Witch Lights (7 page)

Ray turned. Mantu's eyes were shadows and his face looked skeletal in the light from the dashboard. “You never told me. About how you joined with them.”

“Like I said, it's a long story. We never had time.”

“We have time now,” Ray said. “And a full tank of gas.”

Mantu's hands tightened on the wheel. “Okay, Ray. You asked for it. But you're gonna have a few more gray hairs before I finish.”

“I was doing a gig at a club in Philly. I was just a kid back then—young and dumb. I'd go from club to club, do my set early in the night, and crash at someone's house. I was drinking pretty hard. Doing a lot of coke, too. It was the eighties—everyone just did lines right out in the open in the clubs. Well, at least until Len Bias.”

Ray nodded. He'd managed to avoid the hard-partying scene, but he'd watched a couple of his old girlfriend Lisa's friends go through piles of nose candy.

“But the gigs were getting better. People were starting to take notice. After one show in Philly, the owner of the club asked me if I wanted to come to a party at his place. He had some really good Peruvian shit, and he said I reminded him of Richard Pryor before he caught himself on fire. Which I took as a compliment. So he drives me to this place in Chestnut Hill, and, man, I tell you what, it's a
serious
fucking party. Weed and Cuban cigars stinking up the place, bottles of Dom, and lots of guys in expensive Italian suits. Mostly white guys, but some Asian Yakuza-looking dudes with their crazy tattoos, too. I was the only guy with skin darker than a paper bag, but nobody seemed to even notice me. Everybody was high, the music was pumping, and the girls were walking around in short skirts and high heels. Beautiful girls, too—high class, natural beauties, natural tits, not a stretch mark on any of them. Young and sweet. And this hot little blonde starts chatting me up—sits down next to me and starts running her fingers across my chest. I was pinching myself the whole time. It seemed too good to be true.”

The van dipped into a rut and Ray's head nearly hit the roof. Mantu was unperturbed. Driving at night in Guatemala was a daredevil sport but it hardly fazed him.

“But she had the weirdest eyes. Like she wasn't all there—like her face was a mask and there was nobody behind it. I figured she was just really high, or really shallow, or really high
and
really shallow, but at that point I didn't care if she had the IQ of a dust mite because she started whispering nasty stuff in my ear. Telling me about all the freaky shit she was going to do with the big black python in my pants—and let me tell you, he was getting bigger and blacker by the second. I'm talking shit straight out of the
Penthouse Forum
. I was a little creeped out by her weird eyes, but I was horny, and she was playing me like a fiddle. You know what I'm saying?”

Ray thought back to Lily. “Yeah.”

Mantu wiped his forehead. “So she takes me down to the basement, to a spare bedroom or something, and she pushes me down on the bed, pulls off my shoes, my belt, and pulls down my pants.”

“I don't need to know
all
the details,” Ray said.

Mantu didn't smile. “But it was wrong. Looking at her was like looking at a doll, or a puppet. Or a robot. I guess some guys find that sexy, but not me. Something about her was just unnatural. Artificial. Like she was programmed.”

Ray nodded. Like Crystal. Poor, dead, lost Crystal, who'd been programmed to do whatever Crawford and Lily had wanted. Just one of the women everyone believed he had murdered.

“But she fucked me. Oh my God, did that crazy bitch ever fuck me. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, like I'm dying, having a grand mal seizure. But her eyes got even scarier—there was definitely someone behind them then. Something had been hiding and it just came alive when she was riding on top of me. And I didn't like it. The only thing I could think of was Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
.”

“Jesus,” Ray said.

“But then—boom—it passes, and her eyes are back to normal. I figure maybe I'm just tripping out from all the blow and reefer—getting stupid paranoid for nothing. But I couldn't look at those eyes again. No way. I couldn't let myself look into them. Then she asks if I want to shoot some heroin. I tell her no. I had that feeling you get when you know you've gotten yourself in deep shit and you know it's just gonna get worse and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. I knew I had to get out of there. It was a gut feeling at first, but then I started to panic.”

Mantu stared in silence at the road ahead, his eyes lost. “Then the door opens. I'm lying there, with the girl next to me, both of us buck naked. And there's a guy at the door, clean-cut, businessman type, fifties, maybe sixties, short gray hair, real conservative looking, but he's wearing a fucking
robe
. A black robe. You know what I'm talking about.”

Ray didn't need to answer. When Mantu had found him that terrible night after the ritual at Crawford's, Ray had been wearing a blood-splattered hooded red robe.

“And he starts screaming. Eyes popping like his head's gonna explode. ‘Amber! What the fuck are you doing? Get upstairs or I'll beat your fucking head in!' He's screaming like that, his face purple and veins sticking out of his neck like he's gonna have an aneurysm. She just gets out of bed, picks up her clothes, and splits. She doesn't say a word to me.

“And now the crazy white man in his scary robe is looking at me. The robe was black, not white, but shit, a white man in a robe is still
a white man in a robe,
right? Then he smiles. I'll never forget that smile. The smile of a jackal. Looking straight at me just like when Wile E. Coyote would see the Road Runner turn into a lamb chop or a turkey leg. And then he looks at my dick, which at that point was about the size of a raisin. ‘You part of the entertainment?' he asks.

“I tell him no, nope, just a guest, thank you very much. No entertaining for me, no sirree, and hey, I think it's about time I got home anyway because my poor, sick mother needs her medicine. I'm wondering how the fuck I'm gonna get out of the room alive. Then another guy pokes his head in the room. Younger man, fat. Greek or Italian or something. Mafia type if I've ever seen one. The way he looks at me I'm sure he's gonna slice me from my balls to my chin. But he turns and grabs the other guy and whispers something to him and they just leave.”

“Damn, Mantu.”

“Oh, that ain't the end, Ray. I wish it was. So I get dressed as fast as I can. I'm just getting my shoes on when two more motherfuckers come in. Young white guys, mean-looking and dressed in nice suits. One of them pulls out a Dirty Harry–sized Glock and points it at my face. Right between my eyes.”

He wiped sweat from his forehead but didn't take his eyes off the road. “They made me get on the bed. Facedown. Asked me all kinds of questions—who I was, why I was there. I told them the truth, but they seemed surprised that I had gotten in. I was sure they were just gonna pop me and toss me in the Delaware River with a cinder block tied around my neck.

“And then they took me out into an alley. I was praying to Jesus, to Allah, to Buddha, praying that I would live, because if I did I was never going to do another line of coke, I'd never drink again, I'd stop the reefer, and I'd buy my dear old mother a condo in Florida and take her to church every Sunday and out for a big pancake breakfast afterward. All those bullshit bargains you make with God to avoid getting a piece of lead in one side of your head and your brains out the other.”

“And you're here.”

“Yeah. Here I am. They just kicked me in the balls and threw me on the concrete and said, ‘You forget all about this night, nigger, because we know who you are.' I cried. I was so happy to be alive, I just laid there and cried.”

“So then what?”

Mantu looked at Ray, then back at the road. He cleared his throat. “I couldn't get it out of my mind. Once the fear wore off I got mad as hell. And then I just stopped getting gigs. No one returned my calls, not even people I considered my friends. Somehow those bastards blackballed me and shut me down. My whole career, all those years putting in my time…up in smoke.”

“You must have been pissed.”

“Oh, yes. So pissed it drove me to try to figure out what the hell had happened. But curiosity was part of it, too. Who were these people? What was the deal with the robes? I figured maybe they were Freemasons or the mob or some weird Illuminati-type shit. And then I picked up the paper one day and there he was. Looking me in the face.”

Ray stared. “Who?”

“The businessman. The guy in the robe from the party. William R. Hobbs.”

Ray shrugged. “Don't know him.”

“I didn't know him, either. But he was the chief financial officer of PEXCO.”

“The oil company?”

“Exactly. Oil and coal and gas, worth about a billion bucks. His wife found him in a puddle of blood with a chunk of his face blown off. Suicide. The
New York Times
had just published some details of his—what did they call it?—
unsavory
accounting practices. And there were persistent rumors of him buggering little boys at parties in LA. So everyone assumed he just offed himself.”

Ray rolled down his window halfway. The air in the van felt stifling and stank of sweat. Neither of them had been able to shower in days. “But you didn't believe it?”

“Fuck no. That guy wasn't the type to kill himself. One look at him would tell you he'd kill his own mother, his father, his kids, and his puppy before he'd kill himself. He might as well have had ‘sociopath' tattooed on his forehead. I think he fucked up and did something they didn't like. Or maybe talked out of class. And they—the big boys—didn't want to take the chance on him spilling any secrets.”

Ray nodded. “You're probably right.”

“I was
definitely
right. Anyway, I got obsessed with it. I moved to D.C. and found a crime reporter at
City Paper
and he helped me connect the dots. The more I looked, the more dots I found to connect. And it just got bigger and bigger and higher up the chain—politicians, bankers, CEOs. But I was getting really paranoid. I'm talking
clinically
paranoid—too afraid to leave my apartment because I knew that
they
knew I was onto them. Looking at the kid bagging my groceries and wondering if the little shit was there to spy on me. I even took apart my smoke alarm because I was convinced there was a camera in it. I started smoking coke, and then meth, which definitely didn't help—staying up for days at a time and then crashing hard. I was doing some performances at shitty little dive bars and cafés—crazy, rambling conspiracy monologues. I was going off the deep end, and I was sure one night I'd get home and find a guy in a robe sitting in my living room. Smiling at me. And that would be the last thing I ever saw. Period. The End.”

“But you didn't.”

“No. Why would they worry about me when I was busy killing myself line by line and hit by hit? I was no threat to them. And then one night I was doing my shtick at this coffeehouse in Adams Morgan. There might have been ten people in the whole place. I think most of them felt sorry for me because I was really gone at that point. They only laughed at first, until they realized I wasn't funny—I was sick. I hadn't eaten in days and I really felt like I was just going to snap, right there, in front of everyone—just start babbling and screaming until someone called the cops to drag me out. But then this old man comes in and sits down. Right in front.”

“Micah,” Ray said.

“He just looked at me. Stared right into my eyes. And then he smiled. And I knew right away that he had my number. He knew me—what I was going through and what I was doing to myself. And when I got off the stage, I went over to him and sat next to him. And he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know what you're going through. It's time for you to understand.' And I just broke down, right there in the middle of the coffeehouse, blubbering like a baby.”

“And here you are,” Ray said.

“And here I am. Driving a twenty-year-old VW van on the shittiest road in the shittiest part of Guatemala on my way to visit the meanest and shittiest drug kingpin south of the border.”

Ray turned away. He was doing it all for him.

“It's not easy. In a lot of ways my old life, no matter how fucked up, was easier than being part of the Brotherhood. Knowing any day I could just walk around a corner and my life would end before I even knew what hit me. Just”—he mimed a gun next to his head—“pow. Game over.”

“Why did you stay with it, then? For so long?”

Mantu laughed. “What do most people do, Ray? They go to school, get some job they don't give a shit about, marry somebody they pretend they love, have a couple kids, go into debt putting their kids through college, retire from their shit job, and die without ever thinking about any alternative. I always felt like I was here for something bigger. Even when I was circling the drain. When Micah invited me to be part of it, I realized I'd found my calling. A higher purpose, if you want to call it that. My true purpose.”

“What purpose?” Ray asked.

Mantu had to think about it. “Doing the right thing. Fighting on the right side. Helping teachers who are helping other people evolve. And stopping the psychopathic bastards who are working against that evolution.”

Ray smiled. “You sound like Micah.”

Mantu shook his head. “Actually, I'm just in it for the pussy.”

Ray laughed, but it felt hollow. “You are a comedian.”

“Was.
Was
a comedian.”

The
was
hung in the dank, sour air.

Ray eventually broke the silence. His guilt was gnawing away at his guts. “But you're throwing it all away now? All that time with the Brotherhood? Just to help me?”