Nightwise (2 page)

“I was here in the States handling my family's business. I was planning to bring her over.”

Boj's family's business was called “import-export” in polite circles. The cops called them the biggest heroin production and distribution network in Eastern Europe. When I met him, he was handling everything for them from L.A. through flyover country—Middle America. I saw him at war with the Russians, the Triads. He was the Alexander of the street—bloody, raging, glorious, and terrible. Now he was a skeleton stretched over gray skin, one good bout of flu away from Hell.

“Stupid bastards,” he muttered. “I found out the name of the chief stupid bastard just a few years ago. It took the last of my resources. Most of my ‘friends' have abandoned me, and even my enemies pity me and wait for me to die like a rabid dog. But I knew you would come, Laytham. I know you. I want you to find him. I want you to see he gets what he deserves.”

“Why the fuck me, Boj? I'm no cop, I'm not an enforcer, a leg breaker. I know some wise guys who'll do him for…”

“Because he's into the Life, Laytham, the Art, the Dance,
bajanje
—whatever the fuck you call it, just like you and Harel and all those other weirdos we used to hang out with. I think he used it to escape from the law, even the street's law.”

Down the hallway there were echoing shouts in Spanish. Someone named Tuni needed to mop up Mr. McGowan's piss from all over the break room. I sighed.

“This chief stupid bastard have a name? We may have bumped into each other at one of the weirdo conventions.”

“Slorzack,” he said. “Dusan Slorzack. He was indicted for war crimes back in '96, but he hasn't surfaced anywhere since then. He seems to have found a back door to slip away from everyone.”

“That was awhile back, man. You sure he hasn't just died somewhere?”

Boj said nothing. His face was sunken, a skull with tatters of skin and bone pulled over it, a constellation of sores marking his face.

“No,” he finally said. “Bastards like me don't get that lucky. My karma is fucked. He's out there laughing and drinking and fucking and Mita is only a memory in my skull, and when I'm gone, she's gone too, like she never was, and that is the greatest crime I think I have ever known. I'd do it myself if I could, Laytham. I can't.”

I scratched my head and sighed. Boj waited patiently with the ghost of his dead wife for me to mull it over. Slorzack. The name meant nothing to me. A long-cold trail. My enthusiasm must have been shining out of my face.

“You owe me blood, redneck,” he finally said when he felt me trying to pull away from it.

“Yeah,” I said, “I reckon I do. Okay, I'll look into it.”

“Good,” he said, and I saw his whole body relax. He smiled. His teeth were rotting, and his gums were gray and recessed, but it made me feel good to see him smile, all the same.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I got to go. I'll keep in touch,” I said.

“Yeah. What the fuck is this, Laytham?” he asked.

He unwrapped his present. His eyes widened as he recognized the worn, battered leather case. He unzipped it and smiled again. Everything was like he had left it. The hypodermic, the needles, even the cooking spoon, caked and blackened. The rubber hose uncoiled like a tan viper, eager to wrap around his arm and sink its fangs into his vein. A small red balloon filled with poisonous rapture also fell out, tied tight to keep its contents from spilling.

“I figured what the hell, right?” I said.

“Yeah,” Boj said, arraying his works before him, looking at the balloon like a groom looks at a bride on their honeymoon. “What the hell.”

*   *   *

I knelt over the dead banker's dumb face frozen in agony and terror. The dead always look fake, like bad wax mannequins or grotesque rubber sex dolls, but the death smells were there to remind you it wasn't a special effect. Sweat, shit, piss, blood, all stuffed up my nostrils to assure me it was as real as it gets.

His eyes reminded me of Granny's. All dead eyes did. I half expected him to blink, for those cold, empty windows to shift, focus past the gathering cataract clouds, and regard me from a sitting room in Hell.

They didn't. I started to breathe again and felt the cool sheen of sweat wet the back of my shirt. I closed the dead man's eyes, more out of a desire for reprieve from their regard than anything approximating respect or human kindness. My hands shook a little. I needed a drink.

A man like this would be missed—and soon. He had been here all night, and now, in the cold gray light of dawn, his office manager, or one of his racquetball buddies, or his steroid dealer would walk in and find him. I needed to be gone by then.

I tossed the room, looking for anything that might put me back on the frozen trail of Slorzack. My short-lived friend, the car bomb guy, had left a few legal pads in his desk drawer that hadn't ended up blown to hell. They led me here. Slorzack had paid a lot of money for an introduction to this man—Berman, James Berman. Why?

I skipped searching the plundered desk and the computer with its blue screen of death. The people who killed the banker had done a professional job of tumbling the place. They had found whatever it was they were looking for, if indeed they were looking for anything at all. Tossing the room might have just been a ploy to divert attention from the murder. Unlike the crap you see in the movies, nobody methodically tears up a room and then misses the McGuffin in the false-bottom chest. It just ain't so. The only hope I had was to pick through the scraps. Look for the unseen.

I closed my eyes, steadied my hands, and slowed my breathing and my heartbeat. I opened the lenses of energy that resided along the bone staircase of my spine. I exhaled and opened my eyes.

I started with the primary reason for the killer's visit: Berman himself. If they just wanted to toss the place, they could have done that when he wasn't here. No, they came to do this to him. Ransacking the office was either a secondary concern or a ruse. I examined his body. Berman was a very tan man. He had good hair and good teeth and was tall and had a body that was a testament to many hours worshiping at the temples of the racquet club and spa. He had a class ring—a big, squat, ugly thing designed to announce to the world his pedigree. On his left hand was a simple gold band and a Masonic ring, gold with a ruby glaring up at me in the harsh office light. A Mason. He was a little more interesting now.

A sudden insight, a flare of intuition, made me open his shirt, ripping the buttons off the broadcloth and pushing his tie aside, so that it now clutched his bare neck more like a hangman's noose than a banker's badge of office. His chest was smooth, hairless. Around his neck, on a thin, expensive silver chain, were two slender cylindrical handcuff keys on a simple wire loop of steel.

I touched the keys and felt the swell of tantric power roar through my mind and down in my Swadhisthana chakra. The flicker of the candles, the spatter of hot wax, the feel of warm leather in my hand, the smell of blood and sex, the scream of pain and desire, echoing. This was the first real part of this man I had come across here. These keys were soaked in secret power, hidden desire, and I could track that.

But I felt a familiar pressure squeeze between my brows as my Ajna chakra opened its petals wider.
Something else.

I took the chain and the keys, dropped them in my pocket. I reached for the mug of overpriced, and now cold, coffee on his desk and dipped a Montblanc pen into it. I stirred counterclockwise as I incantated,
“Aperio latito conspici … iam.”

I took the pen out of the mug and moved it across his still chest, left to right then right to left, finishing the charm by circling his chest widdershins and touching the tip of my makeshift wand to the spot where his cool, still heart was.

This was a risk. If the killers had planned on me using the Art to search, I could get a nasty surprise, but this was a very unobtrusive bit of magic. A trap would have to have a hair-trigger to activate against this.

The skin wavered like asphalt on a hot day and the tattoo appeared, spread across the dead man's chest. Emerald ink, racing, arcing, forming symbols, finishing in the pattern of the pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye boring into me as it hovered at the apex amid a halo of brilliant radiating light rays.

Illuminating.

“Shit,” I said, with more than my usual amount of West Virginian twang. I said it out loud to no one but the dead man and me, a soon-to-be dead man.

“You're with the fucking Illuminati.”

 

TWO

I exited the office building of the late James Berman—would-be secret master of the world—faster than a preacher leaving a whorehouse. The sky was ash. Dawn was a thinly veiled threat of bruised light only moments away. The row of streetlight orbs that stood silent sentry glowed in perfect unison. No busted streetlights on Wall Street. They winked out one by one as I passed them, their duty to hold the night at bay finished.

It was September, and dead leaves, empty Starbucks cups, and crumpled McBurger wrappers swirled in the terminus of the wind cutting between the shafts in these concrete fortresses. I pulled up the collar on my ratty Navy pea coat, lit a new cigarette, and kept walking away from the crime scene with my aura all over it. My stupid, unique, mega-magicy redneck aura.

The Illuminati. Fuckity-fuck-fuck.

Down the street, a group of Occupy protesters were huddled together beside a small domed tent, trying to avoid the wind's cold regard. Their cardboard signs bent and bowed in the force of it. None of them looked like they had gotten much sleep. I recalled not too long ago when there had been thousands of them down here. Most had packed up and headed home, but not these kids. They were young, college age, and they were true believers. In other words, cannon fodder.

While their leaders gave speeches and then drove home to Rockaway or Brighton Beach, or NYU for dinner and a nice warm bed, these kids manned the front lines. They were foot soldiers, the ones who end up dead in every war, the dumbasses who most likely volunteered.

Screw volunteering.

Belief has power. Getting someone else to believe what you believe has even greater power. I've always been all about the power, not so much with the following or the believing. I believe in me, that's pretty much it. Believe in someone else too much and they'll fail you or screw you, or both.

One of the kids handed me a flyer. It was shaking, snapping in the wind.

“Learn the truth about who is running our country into the ground, bro,” the kid said. He was maybe twenty and had a mop of curly, brown hair stuffed under a Nike lid. He sported a week's growth of beard. A blue North Peak jacket helped keep him warm, and he had an iPad in his hands with Angry Birds fluttering across its glowing screen. “Help fight the corporations that are bringing us all down.”

“Irony,” I said. “Do you know it?”

“Huh?” the walking billboard responded eloquently. I shook my head and took his flyer. “Fight the power,” I said, and gave him a fist bump of solidarity as I slid the two Montblanc pens into his pocket without him seeing. I kept walking. If he knew who really ran this world … well, he'd be as screwed as I was. If they found those pens on him, he'd be a damn sight worse than screwed.

And better him than me.

*   *   *

The Illuminati. Really? For half a second I thought maybe Boj was setting me up to get killed. I did owe him, and maybe he thought this would be a good way to get fair market value out of me. One last “gotcha.”

No. I saw the look on his skull-face, in his heavy-lidded eyes: hate. Not for me but for the man who had taken the only light he had known in this world. No, Boj had said Slorzack had mojo. If he was hooked up with the Illuminati, it might explain why Boj couldn't find him.

I fell into a booth at Jack's Stir on Front Street. For the millionth time since I saw that symbol manifest on Berman's chest, I thought about saying fuck it and rabbiting. Boj would be dead soon and I could tell him I did my best but I couldn't find Slorzack. I'd live, Boj would die either way. You mess with the “I” and you end up with someone using your nerves as violin strings while you lie somewhere and feel every draw of the bow, every note of agony. No, thank you.

The waitress was pretty, Mediterranean with long black curls and tanned skin showing in all the places to help with the tips.

“What to drink?” she asked. Her English was pretty good. The tag next to her cleavage said
DANNI
.

“Cheerwine,” I said as I unwrapped, and tapped, a new pack of smokes. I knew I couldn't smoke in here without a lot of bullshit following me, but the ritual comforted me and made me think of the next cigarette to come.

Danni frowned. “Wine? I'm sorry, we have no liquor license for…”

“No, darlin', Cheer-wine. It's a soda.”

“Soda.” Danni nodded. “Oh, pop. We have Pepsi … we have…”

Suddenly I felt like I was in an old
Saturday Night Live
skit with John Belushi. No Coke, Pepsi. I shook my head and smiled.

“Coffee, darlin'. Black as my soul and those pretty eyes of yours.”

Danni looked confused and then smiled and wrote something on her pad. “Coffee. Yes. Very good.” She looked me in the eyes. I sent a little current back to her, just a nudge of power from my sacral chakra, to make sure I got a decent cup of joe and her attention while I was here. She walked away and glanced back to see if I was watching her. I was. We both smiled.

Great. Here I was in the Big Rotten Apple, no fucking Cheerwine to be had—I hated going north. No one ever carried it up here. I could make the most of this day right now by asking Danni to come back to my hotel with me.

And then there was Boj, dying. Waiting for me. Fuck.

Boj. He took a 9mm rune-carved heart seeker for me in Vegas, back in '99, when we burned Joey Dross and stole his philosopher's stone. Boj was the only one who came back for me when everything went to shit in '01, with us trying to save that little girl from the breeding pools under Carrabelle, Florida. He risked his life to pull me out of there when the Mosquito Queen was draining me dry and I was begging for her to do it. He stayed with me during the sickness, madness, and addiction that followed.