Nightwise (4 page)

Coming up from the mirror, I saw a man on a table on his stomach, glass cups, the air within heated by the blue blade of a handheld acetylene torch, were attached, one by one, to his naked back by a slender girl with a mane of white hair. The girl was wearing a corset and skirt of bloodred leather and a gas mask. The hot air inside the cups created a vacuum that, when pressed to the man's skin, sucked the flesh up into the cup and made the man hiss in pain and sensation.

I watched the show, along with the small crowd that had gathered. As they watched gas mask girl add more and more cups to the shuddering man's back, I lost interest and turned to regard a beautiful nude Asian woman, her head shaved, a coiled serpent of emerald and crimson ink flowing down her flawless body. She stood like a queen, regarding the crowd and me with utter contempt, then lowered her eyes and knelt at the feet of three well-dressed men in suits and featureless black leather masks. Each man held a crackling neon purple wand that sputtered and hummed with electricity. They thrust the wands into the flesh of the Snake Queen. Her aristocratic features contorted in pain and ecstasy. The whole tableau was overseen by a woman in a flawlessly tailored man's suit, a leather mask, like those of her knights, obscuring her features. She sat in an antique electric chair, in rapt attention to the Snake Queen's torture.

The pain was sudden and severe, and it came on me instantly as I watched and listened to the violet wands sizzle the Snake Queen's nerve endings. The pain was centered between and slightly above my eyes, and I knew exactly what it was. I walked away from the crowd and the show and let the yawing ache in my third eye lead me. It was at a table near the terminator between the churning dance floor and the conspiratorial darkness that was haven to lovers and criminals. It was skinny, almost gaunt, with long blond hair tied back into a ponytail and a fringe of a beard. Its eyes were heavily lidded and reminded me of a lizard's.

It was feeding on a young man at a table about twenty feet away. The boy was pale, weeping, his makeup streaming down his cheeks. Black tears. I saw the kid stuff a handful of pills into his mouth and drown it with a shot of Jägermeister. The pain radiating off him was sharp and bright, like a scalpel. The blond “man” with the ponytail smiled when the boy winced in emotional pain. I stepped into its line of sight, blocking its view of the boy.

“Try me,” I said. “Go on, try it on me.”

The psychic vampire regarded me for a moment like a cobra preparing to devour a mouse, and then its lidded eyes widened as it encountered my defenses. It sniffed me and quickly did the math of the jungle.

“Go on,” I said, lighting a cigarette, “eat me.”

I leaned over the table and flicked my ashes in its drink. It started to rise. I put a hand on its shoulder and pushed it back down.

“Don't come back here,” I said. “You do and I'll rip your aura off and we'll see how long you can live with every nasty entity and negative essence in here chewing on you.”

I released it. The psychic vampire stood and nodded slightly. Its face remained a mask of bland indifference.

“My apologies,” it said in a near monotone. “I didn't realize this was your feeding ground.” It walked onto the crowded dance floor and disappeared into the forest of sweating bodies.

“Fuck you,” I said to the empty table.

*   *   *

I found Grinner on the fifth floor of the old power station, up where the really weird shit goes down. I ascended the wrought-iron spiral staircases, rusted helixes that took me lower and lower as I climbed higher and higher. On five, two more of the bulletproof legionnaires, like Baldy outside, told me Grinner was in the cages. They looked at me as I passed with the same guarded disgust I had given the psychic vampire. When you work in a place like this, live in this world long enough, you can smell dangerous, crazy, and sick, like dog shit on someone, and you never turn your back on it.

I passed the snuff room with its burgundy velvet drapes and muted Schubert, where, by invitation only, serial killers and things much, much worse watched the murders performed on the circular stage at the center of the large, darkened room.

I paused and scanned the crowd as best I could without drawing the predators' attention. Many wore masks. I wondered if one of them could be Slorzack; this looked to be his kind of crowd.

Tonight's murders were a ritual, a tribute to Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of sorcery, destiny, and the night. Not that most of the shadow men sitting at their tables watching the young girl struggle and beg for her life knew or cared. I saw one shadow's arm jerking furiously under his small candlelit table. It struck me that once that would have made me puke; now it just was. A string quartet wearing tuxes and skull masks performed “La Muerte y la Doncella.” The cellist turned to regard me with hollow bone orbs and cocked his head. I walked quickly away from the door.

The cages were a maze of steel wire and human degradation. Speakers hidden in the room blasted and distorted a club mix of Depeche Mode's “Master and Servant,” bouncing it off the concrete walls. I walked past people wrapped in plastic like mummies with straw holes for them to breathe through, suspended in their cocoons like alien moths, twitching to be reborn. Eyes followed me as I moved through the corridors of cells, some feral, insane with fear and high from it too, others content and serene in their enforced captivity, drooling happily behind ball gag pacifiers. And then I came to Grinner.

Grinner's real name was Robert Shelton. He was a big guy, six two, well close to three hundred pounds, covered with tats. He was nude except for a steel contraption like a cage that encircled his genitals. He hung by leather wrist restraints inside a large cage, suspended a few inches off the floor. His dyed hair was the color of asphalt, shaved on the sides and put up in a topknot. His hazel eyes were only slits. His lips were cracked and dry. He didn't seem to recognize me or even be fully awake.

“Hey, Grinner,” I said, and whistled. “Rise and fucking shine, man. I need you. Got work for you. Playtime is over.”

“Who,” a powerfully built bald man in a black leather and mesh wife beater with a dull steel ring sewn into the chest said, “the fuck are you?”

The music faded, morphed into a home-brewed mix of Prodigy's “Smack My Bitch Up.”

“I'm the client,” I said, and took a long drag on my cigarette. “I need him.”

“Well, I am his master, and I say when he comes out of there,” the bald man said, and held up a key on a thin steel ring that had several collected on it.

“Look, Fifty Shades,” I said, “I'm not looking for trouble. Just need his expertise and I know he always needs cash.”

Grinner moaned, and his eyes opened for a second. His breathing was a dry wheeze.

“How long has he been in there?” I asked Grinner's master.

“Six days,” the master replied. “No food, minimal water. He contracted to give me seven.”

“Well, I'm sure you have gotten your rocks off plenty of times in the last six, so I'm getting him out of there now.”

Master edged into my space, into my face. “He's not going anywh—”

I jammed my lit cigarette into his left eye. He managed to close his eyes in time to save his cornea. I drove my right fist into his gut, and he went up off the ground and then down in a heap. I flicked away the crushed cigarette and then kicked him a few times in the flank and stomach with my steel-toed boot. I knelt down and took the key ring out of his hand.

“Do not try that dom bullshit on me, my friend. Now roll over and play dead. Good boy.”

I unlocked the cage and slid the straps off Grinner's wrists. His voice was cracking from lack of use and a dry throat, but it was still a booming bass.

“That was epic,” he croaked. “I was ready to get the fuck out of this about a day ago.”

“Where did the Marquis here ditch your clothes?” I asked.

“Locker over there,” Grinner said.

“Lean on me,” I said, and handed him the key ring. “You can unlock your own crotch cage.”

“Don't be judging, man,” Grinner said as he tried to laugh. It came out a jagged cough. “Seen you up in some weird shit too, Laytham.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I was usually the one with the keys to the cage.”

Grinner tossed the genital cage away and pulled out a pair of purple and gray camo pants and a black T-shirt with a faded Special Forces logo on the back. He sat on the chest with a groan and slid his feet into a huge pair of black Chucks.

“Look, we'll talk business at my place. You go hail a cab since you have to go outside anyway, and I'll settle up with Master,” Grinner said.

“This clown is really your master?” I asked. “And why did you say I had to go outsi—”

A powerful set of hands grabbed me under the arm and behind my head, and I was down on the cement hard and fast, a brilliant flash of pain-light filling my vision as my brain flopped back and forth inside my skull.

“I told you, didn't I?” It was Baldy's voice calm and even in my ear. More hands grabbed me, most likely the security boys from the stairs who had given me the hairy eyeball. They dragged me away, and me and my headache didn't argue.

“Glad to see you still got a way of bringing out the best in people, Laytham,” Grinner said as he helped his master to his feet. “I'll meet you at the cab.”

*   *   *

“One fifty-five Avenue C,” Grinner told the back of the cabbie's head as he climbed in the cab. “Loisaida.”

Even through the headache, that sounded familiar to me.

“That's C-Squat, isn't it?” I said. “Punk House?”

“Affirmative,” Grinner said, pulling his cell phone out of his leather jacket. He frowned at the screen and then began to text someone. “I am an artiste, after all.”

C-Squat was the name of an abandoned building in a part of the East Village known as Alphabet City. It had been claimed by squatters, homeless, kids from the emerging punk scene, in the 1980s. In buildings between Avenues A through D, they governed themselves and claimed the land as their own. They ended up fighting a war for it. The NYPD came numerous times in the dead of night to dispossess them. I knew secret heroes of those shadow wars—“the Alphabet War,” they called it. It was driven by many of the same Secret Master Illuminati douche bags I was dealing with now. There were initiated sects within the NYPD, cults with badges and clubs, who worshiped much more than poor Lady Justice. Some of them were little more than death squads for the Illuminated. In the end, twelve buildings survived the secret war and were still in the possession of the squatters. The city had even cut a deal with most of them, to buy the buildings. That was the way of the world; if you couldn't take it by force, buy it with money.

“Where you staying?” Grinner asked as he continued to text, his fat thumbs dancing over the touch screen.

“Figured I'd crash with you,” I said. Grinner said nothing, intent on the screen.

We got out in front of the building. It was still dark, and a trace of snow was blowing. A group of street people and tenants stood around old oil drum bonfires warming themselves, talking, joking, laughing, singing, living. A group of musicians, black leather and duct-taped troubadours, jammed on the crumbling tenement stairs. They greeted and fist-bumped Grinner as we passed. The elevator was a death trap, so we walked twelve flights of dark stairwells that smelled of piss and stale beer. Street artist murals were everywhere. No gang tags, just beautiful, primal art. I liked this place in spite of myself. They had fought the fucking Secret Masters of the city and won. Maybe I could survive this.

Grinner rapped on the door as he unlocked it. There was a dream catcher made of a rusted hubcap, old wires, rats' skulls, and pigeon feathers mounted on the door.

“Christie, baby, I'm home, and I brought company, right behind me.”

Grinner entered and turned immediately to his left, sharp. His wife, Christine, a tiny, waiflike woman, pretty, with auburn hair, sharp, well-defined features, and piercing green eyes, was about twenty feet from me. She was aiming a big military-looking rifle straight at my guts, and she looked like she knew what she was doing.

“Hi, Ballard. Don't move or I'll cut your redneck ass in half. Hi, baby. Did I do good?”

“You did great, baby,” Grinner said from behind me. I heard the front door close and many bolts, chains, and bars locked into place to secure it.

“Hi, Chrissie,” I said. “You look prettier than ever and a damn sight more pretty than this sorry SOB deserves. My god, are you pregnant, darlin'? You are glowing, baby!”

Christine smiled sweetly from behind the rifle and nodded eagerly. She smiled so wide her eyes closed in happiness. The rifle never wavered. I felt a large cold barrel of steel rest at the base of my neck just behind my left ear.

“You have never, ever wanted to stay with us, motherfucker,” Grinner said from behind the massive pistol resting against my head. “So I figure you are running from someone and you think me and my family might slow them down a little bit. That how it goes, buddy? I remember how you did Malcolm XYY and that sweet little girl from the Crusade of Secret Saints. You fed them to the fucking dogs, feetfirst.”

“It's not like that, man,” I said. “I need you to…”

“Erase your ass? Hide you until some trouble with a badge and a gun kicks in my door and fucks my world up while you go dancing away? That what you were going to say?”

“I need a crosshair go-to on someone, full package. Everything. I'm looking for someone, and yes, I have trouble nipping at my ass, but it won't be back on my scent for at least a few days and by then I will be gone and…”

“And who did you have to throw under the bus to keep your pretty fucking ass alive for a few more days, Ballard?”

I turned slowly to stare into the gun, into Grinner's eyes. I felt a great sense of peace flow over me at the prospect of the gun ripping my head off, destroying my brain. The feeling passed.