Second Skin (66 page)

Caesare was waving his arms around wildly. ‘Will ya look at this?’ he shouted over the roar of the engines. He pointed down to where he’d pried open the top of a crate covered with government seals and official warning stickers.

Vesper bent to take a look and he grabbed her by the back of the neck so hard that she saw stars. Before she could catch her breath, he jammed her head into the edge of the open box of weapons. Forward, Milo, who had been watching from the shadows at the edge of the cockpit, turned away.

Half-dazed and hurting, she heard a metallic click, felt the cool metal muzzle of his gun worming its way painfully into her ear.

‘You fucking little bitch,’ he spat. His face was a twisted mask of rage. ‘Did you think you’d get away with it?’

She had a hard time forming words, but at last she managed to answer, ‘Get away with what?’

Caesare cuffed the back of her head. ‘You fucking ratted me out to the feds.’

The vaguely triangular shape, glistening, dark as death, hung before Nicholas’s eyes. He could smell it, and even through the drugs, his stomach quailed. He was hyper-metabolizing the Banh Tom toxin, but it wasn’t fast enough.

‘Here it is! Power!’

Mick Leonforte held Mikio Okami’s heart in his hand, and as Nicholas watched, horrified, he bit into it. Like the butcher he had become, Mick was covered in blood. Mikio Okami’s blood. Nicholas did not want to look at the swaying corpse across the room, the lifeless husk that had once been the Kaisho of all the Yakuza, now mortal as the next man. Worse, he had been reduced to a slab of meat.

Mick chewed slowly, thoughtfully, ecstatically, wordlessly. The time for speech-making was over, Nicholas knew; the time for deeds had arrived. Nicholas knew a great deal about shamanism. He knew, for instance, of the power of human organs to instill superhuman strength and endurance into the eater. The greater the warrior whose organs you ingested, the more strength and endurance you achieved. But there was more. In taking from your enemy his vital organs, in destroying them utterly by eating them, you deprived him of his place on the mandala of life, of being born again.

Mick finished the heart. He strolled to the corpse, made another slash in it with a precise but offhand flick of his wrist. He returned to Nicholas carrying a darkly purple, slithery object. Okami’s liver. This Mick thrust against Nicholas’s chest like a poultice. Mick began to chant in a strange Vietnamese dialect.

‘You are ill. Terminally ill. It is your Jewishness. It’s like a blood disorder; it has damaged you, turning you into a lower order of life. I can save you, perhaps, if that is what pleases me.’ He gave a laugh that was part bubbling chortle. His lips and chin were dark with blood.

He resumed his chanting, his eyes closed to slits, his body swaying slightly in trance. Then he snatched away the liver and, with a growl, bit off a piece, then another. Curiously, he did not chew but held them in his mouth.

He put his stinking face close to Nicholas’s and said with a half-full mouth, ‘Eat! Eat!’

He offered up the liver but Nicholas held his lips firmly shut. Mick smiled, almost benignly, and slammed his fist into Nicholas’s solar plexus. Air escaped Nicholas’s mouth as it gaped open. Mick put his lips over Nicholas’s in a terrifying kind of kiss, spat the bits of liver into his throat.

Nicholas’s jaw snapped shut and he gagged. Mick clamped his hands across Nicholas’s mouth and whispered in his ear, ‘Swallow, Nicky boy, or Okami will choke you to death.’

Nicholas swallowed convulsively.

‘Better.’ Mick nodded. ‘Much better.’ He finished eating the liver, tearing at it with bared teeth and feral eyes. When he was done, he said, ‘I’m not through with you yet. There’s another chapter that needs to be played before it’s done.’

He touched Nicholas gently, almost lovingly. ‘Rest now,’ he said, his voice utterly calm, still and brittle as glass. ‘You will need all your reserves of strength in the hours to come.’

‘Deal? What kind of deal?’

But Wade Forrest was not even looking at Croaker when he said this. They were in the middle of the compound and Forrest was busy absorbing the status reports from his officers. The news was all bad: Caesare Leonforte was nowhere in evidence and no one had any idea how he had escaped. Everyone in the general vicinity was treated to a choice five minutes of Wade Forrest’s unbridled wrath. Even the hardened fieldmen, armed to the teeth, seemed to cringe.

By dint of sheer willpower, Croaker kept his mouth shut long enough to find this out and to learn that Vesper was also missing. He knew where she was, but then again he knew where Bad Clams was. Or, more accurately, where he would be in just over an hour: aboard Coast Guard cutter CGM 1176. This was Croaker’s last best shot to save Margarite, and somewhere deep inside him he knew he was saying his prayers just as he had every night when he had been a child.

All around them was the sanctified chaos only the United States government could generate during emergencies or declarations of war. Armed men in cammo and painted faces hustled to and fro, shouting orders or receiving updated intelligence. The Leonforte button men were being led away under guard, hands on their heads. The field radio on the chopper was feeding blasts of static-laden sound into the general cacophony. Forrest stood in the center of it all, back straight, directing and conducting with all the aplomb of a tuxedoed maestro. Croaker could feel the waves of satisfaction coming off him, as if saying,
What a thrill! It’s war again.

But like all wars, this one had its downside: despite their best efforts the main quarry had eluded the elite troops.

‘I got a deal for you, Forrest,’ Croaker repeated into the teeth of the din.

‘I don’t make deals,’ Forrest said simply.

‘Sure you do, you just don’t know it yet.’

Forrest dismissed one of his men, turned to look at Croaker, who had been in court enough hours to pick up the most effective psychological tactics of defense attorneys as well as assistant DAs. He pulled Francine close against him. She was weeping, and he could feel her shivering against him and knew her eyes were locked on her manacled mother. He hated to use her like this, but it was for all their good.

Forrest grunted his disbelief. ‘You’re dreaming, brother.’

‘Maybe, but I don’t think so.’ Croaker stepped closer so he could lower his voice, making sure he kept Francie at his side. ‘See, Forrest, you and I have the makings of a perfect deal. You have what I want: Margarite DeCamillo.’

‘Yeah, I got her and she’s staying with me.’ Forrest’s cool skepticism could not completely mask a kernel of interest. ‘Now what could you possibly have that would interest me?’

‘Caesare Leonforte.’

Forrest’s all-American face clouded over. ‘Let me tell you right now, buddy, if you have any information pertaining to the whereabouts of Leonforte, you’d best tell me now, otherwise I’ll slap you with a federal warrant for obstruction of justice.’

‘Don’t threaten me, Wade,’ Croaker said softly. ‘Whatever you do don’t try that.’

Forrest, reacting perhaps to Croaker’s tone or his use of Forrest’s first name, pulled in his horns slightly. ‘I’m not giving Mrs DeCamillo up, so forget it.’

But Croaker could see Forrest making sure he didn’t look directly at Francie’s teary-eyed face. ‘Then you’ll let Leonforte walk.’

‘If I have to.’ Forrest was choking back bile.

‘And with him his cocaine connection.’

‘Fuck it.’ Forrest hung tough. ‘We’ll find others to bust.’

‘And his pipeline into the DARPA weapons cache.’

At the mention of DARPA, Forrest winced. He bit his lip. He was about to say something when one of his idiots reported in. Forrest almost took his head off and the man backed away, ashen-faced. Forrest returned to chewing his lips, as if he were a maddened animal in a too-small cage, ready to rend itself from limb to limb. At last, his restless eyes alighted on Francine and stayed there for a very long time.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

‘I think you’ve lost your mind,’ Maya said. ‘What d’you know about him anyway?’

‘He can ride a fucking bike,’ Kawa said.

He was standing just outside the tiny elevator that had whisked Nicholas upstairs to Pull Marine minutes ago. Kawa had gone back to the coffee bar, listened without really hearing the beat poetry. He kept thinking of Nicholas and where he might be headed. Someone laughed, asked him a question, but he paid no attention. He did not notice Maya looking at him from across the table. When he had abruptly got up and gone into the kitchen, she followed him.

Now Kawa pressed the button and the elevator hummed.

‘So what he can ride a fucking bike,’ Maya said. ‘Why should you get involved?’

‘’Cause it’s there. Also, that poet sucks.’ He grinned at her.

The elevator door slid open and he stuck his head cautiously inside.

‘Shit,’ Maya said. ‘It smells in there.’ She turned to him. ‘You’re going, aren’t you?’

He stared at her and she shook her head, placed something in the palm of his hand. He looked down at it, closed his fingers around it. ‘Hey,’ he said.

Kawa took a deep breath, held it, and stepped inside. When he turned around, all he could see were Maya’s zonked-out eyes. Then the door closed and he went up.

The door opened and Jōchi almost took his head off with one giant swing. Kawa ducked, felt the fist graze his temple and strip off three layers of skin. He bent forward, flicked open the blade of the knife, and went for it.

Jōchi grabbed his arm and nearly broke it. The knife clattered to the floor. Kawa, realizing this was no joke, no way-cool hipster happening he was creating for himself in the video arcade, did the only thing he could think of: he bit into Jōchi’s cheek. The agonizing pressure on his arm let up just enough for him to use his knee. That seemed to have little or no effect, as Jōchi grunted and pinned him to the wall.

Kawa grunted, Jōchi grinned, and Kawa saw his death reflected in the older man’s eyes. Jōchi slammed the heel of his hand into Kawa’s solar plexus and the Nihonin doubled over. His knees buckled and he slid to the floor. As he reached out for the knife, Jōchi’s shoe trod hard on his hand, making him cry out.

Kawa, truly pissed off now, cleared his head of the residual pot he had smoked earlier and, using all the strength in his coiled legs, butted Jōchi under the chin. Jōchi’s head snapped back and he took one stumbling step away. Kawa grabbed the knife and, crying a little bit, plunged the blade between two of Jōchi’s ribs.

Jōchi made an inarticulate sound and he tried to grab the knife. He whipped backward, wrenching away Kawa’s grip on the handle. He stared down, wide-eyed, at his chest. He looked up at Kawa. He mumbled something, took a shambling step toward the Nihonin, and promptly fell onto his face.

He lay unmoving for a long time. Kawa was breathing hard, crying still and unaware of it. He bit his lip and ran a trembling hand through his snow-white hair. He continued to stare down at Jōchi. Why wasn’t he moving? Then he got it. Understanding flashed like lightning across his face and he vomited. He kept on retching even after there was nothing left to throw up.

Eventually, he felt better. He thought of Maya, waiting for him down below, and he almost turned back, almost reached out for the button to open the elevator door and take him back down to his familiar, anarchic world. But now something had changed, because he suddenly understood that what he and his pals had believed was rebellious anarchy had its own grooved pattern. It was actually as safe and tame as going to work five days a week, and now it seemed empty.

He thought about why he had come, and he went in search of Nicholas. He found him, eventually, in a back room of the restaurant, a place that looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades – until tonight.

Walking into the charnel house, Kawa was perversely grateful he had had to kill a man that night, otherwise the sights and smells in there would surely have blown his mind to smithereens.

‘What if you’re wrong?’

‘I’ll tell you what, babe, the world doesn’t function on
what if,
and because of that I don’t go around second-guessing myself.’

Vesper felt her pulse heavy in her temples even over the deep throb of the cutter’s diesels. She smelled the ocean, briny and fish-laden, full of life. Spots of spume settled on her hair. She knew she was at a nexus point. He wanted to kill her, she knew that as surely as if he had said it. The coiled-spring tension in his body told her. It was anger, pure and simple; his empire was coming apart. And she had become the lodestone for his rage. But, as was typical with him, she sensed something else as well, and she knew she must capitalize on it if she had any chance of staying alive.

‘Shoot me now.’ She spat. ‘Go ahead, it’s what your father would have done.’

She felt the momentary hesitation ripple through him, and she extended her psyche to its limits, trying to redirect his towering rage.

He jammed the muzzle of his gun so hard into her ear she cried out. ‘What does my father have to do with it?’

‘I used to work for him, remember? I was one of his elite agents in the field.’ She was growing dizzy from a combination of mortal tension and using her limited gift. She gritted her teeth and went on. ‘He was so obsessed with his secret identity he became paranoid. Field executions became the rule rather than the exception. When you get like this, you remind me of him.’

Again a ripple, this time more pronounced. ‘What you do you mean, “like this”?’

‘You know,’ she said in her most offhand voice, ‘irrational.’

It was a risk and she knew it. But she sensed she was teetering on the brink. Either she would fall into the eternal abyss or she would survive. There was no middle course.

‘Irrational.’
He said the word as if it were food he was tasting. ‘Yeah, right, my father could be fucking irrational. Not that I’d remember what he was like ’cause he was never around when we were growin’ up.’ He nodded. ‘Yeah, he could be a fuckin’ pig, all right. But he was also smart. Smart enough to fool the feds for decades.’

Vesper concentrated. She could hear it now – the darkness and the light, the two sides, the rage and the admiration he felt toward his father that he could not reconcile. She could almost hear in her mind the clash of swords as the two opinions continued their endless war. No wonder he had to see the world at large as black and white. Anything else would be for him utter and complete chaos.