Nightlife (42 page)

Had to be another way to smoke them out.

“Start running this place through a fine-tooth comb,” he told his men. “Go through everything. Every drawer, every cabinet, every shelf.”

The guys divided it up by room assignments, or what passed for rooms in her home. Lupo took the kitchen and dining area. BB the living room, Ivan her bedroom. All wore skintight surgical gloves to avoid fingerprints.

Tony began in the bathroom. He went through the medicine cabinet, then the vanity, then the narrow linen closet. Didn’t take long; not much he could learn from soap and towels and Tampax.

Gleefully, then, he emptied the nooks and crannies of their contents. Jars and bottles he hurled into the tub, where they shattered, contents mingling into sickly splashes of color. He jammed the toilet full of tampons and sanitary napkins, gave it a flush, then had all her towels strewn across the floor to soak up the overflow. Lastly, he found a curling iron and fired it into the mirror, watched his sneering reflection burst into a radius of a thousand fragments.

It was a slim fraction of the rage boiling inside over his piranha. He’d let it all out, in time.

While combing her belongings, the boys eyed him surreptitiously as he stalked through the loft with a mounting sense of vengeance. He slipped a butcher knife from the cutlery block and reduced the cushions and backrest of her sofa to ribbons. Carried the knife with him into her walk-in closet and slashed every dress, every blouse, every pair of slacks and jeans. Men’s clothing hung in here, too, from one bar, and he took unbridled delight in ripping it and pretending that Justin was wearing each piece.

Of course, when the
real
time came, their hides would not be cleaved by anything so mundane as a simple knife.

An address book was uncovered in a living room end table, and this Tony perused, found a few names to check into. Nothing so definitively ripe with possibility as a map for a remote family cabin, but a valuable find nonetheless.

Tony bulldozed along toward her office, pausing in the bedroom to slash her mattress and bedsheets, then smash a freestanding antique full-length mirror and overturn it in a clamor of shattering fragments. Into its rubble he added a ceramic bowl and pitcher from atop her dresser. Framed pictures hanging on the loft’s inner wall and brick pillars he plucked from their supports and clashed together like cymbals. Everywhere, broken glass and torn fabric.

Her office.

Drafting table, desk, file cabinets, desktop copier—he could have boundless fun in here once it was searched. He could cripple her business as effectively as a torpedo in the hull of a ship. Maybe let her live after all, let her come home from a dead lover to find this place in shambles. Let her die a slow death of business strangulation. Let her sit amid the sackcloth of shredded financial documents and contracts, the ashes of all her files. Let her know what it feels like to come home and find a piece of your life ripped out by the roots.

He was about to seize her business telephone and plunge it through the glass of her copier when he froze. Stared at where it sat on a deskside tabletop, beside an answering machine. With both its ON and CALLS status lights glowing red.

It had the calming effect of a sedative.

Tony rewound the tape counter down to zero, hit
PLAYBACK
to listen. Several calls, clients yammering for one thing and another like petulant children. He shook his head, thought he’d likely go bugnuts having to spend his life answering to people like that.

“April, this is Marian again,” came one voice near the end of the string of messages. “In regards to our conversation earlier this morning, I decided we can probably wait until the middle of next week on those proofsheets. No later than that though. Call me if you get this message before five-thirty today, okay? This is Wednesday, by the way, that I’m calling. Um . . . I really do hope you get your family problems ironed out soon. We need you here.”

Another message followed, but Tony scarcely registered it. His mind was racing, trying puzzle pieces together and finding that some were starting to fit. Smart girl, she was keeping tabs on business by checking calls. Daily, at the very least.

Tony set the machine back to
ANSWER CALLS.
Looked at her business line long enough to commit its number to very short-term memory.

And walked to the other end of the loft to her personal line hanging on the kitchen wall.

The bubble, fragile as it was, burst on Thursday morning.

Justin had tried phoning Rene Espinoza a few times on Wednesday afternoon and evening, hoping to get news of the lab results and how they would subsequently proceed. She was always out, though, and he would talk to no one else, wouldn’t leave his name. He finally caught her Thursday morning.

As soon as he heard the shift in her voice when he identified himself, his heart stuttered with a downward lurch. Hers was not the voice of triumph incarnate.

“The stuff you gave me?” she said. “It tests out as a hallucinogen, really potent. The lab said they’d never seen anything like it.”

“And?”

“And it’s legal.”

His heart deflated. Every hope nailed on using the skullflush against Tony blew away in the breeze.

“Legal?” he whispered. “How can that
be?"

“Because it’s not
il
legal. The law’s pretty clear-cut when it comes to things like this, the chemical makeup of the drug.” He heard papers rustling over the phone. “I’ve got a full readout here that looks like a chemistry textbook. It probably wouldn’t mean any more to you than it does to me. But the fact is, it’s never been seen here before, nobody even knew it existed. So it’s just one of those drugs that manages to slip through the cracks in the law, like some of the designer synthetics managed to do.” She sighed, a wearisome sound. The sound of someone who had climbed too many paper mountains. “Mendoza could be sitting on a dump truck full of the stuff, and there’s nothing anybody could do about it.”

Justin had been slumped onto the bed, and now he lay back a moment to stare at the ceiling.
I suppose I could tell her he’s killed somebody else,
he thought. Of course, she would wonder how he knew.
I
saw it in a vision induced by another tribal drug,
he could tell her. That would go over big. Ironclad testimony. Despite all the benefits from his experience with
ebene,
he still felt heartsick over what it had ultimately shown him.

“So where does this leave us?” he finally asked.

“Did you have any backup ideas?”

A frantic mental scramble, then, “No.” Barely a word, barely a noise.

“Then my advice from two days ago still holds. Lie as low as you possibly can until something blows over.”

He barked an embittered little laugh. “For how long? You said something could break any day, but be honest. You don’t know, do you? You don’t honestly know. It could take another month, or six months, for all you know.
Couldn’t it?”

Another weary sigh. “I’d be lying if I said that was out of the question.” They shared silence for a few moments, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower. An almost conspiratorial hush meant for his ears only. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, one way or another. Just what
I’d
do, if it was me. And if you
ever
tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it. To your face, in court, in church, wherever—I’ll deny it.”

“Let’s hear it.” Although he suspected what it would be.

“I’d kill him. Flat out kill him. I don’t know if you’re up to something like that.”

“I—I don’t either.”

“But you ripped him off to the tune of five keys, so you’ve got something in the way of a pair of stones. At least you can be sure of two things: If he turned up dead, I don’t know of anyone who’d shed a tear. And the natural assumption is that it would’ve been one of his business associates. If you get my drift.”

“Yeah. I do.” Another whisper.

“That’s all I’m going to say on the subject. Ever.”

Kill him.
She was probably right. And while Justin had passed on that option a few nights ago, now he wasn’t so sure it wasn’t the best one after all. In no small way due to what the
ebene
had shown. A man who slaughtered like that didn’t merely deserve to be locked up, the key melted down into something useful. No, he deserved to die. But to have no qualms over decreeing such a fate and acting as executioner —a veritable gorge separated the two.

“It’ll be taken under consideration,” he said, and after she wished him luck, the connection was broken. He sat on the bed holding the receiver a moment, then cradled it gently when he instead felt like pulverizing it to plastic chips and dead circuitry.

“What’s wrong?” April, at the round breakfast table. Kerebawa sat across from her. Optimism was not showing its sunny face.

He told them of the lab results, watched shaky hope lose all ground and become lost hope. And then offered the partial redemption of Espinoza’s suggestion, the apparently last-ditch chance among their rapidly depleted roster of options. Sad, in a way, to watch morality become the next casualty when the situation looked this desperate. He put it to an informal vote.

“I say we do it,” was April’s.

“We already should have.” Kerebawa had probably never heard the phrase, but his expression plainly said
I told you so.

Justin rose from the bed and paced toward them. “Can you do it?” he directed to April.
“Can
you? Because I’m not so sure I can, to be honest. When it comes right down to sticking a gun in his face and pulling the trigger.”

Kerebawa tapped his chest.
“I
can.”

“Mentally, okay, I believe that. But you’ve never even used a gun! And believe me, he and his people will have them, too, and machetes and bows and arrows aren’t going to be any match. It might have been close when you had the curare arrows, but you said those got washed clean in the rains before you even got to Tampa.” Justin sunk onto the bed beside them. “It wouldn’t be as easy as that, anyway, just walking up into his face. We’d never get that close.”

“So we do it from farther away,” April said.

“A firelight against people who’ve got us outnumbered, outgunned, and outexperienced.” He reached over to rest a hand on her knee, hoping she would join his with her own. She didn’t. “Plus, no matter what Espinoza says, it’s still murder, it’s still illegal. Even if we stay alive, we could still be caught with the smoking gun.”

April snatched her knee from his touch. “Do you want to do this, or don’t you?” An angry demand. “Because what else are we gonna do, huh?
What else?
Look at us! Do you want to live like this forever!”

Justin looked at Kerebawa. No words needed; the set of his face indicated that he was siding wholly with April.

Some change in life he had managed to fashion for himself. At least back in St. Louis he had had identifiable hallmarks to dread, court dates and meetings with lawyers and cops. None of whom were out to kill him, but who drained him of lifeblood just the same. This wasn’t much different; the main distinction was not knowing when the hammer would fall, or if the blow would be fatal.

“I never said I didn’t want to try,” he finally told her. “Just trying to be realistic. Nothing wrong with being realistic.” April nodded, swirled the last swallow of coffee in her cup. “No. And you weren’t wrong about anything.” She finished the coffee. “I’ll tell you what our problem is. Tony’s got too much control. We don’t have any leverage to get him to behave like we want.”

“We have the
hekura-teri
,” said Kerebawa. “He wants this.”

Justin shook his head. “That’s not good enough. Sure, that was a blow to his pride when we took that, but it didn’t hurt him much. He couldn’t sell it anyway. He’d probably already gotten used to the idea of eating the financial loss.” He smiled thinly, an idea starting to gel. “What motivates Tony? More than pride, more than ego or sex drive or power. What does that leave?”

“Money,” April said immediately.

“Exactly. And if we want more leverage to bargain with him to maybe get the last of the skullflush, and to get him into a position of maximum risk to himself at minimum risk to ourselves, we’ve got to hurt him through his cash flow.” Kerebawa had been following carefully, new terms and concepts alien to his home. He seemed a quick study. “I have seen many men die from their greed.”