, and they let him rage, and finally Lupo looked overhead. Tony sputtered into silence and followed his gaze.

“They didn’t,” he whispered. Blind hope.

“Have to check.”

Tony took an automatic step toward the recliner, then stopped. No. Couldn’t use it as a stepladder now, not now. It would be too much like wallowing atop a fresh grave.

“Give me a boost.”

Lupo wrapped thick arms around his waist and heaved him upward. Tony lifted an acoustic tile, then let it fall back with a strangled cry. When Lupo eased him back to the floor, Tony took two wobbly steps to one side before his knees gave out. Too much grief, too much rage, too much shock. Systems were close to overload. If he had Justin Gray and April Kingston before him now, he knew with complete certainty that he could take them apart with his bare hands.

He sat in the floor like a dejected child, water soaking into his slacks and shirt. Ran a hand through his hair, and water trickled down both sides of his face. He looked up only when Sasha moved toward him with splashing footsteps.

“Get the fuck out of here!” he shouted, and she flinched. “This doesn’t concern you, so just get the fuck out of my sight!” She splashed back to the hallway without a word.

Tony uttered a mortal groan. “They took it, man. Every bit of it.”

“There’s still most of that kilo hidden in the Lincoln.”

A singular weak ray of sunshine through this darkest of clouds. “That’s right, I—I forgot.”