Nightlife (38 page)

The adrenaline boost of last night’s strikeback had carried over to this morning. His system still surged, in spite of April’s justifiably angry response to his destruction of the piranha tank. Her good morning kiss had been warm enough, so he’d apparently been forgiven. Buggering possible evidence, though, he couldn’t much blame her being angry. Yet everything was a tradeoff. Tony was probably giving himself ulcers by now.

Too hotheaded, I was too reckless,
he thought.
I’ve got to watch that.
Because things were finally moving along, by
their
hands this time.

Justin looked across the little round table at Kerebawa, who was licking flakes of glaze from his fingers with loud, smacking gusto.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a couple of days,” Justin said. “How do you plan on getting home once all this is over?”

Kerebawa glanced up from wet, sticky fingers. “I hoped I would meet someone who would take me back to Miami-teri and help me find the skymen. Barrows and Matteson.”

“You’ve got that,” said April. “You’ve earned all the rides you need.”

Justin tipped his cup, and the coffee was history. “It might be better to take you down there right away. We’ve got most of the
hekura-teri
now anyway.”

“But not all.” He was shaking his head, no no no, fiercely stubborn. “I would never know about the rest.”

All because of a promise to a dead man. This guy’s sense of honor and duty was something out of a medieval code.

“I will destroy the
hekura-teri
we took last night,” Kerebawa went on. “I will destroy it this day. But I will not return to home until I destroy the last.”

Justin glanced sidelong at April. A sudden tightening of both their mouths.
Trouble brewing
was the unspoken translation.

“Kerebawa,” said April, her voice soft, placating, “we can’t destroy the powder. Not while Tony Mendoza is free.”

He peered up from his fingers again. His whole face sharpening. More trouble brewing.

“We might need it, either to try and get him in jail, or at least to have some control over him.”

Justin nodded. “Destroying the powder, that’s like throwing away the biggest weapon we’ve got against him.” Kerebawa was back to shaking his head, even more fervently than before. “No! This was my promise to Padre Angus, to find the
hekura-teri
and destroy it! It has no place in your world. It has no place even in mine.”

“But it
is
here, and we’re in trouble because of it.” April the diplomat, unruffled and earnest. “If we need it to help ourselves, and it’s gone . . .” She held up her palms, implied defenselessness.

“Yeah, you’re not the only one around here who’s in a mess because of that stuff,” Justin said. “Most of your problems are taken care of. Five out of six. But ours? We haven’t managed to do much of
anything
about them.” He paused, looking for some sign, however small, of Kerebawa’s wavering. Like trying to read the thoughts of a brick wall. “Before we got up I was lying there awake, and I had this idea, how we might use the powder—”

“No.
No
!” Kerebawa rose from the table, legs widely stanced, hands curled into fists, knuckles braced against the tabletop. “You will need to find other ways.”

With that, he moved swiftly away from the table along the side of the unused bed. Knelt on the floor long enough to pull out the kilos of skullflush still in the grocery bag. His eyes were chips of onyx, his jaw granite. Justin rose, moved for the bag, feeling oddly that this seemed as ridiculous as some petty playground squabble among fourth graders. Stay away from my toys, or else.

Two steps closer, and Kerebawa knelt to his pile of belongings.

And reared back up with his machete. Arm cocked, ready to swing.

Justin froze.
I don’t believe this don’t believe he’s pulling that blade on me.
More disbelief than fear, on April’s face as well as his own. Which doubled when Justin found himself reaching for the Beretta atop the dresser and holding it at Kerebawa’s chest. At ten feet, there was little doubt of accuracy.

“Would you guys knock this
off
!” April shot to her feet, spoke sternly, but the unease was evident. Justin thought it probable that she knew he wouldn’t fire. Kerebawa, though, was a less definitive story; less apt to bluff. More apt to be like the countless tales of canines, gentle as lambs for years, who suddenly tear into the family child for reasons known only to primal instinct.

Seconds ticked by, metronomed by the bleedthrough voices of a TV in another room, muffled through the walls. Five, ten . . . they seemed far longer with a gun in hand.

Finally Justin looked at it. Tossed it onto the bed, midway between himself and Kerebawa.

“You too,” April said to the Indian. Then to both: “This macho chest-pounding isn’t going to solve anything. Now put that machete
down.”

It didn’t waver. Nor did his eyes.

“He’s not going to use it.”
Maybe in his own home he would, but not here. Not with us. Not with what he’s learned over the years about our civilization.
At least, that was what Justin was betting on. He looked straight at Kerebawa. “We owe you our lives. We’d be dead if it weren’t for you, we’re not forgetting that. But you wouldn’t have gotten back those five bags of
hekura-teri
if it hadn’t been for us. We need each other.”

Another several seconds. Sounded like a game show worming through the walls. At last, the blade was lowered. Tossed toward the bed to clank against gunmetal.

No apologies though. Neither in voice, nor in demeanor. Rather refreshing, in a way. No chance for anything phony.

“We can talk,” Kerebawa said, and sat on the bed.

Justin took the floor, leaning back against the dresser. April returned to her seat at the table, like a mediator between the two. Justin frowned, composing his thoughts for a moment. Had to put everything in a context Kerebawa would best relate to.

“First off, I promise you—
promise
you—that we won’t do anything with the
hekura-teri
that would risk getting it back to Mendoza. But this land is our home, and we need to defend it from him.”

So far, so good. No recurring flashes of temper.

“You want the last kilo, we want Mendoza in jail. Jail is something your people don’t have, so we have to do things a bit 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. Oh, 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 virgin summer should be.

Justin fingered the vial in his shirt pocket, a bulge he felt a touch of paranoia about. The vial had previously housed aspirin, apportioned into April’s travel kit from an econo-drum of a thousand; no longer though.
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 or Primatine Mist.

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 had 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 stereotypical spare tire. Justin had retained only enough for a sample.

He fingered the vial again. Eyes distracted by a co-ed 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 the hell 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 often 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—has anything turned up yet about Erik’s death? Anything about 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 the question had been anticipated. 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 an animal”—he winced inwardly at the unintentional pun—“and it’s bad news. 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 every bit 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.”

“Oh, 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?”

“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 their names in without need. “Now, I know you’re in homicide, that you don’t represent 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 macho 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 developed and honed to perfection in earlier days. Must be like riding a bicycle; once learned, never forgotten.