Nightlife (39 page)

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 anything else until that’s done.”

“And then?”

“We’ll see.”

Frustration at this lukewarm reception was reaching beyond tolerance levels.
We’ll see.
It had been spoken in the same tone of voice every guy in Western civilization has heard from female lips.
I had a great time tonight; when can we go out again?
An uncomfortable pause, lasting geological aeons, then:
We’ll see.
A noncommittal response with all the finality of a slamming door.

“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 a bit heated, as well. “Just stay out of our faces, Justin. You have no idea what all this 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. “Are you people 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. “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 Mendoza ...”

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 weren’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, from sex to career to happiness to life and death. “Damn you to hell.”

“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 almost 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.”

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.

“Come here,” he said, and she came.

Sasha moved across the bedroom, a seductive wraith, smooth ivory skin strategically draped in black silk and lace. Blond 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 flat, rectangular mirror. Chopped and paralleled across its surface, sixteen lines of fertile green. And two straws, as if they were a pair of carefree teenagers ready to share a malt in the fifties.

Grief had driven him to this, grief and thwarted rage. Today he had taken his deceased 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 had leaped over one side of the gazebo to the mudflat below, landing with a squishy thud. He shed his shirt, the shark’s 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. In one of these a kilo had remained since his initial test on Sasha nearly two weeks ago. He praised his reluctance to take it from the car and store it back 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 much preferred this one. Whitewash disappeared and rinsed everything within reach a vibrant red.

Where 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. Like the malt-sipping lovers from the fifties, 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 . . .

The wickedly spiritual 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. 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 eradicating the last of this morning’s tension.

Justin 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 very 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.

Kerebawa took his bundle of
ebene
and began to carefully load the bamboo tube. Pouring a bit into one end, tapping so as to distribute it along the length. Finally he set the bundle aside and reversed the tube, held it before Justin’s face.

“I hold it in front of my nose?” From Justin’s vantage point, as the two of them squatted a few feet apart, it looked as if Kerebawa was holding a gun barrel toward his head.

“Yes. One side, then the other. There will be pain.”

Deep breath. Release. His heart had speed-shifted into high gear. Fear of the unknown. “I’m ready.”

“If you have strength left, then you do me.”

Justin nodded. And shifted the bamboo in line with a nostril.

Squatting on his haunches, Kerebawa drew a massive breath, held it within a puffed-out chest. Placed his lips to the tube. And with a blast of air that sounded deceptively gentle, propelled his breath through the tube.

The pain was staggering, an invasion of his skull by both solid and gas. Justin tumbled backward onto his rump, his head feeling clubbed by a hickory stick. He looped his arm around the small waste basket provided for the room and retched into it, then wearily resumed his squat.

“Beif”
said Kerebawa.
Again.

They did the other nostril, and if the pain was less, it was only marginally so. Justin leaned groaning against the bed while mucus dribbled from his nostrils. When he wiped it away, he marveled at the vivid green tint. Memories swirled, kaleidoscopic. Trent, at Apocalips, his running nose. But while the pain of insufflation may have been similar, he knew instinctively that he was on a completely different journey. And as its cocoon began to draw tighter, there was no fear. Only the dawn of wonder.