The Light is the Darkness (10 page)

Conrad never fully slept as the fever licked at him with the urgency of a selfish lover.

Later, a vehicle with the headlights off rolled up during the wee hours. He was reclined in the bathtub, where he’d tumbled several hours before while looking for a spot to relieve himself, naked except for a pair of horridly stained boxers. He hazily glimpsed silhouettes reversed upon the plaster ceiling. The strangers circled the house. Their shoes crunched in the gravel beneath the bathroom window; mutters and whispers carried to his ears, pierced his delirium.

They entered through the unlocked front door and began moving from room to room. Someone shined a flashlight into the bathroom, flicked the dead light switch a couple times, and moved on without spotting Conrad’s foot and ankle hanging over the rim of the filthy tub.

Stuff was getting knocked around. Glass was breaking. The men spoke Spanish and there were at least four of them. Government men? Cops? Mobsters? Conrad decided to ask.

He eventually levered himself from the tub and limped into the hall. The world rushed him in 3D; he braced himself with one hand to keep from pitching onto his face. It was dark but for bits of moonlight coming in here and there, and bobbing flashlight beams poking around. Conrad bumped into a man in a suit. The man was small and wiry, like a bird, and reeked of nervousness and aftershave.

Conrad opened his mouth to utter a greeting, and the guy jumped back, cursed, and shot him with a taser.
Whap
, prongs stuck in his shoulder and here came the juice. It must’ve been a supercharged model, because Conrad had been tasered before, and usually they didn’t pack enough of a punch to faze him, but this one clicked his teeth together, rolled his eyes backwards and caused foam to slather from his lips.

The slow waltz in Hell began without music.

Conrad collapsed against the wall. The man released the trigger and when he did that he was fucked. Within an instant of the current’s cessation, Conrad tore out the prongs and swung his arm like a baseball bat and chopped the man’s throat with the edge of his hand, made jelly of the windpipe. The man fell, thrashing. Conrad stomped on his chest until it caved, and again on his groin and the man stopped moving.

It was all instinct. His rational thoughts melted into a pulsing, crimson mass. He had left a brace of pila in the corner of the hall, intending to practice in the high desert air once he recovered. He grabbed three of the javelins and crabbed through a doorway toward a moving flashlight beam; slung a spear underhanded at the shadow behind the light and got lucky. Someone grunted and someone else opened up with the heavy armament, probably a submachine gun, and the hacienda was briefly lit by strobes of yellow-blue fire. The stench of burning copper rode a blizzard of plaster fragments and sawdust.

Conrad bored into the maelstrom, collided with a body and immediately plunged three feet of steel and ash through the man’s belly, then the wall, and the machine gun whirled away in a fizz of Roman candle sparks.

The last guy ran from the house and for the car, got it rolling backwards as Conrad burst onto the porch and threw his remaining pilum, overhand this time. His aim was bad because his night vision was mostly ruined by the muzzle flashes. The windshield imploded, a mass of fractured safety glass that wrapped around the driver’s head and torso like a net. The car yawed, flew off the road and toppled into the ravine.

The driver crawled from the wreck and clambered up the opposite bank. He’d lost his suit coat and his white shirt fluttered among the clumps of sage, the flowing shadows of low clouds. The cadaverous moon grinned as it peeked between the pleats of glinting star fields.

The man cried out when he saw Conrad loping after him with the hitching, drunken gait of a trained javelin thrower; fired several wild shots over his shoulder as he fled. The reports came soft and ineffectual as a child’s cap gun, counterpoint to the
slap-slap-slap-slap
of Conrad’s bare feet against pebbles and dirt.

Conrad overtook him, a cat cutting down a wildebeest, a large shadow swallowing a smaller, and they tumbled together among the rocks and the bushes. It was a short, pathetic struggle.

When the soldiers came, they found him slumped over the kitchen table, clutching a pile of bloody wallets. According to various pieces of identification, the dead men belonged to the Mexico City police department. No one knew why they had been sent into the country. There was no record that the excursion was authorized.

The Mexican Army took Conrad into custody. He was hauled to a basement and tied to a chair. Someone gagged him and then sprayed soda water foam up his nose to simulate drowning. Many, many hard questions were asked. After a while, the military interrogator figured out his subject was just another dumbass gringo, albeit with a hotter temper than most, who’d gotten crosswise with somebody powerful. The intelligence officer had actually cocked the hammer on a revolver and stuck the barrel in Conrad’s ear when Marsh and Singh strolled in to save the day. Money changed hands and Conrad was blindfolded and taken from the torture scene.

The agents drove him across the border and the three had dinner at a nice Tex-Mex joint, then a long conversation over several platters of beer and tequila.

You’re one lucky bastard, Mr. Navarro
, Marsh had said.
Those off-duty cops you dusted were freelancing. Nobody seems to give a shit about them.

Conrad explained what he did and how his sister had disappeared investigating he wasn’t sure what and that the goons had probably come for her.

How did you wind up in this line of work?
Singh said.

A family friend knew a guy who knew a guy. I was recruited and trained.
Conrad didn’t go into specifics—how he’d been tested, the nature of the training or where it occurred; didn’t speak of those early years in the modern day slave pits of the underworld, how he’d probably killed two of every species, including men, that might’ve walked, hopped, or slithered up the gangplank of Noah’s Ark. He didn’t mention how Uncle K had scooped him from the mean and bloody amateur ranks and become his patron, his master.

Marsh and Singh drank excessively and hung on his every word, although they didn’t press, not then. In those early days of Conrad’s burgeoning stardom as a blood sport personality,
The American
, he’d paid taxes to an NSA slob named Furillo. The NSA kept tabs on the underground fighting rings, most especially those as elaborate and lucrative as the ones Conrad belonged to. The power of those exorbitantly wealthy organizers of the Pageant sufficed to keep the intelligence community at least nominally neutral, but graft was the order of the day and payoffs were necessary at every level of operation. So many palms to grease, so little time.

After what Singh referred to as “The Mexican Incident,” Conrad’s management situation underwent a radical alteration, precipitated by Furillo’s timely coronary conclusion due to the ingestion of multiple prescription medications and the able ministrations of a Vegas call-girl who conveniently vanished without hanging around to clarify the circumstances of “Big Joe’s” demise.

The operatives stepped in without skipping a beat. They took a cut of Conrad’s exhibition paydays, ran interference for him with local authorities when necessary, and promised to look into his sister’s case.

It was the start of a beautiful, horribly dysfunctional relationship. Basically the same as every other relationship Conrad had known.

Chapter Three

I

It was night when he stopped at the flashing arms of a railroad crossing. The klaxons twisted his insides. He opened the door and puked. Murderous thunder of passing flats vibrated his bones. While he was spilling his guts onto the pitted asphalt, someone climbed in on the passenger side, slammed the door hard enough to rock the car.

Conrad wiped his mouth, regarded the dark-haired girl in the denim jacket and bellbottom pants who was calmly checking her makeup in the visor mirror. A livid strawberry keloid ripened on her left wrist, partially occluded by a charm bracelet. She smelled of cigarettes and Prince Matchabelli and seemed unpleasantly familiar. One of those malleable faces he’d seen a lot of lately; it glowed a blurry white in the gloom.

“Ever wonder what’s in those boxcars?” Her voice was husky from the rawness of the country air. “Could be cattle, could be people, political prisoners on the way to Gitmo. Anything, really. See their eyes in the headlights, peeking between the slats.”

Conrad was dizzy. Concussion, definitely. Goddamn, he hoped it was a concussion. Looking at her almost caused him to be sick again. Was he hallucinating? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t certain of anything, even gravity.

“I’m Rhonda. Where you goin’?” Her eyes were small and lively. She nervously rifled a leather handbag with a peace symbol stitched on the flap. “You don’t mind, I hope…? I was freezing out there.”

He hadn’t noticed her at the crossing, hadn’t seen her at all. She likely planted herself nearby, hoped to catch some poor sucker who got blocked by the train. Popped up like a trapdoor spider.

Rhonda nodded at her bag. “So…where’d you say you were goin’?”

“West.” His mantra. And in truth, the answer was South if he kept on to the end. South into the magma boiling heart of the world, and onward to Hell.

“Cool. Me too.” She lighted a clove cigarette, glanced around the interior, wrinkled her nose. “Old car you got here. Wow, is this your mom?” She tapped a black and white photo pinned to the visor; a dark woman in a gypsy kerchief smiled from the shade of an elm.

“It’s a classic.” Conrad stared at the train, the lights.

Rhonda exhaled gustily. “Wow. Somebody kicked the shit outta you, didn’t they. You feelin’ alright, man? Train’s gone.”

Indeed it was gone, reduced to a shadowy wedge lit by blue and red beacons. His hands shook as he put the Eldorado into gear.
Seem to fly it, it will pursue
…hadn’t Ben Jonson said that about shadows? Jung knew; Hesse knew; Nietzsche absolutely knew. The Germans were canny. Conrad thought about shadows, how there were so many to choose from, how hungry and insatiable they proved to be. Relentless as cancer. “You picked the wrong car.”

“Oh, yeah? Are you a psycho?” The girl smiled as if at a joke.

“It’s a bad time for me.”

“Well, it ain’t so wonderful for me either. My last two hitches were from horny truckers. Some fun. Home, James.”

Conrad sighed. “Wanda, I’m beat. I’m going to get a room and crash for the night.” He’d spotted a sign that said FOOD GAS LODGING THREE MILES. That would be the Happy Raven and it was on his list of places to go, the very reason he’d driven across the belly of the country, taken an unsanctioned bout against a no-name flak. The fight had been one of his many pretexts to lurk in this geographical region, to conduct his private manhunt within a manhunt, a veritable nested Russian doll of plots and stratagems.

The machinery was in motion. It was down to the lounge singer, the English professor or the retired politico. He’d picked the lounge singer because the lounge singer was as good as any and because the lounge singer had been a traveling man. Travel always made for interesting conversation. According to his sources, the man he sought worked the lounge Friday through Sunday, six to ten P.M., had done so for the last eighteen months. Conrad reflected that often the most slippery ones were those who never really tried to cover their tracks.

“It’s Rhonda.”

“Yeah.”

II

Rhonda tagged along as Conrad registered in the hotel lobby. She adjourned with him to the lounge for the theatre half of dinner theatre. Five minutes and two margaritas later, she spotted a gaunt man in a razor-crisp Armani suit who disappeared through the door with the fly-spackled EXIT sign.

“Omigod—there’s Raul!”

“Who’s Raul?” Conrad asked half-heartedly. Too familiar faces, too familiar names. The only Raul he knew was presumed dead at the bottom of some Mexican landfill. Time for another drink. Rhonda patted Conrad’s hand, promised to be back in a jiff. Her small, quick eyes had gone over to black. She smiled a shark’s smile and followed the immaculate stranger.

Conrad hoped that was the end. Meanwhile, it was just him and the lush and a whiskey river. He even toasted Mr. Willie Nelson. “God bless you, Willie.”

The lush wasn’t interested in Willie Nelson. He was a Rat Pack man. He gazed at Conrad. “Gotta say, real clean,” the lush said. He wore a silk blazer open at the neck to display a clunky gold medallion. His hard cheeks shone like a polished boot. He sat stiffly; an action figure melting under a sun lamp.

The lush called himself Marty Cardinal, although Conrad knew the man’s birth certificate; his forty year old visa stamped a dozen places in the Orient, the Middle East and points between; and his dog tags said something different. But, tonight, as every other smoky, gin-soaked night for several crumbling decades, it had been Marty Cardinal. He sweated through a poorly-dyed pompadour from his last set of Dean Martin and Perry Como covers ala Tom Jones on Quaaludes. The audience of the Happy Raven Lounge, which included the requisite barside lechers and a few drunken seniors on a pit stop from their bus tour, had applauded tepidly as Cardinal ambled from the stage and listed to the dim corner where Conrad nursed a boilermaker. They’d never met before Conrad told the waitress to slip the crooner a crisp g-note and ask him if he could fake his way through
My Rifle, My Pony And Me
, but no time like the present, according to the singer as he’d ordered a round from the baggy-eyed cocktail waitress,
Put it on my tab, sweetheart, baby face.
“They sewed you up real nice, kid. Maybe you should get
’
em to do you a favor and stitch that cheek of yours. It’s nasty.”