Nightlife (41 page)

“Traffic’ll be picking up before long,” said the guy in the passenger seat. One of the hired help from the past couple of nights, one of two brothers named Barrington. This one was Bruce; everybody called him BB for short. Neither particularly big nor menacing in appearance, but looks were deceiving. BB had been into the martial arts ever since he was seven. Got hooked on Bruce Lee movies at an early age, partially because of the draw of identical first names.

“Don’t worry about traffic.” Behind the wheel, Lupo was steady as Scylla, beast of rock from Homer’s
The Odyssey.
“We’ll be on the bridge before long.”

BB looked down in faint distaste at the garbage-bag bundle at his feet. It looked weighty, shapeless. Lupo knew he would just as soon be rid of it.

“What happened to the rest of the body, man? That’s the lightest corpse
I
ever lugged around.”

“It’s been disposed of,” Lupo said. Voice very cool, very even.

But his nonchalance was a mask, if an effective one, covering the sliver of doubts and disturbances pulsing beneath. He thought he’d seen it all, death in all forms that mattered. Torture. Murder. Brutal interrogation. Had a crinkly white scar across his own gut guaranteeing that he had endured some heavy-duty abuse of his own. Thought he’d seen it all, no more surprises left.

And then Tony had to go throw a new one in on him.

A couple hours earlier, he had walked into the condo— alone, as the Barringtons remained outside—and was almost immediately slapped in the face by the rich, coppery odor of a recent kill. A messy one. He had rapped on Tony’s door. Waited. Rapped again.

“Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Come in.” Tony’s voice was ragged.

What Lupo had found inside had given even his own battle-tested gorge a run for its money.

Tony, sitting in his waterbed. Not on it,
in
it. As if it had been hurriedly converted into an aquarium to replace the one he had lost. Tony had been leaning back against the headboard. An absolute mess, blood caking his mouth, face. Streaking the wall behind him. And in the water, floated, well . . .

Things.

Things that had once been joined, parts of a whole. And were now apart. The most recognizable of which had been a foot and lower leg, rising from the water to drape over the bed frame.

Tony had sighed heavily. Finally met Lupo’s astonished gaze.

“Don’t we do a lot of bizarre things out of love?” he had said.

Lupo’s mind had spun frantically to grasp it all. Not entirely sad to see their association with Sasha come to an end.

Not entirely relieved to see it come about
this
way. It was the last thing he’d expected, because for the past few days Tony had actually seemed to be falling for the girl. Falling, and fighting it, maybe even subconsciously.

Tony had likely snapped back to his right mind. But was it possible to snap back too far in the right direction? To go beyond?

Then he saw the mirror on the floor. The straws. Recalled finding Tony last week after his earlier experiment with skullflush. He wasn’t sure he wanted to learn anything more of what had gone on in this room than absolutely necessary.

“Need to get rid of this mess.” Tony held up a second foot and let it go to splash back into the water. Too far apart from the other one, the angle all wrong. “And then we’ve got a lot of things to plan out.”

Sometimes, over the past couple of hours, Lupo had wondered why he was going along with this, as if it was par for the course. This was careless, sloppy, needlessly risky. Tony had been taking more risks, calculated and otherwise, the past two-plus weeks than he had in the past two years. Why stick with that, given the consequences?

And then he knew.

That was the way it had always been.

Childhood friends, from the same neighborhood. Tony had always been the outgoing one, Lupo reserved, preferring the company of books to that of other kids. They were an escape from decay, the stink, the rats. He’d earned no small number of beatings and torment because of it. Until he began to grow. And grow. And beat the hell out of Tony Mendoza, who had made the mistake of picking on him one too many times.

But instead of now fearing him, like the rest, Tony had said he was impressed. Glad to see him standing up for himself for a change. Lupo still remembered looking down at him with those split lips, puffy eye, scraped forehead and cheekbones. Watching him laugh. Not believing it when this early teenage Tony Mendoza had said he’d been looking for someone with
cojones
like that.

Man, you gotta be crazy,
Lupo had thought. His knuckles ached from Tony’s face, and here the bloodied kid was acting as if Lupo had passed some sort of audition.

You had to listen to a guy like that.

Crazy; now
that
was par for the course. Seemed like every time he fought a little harder and higher up the powder heap, Tony got a little crazier for it. For that was the way to pull it off. The meek may have been penciled in to inherit the earth, but not in
their
time.

He had told himself before, on occasion, that whenever it appeared that Tony had finally twisted his mind to the point where it might snap for good, he would cut his losses and bail out. Maybe that time had come. Probably.

Yet here he was lapdogging same as before. No real intention of leaving, just curious as to how crazy Tony could get and hold it all together. He
had
talked a frightening kind of logic up in his bedroom—especially since taking that surprise call from the accountant.

So he’d hang tough with Tony awhile longer, see where it led. Had to know how it would all turn out. From a ringside seat. Face it—what else did he have going to fall back on?

So.
Drive.

The Lincoln left land behind them as 1-275 cut southwest from Tampa over the Old Bay toward St. Pete and Clearwater. The Howard Frankland Bridge spanned better than five miles of water, and once on, you could soon see neither the land you had left nor the land you were heading for. Midway to the west you picked up a whiplike spur jutting from the mainland, just barely wide enough to provide bedrock for the bridge, but that was it for solid ground.

Lupo began slowing the Lincoln after the first couple of miles. Looking ahead, behind. Across the low concrete divider, in the two northeast-bound lanes, a pair of cars passed in tandem, and the next headlights were hundreds of yards away. Behind them, beneath the pink ridge of dawning sky, the nearest headlights were pinpricks. The time was right.

“Let’s lose her,” Lupo said.

He was in the outside lane and hit the brakes to bring the car to a halt just shy of a skid. Nothing but dawn and vast plains of water for company. BB had one hand on the door-latch, dropped the other to the sturdily wrapped and weighted garbage bag.

Just as well this one was going to sink to the bottom with precious little chance of floating and discovery. Packing up the pieces had shown him some bizarre things about this particular corpse, things that would attract all manner of attention. Try getting fingerprints from paws, for one thing.

Dead stop. BB flung the door open, lugged the bag of bones out behind him. Sent it whirling out over the retaining wall, against the northern horizon, out of view.

Just before BB hopped back into the car for quick takeoff, Lupo could barely hear the splash.

With every tick of the clock, Tony felt himself gaining momentum. A sluggish start in the wee hours of this morning, though, waking up wet and bloody with recollections of the night that seemed more like dreams than anything.

He had been sleeping underwater. Awoke when the change reversed and sent him back to reclaim full humanity. Gills sealed, and his sleeping body had no option other than to begin sucking water into his lungs. He erupted from the water in a choking flurry, coughed it back up.

Only then did he realize what he was sleeping
with.

For a short while, tears had wanted to flow as memories settled into focus. No more Sasha and her horizontal dance of delights. No more Sasha, period. The death of an impending fatherhood he’d not even known about, nor she. Tears. Had he let them, they could’ve come.

But then came the resurgence of feelings more instinctual than emotional. Predators had no time to waste mourning dead mates they themselves have brought down.

Besides, she was still with him in a sense. You are what you eat, and all. He could feel bits of her essence within, food completely unrelated to physical sustenance. He had eaten bits of her soul and felt all the stronger for it. Fragments of silently screaming distress that fueled him like a battery. He would drain them until there was nothing left but anemic flickers.

Meanwhile, the future beckoned. Its possibilities to be plucked like ripe fruit from trees. Now that he had unlocked this green Pandora’s box of secrets, he was limitless. Not the least of which had begun With that early-morning phone call.

It led them downtown around noon to pick up their rider, a guy named Santos. A thin, nervous sort of twit, one little speck among the glass and steel towers. The Lincoln swallowed him whole, then cruised back into traffic.

Tony was wearing one of his finest white suits, but even that didn’t stave off a sense of coming in second on a comparative basis. Santos wore basic Wall Street gray, Savile Row all the way. Looked as if he’d been born in that suit. Tony smirked inside though. Above the neck, seemed like nine out of every ten accountants looked alike. Some kind of international law, maybe.

They shared the back seat, stretched out on the leather with plenty of legroom. Tony fixed him a drink out of a portable bar, which Santos accepted gratefully. Not once did he move toward doffing his sunglasses. He was fooling no one. The rich bruises around the left eye socket needed far more than shades to screen them from sight.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Tony said. “I personally guarantee you will
never
have cause to regret it. Never.” Santos nodded his battered head. “I swore to myself, this is the last time that
hijo de puta
does this to me. Thinks I’m skimming off the top? If I’d done that, he’d never know. Paranoid
cabrón.”

Tony nodded, sympathetic. You bet, pal, life’s tough enough, and you’ve already been dished out more than your share of shit. “That’s what happens when you mix business and pleasure.”

On the outside he was calm, easy diplomacy. Inside, he was turning orgasmic cartwheels. The timing on this was incredible. Life was grand, life was charmed. He had been subtly working this guy for nearly a year. Agualar’s primary accountant, increasingly dissatisfied in his present position. The money was prime, but even that wore thin after a while when Agualar put you on the brunt end of his greaseball temper. Waltz you around the office with his fists, no matter how much he was paying, you still felt like some kind of kinky whore. Pride rebelled eventually.

Santos could take him places. Oh, yes. Guy was a money-laundering wizard, all kinds of connections with cooperative Bahamian and Panamanian banks, plus a network of bogus brokerage houses and furriers and jewelers acting as legit fronts nationwide. As it was, Tony currently belonged to a loose financial coalition that pooled resources for laundering purposes and doled out eight percent cuts of the gross as commission. Santos had promised he need never pay anything more than six and a half ever again.

So long as he was successful in his bid for coup d’état. Tony was willing to take that risk. Now more than ever.

He snapped his fingers. “Let’s see what you got.”

Santos unlocked his briefcase and flipped through an immaculate array of files, folders, and sheafs of paper. He withdrew a sealed envelope, passed it over. Tony ripped it open and unfolded papers that appeared to be overhead maps of a highly upscale residence.

“The electronic security is based in a second-floor room in this part of the house.” Santos aimed one manicured fingernail. “Two men are on the console, with eight monitors in all. The cameras are programmed into the monitors on a rotational basis, with each one changing images every five seconds. Any one of which they can lock-in permanently.”

Tony nodded, watched as the fingernail began to tap various little blue dots labeled with
C
s.

“Cameras here, and here,” Santos said, “and here, and here. . . .”

And on he went, that most dangerous of spies: the one with a personal grudge. Tony loved it. He watched, listened. Learned. The seeds of revolution already sprouting in his mind.

Midafternoon.

Santos had long since been deposited back where they’d found him. An hour later, they linked up with the Barrington brothers, who followed in a second car as they drove to Kennedy, turned off onto Magnolia.

The Barringtons parked first. Bruce’s brother, Ivan, was no slouch when it came to locks. He and BB headed for April’s second-story loft while Lupo circled the block an extra time. Wait until Ivan was in and things looked kosher. After the first lap of the holding pattern, Tony saw that BB was leaning against the building, and gave them a slight nod. Lupo parked, and up they went.

Tony didn’t know what he was looking for. Something, anything, to give them a clue as to where he might find Justin and April. One solitary fact they were overlooking or were not yet privileged to know.

“Look,” said Lupo, just past the threshold. He pointed with one shoetip toward the wall beside the inner door. A bullet hole. Angled downward, as if it had come from someone firing down from the outer doorway.

“The Weatherman,” Tony said flatly. “Fuck. I’d give just about anything to know the story behind that.”

He wandered in, Lupo and the Barringtons in tow, stood at this end of the loft and stared down its length. Stuffy and stale and overbearingly warm in here, closed up for days. Dim, too, all the blinds drawn. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the narrow gaps between the Levolors and the tops of the window frames. Dust motes swam in the air.

Tony had had people continuing the phone campaign to area motels and hotels, still hoping to uncover a likely registration. About ready to give that tactic up. If they were taking the motel route, they weren’t using their own names. Of course, they couldn’t manage that indefinitely; April wasn’t rich, and he was willing to bet that Justin wasn’t either. Plus, April worked right here at home and couldn’t survive away for very long. He could wait them out, let them deplete their cash reserves, but that could take too long.